At Least It's Over (?)

“Hey, Dave, look, it’s a Covvie ship,” said Beau. I looked up and saw that familiar outline, colored a deep violet, coming in for a landing at one of the pads of the spaceport. It hovered above pad two, and its hold or something like that opened up and down floated a bunch of big-ass crates. And coming down with them were some Elites. Even after two years since the war ended, I still had half a mind to jump up off the crate I was sitting on and make a run for it. That’s the first instinct. The moment you even see a Covenant ship, you run. Run for a spaceport. Run for a ship. Just run. Get out of the system as fast as you can.
Now we don’t have to do that. Now we’re all “friends” with them. Like any of us can forget what happened? How can we? How can I? How can I forget all the people that I left behind? That never managed to make it? What about all of them?
“Yep,” I replied to Beau. A cigarette hung lazily from Beau’s lips. He was tall, lanky, thirty-something, and spent his whole life working as a dockhand here on Earth. He only really knew how bad things got in the war when it actually came home: he lost an uncle on Malta Station, I heard.
“What do you think about all this, man?” I asked.
“I dunno,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. “I just feel like they’re getting away with it all, I guess.”
“Yeah,” I quickly replied. Then memories of my own family started flooding back into my head. I remembered my son Charlie, his face, his little freckles, his dazzling green eyes he got from Tess, and that time I dug a meter-deep hole in the sand on the beach with him one summer day. But that’s never going to happen again. Charlie will never stop being six years old.
And as I glare at the Elites helping to move the crates carrying whatever the fuck was inside them, all I could think was that those guys maybe… just maybe… perhaps… one of them was probably there when my son was killed. One of them probably pulled the trigger, directed the bombing, caught sight of the crowd and had it targeted for attack. Maybe it was one of them. Maybe none of them were anywhere near the planet when it happened. But still… the thought remains. The possibility remains.
Those thoughts raced through my head, but Beau added his own voice to the conversation once more, saying, “War’s fucked, man. At least it’s over.”
Our break was almost over, and I only grew conscious of that when Beau said “war’s fucked.” I quickly said, “Yeah, yeah,” to try and snuff out the conversation. I pushed myself off the crate and went back to work.
Charlie was on my mind for the rest of the day.
Category:The Weekly