Lima Sierra [Work in progress]

[Chapter 4 | Part 1]: Blind Yankee

You've ever dive into a pool and smack the water so hard you start to sting all over? That sting that would redden and burrow deep into your skin all the way down into your nerves was something we had to deal with for maybe two or three days now. Burning embers and ashes of whatever kept piling down from all around us like a sickly snow that coated the sky in a harsh orange the would go from light to dark depending on if it was dawn or dusk. Hell, that was the only way we'd know what the time was sometimes if we could see it through the dust coating on our gas masks as we walked across our designated patrol for the day.

I looked over at Bauer, or who I hoped was Bauer, to check on him. He was still there clearly, but you really never know in every way. I was used to it by now, and I think everyone in our nine man squad. We all did the same no talking and all walking shit long enough to. But still, it's never the same. Some of the men in my squad would play games in their heads or sometimes with each other to count how many burnt up cujos we could find while walking. They would reason with, "There's never any fucking action anyways, so why the hell not? The carpet skin sons of bitches are all dead now, so let me help with keeping up with the kill count this stupid operation is aiming for."

I couldn't blame them, I did the same thing in the past in a sort of way, but I recognized what I did later on and stopped that shit. All it seems is that factor of compassion for your fellow man is thrown out as soon as some bipedal alien dog bastards start trying to massacre regular people out of nowhere. But for me, I can't really bring myself to completely see them as mindless animals. Considering the other soldier I got the chance to see how she behaved, I can't really logically think they're all brainless murder machines as mostly everyone see them as. If they weren't, they would have given up and ran away like her, so maybe we're only facing the ones that didn't or couldn't and I don't have enough time to interview and distinguish who's who when they got a gun aimed at me or my fellow men. War really never allowed time for bleeding hearts to make morals out of the totally immoral and insane. I should know better anyways.

Without realizing it we had already finished our walk around and we're approaching the main gate into the fort. I scrambled for my ID and held it up to the gate guard to nod at for the thousandth time today. We made it all back as usual with no crazies or cujos trying to shoot at us. As we walked back to the armory to change out, I felt a tap on my head that grew with every step I took towards the armory. I got to the door and tried to open the door before I got smacked in the head that sent me out of it.

The stinging was back. All that talk in my head and it comes back. I inhaled deep and tried to open my eyes only to be met with the harsh texture of metal and dirt go down my throat, making me hack up a lungs worth of black phlegm. I opened my eyes to see a gas mask with a helmet looking down at me. I couldn't see who it was because of the thick layer of soot on top of the visor. My face burned like a thousand wasps stabbed it repeatedly. I tried to feel it, but I got my hand pulled away by someone to my right as gunshots rang out from both of my sides.

I fought to stay awake with a spike of adrenaline running through me. I can't let go after everything now.  I remembered where I was and what I was doing. I pulled myself to a upwards sitting position with the emplacement of sandbags supporting the weight of my back and pulled my pistol from my holster. With a rush of energy, I swung myself over to face down the enemy ahead of us and tried to train the iron sights on anything in front of me.

I could tell through the confusion, pain, and smog there was a opportunistic gray anthro hound dodging through the wall of gunfire to advance towards our position by running to a burnt out car. My hands rattled like an engine as I steadied the sights right on his middle chest before slowly squeezing down on the trigger and letting a bullet pierce through his webbing and into the middle of his chest. The anthro staggered to a near halt afterward before taking his last few paces before dropping face down into the gravel of the courtyard. I smirked as much as I could with my injuries before looking around and continuing to find targets desperately fighting for ground as rounds kept pelting the unseen army from all sides.

Not too later on, the gunfire stopped on both sides. I dropped my pistol and slumped back to the ground with a thousand pound weight being placed on my head, crushing my skull until my head rested on the charred grass. I coughed deeply as ash parachuted from the sky down to the earth as an ever present hell reigned in the clouds above me.

Another person in a covered up gas mask and helmet started to wrap a roll of bandage around my face and mumble something under his mask before I started to slip out of consciousness again.

As I slowly drifted off, the sounds of the outside world faded, with all of its screaming, explosions, gunfire, yelling, and burning. I was later brought to a empty apartment room with plain white walls and dirty floors covered with trash and metal ceiling panels that have fallen off of the now nearly collapsed ceiling above. Ahead of me were three glass panels with a glass door open behind a dark figure standing about my height looking out from a balcony at a barren European style courtyard surrounded by other apartments. Glass and thin metal crunched and groaned under my boots as I walked towards the balcony and looked out at the courtyard below with the man. I felt no rush to see who the man was and more of an interest at the outside in front of me as I grasped the cold metal railing.

A whispering wind blew overhead of me as I looked down to see one other apartment window below me with no balcony before a bright light shines out from where the courtyard was. I swung my head to meet the new source of light with a hand in front of me to help me see. The hand wasn't mine. It had grey smooth feathers with a human-like shape to the hand itself with the rest of the arm being covered in smooth feathers. I couldn't see the rest of the figure that stood by my side and helped shield me from the light. I heard a message play in my head as I stared at the figure trying to find a face in its black nothing form of a head in a ball cap. "The panhandle shall seek to bite down and cauterize itself a new land." That's all I had in my head as the hand lowered back down into the figure of nothing and allowed to witness the great cloud from hell that had just rose from the ground into the sky with an outwards round top and thin middle between the flat bottom of its cloud of fire.

I looked on with fear. I knew nothing of any of it the next day when shrapnel was being picked out of my face. I knew less when they let me loose a month or so later after healing and getting appropriated with my new purpose assigned to me. All I knew undoubtedly was that something irreversible could come of this hell. Then, I was sent off back to Fort Hood to do some kind of integration training. New orders came in from the top and now I had a new purpose other than being a babysitter to some base.