Won?

The battles fought in the south and in the north ended. It seemed the allied forces had won. Barely. But in the north, in Köln, the Russians covered their retreat with a tactical nuke, forcing the allied armies to regroup. The losses were tremendous. The Russians had used their entire ABC of weapons. And with ABC I mean Atomic, Biological and Chemical warfare. They had no restraints at all. The Russians in the North didn’t retreat because they lost that battle, but because there was no hope of winning it. It was because the Russian armies in the south had lost. They simply couldn’t break through. So they retreated too, what was left of it. Still too many of them to follow without regrouping first. Valuable time would be lost. Time in which Russian soldiers could desert, form gangs and do whatever they felt like doing to citizens still in the area. The Black Forest wasn’t safe, it was just more secluded, but soon, I felt the first Russians would be arriving, looking for isolated areas too.

I didn’t feel like we had won. Firstly, we didn’t join the battles, we had deserted. Secondly, even if we had fought in them, even if we all had survived, without any people or body pieces missing or damaged forever, they were still a plague, a locust swarm on the land. And thirdly, the initiator of all this misery wasn’t even talking about surrendering, even though his own people were storming the palaces of his country. He probably wasn’t even in the country. Perhaps he was biding his time in a nuclear submarine, still firmly in command.

We couldn’t leave. Even if we wanted to. Which we didn’t. Tom couldn’t leave his girlfriend, his girlfriend not her mother, her mother not her house in the vain hope her husband would return. I couldn’t leave Tom behind, Kate neither. I couldn’t leave both of them, the other women wouldn’t leave me. So we didn’t want to leave. Only Didier had the option to leave with his girlfriend, but told me he didn’t want to. For whatever reason, he didn’t want to tell me, either. And for practical reasons we couldn’t leave, even if we had enough fully fitted army cars to go on a long trip to Spain. It was still a warzone in between, and it would remain unsafe, what with plundering gangs, Russians or not, in search for food, anything else or anyone else. Only if we had a transport helicopter, to move us to a safe spot, to travel further away. But we didn’t have one of those, none of us could fly it, and none would come, we had made sure of that.

So we stayed. We patrolled. We taught the women of the villages how to patrol. Each had its own sector, we stayed in touch with radios, we did everything in our power to keep the villagers socially connected, aside from interfering directly. The women in the villages started to realize that from now on they would have to live a life completely different than before. And it would take a long time before things would start to change back to normal times. If those times ever came. It was like the corona-virus all over. Well, not really like that, perhaps a thousand times worse. They needed to adapt, with no rescue in sight, no relief in sight, for perhaps years to come.

We went on a trip to our old first bunker. To the army camp. To plunder it, whatever what was left. Lots of guns, ammo, various types of infantry weapons. We blew up what we couldn’t take with us, even in multiple trips. We had enough supplies for a small army, but we weren’t. Just two small sections. And a few villages, full of women, elderly people and a few stuck tourists.

If there was ever a time to start a harem, it would be here and now. A healthy young single man could sweep in and take half of them, wind them around his one finger. But there weren’t many of those left. Healthy young men. Or at least healthy and young enough. Only three in fact. And they weren’t single. One of them even so far from single as he could be. And the women were still clinging to the hope their partners would come back. They had hope, once the bigger armies were defeated, they would come back. They hadn’t received any news of them, but it was like they said: no news is good news.