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The Healing of Death - IV
Posted By: russ687<russ687@hotmail.com>
Date: 16 June 2006, 5:53 am
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The Healing of Death
IV
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Epicurus
The rifles opened fire simultaneously, each individual explosive crack flowing together as one. The sound ripped into the slight hum of the soft breeze, and quickly overshadowed the distant whine of the two vehicles. The muzzle flashes were indeclinable in this white heat, but the hot tracers bearing down on their enemy were fully perceptible, and each Marine watched through their rifle's sights with grim satisfaction as the barrage of rounds cut through the patrol, the first wave of bodies falling back in a bloody eruption that quickly spattered on the ground, covering this wasteland with the life that had now passed on. With only a hundred meters between them and their foe, the screams of death were hauntingly unmistakable to the Platoon.
It was almost too clear in Mardaroni's mind the assuage granted to the darkness that preyed upon these rocky hills, and he watched as yet another life vanished from existence under the sunlight. Clearly, this darkness had no ulterior motives or false intentions as it silently broke each being, either by its own maddening hand or by the hands of the occupants within its province.
This darkness had only one cause, only one intention, and it was to take each life roaming the deserts that only it could subsist in. And now, as he pulled the trigger again, a round discharging from the rifle in his hands with a deafening crack and a sharp recoil, Mardaroni couldn't help but know that he was now an adherent to this entity. He was not fighting against it, fighting to contain its persuasive voice and its slaying hand, but rather abiding to that soft, cold voice in his head. He was following this darkness, his very actions then and there clear proof of it.
With immeasurable emptiness—emptiness that could only be found in the eyes of the dead—and suicidal intentions, Mardaroni kept his rifle shouldered as he stepped out of the safety of the ravine and began moving towards the Covenant patrol, picking out targets calmly in a half-hearted attempt to actually win this fight. While he felt the ever present gnawing of responsibility and accountability to his men, every virtue and every inkling of leadership and guidance was dying within.
In a taunting gesture, this darkness reminded him that it would consume all—one way or another—and a sharp heat wisped by the Lieutenant, passing on harmlessly over the heads of the Marines still in the ravine; men who watched with wide eyes as their commanding officer walked defiantly forward, his intentions or reasons momentarily unclear to them.
The white-hot plasma rounds had no color here, and Mardaroni watched in distant concern for his own life as the bright pallid and quite deadly return fire sped by, the heat even more intense than the dehydrating and burning sun overhead. He felt his lips crack from the dryness and excessive heat, and could feel his face harden to numbness as those aliens fought to defend themselves.
The white desert, surrounded by the rocky hills, echoed with gunfire as the two forces exchanged words—words in the form of actions and actions in the form of arsenals—with both sides succumbing to the influential darkness that had poisoned their hearts and minds. The distant mirages, only broken by the occasional cactus and shrub bush, seemed to beckon peacefully amidst this skirmish that would claim more lives as each second passed. The blue sky overhead offered some sense of peace, but to each man's discontent it was mostly blinded out by the scorching star that this hopeless planet revolved around.
Mardaroni came to a knee, hitting the ground with his padded leg and taking more careful aim at the small figure stumbling upon the top of the large vehicle to operate the turret. He pulled the trigger repeatedly as his shots ricocheted off the dirty alien armored troop carrier, refining his shots until one tore into the alien's right arm, the being falling back out of sight with a barely discernable mist of blood climbing into the dry air.
With a maddening click, the charging lever snapped forward, forcing the Lieutenant to pause and reach into his Load Bearing Vest for another clip. His efforts to reload were met with a very frustrating search to actually find another clip amongst his empty pouches, and he padded himself down quickly, his training briefly causing him to react like a Marine rather than a despondent man.
He looked back when he found a single clip; gazing back twenty meters to the ravine, where his troops remained. They were not pressing the attack, they were not following him into battle. Instead, their eyes betrayed a newfound understanding for why their commander was in the open without remorse or rationale. They had followed him this far, far enough to engage the foe that had birthed this hell—a hell none of them could hope to escape—but their following ceased at this ravine. With a stark realization, the Lieutenant understood that these men knew what he was trying to do here.
He was trying to die.
That realization almost pricked his mind out from this darkness's control; the recognition that these soldiers now knew what he was trying to do. It served as an eye-opener for the despair consuming his heart, but it ultimately failed to save the dying and dejected mind from death. As rounds passed by him, both from the Marines in the ravine and from the Covenant cowering behind their vehicles, it became evident that not even the disappointed eyes of his men could save him from his own will to escape this misery. Nothing could save him from this darkness. Nothing.
Slamming his last and final clip into the rifle, he turned forward and pulled the charging handle back. With kicking recoil that drilled into his decaying mind his longing for an end, rounds shot out towards the enemy that had caused all this; this enemy that had taken away from him everything he had, his will, and his life. With hazy awareness, he watched as more of those beings fell, and in spite of the return fire that passed around him, he remained alive and able.
