Cold Warfare [Short Story- Original]

A request I completed for another user,


The prompt was about a pre-apocalyptic war in which everything is left to rubble with a cliffhanger ending. Was supposed to have a lost soldier and an ex-elite soldier within it, and I think I did that rather well.



Hopefully you like it!

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The countdown has started. A tinny voice drifts just out of reach, speaking words she can't understand. Nothing seems to exist anymore, does this voice?



Warmth prickles at her feet, from a time so far away when she used to sit too close to the oven because it kept away the cold. Hands icy like the river she had to trample through in training camp, being screamed at to keep going despite the fact her body was giving out on her and all she wanted to do was lie in the muck and let her fellow soldiers trample by and over her.



None of that exists here, simply emptiness and the sharp feeling of cold and heat.



That tinny voice stops. Was it there at all? A sharp crackle rings out, so close it's almost on top of her, and her entire body jerks, her hands fling out and smack against solid material that leaves stinging down her arms.



Deep gasps bring in breath her body has missed and slowly the details come back to her, body shaking hard as her eyes open to take in everything around her. Oh how she never wanted to see this again, all the death and carnage.



“I'm alive...” she mumbles, breath whispery and barely reaching her ears. Slowly she moves her trembling arms to take her weight, pushing herself up onto her hands. Nausea overwhelms for a moment, a sick-cycle of sharp pain somewhere in her stomach that precedes vomit.



Grapples with the feeling and manages to shove it down so she can climb to her feet while the world swayed and danced across her vision. Red splashes here and there darted the land, like a plane had flown overhead while its crew tossed out giant buckets of paint.



Except it wasn't paint. And it wasn't pleasing to be covered in. The sickly smell of copper and some other substance assaulted her nose, taunting her as even her hands were too slick to cover it.



Blood. She didn't want to think the word but there it was. That was all it could be, she couldn't think of who it belonged to. Of the soldiers who had been her friends and allies in combat, there by her side at the final moment when the missiles came tearing at them from the enemies' bunker.



There was no bunker now, not from what she could see when she strained her eyes against the harsh sunrise beating down upon her. Just a landscape of wrecked machinery and shattered earth, pieces of land jutting up into the air from where the missiles had impacted. Angry things beating into the land and releasing their toxicity, tearing apart metal and their bodies. Leaving nothing but the red paint- blood- across the land.



A soft crackle at her ear. “To anyone listening the final countdown is now ten minutes and counting. All soldiers are to return to base or face elimination. I repeat, final countdown is now ten minutes.”



“What final countdown,” she speaks out to the ghosts of the battlefield around her, making her way through the cracked earth to where she thinks the base might be. “Surely they can't be meaning...”



There's a numbness spreading through her, a slow toxin which infects the hearts of humanity when facing an insurmountable task. The warning is only a formality, she understands it just as she understands they've all been given up for dead. A lost cause. Soldiers are unnecessary when you can just nuke the enemy off the planet.


What reason lies in trying to get back to base? Somewhere deep down she knows it's a lost cause but something drives her forward, to seek a path back even though it's impossible. Through the battered landscape she continued to walk, not a soul in sight.



She didn't expect one to be, who could have survived out amongst this destruction?



Long moments passed as she put one foot before the other, wobbling occasionally when the terrain tripped up her tired feet. While she knew too much time had already passed she couldn't summon up the strength to run nor would it have helped her either way.



“H-hey! Hey wait up!”



Leann turned sharply towards the voice, eyes widening in surprise. Had she imagined- no there was a shock of black hair and a body beneath it coming towards her at a fast pace. Their gate was halted however, no doubt by the blood slick on their leg, coming from a gash that looked to be to the bone.



By the time the body was close enough to her, a male from what she could tell, her sluggish mind recognized the armor he was wearing. An enemy, perhaps one of the last surviving on this battlefield.



If she'd had the strength or the will she would have lashed out, attacked him and struck him down as were her orders. Instead she continued walking and smiled tiredly at the man who fell in stride beside her, exhausted and panting heavily.



“You're a little too late, you know,” she said softly, “they're going to be dropping the bomb in a few minutes.”



A flash of pain shot through his eyes, anger twisting his face and he slammed down his foot. A pained gurgle rose from his throat, no doubt having further damaged his beaten and torn leg, yet despite that he glared at her and raised his hand as though to strike her.



“They've left us all for dead,” she continued on, unflinching in the face of his threat. She didn't have to be concerned about what he would do to her if he wanted to use her to take out his anger, they didn't have long enough for him to do anything more to her already steeled mind.



Instead of hitting her he simply dropped his hand back by his side, tilting his head back to stare up at the sky almost as though he could spot the incoming missile if he squinted hard enough. “They even left their own soldiers for dead, huh, I can't believe... Man, I always knew you people were disgusting.”



It was the little twitch he gave towards her, eyes crinkling in regret that told her he hadn't meant to say that in regard towards her. She simply released that tiny smile again. It was weaker this time.



“It was always going to come to this, I think. I can't defend my people.”



There was silence after that, a battle waged on around and inside them. Acceptance warred with the plain struggle to survive, even against impossible odds.



Far up in the sky they could see the missile finally, the bulky metal seeming almost foreign so far above the shattered land and the backdrop of a smoky-strewn sky. Death came on a jet engine and she couldn't find it in her to smile this time.



Instead she turned her head away from the slick device to the soldier beside her. A high-ranking officer if the marks on his torn and blood-stained jacket were anything to go by. A simple boy, shy in the way his wet eyes traced the missile's arc as it came towards them.



Would they be friends if they survived, joined together by the horrors that brought them together as she had heard so many veterans remark during the recounts of their tales?



“What's your name?”



“My... my name?”



“Yeah. I'm Leann. You can call me a lost soldier, I guess.”



“I... I'm Lycus, the ex-elite STAR, then.”



Overhead the missile shoots above them, silently. It's strange, she always thought they would have a deafening roar to accompany the poison it carried inside. That it would be pure nothing unsettles her and she reaches out her hand to take his.



He looks away from the missile now, at her and they continue to stare. His lips curl up hesitantly and she returns with her own, a brighter smile.



And then she tilts her head back to stare up at the smoked sky, imaging another time when the smoke came from a factory and people ran back and forth across a field set with wires and traps. Her sergeant screaming commands at her to get it right, that if she didn't she'd end up for dead.



Eyes closing slowly she wonders who the man standing beside her is, what journey he's had up until now. What was similar to hers, what was different? Why did it have to come to this?



There's a clicking sound in her ear, the com crackles to life once more, “May God forgive us for what we've done. They're firing missiles in return, I'm so sorry everyone. Please... please forgive me.”



Opens her eyes now to stare into his own, wondering if he's heard the ring of her president's voice. The tinny voice so far away in a world that won't even matter. From somewhere far in the distance a white blast goes off, the impact doesn't hit for several seconds. Long enough for Lycus to cling tightly to her, screaming something she can't hear in her ear.



Crackles in the earth throw up huge swathes of land, a large cloud monster rushes towards them. Leann hugs Lycus tightly and closes her eyes, burying her face in his hair.



He smells like any other person she's been close to, like all her friends and her fellow soldiers. Like every person would, she thinks.



Why was this necessary?