Snake wiped the sweat from his brow and sat heavily under the oak tree staring at the newly turned earth. It had been a few years since he made it home and just 2 days out of New York, the reason was not the one he'd have chosen in any circumstance. He looked to the cross beyond the mound. An empty coffin lay in the dirt below and he tried to forget that she had been left to rot on the battlefield of Leningrad. Above both of them was a stone arch that his eye settled on twitching with a deep seated pain.
Snake sat there with his family under the tree or at least imagined they were there with him. Today he buried the last of his family. The body had spent a day in the sun of the Colorado Desert but Snake had carried it back to Deadwood despite the stench. The man he called his brother for over twenty years deserved better then what the United State Police Force had left for him, looters and vultures.
Plissken rubbed his shoulders staring at the roughly chiseled stone above the hole he just filled. It wasn't pretty but then Snake wasn't a stone carver either. His eye worked over the words one more time: William "Bill" Taylor, September 10th 1968 - October 21st 1997, Brother, Sarge. His body ached but very little of it was due to labor. This was a type of tension that couldn't be massaged away. It was fueled by hatred and loss.
His eye throbbed behind the patch in rhythm with the breaking breeze. Plissken had nothing much left now besides that burning hatred. He had realized that when he saw Taylor crawling toward him and the dogs circling him itching for the kill. It was a terrible way to go for a man of honor, to crawl. Snake despised them for that one act. They had humiliated his brother, stripped him of his honor and left him to die alone.
The cold wind whipped at Snake's hair. He had been blessed with a warm day that thawed the starting freeze. He wiped his mud caked hands in the grass beside the tree and turned his attention to the town he could see. The place was deserted now except for a few die-harders and some criminals moving to the free west. As a boy he hated this place but now he would give everything to take it back to what it had been. Plissken looked on the mound of soil. What did he have to give any longer? All he had was his life and at the moment he felt more dead then alive.
Plissken stood brushing the dirt and grass from his pants. He knew better then to imagine things could ever go back without first going forward. Things had to be pushed so far into the red that by default they would return to the past. Problem was how to accomplish that. Snake turned to the mounds and saluted before heading toward the gate. He doubted he would be back unless someone remembered to bury him here when he died. That wasn't likely and so this was goodbye for his past. It left him feeling hallow as he left his memories buried with the graves. He had no use for them now, they were nothing more then a burden and he still had a war to win.