The Last Campaign

By Daniel Snyder

 

Well, I got to give him this much--at least he keeps his promises. Said he’d come back and clean up the mess, separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and he’s doing it.

Just like he said, he came in a blaze of hellfire and brimstone, four horsemen behind, swinging their big-ass swords at his enemies, decapitating, dismembering, mutilating, and wiping out thousands with a single blow. Damned impressive if you ask me, and pretty fucking scary if you’re not on his side.

So, in the interest of self-preservation, I enlisted. Funny now that I think about it, but at the time, it seemed like the smart thing to do. Took me six years to become his second in command, but once I did, I finally got to talk to him. No. Let me rephrase that. He finally got the chance to talk at me.

The parables weren’t that bad, and for the most part, I got them, but every Sunday, after maybe one too many bottles of sacramental wine, he’d start speaking in tongues, or maybe he was just slurring so bad you couldn’t understand him, but I’d just sit there, pretending to get what the hell he was saying, figuring I’d get struck by lightning, find locusts in my shorts, or break out in boils if I left.

I first met him in Baghdad, a few kilometers outside the garden of Eden, where all this insanity started. Said he was really proud of the place, it being all green and fertile and shit, but obviously he hadn’t been there for a while. I served there a few years ago, and it was the worst fucking desert I ever seen. When the conflict was over, even the camels avoided it, which is really impressive, since camels can find a drink of water in a bucket of sand.

Anyhow, about a week ago, we finally had our first real conversation. We were in a tent in Greenland, which is actually green now. Global warming from the nukes we sent off in South America changed the climate everywhere, and Greenland is now almost tropical. Nice, if it weren’t for the mosquitoes. No idea how they figured it out, let alone how they got here, but they got here anyhow. Fucking insects.

Even if you’re one of the lucky ones not living on the shitter with malaria, you’re still itching all the damned time. Except for him, of course. He’s above that sort of thing. Still, he said it’s best not to complain since bugs are, after all, one of his father’s creations. So are people, I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to set him off, if you know what I mean.

So, there we were, middle of the night in the tropics of Greenland, lying on our cots under mosquito netting, finally having a conversation. He said it’s almost over, only a year to go. I said I think I read that somewhere. He told me not to be a smart-ass.

 

Maybe it was the combination of the heat and the damned bugs, but mostly it’s because I was getting tired of listening to his drunken whining about how hard it was to please his father, how he didn’t ask for any of this shit, and if it was up to him, he’d just wave his hand and end all this, but he couldn’t because the future was up to free will, which makes no sense to me, since they’re the ones who wrote destiny, so it seems like they could rewrite it so people could stop dying so much.

He finished the last of the bottle, wiped tears from his eyes, and said there’s worse things than dying. I figure, more than anyone, he ought to know, but it wasn’t much of an explanation.

I got to be honest with you, it’s hard to feel sorry for him. After all, he and his father, the two of them, or the one, or the three of them, it’s kind of a weird relationship, they’re the assholes that started all this. When I finally got up the balls to ask him why they didn’t stop it, all he could say was that it’s complicated. It doesn’t work that way, and I just had to have faith.

But they been saying that for more than two-thousand years now, and look where it got us.

I’m not impressed anymore. They could stop all this, but they won’t, and they can’t seem to explain why. And it’s not like they have anything to lose. They can die as many times as they want to. So, the next time he gets drunk and passes out, probably next Sunday, I’m going to sneak over to his cot and slit his fucking throat and watch him die again.

When he resurrects himself, he’ll probably kill me right back. But you know what? I don’t care. It’ll make me feel better about everything I done in his name.

 

Daniel R. Snyder from US is a writer with dozens of essays and stories published in magazines and journals. He plays the accordion quite well, and the piano and guitar quite badly, which is fine because he never wanted to be a Rock Star. All he's ever wanted is for people to read his work. He and his wife currently live in South Carolina.