Atlas

13

 The next location wasn't a room at all, which told me that everything was different now. I found myself at a train stop. It was rusty and falling apart. It was a place where trains would stop to pick up coal and oil and fuel, but never people. Everything was a dull gray color, from the cloudy sky to the buildings. A few snowflakes of gray snow was falling from the sky. I was alone.

"That's quite the getup," the girl from Room 13's voice flowed through the air like birdsong, but I couldn't see her anywhere. "I like the boots."

"What am I doing here?" I asked.

"Well," she said, "I guess you're here to remember."

"Are you the one keeping us all here?"

She laughed joylessly. "I guess you could say that. But I wouldn't go pinning all the blame on me, you perfect little mommy with the perfect little daughter. Maybe there are other people to blame."

"Why do you hate me?" I asked, turning around to see that the world behind me completely resembled the world in front of me. Gray. Sad. Empty. Lifeless.

She seemed to think about that for a few seconds, her thoughts wrapping around me like a thick fog.

"You'll see," she said. "You just have to remember."

Like there had been a light switch flipped, the world around me suddenly burst into motion. Soldiers jogged around me, clutching their machine guns in their gloved hands. My heavy gear pulled down on me, creating an ache I knew well. I could hear gunfire in the distance. One of my soldiers asked a question, and I yelled back the answer. We were getting closer to our destination, the gunfire getting louder and louder as we neared it.

The place was chaos when we got there. The meager sunlight had vanished into the darkness of night, the only light the quick flashes of gunfire, candles flickering in a few of the numbered buildings' windows, and fires crackling from cars and through blown-out windows of the uninhabited buildings.

People were yelling, soldiers from all sides.

The vision changed from what my memory showed me. What had actually happened was I had focused my attack more, holding up my weapon so I was ready to attack. But this time, I was able to see the hooded figure scurrying against the bullet-hole ridden walls of the hastily thrown together buildings, every once in a while ducking behind a destroyed car or a boulder from a fallen building. She was clutching something in her arms.

I hadn't noticed her the first time, but now I could see that we were heading in the same direction. I was holding a gun, however, and she was just trying to stay alive. The shadow snuck across the gravel street when my eyes in the past found an assailant, not wearing the military uniform that I was. He raised his gun at one of my soldiers, and I instinctively fired at him. I don't think I hit him, as he quickly ducked behind a car. But I had my target.

The girl opened the door to one of the cheap apartments with a candle in the window and darted inside, closing the door behind her.

But still, this past version of me didn't notice, I was only focused on my enemy. I approached the car, but he stood and ran, turning the gun so it blindly fired at me behind him as he ran next to the buildings.

I did everything that I was supposed to. I protected myself, I returned fire. But then something changed from what was supposed to happen. As the man got away from me, I heard glass shattering over the sound of my gunfire. I paused and heard the unmistakable sound of a young girl screaming. I was the parent of a young girl, after all.

The man was gone. The everlasting battle continued, but it was moving to a different part of the village. I knew I should have ignored the cries and gone to help the soldiers I was in command of, but I had to see what was happening. Whoever this girl was, she was in danger being here, and it sounded like she was alone.

The broken glass was from the window of the apartment the girl had walked into. In both the memory and the vision, I looked up to see the apartment number: 13.

I pushed open the door and immediately saw the single most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed. The girl from Room 13 was there, her body thrown on the floor. Her skin wasn't ashen or her lips the color of a seashell. She was human - and dead with her chest ripped open by multiple machine gunshots. Blood covered the matted old rug. There was another girl, younger, that looked just like the other girl, kneeling next to her and screaming and screaming.

It was the man that had done this, I tried to tell myself. But I knew that the man had never fired in that direction. I had. I had done this.

The little girl screamed and screamed, crying out in a language I didn't understand. But I knew she was begging for the other girl to wake up.