Light from Darkness

Chapter 3- Loner

I have never been smart, funny, charismatic, handsome or lovable in most ways but I had my health and a strong sense of justice which no one could really work out where I had got. My parents worked in low paid jobs in offices hidden away in New York and never really spoke out about the state of society like some did; they just got on with their lives the same as most with no complaints. I was not the same however. Since I can remember I have been  highly opinionated and I still there was something deeply wrong with the world when people were disregarded as useless just by a few tests and thrown down to the bottom of the pile as his parents had been. With all rights I was a bright boy as a child and would have succeeded in everything I did if I had wanted to give it the time of day but there was no swaying me. Instead I spent my time arguing with his parents to try and be more vocal about things and this of course was highly annoying as well as confusing to my family. Why would a child, someone without a true concept of the world, care so much? To me the answer was simple: heroes didn’t exist. It was a fact. Superheroes like Spiderman, Batman, Ironman and so on weren’t real. That may have been a fact of life but it was one that I could never really grasp as I watched and read about wondrous tales of fantastic people who used their gifts and power to help people rather than destroy. But then I did some research when he was slightly older as to whether there were at least any plain heroes. Yes but they were far outnumbered by evil people who had more power than they unfortunately ever would, and that was deeply saddening for me. It still is. How some were born into wealth and destined for a far greater position than I could ever hope to dream of yet they never wanted to do anything good with what they had, just make money because that’s all they had been raised to do. Some were only brought into this world to be grease monkeys for those men and for me it was disgusting. I failed every test I had taken except for English as my teacher had convinced me that I needed to be articulate to make any difference in this world in the way I wanted. Things didn’t really look great for his job aspects but there was one thing he could do to make lives better for the ninety nine per cent of America. Join the army. It may not have seemed the most logical path to choose but to me it was crystal clear that I would fight for his country, to protect it from the very government that had betrayed them by sending boys and girls to die in war. He’d be a hero of war like those he’d seen come back and his parents even supported this choice to an extent. My father had told me many times “Son it’s a great way to travel the world and defend those you love, you’ll fit right in.” It never turned out quite like that.

Years later after leaving school, joining up at eighteen and being trained to be an operator behind the scenes, I was happy with how I was spending my life by helping those who helped my country. I was close to promotion as well as liked by those I worked with. Many days were spent sipping coffee while keeping an eye out for my comrades and a lot of the time I didn’t even miss his parents. Then something changed: a surge of enemy forces that killed off some of the camps on the outer rim that formed the first defence between main command and the harsh desert-like areas beyond. The situation had taken a savage, unexpected and  terrible turn. The army was thin on numbers and a recruitment drive was going to take a while, never mind training those they recruited, so it was time for my call to duty. I remember the day when he and those he’d worked with separating before he joined a squad going straight into the danger zone in order to take back their previous territory. What was supposed to be perilous turned out to be an eerie walk in the park as no one was there, no dead bodies and certainly no Taliban insurgents. In fact not one bit of resistance had been met on the way there, no escaping U.S army marines or even innocent bystanders who often got caught in the middle. Then things had got stranger. All electrical appliances went dead, cars wouldn’t start up and no communication was possible. I remember one of the others speculating on the cause:

“They’ve stitched us up! Those at that Whitehouse I mean.” He said with his strong southern American accent. “They’ve left us high and dry in the middle of this damn desert with no back up because there’s some sort of fight going at home an they don’t want us back there to help our own people.”