G.U.N

• Shirlin Wu, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2007

Rain poured down in torrents, filling rivers with red tinged water. The sky darkened to a shadowy blood-stained red, clouded with a heavy black that seemed to weigh on the earth, forcefully pushing down. The air was cold, stuffy, stale, and thick. Lightning crackled against the sky, illuminating the broken city for a mere moment before darkness fell again. The cold seeped into your bones, freezing you from the inside; the atmosphere unforgiving, all comsuming.

The rocky ground was soaked with thick red blood, a dried crust already forming. The view was littered with broken metal, fragments of weapons, dented bullets and ashes from long-gone fires. Two lone figures stood hunched back in the debris of broken bones and burned flesh, their skin a pale white, their lips a purple blue. Blood shot eyes heavy lidded and hair crusted with dried dull red, they looked like the living dead.

“Let’s go.” The voice was a raspy whisper. A shadow of what it was before, the sound of a man who had experienced death

“Where?” Was the simplistic answer, a soft murmur, stating rather than asking, hiding long-lost memories and places of forgotten love.

“Somewhere.”

“Might as well stay. Wait for the end to come.”

“…Take this.”

The younger boy looked at the offered weapon, the cool steel illuminated as a sharp jolt ran through the sky. The barrel was pointed towards the ground, a gleam of gold just visible. The trigger was set, ready to let the contained death sentence find its mark. It yearned for spilled blood, lusting for the silent cry of the dead.

Darkened eyes clouded with pain

“That’s a tool to kill.”

A heavy silence fell between the two survivors. The reply, a raw truth, was just heard before being wiped away by the dry wind.

“It’s a tool to protect your life.”

*************

The screams still echo through my mind, haunting me in the dark depth of night. Even in the bright sun I can hear the muffled sound of ricocheting bullets, of blood dripping, a constant background rhythm to the eerie scene of war. The cold battlefield, icy, harsh, cruel, where the only warmth you get is from a splash of blood.

The street are clean now, repaved and rebuilt, no sign of the bloodshed that occurred. But I still see the limp bodies, some strangers some friends, all faces imprinted in my memory. When I walk, I try to avoid the blood stains, the burned flesh, the decaying stench, which only exist to me.

Why do you kill?
…to survive

To protect, sometimes you must destroy. When we are children, we’re told that two wrongs do not make a right – when somebody strikes you, you do not strike back. That naïve belief has no place in the world. To protect your dreams and hopes, and the dreams and hopes of your loved ones, you sometimes must destroy the dreams and hopes of others. We give this concept the name “war”.