Into the Fire

by Mark Tufo

“Keecan, do you mind if I ask how you amassed such a giant army and had them ready to go?” Our two groups had been mostly keeping to themselves. Boredom was a particular enemy of mine so I decided to push it away and start up a conversation.

  “The army you speak of had already been amassed. Our platoon had been out on reconnaissance when we were ambushed and nearly overtaken.”

  “Yeah, you guys probably wouldn’t have made it if not for our help,” I told him. His facial muscles didn’t really allow for surprise or a look of “you have got to be kidding me” but his body language said it all. To him, I was speaking truthfully. Sort of; nothing more fun than having fun with someone who has absolutely no clue, although, on the flipside, if he figured it out, he’d pitch me off the roof.

  “I do not believe that to be the case.”

  “Yeah, me neither, just wanted to get your slant. What were your original plans for this army of yours?”

  He studied my face. “I do not know hu-mans well, but I believe you already know.”

  And I did. This was a battle force to rule the planet, just so happens more pesky aliens got in the way of their plans. There was a question I needed to ask and the answer could be extremely detrimental to the health of those of us on that roof, the human ones at least.

  “Which side would you rather be on, Keecan?”

  “I do not like the thought of aligning with hu-mans, but the thought of fighting with those twisted cousins of ours…I would rather die trying to erase the abomination the Progerian overlords have created.

  “Why the hatred for humanity? We gave you your freedom.”

  “You did not give us anything, we fought for it.”

  “Alright, give is the wrong word. How about we gave you an opportunity for freedom?”

  “That is acceptable.” He had rolled the thought around in his head for a moment before replying. “Perhaps the theory of our freedom appealed to your human weakness of empathy.”

  “Empathy as a weakness. Never heard that one before, go on.”

  “The reality of an alien species roaming your planet unnerved most of your kind. When those closest to our reservations realized we were without weaponry they hunted us down savagely. We have lost hundreds this way. Then your fellow hu-man got more brazen. They lined up in their vehicles and opened fire, killing our women and children. They had no honor. When we would run out to confront them they would speed away. This happened repeatedly until one day we set up a trap. We killed twenty-nine of ‘our liberators’, tore them apart for the lives they had taken. That was when your military became involved. More Genogerians died as your kind attempted to quell our uprising.” He sneered again at the memory. “It is clear enough to me that your kind does not want us around and will not stop killing us until the job is done. I have found that I would much rather fight for my right to rule my own existence.”

  “Huh,” I grunted, “we’re more alike than you know. I mean you and me specifically, not the assholes that were shooting at you.”

  “You refer to your kind in a derogatory manner?”

  “Some of them, yeah. We’re not all like that, Keecan. I’ll admit you guys scare the shit out of us, and humans are not good when motivated by fear, but I wouldn’t have fought so hard for your freedom if I didn’t think it would be for your betterment.”

  Very astutely he told me that we would now not be in existence without the Genos’ previous help. He was letting me know in no uncertain terms that all of my deeds were not entirely selfless.

  “Of course they weren’t, Keecan. I was motivated with protecting my species from extinction. Would you have done any less?”

  “I would not.”

  “That the Genos could have a new start on our planet was just a bonus. I still think it can happen. We’ll just have to work harder. I originally thought keeping you as far from people was the best idea. I was wrong. I know that now. Away from people, they could demonize you. If you lived and worked next to them, they would not be able to make assumptions that were untrue. Sure, they’d have to hide their cats, but they would know that you were not monsters to be shunned, but friends to be embraced.”

  “I do not wish to be hugged by a hu-man.”

  “Turn of words, Keecan. I don’t think they’d want to hug you either.”

  “You may wish to rejoin your group.” Keecan was looking off into the distance.

  “And here I thought this conversation was going pretty well.”

  “The Devastators are close.”

  “Oh.” As I left, I walked past the gaze of a half dozen Genos. I couldn’t tell if they wanted to say hi or eat me.

  “Making some new friends, I see,” BT said. “Why bother, man?”

  “You never know when you might run across one of them again. If I hadn’t befriended Drababan, he would have snapped me in half like a pretzel rod and then dipped me in honey mustard sauce before chewing through my spine.”

  “Little graphic, don’t you think?”

  “Mutes are approaching,” I said flatly.

  You can say the words “one hundred thousand” but that means little until you start to visualize it. What would one hundred thousand dollars in ones look like all stacked up? Perhaps a huge football stadium stuffed to the gills of people coming at you? Am I getting closer? Now, take a being that is on average four times the size of a person and imagine that coliseum of angry enemies heading to you. At this point, I was very much wishing that Keecan had kept us in that huge densely-packed ball of Genos. I felt extremely vulnerable with the few thousand Genos I could see around us. And then the battle began.

  The Mutes started shouting as one, a thunderous roar with a bass sound so deep that it literally shook the building we were on top of. I was not feeling so confident about our superior position at the moment. The more I thought about it, the less I liked where we were. If the Genos ran, we’d be marooned on an island with no chance of escape. Part of that was crazy; the Genos would never run, but the chance that they could get completely wiped out was certainly a possible outcome. The Genos’ voices rose as well in a clash of sound waves. I was swept up in the moment as I joined in with my own battle cry, weak in comparison even if it felt like my throat was on fire. I got more than one nod from our Geno companions for the effort. Tracy could only look at me like I was nuts, so nothing new and unusual there.

