Chapter 5

I was falling, falling through harsh red light and red mist. The sensation of weightlessness hit me and my muscle memory kicked in. There is a certain way to fall and a certain way to land, it’s one of the first things you learn in Army Airborne school. If you want to avoid injury you need to master falling and landing, and I had practiced it countless times. Red volcanic looking soil was coming into focus below me through the mist and it was coming up fast. I went into a textbook PLF which stands for Parachute Landing Fall. Or it would have been textbook if I wasn’t landing on the side of a mountain. My ankles didn’t immediately shatter so I must have done something right, but I was carrying so much momentum I couldn’t bleed off that I basically ping pong balled right off the side and kept on bouncing.

I can’t recommend bouncing down a mountain, it hurts. The first couple of times I bounced I landed on my back and side in loose shale like gravel, those weren’t so bad. Sure getting my bones and muscles kneaded like putty wasn’t fun, but compared to hitting boulders it wasn’t so bad. Life is all about perspective, which is why of course my next fall landed me on a boulder.

I was still loosely gripping my captured Luger in my right hand, and I had my left arm stuck out in front of me to take the brunt of the damage, but the rock outcropping came up too fast. I hit with my palm out and felt more than heard the crack. Lightning raced up my arm and then my body hit. I was still falling fast so I just kept on rolling after my collision with the boulder. I must have lost consciousness because all of a sudden I was on back staring up at a red sky.

My first thought was of some science fiction comic about Mars that Billy had shown me once. Right then and there I laughed harder than I had laughed in a long time. My plane exploding, demonic churches, Nazi wizards, spies, magic portals, and now I was on Mars. Surely I had lost my marbles and I was really locked up in some padded room somewhere hallucinating.

Then I heard the screaming and gunshots. Something large landed on my legs and pain shot through my left ankle as my eyes popped open. I looked down to see Neff laying over my bottom half, bloodied and battered, I’m sure I looked just as bad. He must have fallen down the mountain like me.

I looked right without getting up, my view was cantered to the side since I was still laying down. I could see Sgt. Rowe firing into the red mist that seemed to be present everywhere here. I just couldn’t see what he was firing at, but I heard a woman’s shouts, and I remembered Lt. Wager, or the Sparrow, or whoever she was. She sounded like she was in trouble and an instinctual need to go help her sprung up somewhere deep inside of me.

All of a sudden Neff’s weight was ripped off of my legs and my ankle silently screamed in pain. I involuntarily sucked in a deep breath to cope with the pain, and all I got was a mouthful of hot air. It felt like someone had just opened an oven in my face and I had tried to breathe in the heat. Had it always been this hot? I looked down and saw Neff was being pulled across the red landscape by some kind of creature. It was hunched over and about 5 feet tall. It had red and black marbled skin that was beautiful in a grotesque sort of way. It was wearing some kind of tattered leather pants that had a small hole in the back of them for a short little tale to stick out of. On it’s back grew two stubby little mismatched wings, one of them looked healthy and young, and the other was blackened and brackish as if it was poisoned.

“Hey... Hey! Let my friend go!” I shouted as I tried to get up. As I continually tried to rise I felt pinpricks of pain all over my body and I gasped in surprise, and then fell back down. Somewhere behind me my slung M1 Garand dug into my back in all of the wrong ways exposing even more injuries that I didn’t know I had. The trip down the mountain had taken its toll on me, and the price was pain and blood.

The thing pulling Neff away by his ankles turned around and looked right at me. His face, and it was clearly a him, was contorted in all kinds of unnatural ways, and he had two horns on the top of his forehead, one of which was broken off at a sharp angle. He shot a forked tongue out towards me as if he was tasting the air, and then he spoke to me in perfect unaccented English.

“You shouldn’t be worried about him little pink-belly, worry about yourself,” he said as he dropped one of Neff’s ankles and pointed somewhere off to my left behind me, before cracking a manic smile. As he smiled his mouth revealed two upper sets of teeth and two bottom sets of teeth just staggered slightly off of each other, each tooth razor sharp...

I immediately shifted myself over to my left elbow and regretted it when it wouldn’t hold my weight. I fell onto my left side and looked up to see what the creature had pointed at. A monster that looked a little like the last was only about six feet away and heading right towards me. It also had the red and black marbled skin, and short stubby forehead horns, but that was where the similarities ended. This one didn’t have the short tail or the little crumpled wings. He looked like one of those “strong-men,” you see on circus posters, except with a monstrous face and razor sharp teeth like his cohort.