The rifle ran dry, and again the charging lever snapped forward, though never to be pulled back. The Lieutenant dropped the instrument of war into the sand, bringing himself to his feet in the process. Ignoring the lingering thoughts for his own safety, or for the responsibility he held for his men, he began walking forward towards the now immobile vehicles—and the few remaining aliens. This firefight had defied his own preconceptions, and instead of these aliens mercilessly gunning him down as he sat in the open, the Marines behind him had all but eradicated them from existence.
Sweat dripped from his nose and his lungs huffed in the hot air as he stepped slowly over the rocky, sandy desert towards the two vehicles, his eyes loosing focus and disregarding the few figures that still fired back. The sounds of war, of rifles and explosions, slowly faded out as he walked empty handed towards this nemesis. He was no longer a fighter, a defender of his own kind. Rather, he was now a defeatist, a searcher for his own release.
As the officer neared the two vehicles, no alien being remained in his hazy vision. Only bodies littered the vehicles and the ground around them. In the background, the rifle fire ceased and silence over swept the entire desert valley once again. Was this battle over, along with the only enemy that could justly remove him from this torment? Had his way out found its own way out?
He stopped short of the two vehicles, staring at their light lilac bodies dirtied with the tan sand that dominated this world. Were they all really gone? Was his escape no more? As his mind glazed over in a mixture of anger, despair and pain, he slowly began to realize that this darkness, this fiend that pushed him towards this end, had now snatched it away.
Maybe this darkness wasn't the seeker and producer of death. Maybe this entity that prowled the dunes and valleys did not wish for its occupants to die and move on to a better realm and escape this hell. Rather, perhaps this darkness's only intent and purpose was to keep its occupants in their own hell, their own suffering. For those who feared death, that is what they were served. For those who longed for death, that is what they were denied.
His longing for death, for release, was the very essence keeping him here, alive and breathing in this hot desert full of emptiness. It was his desire to move on and join something else in some other place that kept his heart beating and his senses aware. This darkness was not the beast that gave a way to another realm, but the beast that kept all men in their own hell, full of their own fears.
Mardaroni slumped to his knees and let his head fall, feeling his uniform stick uncomfortably to his sweaty back. He was destined to a hell no matter what he did, and there was no changing that. He would never escape, no matter if he died here and passed on or remained here and persisted on. There was no escape, there was no release.
Death is nothing to us.
Before this condemnation, this damnation to this world, death was a far away thought, only feared by those with the fear of what lay beyond. But it was always a far off thought, something that would never come to pass. It was always something beyond the scope of actuality.
Since when we are, death has not come.
Men all believe that their demise will come at some far away moment. They all believe that it will come, but never now, never in the moment of the present. Perhaps it is universal to all existence and is what keeps life moving forward, rather than pausing in the reflection that life does not last forever. It is the belief that death and the passing on will never come, in spite of the fact that it remains inevitable. It is the belief that life could exist with out the inherency of death.
And when death has come, we are not.
Broken men, those who long for the release of death, find that the fiend that many fear or ignore will itself ignore those in pursuit of it. Those who search for the release, to leave the torment of the present and find rectitude somewhere else in whatever may lie beyond, are those very beings who are denied the release of death.
Simon Mardaroni stared at the sandy earth, his heart and mind now understanding what this darkness really was. It was not death, the instigator or deliverer thereof, but rather the creator of man's worst reality. It provided anguish in any form, whether that be in the supernatural or the natural. It was hell itself.
He would not leave this world, not through death or rescue. He was condemned here, to exist with this darkness over him. There was no release, no relief from the pain coursing through his mind. There was only anguish to endure, all because this darkness had evoked a Covenant to breathe fire upon the life that inhabited all of creation. Upon them were spawns from the depths of hell, dwelling in the figures that composed this nemesis, waging an unending war against humanity in the natural and in the mind.
It was now clear to him. This darkness existed not only on this desolate planet, infecting the hearts and minds of those caught in its grasp. No, this darkness was in the hands and swords of those hordes that marauded their lands and slaughtered their kind, and it was in the eyes and hearts of those men forced to kill for their own life. This darkness was the hand of the hell itself, and had brought into existence a war to assert a hell over everyone; a war that took the innocence and blamelessness out from the sons and fathers, and imposed lust and blood thirst into the beings that set each world afire.
This darkness was more than his own personal torment, but that did not change the worst part of it all. It did not change the sinister truth that it would stop at no means to rain down suffering onto all, whether that is to take life or preserve it. It would stop at nothing.
And the worst part had already befallen him.
The scars of life
Are many and few
The fears and pains
Are all and one
The search for escape
Is ever present and true
Only to be removed
By the healing of death
Yet forever denied
Yet forever denied.
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