Night fell.

Night fell. 

Knowing it would again lift seemed to be an unspoken optimism shared between members of the group; all except for Conrad. His faith that the night would end was as much operant on him surviving the night itself and waking with the light of morning scraping against his eyelids, slowly prying them open and drawing the dormant processes of his mind into reluctant activity. He wondered if death would be as a night never-ending, or a sudden transition to a new morning, or perhaps the sheer brightness of midday. These thoughts and others invaded his mind and hung there as pleasant distractions from the palpable fear coursing through the steps of his comrades quietly bustling about the camp. With the darkness caressing the ends of their lamps and threatening to creep in at the first signs of weakness, members of the group had collectively summoned together the restless motion of a hive, hardly daring to falter. Whether this was done to withhold from themselves, or the darkness, a moment to consider the calamity of their position Conrad couldn't tell.

Something had taken one of their operators earlier that day. They discovered the corpse ten meters away in a ditch, legs folded backward at the knees and a puncture at the base of the skull. Having seen dead bodies before Conrad was not initially overwhelmed with the sight as some of the group were. It was after seeing the operator twitching and opening his mouth, gasping for a substance he needed other than the air swirling in abundant circles of mist running across the ground, that horror took Conrad to his blood. His heart panicked and eyes began dancing furtively between the man warring with his flighting vestiges of life and the perimeter of forest and hulking granite that now appeared as ramparts against an imminent attack. It was his impression as well as his colleagues' that the act was wild and mad; the conjecture contained the trauma to a degree.

The operator gave his last breaths some moments later and so they hauled the corpse back to camp. After splaying him out on one of the tables Conrad saw and heard the conversation between the medics. They probed into the head wound to find more than several inches of brain matter had been removed centrally through the cerebellum to the center of the brain with a device, for it was hard to conjure an image of an animal with some appendage evolved for the express task of coring out brains and leaving the rest to rot. The implication of calling the murder weapon a device had herded them into a cage, the label "subjects" shrouded them in the semblance of rats awaiting their forced sacrifice on the operating table. What made this image all the more appropriate was the additional fear, being subjects, that they would never know to what purpose their brains had been extracted. Perhaps it indeed was necessary for the success of some vital research, Conrad thought morbidly.

They were told to burn bodies when possible so as to avoid contamination of the site. A precaution that seemed in that moment to be founded on the belief that whatever was out there could be contaminated at all. Maybe contaminating their hidden enemy would save them, Conrad thought. He also felt that he'd been thoroughly contaminated by everything he'd so far seen. It was then that he considered for the first time the possibility of not being allowed to return, to show up at the insertion facility and fail whatever test they'd contrived for determining his "contamination potential" or some other meaningless stamp of disapproval. That was when Conrad first started feeling trapped, and he could tell the others felt it too. Whatever force in front or behind them had somehow already won. They had stepped into its jaws long ago and only now wondered how they had ended up futilely scrambling over each other to avoid the waves of cloudy stomach bile.

#

Conrad jerked awake as shots rang out in the night. The burst of gunfire died out as soon as it started and he felt the sudden absence of violent noise as an obnoxious void which needed to be filled. His back ached as he reached deftly to the side within the confines of the tent and picked up his rifle. The shouts outside had now localized toward the fit of bullets. When Conrad brushed aside the tent flap he saw three men waving their flashlights into the dark woods like beacons advertising their position. Conrad clicked on the attached light under the barrel of his rifle and instead of looking directly at where the focus of attention was, no man was obviously injured or missing from their position, he scanned to the immediate right and left of the spasmodic light show. After a few seconds, he turned around and peered into the dark on the other side. His eyes adjusted and were subsequently assaulted once more as the slow elevation of a flare soared up out of the gloom several hundred yards beyond the treeline and arched down with the gentle breeze.