“I was supposed to protect them,” he said, more to the photo than to the boy. “I was trained to fight an enemy. But the enemy was never out there.” He tapped his temple with two fingers. “It was in here the whole time.”
Gabriel didn’t answer. He slid down the wall opposite the boy, his rifle across his knees. For a long moment, neither spoke. The AAC audio captured every tiny sound: the drip of a leaky pipe, the boy’s hiccupping breaths, the creak of Gabriel’s vest as he leaned forward. Man.Down.2015.1080p.BRRip.x264.AAC-ETRG
The last shot: Gabriel sitting on a curb, alone, the child’s drawing now tucked into his helmet band. He looked up at the sky—empty, save for a single, distant bird. And for the first time in two hours, he smiled. Not because he was happy. But because he had remembered how. “I was supposed to protect them,” he said,
The plot, if you can call it that, was a splintered mirror: a near-future America ravaged by an unspecified catastrophe (nuclear? biological? did it matter?), intercut with flashes of Gabriel’s past—a wife, a young son, a promise to return. In the present, he searched. For what, even he didn’t seem sure. Food. Water. A reason to keep the rifle out of his own mouth. “It was in here the whole time
The boy didn’t understand. But he didn’t need to. He just crawled into Gabriel’s lap, teddy bear and all, and fell asleep. Gabriel sat perfectly still, staring at the photograph until the light through the shattered windows turned from orange to bruised purple.
“No,” Gabriel finally said. His voice was rust and gravel. “But I’ve done bad things.”