WAR FRAGMENTS

When I was like 10, the GovRep came to my domicile. I was kind-of-reading to my baby from a book printed on toilet paper and wiping her butt with it as I went. That’s our little secret, though (don’t tell). People just burst into my house and I thought everything was exploding. They pushed my mother out of her chair and the bugs scattered because they had been living in her eye sockets. Two big guns were put to my head, and the GovRep, she said “I’m taking your baby, what are you going to do?” My bf was there and stood up, said “No ma’am, no ma’am,” then hit one of the gunthugs who was on me. The gunthug had a shield so his fist just bounced off. I put the baby down on the table while they were distracted and slugged the GovRep. Shield. My fist rebounded so hard it knocked out one of my teeth, which was OK because it was loose anyway. The GovRep laughed and said something like “Damn, that was almost a quarter of my battery.” She snatched me by the hair and dragged me outside where there was a truck, and said that Quiet Home needed everyone who wasn’t small or real retarded or clubfooty to be soldiers. While I was riding to the training camp I figured out that Quiet Home must be the place where I live. Nobody had specifically said that to me, even though the speaker usually yelled those words in the morning and evening.

It was two weeks into training that I was promoted to gunthug, and the opportunities just opened up from there. Most of the time, I want to hurt other people or myself. The army is about doing both of those in moderation, the driller told me while I was PTing and tasting that familiar “vomit-for-someone-else” flavor, like I’m 8 again with my bf and a little too roly-poly from winter rations. We were always trained to aim high while shooting, because most of the people we would be fighting were all old and grown. “I’m not gonna shoot a grandpa or some shit,” I said, like a dumb idiot. After the beating, it was explained that the Angels (our enemy) were “like grandpa in stature, just more healthy.” What’s the point of learning everything under fire? That’s a question I asked too much. The answer was always *camera pans away while an ass-whooping takes place*. We’re in the barracks, shining our standard-issue black plastic sandals. Driller comes in with an AK and starts spraying everywhere. We’re in the shower, once every month. Bullets fly around and threaten to bite bare asses. We’re in the club (right?), taking morphine gummies to zonk out before deployment. Driller is there, too, and he’s frothing at the mouth and ejecting slugs everywhere. Driller’s name was Bill. We called him Bullet Bill, cause he was always behind us with the threat of taking a life. In a human wave attack, you have to run forward as fast as you can and not turn around, ever. If you do, you’ll see Bill back there with his wide eyes and huge fucking gun, screaming slurred admonishments, grimacing.

Language is totalitarian is what the fascist government that banned reading tells me. “Language is magic,” and that’s totally gay in a bad way, and scary. Those writing Angels—obsessed with their fandumbs and stories—deserve to die because they write things into real life; that’s less space in real life for ME! I hate the way things made with language come true. I fall asleep when people tell lie-stories, which is my defense against them coming/being true. Language is like a forge. A long time ago, an Angel named Ronald forged the dwarves out of ink and paper and language feels from the desert. I’m kind of glad he did, I guess, because dwarves fix our weapons and humvees. I saw a dwarf disassemble an AK in less time than it would take to say “Get your football-sized asses across that no man’s land and sing your ballads of stone, or a Stones ballad, or fucking anything—be loud, now—and keep running towards the enemy trench. That trench is empty. We’ve blasted it to hell with our arty.” which is a lie-story *yawn* that the general is telling the dwarven division right now. They’ll die and we’ll sleep an extra hour before our big push.

This whole goddamn theater is a sold out peep show, man, dirty nickelodeon, with the generals and probably God Herself masturbating in the back. Most weeks are cartoon G.I. Joe shit that becomes a live action Neverending Story—the part where the horse drowns—whenever a 7.62 tumbles through a friend and tears up organs like a retardstrength Quasimodo loose in Notre Dame with a vendetta against the diocese (“How many kids, Frollo? HOW MANY?”). Before God left, Heaven was a place people wanted to go. It was filled with little winged fetuses, famous language-spewing philologists, and less-famous language hatchet men who preferred that their spilled-ink-y white lies be about 4 chocolate dudes having tea instead of 1 and a half default-race dudes fighting existential threats. Post-unrest, everything north of the babbling skyscraper I rode up here on is an existential threat. Rebs vs. loyalists. “God ghosted us, let’s go fuck someone else” vs. “bitch hello? ANSWER ME BITCH??!” The Battle of Who Could Care Less. A lot of Angels haven’t seen young people like me in thousands of years because they stopped laying pipe to watch anime. Now me and the 54th Bayonetta are here shooting them (the rebels anyway). A reb asked me to dress up like Helga Pataki when I was a POW because I’m 13 and have a unibrow. Rape was on my mind—and on his, to anyone who could read faces beyond a grade school level—so I did it. Half an hour into saying gay shit like “football head,” a woman commander pulled up. She was dressed as Arnold. When I tell this story to my squad, the guy rapes me while three other rebs hold me down, but in reality we sat awkwardly and, like, roleplayed. I didn’t hate it. I felt warm.

