War’s End- A SciFi Short Story

A SciFi short story about love, grief, and the pain of moving on.

Kat waited until she was a block away from the hospital before tossing away the bag of ice. She opened her phone camera and turned it toward herself, noting the large bruise on her right cheek. She nodded, satisfied, as the pain returned, and kept walking through the snowy streets.

She felt a too-familiar sting around the corners of her eyes, but she blinked the impending tears away. She had an hour’s walk ahead of her, and she didn’t need dried tears tugging at her skin in the freezing weather.

“Let’s get you home.” Tyler’s words echoed in her memory. “I’ll have to drive you. They were talking about towing your car out of spite, so I doubt it’s there anymore.”

“I’ll walk,” Kat had replied.

He let out a huff of breath. “What’s with you? Provoking Renata’s parents? What was the point of that?”

Kat turned her head away. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Their daughter came home from the war with a bullet wound through her neck. Why add to their grief?”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said they killed her. The military evaluations gave her a thirty-three percent of survival over her ten-year draft. And all they had to do to keep her was take a five percent income penalty for ten years. They were already paying a fifteen percent penalty to keep Robert home. You know what his projected survival rate was? Ninety-three percent.”

Tyler sighed. “I won’t deny that’s shitty. But what good does it do to bring that up at her funeral? What good does it do to accuse her parents of killing her?”

Kat bit the inside of her lip. If Tyler didn’t understand now, he never would. “I’m walking home,” she said, “Clearly, I’m not capable of following social rules right now. If you value our friendship at all, you’ll get out of here.”

“How is it valuing our friendship to make you walk in the freezing — “

“I need the time to think.”

He nodded, “Whatever’s going on with you, Kat… I hope you figure it out.”

Kat trudged through the snow, marking treads with her heavy combat boots. Her words with Ren’s parents and her father’s subsequent punch had made it so that she couldn’t see Ren’s body one last time, and she did regret that.

You have seen her body, she reminded herself.

Ren’s last minutes haunted Kat’s every unguarded moment. Kat woke up from dreams, cold and sweating, where the scene replayed itself in her head. Realizing that Ren had been shot, then running over to her. Seeing the hole in her neck. Watching her terrified watery eyes as she failed to speak, as she slowly choked to death on her own blood.

Kat shook her head, forcing herself back to the present moment. She tugged a bunched-up pair of earbuds out of her right pocket, plugged them into her phone, and tried to lose herself in music. Her mind mostly obeyed, badly needing the break. She absentmindedly fidgeted with a small metal ball in her left pocket as she walked.

An hour later, she was home. Kat laid back on her bed and took the metal ball out of her pocket.

This is all I have left of you, Ren, she thought, So much and yet so little.

She got up and went to the kitchen, fetching a saucer from the cupboard. She went back to her room and put her finger on the thumbprint scanner. The ball slid out slowly and fell into her cupped hand. She put the ball carefully inside the saucer and put them both on the bedside table.

She took Ren’s ball and inserted into the docking port on the side of her head, grimacing as the port made its usual sucking sound. The interface booted up, displaying in front of Kat’s face, pointing white off of her eyes. It was a directory.

“Sort by emotional intensity,” she said. The top results showed Kat’s own stricken face as a thumbnail. She scrolled just far enough so that the thumbnail was hidden from the search results. She wasn’t ready to relive Ren’s death again.

Kat looked at the next result. She bit her lip but booted up the memory. Ren’s lips kissed her own.

Strange, Kat thought, knowing what it feels like to kiss myself. She tried to empty her mind as she plunged further into the memory.

Ren’s stomach lurched pleasantly.

“I still can’t believe how lucky I am,” Ren said, breaking out of the case.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m with the most beautiful girl in the world.”
The Kat in the memory scoffed, but Kat knew now that Ren really meant it.
“I’m serious.” She wanted to say more, but of course, Kat butted in. She was always butting in.

You’ll be able to talk as much as you want now, she thought, You never have to wait for a turn to speak again.

“While I’ve got you in a good mood…” Kat started. She took a felt box out of her coat and got down on one knee. Ren’s stomach plunged with fear, an emotion that Kat had seen in her eyes.
“Don’t worry. I know better than to ask you to marry me,” Kat grinned. The grin looked so confident from Ren’s eyes. Not at all like the scared shitless feeling Kat had actually had. Kat opened the box, revealing a gold-latticed ring with an oval sapphire in the middle. “Will you agree to never marry me unless you want to?”

Kat couldn’t help but laugh again as Ren scrunched up her face in confusion. Her generally serious looks made her look older than her years to other people and she was generally tense. It was at times like this when Kat realized just how small she was, how just a few simple changes to her face, transformed her into a child.

Past Kat kept talking, “Will you agree to wear this ring as a symbol of my affection for you, on your right hand? Will you agree to be mine until the end of this war, when you inevitably find a more interesting girl to go out with?”