  “This isn’t a game, Mike,” she said.

  “Do I look like I’m having fun?” I asked seriously.

  “Umm, Mike, a little, man. The corner of this side of your mouth is upturned,” BT said, pointing to the right side of his lips.

  Fuck, who knows; maybe I was. I had a chance to send these assholes of an enemy to where they belonged, in the ground and with excessive discrimination. We propped our weapons on the small chest-high safety wall that encircled the building and waited. The shouts had died down, and the glow of weapon discharge lit up the area like the world’s largest disco.

  “I thought Star Wars looked so cool when I was a kid…not so much anymore.” My cheek was pressed against the stock of the weapon.

  The Mutes appeared to have the main body of their force over to the right of us. The fighting was intense and they were able to keep moving forward. It would only be a matter of time before they came even with us. To our front, the Genos were holding their own. Shot for shot, there was little movement there. In a war of attrition, the numbers will always win.

  I moved from my present position. “Keecan, do you have any means of communicating with the…your people?”

  He had been watching the battle so intently that I did not think he was going to spare me a glance. “Yes,” was his sparse reply.

  “Call your troops, have them disengage, back up and find cover.”

  He paused, stood, and puffed out his chest. Next would come my beheading. I knew it must have looked bad because BT shouted, “Touch him, motherfucker, and I will blow every one of you overgrown lizards away!”

  Keecan looked over my head and to
BT.

  “Real diplomatic, pal,” I told him. “Keecan, listen to me.”

  “Genogerians do not run. We have been over this subject before.”

  “We have, but has not what I said earlier stuck with you?”

  I wanted to ask him how many proud Genogerians had died because of that bone-headed strategy, but I refrained. “I’m not asking you to run, I’m asking you to tell your men to find cover.” I pressed on, not giving his over-sized ego a chance to push my suggestion away. “Listen, I know how smart you are.” I hope he didn’t think I was being condescending, because honestly I wasn’t. They may look and act like brutes, but intelligence-wise, I bet that as a whole they were smarter than people. I hated to admit it but there it was. Drababan was at least on par with Einstein, and he was not the exception to the rule for his people like Albert was for ours. I would imagine there were far less Genogerians that would have qualified to be on the Jerry Springer Show. “It’s the numbers, Keecan. You’re on the losing side of numbers. All things being considered, the Mutes, umm, Devastators are more heavily armed and armored. Even if you stand toe-to-toe and possibly pull off a one-to-one kill, you’re going to fall somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty thousand souls short.”

  “They will have died valiantly.” Keecan seemed overly proud of himself and his soon-to-be dead compatriots.

  “All they’ll be is dead, and there will be a shitload of Mutes still alive to do more damage. Do you understand me?”

  He didn’t say anything, including “no” which was a plus.

  “I understand enough about your kind to know that you form relationships with those around you. That you do care for others, no matter the persona you display. Is there not another Genogerian here or somewhere else that you care for deeply?”

  “I have a newborn daughter that brings me great joy when I hold her in my arms.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.” I had my opening. “Now I need you to imagine some Mute unit ripping into your village and killing your daughter.” Harsh to say, I know, but I felt it very necessary to get my point across.

  “I will kill them!” he raged, taking the imagination part a little too far.

  “Not if you die here,” I told him, when he was done with his violent outburst. He had been stomping around on the roof so fiercely that I thought he was in danger of falling through.

  I don’t know if I expected him to see the truth in my words or not. I can honestly say I was pleased when I saw the light of recognition dawn in his eyes.

  “Go on,” he urged.

  “It’s called a tactical…(I almost said “retreat” and that would have been the end of our conversation)…placement.” It was all I could come up with in mid-sentence. “Some of your Genogerians will keep firing upon the enemy while others find cover. Then the Genogerians that have found protection will give covering fire while those others come and find their own place to shoot from.” It was all I could do to avoid words like, “hide” and “run” and “back.”

  He got the point, though. He said not another word to me and went over to his small group to discuss this new development. It was met with about the same resistance he’d given me. He must have used the “important to them” argument, because a good many of them had stomped around like he had. It was sort of comical, right up until the roof began to shake from their accumulated efforts.

  Keecan either convinced them or outranked them, don’t know, don’t care, but they all started to talk into a device they carried that seemed size-wise to be better suited for a human adolescent. That those fingers could be so deft given their size was strange. I guess I was just used to seeing the horror movies with the man in an oversized suit who could barely manipulate his phalanges, always looked like what they were—large rubber and foam appendages that couldn’t pick up anything. If you’ve ever noticed, those monsters used to grab everything with their palms like they couldn’t remember they actually had digits. Strange observation at an even stranger time.