Before God faded into nothing, She was on the toilet shitting out a creative brick. The place where I’m from—the place that bleeds young adult fiction from stigmata wounds that reopen every November, the place where we OC’s compete to stand in spotlights like they’re breadlines, (the place where RNG Jody is fucking the guy I had a baby with)—is the turtlehead poking out from Her asshole. All good fiction needs villains, so Government was created in ages passed to oppress everyone. The Worldbuilding Committee must’ve just been sadbois in dirty pajama bottoms with nothing else. That’s how someone like Lord Nim—an incel faggot with mommy issues who happens to be an anthropomorphic fox—becomes dictator for life. Heaven’s lucky. Dictators are ambitious. Dictators create somethings from nothing, like God. Dictators queer up nature with biotech because of anomalous touching that happened years ago. Genitals and armies swell as a result; the new precocious YA protagonist is a 9 year old gxrl delivering a healthy baby to the state. Dictators put raw power into the hands of kids like me: guns!, grenades!, MRE packages (the kind with glowsticks!!), e-tools for IRL Minecraft or Mein Kampf. Raw power = more death for rebs lmao, because dictators also believe in making deals in vape cloud-filled rooms. Soldiers for the loyalists, bullets for rebel brains, magic carpet rides for Lord Nim. If you’re a loyal fan still waiting to see if God will look at Her turd before She flushes, dictators are bright red blood in the bowl that screams “this might be cancer.”

Olgaeb’s a creepy crone who lives in the tower people built to get to Heaven. Angels helped her build it, but her witchery did most of the work. Olgaeb is the tower. I’m headed to R&R, which means a trip through her innards. The elevator ride down the backend begins as weightless euphoria. Floating: me, three sadbois, and one smol retarded woman with a dysgenic crooked grin who keeps headbanging like she’s a fucking candy raver. SLAM! We come to a screeching halt at floor “Seventy times Seven.” Our luck. Bored sadbois start putting eyeliner on each other. Black stuff from the special rations lootcrate (doubletake: Party badges, eyes that say “My dad has a villa! I’m an Abu Hajaar!”; tripletake: Their eyes say nothing besides “... And I’m a black rainbow, and I’m an ape of God.”—too much eyeliner). The retard breaks into song, “Everyday” by Buddy Holly. Giggling sadbois start applying black/blue under her eyes with heavy fists while the LED ceiling light flickers on and off. Each punch lands during periods of brief darkness. I know they connect from her shrieks. When the light’s on, I make myself blink so that I don’t see anything. Sometimes I have to keep my eyes shut for like 3-4 seconds to avoid glimpsing the windup, because the flickers change frequency. I'm apologizing to her in morse code, I assure my imaginary conscience. She starts to stammer out some moron ambience, but eats the so called words. The bois eat splashed blood. Itis conks the others out, but I remain vigilant. Something is banging on the top of the elevator, begging to be let in through the trap door. I open it. It’s a Carhart-wearing facsimilie of the retarded woman sleeping on the floor. Her utility headlamp blinks out “4GiveU.”

"Men come before orcs," is what the colonel dressed like the biker from village people says to the orc who must be a general judging by the strength of his feces-smell, "Unless you tuskniggers want the pleasure of warming up the rebel arty." 3rd Mass is a salty vet division, no fuccboi shit, and their big reb guns go blam bang BOOM while ours weep and wilt over like Elmer Fudd's. I don't really want to buy the farm, but Farmer Death is pushing hard to sell. He is a city fag at heart—gucci penny loafers, shroud from comme des garçons (midnight blue NOT black), artisan scythe—and can't wait to unload on a fucking hick like me. The colonel wants to buy, but no money. He spent it all gambling. I've saved mine going on 4 tours now. "The So'm’e Orc N'am-e horde is more than ready to di--" is about all the tusky gets out before our fearless leader tells him "shut the fuck up" and starts motioning our column by. I hear the dealer shout "Black action" as Colonel drops back to the rear and starts punching keys that look like kids' faces on his big odds machine.

According to Government, there’s a bunch of little creatures inside of me. Little me’s. They’re all me, and the sum of all of them is me. When I was born, I had to get my conformities like everyone else. Conformities are like a cootie shot that stops the creatures who move things through my blood, or protect me from outside-me’s, or sew up my ouchees from unionizing. When the insiders become union varmints, me’s and you’s die because union workers are lazy and disorganized. It’s communism, the worst disease Ever. Judgment and reflexes go to shit under communism. My uncle was patrolling the Wastes and got bit by a commie. He bit three people in his unit before they shot him, then those three bit five more, which turned into double ten and triple ten, on and on into the night, which was probably not much of a night but instead daytime with all the flares going up to signal that Mommy and Daddy were ready for the bomb stork. Then uncle’s friends were dominoes that fell into each other while ... CRASSSH, CACRACKROOM, WHOOSH or *noises of air being sucked out of lungs*. Anyways, an oligarchy of the little me’s in my head controls my body absolutely and I’m glad. When I think, is it “I think” or “we think?” Dunno. But in this foreign land they marvel when I suppress my period |-||~~Berlin Uterine Wall~~||-| and in the sniper perch I punish enemy domers who reveal themselves through unheld sneezes and tardive dyskinesia.

