Hells Bells

Project: Atlas.

"Nulla anomalia contra aestus Americanos stabit."

-Unknown group.

Originally Written in 2022.

February 8th, 2025. Washington D.C.

Snow falls upon the white house lawn, as the reporters and camera crews stand in the freezing cold, along with a crowd of bystanders huddled outside the fencing. The sound of the military helicopters occasionally breaking the silence. Military riot police armed with shock staffs, move in between the crowd and the fence. Two apaches fly overhead, as a sense of tension fills the air. An hour passes before the door opens and the president and secret service walk out. The reporters start spouting questions when the president reaches the pedestal. The president raises his hand and the reporters quiet. A few minutes passed before the president spoke in a weakened tone.

STOKINS: I want to give a quick speech before we start. My service in the Army showed me how the civilian knows well or is ignorant to how war affects us soldiers or families of those soldiers. I was deployed to a hellscape known as Vietnam.

The president stops for a moment.

STOKINS: The time I was in that cursed jungle, I lost ten friends. One by the name of Thomas, just got married to his sweetheart and was expecting his first kid, died when a injured woman pulled the pin on a grenade and jumped on him. Another one called Jethro, was about to graduate college, but dropped out to do his patriotic duty. He was killed by his fellow country men, after they mistook him for the enemy during an intense night time fire fight, he was a runner handing out ammunition. The man who shot him ended up in a psych ward a month later.

He stops for a few minutes, then continues

STOKINS: Leroy, a kid forced into the army by his father to toughen him up. He died in my arms with his skin melted off after napalm struck too close to our position. When I got home I got to meet his father...in a bar...drunk to the point where he could barely stand ranting on how it was all his fault he got his boy killed.

The president turns away from the mic covering his face. After he regained his composure he continued.

STOKINS: That same day I got beat to shit by a bunch of college football players, all the while their girlfriends kept shouting that this is what I get for gunning down civilians for the hell of it. A couple of months later, two of those men were being lowered into the ground after their family forced them to join after hearing what they did to me. Twenty years later I met the third one working at a tire shop, when I came in he immediately recognized me and apologized, he went on to explain that after he kicked the crap out of me, he received a letter notifying him that his brother died in the war he beat me up for being in. Those experiences opened my eyes to the ignorance of the people who haven't suffered from war, and on how those who have, whether family or soldier, can drive them down deep.

He takes a moment.

STOKINS: These experiences are why, when my son joined, I got him into a comfy security job so he doesn't suffer like I did...or maybe I wasn't prepared for that knock on the door after seeing my friends' families suffer. My son hated me for putting him there and keeping him there, when he was little he always said he wanted to be a hero like me...so when he saw an opportunity to do so, he took it...only to befall the same fate many of his comrades did, being shipped home in a flagged covered box.

Wyte flicks his cigar at the TV.

WYTE: What a bunch of horseshit.

Wyte plops his feet on his desk and lights another cigar, with the snow coming down harder outside the balcony window behind him.