The Old Soldier

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The scorched earth crackled beneath the old soldier’s boots, echoing as he trudged across the desolated battlefield. He paused several seconds between each footfall, relying on a broken rifle as a walking stick, the soldier occasionally bumped into destroyed tanks and shattered fortifications. He shambled onward, contemplating how the consequences of his actions led his life to come crumbling down around him. So many lives had been lost. The Order of the Ouroboros had made short work of his troops and his rebellion had hardly made a dent in their forces. Gripping a stainless-steel chain around his neck, he knew the Symuri Sovereignty must be destroyed and that the rebellion had to endure.

Thunk. Thunk. BANG! The young Ouroboros operative inhaled after staining the scarred battlefield with the blood of another straggler. She broke down her rifle’s tripod. The Order's commands were clear: leave no survivors. The operative had witnessed firsthand the power that an individual could wield. The power to persuade, the power to gain followers, the power to destroy, but worst of all, the power to ignore consequences of their actions. She vowed never to let these rebels escape the consequences again. Why else would she join the Order? Her superior marksmanship and tactics had won the battle, and though she knew her fellow operatives could handle the cleanup, she would not rest. Her commanding officer had even offered her a reprieve, a rarity, but she refused. She had to find him. Her hand instinctively grasped the pouch around her neck. She had something she needed to deliver, personally.

Thunk. Thunk. THUD! The soldier fell into a mixture of blackened ash, dirt, and blood, indistinguishable from what already stained his jacket. If only he had heeded his wife’s warning sooner, he might have been able to save her. He struggled to raise his eyes and open a stainless-steel heart shaped locket. He glanced at a faded picture of his beautiful Sophia and his daughter Lillian stuck inside the locket, one of three which had been purchased for each member of the family a lifetime ago, before blacking out. In happier days he served as a general in the Symurian army and enjoyed an abundance of wealth, food and good friends. They wanted for nothing. Sophia, his loving wife had always been a champion of the truth, questioning everything and everyone around her to help those in need. Her ambitious spirit earned her a unique reputation since grade school. When she began to excel at her career as a reporter and was given her own time slot on the news, only one title would suffice: Sophie the Sleuth: With the Scoop! He always joked that it would be the death of her, and the Order of the Ouroboros had proved him right. Now she was gone.

The soldier gathered his strength, rose to his feet, and continued his heavy, belabored trek. The weight of his physical form paled in comparison to the crushing gravity of his guilt. His dear, sweet Sophia. Ten years ago, Sophia received a tip from one of her most reliable sources, a history professor, to track the Sovereignty’s elderly population, the call ending abruptly after. The next day, the source had, according to all her loved ones and colleagues, journeyed to a mountain retreat to “explore the beauty of the natural world,” despite being allergic to every conceivable form of plant life, and having no greater desire than to sit in her comfiest chair and read all day. The professor had only taken the job because she could get paid to indulge her reading habits when she was not teaching. After receiving that fateful call pronouncing the professor’s death, his wife’s nose twitched a little too much, and a fiery vengeance burned in her eyes. From that moment the sleuth was on the case, and nothing could deter her from it.

This case however was different. Leads that were warm, went cold within 5 minutes of discovering them. Half the city felt like it was disappearing, the truth always just out of reach. Sophia had several near-death encounters and close calls; someone even broke into their home. But the most disturbing part was how sick she was getting. Ordinarily quite hale and unflappable, Sophia started experiencing dizzy spells, fatigue, and eventually started coughing up blood. At first, he had chalked it up to the weather, then to late nights of research, then going out too often and not resting enough. Left with no other options, Sophia used her husband’s security clearance and tapped into the information network of the Sovereignty. They learned of the outside world, and how the world’s greed had sucked their planet dry of its resources, and replaced once thriving ecosystems with barren wastelands 300 years ago. They discovered how all the wonderful comforts of life enjoyed by previous generations had been lost to all, except for those lucky few denizens of the Sovereignty who discovered a new method of generating resources.

The human body truly is an amazing construct with such fascinating inner mechanisms and unique chemical compounds, which when properly harvested, could provide resources for all kinds of functions. Bones could be artificially fossilized to create oil for gasoline. Fats could be used to help cook food and help create medicines. The corpses could be dehydrated, the water traveling to a collection chamber and then getting distributed to every tap in the city. The list went on with a hundred other horrifying processes. The main problem was finding the right supply, a question easily answered within the next two years when a neighboring barbaric tribe tried resorting to ancient siege tactics and launched diseased corpses via catapults into the Sovereignty’s borders. Once these barbarians had been defeated, their bodies were harvested. However, this proved to be an unreliable occurrence, as helpful as it was, because they could not guarantee consistent barbarian attacks. One physician noted that the elderly seemed to be hit hardest, and from that benign observation a disgusting supply chain was born.

