I haven’t had much time to think about my brother. No has had much time to think about anything lately besides running and fighting. The city of Tharsis has been lit aflame by a gang war. A gang civil war to be precise. There’s an old joke about one side of a war being Right but Repulsive while the other is Wrong but Wromantic. I wish that was the case with this war of theirs. Both sides were repulsive and both sides were wrong. I’m no cop. I can see the value in supporting doing illegal things. Hell, I’ve done some illegal things before the war to survive. But the syndicate was not the way to do it. Too much like recreating the systems that have been putting everyone down but with them on top. They wanted power, control, and all the other boring things one could want.
The war lasted five months. I found out what was happening in the third. I was awoken by the sound of gunfire and death. My neighbor, Wilma Jones, was screaming as the gunfire raged. Someone on our floor was working against the old guard of the syndicate. The new guard wanted the power the old guard had and the old guard wanted to keep it. The guy they were after wasn’t even a member of the new guard. He didn’t even betray the old guard. They just thought he did and acted as if that was the same thing as him doing it. I never knew the guy’s name, but his remains were barely anything that looked at all human. Everything was on fire. Wilma was in pain from the gunshots. All she could do was scream as the lower half of her jaw lay on the floor as a puddle of gore and liquid. It was shocking that she was still alive. I was only spared because I was sleeping prone in bed.
Other neighbors were in pain too. Frank Smith had his left leg ripped clean off. He barely survived the night, but didn’t survive the day. Luna Jane Masterson had five bullets go clean through her chest. She was shot in the ribs, just below her heart. She survived and stayed in the city. I never found out what happened to her besides that. John Johnson, which was not his actual name, lost his eye and half of his nose. He lived in the end. He even tried to convince me to leave shortly before my brother died. Said there was no reason for me to stay on Mars. I looked out the window. The sky was grey and the autumn leaves of November danced across the sky in intricate yet improvisational movements. Their symbolism is lost on me even now. I told John, “My brother lives here. I’m not going to abandon the bastard to save my own skin.” John respected my decision by calling me a fool and leaving. My brother’s dead, and John isn’t.
The first thing I did when I found out my brother was dead was look for his husbands. They weren’t home, but then no one was home anymore. We were all hiding in someone else’s house we once called our own. But they weren’t there either. I called Sean Jacobson first. He was always on his phone, hoping someone would care enough to post a warning that the city was on fire. No response. Lucas Gaines was next. While he wasn’t as glued to the phone as Sean was, he still kept it close to him. No dice. Sam Jones was a bit more of a long shot. They weren’t what you might call a luddite, but they didn’t use their phone that often. When they picked up, they were sobbing.
“Ry-Ryan, it’s so g-g-good to hear you.” They landed the “D” harder than they meant to land it. “W-whe-where’s P-P-Paaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” They couldn’t even finish the sentence. They knew where he was. They knew I’d only call at a time like this to tell them bad news. I hung up instead of answering their question. I never heard from them again. I was too busy running for my life like everyone else to care any more than I had to. A woman was lying dead on the streets next to me, cradling her equally dead child. That’s what happens when you care more than you need to: you die.
The next week is a blur. The leadership of the syndicate, both the old guard and the new, were dead. And yet, the fighting raged on and on and on. New leaders came and died in the vacuum their stupid war left behind. I could see a bird flying in the sky, silhouetted by the evening sky. It was raining, so the lights that made the bird visible were all artificial. But you could still hear her mournful cry. I thought for a moment that it was over the city that burned beneath her. But the city was not on fire. There was just a lot of death. I remember a song my mom used to sing to Patrick and I. I forget the words, but there was always this melancholic tone to how she sung the song. It was like she was remembering a life she used to live. She wasn’t that old, all things considered. But she sang the song like she was thirty years older than she was. She died when I was 21 and out of college. It was a freak accident involving a bomb placed in the wrong car. That was ten years ago, and I can’t help but feel like this war is just a bunch of bombs placed in the wrong care over and over again.
The ISSP and whatever cowboys they could bribe got involved near the middle of this awful war. Tharsis is a city split up into two: The High City and the low city. The High City is where all your upper middle class and above people live. The kind who can easily ignore a war even as it’s happening three blocks away from them. Whereas the low city is where the lower middle class and below people survive. We live day by day in hopes that the syndicate or whatever other bastards wanted to use and abuse us. I remember the chief of police saying on some conservative talk show, “They deserve this bloodbath. They allow filth and decay to thrive in the city, tarnishing everything that’s good about it. We shouldn’t have to deal with it. Let the poor kill each other! It’s like the human body occasionally needs to sweat out sickness. This is just the natural way of things.” The law only started to care when The High City got hit and now the chief is talking about bringing law and order to this crime infested city. Arguably, they made it worse. Suddenly it was a three sided war where the blood and guts danced in the air. At times, the city actually was on fire because of the sparks of the war leaking out like water out of a tied up hose just waiting for it to be untangled and unleashed upon the world. I’ve heard that the war hasn’t touched most of the other worlds outside of Mars. I suppose they’re lucky in that sense.
I can only remember unrelated images shuffled together in my brain like a deck of cards. A man holding his mother at the airport, just rich enough to avoid having to deal with the war. The innocent son of a gay couple crying as his parents try to keep the blood in his body. The face of an old woman as she watches school children lob Molotov Cocktails at syndicate and ISSP alike. The rumble of the sky a spaceships crash just outside of the city. All because one asshole Syndicate member was on the ship. 35,000 people died in the crash. There were only 2,019 or 20,20 survivors. Patrick making a joke about how no one wants to drink at his bar because the water’s poisoned with blood.
It was on December 23, 2071 when I thought of my brother for the first time in forever. The war was ending, mostly because they were running out of bullets and none of the now seven sides (The Old Guard [made up of mostly new people], the New Guard, the ISSP, the Cowboys [who were just there looking to make some easy bounties], the bandits [who weren’t so much a side as people taking advantage], Lucifer [who was trying to gain power in the vacuum], and everyone else) had enough pull to get any more. The ISSP had long since stopped trying to collect the bodies, even in The High City. I was in The High City at the time. Streets were paved in the blood of the guilty and innocent alike. I could hear screams of people who I would never meet. The ruins of the syndicate headquarters loomed over me like a domino waiting to fall and crush everything beneath it.
I never wondered why the ISSP did nothing as the syndicate reigned over the various planets. I never wondered why the chief thought the source of the problem was in the low city even as The High City held the headquarters of the syndicate. I never even contemplated the implications of who was on which side when and why. All I could think of was how much my brother would have liked to seen this tower collapse into ruin and decay. Inside, a bunch of people, unaffiliated with the other six sides, trying to keep warm. Further away from them, there was a body that no one seemed interested in touching. (We never considered moving it until the moment we learned the war was over.) I only recognized one person around the fire.
“Sean?” I said with a small crackle in my unused vocals. He turned to me without saying a word. He had long, curly hair and a thick beard. His eyes were green, yet invisible past his horn rimmed glasses. He had lost a lot of weight in the year since I’d seen him. You could see the bruises even on his dark skin. He tried to smile at me, but he couldn’t make his mouth move that way. All he could muster was the beginning of a smile. The moment where the emotion of happiness hits the body and prepares to smile. His smiles were always the best I’d seen. I’d like to see Sean smile more often. But he turned away from me as soon as he saw me. I sighed.
And then I noticed everyone else was looking at the same thing Sean was.
We’ll be Right Back
Support the blog on Patreon.
No comments:
Post a Comment