This story is called "Angel of Mercy" and was part of a project for a club I'm in. We were supposed to use our favorite song as a starting point but I have too many to pick just one so I used one of my friend's favorite songs instead.


Angel of Mercy

“Yes, I think I’ve lived a fortunate life”, said the old man to me.

I nodded my head and said, “Go on sir. I’m glad you’ve let me interview you, after all you are a living legend these days and I just wanted to let you know that I’m honoured.”

He looked at me and said, “Do you know the reason why I chose you for this interview son? It’s not because you’ve got connections, it’s not because you’re a powerful person, or even that you’re a good writer. No. It’s because I understand that you are an honest writer who cares about the story and respects the wishes of those that you talk to. As such I want you to know that everything that I’ve done and everything that I’m going to tell you I tell you because I want to set the record straight. What I am most well known for, the things that seemed to be incredible feats of daring or cunning, all of these things that you have heard my name from I did not do.”

“But surely that’s not true! You are Andrew Walker, the man who fought in three wars, including the War of the Great Depression, the man who brought countries to their knees and won not only glory but also respect for our now mighty Alaganda. You-”

“Shut up and listen.”

And so I listened, and this is what he told me.

“Yes I’ve lived a fortunate life. A very fortunate life. I guess you could say that, for many of the things I’ve done I had a guardian angel. An angel of Mercy if you will. And this angel, now gone, helped me become what I am now.”
“I suppose I should best start from the beginning, as all good stories should. I’ve never liked a story that starts in the middle and goes back to the beginning, they take away from the main story.”
“When I was young, a child no more than ten years old, I knew how to fight. I had grown up on the streets and fighting was all I had known. There were no programs for sheltering orphans back then, or places where those without income or homes could go to be out of the cold. Everything those of us, unlucky enough to fall beneath the government’s radar, earned we earned through teeth and blood.”
“I had a sister. A younger sister, two and a half years my junior, and I loved her dearly. Whatever I managed to scrape together from menial and difficult jobs I would give to her. And she was precious to me. She had a necklace that she had kept from our mother. It wasn’t a valuable thing, I would not have even called it pretty, but she treasured it as if it were the last lifeline she had. And in some ways, it was.”

As he said this, his face softened and a tear began to form in the corner of his left eye. It did not fall though.

“As we grew older it became more difficult for us to survive on the meagre amounts that we were given. In order to help Angela, my sister, keep growing and stay healthy I took up with a gang of street urchins. We were not called the Red Ravens but that will do for the purposes of this story and it is not about them. I learned pick-pocketing and lock-picking and all manner of unseemly tools of the trade. And I became quite good at them.”

I nodded, many of the stories had mentioned how, using only a bit of soap he had escaped from one of the most impregnable prisons on the Swasiri coastline.

“I was never quite as good as Angela though. Even though I tried to keep her away from these things she would always tag along behind me, happily watching and silently learning. We became quite a team near the end. I would distract people and she would go around and collect ‘donations’. I never quite figured out how she managed to do it. I guess her size helped her. She was quite slight, even frail sometimes if the light hit her right. But she was fast and nimble. A far better thief than me.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt sir, but you said you were ‘quite a team near the end’. What did you mean by that?”

He looked at me, calculatingly, and he sighed.

“Mmm, yes I did say that didn’t I? Very well. The Red Ravens were doing quite well for themselves, by children’s standards. We had even gotten enough money to rent out a place, it was cramped for 40 odd children but it was better than the sewers any day. We kept watches, as we always had. A child an hour while the others slept, four children, one watching each side at all times. But I fell asleep.”
“As it turned out, the local mafias had been watching us too. They felt that we were beginning to become a nuisance as both the child gangs that they supported were no match for us and many of their members were victims of our crimes. They were, unappreciative, to say the least.”
“They attacked us at two o’clock in the early morning. I should have seen their cars but I had fallen asleep against the pillar I was at, my sister sleeping by my side. They drove along my side and sprayed the building as they went past. The shattering glass gave me this scar and badly injured my sister’s leg as several shards went through her calf muscle.”

