Redemption

Morning After

After a bit, the screams started to go quiet, the man removing his hands shortly after and braving a peak through the small gaps in the metal, his quick and heavy breath echoing throughout the locker just as easier as the screams had done just a few moments before.

He soon returns back to his cowering state however as his eyes go wide and he covers his mouth with his hands, presumably in an attempt to quiet his own breathing so that he can remain hidden from whatever it was that was looking for him outside. I say presumably because as far as those with gas masks or those experiencing something else were concerned, or if you were a conscious construct such as me, there was nothing found there to be afraid of.

But still the man remains cowering, his breathing picking up every time he flinched at another imagined sound, moving one of his hands until it was positioned directly over his chest while the other remained over his mouth, his tense fingers gripping at the cloth and hidden flesh as he clenched his eyes shut, either in pain or fear I wasn't sure.

What I can be certain about however is that after a few moments in this state, his eyes flew wide open and his breath hitched as he slowly began to turn his gaze away from the hand that remained clutched at his chest and turned his attention back to the space behind the open gap. There, of course, is nothing looking in at him from the other side of the door but he must have seen something regardless because he soon was trying to raise both of his hands above his head in a desperate attempt to protect himself all while he was screaming and shouting, "NO!" squirming about as best he could from within this cramped space.

His breathing picks up faster and faster until, finally, he clutches at his chest with both hands tensed and his breaths lower to chocked gasps and then... nothing at all, the room now becoming completely and totally silent as the soldier's body stops moving, his eyes wide with his mouth open in a silent scream and his hands still hovering above his chest as he remains trapped within the locker, now dead.

The scene changed once again, this time to show the weather deck in a state of frantic and random action, a multitude of soldiers driven mad with fear man their gunning stations and take to firing into the air, the flashes of heavy anti-air fire lighting up the deck as the bullets continue to whirl into the sky and hit nothing, the guns destructive forces doing little to stop the unseen enemy that dives towards the soldiers hallucinating them, the men still attending their stations at seeing this invisible threat continue towards them unhalted are either soon killed off from a heart attack, are murdered by another inflicted soldier, or simply end their own lives by jumping from the bridge onto the deck or into the sea.

Eventually, the firing begins to calm down as the soldiers previously attending are either killed off or retreat back inside the ship to 'safety,' unknowingly dooming themselves to their fate but as the steady roar of a distant aircraft's engines begins to make itself present amongst the ambient sounds of men screaming and machinery humming, one man rushes back to one of the nearest Ack-Ack guns stationed along the deck and takes aim.

Private Patterson, driven mad from both the chemical effects of the gas and the continuous and extreme intake of medicine he was guzzling down to counteract his own terrible hallucinations his own continuous and extreme intake of medicine that he was guzzling down to counteract his own terrible hallucinations, targets the approaching B-29 which upon seeing the people stranded in the water and swimming away from the ship, deploys one of its onboard life rafts.

I can only try and picture how confused the pilots must have been when they began taking fire from the very same ship they received a distress signal from, but as the Private continued to fire upon the now retreating aircraft, the anti-air rounds tearing through the B-29's framework, one of the engines proceeds to burst into flames, leaving a long trail of smoke and blazing fire as the pilots manning it struggled to maintain their current altitude.