...gasp...

Noose.

This is a little different from my other short stories. It's a little longer (still only about 900 words, but longer than my others). I hope you like it; it took a long time to come up with the ending.

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The war between the humans and the aliens had been raging for years before someone found a solution. They were harmed, quite severely, by salt water. It took a while to round them all up and trap them in encampments, surrounded on all sides by moats of salty, frothing water, but after three months of hard work, and many lost lives on either side, the aliens were tamed and humanity was safe. This was not a solution, however, according to some-- and it wasn't that they felt it to be an inadequate solution. On the contrary, activists believed this to be too much. It was too harsh, they said, too brutal. Now that they were tamed, the aliens should be negotiated with, or at least exterminated, and put out of their misery. These activists soon became the subject of much violence and abuse, particularly from the families of those who had lost their lives to the aliens in the terrible war.

"They're traitors to their own kind," growled a man at his dinner table one evening. His wife and son and daughter were seated around him, all looking up at him silently. His wife was nodding, his son was grinning, and the daughter just blinked and kept silent. "No decent person would sympathise with those... those blasted creatures."

"Quite right, Mark," his wife said, "anyone who thinks of those aliens as anything more than that is a fool and a degenerate." She narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her nose so that she looked like a hag. "No one in this household will ever be found on the side of those traitors, or else they'll find themselves sitting in the streets faster than they can say 'idiot.'"

"Very good," said his son, and the daughter nodded mutely, and the family finished their dinner.

The days passed, and the unrest grew. More and more activists began popping up, and less and less people took action. Mark found this distasteful, and he claimed he was acting as a responsible citizen by taking care of 'those traitorous scum' as he so delicately called them. His wife began donating money to the Foundation for the Protection of Humanity, and his son went out and bought a firearm that he threatened people with on the streets, and the daughter shut herself up in her room and took long walks outside by herself.

One week later, Mark noticed a glittering necklace that was lying on the ground, discarded. He paused a moment, thinking of the daughter, who loved jewellery, and picked it up and took it home with him. Along the way he was stopped by a gang of young people, who asked him what side of the war he was on.

"The side of humanity," Mark said smugly, and the gang cheered.

"We're having a rally down by the soccer fields tomorrow," one of them said, "bring your weapons, if you have them, because we expect retaliation."

When he got home, Mark gave the daughter the necklace, telling her that he'd seen it in a store window on his way home. At dinner, she sat silently with it around her neck, like a glittering noose, as Mark told them all about the rally.

"We should go," his wife said, "we should help the community."

"That sounds like a good idea," his son said. Mark noticed that the daughter had grown pale, and he thought that she must not like all the shooting. "You don't have to come," he said kindly, but she didn't like that idea.

"I'll go anyways," she told him, and that was all she said all night.

The next morning, Mark and his wife and his son and the daughter all piled into their car and drove to the fields. There was already a sizeable crowd gathered there, and Mark was excited. He and his wife and son went off into the crowd, but the daughter said she would stay behind. Once they were gone, she left too, slipping into the crowd and disappearing amidst the people.

There were a few minutes of tension, and the people realized that there was only one crowd. This meant that there must be activists cloistered with them. They started calling to one another, and those who didn't answer and who didn't recognize anyone were shot.

Soon the fighting began, and the activists all ran to one side and the rest ran to the other. Only one side had all the guns and the hatred for the other, so they began mowing them down, shooting men and women and people of all ages to the ground. Mark was firing, and he was half-blinded by all the smoke and half-deaf from all the gunfire and all the screaming, but he kept on shooting. One of his bullets struck a young women who was crying for them to stop. She fell instantly, a crimson flower blossoming on her chest, and she was dead in seconds. Mark didn't stop to look at who he'd shot; in his opinion, anyone on that side wasn't worth a passing glance as they lay dead.

But perhaps it was better that he hadn't look, for if he had, he would have seen, as she fell, the flash of gold on her throat. It was stained with her blood, and once the bodied began piling up, it was no longer visible, but a single passing glance would have allowed him to see the glittering necklace that hung around his victim's neck, like a noose.