Clearing his throat, he spit on the ground.
“Roger that,” he grumbled.
A unit from the rear line crouch-walked their way to John’s team. They were a Sweeper party of three. A unit similar to the one John was commonly assigned to. The team’s leader, Sergeant Carlson, yelled as he closed in on them, “I think they want them captured alive. What do you think, John?”
“Alive?” He responded, panning his eyes across his men. “Nobody’s getting out of here alive.”
The great star-of-the-sky’s brightness reflected off the crystalline water of the contrails that were pinned high in the atmosphere. By the purpling haze of light filling up at the horizon, every man knew that the daylight of Red was only a few more hours short of giving way to the darkness. Without any night vision devices on hand, John understood the severity of their predicament, the advantage they would be giving to the enemy if they did not move quickly to secure a base of operation closer to the area in which they were holding out.
With the order to commence, his and Carlson’s teams expedited their transition into the ruins. Divided into several two-man groups, John ordered his teams to move cautiously under the watchful cover of every other member. Heavily organized and methodically advancing, they headed towards the towers of the city’s central hub, visibly peeking over the ruinous heaps and crumbling, skeletal frames of their surroundings.
John considered the distance on his map. If they did not run into anything to hinder them, they would arrive at the first of the great towers by last light at best, or in the early darkness at worst.
As the light of the sky was beginning to dim, the Sweepers reached the border of the inner city. Constantly slowed down throughout the day by intermittent shots fired from the distant buildings, John was relieved that they had made the journey in such a short span of time, and without any casualties to boot. Each member of his team was feeling the exhaustion of the trek. Dehydrated and parched with thirst, under duress from their weariness, they had to take extra precautions with silence and motion due to the close proximity of the enemy, as they searched for a secure place to pass the night away.
The darkness had unfolded itself over them like a hostile sheet of fabricated nightmares. John sat with his rifle on his lap leaning behind the cover of a wall, just below a blown out window frame. Listening to the radio chatter through his earpiece, he began cursing the Command for letting his men get into such a plight. Gassing the deserters would have brought the whole fiasco to a closure long ago, he thought.
Central Command had discounted the enemy’s size and strength during the morning’s battle analysis, resulting in every Sweep teams’ overconfidence and lack of preparedness with regards to their posturing and necessary equipment. As far as John was concerned, the blood of Sweep members was on their hands.
Over the airwaves, the screams and mutilating deaths of his comrades fighting the deserters in other, distant parts of the planet poured through in volleys of mentally torturous waves. They were a constant reminder for all the men of his command to keep themselves vigilant, even with the grueling heat and nagging desire to rest tugging at their minds and tearing down their bodies.
After listening to the minute-by-minute updates on the open channel for several hours, dozens of raging gun battles and countless skirmishes had yielded nothing of significance: no Sweeper teams were able to report the capture of a single Valley fighter, but the casualties were mounting up among those of John’s own community.
Having no idea as to the size of the enemy force they were soon to be facing, he was beginning to feel the nudge of anxiety in his gut. Was it a whole formation waiting for them out there? Or, was it merely a single unit with a strong, well-informed leader? There was no way he could tell, and Command was not helping them in any way. Turn the fear into hate, the motto rang in his ears. He followed it hard. He hated the deserters with a passion. Killing them would be a joy, if only he could find them. He was doing it for Sofia, after all, if he remembered correctly. That was the reason, he thought to himself, wasn’t it? She had been his love, his life, his… like coals of fire, so the baser emotions fueled his anger. He pushed the thought from his mind, another morsel of that past life that had somehow managed to remain hidden in the cracks and crevices of his brain. He despised it. It made him soft and weak. Weakness needed to be dealt with. It was an energy that needed to be refocused into a new form: hatred towards the enemy. It was the guiding factor that had kept him alive for so long… if his existence could be called living at all.
The tips of the buildings of the inner city were feeling the heat of the Great Star as it arose over the horizon, touching the skyscrapers reaching up to the skies. Due to the heights of the structures, they seemingly existed among the unusually high quantity of contrails that crossed through the blue-green expanse. In order to get an upper hand on the situation, the team leaders, John and Carlson, had agreed to a pre-dawn excursion, with the idea that they would secure a safe zone long before the enemy had knowledge of their intentions. Seeing the revealing glow of light descending upon them, the Sweepers picked up the pace, moving into the shadows of the buildings, staying within close proximity to immediate cover in case of incoming arms fire.
Amazed at the ingenuity of the mind of man, John had never seen such towering monstrosities before. In his nearly twelve years on the planet, this was the first time he had ever stepped foot so deeply into the ruins. Packed together with such close proximity, the designed layout of the city vaguely reminded him of that other world of his, the distant past that he had once belonged to: Labor, where the light of the Star was not permitted in. He dropped his eyes from their skyward gaze: nostalgia was evil. He had to kill it before it killed him.
Entering into the lobby of what had once been a business construct, John could see the faintly visible brass letters that were set into the concrete on one of its walls. The structure was once known by the name Adelaide and Sons, Incorporated.
