Chương 2: Chapter 1 - The Day it All Ended

Drip… drip… drip… A young man looks in a mirror as the droplets of water he splashed on his face fall back into the basin of the sink below. It was a dirty mirror, the kind you would expect to see out of a truck stop bathroom, but that's not all that surprising given where he was. Graffiti marred the edges of the mirror, was etched into the porcelain of the sink basin, and covered damn near every surface that has not been recently scoured of it.

The man wrinkled his nose at somewhat expected dubious odors creeping from the rest of the industrial white tiled bathroom. What else would you expect from a public bathroom in one of the most trafficked areas of the nation's capital? He took a quick look at his figure in the mirror and turned away with a slight grimace. While I'm not unhappy with my appearance, I was hoping to be further along in my weight loss goals by now.

I've always been pretty aggressively average in the looks department but one of the things I had going for me was my physique due to my previous profession. When in military service, daily workouts are a job requirement, much less the other physical labor involved which went a long way to keeping him trim.

To be fair, he had a pretty standard build a little above average height and weight, but while the above average weight was once muscle he is getting a little extra padding now that he's spending more time behind a desk these days.

He gives himself a shake to remind himself the run isn't going to finish itself, and sent another splash of water across his face from the sink, and stepped back look at the ineffectual hand dryers before he wiped his hands dry on his clothes with a habitual grimace and stepped out of the restroom. There was a short walk down a small tiled hallway with rough stucco walls to reach the exterior of the subway stop where he had taken a quick break on his run.

As he shuffled up the stairs rising through a domed cement tunnel leading out into a grassy field. The field was lined with trees sporting bright pink cherry blossom trees under a clear blue sky, and he resumed weaving through the lightly crowded sidewalk at a fast but steady jogging pace. That's why I'm out here early in the morning for a jog to work some of that padding off and slim down a bit again.

I really wish there was a better place for a bathroom break, but given a highly trafficked area like the capitol mall, beggars can't be choosers as they say. It was a beautiful place despite the amount of tourism, a highly curated area with shops, well manicured grass, bordered by cherry blossom trees, and some of the most highly accoladed educational museums in a nation who has an absurd amount of money to invest in the education of their populace.

The sight of the spectacle had a great grounding effect on him that brought a soft smile to his face. He took a deep breath, and after looking up at the deep blue sky, he ran through a few quick stretches to loosen his upper body, a couple strides worth of lunges to loosen up the kinks in his legs from the break and tapped his ear buds to resume his playlist.

Elias Mercer, Eli to his friends, attempted to keep a stoic expression on his face but as he tried to zone out and focus on his run, the slight frown on his face gave away the internal conflict. These days I'm a bit of a bum, but it's a little bit by choice. I am not really a lazy person at heart, I just feel like it in comparison to my previous profession, and life wears on me a bit.

I was recently in the military where every second of every day was accounted for, and the actions I took often had a weighty feeling, a feeling where it all meant something. I knew that at any given time an action I took, any decision I made, could have serious consequences and could be brought before some of the highest leaders in the land for judgement on the worthiness of these choices. However, these days I was just another guy.

Most some days my toughest choice was what to have for breakfast, and it led me to feel like a statistic, a mindless automaton that shuffled from one place to another adrift on the winds of fate with no choice over my destiny; or at least this is what my darkest thoughts wanted me to believe, even if I knew better. The wars that drove me to join the service were winding down, and it was time to leave that life behind and join the civilian world, and I was doing my best to do so.

I needed to find another purpose in life, even if it was a little disappointing to downgrade from capturing terrorists and drug lords to scolding petty thieves (usually teenagers) for trying to steal discount makeup; but hey, it pays the bills. While I don't like the idea of being essentially a glorified mall cop while going back to school, there aren't many job fields that my experience transfers into, and to be honest while my work environment isn't the most enjoyable I found that I honestly really love learning.

I was a little surprised to find that I may be a bit of a geek but math, physics, science, I've found I can't get enough! The joy it brings me almost, but not quite balances out the disappointment. I hope I can eventually find something to bridge the gap, maybe something challenging enough, unique enough, or with enough problem solving to occupy the puzzler's brain my previous profession developed, who knows?

As Eli ran he worked his way into a comfortable pace, breathing in, breathing out; and as his footfalls began to strike the pavement in time with the beat drifting through his headphones he quickly fell into a rhythm. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. As the pace became automatic his mind drifted free, it created the feeling of zen that led to running being such a mainstay of his life even after it was no longer required.

He glanced at the various marble edifices drifting past and thought to himself, this is what I always loved about this place, it reminds me of why I joined the military service in the first place. While the older I get, the more I realize I was propagandized and the reasons I joined the service were more than a little idealistic and overly romantic, I still hold them dear.

I see all the school children on the museum field trips, the same ones I used to love, learning the history of the nation exemplified by the national landmarks around us. It's not surprising to find that if you grew up in such surroundings that it would lead to an unusually high amount of national pride. As you pass monuments to great men and fallen heroes everyday, it's easy to yearn for a chance to make your mark on the world.

