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.

The place beyond the mountains

   Lakia ran in front of her owner and then waited for a bit. After all, Madame Greska was an elderly woman that needed a cane to support her weight. Even so, she liked to take a walk around the village every single day with her dog, as she had done for years and years. Her husband used to join them for the walk but he had died very recently and now a stroll around the fields was the only thing really making her feel alive. There was nothing more for her in this world, so she took what little she had around.

 And one of those things was the nature and beauty of her village’s surroundings. It was a very small town, deep into a very steep mountain range, so the modern world had been kept largely at bay. There was electricity and hot water but that was basically it. Very few people came but those who did chose the town precisely because it seemed to have been frozen in time. Madame Greska’s clothes were even the traditional attire for women of the region, something women did not wear anymore elsewhere.

 But in that place between the mountains, people lived a different kind of life. As she smelled the deep and beautiful smell of the lavender fields, the woman looked at how peaceful it all seemed, how untouched and perfect the countryside was and that could also have been said about the town itself. The homes had been built almost three hundred years ago by hand, stone by stone, and they had been kept in the same conditions since then. No major changes had ever been done.

 Even when electricity came, people came up with ways to install the whole thing without having to modify their homes or the general look of their town. And it was a success because no one would have ever thought those interventions had been made there. The town was made up of about twenty to thirty houses, all very similar, some of then containing the post office, the mayor’s office, the restaurant, the bar, the hotel and some other dependencies needed in the town’s daily life.

 They celebrated festivals in the summer as well as in the winter and they also had a small church on the outskirts to praise the Virgin Mary, the protector of the mountain towns. It was there that they prayed for days and days during the hard times, that had never come to the mountains but that had been looming around them for quite some time. The town was never in the middle of any historical occurrence but they had been very close in a number of times and only prayer and keeping their traditions had seemed to do the work and keep all the bad things at bay, away from their paradise.

 One of those bad things was war, both great wars in this case. During the first one, Madame Greska had not been alive yet. But her parents told her when she was young how they feared for their lives when a messenger arrived, having been sent by the royal house hold in order to announce all over the country that the war had begun. For them, it had been the announcement of a tragedy; something that they just knew would change their lives forever. So they prayed and prepared, and waited and waited.

 But the war never came to them. The small town stayed as it had been for hundreds of years and its people, although fearful, were able to live normal lives, plowing their fields and harvesting their crops. They had animals and even did a little bit of commerce between themselves and neighboring small towns. It was only in those opportunities when someone would come back, updating everyone about what was happening beyond the mountains. But somehow, all of it just seemed like a bedtime story.

 No soldiers ever came and those machines that people had invented to fly had been simply considered exaggerations. No one there ever saw a tank or even a rifle. They had no idea what mustard gas was and how it affected people. In time, many years after the end of the war, some travellers did tell them about what they had heard and seem. So the war did become a little bit more real but probably not real enough. For the people of such a small town, all those grandiose stories were just that, stories.

 Madame Greska grew up during the times between the wars and she remembered those days fondly. She remembered frolicking around the meadows in the spring, catching tadpoles with her sister and running after some dog, probably Lakia’s grandfather. Something she had always loved was when, in winter, they would offer her ice cones in the town’s festival. They were made out of ice collected in the mountains surrounding the town and they would then add some flavoring, most likely some kind of berry.

 Her parents her very caring people, the farmer type. They had a couple of cows and would sell the milk in the town’s market, every single day. Her mother was the one that had to do the heavy work and her father was in charge of selling the product. She never knew why her mother had to carry such heavy buckets and walk the cows to a prairie where they could eat. Her father didn’t seem to do that much at all. But he was such a nice and funny guy that, no one ever really seemed to be able to be mad at him. He was just the kind of person that would lift your spirits any day of the week.

 That was until the Second World War. The town was left untouched by that one too but they were more affected by it in ways very few people can understand. Again, no soldiers ever stepped on the stone streets of the small town nor they walked among the lavender fields. But it was people that heard about what was going on and how now it seemed to be worse than the last time. The atrocities people talked about were so heinous that some people even qualified them as fabrications and dismissed them completely.

 But by the end of the second year of the war, people noticed that it did seem like something completely different that before. More and more, people that had been beyond the mountains would tell everyone in town about the battles being fought and the threats being fulfilled. And those people would almost always come with some kind of proof, mostly in the shape of flyers and newspapers, which had become easier to find. They came with detailed stories and even with pictures of the horrors.

 This caused town to prepare once again. And even knowing the war would probably never get to them, they did try to cut off some ties with the outside world in order to prevent anything bad from coming to them. Some youngsters were even thinking about the bigger picture, what would happen if the enemy won the war and was able to take everything for themselves? They thought about it for a long time until one day, something happened that made them take a step that their families would regret for life.

 One night, a large group of planes passed over town. They were noisy and seemed to be flying really low. Most villagers thought their tie had come. But no, the planes continued for a bit and then started dropping their payload on a neighboring town, much larger than Madame Greska’s village. It was beyond the mountains but the explosions were so potent that they could be seen from afar. This event caused many young men to decide joining the army and fight for the freedom of the whole nation.

 None of them ever returned. Only letter with their uniform and a picture of their battalion would get to their families, who would mourn them forever. Brave young men that had decided that their ignored village was more than enough to be able to fight tyrants and monsters.

 Two of those men were Madame Greska’s brothers. And she was so affected by the tragedy that she was never able to have children. Her body was able to do it but somehow inside seemed to prevent any pregnancy. It seemed her soul had always been in mourning and would always be.