Ordering his team to clear the area and move to higher ground, they swept through each of the first floor’s adjacent rooms before ascending the stairwells leading to the upper levels. Taking up tactical positions at the mid-point of the building, they were approximately forty stories above the ground before they settled in.
Carlson’s team had moved into the building across the street, setting up its own base of operations. Their plan was to head to the roof of the skyscraper, hoping to gain a better view of the enemy. After nearly forty-five minutes, the leader of the three-man team reported his findings to John.
“There’s no advantage from this high point. The buildings are too close together to see anything other than the next one in line. Over,” Carlson said.
“Alright. Rendezvous with me at the Adelaide lobby. We’ll set this place up as our command post and go from there. Over,” John responded into his microphone.
As Carlson affirmed his message, John peeked out the window. The morning had brought an eerie calmness with it, as there were no snipers frustrating his team with random potshots, no explosive eruptions of resistance, not even a hint of breeze existed to rustle the dust into the air. The deserters were up to something, John thought. Their inaction, coupled with the mood set by the stillness in the wind, was a witness to their scheming.
Continuing the anticipated wait, the seconds hand on John’s watch unrelentingly ticked by. It had been nearly forty-five minutes since he had sent a small unit to meet Carlson and his men downstairs, and nearly an hour had passed from the time that he had heard the last words from Carlson himself.
Taking another peak out the window, he spied out from the edge of his field of view the movement of an unnatural entity in the streets below. His binocular brought the culprit vividly into view. It appeared that a deserter scout was advancing towards their position, moving haphazardly from cover to cover.
Apparently unaware that he was being watched, the soldier’s actions were novice at best, and poorly executed. He was the only moving object
in a world that existed with the stillness of a painting.
John immediately assumed his presence to be a trap. Radioing to the men down below, he informed them of the incoming enemy, but refused their request for engagement: the peculiarity of their predicament required a careful balance in his consideration of the use of force against those potential advantages that forbearance could sometimes procure.
Like a spider in a dark room that had just been exposed to light, the scout scrambled through the rubble in a disorderly fashion. He appeared to be a man in mental turmoil. Eventually making his way between the Adelaide building and the structure that Carlson was last heard from, he held his position, leaning against the twisted, metal frame of a burnt out transporter.
Observing the event through the sights of their rifles, John’s men remained in their hidden locations throughout the lobby. As the unarmed man ran to cover amongst the debris of a fallen wall across the street, a pile that lay just outside the building’s blown-out doorway, several of the men began to apply the tension to their triggers, anticipating the kill.
Removing his backpack, the deserter undid the straps of its cover and reached inside, unknowingly so near to death should he make the wrong move. In the same manner that the scout’s hand entered the sack, so it returned: empty. He pulled the straps back over his shoulders. After cautiously looking around, he disappeared inside Carlson’s stronghold.
“Carlson, you’ve got a single individual making his way to your location,” John spoke with urgency into his microphone.
There was no response, not even a hint of static.
“Carlson. I repeat. You’ve got a single individual making his way to your location. Do you copy?”
Again, there was no reply. Switching his radio to the open channel John received nothing but silence. Realizing that the communication was either jammed or that Sweeper Command had been overrun, he called out to the two men in the adjacent room, informing them of their current situation. John took a minor comfort in hearing the message shouting down the line and into the other rooms: his team was still intact, but initiating orders would no longer be done through the silent whispers of their individual communication devices.
As the heat of the morning was beginning to rise in conjunction with the Great Star of the sky, John wiped the sweat from his brow, handing his rifle to the agent kneeling at his side. Removing the binoculars from his vest pocket, he intended to scan through the windows of the opposing building, hoping to get a glimpse of Carlson’s team or, perhaps, of the scout that was now in their midst.
The eyecups had just made contact with the sockets of his skull when the roaring billow of flames and scattering fragments of concrete exploded out the sides of the skyscraper, tearing away the walls and structural integrity from the lobby below. The destruction arose approximately twenty stories upward.
As the entire team stationed on his floor abandoned their posts, rushing to the aid of John and the other men exposed to the detonation, the din of twisting metal and crumbling concrete accompanying the swaying building across the street filled the air with its ominous tune.
Tipping towards its side, a thunderous wave of ashen, gray cloud blew through the windows as the tower crumbled into another building across the way, disintegrating the two structures into a single mantle of wreckage. Before pulling his face shield down, John shouted the order for his men to retreat to the lobby floor.
With their visibility obscured, the agents groped around, calling out names and positions until they had transitioned into a single file line, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him, the other hand on the grips of their rifles. There was no way to expedite the move. Everything would have to be done with a slow, methodical order until they were in the clear. Yelling out to the agents John had earlier sent down to meet Carlson’s team, the lead man was cautious not to become the first casualty by way of friendly fire.