Your own chance to protect the innocent, defend your country, do something, anything, to leave the place a little better than you found it. To struggle against the weight of the world, right wrongs, and accomplish something to be proud of. While my overseas service did disillusion me of this notion quite a bit, it did also provide a bit of perspective as well as a healthy dose of skills you would never develop in the comforts of a modern society.

The experience had, in its own way, helped me appreciate what I had even more. Unfortunately, it has also led to feeling a little rudderless in the past few months as I returned to a part of the world that feels like it has moved on without me, and changed in subtle ways that make me feel like a foreigner in my own homeland. A feeling like I was the only one who looked up and saw the greater truth outside of everyday life, some indescribable thing that I can't name.

Like reading a passage in a foreign language that you don't speak, but somehow know is vitally important and yet can not grasp, leaving behind an eerie sense of foreboding. I'm working on it. The strange feeling is a heady mix of stress trauma and imposter syndrome from what the doctors are saying. Enrolling in university these past few months has helped, but if I'm being honest, it has less to do with growing my potential employability and skill sets as with buying myself a breather.

Creating a space of a few years to re-acclimatize to a civilian life and catch up with the changes that came to the world I used to be a part of. A world that changed while I was off living in a cave in some long forgotten desert mountains, halfway across the world fighting a war that it seems so few of my countrymen even remember why we were ever there.

The ineffable feeling of grasping a deeper and unsettling truth about the nature of existence, which leads to a sense of creeping unease and foreboding is apparently just a bonus. Lucky me. A light breeze blew through the trees bringing the scent of cherry blossoms breaking Eli free from his reverie, and he took a deep cleansing breath of the nostalgic scent that eased his mood. I need to remind myself it's more important to focus on the future and not the past, and to appreciate what I have, not what is lost.

As he worked his way down the tree-lined streets sided by the towering marble and granite neoclassical buildings of capitol, taking in the beauty of his surroundings, a small smile creased his face as he appreciated the cheerfulness the beautiful day brought to everyone's faces. Eli dodged families on outings, street vendors hawking coffee, donuts, and some other rather dubious meal choices, and mad prophets screaming to anyone who would listen about the end of the world, as he wound his way down to the waterfront.

Seriously, who eats a bacon wrapped hotdog for breakfast? Apparently more people than I would think given the unexpectedly long line for the cart this early in the morning. Whatever makes them happy I guess… Eventually he arrived at the river that bordered the park on the western edge and panted heavily while he took a quick break to stretch out his legs.

Pacing for a moment he chuckled at the waterfowl arguing with each other about a piece of bread a passerby had tossed in the water, before taking off down stream with a series of angry squawks that he can barely hear over his headphones. A song that he was not a fan of started playing in his ears, and he pulled out his phone to skip it on the playlist. Eli was looking down at the device in his hand he saw a flash illuminate the ground below him followed by a large boom in the distance like an angry thunderclap.

Startled, he looked up at the clear blue sky with sparse clouds lazily drifting by in confusion. As he turned south he winced, raising his arm and squinting as a wall of heated air blew past him. A heavy gust brought a spray of dirt and loose grit kicked up from the gravel path he was standing on buffeting his face and clothes. Eli lowered his arm and cracked open his eyes as he felt the bottom of his stomach drop to his feet, and his heart began racing, panic rising, as he clutched at his chest.

In the distance south over the river Eli could see a mushroom cloud rising. Anyone who was in this country's military and most civilians in the area knew exactly what building was in that direction. The building was the seat of military power for a modern day empire, a building where old men sat in darkened rooms and decided the fates of millions over cups of terrible coffee.

The building was famous both for its geometric shape as well helping ensure an enduring hegemonic dominance for the country on the stage of global politics. At the realization of what he was witnessing Eli gasped in horror as the rising panic shifted into a foreboding sense of horror.

If there is one universal topic that came up as a school child in this city, it was that if the "big one" came and the world went to war again, you were either in the safest city in the world, or since you are at ground zero the end will come so fast you probably would not even see your end when it happened.

Turned out they were slightly wrong on that, since Eli did have time to see the cloud, but as any school child born after the atomic age could guess what happened next, Eli shifted with a sense of looming dread to the seat of the government less than a scant mile from where he was standing. I guess this was the wrong day to go for a run in the park.

As he faced the massive building with nothing but a few trees and grass which provided absolutely nothing in terms of protection between him and the domed building, Eli had but a moment to just barely see an infinitesimally small dot come rocketing out of the sky like a meteor. A thunderclap resounded as the object struck the massive building with such force it felt as if the heavens were ripped asunder.

In the moment before the strike and his entire world being dissolved in an unfathomable wave of heat, pressure, and pain, time seemed to stretch and linger for a moment. While Eli didn't experience his whole life flashing before his eyes as he was always told he would, he did have just enough time to think one final thought as ignoble as it was. Well, fuck me I guess.