“Hey, Peter!” says Isaac, grabbing his attention. Peter looks to the side to see Alex and Isaac lying down behind a crushed concession stand, pinned as plasma fire flies about their position. “Get the fuck over here before you’re hit too!”
He rolls sideways to them, grabbing Isaac to orientate himself. “Vance is still alive, he was moaning.”
“Well we can’t move,” says Isaac. Glass shatters above showering them and cutting their necks and hands. The rest of the marines have finished getting inside the carries. “Fucking great,” says Isaac. “They got in without us!”
“I’ll call Blake to open the door while we drag Vance in,” says Peter.
“He is on our way,” says Isaac. He retrieves a canister from his vest, “we have a smoke grenade actually.” Isaac tosses it out in the gap between them and the convoy.
Alex rolls over getting closer to them. “On three,” the smoke pours out fast into a cloud, “one, two, three!”
They sprint out into the open and plasma fire hits Isaac’s rifle as he leans over Vance. “Fuck!” He hurls the ruined XM to the side as the hot metal burns his hand. “I fucking hate you!” he screams at the Herculeans down the street.
“Alright, focus!” says Peter. The smoke cloud makes it nearly impossible to see and they grab on to each other’s neck collars to stay together. “Grab him and take him to the Patria—shit, that is now moving!” The silhouettes of the convoy begin to disappear in the smoke. Peter talks into his earpiece, “Sergeant, this is Peter. I have Vance with me. Open the rear ramp so we can bring him in.”
“Goddamn it,” grunts Isaac as he lifts Vance by the shoulders and Alex grabs his legs. “Let’s move.”
“Copy that Private, hurry up!” says Blake.
Vance is carried up the rear ramp by Isaac and Alex. “Where are you going?” says Isaac, after Peter turns around.
Peter doesn’t reply as he exits the smoke and dashes to the street corner. It’s now time to capitalize on his promise to the Herculeans. He slips on a puddle of blood, falling backwards over the dead Brit as Herculean plasma zips centimeters above his face. He lifts himself up quickly and hops back to cover with the Leader inside a destroyed front office.
“You’re alive,” says the Leader after he whistles. “Did you get your boy?”
“Yeah, I’m ready to take these bastards out.”
“Those stims really do make you a Lionheart, don’t they? We can’t do shit though till those buggers are taken care of down the road.”
“We can flank them,” mentions a paratrooper, “as we intended to do to the Herc’s down the street in the first place.”
“I was already thinking that,” says the Leader. “But it would take too long to reposition ourselves. We have no idea how much longer the rangers can hold off for and if those Herc’s can call for reinforcements. Besides, they would just reposition to face our new front.”
Another one of the anti-armor rounds is launched from the Herculean bunker alongside bolstering plasma fire, and soars towards Peter’s group. The entire building they’re sheltering in fantastically shakes as the wall of the store next to them blows out into the street from the impact. The paratroopers on the other side of the lane have crowded themselves inside a small alleyway between two shops with a low wall. One of them balances themselves on top of the wall and fires blindly over his head across the shallow rooftops at the bunker.
“Bloody hell,” says the Leader, “Chandler has an AT launcher right?”
“He does sir,” says the paratrooper next to Peter.
“Well, where is he? He’s not with us, and I don’t see him over there.”
“He’s there, sir,” says the paratrooper. “Lying low against the side, he got hit.”
“Behind the rubbish?” says the Leader. “Perfect, I see him.” The Leader points at Peter, “We’re going to make a break across the street and meet up for our plan.”
“What about me sir?” says the paratrooper.
“You’ll stay here and give us some suppressive fire,” says the Leader. “Okay yank, you have already run out in the open once today, so it can’t be too hard for a real gentleman such as myself.” They shuffle towards the storefront edge, “Now!” They hop over the broken front window and sprint across the lane to the others.
“Sweet Mary I told you,” says the Leader huffing for air, once they’re in safety again.
“This the best they can do?” says Peter, stoked and excited. The adrenaline of war mixes with his Buzz—he has never felt so alive!
“How goes it, sir?” says one of the paratroopers.
“Dandy, I have a plan so listen up. We need to break down that bunker enough to be able to get any good cracks at the bastards inside. I am surprised none of you blokes had thought of using that AT yet,” he points at the AT rocket launcher hurdled behind the injured paratrooper. “We need cover fire and a distraction so that one of us has enough time to aim a good round at that bunker. If we fuck up once, the buggers will know what we’re capable of and will ether give us living hell with their own, or retreat.”
“Ronald,” the Leader hands the AT to one of the paratroopers, “you will wait here with the launcher. The rest of you, we’ll be strafing across the street drawing attention. That’s when you poke out and give it to them.” The Leader looks around, “All clear?”
The paratroopers reply unanimously, “Yes sir!”
The Leader moves to the front to prepare for the crossing, “Airborne, on me!”
He runs out first, sprinting back towards the other side with his rifle lying sideways across his torso, so he can hip fire at the Herculean position as he crosses. The next two paratroopers move out directly behind him, and Peter kneels to brace himself for the race across again. Herculean fire concentrates on the crossing paratroopers as expected, and the middle paratrooper is hit and stumbles, wailing in agony as he starts crawling the remaining distance.
Peter is about to brave the crossing when a large explosion knocks him and the AT wielder down. The world disappears and the noise of the firefight subsides to a silence. It’s a silence filled with a peaceful serenity similar to that distant feeling I once had when going to college. Creon… I tried Creon. Please.
The world—understanding of reality, becomes a white and shapeless room. In the middle of the never ending white void, a mound of dirt protrudes into existence. It grows till it’s a large hill covered in crisp green grass. On the top of the hill is a rampant thicket of weeds. Inside the bush of weeds grows another plant though, breathtaking in beauty: a bundle of red roses, their thorny thick stems elevating them higher than the weeds. Near the thicket on the hill is a naked woman curled up on the ground. Her body is frail and resembling a corpse, and her hair frizzled and unkempt. The vines and roots of the weeds crawl out, and wrap around and insert themselves into enlarged dark veins on her wrists. She cries horribly into her boney arms.
“Hello?” The words echo, forever like the white void, till they lower into octaves that can’t be heard anymore.
“Oh you’re here. Well Soul, what do you think?”
“I still think we should go, Mind.”
“But if we go, Body will surely be doomed,” says Mind. “Maybe he wants to us to stay.”
“Go where? Am I dead?”
“That is always the first question Body asks when they reach here,” says Mind.
“It doesn’t matter what he wants, it changes nothing,” says Soul. “The Body is almost always wrong. Look, he has gone and gotten himself addicted to drugs. He has lost who he was. We must go before he pollutes us anymore.”