  The Genos at the front lines didn’t seem to have the same misgivings those giving the orders at the rear had. They grasped the idea of not dying, well. The firing intensified, if a thing can even be possible. The wind changed and we were wafted with the sickeningly sweet stench of charred flesh. All great and fine when it’s a beef brisket, a little different when it’s a Genogerian. And for the record, meat-eaters don’t barbecue up well. The Mutes to the right that had been advancing gained about twenty yards seemingly in the span of a couple of breaths and then their surge was halted as the defending Genos held their ground, yielding it now much more begrudgingly.

  The Genos on the front lines had adapted quickly to the new tactic. When they were in threat of being run through, they would pull up their stakes, so to speak, and do the tactical withdrawal scenario again. This seemed to frustrate the Mutes to no end, as they would occasionally scream out in frustration from time to time at various points across the line. The advantage of this tactic was that more Mutes died than Genos, the disadvantage was that the war was slowly but continuously and relentlessly working its way towards us. I looked to the door that led to the stairwell more than a few times, wondering if I could get us out of here before the Mutes were upon us.

  “You’re going to get whiplash, Mike,” Tracy said, peering through her scope. How the hell did she even know what I was doing?

  “I always wondered what upstate Washington was like this time of year,” was all I could think to say. I took one more yearningly long look at the door and resigned myself to the fate that awaited us to the fore.

  Within ten minutes, our conventional weapons were in range. Most of the time it was like throwing rocks at elephants, but every once in a while we got lucky and a bullet found its way past the armor and into a head. Blood would arc up in a spray much like a model’s hair in a shampoo commercial and then the Mute would go down hard at that point. Unfortunately, there was a seemingly endless supply of soldiers behind it to take its place. The scene was horrific as the titans clashed, body parts becoming so much detritus as they littered the ground. Hand-to-hand combat was common as beast pummeled brute. Strange how the mind can filter out certain things, I could hear individual punches as bones cracked and cartilage snapped.

  The Mutes fought with an unmatched savagery, but the Genos fought for a higher cause. A Mute in trouble was an island unto himself, a Geno in trouble was a cause to rally behind, and rarely would one go down alone. Another ten minutes, and my pilfered Mute rifle was in range. Good thing, too, because I was getting low on ammunition and my barrel was getting warmer than it should be. What I wouldn’t have done to be able to go down to the front lines and get the hundreds of weapons that were not being used. Sort of, I mean, only if I could be invisible and invincible, otherwise it was a suicide trek. I’d more than likely get trampled underfoot as much as shot. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

  “Mike.” Tracy was leaning against the retaining wall loading up some magazines.

  “Yeah?” I asked, still targeting Mutes and shooting.

  “We’re going to be alone up here soon.”

  “I know, why do you think I was looking at that door?”

  “The fuck you mean alone?” BT stopped shooting to ask. He was looking over at me, his eyebrows furrowed.

  “The Genos are going to pull back past us and then we’re going to be sitting here like the fucking crown jewels.” I had not stopped shooting. “Waiting to be plucked.”

  “Plucked? I don’t want to get plucked. I keep asking myself why I stay with you. We’ve been fighting hordes of Genos in Los Angeles, then we get sucked into a Stryver hive, kidnapped one of those ugly bastards, then, somehow…I’m now fighting alongside an enemy that we were killing what, three weeks ago? A month? I don’t even know anymore. To kill another enemy hell-bent on world domination…how is this possible?”

  “How’s it feel?”

  “How the fuck does what feel, Mike?” BT asked. He was more than a littl
e pissed off.

  “To be a part of my life? This has become my new normal. If I’m not playing through some weird twisted variation, then I’m just hanging around waiting for it to happen.”

  “Can I say amen to that?” Tracy had finished loading her magazine, popped it into the mag well, and pushed the bolt release to drive it home and chamber a round. She was back in business, picking off targets in less than a couple of seconds and at this range it was much easier to hit a head the size of a beach ball.

  Kap could only shake his head and laugh. “Gotta admit, I wish I was going to be around long enough to have grandkids so I could tell them this story.”

  “Grandkids? Screw that. I wish I were going to be around long enough to go to the pub and tell this story next week. I’d drink free all night,” Reaper said with a smile.

  Kap had pretty much been on reload duty from the start, as standing in that half bent over position caused severe vertigo from his concussion. He was pretty angry to be out of the fight. He’d tried but he knew he was wasting ammunition and had said the same. “Can’t keep my fucking arms steady,” he’d said as he sat and gathered all the empty mags and began shoving bullets into them. We’d all been grateful for that.

  Keecan came over a few seconds after Tracy’s admission to a higher power. “Your group fights well. There is honor here.” He paused. “But there is no escape.”

  We all paused for a moment to look at him. For a millisecond, I thought that maybe he had decided he wasn’t too keen on this little cease-fire treaty we had come to terms on. I expected his group to turn and just open fire. It would have been over before it started. When it became clear that a double-cross was not on his mind, I asked him what he meant.

  “I have heard from my brethren down the entire lengths of the line. We are killing the Devastator troops and yet we are still yielding ground. A time will come when there is no place else to go.”

  “We could leave here,” I told him, referring to the rooftop.

  “Where would we go, Michael Talbot, that they would not follow?”