The End of the Beginning

by Eichholz, Zachary

  The world had its new war hero. Hope Giver was now not just a local legend but a household name. He was the face of the New York Times and People Magazine. Time Magazine even made him a candidate for their person of the year issue and CNN wanted him in their studio within two months. But he didn’t want any of it.

  Those bombs had burned the shadows of anger and fear into his brain, replacing the emboldened passion he had once had. These people expected a hero. All William believed they were getting was a failure.

  CHAPTER 5: Adaptation

  “Report.”

  “Pyongyang has surrendered. A bunker-busting nuclear bomb, dropped from a US B-2 stealth bomber, has killed the remaining leadership of the North. They are finished.”

  “Death toll?”

  “No one is certain yet, but it is estimated to be over seven million people. Long-term radiation exposure is expected to make that number even higher. An evacuation of the entire peninsula has begun for all those that remain. South Korea will move its capital temporarily to its Japanese embassy. The bombs meant for Beijing, Tokyo, and Osaka never made it; laser defense systems in both countries successfully destroyed them before impact.”

  “And what’s to happen after this evacuation?”

  “A UN peacekeeping force comprised of international troops will be placed in the peninsula to begin reconstruction efforts. It’s called the United Nations Mission in Korea or UNMK. It’ll remain there for decades, most likely. A coalescence of the two countries is still expected, eventually.”

  “And the matter of the bombs. What do they suspect?”

  “In regards to us, nothing. That’s about the only good news I have. They seem to have no idea how the North got their hands on the weapons, nor how the Zumwalt missed every single one, but they do know now that they were stolen from the Chinese, after studying the remains from the successful laser intercepts.”

  “Hmm…”

  “I’m sorry. We… We have failed.”

  “Failure is a matter of opinion. Failure is but merely learning. It is… adaptation. The world may not be broken physically but its spirit is. They believe they are in their darkest hour now.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “When the night is darkest, people will turn to any light to stop the shadows, even when the light creates more. We shall complete our mission through a new direction.

  CHAPTER 6: Don’t Make Promises

  Honolulu International Airport, Hawaii

  Thursday, December 17, 2020

  Before all the rain and wind, before all the death and destruction, many promises were made to me. I was promised we would be together. I was promised we would be happy; that things would get better. I was promised we would all live. But all those promises disappeared with a surge of water and at the tip of a blade. For me, my own promises ended with the searing of my soul…

  “Well, Captain” said John, beaming, “I told you I’d have you better by Christmas.”

  “You did say that,” chuckled William. “And you don’t have to keep throwing the new title around. I don’t need it anymore.”

  John ruffled his lips and scratched his temple.

  “Will, it’s well deserved after what you did up there. Your mission for those children was nothing but pure heroism.

  A ghostly image of Kyung flashed into William’s mind. He heard her screams and his men’s panic. John was wrong though. She hadn’t been his mission. Did John know that? Had anyone known what his actual mission had been? In the confusion of those twenty-six minutes and with the deaths of his team, General Rose, and the secretary of state, it was possible his true orders had been forever lost.

  “That wasn’t… I wasn’t…” stuttered William, gripping his cane tightly.

  John looked confused. “What is it, Will?”

  “Never mind,” William said, shaking his head.

  “Listen, Will. Is there anything I can do to keep you in the Air Force? With a few more months of physical therapy and exercise your back will be perfect. You can continue to do great work… and keep me popular,” he said with a wink. “I was finally added to the base Facebook group… only took three years.”

  “No,” smiled William, “I’m sorry, Doc.” He looked out across the airport through the large windows of the waiting area. Ground vehicles and planes ran about. Boats in the ocean zipped by. Downtown Honolulu shone brightly across the harbor, people going about their busy days. It was too loud. The world was too loud.

  “I just need some… time away for a while, Doc. The Air Force will certainly survive without me. I want to thank you for all you’ve done though. Since I first met you on that plane, you’ve been nothing but good to me. Take care, Doc.”