He indicated on his own body where his sister had been hit, three places in the lower leg with shards of glass that ranged from three inches to one inch in width.

“Bullets chipped pieces off the walls and broke the few beds that there were. The leader of our gang was killed in that. The chairs looked as though they’d simply fallen apart. And the sound, the sound of gunfire as it zoomed past us. Each car unloading its weapons and then moving on. It seemed to last forever but it took mere seconds. Then, as the last car passed us, something shiny and metallic hit the ground in front of me. It looked almost as a pineapple would.”
“I acted reflexively, of that I have no doubt. I had heard about grenades before and I knew what would have happened if I didn’t get it away from me. More importantly though, my sister would have died, if she was not dead already. So I kicked it away from me. Unfortunately the only direction open to me was to kick it towards the other gang members, still recovering from being woken up so violently.”
“One of the members, a boy called Mickey, realized what it was that I’d kicked over and began to scream. He didn’t get that far. The grenade detonated and brought the whole building down. It was only a one story thing in the slums but it was still terrifying. I was quite lucky that I was behind a pillar, my sister had told me to keep watch there because I would be less visible. Another example of how my sister saved me.”
“After the building finished collapsing, some men came in through the remnants of the window that I had been supposed to keep watch out of. I was about to try and escape when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my sister, pale and dazed as she was she could still recognize the incredible danger that such a move might make. Which was demonstrated when Mickey, or what was left of him, got up and shambled towards the light from that window. He was cut down in a hail of bullets.”

At this the old man began to brood, lost in his own dark thoughts. I cleared my throat.

“Ahem, what happened to you and your sister sir?”

“We escaped of course. We waited for the men to finish their sweep; every time they found a child with signs of life they shot them. I prayed silently to whatever gods there are that we would not be caught. My sister, ever practical, passed out and left me to pray for her well being as well. When the men came around to us I shut my eyes and played dead. I hoped that it was convincing and it appeared to be since they left. After five more minutes of agonized waiting, expecting the bullets to come my way and end me then, I opened my eyes.”
“Every child was dead except myself and my sister, and she would have died very quickly if I didn’t get some help. I picked her up in my arms and peeked out into the street. There was no-one to be seen. Slowly and cautiously I made my way around the wreckage to the side alley that would take me to the hospital, and I felt a sense of urgency that I haven’t felt for a long time. I began to speed up, still unsure whether it was a good idea to run. That is until I heard the gunshot and a bullet buzzed over my head and pinged on the metal wall next to me. Then I ran like a bat out of hell.”
“It was three miles but I ran all the way and collapsed from combined shock and blood loss just at the entrance. When I regained consciousness I was lying in a bed next to my sister in the intensive care area, which was the majority of the hospital since at that time the streets were quite vicious. And the hospital staff were good people, although the administrators were corrupt. They patched up my sister and I and let us stay there for a while.”
“There was a hospital worker called Cynthia, a psychiatrist who often treated those with trauma, who was especially nice to my sister and I. She let us stay in the staff room or in her office at night when there weren’t many patients she had to see. She would bring us food that she cooked herself and we were grateful for it. It was better than we had ever eaten, and I still haven’t had anything better than her Lasagna.”
“This lasted for about a month before she asked us where our parents were. I told her that they’d left us to die in the streets and that I hoped they were crushed by a building falling on them. And then Angela began to cry so I took back what I said. At least, I took back having said it out loud. And so Cynthia adopted us. Sort of. Since there were no official adopting agencies she pretty much just put us in her house and took care of us. And we were a family for a while.”
“It only lasted four years, but it was the best four years of my life. She taught us so much in those four years that I don’t even know where to begin. She taught us how to be human, how to be kids.”

The old man’s face turned up at the corners and a spark of amusement reached his eyes.

“I remember when she bought a fire-truck toy for me to play with. I kept trying to figure out what the point of putting fires out was! And Angela, bless her small heart, she began to smile again. She had the most beautiful smile, and a mischievous heart too. She never quite gave up her old habits of thievery. She once replaced one of the patient charts with a cereal box and nobody realized it until they began trying to figure out the medicine given to him!”

