Finality

The dream was always the same. A gas mask was looming over her, filling her entire field of vision. It came closer and closer, until it seemed to be impaled in her brain. She realized that behind the eye guards were her own green eyes, and immediately after she reached that realization, the eyes rolled back, and she was dead.

Brynn screamed, waking herself from the nightmare. Her twin brother stirred on the cot next to hers, but did not wake. She tentatively leaned against the occasionally stable wall and listened to the explosions in the distance. The day after tomorrow she and Caleb, her brother, would be old enough to be sent into the war. Once children reached the age of fifteen they entered the army as infantry. Most of the adults had been killed, so the draft age was continually being lowered.

Brynn and Caleb were the oldest in their group of friends. They shared each other's looks - tall, lithe bodies, green eyes, light brown hair, and lots of freckles - but that was all they shared. Caleb had conformed to the pro-war sentiment that had permeated their society, which meant that nothing mattered to him but killing the Villutians. But Brynn could remember a time before the war had begun. The other kids thought she was crazy, but she knew there had been a plant called a flower, and that it had been soft and beautiful. Now the land was covered with tumbleweed: it was the only plant that could survive through the constant technological warfare. She remembered that her mother's smile had been as warm as the sun on a spring day, and her father had been strong and protective. Her parents had been killed over ten years ago, when Brynn and Caleb were four. After that, the twins had scraped by on their own, stealing food when they were younger, and hunting for it more recently. They had taken a few other orphans under their wings over the years. There was Ian, who was twelve and spoke only if it was absolutely necessary. His home had been near the front line when the war began. His father had been killed before he could remember, but he and his mother had escaped. They had lived on the run, constantly fearing discovery by the Villutians. Ian's mother was caught six years later, and had been repeatedly raped and tortured while her seven-year-old son watched and listened from under the bed. After the Villutians had tired of abusing the poor woman, they left, and Ian had crawled out and held his sobbing and bleeding mother until she took her last breath.

Then there was Kane. He was nine, and incredibly levelheaded. He always knew what the right thing to do was, even when bullets were screaming by, just inches over his head. As far as Brynn could tell, he had always been stoic. She had been there on the day three years ago when he had come home from school to find his parents hanging from the rafters in their attic. She had watched as he fumbled with the shovel that was taller than he was in order to dig a grave for his parents. She had wept unabashedly to see emotions that no six-year-old should ever have to feel cross his face, then be wiped away, the traces of which would never be seen again. To an extent, Brynn was glad that Kane no longer experienced emotion. He was never bothered with hatred of the Villutians, or anger at those who started the war. Despair didn't keep him from sleeping. However, on the other hand, he never laughed, never smiled, never experienced the few joys that this war-torn world still had to offer.

There were also two other girls in the group of orphans, Maggie and Carrie. They were sisters, three years apart and polar opposites. Carrie was eight years old, and the younger of the two. When she and her sister had met Brynn and Caleb, she had immediately latched on to Caleb. She attempted to mimic him in every way, and even surpassed him as far as blood thirst went. Maggie was eleven, and it almost seemed like she never stopped crying. She was scared of everything, from the sound of an explosion in the distance to a rat scuttling across the floor. Recently, if anyone asked her why she was crying, she would manage to choke out something about Caleb and Brynn going away and not coming back, and then wail that much louder. She and her sister had led relatively normal lives in comparison to the rest of the group, having been raised by a great-aunt who had simply died of old age.

Brynn had tried to be a mother figure to everyone, but it was proving to be increasingly difficult with her approaching draft. Nightmares kept her up most of the night, which left her both physically and mentally exhausted. Instead of being soothing, she would snap at people, then cry silent tears of aggravation with herself. What angered her the most, though, was that she was completely powerless over whatever might happen.

A momentary pause in the explosions surprised Brynn into full awareness. She got up with an inaudible sigh and headed toward the rickety doorway with plans to watch the sun rise and kill a few small animals for breakfast. The only animals living in this abandoned area were stealthy rats and mange-ridden rabbits, but their meat was enough to keep a person going for another day. She stepped around the cots of the other children, trying not to wake them. She locked eyes with Ian, and realized that he had heard her scream. Without his having to say a word (mostly because he rarely did, anyway), Brynn knew that he understood how she felt. She nodded and hurried outside.

The winter day passed quickly. Kane served as a scout to find a place to sleep that night, since they had been staying in that abandoned shack for a week, and the battles were moving much too close for them to stay there any longer. Caleb and Carrie played a war game of their own invention which they had called, in a brilliant stroke of imagination, "Kill the Villutians." Brynn made her weekly attempt to teach Maggie about computers by drawing a diagram with a stick in the dry, chemically hardened soil, which ended, as usual, when Maggie burst into tears. Normally it was because she was having trouble grasping a concept, but today she had been appalled by the strategic aspect of the war computers, which she had linked in her mind to the constant killing. Ian sat a few yards away, building miniature structures with sticks and then knocking them to bits with a sweep of his hand. Kane returned an hour before sunset with news of a ruined warehouse two miles east. They set off at a brisk walk, stopping only to kill more rabbits for dinner. When they reached the warehouse, which was just a cement and sheet metal shell, offering little protection from the cold, they built a fire with some old cardboard boxes and wood they had brought from the shack. There was none of the usual attempts at conversation around the fire after dinner, and it was not long before everyone decided to go to sleep. Brynn slept remarkably well, for a while.

At what seemed to be midnight, two men stormed into the warehouse, shaking each child violently until they found Brynn and Caleb. They were easily distinguishable from the others because of their size. The ease with which the army had found and recognized the twins did not surprise them. The fact that the army had the country under discreet but constant surveillance had been common knowledge for quite some time.

"Boyer twins, Caleb Renaldo and Brynn Angelina. This is your call to duty in the Army of the United Nations, American division." They were allowed time to respond in the affirmative, but that was merely a formality. Had they refused, the reaction from the two men would have been the same. Each took the arm of one of the twins and forcefully dragged them off to a waiting groundsmobile. When they reached the base at the front, they were separated, cleansed, dressed in uniform, briefed of the immediate situation, and given weapons and position assignments. The faint glow of dawn had barely touched the sky when Brynn found herself huddling in a trench wearing a gas mask and carrying a rather heavy benzene rifle. The shock of being ripped away from the five people she loved and placed on the front line was almost more than she could handle. The wall of packed earth in front of her swam before her eyes and her stomach lurched, as if to vomit up the breakfast she had not eaten. She caught herself just in time to see the Villutian army pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, and attack in a cloud of purple-tinged smoke. Brynn fired haphazardly, knowing what she should have been doing but unable to reconcile her rational mind with her animal instincts. The few other soldiers who had shared the trench with her had either rushed out and forward in order to kill the enemy, or had been killed themselves. Brynn was alone. Even through the gas mask, her lungs began to burn. She quickly noticed that she had not fastened the straps properly on her gas mask, and was thus breathing tainted air. There was no time to give this problem any thought, though, because a Villutian soldier was almost upon her. On his facial shield, she saw a reflection of a gas mask. It came closer and closer, until it seemed to be impaled in her brain. She realized that behind the eye guards were her own green eyes, and immediately after she reached that realization, the eyes rolled back, and she was dead.