The Strong, With Heavy Hearts

Mae, man-hunter recruit

In hindsight, I saw all the tell-tale signs of betrayal. At the time, I was naïve and more gullible than I am now, it was quite awhile ago the year 2020. We all were naïve and gullible, it almost seems laughable how we were back then. I have had to act as a mediator to some of the others, since we all have to stick together to survive. We all lost most everything that we cared about. I had a baby sister and a four year old brother, and they had nothing to do with me being a man-hunter. Some of the others had younger siblings on the way, and they made sure that even the unborn were dead. All we want is to have freedom and our liberty. We do not need any material comfort items; they would only distract us and make us weak. Food, clothing, shelter, and basic hygiene products are all that we need.
They trained us to fight and survive, no wonder they can’t seem to get rid of us, they forgot to teach us to die when they wanted us to. We consider our group of former man-hunter trainees to be our family now, though we know that we cannot replace the ones we lost. We have decided on a permanent base in the mountains, we know every inch like the backs of our hands. We also have safe areas, like the Underground Railroad had. We are hunted like animals by the man-hunters. To think that we would have become like them, if we had not found out the truth, it makes me shudder. We try not to kill them, only to detain them, but that does not always work out. We have to be able to kill them without hesitation, for they would do the same to us in a heartbeat if we let our guards down. It is hard to live with it sometimes, but we work in shifts so as to allow us to rest our bodies and our minds.
It strikes me sort of funny that they would chose people that they thought would have had worked for them, only to have those very same people fight against them. The other day I saw a girl fall to her knees and cry for her mother to wake her from this nightmare. There is no waking from this nightmare; this is our reality, our lives. We spend every waking moment furthering our goal, freedom. We have learned that to get that, we need is to get rid of the corrupt, greedy government officials that run things, and we have compiled a list of the key officials that need to be taken out, which is all of them basically. Our bodies are strong, our hearts are heavy, and our minds calculate the estimated losses of our people, innocent people, and the not so innocent people that we call our enemy. We have lost some, but they have lost more, and not all because of death. We have told the people that we have captured our side of the story, the truth, and some of them decided to fight on our side. Though, they do have to gain our trust before we hand over weapons, codes, and information to them. We have grown in experience from previous encounters with some of the people that we captured.
Next week, we are going to start infiltrating their military bases and sabotage all of their weapons and communications, then to lock them in so that they cannot be called upon at a later date. We have planned out everything that could or could not go wrong and have plans for every single one. Our next target is the government buildings to remove the corrupt ones from power and reinstate democracy. I know that it will take much longer than the fall of democracy, but I have patience as do most of the others.
Our leader is Kane, one of the people who broke out of the training program four years ago. She as with all of us changed our names to avoid bringing up bad memories, and to help us hide in plain sight. Jessie, another original rebel, is very adept in making fake ids that are real to the naked eye, the only way to tell it is a fake is if a cop scanned it. I joined the cause because I stumbled across the instructors beating a trainee to death one night, and then watched as they threw him into one of the trenches that they had us dig. I saw my little brother, he happened to still be alive, and managed to get to the top of the pile of bodies. Needless to say they fell upon him like the grim reaper, and they twisted his neck after shooting his body full of holes. I was shocked and enraged; I could hardly breathe as I went to tell the others of this news and was horrified about what had happed to Sarah’s mom, so I stayed behind to throw the instructors off from the ones that escaped. I engendered the fight between the rest of the trainees and the instructors. I am also the top strategic planner in our group of teens, which now has a few adults as well.
We have taken a military base forty miles from our mountain base. Instead of making the weapons useless for them, we took everything we could carry. Since we also took their vehicles and tanks, we could carry more than we could have hoped to have carried on each person. When we got back to base we hid the tanks and the vehicles practically in plain sight by covering them in camouflage. After that the military targets were getting easier to take. This could mean one of two things; one, it’s a trap, or two, the military is secretly on our side and this is just an easy way to minimize casualties and not be considered traitors. They are crafty, if it is the later of the two. Surprisingly, we took every single military base in the United States in only three years, at first we thought that it would take five years. The reason we thought so is because we planned on them fighting back more and on more casualties on both sides. The political targets will be much harder, because they continuously move around the country.