He laughed at this but quickly began to darken again as he recalled what happened next.

“It didn’t last though. On June the third Cynthia was shot by one of her patients for having told him he had an Oedipus complex. We were told by police that she had been shot and that we had until that afternoon to leave her house as it belonged to the state now since she had no children. And because we weren’t officially her children, even though she had treated us as such, we had no rights to anything that she had owned.”
“Once again out on the street we began to give in to bad habits. We stole, and we mugged, and we did all we could to survive. We stayed out of the way of the mafias as much as we could and the same with the government. We ‘lived’ like this for another two years, sleeping on the streets in the remains of the building that had been such a slaughterhouse so many years ago.”
“But then I got stupid. I saw the daughter of one of the dons, she was eighteen and she was very well proportioned. And even though my sister warned me that it was stupid I tried to meet her.”
“With my sister’s begrudging help I was able to get into the don’s estate and I posed as a gardener. She was lying by the pool, no one watching over her, after all who could get into the compound? I ‘worked’ as a gardener for two weeks and for those two weeks my sister had to fend for herself as I couldn’t get back out easily.”
“I apologize, I seem to have skipped over a part that will be important later on. I shall explain to you how I got inside the compound.”

He took up his pipe and lit it with a match. Then he drew in a deep breath and blew smoke rings.

“The compound was exceptionally well secured on the outside. The people that worked there were not allowed to leave so there was no chance of a ‘replacement’ getting in. The compound was surrounded by an electrified fence with barbed wire at the top and armed guards that patrolled the walls behind. There were two entrances, one main entrance and one side entrance that was used for deliveries. Both entrances had cameras and intercoms, two metal doors that were each a foot thick and twelve feet high, two towers on either side with armed guards who were both required to open the doors, and an additional three guards on the ground who would check the vehicle for anything dangerous and make sure the driver was who he said he was. It was, for all intents and purposes, impregnable.”

“So how did you get in sir?”

“Well, my sister got me in. She helped me study the schedule of the guards, one that was supposed to be irregular but she discovered a pattern that repeated every two and two thirds weeks. From that we found that the guards were unable to watch the corner closest to us for about ten seconds every second week in their schedule.”

“Ten seconds! So this is where you learned your precise timing then sir?”

He looked at me and shook his head.

“It was never my timing to begin with.”
“My sister and I used fertilizer and gasoline in a wheel barrow. Knowing that this town was quite violent we understood that, while a full on attack would create quite a stir on the walls it would not have too much of an effect on the people kept inside. In fact the only chance we had of a distraction was to cause a lot of damage. So we stocked up. We used the cigarette lighting apparatus and a car battery to light it and we replaced the metal struts with wheels we had also stolen.”
“We were especially lucky as well. While we were planning this, there was another don who was planning to attack his stronghold whose plans coincided with ours timing wise. He had sharpshooters set up on the sides perpendicular to where I would approach from and he was set up to do some damage. Unfortunately for him our plans collided.”
“I learned later, from my sister, that while I was waiting to make my dash she was finishing up with the wheelbarrow. We had designed it so that when the wheelbarrow hit something it would ignite and explode so that we wouldn’t need to get too close. I heard gunshots and the guards that were on the sides of the walls must have been shot because the guards on my side thinned out as several headed to the sides under fire. My sister pushed the wheelbarrow down on its course and was hit by an armoured car, which itself had been carrying explosives. The wheelbarrow detonated and blew the car off its intended destination and it went onto its side. Then it exploded with a much greater bang than we had intended causing all of the guards on my side to rush away to where the fighting was. I took this opportunity to run down to where the fence was and climb over it using rubber gloves and boots. I then used a jury-rigged grappling hook made up of girder steel from the wreckage of our building to climb the fence and I was over.”
“In all the chaos nobody really noticed me and so I hid for about a day until things calmed down inside the compound and I went to work in the garden. Buried my tools in the bushes beneath where the girl’s window was and I began ‘gardening’.”

