21 Guns

“It’s not worth it, Gloria!” he shouted over our pounding feet.

“No! It’s always worth it!”

He didn’t respond, but I could hear his breathing behind me. Night had fallen on the city, and the streets were alive with fire. Judgement Day had come.

“Where are we going to go? Why run anymore?” Christian was out of breath and out of faith. He slowed down.

Think Gloria, think! “There!” I shouted. “See that light?” I pointed to the Capitol Building, on a far hill. “We’re going there.”

“No.” He slowed to a walk.

I skidded to a halt a few feet in front of him. “No? No? What the fuck do you mean?” I was screaming, I was in his face. I was the anger of the nation. “We are going to march in there and take what’s ours! We are the people, we are the change we wish to see! We have come too far, gone too far to just fucking stop!”

“I don’t feel anymore.” He wasn’t lying. He had no life, no motive, no Christian.

We had no time. “I don’t care how you feel! You shouldn’t need feeling, the mere momentum, the gravity of this should keep you going!” I pulled on him, but he would only walk. My heart clenched in disgust. I could never not love Christian. But I could never not fight for what is ours.

We need to run, if not for the world, for ourselves. There are police everywhere, gassing the rioters, running people down with cars. We need to run.

“Chris, we just need to keep running,” I tried to persuade him. I just pissed him off.

“I asked you why Gloria!” he ripped his arm from my hands. “We can’t win! There is always going to be a government, there are always going to be lies and censors. The human race will never win! We are fighting ourselves!”

I was shocked. My mouth hung open and echoed with the screaming and crying in the air around us. He continued.

“They are going to kill us all. Everyone out here tonight will die. Maybe not right away, but they’ll be captured, they’ll be questioned, and they’ll be killed.” He moved closer to me through all this. “So say we keep running. We’ll never make it to The Hill. They’ll shoot us faster than we could look at it. Say we run away. Someone they capture will give them our names, our faces. They’ll hunt us down. They’ll fucking hunt us like rabbits hiding in our holes and they’ll smoke us out with mustard gas!”

I couldn't stand it. I slapped him, I slapped him as hard as I could. He stumbled off the sidewalk and into the street. All was silent in our little piece of the world.

A silence that was shattered by the sound of marching boots. We looked, and there they were.

Christian ran. He ran faster than I had ever seen anyone run before. I followed him, still reeling from his speech and the hit. We ran for miles, hours, days. We ran till my heart nearly burst and my eyes blurred with tears and the sheer pain of it.

Then we stopped. We were on the street that led to The Capitol Building. I could see the city in the distance, an inferno of lies. I suddenly felt sad. My childhood is burning. The wind blew the smell of smoke up my nose.

Grabbing Christian’s hand, I moved into the middle of the street, where you could see through the trees to the East Wing. No lights were on.

I began to walk. Christian walked with me. I began to jog. So did he. I started to sprint up that road, and the love of my life matched my stride. We flew up that hill, to the house that housed our owners. No one was home.

The doors were open, wide as day, and it was dark. There was no sound that came from inside. So we went in. Hand in hand we walked into the mouth of the monster that we hated. There was no one here.

Christian found a piece of wood, splintered at one end. It looked like the handle of a rake. I gathered papers that littered the floor and speared them to the end. He got out his lighter and set it on fire.

I screamed when I saw what we were standing in. A long smear of blood wound its way from another set of open doors, through the room we were standing in and out the doors to The City. Twenty sets of foot prints stomped through the blood, smearing it into a flame-like pattern. I could only hope the blood wasn’t ours.

“We just missed it.” Christian’s voice was different.

“What?” So was mine. He sounded older, amused. I sounded young, frightened.

“The mob got here before we did. They captured the President, and by the looks of it, killed him. The blood is still so fresh. We just missed it.”

I nodded and moved away from him. He didn’t understand. We didn’t miss anything. They did. I began to pick up more papers. They missed our talk. They missed the most brilliant moment that anyone can witness. They missed Christian’s moment of despair.

They missed someone at the lowest point, someone who has lost all will to live and to fight, find that spark; the jolt that gives you hope and faith. The light that had slowly faded out of his heart burst back into life and gave him a reason to continue. Christian was born again.

I set the papers down on the floor by the wooden doors the blood had come through.

“Come here,” I told him.

He complied. “I’m sorry. I know that you wanted to help. I was too scared. For you and for me. I ruined it.”

“No.” I grabbed the lighter out of his hand and snapped the top off. “You figured it out.” I poured the fluid over the stacks of paper and the doors. “You realized that some things are worth fighting for. Not dying for.” I turned to him, and wrapped my hand around his, the one carrying our torch. “Life is the most effective resistance. They kill us. If we kill them, then what's the difference? Where does the evil end and the good begin?

“The fighting ruined us. It renewed us, it gave us hope and faith, the progress we made, going where we thought was forward, came at such a price. We aren’t kids anymore. We can never be kids again. We can’t ever see the people we used to know. They are dead now. Even if they’re not, the fighting is the only thing that bonded us. Now we have nothing.

“We have to live and let die now. You were right, Christian. We’ve done all we can.” I began to slowly bring our arms down. “Besides,” I said as the flame licked the fluid. “Nothing lasts forever.”