He casually walked over to me with confidence and anger on his disgusting face and grabbed me by the straps on my rucksack and hauled me into the air in front of him. My body screamed in pain as my bruised and torn muscles were stretched. I tried to batter him off with my left arm, but realized I couldn’t move it at all. I looked over at it and saw my uniform on that side was completely blood soaked. I must have been in shock yet again because I felt like that didn’t alarm me as it should have. I went to batter him off with my right arm and felt a weight in my right hand. I looked over and saw the Luger still gripped there in my fist. I quietly thanked my Drill Sargents and whatever higher power is up there for instilling in me the concept of never letting go of my weapon.

The creature in front of me pulled me closer to him and slipped his forked tongue out and ran it along the side of my face. “You taste strange human, and your weight is off.”

“Taste this,” I said before putting the Luger on the monster’s forehead and pulling the trigger. The monster’s head snapped backward and he dropped me like a sack of rocks. I of course landed on my shattered left ankle and crumpled to my knees. The pain was so intense that my vision blackened for a second and the thought of passing out sounded better than a one-hundred dollar bill, but I hadn’t forgotten about Neff. I looked up and saw the smaller monster had only gotten about 15-feet away, he was having trouble hauling Neff’s weight.

I lined up my Luger looking down the pistols small insignificant sights and wished I had two arms to grab my M1 Garand which would be better for this kind of work. I put the sights right between the things shoulder blades and sent a prayer up for anyone that was listening that my shot would be true and that I wouldn’t hit Neff. I took a deep breath and watched my right hand waver, I was weak from blood loss… Then I pulled the trigger. The creature dropped Neff then grabbed its left arm, I must have hit it. It spun around and hissed at me. I let off another shot that exploded the gravel just a foot left of the creature’s feet. He jumped and then ran off into the mists.

Behind me I could barely see Sgt. Rowe’s silhouette through the strange mists still firing at targets that I couldn’t see, but in front of me Neff was still unconscious and exposed, I couldn’t leave him. I was stuck with two soldiers on either side of me that needed me. That’s when Neff moved, it was small, little more than a shudder.

I yelled out to him “Neff! Neff! Show me a thumbs up, are you alive bud?”

Neff shakily held one thumb up into the air. I scanned his area one more time looking for hostiles and I didn’t see anything. I made the decision then to go to Sgt. Rowe. Neff was a big boy, he could hold out for a few minutes alone. I tried once again to stand but my left ankle wasn’t having it. It wasn’t dignified and it wasn’t pretty but I began to crawl across the ground towards Rowe on my knees, every once in awhile using my right arm with the Luger still clutched in my fist as a counterbalance to get over the uneven ground.

The crawling was hell. Sharp rocks were stabbing into my knees from the torn up landscape below me creating even more wounds and blood loss. I wasn’t even sure how I had blood left at this point. I just knew I was in a world of pain and that my friends needed me. I kept crawling, choking down the too-hot oven air as I moved.

The closer I got to Rowe the more I could make out the figures he was shooting at. There were dozens of them, some threw rocks at Rowe, others fired stubby little bows. He dodged and dipped through their projectiles and returned fire at an unheard of rate. His Garand let out the iconic ding as his clip ran dry and flipped into the air. In a blur of motion he reloaded and was firing again.

He seemed to be firing mainly at a thick group of five or six monsters carrying something, so I helped lay down suppressing fire in that general direction. Rowe spun around and saw me, then tumble rolled behind a small boulder that was just big enough to provide decent cover for him.

“Stop firing soldier! They have the woman, look!” he shouted while arrows and large thrown rocks bounced off of his position.

I focused on the group I had fired on and did indeed see a struggling figure between them and I hoped I hadn’t hit her with my hasty shots. Sgt. Rowe reached into a pouch at his belt and pulled out a Mark 2 Grenade, AKA the Pineapple. He chucked it over the rock he was taking cover behind loosely at some of the monster archers that were firing on him, but far enough away from the group carrying the Sparrow so that she wouldn’t catch any fragmentation. I knew the drill and hit the deck, I laid as flat as I could and presented only the top of my helmet in the direction the blast was going to take place. I felt the ground shake and heard the explosion, then loose rock and gravel rained down on us bouncing off of my helmet.

I fought to get back on my knees and saw the monsters retreating into the mists, and I couldn’t see the group that had the Sparrow at all. Sgt. Rowe was a step ahead of me and apparently uninjured enough to run because he hopped to his feet and was after them. He ran into the mists and disappeared, I heard a few more shots, and then nothing… I waited there on my knees with my Luger in my one working hand scanning all around me. Just when I was about to give up on Sgt. Rowe and make my way back to Neff he came back out of the mists.

