Warning: Some May Find Disturbing

Warning: Read With Caution

They have no names, only numbers. He knows only two things, for all of his life: that he is a number born to subtract other numbers, and killing makes him feel nice.

In the street, he looks almost absurdly...ordinary. He was pulled from families scanned to have the greatest genetic propensity for battle and suffering least from battlefield issues, and he could be from any country. He could be from any region or state or land or province; someone once made a joke about how he was 'generically ethnic' and said he'd seen that in a book somewhere.

Books are, so to speak, a closed book to him. He doesn't see the point in reading, in fiction, in living a life dreamed out from someone else to be someone else and see things different...

He doesn't see the point in anything.

He doesn't smile much. He doesn't laugh. He just sits, and listens, and eats, and then when he is on the battlefield and killing other men and women, feeling his will as the bullets streaking out and vanishing their heads in bursts of gore, their lives and histories abruptly terminated because he looked at them and decided he might as well shoot there... then, he smiles. Its the only time he does.

He's just a man, fighting in a war so vast that he is just one out of a pool of billions of recruits, fighting against every other country everywhere, killing anything that isn't in the same uniform as him. It's delightfully simple.

He doesn't grasp things like good or evil, not the basics of ideology. Periodically the commanding officers fret for them and give them entertainment, showing how all the rest of the world is savage animals and monsters in human appearance, and they must die for the good of humanity (and some glimmer of social awareness leads him to wonder if they all get the same propaganda but filtered for cultural relevance).

He just likes the killing.

He's just a man; a barely literate recruit who was so placid and dull outside the battlefield he was more a piece of furniture than anything else.

(Sometimes, evil was so banal it was almost offensive in its lack of interest.)

Every so often, he looks up and thinks of the stories he hears. The whispers and rumors that filter from up top. About the Bomb. Or the bombs, really.

He imagines what it would be like to see them coming down, all the world on fire and everything stopping.

He imagines it to be everything getting cleaned.

------

They day the world ends and humanity dies, he's knee deep on corpses. He's on a mountain of blood, staining his uniform and legs, and he shakes off a roll of intestines slicked to his arm, like warm tendrils that own't let go.

There is a girl there. She is blue, and she is screaming, and crying, to a man in a strange crown who stares at the sky. Neither of them look right, look entirely human. He looks at them, dully thinks 'monster', and considers whether or not they are to be killed or not.

He doesn't understand the concept of 'noncombatants'.

He raises his gun, and by fortune or fate, that is when the world falls down.

He sees the bombers coming. He drops the gun and stares as the bombs fall, and he sees a dream come true.

The old man, and the girl, somehow they fly, fly like the bombers above. Maybe the old man could have stopped it. Maybe not.

But they are there to see him stare at the bombs with an odd half-smile, and sink to his knees like a worshipper before a god. He doesn't even try to run as the bombs fall down upon him.

He says, "It doesn't matter."

He smiles again, as if of someone at total peace with themselves.

"Nothing matters."

The bombs fall, and everything burns.

---

Who knows how many years later, a single corpse rising from the ground.

It's sockets burn green. Misshapen horns rise from its skull.

And it, he is still smiling.

There isn't a number for him, anymore. But he's had time to think, on his purpose, and a name.

He was born to kill. He asks himself, why not?

He thinks of old, old stories he had to listen to, about kings and heroes and liches.

Yes. 'Lich'. That seems appropriate.