The Tank

The Tank, Chapter 1

Chapter 1

            It wasn’t a nuclear war; it was just a war that happened to be fought with nuclear weapons. That’s what they told us, anyway, like it was supposed to make us feel safer. After all, these weren’t big thermonuclear weapons. They weren’t fired from submarines or dropped from huge strategic bombers. They weren’t intercontinental ballistic missiles. They were smaller than that, small enough to be mounted on artillery and mortar shells. Some could even be fired from shoulder-mounted launch tubes. The Russians used them first, in a desperate attempt to stop the Chinese from crossing Manchuria. And then the Chinese used them in an equally desperate attempt to stop us from crossing the demilitarized zone. The armies claimed they only used them on valid military targets. Problem was, the definition of “military” kept expanding. First it was just troops and tanks. Then oil fields, and factories and even farms. Nuclear war or not, the world changed. Governments were destroyed, their armies shattered. All that remained was survival.

            We were fortunate to have found the valley. It was beautiful, somehow untouched by the war and nuclear fallout. Most importantly, the water was clean. That meant we could farm. And farm we did, covering the small, round hills with fields of grain that moved in waves with every fresh breath of wind. The gasoline was all gone, so we used oxen and horses and even, occasionally, dogs, to help plough the fields. We didn’t eat the animals; that would have been a wasteful. They were more valuable as workers than as meat.

             We took signs from the nearby highway and used them to build our homes. Our farm turned into a village. War continued to rage around us, but we were at peace, for a time.

            Then the bandits came. They were survivors, like us, but they survived differently. They didn’t work the land; they didn’t farm or build. They fought and threatened stole. They had guns and they took from us whatever they needed. They didn’t kill us; that would have been wasteful. They needed us to work. They left just enough for us to get by. But they took everything else -- our crops, our water, our tools, and even our children. Boys they forced to be gunmen. And girls -- well I’d rather not talk about what happened to the girls.

            I was thirteen years old when they took me. We heard the engines of their “technicals” -- civilian pick-up trucks with machine guns bolted in their open beds. We tried to run and hide. But the technicals roared forward, cutting huge swaths through the crops to cut us off. Gunmen jumped out of the pick-up trucks and pointed their Kalashnikov assault rifles at us, forcing us onto our knees. Those of us who resisted were clubbed with their rifle butts. I wasn’t clubbed, I was grabbed. I screamed and struggled as they pulled my hair and beat me, but it was no use, I wasn’t strong enough to resist them. Soon I was thrown into the bed of their truck like a fish hauled up on a line and thrown into a boat.

        My father begged them not to take me; he offered them anything in return. But Axel, the bandit’s bald leader with the tattoo of a howling coyote on his scalp, just kicked my father in the face. “You have nothing left to give,” he said.

        My father, blood pouring from a broken nose, shook his head. “We’re only a month away from harvest,” he promised, “we’ll have something then.”

         Axel turned a full circle, then, admiring the expansive fields of growing wheat. He nodded with satisfaction. “Then we’ll be back in a month.”

         “Leave her,” my father continued, “and we’ll give you everything.”

         Axel just smiled. “You’ll give me everything, anyway.” He jumped up onto the side of the lead vehicle – an ex-military Humvee – whistled, and waved his hand in a circle over his head. Engines roared and the technicals tore through the grain to disappear…taking me with them. How much luckier, I thought, to be one of the dead ones, vaporized in the first seconds of a nuclear strike, than to survive and linger, only to see everyone you love lose their freedom and dignity. I was sure I was going to lose both.

        But then the tank changed everything.