After another sleepless night, Victor stumbled out of his room, still shaking. He desperately needed a whiff of fresh air to clear his mind. Slowly he descended the creaking stairs to the first floor; only now did he clearly recognize the structure in which he had resided.
He was so consumed by depression that he had not consciously remembered his home. As he exited the barrack's broken doorframe, he saw a man hanging from a dead tree.
The wounds the hemp rope had cut into his throat were still bleeding, and a crow stood on his head, pecking at the man's eyes. Victor had seen this throughout the war, but now it felt different, not an act to escape trauma, but a way of giving up on life altogether, fleeing from this broken world.
Just as he finished that thought, a gunshot rang through the city's ruins. A part of him wanted to duck, to get behind cover as he once had, but another part already knew what it meant, the thought reinforced by the hopeless scene before him.
Absentmindedly, he walked down the path toward the city, away from the hanged man. As he moved through the ruins again, after days spent drinking in his room, he noticed something was amiss.
Bodies lay on the cracked pavement, in broken houses, and across empty plazas; some fresh, others days old. The image of a battlefield flickered before his eyes, filled with the corpses of his faceless comrades. He blinked, making the image before him vanish as quickly as it had come.
A great feeling of loneliness and longing washed over him. After a quick pause, he turned and left to continue on his path. Walking down the main road, he saw even more bodies, scattered like flowers across a field.
At the end of the road he saw another soldier like him, gray-haired and clad in a rugged uniform. The man cleaned the barrel of his rifle the way someone might clean a pipe, slowly and with care. Victor stood on the other side of the road, watching. Perhaps after the war he would have tried to save the man, but now he only met his eyes.
All he saw was determination and relief. Soon the man finished, methodically inserted a single bullet into the chamber, and raised the rifle to his head. He took one last deep breath, as if setting down a heavy weight, then pulled the trigger.
The shot cracked through the air, and the man's head slumped over the barrel, blood silently flowing to the ground. As the ringing in his ears subsided, he slowly looked back at the man's face. In the dead man's eyes, Victor could still see the relief. Or did he only imagine it?
Victor remained standing before the corpse. But he didn't see a broken man slumped over his rifle; he saw a man that had freed himself of the burden he carried. Suddenly his vision shifted, and the ruins behind the dead man turned into burning trenches stretching across the horizon.
The man sat on a pile of mangled corpses, looking as if he had just slept. Victor blinked slowly, making the image disappear. And his mind felt somewhat clear again. As he let his gaze wander over the ruins again, his shoulders slowly relaxed.
The way back to the barracks felt as empty as the streets. Though this time he could smell gunpowder in the air. A wave of familiarity slowly washed over him. As he raised his head to the sky, he noticed the sun was going down.
The clouds were tinted in a variety of orange colors that illuminated the ruins beside him in a soft golden hue. The path towards the fortress was dipped in rays of evening light, glistening silently. The air had a smell of tranquility.
He could hear a piece of cloth flutter in the gentle wind that threw up dust all around him. The dust captured the light like a veil lifted, giving the world back a little color. And as he entered the doorway into the barracks, his chest also felt as if a veil lifted from it, finally feeling light again.
Everything in his room stood in its place. The candle on the stool flickering in its sickening tone and the moldy mattress in the corner. Looking around the room, he memorized its layout.
He wiped the thick layer of dust off the stool. Then, after opening the dust-covered window, he sat back on his mattress as usual. He saw the carpet on his floor and recollected his memories of the war.
He thought of the world that had lost its color. Oh, how pointless it all was. Once he had hoped to rebuild, to start anew, but now it was useless. A long time ago he was full of anger. But it had no reason anymore.
The enemy was just as dead as all the others were.
The comrades he had called his friends lay buried away from home, and the people who caused the wars were gone.
He survived, but the person who had a place in the world had died with them.
He let everything loose, his shoulders slumped forward, and now after all that had happened, his expression turned somber and soft. Looking out the window, he saw the wonderful sky, tinted in the beautiful orange spectrum by the sun's descent. Now he slowly stood up again.
He carefully pulled out his old revolver from beneath the gray mattress. The revolver with which he executed his poor subordinates. He felt its weight. Grabbing the handle, feeling the warm wood in his hands, he pulled out two bullets from his coat's pocket.
After that he ripped part of his hat's inner fabric, using it to clean the dirt and rotten splinters from the gun's frame. He polished the barrel, stopping at the engraving at its underside.
It simply read: Lieutenant Victor Holloway. He hesitated for a moment. He could hear the words of the major issuing him the gun. They were blurred and promptly turned into the words of praise his subordinates offered as he presented it to them.
The voices blurred more, and as a breeze blew through his window, they fully vanished. Just then he regained his composure and calmly resumed polishing the barrel.
Then after carefully cocking back the hammer once, he flipped open the gun, ejecting the empty casings out of the chambers that he hadn't removed after the war ended. Carefully he brushed away the dirt and rust inside each chamber with the cloth.
After tending to them, he took care of the two bullets, polishing their surface with spit and the cloth. First, after putting everything back together, he pulled back the hammer fully. With a damp mechanical clicking, the barrel rotated as intended.
He took a quick glance into the mechanics in the interior, which were sufficiently clean. He pulled the trigger, and the hammer shot forward, hitting the frame with a loud clicking sound.
Once again he opened up the gun, this time inserting the bullets into the cylinder. He closed it, hearing the catch of the barrel latching onto the rest of the frame.
He cocked back the hammer a second time. The barrel rotated. Raising the barrel to his eyes, he could see the brass glistening in the orange light that had filled the room.
He donned a smile.
Just for a moment he took everything in.
He pressed down on the trigger.
The hammer clicked.
He heard the crisp bang.
He saw the muzzle flash blinding him for a second. His head felt as if someone had kicked it from behind.
He saw the sunlight hitting the old floorboards under his feet, making the red puddle above it glisten.
Then nothing.
Absolute Silence.