Chapter 4: Home

Tom goes home.

It had been several weeks since I was deployed to this station. The fighting was rough, but we seemed to be winning under my command. However, I was growing increasingly tired, and didn't know how long our troops' morale would last.

"Corporal Keir, report the Sergeant's office immediately." The announcement blared over the loudspeaker. I thought the sergeant was was going to congratulate me. But of course, I was dead wrong.

"Yessir?" I asked when I entered the tent.

"Mail," Sergeant Adams replied with a grunt and a point of his thumb as he picked his nails with his buck knife. He seemed awfully gruff...Maybe the stress of all of this was getting to him too... I took my letter. It had a familiar seal... A "K" with a dot above it to make it look like an 'I'; IK. Izzy Kinde. I tore open the letter, I was so happy to get news from Izzy! That is, until I read it. I could almost feel my heart stop and sink down into my stomach.

My entire family was murdered brutally by an Equinox raid squad. My mom. My dad. My brother. All of them.

I held the letter, my hands trembling. Adams put a hand on my shoulder, intending to be comforting. I quickly twisted my shoulders back, ripping away from his hand. My hands continued to shake as my grip tightened, ripping the paper into pieces.

"The god-damned motherfuc*ing b******s!" I shouted in a fit of rage for the entire world to hear. I didn't care. I was fuming. To me, this was the most spineless, cowardly, and evil act that could ever be taken. They attacked innocent people, civilians, just because they refused to go to war with the world. It was ludicrous, but that was how the Equinox was winning their war. However, this would turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes they would ever make. They got me pissed.

I ran out of the bunker, grabbing my assault rifle, and jumped onto a motorcycle. I heard someone shouting in protest, but the wind carried their voices away. I rode straight through the ravaged city that marked our battlegrounds, gun on full auto in one hand, the handlebars of the bike in my other. I wasn’t afraid to die. I was even willing to die; but I was going to take as many of the soulless b******s as I could with me. I mowed through enemy encampments, decimating their ranks before riding on to the next one. I was shot several times, but nothing fatal, so I didn’t care. Eventually I stopped the motorcycle, leaning on one foot and breathing heavily as I looked around at my carnage. I thought I had killed all of them.

To my dismay, I was wrong. One shot rang out and I felt an extreme pain in my right shoulder; I was right-handed. As my right arm fell limp, I shifted my rifle into my other hand, just before another shot rang out. This time it ripped apart my right leg, right at the thigh. That's gonna leave a mark, I thought, as I fell to a knee. I saw a muzzle flash, and another bullet whizzed past me, grazing my cheek. I hefted my rifle against my shoulder and unloaded an entire magazine into the spot that the flash appeared. Two bodies fell. One was a sniper from out of the building. The other was mine.

The rest is a blur. There were helicopters, gurneys, air lifts, and hospitals. I got both appendages amputated, to the point where I had hardly even stubs left. I was going home, but to whom? To what? I couldn't stand to be taken out of action. I was awarded a medal for valiant action, which they pinned onto my chest in the hospital bed. I remember Izzy and Alex standing on either side of me, crying. I was going to live, but I was dying on the inside.

I was in the hospital for weeks. I couldn’t stand it anymore I told the doctor I wanted to go home, no matter the circumstances. He protested, but I gave him a glare of fierce determination, and I think he understood. Izzy and Alex helped me into a wheelchair, and I went home.

Author's Note

We are currently editing the first part of Gigalist so if there are grammatical mistakes just know that they will all be fixed very soon! Thanks for bearing with us!