Words of war

Dearest Adeline,

 I write from a hole in the ground. This might worry you, it might make you laugh or it might just make you curious. First, I would like to say I’m one hundred percent fine. I haven’t been injured, although I have seen a lot of that around me. It is a tough place to be in but one I feel I have to make people see. As usual, there are two rolls of film in this envelope that I trust you will deliver to my office as soon as you get the letter. They are very important pictures and I want them released fast.

 Sorry to make you work like this, as if you didn’t have anything else to do in this world, but the thing is I trust you, I really do. You are my best friend in the world and I wouldn’t trust anyone else with this delicate information. I’m even nervous that they could try to intercept it in its way home, but I know that is not a very likely thing to happen. When you’re in such a situation as this one, I guess you get a little paranoid and you start seeing things everywhere, expecting some kind of attack from any side.

 It is important that I tell you that, since Monday last week, I have been locked in this hole in the ground, as the battle ensues all around me. I have been trying to get away but the military tells me it would be suicide. I have even thought of going to the other side, as they would never kill a journalist with so many eyes looking at them. But that appears to be an impossibility right now, as bomber planes have been known to pass once or twice everyday and just flatten the ground between us and them with tons and tons of explosions.

 Besides that, I don’t really have anything to say besides asking how our you guys? I’ve heard of the political turmoil the war is causing there. But at least no violent acts have taken place and there’s still some shred of humanity back home. It might be silly to say, but I do trust them when it comes to defending freedom and all of that stuff. I have to believe in them because there’s no much else to believe in around these parts. I’ve seen too much to just turn cynical and stop caring about what’s going on.

 I’ll keep doing my job as well as I can because that’s all I can give at this moment. I wish love or caring was enough but the truth is, it just isn’t. These people get food rations every so often and it just doesn’t matter… But I have to keep believing. It’s all we have.

My best to you,

Ollie.

 My dear Ollie,

Hello. I have no real idea of how to start writing this letter. First of all, because I think its kind of fun that letters are still a thing in this very digital world. But as electricity is almost non-existent in that region, I understand that I must compel myself to write this words with a pen you gave me for my last birthday, the one you said belonged to a very well known author. He killed himself with this pen on his hand… How strange.

That was weird to write but the most important thing I have to tell you is that I have gotten all of your pictures to the paper. I had to argue with that idiot Melissa because she didn’t want me there. I guess that when you’re fired they don’t really want you back there, even if you have some killer pictures of one of the most important things happening in the world right now. I was tempted to kick her ass but I refrained myself. Aren’t you proud?

 Jonah and I went through all of your pictures and, I must say, I admire you. Some of them are just too much but they really do capture the horror of it all. We chose some that could be printed in the paper and I have a copy besides me right now. People seem to care and I think they will rally behind your pictures in order to stop all of this madness. Something has to be done. There’s too much blood in those pictures and, somehow, I feel as if there was a lot of blood in my hands now too.

 I have to confess I don’t understand your passion or your trust in the system. It’s this fucking system, which has caused all of this, the one that had killed those children in your pictures and so many more. I think it’s nice you think our country still stands for freedom and all of that shit, but you’re missing the point big time. If you could hear what they say and o here, I think that even a big patriot like you would not be able to deny how fucked up things are right now.

 It’s not my intention to pop your bubble but your work is too raw, too real to not be frank and honest about it. This is shit, Ollie. And they did it. The ones that love freedom and liberty and all the other crap. It was them who killed some many of those people.

 Anyway, keep doing your thing. It’s the only thing that matters now.

 I send you a hug,

Adeline.

REPORT #146 (CLASSIFIED)

-       SUBJECT: Termination of “Operation Thunder”

-       IMPORTANCE: Regional

-       DETAILS:

At 2 AM, local time, a squad of fifteen bombers was sent to the capital of the regime and was ordered to form a perimeter of explosions around the central compounds, in order to make the people in charge capitulate to our government. Although many fires and casualties were reported, there was no communication of any kind between our government and the regime we’ve been trying to suppress.

 At 4 AM, after failed attempts to contact their leaders, we ordered another pass with the same amount of bombers, in order to completely neutralize their central command. The presidential palace was confirmed to be destroyed, as well as all the adjacent building. Soldiers on the ground were ordered to stand by, to prevent any casualties from our side.

