They were only toys, but those two helicopters looked frighteningly realistic. Especially when one of the controls on the remote unit activated their cannons. The first one, peppered by the attack, finally fell out of the sky, it’s rotors a mangled mess no longer able to keep it aloft, it’s plastic armor pock-marked with holes created from seemingly realistic BB’s.
The toys were captivating, for a time, but we had work to do. I gathered up the broken birds, and walked down the clean, hospital-like hall towards the back of the building to the store room, grabbing a Walkie-Talkie as I did. On my return to the main control room, the chief had news of a pending attack on our stand-alone, quiet monitoring station.
Listening to the other agents chatter regarding the concerns, I checked my belt to ensure a proper load-out, and discovered that I was disturbingly without a sidearm, or any other weapon for that matter. I returned to the store room, slightly concerned. While in the store room, I began looking around for weapons, growing increasingly alarmed at the short supply available. Only a few small handguns were available, no where near the power we’d need for defending ourselves.
In my search, the radio at my side crackled to life, an agent sputtering out that the perimeter had been breached, and that all agents should prepare for the worst. The attack had come, much sooner than we had originally feared.
I gathered up a handgun and a pre-loaded magazine, and ripped the radio from my belt, radioing in to check who else needed weapons. I was told to bring as many weapons as I could from the supply room to command. My reply was that weapons would be in short supply, but I’d do the best I could.
Running down the hall was in dreadful slow-motion, feeling the seconds tick away knowing that our defense would not be nearly enough.
I reached the command room with enough time to dole out the few meager sidearms I had gently carried in my full grasp.
The door burst open, and we were almost instantly surrounded with noticably better armed, more poorly dressed individuals shouting for us to drop our weapons. My thought, instantly, was that they’d never take me alive.
As they rushed into the center of the room towards our hold-out, I raised my weapon and fired, just as one of the attackers reached the commander and put a rifle to his neck.
The bullet struck harmlessly off his chest, having been fired by the same kind of launcher that had been in the toy helicopters moments before. The moment of dawning realization came to me in a flash, fear for my life, and fear for the lives of my friends. I had found small BB guns, and had given them out to the other agents.
Thoughts rushed through my head in the span of a moment it took for the attacker to look at where the BB had struck him, to the meager weapon I was holding, to my face, streaked with curiosity.
In the space of a single instant, I screamed, rushed forward towards the attacker, and firing the weapon only for effect, knew that my life was soon over. My commander’s eyes were closed, in what I could only assume was a combination of humiliation and resignation in our tiny, unwinnable war.
The attacker pulled his far more angry looking weapon from the commander’s neck, leveled at me, and deftly squeezed the trigger.
I felt the pain of the bullet enter and exit my body, felt the heat it left as it scored my insides, felt the heat my insides made as thousands of nerve endings fired back at once, felt as my legs began to collapse, no longer able to maintain my momentum, overcome by pain and surprise, felt as my frame began to sag around me as my body tried to win a new war against damage delivered to it, felt as my mind lost the battle with maintaining the dream, felt as I awoke with a shudder…
And drifted back down to dream happier dreams, after catching my breath and feeling where the imaginary bullet had struck me.
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