A Soldier’s Story

I often like to walk the streets of Betlacall. The town is quieter than, say, a big city like Niw Brunswik. I need the quiet.

I could have the quiet if I lived in Niwklinton

But not that kind of quiet- a devastated, sad quiet, the kind that shouldn’t exist in a city as big as Niwklinton is, or perhaps I should say was.

It’s been over 7 years. I’ve moved on and accepted it. But I haven’t forgotten, and when I see the skeletons of those skyscrapers- clad though they are in scaffolding- I remember, and I remember in a way I normally don’t.

I suppose I should be glad I’ve come this far. There was a time when I couldn’t bear to see those blackened spires. Nobody could, but I had another, deeper reason.

I’m not talking about the nuclear war, really. That’s not the memory that really bothered me personally, but it was when I suppose I finally had to confront it- confront my past.

I remember getting the warning, that the bombs were coming.

I can’t say I was surprised or particularly afraid. We’d been winning the war against the Soviets for the last 2 months, and it had been going so well that the air-raid sirens, like the ones that occasionally blared during many earlier wars, hadn’t gone off once.

But the Soviets, we all knew, weren’t typical enemies.

I knew all too well.

The alarm came as the sun rose into a clear blue sky, without a cloud. The warning was expected. We’d been denying it up front, but deep down, we all knew that this would happen once the Soviets knew they were beaten.

I remember calmly driving the 2 minutes the bunker with my emergency supplies. I wasn’t too worried; I had nobody to lose. I had been raised by my grandparents, and they were dead. I wasn’t married. I myself had all the supplies I needed to wait out the fallout in the vaults.

It was when I came out of the shelter weeks later that it really hit me. I saw what was left of Port Raritan, the city where I had worked.

The ships, black and broken, in the once-blue waters of the bay, now swirling with the brown dust washing down the polluted rivers

The skyscrapers of the city center, once gleaming, the heart of the country’s trade and commerce, lay broken and twisted. Even from my distance I could see the great rubble heaps of blackened metal and shattered glass, melted into great globs, and make out, through the Atlantic haze on the unseasonably cold weather- it had no right to be 55°f in August- the ruined forms of the skyscrapers that were left.

They’re still like that today, though the rubble is being cleared from downtown, and one of the piers is back up and running.

But that day is when I remembered it all.

I remembered the evil of the Soviets.

I remembered who they were, and what they did, all those years ago, in the mountains of Hainan China.