“That’s still quite impressive sir. And it explains how you escaped from those prisons during the wars.”

“Impressive, ha! Stupid is more like it. I was a fool blinded by youth and hormones. Not to mention being lucky as sin I didn’t get killed then. Might even have been better if I had.”

I decided not to press him on the subject and redirected him back to his story.

“So what happened with the girl sir? The one that was the reason you went through all this?”

“Ah yes, the girl. As I believe I mentioned before, after a few days things had settled down significantly. On the inside of the compound at least. From what I’ve heard there were brutal massacres as the two don’s fought each other in the streets. But I wouldn’t know about any of that.”
“She was lying out by the pool sunning herself and I spent a while simply staring at her, trying to work up the courage to actually talk to her. Oh, I should probably mention that, since the pool was in a separately fenced area I had climbed up a tree, with some shears so that I could use pruning as an excuse. And while I was busy trying to convince myself to talk to her she stood up and reached behind her back. I didn’t think much of it at the time until I realized that she had removed her top, and indeed she had removed everything else as well and she was skinny-dipping.”
“Well, me being young and stupid, as I’ve said, I tried to get a better look and ended up going further and further out along the limb I was on. That is, I did until the branch broke and sent me tumbling down.”

I smiled at the image of this great man falling into the water while peeping.

“What did she say when you fell?” I asked with a smile on my face

“I don’t know. I landed face first on the concrete. Knocked me dead cold.”

At this the old man burst out laughing, either at the memory or my expression, I am not sure.

“But I woke up and she was fully covered up again by her swimsuit and she was quite visibly upset by what I’d been doing. She kept on telling me how I would never work again and Didn’t I know who she was. Well, she did at least until I told her that I knew she was the don’s daughter and that I wasn’t working here, that I’d snuck in because I’d seen her from the building across the road while I was stealing things from it.”
“And at this, she laughed. She asked me how I could possibly have snuck in and so I told her, which impressed her.”
“I spent the rest of those two weeks with her, but I couldn’t stay.”

“You needed to see your sister?”

“Nope, the don caught me in her bed and banished me from the compound.”

“Wow, that’s very lucky. He sounds like he would have easily just shot you and been done with it.”

The old man then looked at me with a wry grin that made him appear twenty years younger and said, “Mmm, well he was very nice about it. Apparently he lost quite a lot of the male staff that way.”

And as he said this there was a knock at the door and his manservant entered and informed us that it was six o’clock and that I should best be getting back to my family as it was late and his master needed his evening meal.

“Nonsense Jeeves, he can call his wife and tell her where he is and what he’s doing and I’m sure she’ll understand. In the meantime, set a place for the young journalist as well. My story isn’t done yet.”

“Yes master”

“Now go on young man, call your wife and I will meet you in the dining hall. Jeeves will come collect you.”

And with that the old man left me to call my wife. I dialled the number and waited for her to pick up.

“Hello?”

“Honey, I’m very sorry but I need to work late tonight and I’m not going to be home for dinner.-”

“Jonathan? What do you- you’re seeing that tramp again aren’t you? Don’t think I haven’t noticed you sneaking away at all hours of the night to be with her! Honestly how stupid do you think I am? You didn’t even give me an excuse this time, you must be losing your ‘journalistic touch’ or are you spending it all on her these days?”

“Marsha! Look this is not the time for this. I am currently standing in the home of Andrew Walker, that’s right the Andrew Walker. I have an interview with him and he has asked me to stay for dinner so that we may continue the interview. Now I apologize that I’m not going to be there for dinner with you but this has nothing to do with that so-”

“Oh yes, that’s rich. You have an interview with the most famous and influential man in the world? And he’s invited you for dinner, how marvellous. Well you just go ahead and have a good time with Andrew Walker or whatever you’re calling her these days and let me deal with raising our children good and proper. You bastard.”

She hung up and so I put the phone down. I turned around to wait for the manservant when, to my embarrassment, I realized that he was standing behind me.

“If the young sir is ready to go I shall show you to the dining hall” he said and indicated the door.