  “It’s been my absolute pleasure, Captain,” said John, giving William a hug. He pulled back, looking William in the eye. “Now, one last time, are you absolutely sure there’s nothing I can do to change your mind about leaving the Air Force? Nothing? I mean, you’re a captain now, a real deal hero. You could have a command here in paradise with me. Wouldn’t that be fun? It would be nice to have a man so comfortable in the sky as yourself by my side because I, uh...” John trailed off, looking sheepish, “Well, I’m actually afraid to fly. Like, a lot.”

  “You’re a flight surgeon and you're afraid to fly,” William said with a chuckle.

  “Yes,” John replied seriously. “That’s our secret though, okay? If they found that out, they’d lock me into an F-35 or something and spin me ‘til my cows came hurling home. And then I’d get removed from the Facebook page…”

  “That’s why you looked so nervous and sweaty when I first met you on the plane, wasn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m sorry, Doc, but I can’t help you with that one. And as much as it does sound fun to stick around, I think my time here has been served.”

  “I understand, Will. I know you feel you’ve lost your way but you’ll find it again. Get back stateside and relax. Look out at a beach. Watch some movies and, most importantly,” he said, wagging a finger at William, “don’t lose touch. This certainly won’t be the last time we meet, I promise. Our paths will cross again someday; maybe at some Air Force reunion or something like that. Things’ll be different. They’ll get better. And don’t be too hard on yourself. Doctor’s orders.”

  William nodded appreciatively as they shook hands. He grabbed his luggage and his cane and started walking. Just before he went through the gate, he turned to John.

  He said, “I know you mean well, Doc, but don’t make promises. In my experience, promises don't turn out too well, especially for those making them.”

  CHAPTER 7: The Disaster of Silence

  Outside Rainbow Lake, Alberta, Canada

  Wednesday, March 24, 2027

  I will never forget the silence that followed. It was beautiful. But with silence there is also remembrance. When the world all around is quiet, the mind within is not. And that in itself can a be disaster all its own…

  Snow coated the landscape. Drifts had accumulated around the trees and their branches slumped under the weight of fresh powder. William liked the cold. He liked laying in the snow. It reminded him there was still something to feel.

  He spotted a deer drinking at the edge of a partially frozen stream. Through the scope of his hunting rifle, he lined up the shot, aiming for its chest. This would be his dinner for the next few weeks. He rarely went into town anymore for supplies. His lonely log cabin was a few hundred miles north of the Montana border, just outside of Rainbow Lake, Alberta. The backcountry of central Canada offered him the quiet and isolation he now desired.

  A country of extremes, Canada saw the vistas of the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia in the west and the jagged coastlines across Nova Scotia in the east. Wilderness ran across the land, reminding William of the Korean Peninsula before the war six years ago. Like that scorched land he’d once left behind, this new land was calm and serene. Coursing rivers and glacial till enveloped it with dottin
g’s of bogs and swamps throughout boreal forest. Much of it remained under the protection of the law, but oil and gas exploration had left its mark. Tar sands and pipelines undermined and crisscrossed this expanse like a growing disease, its viral tendrils sucking the life from its nature every day. William hated when he saw a new rig going up or a pipeline being laid down, not so much out of environmental concerns, but because it meant more people.

  His finger was ready to make the kill. He was about thirty yards away from the deer when suddenly, a fawn came in between his scope and the adult. The fawn took several licks of water from the stream and began to forage. William removed his eye from the scope and put the rifle down.

  “Damn.”

  He ran a hand through his beard. Try as he might, he couldn’t kill it. Before the war, he would’ve had no problem pulling the trigger. Now, he was sensitive to anything he saw. He looked around at the dusty rose sky. Nightfall was approaching. The wind was cold.

