Do your best to forget my difficult days. 

Give me to the wind to take away.

Reyhaneh Jabbari.

The world before me is round. Not round as in sphere-round, but as in circular-round, a dotted cross stamped on its milky surface. Green is the only colour glimmering atop the greyscale. Green is where my bullets will go. Black and green is how blood looks when it spills. Even the scents of the forest are black and green. Black like the soil; green like the foliage. The white is the fog. The Fog. Me. Silently, I embrace and engulf you. You don’t hear the bullet that gets you, for it travels faster than sound. You don’t hear death leaping at you. But I can hear you dying. And I can see your body growing as grey and black as the soil that drinks your blood.

‘Micka?’ Runner whispers through my earbud.

‘Yes?’

‘The BSA’s helicopter is gone and I can’t see Erik, either. I don’t know how many men he took with him but…’ He stops, then produces a soft hiss. I wait. 

Booom! The muzzle report bounces off the trees. It’s the deep sound of Runner’s .50 calibre rifle. A long moment later, he continues, ‘Kat must have given the go signal to all our forces. Our ships will be on the move. Erik’s on the move, too, it seems. We’ll finish this tonight, then we get to the west coast as quickly as we can.’

That means we’ll be rather slow; I can’t run. But I can take down anyone who shows in my finder. 

‘Acknowledged,’ I whisper — inhale, hold, and fire at the top of a head who dares to peek over the sandbag wall. I learned days ago that the BSA never lets the kids hide in safety. Whoever is behind that wall, it’s a man with a gun. The six children left alive are walking the perimeter, all packed with explosives, not one of them assigned the job of the overseer and executioner. Tonight, it’s only the men behind the wall shouting commands and pointing rifles at the kids, directing them farther away or closer to the camp, depending on where they suspect our location.

The BSA is changing. It seems that, for years now, Erik has been sharpening them as one sharpens a blade. From the bottom of my dark hole, I can see what he’s doing, I understand what he wants. He wants to make a clean cut, one that lets you bleed out so quickly, you barely have time to notice you’re dying. And somehow, I think I can understand why he wants to stop humanity from populating this planet. He knew my parents, my whole village. I’ve always believed something’s wrong with them. But now, I know that they are not so very different from other people. A little cruelty here, a good amount of ignorance there. Erik knows human history, the universal pattern — that of violence expressed by the few, abetted by the ignorance and inertia of the many; that of the attitudes “but they started the argument” and “not my problem.” Here in my dark hole, these sentiments don’t even touch my mind. If I believed this shit were “not my problem” I wouldn’t be here; if I kept repeating the tiresome sermon of “but the Bullshit Army started the argument,” I’d be an idiot. I don’t give a shit who started it, but I’ll bring it to an end.

Four shots in quick succession sound from Runner’s rifle. Doesn’t he know they’ll be able to gauge his location? 

‘Four more, then I’m moving,’ he says quietly. ‘They are yours in a moment.’

Four more booms ring through the fog, then heads and shoulders pop up in my finder, a mortar is brought in position. He’s lured them out for me. I aim and fire. After my third hit, they begin to act erratically, shelling the shit out of the woods, squeezing off undirected burst after undirected burst from their submachine guns. The rocket launcher goes off, the missile hits so far behind me that the detonation doesn’t even knock dirt off my foxhole walls.

‘Okay, douche canoes,’ I whisper. ‘Say your last prayer.’