It has been five years since the military fell, and I am sad to say that the leader has eluded us each and every time that we have sent someone after him. Though, it is now my turn to hunt him down and try to eliminate him. He has hunted us like animals that needed to be eradicated, but now we hunt him as a hunter would hunt for his trophy buck. Not that we would have him stuffed and hung on the wall, which would be something that I think he would do. I let out the breath that I did not even know I was holding, and looked through the night vision goggles at the mansion. I had already gotten past the security and the guards. He is here. I saw him walk by a window on the second floor. I entered the building through a basement window in the back and made my way to the service shaft. Once there I climbed the rope that was there, though I had brought rope just in case the rope had rotted away. I had studied the blueprints to this place diligently and knew that I could take it to the second floor and get out in a closet. I am lucky; he was in the bathroom of the master bedroom. I reached the walk-in closet, closed the door, and kept the knob turned, before he got out of the bathroom. He finally went to bed; I waited two hours before moving even an inch. I was rewarded with the sound of snoring. He was asleep, now was my chance to end our twelve year struggle. My mind churned about the morality of doing this and found that it would save more lives if he were dead than to let him live while he continued to murder the people, who decide to take a stand, protest, civilly, and think for themselves. I had to act and act fast, so I did. What he received was better than what he doled out. He received a quick death, and since he had already killed off his family thinking they would try to assassinate him; he had no one to morn his passing.
We speculate that in the next four years that we will have the economy back to normal and we will have new people governing this country for the better of the country, not the better of their pockets. Also, we have heard rumors that in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Russia, and all the other countries under the influence of the government that rules everything, including what people will do for a living. The intelligence that we are getting proves the rumors to be true. If they ask for our help we will offer it willingly. They only needed the nudge of one country overthrowing that style of government to get them motivated. When I stop and think about everything that has happened I know it turned out for the better. Though, I still have nightmares about what I did that night. I am getting counseling, as are the rest of the rebels, we all went through more than any person our age.
I finally decided to get married, and to Jessie, we are both thirty-one years old now. My, the years have dragged by since we were nineteen. I hope that our children, our children’s children, and so on down the line do not have to go through what we did, nor have to go through another war. I think that when I am dead and gone; I will finally have peace from the nightmares that used to be our reality and from the flashbacks that continue to haunt my every unguarded moment, when I start to let my mind wander and just think about anything.
Jessie and I will be married on the sixth of August. We plan to invite all of our family, the rebels of old. It will be big, but it will be worth it. We have made a brighter future for our children and we can only hope that it only gets brighter. I know that I would be rolling in my grave if they had to go through the struggles that we did, and I am sure the others would be doing so as well.
There was some insecurity about the future. I was the one with the insecurities and it was embarrassing to voice them to Jessie. I thought I was going to bawl my eyes out when he asked me what was wrong. I almost did, too. I had to answer him, so I decided to answer his question with a question of my own and I really did want to know if he was a hundred percent certain about what he wanted in the future.
“Jessie, are you sure we want to have kids? What if they turn out, well, to be like us?” I asked him with a quake in my voice.
“Yes, I am sure. I hope they turn out like us; otherwise we will have to see who the donor was. I know Mae, honey, and I am sure they will not have to do any of the things we had to do,” he said with such assurance and confidence that I knew it would be all right.
Now Jessie’s and my only goals are to have four children, two of each, to grow old with each other, and to be buried side by side in the mountains where we first got to know each other. I think those are simple enough goals. I am certain that we will reach them, no matter how long it takes, we will reach our dreams and our blackened, heavy hearts will be content.