A Story of an Ending

“These are the days that rarely come.”

The words fell on silence, pregnant with trepidation. Hushed voices made up for it with active expressions and eager eyes. The platoon watched Captain Wilson with equal parts hope and despair. Hope that he would have something to quell their fears. Despair that they knew he wouldn’t.

“These are the days when you have to decide for yourself, what sort of man you’ll be before the lights go out. Before it all ends and you meet your maker, you’re born again, or you just become worm food, depending on whatever you do or don’t believe. That part doesn’t matter. What does is that it’s ending. You are ending, and the world’s just going to keep on spinning. And you have to decide if it’ll spin just a little bit better because of what you’ve thrown away for it.”

“So this is it, then?” The speaker was barely past boyhood. Eighteen, scrawny, with a spread of acne that probably made it difficult to get laid. “I mean, we make our stand here, now? There’s no way out?”

Wilson eyed the kid’s nameplate, stitched atop his muddied camouflage. “Out? I suppose you could hide, Pete, but they’ll find you. You know they will. Or you can act, and in that act, I’m not going to lie. You’ll die. There’s no better way to put it. When we plant that bomb and set it off there’s no way we’ll be far enough that it’ll spare us. We go up in smoke. And we take ’em with us.”

Peter hissed through his teeth. Probably when he joined up for the war he thought himself invincible. That clear cut of death was muddy until you got a solid taste of the blade, right between the teeth. Especially in young men, who thought themselves demigods. Wilson pitied him, but he wasn’t about to baby him. He couldn’t afford to.

“I won’t force you to go with me,” he said. Overhead, the sound of someone screaming ripped the air outside the trench. Those more shaken placed their hands over their ears before the inevitable bone crunching followed. “One of us has to get there. One of us has to get to that reactor. Just one. The rest are a shield. A shield of bodies. That’s the plan. Insane, utterly. But it’s all we have. And I won’t force you into it. But I want you to consider something before you decide.”

More silence. Peter looked ashamedly down at his gun, then behind him, where the network of tunnels led back to the city. It was what the human race had been reduced to. Moles, hiding in the dirt. It made Wilson sick, but more than that, it made him furious.

“You can keep hiding, maybe for a while. Maybe you’ll live, deep underground, hoping each and every day that they won’t find you. You’ll become subhuman, scavenging, hoping that maybe, just maybe, they’ll leave or die off. They won’t, though. And you’ll just keep going deeper, down and down, as more and more of you die off. By disease, by madness, or simply starved from want of sunlight. You’ll wilt like little flowers, and the earth itself will decay above you.”

Wilson thumbed the safety on his weapon. The explosives thumped against his side as he moved, eager. “So you’re going to end either way. You have to choose whether it’ll be in body, or in soul.”

Peter swallowed. The boy looked around at the others: Marty, Stephen, Luke, Joseph. They were all too young for this, but most of the prime fighters were dead or debilitated. They had one shot, the window was small, and it had to be taken.

“…I’ll do it,” he said quietly. “I got a kid sister. I don’t want that for her. Can’t have it. I’ll go with you.”

Wilson looked around at the others. Grim faces, streaked with mud, streaked with hopelessness. But one by one they nodded agreement, readying their rifles, eyeing the ridge above where Armageddon waited, temporarily clueless. Not for long, though.

He turned. The shuffle of feet on dry clay behind him made his heart jump to his throat. His words felt like bitter poison left on his tongue. He’d romanticized it, he knew. The plan was faulty. Shaky. Desperation made operation. There was a plain truth in it all, without heroics, without the sugar to swallow the pill of reality.

The days rarely came only because they were the last.