Gunpowder

Blood. Oh god, there was blood everywhere!

Poppy dove behind a pile of rocks, feeling the rough ground beneath her bite into her skin as she slid. There was blood on the rocks too. She didn’t know if it was hers, but she knew that she was bleeding. The ground beneath her was growing red. She was bleeding. Bleeding badly.

A gun fired. It was the loudest thing she had ever heard.

She stood up. She was short. Too short. She felt her hair. It was... dressed in pigtails?

The woman had no time to wonder what was going on. She ducked out of the way of a tranquilizer bullet.

A tank shot lurched past her, and blew up. A dozen screams tore through the air. A hail of bullets sailed in the direction of said screams. It was hell.

Poppy realized suddenly where she was. It was a fight she remembered all too well.

It had happened when she was 12. She was working as a mechanic for a war camp at the time, and had been chased into the battlefield when the attack had begun. It was the battle in which she had sustained her first real injury. The whole thing started when a organized army of rebels had surrounded the city, demanding for something to be returned. She couldn’t remember what it was, but she was chased out of the secure walls of the camp. She was bait.

No one had shot at her at that time. No one had even used their weapons. They had all been mounted, on robot horses of some kind. The leader, or at least who she assumed was the army’s leader, had even laughed a bit, and ordered two of her soldiers to chase her away from the walls. She obviously couldn’t fight them, and she had ended up in the middle of the battle once the rest of the camp’s soldiers had charged the imposing army.

There was blood. A lot of blood. It was a memory. She recognized every little detail. But it felt so real. It felt like she was experiencing every second. She felt pain in her leg, where she knew she had been shot in the battle. She knew someone had been shot and forced against the rock she hid behind by the force of the blast. She was there. She had to be. This wasn’t a dream, it couldn’t be. It was real. She was in the battle. She could see every drop of blood, every gut-wrenching piece of gore. It was all real.