The Symuri Sovereignty established a surveillance state, ostensibly to keep its denizens safe, but truthfully to monitor every denizen down to what they ate and the medicine they took. When a denizen of the Sovereignty achieved the venerable age of 60, they had a routine physical examination, just like they had throughout their life within the Sovereignty. The truth of those examinations is that the Order of the Ouroboros, by the will of the first Sovereign, used the information to craft poisons specifically designed for those individuals to steadily grow increasingly ill over time. The Order would distribute poisoned food, drinks, and medicine to particular denizens. The Order wanted the elderly to have enough time to say goodbye to their families and attend to their affairs, before dying peacefully, so no one would miss them, or question their death. They would then be buried in the earth at remote cemeteries on the edges of the Sovereignty’s borders. In the middle of the night, the grave keepers would utilize mechanisms causing all the recently buried bodies to drop into underground storage containers which would be transported to laboratories to be disassembled into their base components. The Order had to start when people were 60, to ensure that the bodies did not reach the age of 65, lest their bodies decay to a point where the amount of resources they would provide was drastically diminished. This also allowed the Order time to recognize the individual’s natural immunities. The intense study of immune systems increased the average lifespan by several years, ensuring there would always be elderly ripe for disassembling, and that the Sovereignty always had the right poison to eliminate any neighboring barbarian tribes, or anyone looking to expose their operations. The soldier and his wife then found proof that the Order of the Ouroboros had been poisoning Sophia for the last 8 months with a more severe dosage to make sure it took. Without treatment Sophia wouldn’t last the month. They rushed to gather their daughter Lillian and attempted to steal an antidote before fleeing the city, but the Order was ready. In a desperate move to save her husband and daughter, Sophia sacrificed herself to ensure her family’s escape.

The soldier ran as far as he could get from the Sovereignty. Having experience as a general in their army, which was little more than a group of armchair tacticians, he knew how they thought, all their capabilities, and carefully outmaneuvered them. He began to train Lillian in basic survival skills over a few years, such as how to skin and cook animals, gather water, and pitch tents. But of all the skills she learned, marksmanship was by far her strongest talent. By the age of 12, no target was safe from her sights. That same marksmanship saved them when they were nearly overrun by a group of barbarians, until their leader realized they were in a stalemate and declared a truce. The leader explained how they needed able bodied fighters for defense against other tribes. The pair, understanding the safety in numbers, agreed to join the Murky Crow tribe. Throughout the coming years, the soldier’s tactical experience saw him rise to become a leader, of the Murky Crow tribe, of tribes he then conquered, of the tribes that joined his.

After fighting with and against several tribes, the soldier realized that the barbarians had one advantage the Sovereignty was not accounting for. The Sovereignty had grown soft in its prosperity, but the barbarians outside had only known war and suffering, and if properly organized, stood a chance of decimating the Sovereignty. After receiving proper training, his forces mounted the first successful defense against a Sovereignty invasion and several more followed until the soldier had become the face of the rebellion.For the first time the rest of the world had hope. Lillian also won glory on the battlefield as a sniper and earned the name Lillian Longshot.

But it would not last. The Order dispatched several agents to surprise the barbarian forces, and in a moment that every general dreads, he was forced to give an order that sacrificed troops for the good of the whole rebellion. To not give such an order to one division of his troops would have meant the death of the rebellion, but he chose the wrong division. For among the dead lay his daughter’s paramour, and for that act she could never forgive him. She defected to the Sovereignty shortly after, and she took her expert marksmanship and her knowledge of the soldier’s tactics. His one major advantage, now in enemy hands.

That had decided this battle, and was why they were so handily slaughtered by the Order. Lillian knew exactly where to place her sights, and told the Order where to apply traps and poison gas to render his troops useless. But this could not be the end, lest Sophia and his troops have died in vain! The soldier had to carry on, for he knew if one person lived who resisted the Sovereignty, the rebellion would always live on!

She had finally found him. Using an empty rifle as a walking stick, slowly walking off of the field. She reached for the pouch around her neck, retrieved a stainless-steel jacketed round, the heart shaped design flattened and erased from its surface, and loaded it into her rifle. Took note of the wind, lined up her sights, and waited.

They could regroup and rebuild; they would be victorious! He stopped to rest on his rifle bringing the locket up to his eyes. Just beyond he saw the spectral forms of Sophia and Lillian appear. He sobbed uncontrollably, asking for their forgiveness and walking towards them, hands outstretched.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. BANG! One last thunderous clap roared across the battlefield, the stainless-steel heart shaped locket returning to the soldier through the back of his head, causing his eyes to go dark.

And the rebellion died.