Last Night Locomotive

Final wish: Second class

Fear has taken a hold of me.

The noises I hear, the scene unfolding itself before me... they terrify me.

They make me shiver.

They make me want to jump out of this damned train.

But I can't, the grip of this fear is immense.

I protect my ears with my trembling hands.

"I don't want to hear this." I mumble under my breath.

I kneel down onto the wooden floor.

"Please make it stop!"

An explosion.

Loudly behind me.

I can hear the screams from both the enemy and my allies.

When they told me that going to war, that serving for your country was a blessing, I had willingly taken it upon me.

The title of 'soldier' had been my greatest pride and joy.

I was one like my father and grandfather before me, as a child I had played only with planes and toy-soldiers, imagining I would be like them someday.

Brave, honorable, a hero.

I had always wanted to be a hero.

The kind of hero didn't matter to me.

So when the chance came along I became a hero of war.

A soldier.

Oh, how proud I was when I got my uniform, how proud my family and everyone around me was.

I did many missions, most of them rather boring, only with the final it went different.

I had been chosen for a special mission.

A couple of others and myself.

One of them was a girl I could get along with really well.

It didn't take long for her to become my everything.

And I became hers.

Then when the final mission started, I remember having a bad feeling.

A nagging feeling.

A terrible feeling, one that never really went away.

At the time I tried to shrug it off, but it never left the back of my head.

Perhaps I only made that feeling up after it all happened... I don't know.

Together with my friend group we went into the warzone we had to go to.

The plan was to sneak into the enemy base and blow it to smithereens.

The memories are a bit foggy from the years, but I know for certain, after some time, something went wrong.

We found out a horrible truth...

We weren't supposed to make it out alive ourselves.

We were meant to be bait...

A loud explosion had erupted, sooner than expected.

We started to run, our explosives and the enemies bullets grazing us closer and closer, until it went into the flesh.