It sounds like a war outside. I can hear the gunfire on the hillside. I know it isn't war, but there are still people dying. With every night, the fighting starts afresh. They descend from their hillside homes, ascend from their bunkers and die in a bloody mess that covers the once picturesque countryside. Propaganda, I know it is war. But they won't let me call it that. It's terrorism, uprising, revolution, rebellion. Never war.

The world is a twisted, discarded wasteland. A plane of eternal suffering, brought upon us by our own lack of understanding for each other. Death caused by our contempt for the new age, contempt that sent us hurtling back to the dark ages, in the way that only the human race can manage, a hundred steps backwards for every half-inch forwards.

I can hear their screams, battle cries and death roars. It sounds like hell outside. The clatter of ricocheted bullets from their rusting, abandoned technology. When all you are interested in is death, the only technology you need is that which will help the war effort. Terrorism effort. Whatever. They are still as dead, no matter what they want to call it.

They wear the splash of blood like a badge of pride, a war medal. Survivor's etiquette: only wear the blood of your enemies. And they fight for a cause long lost, as lost as this world, but still they fight, bred to fight like pit bulls. They stand proud and true, in an unjust world. A world they die for. A world they destroy for a life they forgot. Hatred without reasoning, death without remorse.

They took my home; my perfect peaceful world and they blasted it to an unrecognisable desert, a land strewn with corpses, painted with blood and littered with used rounds. I grew up using blood instead of chalk to write on the pavements. I watched boys play football with heads. We grew up playing morbid and macabre games, suitable only for Halloween, but they amused us all year round.

Children raised in the throes of conflict, fending for themselves as parent after parent lay massacred on the battlefields. I remember little of the old world, the world of the brave, and the free. The world where being different was a good thing, death was a bad thing and shooting someone in the back of the head just wasn't the done thing.

It started with terrorism, fires, bombs, assassinations, and then it changed. It evolved into something bigger, badder and all the more fearsome. Still they called it terrorism, the new movement. The new wave, rebelling against the government, rebelling against what, I don't know. And I may never know. Our veterans are dead, our libraries reduced to cinders.

The war seemed to happen naturally, it was the next step. People started fighting back. Terrorism has always been about innocents, and after so many years, the innocents simply couldn't take anymore. Anarchy reined, governments and monarchies fell, the people won. Yet, still they didn't stop fighting. It became a way of life, a reason to live. To be born to die, a strange concept, one that dictated their lives.

The world has been turned on its head, we have became nocturnal creatures, rising to feed, fight and terrorise, lying to rest with the rise of the sun over the blood drenched hills. Scurrying to our homes, hiding from sight, as if the gentle caress of the sun would melt our pallor skin. By the daylight hours, the stench of rotting flesh overpowers the senses, and man's brutality to itself is often too hard to bear. Still, I walk among the silent dead, lost in reverence to the heroic soldiers, carcasses left for the animals to feed from.

The horror is stark under the glare of the light, and the deterioration of society is all too clear to see. We have gone past the place of return, spiralling to the death of our race, by our own hand. As a race that had everything going for them, living lives of luxury, we have returned to the dark ages by choice, and as I view the remnants of that society I am left bewildered. How could anyone choose this mass grave over a world where it seemed nothing could go wrong?

It's silent outside.
Leaving me to despair to the darkness upon the encroaching dawn, as my soul rots from the inside out.

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