When Snow Falls: Gateway.
Chapter 1.
The memoris of a Stranger.
It was there in a small bar in the middle of backwater nowhere, Utah, that he'd found himself a place to piss away whatever money he had left. He just needed a place to settle down for the night with a drink in his hand and a woman or man, or possibly both, in the other, just to forget the world for a while longer. Maybe drink himself to death this time.
He took to sitting in the back of the place with his gun out on the table, hoping to give the biggest 'fuck off' signal he possibly could, rather unwilling to talk to anyone there until he was substantially drunk enough to start picking a few friendly fights with the other patrons of the bar to waste the night away before he even thought about getting to the fucking, he'd already picked out a few other guys that could put up a decent enough of a fight for a drunk him. It was a talent of his, able to judge how well a person could fight. The only ones brave enough to approach him were the employees, those that would serve him his drinks and take his money. He'd already had to throw some cash in advance to make sure they knew he wouldn't cause trouble yet, and some extra as insurance for when he did. He didn't care, he didn't have plans to spend it any other way.
He favored a bottle of straight whiskey, the best drink, in his experience to not so much forget about his worries, but more come to terms with them, or just not care. Normally, whiskey just made him a more friendly person overall, and to those that knew him well, when they saw him hit the bottle they knew it was time to lay low until it hit his system. During the start of his binge though, he was a fucking nightmare. It took a couple of shots before he was smiling. But plenty of noses had been bloodied and broken before that point, usually only if he was interrupted during his most sacred time.
But the poor fuckers here didn't have the slightest idea of who he was, or how the whiskey could get his blood boiling. They'd know soon enough though, and he just didn't give enough of a damn here to warn them. He needed to blow off some steam anyway, and a good fight always did the trick.
When the bartender came to pour him his drink, he just took the bottle from her tray, knocking down the glasses she'd brought for him and shattering them in his process of blindly grabbing for it. He didn't do half measures, he got right to the point. It was less risky that way. It got him drunk the fastest.
She could have sworn he was already drunk, but she was too afraid of the large man to say anything about the matter, even when it seemed like he'd been grabbing at her ass. She just kicked the glass under his table to scatter it around and went about her business after sneering at him, figuring he'd drink himself to death on the bottle of alcohol, or get wasted enough to fall into the pile of shards.
He would have laughed it off had she told him this, and he would have, in turn, told her not to flatter herself, his eyes were just a little blind, so he hadn't had the best luck at finding the bottle at first anyway. Not caring, he just flipped off the top with his thumb as he greedily dove into the bottle, already feeling a little more pissed when just a few drops of the bitter drink touched his throat, yet already he was starting to forget his worries as it started to turn bittersweet.
This wasn't the first bottle he'd ever drank alone, and it certainly wouldn't be the last he'd see before the night was over. See in a figurative sense, as his eyes had only grown darker in the six months since his unfortunate run-in with an IED. He'd avoided the blast, the shrapnel, even the initial explosion, almost everything about it he'd managed to avoid. But he hadn't been lucky enough it seemed, only having had just the right amount to not die, but felt as if this was worse. The shockwave had still hit him, and he'd learned that even that was detrimental to a human body, and he'd seen how badly they could fuck someone's shit. His eyes were slowly losing their light, everything grayer and annoyingly blurry, and told that within another year or two he'd be completely blind. He told them he'd be dead before that year even passed before he'd been discharged. There was nothing more they could do for him, and nothing else that he could do to serve. They couldn't send a blind man into combat, and he knew nothing else but, and nothing else he was good at.
He had a knack for murder, in a way any soldier worth his stripes that was. It wasn't hard to pick up a gun and mow down a few crowds, anybody could do that, children did it easily enough, but what made soldier's good was how many times they could put a bullet through the skull of a man, woman, or child, and not only make it out alive to do it again, and be able to resist putting their guns into a cabinet.
They didn't need to enjoy the countless slaughter of a faceless people, or even hate it, they just needed to be told where to point and shoot and follow that order again and again, however many times they needed it done. That didn't justify what they did, it was still their finger on the trigger, and it didn't make it any easier to forget. He hadn't ever been able to convince him that the people he was fighting here monsters, or less than human, which meant that he did not hate them. He'd had a job to do, and he'd fucking done it.
It was a job that they'd had to finish to get home, and sometimes you had to destroy an entire culture before you could get back. Only, when he did come back, there wasn't anyone he recognized, least of all himself. There was almost no one left for him to turn to when he'd left the military.
