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The man I loved.
His name had been Liner.
I didn’t know him, but he saved my life.
There were times at night where I would cry, thanking God for bringing life to Liner, because without him my children would have never been born.
There was another I cared for, although briefly (and not with the same intensity); we shared no more than two days together, trapped in the basement of that terrible place.
Needless to say, with tensions running as high as they were over the explosion, it didn’t take long for the R.E.D. and B.L.U. conflict to truly go underway. Did you know that they made a movie out my book? They took all the facts I gave them, and they turned them into fiction; the world I pulled them from was thought to be fiction. I WORKED SO HARD ON ENLIGHTING PEOPLE TO THE TRUTH AND THOSE CORPORATE ******** DECIDIED TO CONVINCE PEOPLE THEY WERE LIES AGAIN. Damn their eyes. They sent me a screenplay, and they completely left out this part, this pinnacle moment.
The B.L.U. emissary was a large man, bald, with a thick Slavic accent. When he showed up on our step unarmed he was sweating like… Well, like a fat guy in the desert. Three years later when I started compiling information on specific individuals I discovered why he had looked familiar. He was Svano Kruk, a once world famous boxer who personally taught Joseph Stalin to throw a left hook. His file said he fell on hard times, as the advent of communism retired him from his job before his prime. Officially he went missing and is still considered a communist threat. I saw the man die however, right on our doorstep.
The only other marksman was twenty miles away; we never knew who fired the shot. To this day it is a long sought after answer for conspiracy theorists.
We tried to help him; I rolled him over and looked into his eyes as he died. Death isn’t like Hollywood, death isn’t glamorous; it smells bad and leaves a sour taste in your stomach. The blood on my suit scared the Scout behind me; he yelled out that we were being attacked by the B.L.U.s, and that I was hurt. I tried to them that I wasn’t, but they just ran past me towards the frantically retreating truck that was trying to get away from the horde of Scouts. It didn’t make it.
This was the official start of the conflict, with this act of brutal murder as five teenagers, fresh from high school, pulled the driver out onto the gravel beat the young man to death with whatever they could get their hands on. I heard him crying out to me to help him, crying out to the world; it became a whimper, and then nothing.
I left that day, packed my things and travelled to the other side of the city, where I found the B.L.U. base, all it took was a simple suit change. I put a knit hat over my head and cut out the eyes and mouth, and went off. They asked why I was wearing the thing on my face; I just shrugged and told them it was to blend in with the buildings. I never took my mask off in the presence of the B.L.U.s; in the two years I switched back and forth from company to company they never once saw my face, and none lived to tell about it if they did.
My new team consisted of only six: four young men, an elderly German man who, judging by his lab coat, was the on-staff Medic, and someone named “Charlie” who never left their room. The R.E.D.s fire-bombed them the next day, and in rush of Napalm and screams four became three, then two, and finally none. The Medic fled into the setting sun, fated to die of blood loss in the desert alone. I hid in the basement, the man (who looked more like a boy) they called Charlie huddled in the corner crying his eyes out while the smell of desecrated and destroyed life hung in the air.
We never talked, and when the morning light broke Charlie was gone.
Here were my orders:
1) Do not kill unless needed.
2) Infiltrate and gather information.
3) No attachments.
Fire has always been the most effective weapon when it comes to striking fear in the heart of a warrior. The flamethrower was invented by the Greeks in 673, described as the essence of the Gods. She woke me up the morning after her disappearance; a gentle kiss on the lips was like the dance of butterflies. Charlie smiled and slipped on an old gas mask to protect her eyes from the burning fumes. She was the first female to fight in the conflict, lying about her age and gender to join up to pay for her college. She and the Medic had been “close”.
Sobbing incoherently through her filter, she turned a gas tank and nozzle into the most terrifying weapon any armed force had seen in that age. I followed her as she made a beeline towards the R.E.D. hideout.
The “cloaking” device was always more of a myth than a fact, encouraged by the people behind the scenes. The stories of Spies disappearing in thin air are false. We did not need to disappear or magically disguise ourselves. We simply walked as though belonged, and we didn’t make a scene. When it came time to leave, we walked away and didn’t make a scene.
Charlie was the first Pyro, a group of fighters that specialized in the art of terror. The one survivor she left on their team told horror stories to his commanders. They re-engineered her flamethrower and added to her outfit, attaching a flame retardant suit and oxygen tank. The future Pyros hailed Charlie as both a wondrous man (this always made me laugh) and as a monster. She was ruthless, yet beautiful, and I was there to hold her hand when she passed in the end, the by-product of a bullet to the lung.
I did my research on her a year after the fall. Charlie’s real name had been Claire, and she’d only been sixteen. One hundred and fifty of the volunteer recruits were women, nobody asked back then. The fall brought on social change, women began to stand up and push back.
This was largely due to the article “The Mistress of Fire”, published in TIME magazine, 1969.
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