A/N: Yes I realize it's been forever since I updated Shephard's Epic, don't fret, though, its still alive and kicking! But every once in a blue moon, I need a side project to bring new life into my masterpiece so that it doesn't become dry and repetitive! This work was born out of my reading "World War Z" By Max Brooks, as well as the marketing program "Believe, the John 117 Monument" for Halo 3. I believe Bungie did an amazing job with the marketing for Halo 3, and I personally believe it is the only thing that Halo has on Half-life.
Anyways, enjoy!
The Darkest of Days
An Oral History of the Liberation
Mitchell Dickinson
ForewordIt is my distinct pleasure to be given the honor of writing a foreword for the tenth anniversary of my work The Darkest Days. At the time I set out with pad, pencil, and recorder, I knew this book would be unlike any penned to date. I did not take on this challenge lightly; I suffered through many nights of soul searching, unsure of how the final product would leave the reader. Like so many of my contemporaries, I was born out of the jubilation of those First Days, when our parents were freed from the repressive restraints that had been imposed on them since almost before their parents generation. As one of the Rebel Born generation, I was fortunately denied the chance to live under the oppressive Combine regime, but this lack of experience also kept me from truly understanding the sacrifice and utter determination the previous generation endured during their fight to, as the father of the Resistance once said, "take back our world."
This is why I began my pilgrimage across the globe, tracking down those with truly unique points of view, or looking even within my own community to find those who saw the war with their own eyes. Because it is this generation who took up arms and, in the tradition of the human spirit, brought their enemies to their knees. These were the men and women who fought for a way of life not all of them even remembered. Even now, ten years since my work was first published, we are still finding evidence that makes the odds constantly fall in the Universal Union's favor, yet at the same time are able only to find victory for our own species.
This is the spirit of the Rebellion, how in the darkest of days, it was the drive to make a better world that inspired an entire generation, an entire race, to risk its collective neck.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
[The VA Hospital is sparkling white, absolutely sterile. Outside the windows, the snow falls wildly, temperatures have begun to return to normal, but the winters are still much too long. Across from me sits Corporal Bernard Winters, retired of course. He sucks on a hand-rolled cigarette; the earthy fumes betray the fact that it is most likely not tobacco. He sits hunched over in his hoverchair, his eyes following the snowflakes, refusing to make contact with my own.
I first saw action in City 12, I think they're calling it Brussels now. I'd hitched a ride from the coast after the Resistance had taken control of a few of the overland rail-systems. I was a boot, fresh outta training in City 28, where I'd lived most of my life. The Resistance had been recruiting people since before Nova, and we were in the middle of infantry training when the rebellion happened.
1 City 12 has since been renamed Nova Antigone, in the area formerly belonging to Belarus
2 City 28, known today, as well as before the occupation, as Cairo
3 Nova: Nova Prospekt, the destruction of which is seen as the catalyst for the Uprising
So you were a private then?
[Winters taps the joint in an ashtray and smiles wryly.
Son, we didn't have rank back then, not in the beginning. Not until we were folded into the rest of the AHR did we start using rank.
You mean the "Allied Human Resistance"?
Yup, well we had squad leaders and strategic coordinators who ran the show, handed out orders, but for the most part we were a volunteer unit. Volunteer world savers. When the Lambda resistance and the remnants of the US military and UK-French-Russian Composite finally hooked up, we had to change our whole regiment.
[Winters begins coughing raggedly, a nurse nearby rushes to his side, a vial of green liquid in her hand. Injecting it into his arm, he slowly recovers, though his demeanor is much more relaxed.
Sorry…Too much exposure to plasma coil injectors, the doctors say. Supposed to be a one-in-four-million chance you're susceptible to it.
You mean the ammunition for the old Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifles?
[Winters sucks at his joint.
Help save the world, and life rewards me with an eviction notice, don't think I've missed the irony. But really, we salvaged what we could from Overwatch corpses, and AR2's were the crème of the crop. Those babies would cut through a metrocop or a bullsquid like a hot knife through butter. I don't know a guy in my squad who wouldn't grab one, first chance he got.
Were most of the men in your squad as inexperienced as you were, when you first saw action?
Hell, most of us had barely held a gun before they threw us on that goddamn boat. They did it in the dead of night too, our city was on high alert, any and all civil unrest was dealt with harshly. One of our boys, a mousy guy by the name of Radcliff, didn't know how to swim, I mean, in those days, when were you gonna have a chance to learn? Most of the open water was infested with leaches, and the rivers and canals were full of that toxic shit. Kid slipped on a gangway, fell in the water and drowned. Guess you could call him the first casualty we had. That's how green we were.
[Winters sets the dead joint in the ashtray and pulls the oxygen mask over his face, taking several deep breaths.
Our first engagement was in an old school yard just on the outskirts of City 12. We followed our squad leader, Danielle Filkins, in a perimeter check. We could hear the fighting in the city, the explosions felt like their were less than a click away, when it was more like ten. That's when Overwatch hit us. They came fast, too fast for anything human. We were pinned down before we knew it, I remember taking cover in an old dugout. We took four casualties before we finally got the bastards. I remember looking into the glowing blue eyes on those masks.
[Corporal Winters becomes visibly shaken
That's when us boots finally realized, these fuckers meant business.
How did your squad, and the rest of the Lambda Resistance, react when military advisers from General Destovaya's outfit arrived to marshal your induction into the rest of the armed resistance movement?
[Winters shrugs
Didn't think much of it at first. No, no I take that back. I was ecstatic, I mean, these guys knew their stuff, they had the hardware, the ordinance, the technology to deal the real blow we'd be trying to land on the Combine for all those months. We'd been holding Cities, pushing the Combine back to the brink after they first lost contact with the Farside, but we couldn't take them down like those Marines could.
I think, for the most part, that was the sentiment. But a lot of people, some of my squad included, felt different. They thought remnants of the United States government coming in and taking control was like the days before the Occupation, and having the armed resistance being controlled by the military remnant of an old super power was asking for trouble. A lot of the soldiers looked down on us, thought we were yokels, yahoos who didn't know the barrel of the gun from its butt. There were a lot of misunderstandings, I think, in the beginning. It didn't help when they began instituting old vestiges of the Military machine, either.
You mean the court-marshals…
And the corporal punishments, and the firing squads.
[Winters spits in the ashtray disgustedly
Like I said before, we were a volunteer unit. Any man who didn't want to follow orders could leave. But these soldiers… they were used to a different kind of discipline. We all had the same fighting spirit, but these men knew that if they didn't keep their cool, stand their ground, there would be hell to pay. I heard about LaR troopers who disobeyed orders, being shot by their military CO's. Now I understand, those were tough times, crazy times, but I still don't know how I feel about some of the things that went on. We were all in it together, the LaR troops, the Marines, the Composites. But the thought of shooting a soldier for disobeying orders, when there weren't many of us left period stinks of poor judgment to me.
4 LaR: Lambda Resistance
[It was at this point that Corporal Winter refused to elaborate more on his experiences