Looking down at the bottle, he thought of those that hadn't come back with him, no matter how hard they'd fought. People that deserved it more than he ever would. People that hadn't done nearly as much as he had to have deserved how it ended. Yet here he was, drinking in their place in memory of them, wasting away the life that should have been theirs. Funny how things worked.
He raised up his bottle as he recited those that fell before him in order. Lives that no matter what he'd done, they'd still been claimed. All from his own platoon. Corporal Maya Torres, age 28. Killed in action by an IED, the same one that had taken the light from his eyes. Sargent Coltan Myers, 32, Killed in action by IED. Lance Corporal Jay Strand, 24, K.I.A. Fucking IED.
Each name he listed, he took one hard swig after the other, taking in even more with a shorter pause in between each name. Not all of them had been killed by the same IED. No. Some of them died sometime after. Private First Class Marcus Jones, 22, K.I.A during a firefight when the squad had been pinned down. Died to make sure they were all evacuated, then gunned down trying to make fucking sure they got back the bodies of their dead, but they never did recover his. He'd later heard his body had been paraded around the rathole town he'd been left in. Nothing but his dog tags to send home. He'd stolen and kept the tags of those that he'd fought alongside with. Fucked up of him, but he found letting go wasn't easy
Private Ed Campbell, 20, K.I.A, from later complications as a result from injuries sustained after the IED.
He finally polished off the entire bottle, but when he found that there wasn't a drop left for him, he hissed in the pain he felt over the loss as he clenched his fist tightly around the neck of the bottle, almost crying out as he rested on the table, trying not to blame himself, but no matter what he told himself it was still there.
He stared blankly out into the room as he sat himself up, trying to make out who'd give him the most challenge before wiping away tears and drool, hoping he didn't look too much like a pathetic drunk as he dug around in his pockets, remembering a notebook he kept on his person. He'd been told that writing down his thoughts would help him in his darkest moments of stress, and maybe avoid some PTSD while he was at it, and until now he'd just held onto the thing as a reminder. Before his sight was lost to me, he wanted to finally take a crack at it, to jog down his thoughts and memories before they were lost to time. He knew it wouldn't be a permanent reminder, as the pages would disappear when he was done with them not too long after his story as at its end, but it made him hopeful that they would forever remain. Somewhere stored away in some great library.
He opened it up and found the first page, taking down his thoughts and making them a reality. He couldn't see how well the words were written, doing the best he could to make it legible, but he didn't care too much about its appearance, writing down anything and everything that came to him. The first things he scribbled down were the names of his lost squadmates, and how the book was dedicated to keeping their memory alive, and of the title.
'The memoris of First Lieutenant, Derrick Claudius Rome.'
He took another hard swig of his drink before he began writing, feeling it already lighten his mood immensely.
Entry #1. Date: 6/06/2020
Within these pages, I take note of the last words I will ever write. Within a year at best, my sight will have deteriorated to a point that I will never return from, therefore, I will be unable to write these words again if I do not do so now, nor see the world I have left behind in darkness. Something I have still not prepared myself for, so in this method I will try my best for when that day comes. In a point made short enough to understand, this is my last and only chance to set my story straight, though you may find you do not care either way. I want this to come from my hand only, so before my year has come and passed, I resolve to fill these pages with my true and honest words of the life I have lived and those that have been apart of it, for I believe no other could do so in my place, or do it proper justice.
Of the journey I have walked so far, the very same one that I found my vision crippled and my mind broken, and still might find my death down further along. It did not begin six months ago, it is just the last six months of my life that had the most impact as of late.
Six months ago I was still a Lieutenant, serving in the Marine's and on my third tour, about to be shipped back home to the states a week from now and considering a fourth just to avoid that. Nothing else made sense, but being there is where it all did, and where I truly felt the most at home. Up until a stray IED took out about a good portion of my former platoon, and another handful gunned down during the firefight to retreat when our position was given away.
To say those lost were my close friends, and the only ones I had in the world would have been for the sake of sentiment, and just wrong of fact. I didn't much care for the ones that had died, both in life and after death. I couldn't much stand Ed as it was, but the sorry fucks were under my command, and they'd died on my watch, so still, I mourned their names, and their memories.
I did have to like the men and women I worked with, I just had to respect them enough to place my life in their hands, and I did in every single one of them. When you were out there, they were your brothers and sisters, and you didn't always get along with them, sure, but you still loved them. And I wished they were here to share a drink with me. I drank for every single one of them, so by the time I was joining them in hell, they'd already be just as wasted as I was.