“Their gone, the trail ends at the mouth of a large chasm. I didn’t see any steps down and it’s so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. Where’s Neff?”

“Back their Sarge,” I said motioning behind me with my Luger.

“Can you walk?”

“No sergeant. My left arm and left leg seem to be mostly inoperable.”

Sgt. Rowe came around to my right side and pulled my arm around his neck and then pulled me to my feet. I had to hop on my good leg as he began to walk. I had left a pretty serious blood trail so it wasn’t hard to trace the path back. About halfway back Sgt. Rowe stopped and looked me in the eyes.

“You crawled all this way on one leg and one arm?” he asked incredulously.

“I thought you needed my help Sargent,” I replied.

“You’re a tough kid Ozzy… and a good soldier. God is looking out for you,” he said before continuing on. I couldn’t help that think that God wasn’t looking out for me considering my junk life, my junk upbringing, and the junk situation I was in, but I wasn’t going to rain on the Sargent’s faith parade. Especially if that was the motivation he was using to get me through this.

“So Sargent… Where are we?” I hesitantly asked.

“I’m not sure yet. I have some theories, but I’m not worried. God lights our path, we are exactly where we are supposed to be.”

I couldn’t help but think the worst. This was either Mars or somewhere way way worse… We found Neff in short order, he was stumbling towards us through the mist. I wanted to greet him properly but I was having trouble even holding my head up. Neff didn’t look much better, one side of his face was covered in blood which looked like it was coming from a deep gash above his eyebrow. Face wounds like that always bleed a lot and this one looked particularly nasty. Neff being the juggernaut that he was still had an MP40 gripped in each hand.

Before we had a chance to talk Neff slumped into the red shale below us and said: “I’m not feeling so good.”

“You have a massive head wound soldier,” said Sgt. Rowe before plopping me down next to Neff. “Here, watch Ozzy, I’m going to recon this area, we can’t afford to be attacked again or surrounded.”

“Wait,” I said, Sgt. Rowe looked down at me. “What about you Sargent? Aren’t you injured from the fall down the mountain?”

“I think I have a few broken ribs, but I can walk and recon. If that was a raiding party that engaged us they will be heading back with reinforcements. We need to find a more defensible position ASAP.” Without further preamble Sgt. Rowe trotted off at a quick pace and disappeared into the mists.

“Neff, let’s go back to back,” I said, even though I was tired and wanted nothing more than just to sleep. I didn’t want those things to be able to sneak up on us and take me. We scooted our butts back until our backs touched and we were both leaning on each other. I tried to do my best to scan the area in front of me and memorize the terrain. If you memorize the terrain as a sentry it makes it easier to spot enemies. It’s the reason why everything is so orderly on military bases, it makes spotting something that doesn’t belong that much easier.

We were at the base of a medium sized mountain, maybe it could even be considered just a large hill, for me I knew it as an unholy bastard. I looked up at it and tried to trace the route I must have taken to roll to the base of it. All I saw was sharp rock outcroppings and large drop offs which made me wonder how I was even alive. I couldn’t quite see the top of it through the thick mist or fog or whatever we were in but I could tell it was tapering off. I wasn’t good with judging heights but I could make a rough guess of maybe 300 or 400 feet tall. From my position in all directions the ground headed further downhill.

I took another ragged breath and all I got was the superheated oven air, we had to get out of here, and soon. I remembered it was 100 degrees a few summers back, me and the other kids at the orphanage had a miserable summer suffering through that heat. It felt at least twice as hot as that here. My body was involuntarily taking shorter breaths to avoid sucking in the hot air and the lack of oxygen was making me even more lightheaded. My vision started fading to black around the edges again and I started to slump over, but Neff caught me and laid me flat.

“You really don’t look too good Ozzy.”

“Well you aren’t exactly a ray of sunshine either big guy.”

“We need to get out of here soon and get you some medical attention.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.”

The reality of our situation that we both didn’t want to admit settled over us, and my first thought was that I had failed Billy and the other kids at the orphanage. I started rummaging around the many pockets in my jacket until I found a small notebook and charcoal pencil I kept there. I scribbled down the address of the orphanage and shoved it into Neff’s hands.

“Neff, if I don’t make it out of this, you need to go there, to that address. Save as many of the kids there as you can. It was my duty, but I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

“Don’t say that Ozzy...”

“NEFF! I need you to promise me. If I die here you will go there, save the kids.”

Neff just stared at me, a small tear fell down one side of his face cutting a trail through the heat-dried blood there.