Mission

   It wasn’t very normal for Truman to be assigned to a special mission. Not that he didn’t deserved to be in one, rather than his superiors had always deemed preferable that he stayed with the troops, helping do what soldiers usually do instead of traveling the globe protecting something or someone. He had never been the bodyguard type and people saw that. Instead, they considered him a mastermind of strategy, a very skilled mind that could solve difficult situations were a lot was at risk.

 However, about a week or so ago, he had been summoned by his superiors and instantly praised and thanked for his service. When they did that, he knew that they wanted something out of him. The only question was what? What did they want him to do that they couldn’t find anyone else to do it? Was he their first choice or had they just decided to send someone that not many people would miss? So many questions amassed in his head in only a few seconds. His muscles were tense.

 After being done with the praising, they explained they needed him to form a team to protect a very special cargo travelling through a very difficult region of the world. A region at war that needed to be crossed by a train carrying very important things for the country. At first, Truman wasn’t very convinced by the aspect of the mission. He was normally given a lot to work with but this time they wanted him to get a team just to ride and protect a train. They wouldn’t say anything else.

 But he couldn’t refuse to help him. In the military, there was no such thing as the word “no”. You can have doubts and you can even express them to your superiors but you cannot, never, say “no” to any of their orders. Maybe one day when you become a superior as well and that may never happen for many reasons people knew very well but preferred not to talk about. The point was the he had no option but to accept the mission, as vague and unclear as his orders could be.

 Truman contacted every single soldier that he knew, the ones that were actually good at what they did. The team he needed to gather had to be very large in order to have a successful trip through deserts and farmlands, as well as devastated cities. Some of the men he contacted were spending some time with their families but they all accept in an instant. Again, there was never a negative word inside of the military; there were just orders and the right way to proceed about them. Besides, they all respected Truman a lot, as they knew him from the field.

 They were given amazing brand new weapons as well as a special suit that would protect them in case of an attack. As there was no time to train, Truman asked the men he had invited to the mission to exercise daily until the day they traveled to the city where the train was stationed. They all obliged, going back to their intense gym routine in the blink of an eye. Most of them loved the pain that exercising brought. They felt more powerful after it and their confidence was easily boosted.

When they got to the train, they were kind of surprised to discover that the train they had to protect was not a cargo train but rather an actual passenger train, with few but too many passengers for them to worry about. Truman expressed his concern to one of his bosses but he just said he had done lots of missions like this one that he didn’t have to worry. But he did, because he had prepared everything to protect a cargo train, not really a place were people had drinks and laughed too.

 Because the train was not exclusive to one person. To ensure that their enemies thought twice about attacking the transport, the government had decide to use passengers as a human shield to protect whatever it was that the government needed to have protected. It was very complicated and not very patriotic to use others in order to defend something that no one knew what it was, but once again, they had to trust the superior and just proceed with everything, no matter where they were.

 The train departed on time, early in the morning, with at least one hundred people seating inside. The team had no idea where what they protecting was in the train but, as they guarded doors and such, they discussed their ideas about what it was and why the government want to protect it like that. Some said it was only a bunch of papers incriminating someone somewhere and others were certain it was some kind of new weapon that they had developed in secret and needed to be moved.

 Any of the guesses could be correct, that was the thing that bothered Truman the most. As he walked outside, in order to guard the last wagon, he realized for the first time in his life that he had no idea why he was in that place. Something didn’t feel right to him and when that happened he did prefer to go with his gut instead than his head. Whenever something was off, he had stomach cramps. By the time he reached the last wagon, he wasn’t feeling especially great either. More like the opposite. He felt a little dizzy and then realized it wasn’t because of his gut.

 Before fainting Truman had realized what was going on: they had used some kind of poison or gas that made people fall asleep. As his eyes closed, he was certain that he had fallen into some kind of trap but he had no idea who the trap was supposed to catch. The other soldiers were not attacked, only him as he was alone and the leader of the bunch. He woke up much later, judging by the night sky outside. Truman knew that he was still inside the train but in some sort of closet.

 He was very cramped in that small space, his head still spinning. He wanted to talk to someone; he wanted his questions answered and his men beside him. But he didn’t get any of his wishes that night. Instead, he go to hear the most awful of noises: a woman’s scream pierced the sky. It was so intense, that Truman felt the voice inside him for a while. The sad thing was that the scream was followed by more screams and they were not only done by the same woman, but by other people too.

 Truman fought the cable they had used to tie him up. But it didn’t move from his wrists for a second. She tried to make every part of the small room to shake in order to cause someone to hear him or at least to be able to open the door but he couldn’t. They must have used some kind of lock for the door and the cable on his wrists seemed to pierce into his skin every time he tried to get rid of it. It was very painful, because he had tried very hard and now his wrists were covered in blood.

 The screaming continued and it was followed by the sound of weapons. Truman’s face was drained of all blood when he heard something he could recognize anywhere: his brand new weapons. He had practiced a bit before boarding the train and had discovered how that new assault weapon was just so much better than existing ones. Apparently they were made only to be used by a special task force that protected the most private secrets of the nation, whenever and wherever necessary.

 The sound of the weapons lasted for at least fifteen minutes. Then, it was silence. A very eerie silence because nothing but the train tracks could be heard. Truman thought that maybe they had been attacked by the enemy and now they had killed everyone on the train.

 But then the door opened and someone pulled him out of the tiny closet. The brightness of the lights were very hard to look at but it was way harder to look at one of his superiors with one of the new weapons on his hand. And on the floor, Truman’s team, all dead. It was the first time he needed someone to explain the situation.