Ren kicked her in the shin, and past Kat yelped. The mouse-haired girl lifted up Kat’s chin with her fingers. “Just because I can’t marry you doesn’t mean that I’m going to ditch you. Face it, Kat, you’re stuck with me for life. When we get out of here, we’re going to ditch our small, judgmental town and go somewhere where we can disappear.” She plucked the ring out of the box and smiled. “It’s beautiful, Kat. Not as beautiful as you, but still, it’s a good effort.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

In her own room, Kat felt her face. Straight, long-healed scars covered her face. They had about as much artistry as a frenzied child with a colored pencil.

“You’re wrong,” Ren said. She touched the scars with trembling fingers. How can I get this through her head? she thought. “Scars make us who we are, no less on the inside than on the outside. But you wear your scars for everyone to see.”

“It’s not like I chose them.”

“You did, though.” Ren kept tracing lines on Kat’s face. “You didn’t have to choose to come along with me or to protect me. I’m the reason you have those scars. I’m the only one who has an inkling of what they mean. When I see your face, I see love and strength like I’ve never seen it before. The kind of strength that I thought was only possible in stories. I — ”

But Kat had been unable to resist kissing her for even a moment longer, and Renata felt a chill of surprise and delight go up her spine as she forgot words and focused on Kat’s lips.

Lucky, Ren thought. I’m lucky.

Wrong, Kat thought. You weren’t lucky, not at the end of it all. She wanted to take Ren’s memory ball and toss it over a bridge, but just the thought made her nauseous somehow.

Twenty-five. Goddamn twenty-five. No one deserved to die that young. None of it meant anything. Why shouldn’t she toss Ren’s ball as far as she could throw it? Why shouldn’t she throw herself away?

What was she without Ren? Ren, who she’d known as long as she could remember being happy? Ren, who’d had her first kiss, and a million others besides?

She remembered how she’d boiled over at the funeral. She’d been determined to make it through, to play nice so that she could see Ren’s body one last time. But then Ren’s father, the preacher, had gotten up to speak, talking about they had named her Renata because it meant “born again,” and he had just as much faith now as he had then that they would see her again someday.

She’s dead, Kat had thought, She’s dead and she’s never coming back. She had one life to live, and you gambled it away.

She remembered the first time she’d seen the apple-sized bruises that covered Ren’s back, where no one could see. Ren had only revealed the bruises because Kat had tried to wheedle her into going swimming. Kat hated the preacher then and she hated him now.

Give me a reason, any at all, to play this game, she thought, Give me a reason to keep going on with this hole in my heart.

She’d thought reviewing the memories would make her feel better, somehow. Maybe she’d find out their romance had been one-sided all along, or that she’d idealized it in her head. It was easy enough to do with a first relationship, after all. Instead, she’d found out that Ren had loved her even more than she’d thought, and somehow that just made the hurt worse.

Kat got her coat on and went for what she told herself would be a harmless walk. The fact that there was a bridge along the path she planned to go on was completely incidental.

Fifteen minutes later, she was staring through the bars at the icy, raging river. She sat down, leaning against the side of the bridge and taking a few steadying breaths. She hadn’t advanced to command her own squadron by giving in to her fears, and yet here she was, avoiding Ren’s last moments because they scared her more than the hundred-foot plunge.

Stupid. If Ren’s memories did somehow make her death worse, the bridge and the nihilism would still be there. She opened the interface and forced herself to select the first result in the list.

The feeling of the bullet tearing through her neck came out of nowhere. Kat hadn’t expected it to be the first thing in the memory bank, and she sat there, gasping for air, lightheaded, her throat filled with a warmth that wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t there, of course, it was all a simulation, but she couldn’t grasp that through the fuzzy feeling in her head, because that was all too real.

What’s — happening? Ren’s thoughts and Kat’s were one now; her brain didn’t have the capacity to think more than one string of thought, and struggled at that.

With great difficulty, Renata moved her head to the side, just able to see a blurry Kat running toward her. She heard her name come out of Kat’s mouth, or at least she thought she did — it was a shriek, an unbelieving cry of pain that tore her heart more than the bullet tore her throat.

Renata couldn’t make out Kat’s words. They all sounded far away and muffled in her head. Kat grabbed her hand and Ren tried to clutch back, but she couldn’t move. She panicked, trying to move other parts of her body, but nothing below her neck worked.

I’m going to die, she realized, finally. The dizziness from the fall had let up somewhat, at least to the point where she could think her own thoughts. I’m going to die, and only one person will have known the real me.

The world went blurry for a few moments, but Ren fought to hold it in view, fought to look at Kat’s face. She remembered giving Kat sole access to her memory bank when she died.

Kat, she thought, I can speak to you, or at least I can try. I know you’ll try to blame yourself. Nothing I say will make you change your mind, but know that I don’t blame you. You have to live for both of us now. You’re the one thing in my life that I don’t regret.

The thought cut off as Ren instead used the last of her energy to bring Kat’s face into view one last time, looking at the shrapnel scars she loved so much. Then her world went blurry, and finally black.

Kat gasped long lungfuls of air as she picked herself off the ground. Ren hadn’t really formed words in the end, but the half-thoughts she’d been considering in between had reached Kat. If she ended up dead, it would be just like killing Ren all over again. She owed it to Ren to stay alive.

Practice would be harder than theory. But today at least, she clutched the metal railing and stood up. It was time to go home.

© Kasey Anderson 2019