Circumstance

What exactly differentiates me from them is the real question, the one that keeps getting back to me.  It lies under thoughts like, how close is my smile to his when he shoots into the crowded streets, reveling in the screams, or where do I draw the line when I bring out the long barrel rifle that comes standard issue?  Who do I answer to, superiors or my conscience?  I don't know, and that feels like a probelm I am incapable of surmounting.  I saw something like it in the eyes of the old men from the last war, when they were long gone from it.  I recognized the look as I glanced in a puddle at the end of a long day of suffering through the work.  I couldn't place it then, but I feel the pressure of it now.  I'll take it to my grave if that's how it is, but I sleep by telling myself its just the look of a soldier, that they made peace with this in their years.

Yet now I can't sleep, even with my hollow promises, vague hopes for my future.  The night that slipped into my tent here is thick and suffocating.  All I see is the blackness, no starlight or moonlight making it through the thick leather overhead.  Even an inch from my face my hand is invisible to me.  I'm caught up in my head so much that I miss the first shot, or more let it slip past me in the groggy fog that folds itself around me.  The second, a reminder, and echo of the first, gets to me.  I jolt up, pulling on pants by feel, then grabbing the rifle next to where I sleep.  Not a slow reaction, but it could have been faster, I'm struggling with the tent flap as I stumble shirtless into the cold evening air.  The tent does more than you would think filtering out the chill of late summer air.  Starlight, moonlight, torchlight are shining around me.  A silvery skin by the first two with pockets of orange that shine like eyes.  Then some of the eyes grow, expanding outward.  Not torches, but tent-fires.  The night is thick with screams, from dark shapes running between the rows of tents or the inhabitants as flaming wreckage collapses on the unsuspecting within them.

Rebels.  A word I turn to in confusion.  It must have been, must be them.  More shots, clustered together.  It reminds me to load my rifle and check for the rest of my squad in the darkness.  They haven't formed yet, my commander just struggling out of his tent without pants or his gun.  He's screaming incoherently, what's left of his hair is on fire.  As I run over to him it spreads, wreathing his torso as it descends around him.  My screams to roll on the grounds don't reach him and he is used up like a short candle.  I would feel worse if he were a stranger.

I'm kneeling when a wave of them runs through, torches lit and hands filled with small grenades, filled with oil if the spread of the fires is any indication.  One of the figures lights the egg-shaped object and tosses it on my tent.  The week has been dry, the leather cold, but flammable.  I crouch lower, staying out of the path of the rebels, watching the life I was leading flare up in a pyre of sorts.  Maybe it was born of insanity, but when the last of them pass out of sight, I drag my commander's corpse to my tent.  One solid throw/push and he lands in the wreck of my tent, under the roof where I was sleeping minutes before.  Then I run for the treeline, rifle in hand.  They taught me how to use it, how to respect it.  It feels good, the metal against my skin.  I don't know the line, still, but I want to find it, I want to make peace before I return home like the last generation, something broken inside.  I have time to fix that.