Night Raid

The president snapped awake at three AM. He realized he was a serial killer. Highly trained and equipped killers on his orders were summarily murdering thousands of raggedly dressed people in the name of Democracy.

A woman wailed holding a baby whose brains slowly dripped on dry barren ground. A dog lapped up an errant eyeball.

The president slept alone, so he was solitary witness to the sweats that covered his body. He dared not turn on the light. If he did, a secret service agent would enter the room to see if he had some request. He closed his eyes and lay back down on the bed.

Images flashed. A man sat frantically reaching for his recently severed leg as he slowly bled out and his eyes stared blankly at the Milky Way. A finger on the hand of the severed arm twitched and then slowed to a halt. Blood turned the brown earth black.

A woman tore at her burning clothes until she was naked. Smoke smudged from her burnt skin. Her screams kept rising in pitch. She ran in circles until bullets thudded into her torso.

The images were not the horrors of large scale mechanized warfare, but small skirmishes and battles with personal vendetta and betrayed loyalties fueling the violence. Two soldiers held a teenaged girl as a third raped her. A bayonet across her throat silenced her screams. A second soldier took his turn with her still warm but inert body.

The headman of the village was stripped and tied to a tree. A solider deftly severed the testicles from the headman's body. They forced the testicles into the mouth of the bound headman's wife

They stripped the headman's son, cutoff his genitals and forced the penis into the mouth of the headman. When he spit it out, they cut his throat and forced the son's severed penis into the headman's bleeding throat.

The President gingerly felt his crotch for his parts. All three parts were still there.

The soldiers gather up the living and corralled them into the headman's home. They fired their automatic weapons on the people huddled in the living room of the home 

A soldier found a jerry can of kerosene and splashed it about the headman's house. A soldier flipped his Zippo and started a fire. Another soldier tossed a grenade into the living room 

There were cries and screams. As the fire progressed a few tried to escape. They were all shot multiple times.

The President got out of bed and softly padded in circles around his bedroom.

  -Mr. President, do you need anything?

  -No, thank you. I am just thinking about the budget.

He wished he could look out a window, but the proliferation of drone weapons meant he had to sleep in an interior room within a room. There were no windows and no views.

Yesterday a terrorist drone had killed his Secretary of State as he was driven from his Chevy Chase home to his office at the Department of State. Last week, a drone firing an exploding harpoon had killed the Japanese Director of Fisheries as part of the world wide environmental “Die Like A Whale” movement.

The President took a sleeping tablet and lay back down on his bed. Bloody movies flickered on his eyelids. Today he would address the United Nations with a proposal for universal Democracy at any price.