But this isn't just the writing of my last six months, rather, of all of my 32 years of life, and how I have both lived them, and wasted most of them.
It was 1996, and I was 8, still living in England with my caring mother and drunkard father, yet that did not make him a wholefully waste of a man. In all my time spent in our little cottage in Yorkshire, I could say in truth, that my father never laid a hand on me or my mother when drunk, no matter how much he'd ever down in one sitting, I could not say the same when he was sober though. I had never seen him lose his temper when he drank, as it was common for the men in the Rome family to be happy and cheerful when we had our favorite drinks in our hands, but be bitter bastards when we didn't. Those closest to us would agree we were at our best when shitfaced. That was why we normally drank ourselves to death.
I think my father exactly drank as much as he did to actually protect us, in his own way at least. When he stopped, that's when we were afraid, and when he was his worst.
There was one day, in particular, I still remembered vividly, that my mother had gotten into one of the worst arguments I'd ever seen her have with my father, for whatever the reason I did not remember, but it probably wasn't as important as it should have been to have had an argument of that caliber, having started right in front of me. I'd gotten scared hearing them yell before I ran to my room, neither having taken any notice that I'd left, too busy laying into each other verbally as I took cover in my closet, hoping to god it wouldn't spill into my room and become directed towards me, covering my ears to shut it out.
I hadn't done a well enough job it seemed, hearing a loud crash coming from the living room, and a dark silence that followed it. I was terrified of what might have just happened, quickly fleeing the house altogether, jumping out my window and running into the forest, tears streaming down the face of a scared boy. As I thought back to that day now with a few drinks in my system, I remembered not hearing my fathers voice during the moments that followed, only my mothers as she shouted angrily, screaming terrible things at a man that said nothing back.
I hadn't run in any real direction at first, but once I had calmed down I found the forest path I'd walked before, during a time when my family was actually happy, but that was a few years back. It was an old forest clearing where we'd stopped many a time before on picnics and family gatherings. It was time spent well, and time that I missed dearly.
I found the oldest oak tree in the park, the very first planted here and the mightiest one. When you were small, everything in the world seemed larger than it really was. At the time, when I would look up, its branches seemed to scratch the sky.
I hid under the grandfather tree, crying softly as I rested under its roots, giving me something that blocked out the rest of the world for just a few moments, starting to feel myself become exhausted as I fell into sleep, finding enough solace to do so, something I hadn't had for the longest time. And I enjoyed every bit of it that I was given.
He suddenly jumped back with a gasp, slamming the back of his head against the wall of the booth, rubbing both his injured skull and his temple. He hadn't even remembered falling asleep, yawing out as he took a look at the clock on the wall. He'd been out for nearly an hour and 45 minutes, and judging by the empty bottle sitting on his table, 20 of those had been spent in a drunken stupor. The ramblings he'd written down after the very last thing he could remember putting down confirmed that.
Beyond the first few it was pages and pages of drunken regrets and pitiable sorrow, or just monologing to himself about the most random of shit he could think of at the time, happy, angry and sad, somehow at the exact same time. Writing appeared to have been the outlet he needed, even more so than drinking. He didn't remember getting into a fight, and nothing appeared to be broken, so it had kept him occupied enough it seemed.
He reviewed everything he wrote down with a careful eye, tearing out the least legible of it all while keeping in some of the more strange writings. This was supposed to be a look into his thoughts after all, and there was no more honest time in a person's life than when they were completely and utterly shitfaced. And the funny thing was, he'd drank another bottle of whiskey that he didn't even remember ordering, and the two had only burned out of his system, beyond what any normal man should be able to drink without dying of alcohol poisoning, and he wasn't even halfway through the night, and this was only the first of several bottles. And since jogging his thoughts down had kept him from flying off the handle, he'd keep at it. He found himself enjoying it for the most part.
As he looked over the little book that was to hold his life within, he waved down the waitress walking about, and after a quick check through his pockets to make sure his wallet was still on him after passing out for as long as he had, he ordered another few rounds of bottles to keep him going.
When the waitress left him to get his drinks, he went back to work, tiding up his writing more so he could continue on. He was too focused on the current task to notice who walked in through the doors of the bar; A man in his early 60's in a brown jacket with a Marine corps rank insignia stitched into it and a silver star on the collar; Its meaning, Brigadier General.