  All he wanted was to return to his cabin in the rural countryside. His cabin only had a few rooms, big enough for two at most, a wood-burning stove, and no electricity. Candlelight illuminated his nights, which he spent mostly reading science fiction novels, cleaning his rifle, and cooking. There was no Internet or phones. For all he knew, the world could have nuked itself to nothing following the events of Korea, and he never would have known. When he did go into town, it was usually to buy E-cigarette cartridges, a nasty habit he picked up a few years after returning to the States.

  Odd jobs had gotten him by with the little money he needed to live. He was temporarily a trucker, shipping scientific gear to remote weather stations, but this job bored him. Then he moved to logging but did not enjoy cutting down the trees that helped enable his self-isolation. A Chevron spokesperson came to town one day and promoted a new tar sands project nearby, but no one signed on, including William, so that project never got off the ground anyway. So he took a job at the town's small airport servicing and maintaining aircraft. He was fired a few months in for missing too many workdays.

  Things had gotten bad. The backfire of an engine would startle him into a panic attack or the flash of headlights at night would turn into the flash of a mushroom cloud. William had not spoken to anyone outside of Rainbow Lake for almost five years. He was a recluse, an outsider that came and went. Rumors abounded in town about who he really was and sometimes the media would get close to finding the world’s “lost hero,” but they never reached him. He looked different now. A beard and long curly brown hair covered his head. He was always dirty and smelly. He was always hunched; his back hurting every so often, and quiet.

  The moment he had let go of Kyung kept haunting his fragile sleep and he often heard the cries for help from the people on the bridge in the woods at night, or at least he thought he did. The screams would persist every night, coursing through the trees and entering his mind through nightmares, causing spats of panic and alarm that saw him wake up in puddles of sweat and tears.

  He was so tired, tired of trying to find himself. Tired of being alone and tired of being hurt and hopeless. What was the point of it all anymore? He wanted to see loved ones faces again, feel their hands, and enjoy their company. He wanted the vacation they never went on. He wanted it all back. He wanted to make the explosions, voices, and screams in the night stop. He wanted to feel something again, his humanity. But he knew there was no rescue coming for him. He didn’t want one anyways.

  William wasn’t very religious, but he would sometimes look up to an empty sky and ask what he had done to deserve the life he led. What had made him so different? Surely an all-loving and knowing God would never let his flock suffer like this, would never take away someone’s family so early and so violently, twice. Taking the innocence of a child and the passion of man; was that the way God punished? Was that the way he had punished William for doing seemingly nothing? If there was a God then he had surely abandoned him, he thought, because his burdens were too much to bear for any one person. It was only the good ones that suffered, it seemed.

  His small log cabin had a porch, which William used to wash and dry his clothes and just watch the woods. He found himself one day sitting out there, the snow falling in a dusting, staring at his hunting rifle. It was loaded.

  Staring at it for quite a long time, he thought, contemplated, and thought some more. Weeks of increasing agony tortured him to bring him to these thoughts. Depression for him came in waves, culminating in flashbacks, images, even smells of war and despair from years earlier. After these episodes, things would get better but the wave would always return as regularly as the lunar-induced tides, sucking William right back down to the bottom. Now he was looking at the bottom of a barrel of a gun. If he used it, things would be over quickly. There would be no pain. No one would hear anything in the remote area and no one would find him probably for weeks. He realized he had an out right in front him. One pull of the trigger would end it all, ending his depression of a tired life.

  Suicide. It went against a species evolution. Nature had programmed its organisms to survive at all cost, but suicide was a trick of the intelligent. This was the burden of consciousness. It could give him the peace he wanted, a final peace. William saw himself reaching for his gun, picking it up, and putting it across his lap. The barrel was clean and cold. His grip tightened and prowling fingers slipped towards the trigger.

  Moving the barrel closer to his mouth he said, “You told me wasting is worse than living. You were right. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish… I wish I could have done better. Done more… but I failed. I’m sorry.”