“How long were you standing there?”

“I just arrived sir.”

“Ah, right. Well then carry on Jeeves.”
“…Jeeves, that’s a rather unusual name. Is it Swedish?”

“I have no idea sir. My name is Martin.”
“The dining hall sir.”

And at this I was presented the dining hall. It was long and with an equally long, and quite intimidating, table centred in it. The food was served and I asked the old man,

“Why do you call your manservant Jeeves?”

“Oh, I call him that because I know it annoys him and it’s fun. But enough about Jeeves, eat and I’ll continue my story when you are finished.”
“So, how is your wife?”

“My wife sir?”

“Yes, your wife. The woman I believe you called on the phone.”

“She’s fine. Slightly upset that I’m not going to be home but that can’t be helped.”

“Did she believe that you were interviewing the Andrew Walker?”

“Uh, you heard that sir?”

“Of course. This is my house after all, and you two weren’t holding back.”
“I take it you have a mistress.”
“Jeeves please help the man, I believe he’s choking.”

“Wha-cough- what gives you that impression?”

“Well, I will admit that I’m somewhat old fashioned so I could be wrong on this but I assume that your wife was not referring to your daughter in that conversation when she thought you were going to see someone.”

“You- you were listening?”

“Oh be quiet boy and listen. I’m going to put your wife on speakerphone in a minute but before I do I’m going to impart some wisdom towards you. Should you find someone you want to marry then remember why you wanted to marry her. Having seen some pictures of that woman I would be very surprised if you were having an affair because she was ugly so you’d best make sure that you aren’t being a fool. There’s a reason they call it fooling around and take it from me, affairs are worth as much as the scum on your shoes.”
“Now, am I talking to Mrs. Marsha Archer?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“My name is Andrew Walker and I am currently having dinner with your husband. I apologize that he was not able to make it to dinner with you, I really do. It’s a shame when a man misses out on having dinner with his wife. If you would please forgive me however this interview is rather important for the both of us and I can not say with certainty that your husband will be home anytime soon. In the meantime I believe he has something to say to you.”

“Jonathan?”
“Yes Marsha.”

“That was Andrew Walker.”

“Yes Marsha.”

“The Andrew Walker.”

“Yes Marsha.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yes Marsha.”

“Jonathan?”

“Yes Marsha?”

“I- I’m sorry. I love you.”

“I love you to.”

“There, now don’t you feel better? Now I believe that dinner is finished so shall we return to my study and continue the story?”



“Hmm, where was I?”

“Uh…you had just left the mansion?”

“Ah yes. Well, I was taken outside and beaten of course. You can’t get away with sleeping with a don’s daughter without some recompense on his part. Even if she slept with pretty much everyone on two legs.”
“My sister found me and brought me back to what had become our home and it was while she was taking care of me that I saw how much of a toll this lifestyle had taken on her. Because I hadn’t wanted to cope with the real world I had dragged us both down to the sub-life that we led. She stole and she knew it was wrong. But she had to do it because we needed to survive. And watching her as she did whatever she needed to in order to make money I knew what I had brought her into.”
“I enlisted with the army when I was healthier. And of course, she followed me as she always had. She had no rank and she was not considered a part of the army but she was just a useful as anyone. Even the officers in charge of our platoon were pleased to have her around to help.”
“She was an excellent marksman, far better than I, and she quickly became known for her prowess with a rifle. In the competitions she could get a perfect bullseye at five hundred yards. And of course she was good with not being seen. She became our best scout quite quickly, despite her limp; she could find flaws in the enemy divisions within minutes of observing them during the exercises. She would have made officer in a matter of months if she was actually part of the army.”
“Of course she wasn’t, but she was alright with that. She told the officers that she wanted to stay with me and that if they would let her she would serve just as well as any other soldier.”

