I Haven't Stopped Moving Yet
I'm dead. I just haven't stopped moving yet.
Want to know what the “Hero of Accron” did in those soft days before the Bane arrived and humanity had to develop a backbone or become slaves to a bunch of stuck up aliens? You're going to love this. I was a computer game designer. Yeah, my job was make bad guys fight smart. I still can't quite believe that we actually used to do stuff like that, before everything changed.
I was late for work the day of the invasion. My alarm clock hadn't gone off, then I got pulled over for speeding, because the finance guys were visiting that day and I knew I was in serious trouble if I didn't make it in time. So I've an overzealous police officer to thank that I'm not buried under a pile of melted slag like the rest of the people I worked with. Guess serious trouble is a relative concept. A lot of my friends were in that building.
When things started blowing up, the policewoman shouted something into her radio, got on her bike and shot off. Her citation book fell to the ground with my ticket half written. Like pretty much everyone else at that time, my first thought was for my family, by which I mean Dad. Now I've had my fair share of partners, but generally speaking we've just tended to drift apart after a while. I get very focussed, you see, and after a while they start to feel neglected. And who can blame them? They were generally better off with someone who could give them the attention they deserved. Relationships come and go but Dad had always been there. My mother died from cancer when I was in my teens – lymphoma, they said it was - and Dad and I, we got through the dark times by looking out for each other. So yeah, he's the one I wanted to make sure was safe. And he was all the way across the other side of town.
Driving was not going to work at this point. The Bane laid down a blanket of suppressing fire from the air to keep us confused and isolated, and the streets were soon thick with the burning wrecks of cars. That stopped traffic pretty quickly, and then they dropped in mop up crews with orders to shoot anything that moved. I guess instinct kicks in at a time like that. I abandoned the cars and used the shadows and the subways. Fighting didn't even occur to me. If it had, I'd doubtless have ended it there, with all the other dead heroes. I hid in bins and down sewers to escape the patrols, and must've looked a right site when I got to Dad's apartment building.
Dad was sheltering a bunch of refugees. That's just the kind of person he was. He looked after people – always saw the best in people and tended to bring it out in them that way. But there was a problem. One of the children had a broken leg and was bleeding badly. Seemed like there was a good chance she'd die unless she got to a hospital soon. When Dad told me his plan I begged him not to, but he just said “She'll die, Pete, she'll die”, and took her in his arms.
Then he did one of the bravest and stupidest things I've seen in my life, and I've seen a lot of both. He walked out into the street carrying the child and straight up to the Bane patrol coming down the end of the road. At first it looked as though it might work, like they'd have a sliver of common decency and let the girl get the help she needed. The bastards were just playing with him. They told him they'd escort him to the hospital then shot him in the back of the head as he started to walk there. The girl they left where she fell. I got to listen to her cries of pain for the concealment of the apartment building as she bled out.
That's when I died. You see my dad was a good man, but he belonged to the old days. The part of me that was like him, the part of me that was worth a damn, died along with him in that ruined city street. All that's left now is the hatred, and all I know how to do is to kill and kill until every last one of those alien scum are wiped off the face of the galaxy. At Accron, when we saw our reinforcement drop ship vaporised by enemy fire, a lot of us lost heart, but not me. The only thing I need to keep me going is the siren song of the pain wracked cries of another Bane breathing his last. Guess it's infectious, and that's how we managed to hold out for four days until they could get more reinforcements out to us. No fancy tricks, just a will to survive and keep doling out the damage.
See I'm not a hero, whatever you've heard. All the heroes are gone. Maybe there are others fighting in this army who do it for Earth, for humanity, for home. I do it because they killed my dad and all I have left is the burning fire inside that's someday going to engulf every Bane and every world they hold. I'll keep on doing that until there's nothing left but ashes where they once stood proclaiming themselves masters of the cosmos.
I only wish it made me feel better. Hell, I'd settle for feeling anything at all.
Author: C. Scarborough
Oxford, England
Signature Character Contest First Place Winner