 At 4:30 AM, word got out of the country that not all our hits had been on target. Some of them had destroyed city blocks adjacent to the presidential palace. We acknowledged that earlier, in a closed door meeting, but somehow the information got out in record time, despite the lack of electricity or any real type of communications.

 At 5:15 AM, soldiers had been ordered to sweep the attacked area in order to look for survivors. One rogue agent was reported to have killed a high-ranking officer of the enemy’s army, no confirmation on the deceased’s identity. High command has ordered this information to be classified as soon as possible. No other survivors had been found at that time.

 At 9:45 PM, of the same day, a clandestine Internet server was found in a remote neighborhood of the city. The army was ordered to destroy the structure, before anyone else could verify its existence. Inside the destroyed building, soldiers found everything necessary to make a temporal Internet connection. Army officer are investigating further at the moment.

 The cease-fire has been ordered for midday the next day. Soldiers and crafts have been deployed to every single region. We are in stand by for Operation Endurance, which should commence in mere hours. Com out.

Rooms

   As soon as I opened my eyes, I was in fear. I couldn’t see a single thing, as everything surrounding me was pitch black. I could fear the air moving around me and I thought, for a moment, that I had heard some voices. But aside from that, I was there, in the dark, waiting for something. I did not know if I was standing up or lying down. I did not know if I was inside a building or outside. I felt cold, so maybe I was outside. But why was it pitch black? It made no sense at all, or so I thought.

 For a moment, I tried really hard to remember what had happened before. It was obvious that, as a living person, I would have been somewhere before. Or maybe… Maybe I was dead. Maybe this was death and I had just discovered what millions of people had wanted to know for millennia. Maybe death was just staying put for something that may or may not come. At least there was no pain. But that fear, that sense of dread, the one that makes you want to run away from a certain place… Is that death too?

 Then I noticed I had felt the wind earlier. Dead people are not supposed to feel, so maybe I wasn’t dead after all. Maybe someone had condemned me to a prison of darkness, maybe I was just incarcerated in the most horrible jail and I would live the rest of my days in the dark. That thought in my mind made me want to move but I couldn’t. I hadn’t realized it but my body was completely unable to move around. I could move my eyes but that was useless in such a dark environment. There was nothing to do, but wait.

 Of course, that’s easier said that done. It seemed easy to just be there, somewhere, and wait. But one can grow tired of waiting and waiting, without anything coming to you. Besides, darkness is inherently inhuman. As creative beings, we have learned to combat the dark, as we see in it everything that we fear about in the world. We see monsters that are here to kill and eat us, and we see our past failures and shortcomings being displayed over and over, in order to torture with everything that we are.

 I maybe shed a tear or two, I don’t really remember. Trying to think seems to be almost impossible in such a dark space. You don’t even know what you’re doing and when you can’t even see your nose or move around your wrists, it makes it even more surreal and horrible. I wanted to use my voice, to see if someone would come and help me. Maybe there would be no one to do that but at least tell me why I was there, where was I and how had I gotten to such a place. I just wanted to interact with someone else, even if that meant torture or the silent treatment. Anything was better than that.

 Suddenly, I felt myself move. At first, I thought it was something around me or under me, but then I realized it was I. It was me who was moving but I couldn’t really it was me making the orders. I was scared, but I didn’t try to fight it off. My body seemed to glide in the dark, probably looking for something. Then, I heard voices again. The same one I had heard the moment my eyes opened. They seemed distant but I knew they were coming from people or at least from something that could talk.

 Then, light started to flood the place I was in. An aperture had opened in front of me, horizontal in shape. White light was rushing in, as if the gates of a dam had been opened. I covered my eyes, trying to avoid being blinded by such a bright flow of light. I walked slowly, one foot after the other, trying to breathe as calmly as I could. I didn’t want to rush. I was afraid to die at any moment, as everything had been too much for me, just too much. I finally got closer to the light and I realized, I was in control of my own body again.

 I stopped covering my eyes and decided to check myself, my hands, my legs, my feet. Everything seemed just as I remembered it. The only strange thing was that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Of course, I knew that was uncommon but, for some reason, I did not care at all. I had survived the darkness, the obscurity of who knows how much time. I had felt myself dying or already dead, so who cared about having no clothes on? Maybe there was a reason for that and I had to know what that was.

 So I decided to walk into the light and find out. Every single part of my body was engulfed in white and, for a while, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t that color. It was so powerful that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I closed them tight and tried to navigate, walking like an idiot but knowing I hadn’t seen any objects in front of me before closing my eyes. I have no idea how much time I spent walking like that, but I eventually felt the wind on my skin again, so I decided to open my eyes.