  A lone tear rolled down his rough cheek and into his bristly beard. A noise several hundred feet down the dirt road that led to his cabin turned his attention from the barrel at his lips. He had visitors.

  CHAPTER 8: We Now Have a Chance

  The winding dirt road that led to his cabin was unplowed. The approaching vehicle, looking like a cross between a HUMVEE and some kind of electric dune buggy, was silent except for its tires crunching over rocks and snow. LED light racks adorned its top. It had room for only three people, with its rear end being composed of a truck bed that contained tools on racks and in zipped-up packs. A roll cage protected its hoodless cab, side doors, windshield and all. A rack containing more gear extended out over its bed from the cab.

  William had never seen such a vehicle before. It was mostly white with some dark blue symbols and its wheels were airless in design, having a honeycomb interior structure. It parked in front of his porch and the engine turned off. William slipped his rifle behind the wooden chair he was in and wiped his eyes. He adjusted his posture to a more proper position and cleared his throat.

  Two men emerged from the vehicle and began walking towards him. They could have almost been twins, being of similar builds and dressed the same. They wore athletic-looking white and blue jackets with similar looking pants with what looked to be white reflective patches. Their jackets had many pockets on them and a seal by the shoulder area that William thought looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. Both men also wore aviator sunglasses and white gloves with gray fingertips and reflective palms. William could only tell them apart by their hair color. One had brown hair, the other auburn. William took out an E-cigarette and turned it on. Nicotine vapors clouded around his face and then quickly disappeared. The tip of the machine glowed a dim red.

  As the two men approached, the brunette man took out a tablet that looked to be made out of glass with protective edges. They stopped a few feet from his porch steps. The man with the tablet took off his sunglasses and stared at the reluctant captain, studying him, looking back and forth between him and the glass tablet. He showed it to his friend. William just continued to puff his E-cigarette, staring right back at him.

  Finally, after a tense silence, the man with the auburn hair spoke. “Smoking one of those things will kill you one day you know,” he said tersely.

  “They’re supposed to be better than the real things,�
� replied William.

  “Maybe, but it would be a shame to kill yourself using those, don’t you think, Captain? I mean you’ve made it this far. South Korea. Katrina...You’ve been around the block.”

  William raised an eyebrow. “Who are you?” he asked, looking closely at the two men. Their clothing and vehicle were high tech. They were most likely from somewhere important, somewhere with an agenda.

  The brunette man spoke first. “My name is Roger Wood.”

  The second man followed. “Andrew Douglas.”

  The man called Roger fixed him with an intense gaze. “Are you Captain William Emerson?”

  “Depends on what you have to say,” William said, leaning back against his house.

  “Answer the damn question,” Andrew spat, taking a step forward. “We spent a long time looking for you.”

  Roger put his arm up in front of Andrew and looked back at William. “Are you Captain William Emerson?” he repeated calmly.

  “Yes,” William relented.

  “We have finally found the world’s lost hero then,” he said with a sarcastic lilt. "As Andrew here said, you’ve been a little hard to find. More people than you think have been looking for you for quite some time. After you returned from Korea, you dropped off the map. Why?”

  “Why?” William retorted, annoyed. Roger looked at him expectantly. He sighed and replied, “The world got too loud for me. It never just listened and stopped for a moment. I wanted some quiet. Here, you can listen and just enjoy.”

  “Is that really why?” Roger asked, knowingly.

  William looked up at him, waiting for him to continue. “Your commanding officers called you a brilliant rescuer. The media called you the Hope Giver. I’ve read almost all of your reports. You’re credited with saving over 350 lives throughout your short tour. Very impressive. You were good. You always seemed to be overcompensating for something though; you could be reckless and put your team at risk on your missions. ‘Arrogant in the face of duty,’ is how General Rose phrased it, I believe. You lost people on that final mission, Captain, and now you can't live with yourself, is that it? You couldn’t face another loss?”