Entering the lobby was a disorienting action, as the grayed-out world was so different in appearance from their first encounter with it. The street outside was fogged from existence. The city in general seemed to have been turned into a black and white photograph with its sharply contrasted bi-colored stains splashed upon its image.
Shouting for his team to hold position, John could hear his order moving up the line in the echoing of various inflections and pitches of the agent’s voices, bringing the team’s advancement to a standstill. Using their shoulders to keep his path, John worked his way to the front of their train. Once in position, he shouted over his shoulder giving the command to resume their egress from the Adelaide. Leading his men into the smoky world outside, his plan was to backtrack their way to safety, to wait for the dust to settle before re-advancing upon the enemy.
Surrounded by the thickness of the outdoor atmosphere, the visibility was less than an arm’s length from the tip of his nose. Through his visor, John could see the hazy particles and debris gently hovering around his field of view, floating around his head like fish in a pond. Looking back he could just make out his own reflection in the facemask of the agent following close behind him.
After a moment of time had elapsed, he realized how disoriented he was without his sense of sight. It was difficult to gauge with any degree of accuracy the distance they had traveled or the amount of time that had passed since their extrication from the building. At the slow, steady pace at which they were moving, John figured that they must have crossed somewhere just over ten meters, but he was certain it was well under twenty.
In the eerie quiet of the ashen cloud, as if a beetle whizzed by his ear, John could hear the buzzing of an unseen object passing between him and the agent to his rear. A peculiar snap reverberated from behind him. He felt the agent’s hand slip down his back, followed by a heavy thud at his feet.
Stopping to look back, the smog was too thick to clearly visualize anything with any distinction, but he could make out the silhouette of the agent lying on the ground. Before his mind could inform his muscles to react, causing him to kneel down and assist his fallen comrade, another snap resounded from the thickness before him, accompanied by a spray of bloody droplets across his visor, and the gurgled drowning of one of his unseen men.
“Take cover,” John yelled, dropping prone to his elbows and knees, crawling blindly through the street.
The quietness within the dusty shroud suddenly exploded into flashes of dispersed lights and bursts of automatic weapons. Screams of agony and cursing arose with the wildly returning fire of the Sweeper agents throwing the lead from their weapons in the general directions of the incoming attack.
“Fall back,” John yelled, but his voice was overcome by the intensity of the din, and the loss of electronic communication had left each man to his own fate. Firing in a rash and uncontrolled manner behind him, John retreated from the fight, running back down the street that had led them to the Adelaide building the day before.
Lost in the haze and temporarily devoid of rationalization, he stumbled through the rubble, confused and tormented for abandoning his post in the manner that he did. Tripping to the ground and rolling down an embankment of debris, he abruptly found himself lying beside the torn up carcass of the deserter scout. His face had been torn from his skull and he was missing both the limbs on his left side. The explosive that he had planted had done its job too well.
Sitting up, John could hear the humming of the bullets overhead. The battle was playing out a short distance away. Sweeper Command was either staying silent and out of the fight, or else John was alone, and currently without a functional chain of command that he was being held accountable to.
Searching the man’s body, he felt a gasmask pouch pinned underneath the dead weight. Rolling the corpse onto its back he removed the scout’s filtering device from its satchel and opened his own facial visor. The particulate matter of the air entering his lungs caused him to cough and choke. He placed the mask upon his face and sealed it against his skin. Removing the gas canisters that the soldier had at
tached to his vest, John clipped them to the loops on his own chest armor, keeping the last two in each hand. It was time to play by the Sweeper’s rules.
The automatic fire from the deserters still raged fiercely against the few remaining agents holed up inside the Adelaide building. The cloud of dust was beginning to settle, and the visibility was such, that the men and women closing in upon them appeared as shadows scurrying about in the silhouetted hills of rubble strewn across the streets outside.
With the clanking of several cans rolling into the middle of the street, followed by the eruptive popping of their triggering mechanisms, the deadly gas began to evacuate into the surrounding atmosphere.
“Gas,” came the screams of the deserters.
The exclamation was repeated throughout the immediate vicinity by a quantity of soldiers greater than John had anticipated. They were not a mere squad, nor a platoon size unit. He, along with the last few men under his command, was facing a formation, perhaps two. Tossing out a few more canisters, he advanced his way to an opposing street that ran parallel to the Adelaide, taking up a position in a building to the rear of the enemy.
With the gas forcing them back, John was able to observe them from his hidden vantage point. They were fleeing to their awaiting transporters, speeding off in the opposite direction from his position. Removing his map from his pocket, John could see that they were escaping towards the distant Red deserts, which began approximately twenty kilometers to the far side of the ruins.
As the last two squads of deserters struggled over the wreckage of the fallen building, the first four-man team to scale the destruction sprinted to one of their awaiting machines. With a dust trail following close behind it, the retreating vehicle disappeared into the ruins, leaving the few remaining survivors without support. John could tell by the manner in which the former squad had hastened in their escape, showing little regard for those unable to keep up, that they would not be returning to help, even if the last of the soldiers required it.
The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey Page 30
