In truth, it wasn’t the gun fire that scared me. I was 14 when the unrest started. War was officially declared on my 15th birthday. I got conscripted on my 16th. I’m mostly used to it by now. I can sleep through almost anything. Except the silence. It’s the silence that’s scary. I didn’t love being alone with my own thoughts before everything, but at least then I had the internet to distract me. Play a game, put on a video. Now, without the distraction, the silence gets to me. Gunfire blends into an ignorable drumbeat. You can focus on the task at hand. Tunnel vision is what it is. But the silence is when you have to pay attention. That’s when you see the things you missed. Not just bodies and houses smashed by bombs, but the things that are less explainable.
When my unit entered the town of Pittsfield, Wisconsin (“A City at the Center!” proclaimed the sign as we walked in from the north) it had a population of zero. There wasn’t any sign of a gas attack. No bombs had fallen on this rinky-dink town. It was still seemingly functional. The stop lights turned from red to green to yellow to red, set on a timer. The streetlights had also come on, automatically. Doors to houses were open, but none of the houses themselves were ransacked. No one had run. There were no photo albums or necessities missing from the houses. A few members of my company took some of the abandoned valuables, which were abundant. Not a single house was locked. We were in town for an hour before we realized that there weren’t any animals. No cats under any porches, no hungry, feral dogs – a typical sight in cases where many people had to flee their homes without warning – barked at us. I entered the bedroom of a child, toys still strewn around the ground, with a computer screensaver still bouncing lazily around a dusty monitor, and noticed that his fish tank, still bubbling, was empty. No starved fish floating, only the rocks and novelty items you would expect in an aquarium. The center of the town was a high school. A school bus had been methodically parked outside of it, and a banner, torn slightly by wind, read that Saturday was homecoming. None of the abandoned cars were crashed. Some were still waiting for the stoplights. There wasn’t an open car door in the city. I swear to God I saw something moving in the empty city hall, out of the corner of my eye, but we looked in every room and couldn’t find anything. The whole damn town was empty. We left Pittsfield that day. No resistance meant that there was no reason to stay in the area. There were targets in the next town, and by the time we had taken and subdued that city, I had almost completely forgotten the strange missing town. Almost. I don’t know if I’ll really ever shake the image of the half-eaten meals in the high school gym, or the feeling that something was watching us. The worst part of it is that I can still see something in my peripheral vision. I can still feel the eyes of those 13,000 ghostly town folks on me sometimes.
I’m almost certain that I met the devil once. I was in northern Illinois. We were occupying a good-sized city. The kind you’d find on any listicle about “Hidden Midwest Gems” that you just had to visit. And for its credit, when you looked past the scuttled tanks and the bodies hanging from streetlights, it was really a beautiful town. It was autumn when we took it. There were beautiful trees. Yellows, burning the cold sky, and red, blending with the strange fruit. Towns like this always had great little shops. We paid; we certainly had money. There was usually some amount of animosity towards us, which was something you’d expect from an unorganized militia. But towns like this were always fun to stay in. By the time gunfire died down, they were able to go on with their business. Plus, there usually weren’t much in the area of enemy civilians in this kind of town. I was off for the day, and I was half drunk. I was often half drunk. Things blend for me, a bit. Days that can’t be remembered. Hours wasted away. But this event, this conversation stands clear. I walked into an antique shop. There was a man behind the counter. Most of the store was garbage. Old war memorabilia. Some razors. But there, sitting on the top of a pile of newspapers, was a book. An old cowboy story I had when I was young. I had read it over and over again. It was my favorite book when I was young. I brought it to the front of the store, and I remember exactly what the man, thin with silver hair and a mean look in his eye, said to me.
“This is what you’ve been looking for, isn’t it?” he said.
I told him that it was a lucky accident, but he laughed and told me:
“You don’t know it, but there are no accidents.”
I was intimidated, slightly, by this man. Which was hard, as I had a rifle. I asked him for the price, and he told me that he wanted a story. I told him I didn’t know any, and he laughed a bit and said to me, he said:
“I’ll tell you a story, then. You were 13 when you got this book, right? Your mother gave it to you. That was the last time you saw her, wasn’t it? Your thirteenth birthday. You went to a foster home a week later, didn’t you? Your father, one night, he got mad. He had been drinking and he came home. You claim you didn’t see it, but he hit your mom, didn’t he? This was usual; he was a mean man, but usually he only used his fist. That night, he used a wrench. And he hit her again, and again. You didn’t see either of them again, did you? This was a sad story, my friend. Looks like you got a better deal here.”
He bagged up the book. I haven’t looked at it since. I remember remembering my parents. Remember the shape of them. Remembered thinking of them before that day, but I can’t remember anything about them anymore. I don’t know their names, or what they looked like. I can’t even think of how they smelled.
Like I said, it’s not the noise that scares me anymore. The gunfire can offer a way out if you’re unlucky enough. But seeing what’s left of this country, I can’t help but fear the time that path won’t be offered anymore.