And his face, full of pride, became dark once more as he said,

“And then the first war came. We fought in many battles, her and I. I would go frontline and she would stay back, out of sight, and ensure that I was okay. And no matter how far or fast I pushed, she was always somewhere watching over me. Just as I’d done for her.”
“When we stormed Stromgrad she was on the Melon Mountains taking down enemy snipers within the town. My platoon was ordered to flank the enemy and cut them off from retreat but we didn’t anticipate the additional forces they had.”
“I’m sure that you are familiar with the accounts of that battle. I have certainly read my fair share. But tell me what you learned of that battle.”

“Well, my understanding was that your officer was shot within seconds of sighting the enemy forces and that you proceeded to take command because the second officer in charge was incompetent and crying. Something for which he was later court martialled and you were commended and promoted to lieutenant for.”
“You split your platoon into two groups, one group was given all of the heavy weaponry and they were told to use as much firepower as they needed to keep the enemy force pinned down. You then took the other group, armed only with pistols and explosives, and laid a trail of explosives which you then sent both groups down to draw the enemy into. You had the group with the heavy weaponry set up to the sides with the other group entrenched at the end with several machine guns as bait. And you massacred the enemy.”

“Well done. That was very well remembered. But that’s not entirely what happened. My sister fed me the co-ordinates and movements of what the enemy force was doing and she instructed me to command the troops to set up a trap. When I created the explosive trail she told me to set up gunners on the sides of the corridor and that was what undid the enemy force. My explosive trail was useless until they brought in tanks much later in the battle, drawn there once again at the direction of my sister.”
“What about the battle of Leyarviin? What do you know about that one?”

“That it was a difficult fortress to take, with no visible weaknesses and heavy artillery in positions either side of it where you could not take vehicles to deal with them. You orchestrated guerrilla tactics to great effect against the entrenched positions, dealing heavy casualties against them by hitting them with their own captured artillery positions. Closely followed by capturing the other position and using that as a bargaining chip. I didn’t learn how you captured the artillery though.”

“No, not many people did. I recalled that the guards from the don’s compound had been so busy with fighting on the one side that they had neglected to keep sufficient watch on the sides. I had my sister climb up to the edge of the mountain for the first artillery while I assaulted the second. She, along with a small group of soldiers that believed they were capturing the facility, took that artillery battery by the soldiers providing a distraction with lots of gunfire while she snuck into the facility and reprogrammed the artillery fire. The forces that my team were fighting had placed themselves in an open position, they weren’t expecting to be shelled. They perished and we advanced on the facility without any more opposition. I ordered the other team to cease fire and pretend to retreat and my sister disappeared into the scrub. The enemy force that had been fighting them returned to their artillery to identify why it had shelled the other side. They were all eliminated by traps that my sister had set up.”

“Then what about the battle of Hero Valley?”

“It looked like I made the impossible shot with a pistol and killed their leader. Indeed that’s what was reported. But it was my sister and her skills.”

“And Helsing Caverns?”

“My sister brought them down with explosive rounds.”

“What about when you were caught and imprisoned? Was that your sister rescuing you then?”

“Yes and no. She sent me a message telling me when she would assault the facility. I didn’t want her to get hurt though so I picked the lock and made a break for it through the prison yard. She sniped one of the tower guards, who dropped his weapon, allowing me to deal with the guards in the yard and, using one of their grenades, broke out. She was angry with me afterwards but by that time we needed to escape.”

“So every victory was because of your sister and none of them were reported as such because nobody knew about her?”

“All but one and she preferred that nobody knew about her, it gave her an advantage she said. The last battle was different.”
“I assume you are familiar with the battle of Knopf Beach?”

I nodded.