 The light room had been left behind and now I was in something else. It looked like a forest, complete with the tallest trees I had ever seen and the sound of small animals and birds all around me. I even heard a stream passing nearby, and dead leaves being stepped on by several types of creatures. However, something told me that I wasn’t really there or at least not completely. I just knew that forest was just another room, after the one with darkness and the one with blinding light. It made no sense for me to just appear in the forest out of the blue. Nothing made sense.

 However, there was no coming back. I couldn’t see the light room anywhere, I couldn’t see which way I had come through. It was just the forest and I. So I started walking, feeling with my toes the moistness of the ground and the harshness of the rotten tree bark. Walking felt better than being in that dark room trapped inside some sort of prison. At least in that forest, even if it really wasn’t a forest, I could feel a little bit of freedom. When a bird landed near me, I started crying for no apparent reason.

 Watching such a delicate creature made me crumble, so much so that my knees failed and I knelt in the middle of that place, almost by force. I couldn’t stop feeling what I was feeling, I couldn’t stop blaming myself for a bunch of things and excusing myself for others. So many things were going trough my head that it made me feel sick for a moment. And just after a couple of minutes, it all ended in nothing more than a sob. I felt weak and stupid, but I stood up and kept walking towards the stream.

 It was just a small brook coming down from some mountain. The water in it was cold but filled with life. There were fish swimming upstream and plants moving around with no will of their own. It was beautiful too but I knew that I needed to keep moving. It made no sense for me to stay there forever, to just give up on knowing who I really was and why had I been dropped in such a horrible place. For a moment, I thought I would cry once again. But I didn’t because I had grown tired of not being in control.

 It was then, when that thought happened to cross my mind, when a door, a simple wooden door, appeared out of thin air. It stood there, by a tree, as if it had been waiting for me to get to the conclusion that I had gotten to. Fearing no more, I got closer and opened it. A big breath and I was in. I found myself to be in another room, much smaller than the ones before. There was no detail on the floor or the ceiling, only an armchair at the center, with someone sitting on it. I walked around the armchair and swallowed hard.

 It was I. The person sitting in the armchair was me. I had some sort of goggles on and gloves that attached me to the chair. My head was tilted to the right, as if I had fallen asleep. I tried to touch my shoulder, his shoulder, but noticed my hand went through his skin, as if he was made of nothing.

 No. I have to correct myself. It wasn’t him who wasn’t real. It was me. I was the one that had been living a lie and he was the one outside, somewhere else, the actual me trying to do something. But what was that? I would never know. Right then my body started to fade and everything returned to the dark.

My partner

   When I saw him, I could only laugh. He looked at me exactly in the opposing way, making his eyes turn around as if he had just witnessed the most annoying thing happening right in front of him. That was the kind of relationship we had the moment we started working together. For some reason, our boss had decided our skills complimented each other’s, so he appointed us to missions together very often. I have forgotten how many times I pretended to be his brother, his friends and even his boyfriend or even husband.

 It all depended on the places we had to go and the things we had to do. Sometimes, the mission would be a very relaxing cruise through the Caribbean on an enormous boat that would float peacefully for over a week, carrying carefree tourists around. People that just wanted to get a tan and swim and maybe walk the massive ship, enjoying everything the place had to offer. Yes, I have to confess I loved those kinds of missions but we got assigned to them because they were specifically for rookies in this business.

 I remember one time; only about a year after we got to know each other properly, when we were sent to the Bahamas pretending to be a married gay couple going on an exclusively gay cruise. We had to steal some very important papers out of the office of a very important businessman who happened to be frolicking in the boat with his lover, unknown to his wife. It was a hilarious place and situation to be in, and of course stealing the plans was the easiest part of the whole thing. We did it the first night.

 For the other eight days, we had to hold hands pretending to love each other to death, when in reality we had almost hate for one another. Well, it wasn’t really hated but we certainly didn’t see eye to eye. He was the kind of guy that loves to focus on the job and is obsessed by doing everything by the book, like a little boy scout trapped in an adult man’s body. That to me annoyed me so much that I would often just go rogue for a couple of hours and that would, of course, made him go insane, a result I always loved.

