Private Ned Wilkins shut his eyes and gripped the hard wood of his rifle. Above his helmet bullets whizzed by and sunk into the sandbags of their gun emplacement with sharp woomphs. Over the roar and chaos of battle Ned heard his commander curse loudly. This was followed by a sickening thud that echoed seemed to echo within the young private's ribcage. The soldier next to him learned over and shouted, "Shit, bro. We're like, done." The cold reality of the statement settled on his bones like a frosty November morning. "Yeah, dude," Ned forced out through clenched teeth. He shivered, unable to express clearly his emotions.

A radio crackle made its way to his part of the gun encampment. His commander's comlink, still clenched between bloodied, dirty fingers, chirped and bleeped excitedly. Ned gingerly extracted it from the dead man's grasp and pressed it close, waiting for any speck of hope from its digital innards. "Yo dude, is anyone, like, there?" it asked mechanically. "Yes! Yes!" Ned cried happily, hugging the equipment close like a doll. To him, the battle's fortunes seemed to miraculously change: the bullets were fewer and farther between, the explosions distant, and the moans of his fallen comrades had ceased their mortal chorus.

"Sick, bro, yeah, we're gonna like, drop mad nukes and shit, so you'd better like, uh, peace out of there dude," the radio informed him.

The few haggard men around Ned stared at him in horror. They had heard everything. The youngest, an African-American who claimed he was once a rapper called Puff Da Weedz, mouthed the letters "W-T-F" silently as half-ovals of water collected beneath his eyes. Another soldier stared at the group calmly as he withdrew his service pistol, pressed up to his temple, and pulled the trigger. Ned sunk to his knees as the rain of warm blood clung to his fatigues; it barely registered that a man whom he had shared and bled with just committed suicide. He dug his fingers into the cold, hard soil and played with it idly, watching it fall like a child in a sandbox. The sounds of battle had all but ceased.

"So this is like, the end, yo," Ned said to no one in particular. He raised his eyes heavenward and watched the pale disk of the sun lounge behind the cloud layer. Beneath their gun emplacement, the skeletal outlines of buildings formed a nameless monument to those that had fallen. The quiet was broken by the hushed but persistent drone of a plane above. Ned looked up and watched a solitary black dot divide, letting one half fall as the other sped away quickly. It grew quickly.

"Shit, dude," Ned muttered as his world turned to white.