“Good. Then you know that we were storming a beach where the odds of surviving, let alone winning, were infinitesimal. Well, we stormed them all right. This was one battle where my sister couldn’t hide in a forest or a mountain or a jungle. She was in the thick of it, just like me. We were fighting an enemy that was making their last desperate stand. They had nothing to lose and so they were willing to keep fighting when they would otherwise have simply died. Those soldiers fatally wounded waited for one or more of our troops to go past them and then they would drop a grenade and laugh to their death.”
“We lost half of our force before we even landed to artillery. We were lucky we made it to the beach. But I don’t think that was luck. I think it was payback.”
“We landed and surged forward. We lost many to mines buried in the sand but we pressed on, using whatever we could for cover. Unfortunately a lot of the cover was put there as traps by the enemy. My sister and I fought hard and got to decent cover. We took over one of their bunkers and took a moment to wait for other troops. But none came.”
“We were in a situation where we could either give up and be captured or keep fighting. I should have given up but I didn’t. I was stupid and full of myself, by then I was nearly a general. Indeed I was made one after that battle. That final battle. My sister and I made a move for the next bunker, she watched the palm trees for snipers and suicide troops, I watched the ground for their normal troopers.”
“I failed to notice him. That man behind the broken jeep. I failed to notice him and he shot my sister. I grabbed her and fell behind a rock to keep us safe. She had a stomach wound and I had no medic to save her.”
“She told me one thing before she became delirious with the pain, too weak to talk or even understand anything. And it drove me. Her last words and her death.”
“I’ve been told that in that final battle I seemed like a man possessed and in retrospect I probably was. I wanted revenge for my sister and nothing was going to stop me. Not pain, not bullets, not even death.”
“The man who had shot my sister I couldn’t find. It turned out later that he was the enemy commander. But he hadn’t left us alone either. He had sent a patrol of troops after us to make sure we were dead.”
“I killed them in my fury. I shot the first two with my rifle held in one hand in their heads, the best shots I had ever made unfortunately. The remaining four were taken down by a grenade from the other hand. A gun flew past, propelled by the blast from the grenade and I grabbed it from the air. I wanted blood. The blood of that coward who had shot my sister, my life.”
“I advanced on the next bunker, not caring about what happened to me. As long as I got my revenge it didn’t matter. I caught them by surprise. The first two in the bunker went down to my bullets and the third one, who had been gunning the turret fired at me and missed. I pushed him through the turret hole.”
“I continued along the trenches, killing as many as I could along the way. I was shot several times, but you know that. They say I took thirty seven bullets. They don’t say how much shrapnel hit me. Even I don’t know that one. I have enough still in me that I can’t move more than a shuffle without pain. Not that it really matters anyway.”
“I came to the last bunker after what seemed like it had been forever. It had only been three hours. A man jumped from the tree above me, ready to stab me and with an unpinned grenade in his other hand. I cut his throat with his own blade and threw his body down the slope. I was facing less and less people as I approached the bunker, they were running away instead. I don’t blame them, I must have looked a mess. I can’t look at an inch of my body these days without seeing a scar anymore.”
“I stormed the bunker alone. I saw the commander trying to hide behind a desk. He told me he surrendered. He kept telling me that, screaming it, as I tore him from behind the desk and I stabbed at him. I kept stabbing him over and over as he screamed at me and I screamed back. Eventually he stopped screaming, but I didn’t. Nor did I stop stabbing him. Everything went black from there.”
“I woke up from a coma a day before they were going to pull the plug. They’d already gotten a posthumous medal for me. It’s there on that wall. Apparently I had single-handedly won the fight. But that didn’t matter to me, not then. Not anymore.”
“They gave me my medals and promotions and I retired. All I wanted to do was hide away, which is what I’ve done.”
“Thank you for letting me tell my story, my sister’s story. It’s late now and you should go. Write it up for me and tell the people who their saviour was. Not me.”

He wandered over to his cabinet and pulled out his old service pistol, still immaculately well kept. He set it down on his liquor table and poured himself a drink.

“What did she say?”

“Who?”

“Your sister. What did she say?”

“She said I forgive you”

“Oh”

“Goodbye Mr. Archer”

And with that I left. I heard the gunshot and I felt tears come to my eyes. He had been called a hero and while he denied it so much it was still true. To have lived with such a burden, what else can he be called? I can not think of any word more fitting than ‘hero’, and I believe that it must have run in the family. Now that my duty has been done and I have recorded the last words of the late legend, Andrew Walker, and laid his spirit, and that of his equally great sister, Angela, to rest. I think I shall go home and kiss my wife goodnight.