The Enemy

I wrote this story a while ago and I was obviously really pissed off about something. This gets pretty violent, so if you don't like violence, I'd turn back. But I just found this again, and thought it was cool. I wrote this in two different parts, and the first part is a lot different from the second, just to tell you. Oh well - have fun.

“CHARGE!”

A wave of over twenty thousand armed troops came flooding into the tight space where the enemy slept. There were only two small factions there, but the enemy had strange weapons – unlike any ones they had ever seen. Hundreds of thousands of troops had been killed by these extrinsic weapons when the enemy had first invaded, and now the enemy controlled more than three-quarters of their land, with the remaining quarter beginning to give in. All of the farmland was scorched; all of the major cities abandoned, with bodies and viscous remains laying everywhere. The enemy had only lost about two thousand troops in the yearlong struggle. They hated the enemy. They hated the enemy more than they could bear.

Within two minutes, the entire first squadron had been disarmed and killed. Even with the enemy’s destructive weapons, the troops still had the advantage in numbers. Actually, this was the only large squadron remaining, and this raid was probably inconsequential in the long run, but it was the only thing they could do. Only the commanding officer knew it, but they had already lost the war.

As the troops began to massacre the second faction of the enemy, of which there were 75 infantry, the commanding officer became overwhelmed with powerful emotion. No, not sympathy – he had seen too much in this war to ever feel sympathy towards the enemy – but rage. He could finally put to use his total hatred, his unabashed rancor for the enemy. He exclaimed a shocking order, “Take the remaining ones as prisoners. Death is too good for them.”

The remaining fifty or so enemy left in the former outpost were tied up and gagged. Then the enemy was herded almost ten miles in the hot desert to a small center of operations that the army had prepared to ‘extract information from unwilling prisoners’. As the enemy walked down the damp, dark stone stairway, they realized what this place was. It was a dungeon, a torture chamber, straight out of medieval times.

The officer smiled contently. It seemed like an eternity since he had smiled, but right now certainly warranted the occasion. He had the enemy. And the enemy was fucked.

Each one of the enemies was tied down to a different apparatus, and the fun was about to begin. Then it happened.

They laughed.

The enemy laughed.

The commander shouted, “Why do you laugh?! Do you not realize that you’re doomed?! That you will die in the most painful and horrible way imaginable?!”

One of the enemy, a leader perhaps, with a seemingly genuine smile on his face, replied carelessly, “Painful? We are not like you, with your weak, sensitive bodies in need of constant repair. Pain is a primitive feeling which has outlived its usefulness. WE are soldiers of war, and we feel no pain.”

The commander became furious as his plan at revenge began to fall apart. “You know no pain?!” he shouted to the soldier, “You will know pain! Your pain will be the most excruciating and agonizing pain ever!”

And the enemy laughed.

The torture began with the outspoken leader. His legs were sliced open vertically, and the bone and muscle fiber flayed away slowly, one layer at a time. And the entire time, the enemy looked at them with a smile on his face.

Next were the arms. The powerful arms of the enemy were given a unique method of torture, cheerfully called the ‘thousand cuts’. Several soldiers made minute cuts all along the arms, and then the arms were dipped in a strong acid. With normal soldiers, the acid slowly eating away at their flesh was painful enough, but with the cuts, it became unbearable. The enemy looked at his rapidly disappearing arms with indifference however, and that made the commander even angrier. The still living soldier, although unaware of any pain, went unconscious from blood loss.

When he woke up, his vision was of this mutilated body. His had had been removed from their sockets and placed on a steel shelf facing his former body. Strange devices connected his eyes to his head, enabling him to see.

The enemy’s torso was in ruins. The only organs that remained whole were the lungs and heart. The heart was similarly disconnected from the rest of his body and lay nearby, on a small wooden board. Roaches and other small insects crawled across it occasionally. A strangely white contraption, which was holding the abdominal organs in place, grabbed his attention. He realized it was made of bone, probably his own. Using his disembodied eyes to look up, he saw the remnants of his head. The skin had been peeled off of it, giving it a chaotic red-black look. His skull was exposed in some areas, and an aperture had been carved into the top of it, allowing his brains to spill out slightly onto the dirty plank. His body would have been terrifying, if the soldier had known fear, but he did not. The only comfort he had as he killed himself through a simple act of mind was that his former face still retained a haunting smile.

As the last of the enemy died, the commander sighed. None of them had begged for mercy, none had screamed in agony, none had tried to bargain their way out, they all died with identical smiles on their faces. A realization slowly crept into the commander’s heart. “We’ve lost. We cannot win – they’re just too strong.” and he came to understand why the enemy could keep that self-satisfied smile on their faces.

When the commander had come in here, he thought that the enemy was fucked, and he was happy. Now, leaving the small, dark, damp enclosure, he realized the truth – we’re fucked.

Walking up the steep staircase, he saw one of the enemy’s weapons on the floor. He looked at it quizzically for a minute, contemplating something. He slowly reached down and picked it up, a gleam in his eye. One of his soldiers saw this and said, “Sir?”, but to the commander he was miles away. He smiled a strangely detached smile at the soldier. As he put the weapon to his head, he thought a strange thought to himself, “Hey – I smiled twice today.”