Military parades in Heaven are gay. Love goosestepping in front of big missiles painted with procgen slogans by the fab (can’t read, but one of the Angels quoted some highlights: “MID OR FEED”, “HANG ALL TIGGERS,” “NERF GAY RIGHTS”). Love the parade floats strung with dead POWs hanging off the old barbed wire, which some of the choirbois groan about but not us. Love the spirit of corpse, or whatever it’s called, that possesses me and makes me feel like our army is one huge gelatinous cube fagocytosis’ing every reb, collecting skeletons inside us; our regimental flag is a picture of a total party wipeout. Hate, hate, HATE having to dress up. Bullshit. Pixel camo rocks, but my stomach wraps itself in a bonnet-bow-shaped knot whenever I see female dress browns. Short skirt, long jacket doesn’t sit right on my body, or mind. We’ve changed uniform standards twice in this theater to look more presentable to the locals. First one was way worse: think maid hentai (its appeal was found to be limited, somehow). Now it’s all about those perennial minidresses/girlsuits that emerge in the Eighties of any century, big shoulders whispering “a girl is [blank space where you can put anything you want as long as you write small]”, skirt yelling “I’M DIFFERENT. ~HEY!~ I’M NOT A BOY.” I pretend I don’t have feet when I’m in these shoes. The opposite of phantom limb syndrome; “an IED took ‘em both,” JFC. The aesthetic is still pretty weeb overall—Kill la Kill where the uniform does the heavy lifting (assuming you’re at least a D-cup)—and when I pivot my head to meet the gaze of the High Command, I imagine I’m the physical manifestation of the thing Iris Elbow says in that blaxploitation movie: “I’m not taking no girls.”

The latest moral(e) quandary that neither me nor my superiors care about is the roguelike city: an urban environment that changes its layout everytime we bomb it. All the cities in the center of Heaven were built this way for reasons I’d probably understand if I read architectural plans or AO3. We only use drones to terror bomb now. If the commander looks on the screen and sees no hospitals or residential blocks, they scrap the mission and send the drone to refuel. When they send it back to reengage, every building is someplace else. Repeat + reload until no more home front. Rebel scum. Total war is a real scene with a capital S: EXT. SOME SHITHOLE - ANYTIME. A constantly-reincarnating bunch of soldiers and civilians pass around the same ten ferryman's coins. Cattle run away from danger, cowboys run towards it. Me and the 54th are factory farmers. Wait for the wild West to crash loudly thru our space and put man and beast out of commission. Total war means don't be a tryhard. I feel nothing for rebs and everything for my squad, cause we're all too fucking broken to queue in a breadline ever again. Band of Others. "What did you do in the war?" Violence.

Bridge 379 looks unimportant on a map, but has big Khazad-dûm feels when you’re scaling it with hundreds of other soldiers. Pieces of grunts and pylon are blurry Falling Men in my periphery. The soundscape is a movie turned up way too loud (not even a war film, something gay like Underworld). I’m told this objective has “military significance,” but I can’t see it from here, and the camera can’t see me either. 80% projected casualties means that I’m a speck among other specks in some wide shot that’s probably mostly CGI—me multiplied a hundred times as disposable_soldier_rig. Memorial Day in the future is someone in an Autodesk program mousing over my petrified, skinless instance and reading its ID number. F. Up above are at least 10-12 heavily armed troopers—math that makes me Nash my teeth—and the Director’s eye certainly waters for them. Several men, a dyke, a couple love interests, a rainbow of first-to-die bullet sponges, maybe a corgi with a sniper rifle on its back. Every action is aesthetic. Troopers ride the rhythm of the .50 cal just right as the over-the-shoulder camera swivels with its motion. Bullets cut down uniformed scarecrows in time to some score, beats for the beaten zone. (Green Day’s in my comms, and you, Director?) Life in every word of jargon, Joe and Willy Pete do the tango. Flash. Flourish. Slow breathing. My wave crests over the top. We’re going to overrun them, but a senior class-load of us had to die first. And they’re the stars. We’re just canon fodder. It’s cut to black after we win. A round shatters my shoulder, so I scream a non-sequitur in the hopes of attaining cult status as the first person machine-gun cam captures my downfall. Maybe I can be like Lushros Dofine. I’m bleeding.