 In the bedrooms, we agreed on sleeping on the same bed but avoiding anything weird during the night. No touching each other’s private space, especially not each other’s bodies. The first one to wake up would be the first one into the shower and so on. After a few months, we had a great system that avoided, almost always, any unpleasant moments during our missions. And as they would often take long periods of time to get over with, we just had to find a way to live with one another. It was almost a sacrifice for both of them and we did it because it was our job.

 However, those were our first missions, years one and two. By the third one, they sent us to shorter missions that required a greater deal of commitment from our part. In not so many words, that means that we had to risk our lives during those assignments. Sometimes, we wouldn’t even see each other but once, in critical moments. Besides those, we would often fly solo and assume unrelated identities. I have to confess it was kind of fun at first, playing to be so many different types of men, so many times.

 But after a while, it got annoying and the stakes started looking at me in the face. On my first mission, I got fired several times and they had to pull me out of a dumpster with a bullet on my thigh and several cuts all over my body. It was a weird experience, which was better than what my former partner was going through. I say former, because sometime after we started that decisive year, the bosses decided we wouldn’t be working together as often as we had done in the past. They said it was the right thing to do.

 However, I heard a drug lord almost killed him, after his disguise as a dealer was blown by some snitch. The snitch got killed right in front of him and the drug lord ordered his people to tie my former partner to a pipe and beat him up in every way they wanted. I have no idea of the details, but some people say he could have been killed if it hadn’t been for his security bracelet, which was a secret piece of equipment we all wear that activates itself if we fail to report to it at least once a day.

 You see, the drug lord took all of his clothes away and let him in a cold basement for at least four days. So the bracelet activated itself, called for back up to that specific location and the agent was saved. I was in a mission during that time, so I just heard it all from others. I was tempted to visit him in the hospital, the moment I was able to go back home, but I decided against it. Actually, I realized I was caring for someone I had never cared before, and that confused me enough to do nothing and go back to my life.

 It was almost a year later when they assigned us to a mission together. This time, it was a classic spy stunt: we had no covers, nothing sleek or sexy or nice. We just had to get our hands on a witness, extract him from a certain country, and go back home with that person alive. It was a nightmarish place to be, a horrible experience to be having. But, between all of it, I have to admit I was comforted when I saw his face in the airport the day we left for our mission. I wanted to tell him something but had no idea what to say. So, again, I decided to stay quiet and focus on the mission at hand.

 As predicted, the situation was dire. We had guns and a contact, but that was all blown to hell the second day of our stay in that dreadful hellhole. A group of guys attempted to blow us up in a crappy hotel. It was just luck that the cleaning lady had gone in before us. I know, that sounds insensitive but you kind of lose that part of yourself in such a job. We just started running and killing them all to get the fuck out of there. And in that moment, we were the best team anyone could have ever hoped for.

 It was as if our minds were connected, as well as our bodies. We didn’t even have to look at each other to work in unison; it was almost like a dance that has all the perfect moves to be the best anyone has ever seen. At the same time, I realized we weren’t the same people that had enjoyed those cruises and nice hotels at the start of this whole thing. We were two entirely different men and it showed. I saw it in his eyes the moment we started running away and I had felt it in myself for a long time before that. It just had been confirmed.

 He surprised me with his knowledge of the underworld of that city. Maybe he had been there before or maybe he had just changed that much. I had heard that after his traumatic experience, he had stayed on his post, taking many other risky assignments. He had a nice fiancé at the start but eventually she left him and no one could point at the exact thing that had caused that rift. However, the job was not one where you could see a lot of happy endings. So I understood if that had been the reason why he had decided to be left alone.

 In time, we got our witness and got her out of that place. It was by the skin of our teeth, as I was shot in the shoulder moments before our party rescued us on the border. The thing was, he had stepped in front of me and blocked most bullets by using a metal door as a shield. Only that one bullet had been able to reach me. Making me lose a lot of blood. I fainted in the helicopter that was carrying us and woke up many days later, back home, in a hospital bed. I was very dizzy, so what I saw seemed very unreal.

 It was him. He was fast asleep in the only furniture in the room other than my hospital bed, a very old sofa that seemed to have seen better days. When the nurse came in, she told me he had been there for over two days, never leaving for his home, never going anywhere. He just stayed there.

 After she left, I watched him sleep for a while. And as I did that, I tried to understand the whole situation. It was confusing for me and I know it must be the same for him. So I just decided to think it through another day. What was important was that I felt safe now, and I could finally rest properly for a few days.