A quiet misty morning on a surreal rice paddy, with the fog slowly scraping the horizon. It’s peaceful and still. The silence interrupted only by the occasional call of birds in the distance. Too peaceful, the wise would say. But what the fog hides is a massive wall, 20 feet tall, on one side of the paddy. It has a large, bulky gate, which seems as if it has been left undisturbed for centuries, with nature reclaiming a significant part of what was once on the ground.
Suddenly a hedgerow, on the opposite side of the rice paddy gets mowed down by a massive metal beast, with treads kicking up mud behind it, and it’s bulky, cold, metal armor covered by small beads of water, clearly from condensation. The roar of its engine breaks the surreal silence, polluting the atmosphere with the rumble of the pure power of a V12 diesel engine. Suddenly two more tanks appear from the hedgerow a little distance from the original one. And then another, and three more. It’s a whole armor platoon.
The armor platoon crawls relentlessly towards the wall, each tank acting as part of a hive mind, and traversing their turrets as if of their own accord, but tank enthusiasts will know that this motion is anything but unplanned. The first tank stops around 30 feet from the gate, and the other tanks follow its lead, coming into a formation of a neatly spaced, and surprisingly straight dotted line. Following the tanks closely are armored trucks, with grimaced soldiers sitting in the back, holding rifles nonchalantly as if this is an everyday task for them. Some of the soldiers are smoking, some just staring down, seemingly contemplating the weight of what they are about to do. All the vehicles come to a stop in neat formations, reminiscent of a flock of migrating birds, perfectly aligned, and covered with a thick layer of mud from blowing their way through a recently watered, mud covered paddy.
Suddenly, everything seems silent again, but this is a strange silence; there are no birds to break the silence this time. It’s a silence that is often beckoning of the time to come, a silence that falls when you are about to commit the gravest of sins. It’s the silence that will ravage your dermis with goosebumps, and will give you shivers in a way that never seemed possible. But not even this silence is perpetual and is broken by the screech of the hinge of a heavy metal door on of the armored trucks. Out steps a very ordinary faced soldier. Except this is no soldier, this was an officer, with his beret hat on top, and tank top apparently indicating that he was not a big fan of washing his clothes. He marches in a particular motion to the wall, as if he has rehearsed this thousand of times in his head. He continuous to march towards the wall until he is close enough to see the individual cracks in the visibly aged gate. He takes his hand and places it caressingly on the wall, and just goes into a state calmness, moving his hand across the wall, and visualizing how close victory was.
’The last one’, he thought.
All the while the officer was doing this, the soldiers managed to maintain their grim, bored expressions. As if the war had scarred them; as if they had seen things that no man should observe. It was as if they’ve massacred an entire planet. Maybe they had.
The officer pulls his hand back in a swift motion, turns around in a very clean gesture, and marches back, to his truck. He pulls out a radio transceiver that is attached to a corkscrewed cable in the truck, and brings it close to his mouth:
‘Take it down’, he orders in a tone that appeared routine, as if he had uttered that single phrase hundreds and thousands of times.
Suddenly each and every remnant of the silence is wiped away as explosions rip through it. Bright flashes of light emanate from the barrels of the line tanks, each complementing the reckoning of others. The shockwaves from the tank shells exiting the barrel create vacuums in the blanket of fog, and smoke fills that vacuum, appearing as if the demons own army has risen from the dead to avenge itself. Occasionally, there appear streaks from the barrels of the tanks that terminate at the gate, or where the gate is supposed to be, because it’s now completely covered by a living layer of smoke, and dust.
*Boom* *Boom* *Boom*
The sound echoes, perpetually dispatching of the silence and wreaking havoc on the remnants of the gate, which is disintegrating with each hit. It’s surprising how thick the gate is and begs the question, how did it even move?
But like even the strongest shields, it eventually gives way and collapses in a haze of smoke, dust and gunpowder.
‘All units halt!’ utters the officer, and as if on cue, all the tanks stop shooting.
Silence falls once again over the entire field, and the smoke and rubble starts to clear, revealing the broken gate. The commander steps out of his truck, walks over to the tank standing to attention in front of him, climbs on board and orders the tank to move forward through the rubble. The tank starts moving forward with a sharp jerk, causing the officer to shake a little, but continues nevertheless, and eventually gets over the oversized speed breaker. On the other side, a couple of feet away is a single beacon of light, projecting upwards. And at its origin is a single book. The last book on the planet. The tank stops a walkable distance from the podium the book is placed on. The officer gets off and walks towards the book, that lies open on the top of the podium. He carelessly picks the book up, and pulls out a lighter, ignites it and brings it closer to the book. As soon as the flame touches the book, it bursts into flames, and suddenly the light vanishes. And then there’s darkness. Pitch black night. It wasn’t a misty dawn; it was a dreadful dusk.
‘The sun of hope is no more’, announces the officer as he pulls out a fresh, crisp cigar, and lights it with the same lighter he used to kill the hope of humanity.
‘We have been freed’, he whispers with a sinister snarl.
