Chapter 1

So many questions, so little answers. But I knew that somewhere in the darkness, the answers were hiding, just waiting to be uncovered by someone keen enough to find them.

Everyone I knew and loved was nothing but a distant memory now. Mama, Parker, Deion, Lobel. I had let Mama down. I lost Parker and Deion to the system. I lost Lobel just a few days ago to this meaningless war. Maybe that was the point of the war in the first place; to let kids know what it feels like to be in battle, that it isn’t what we see on TV or what we play in video games. This war was nothing like all that glorified crap you see in commercials. Maybe the war is just some kind of sick joke to make us experience the loss of a good friend to a cause that you don’t even know you’re fighting for. Maybe there’s a group of old rich men somewhere sitting in a living room laughing at other people’s misery. I want to know the truth, and I want to know it now.

 I was jolted out of my deep thoughts about back home when the armored van drove over a ditch in the road. My M16A2 at my side, loaded, cleaned, and ready to be fired if the moment called for it. The cold metal pressed against my face as I sat there, brooding.

“I was so stupid, I was so stupid,” I kept repeating this over and over again in my head.

How I got myself into this mess, I have no idea. All I know is that I’m in it and I can’t change anything that I did in the past.  I don’t even know where to start telling my story, so I guess I’ll start from the very beginning. Or, rather from the last I can remember being back home.

So there I was, sitting on a stoop on James Street with my best friend Deion, smoking a weed and so nervous that I felt like an old woman. 

“You sure ’bout this?”

“Of course. Ain’t no way I came all the way down here.”

“I don’t know ’bout this. Something keeps telling me this is a bad idea.”

“What, you scared or something?”

“Nah, I’m just saying.”  

I actually wasn’t scared, just a little nervous. But even if I was, I wouldn’t have let him know that. I gazed up at the lamppost just above our heads. It kept flickering on and off and it was annoying the hell out of me.

“Whatchu staring at?”

“Nothing.”