So I finished my first short story ever today. And here it is:
[I][B]Transmitter®[/B][/I]
It was as if the black barrel of his M5 carbine was staring back at him. Cruel and silent, the ebony eye openly judged, "Filthy craven," it mocked with false lips, "Coward!" Certainly in the past, he would have ignored the taunting. Now, however, the young soldier found himself incapable of drowning out the insults. He knew they were true. What was worse, he thought, was that he no longer saw his gun as a separate entity, but rather an extension of himself, a limb that he could not survive without. He began to imagine it as a dark well, that, at the bottom, contained his third eye.
"I'm sorry . . ."
The young soldier was startled to hear his companion next to him say anything. It was the first time the man had spoken to him since they lost the rest of their squadron, and that had seemed to have been twelve or so hours before.
"I'm sorry . . . You know, for everything I said to you these past few weeks. To be quite honest, sitting here now, all I dream of is my Sara’s warm arms. But I am here, near close to shitting my pants, and I know that I'll probably have to end up using this thing. If I do, I'll never be able to experience that embrace of her's again, to see her smile, to be with her for even a second. A copy will, though. And she will stay happy, never knowing that I was actually gone . . ."
The young soldier responded with the first thing that he could think of,
"It will be okay."
His comrade stared up at him and smiled faintly, before returning to look down at his boots. The young soldier felt stupid after saying that, because he knew it wouldn't be. He knew that these kind of situations only ended in two possible outcomes: 1) You die. 2) You use the transmitter. He had always despised when people would say that things would be okay, when they clearly weren't; a happy lie to cover up a sad truth. Nevertheless, this was the man who had caused him consistent grief for the past three months, and just because they were facing an inevitable fate did not make him forget that. His recent memory was plagued by the torments of this comrade. Sitting there beside him, the young soldier recalled a specific incident that had occurred one month prior:
“So what happens then, huh?”
Asked the comrade in a fashion that suggested he already knew the answer. Stepping forward, he shoved the young soldier and repeated his question,
“What fuckin' happens then?! I've been thinking a lot – and you know - if you are afraid of a little machine under your skin, who's to say you won't just run away when we get into actual combat? You aren't cut out to be here.”
Once again, the comrade pushed the young soldier, this time with enough force to send him to receiving earth. A sharp-tipped stone met with his face when he hit the ground, scraping him badly across his right cheek.
The young soldier ran his fingers across the scar that was now left. As he looked back on it, that was the first wound he had managed to obtain since he had first arrived in the camp, and it was from an ally. His eyes drifted down to his boots. At one point in time, he would have been excited to be in those shoes, but that was before he had learned about the Transmitter. He remembered the grandiose sense of pride he had felt when he dawned those black boots, back when he first entered the camp. That was three months prior:
He reminisced the smell of petrichor as it had rained that day. Lines of new recruits flooded out of all the forest-colored tents. The clamor from the enlisted and the trickling of the down-pouring rain was almost deafening, he had thought. When it was his turn in line, he was given nothing but a single round metallic device and was told to not ask any questions. He thought the device was bizarre and he recalled overhearing another recruit mentioning that the military had developed a new technology that would save hundreds of lives. Could this be it, he wondered. He was not prepared for the truth.
Later that night, the officers gathered all the new recruits and filed them into a much larger tent. A projector was set up to play a video that would explain the little mechanical devices. The young soldier mainly remembered the part at the end when they went on to say that the transmitters, as they were called, were the perfect gifts for the families and the friends of the soldiers. It was as if they already knew that they were all going to meet a definite demise.
The young soldier unbuttoned his shirt to stare at the machine that was embedded into the left of his chest. He attempted to refuse the installation of the device, but the threat of discharge persuaded him otherwise. He wondered how a little round box could contain everything about a person. Could the entirety of someone's being really be condensed to fit in such a tiny container?
Suddenly, the two soldiers heard the door of the building slam open. A few seconds later, shots began to fire off. The young soldier looked over at his partner, who was now in tears, slowly lifting up his shirt to reveal his own circular coffin. The young soldier watched as the man spent the last few seconds of his life stumbling to open the device. Finally unlocking the top, the man looked up at the soldier and simply said, "Good luck." The man followed by pressing the button on the transmitter.
What was left after was nothing more than a pile of ashes. Looking down at the mass of dark dust, the young soldier knew that this was it. He began to remember the day that he found out his father had died. Two men in suits came to his house and handed his father’s dog-tags to his mother. He clenched his own as tightly as he could and, in that brief moment, he found himself at peace knowing that at least she would know.
The young soldier then picked up his gun, stood up, and began to fire back.
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