Field of Heroes

by Craig Saunders

  Gazing beyond the mercilessly bisected halves of the still squirming man, Alabama discovered several more gore-battered corpses beaten into pulpy chunks that were only recognizable based on the torn white cloth plastered to their decimated remains, some of these victims literally smashed into some of the sophisticated machinery relevant to Alabama’s stasis tube, the panels and consoles dented and rapidly bursting in explosions of sparks due to the colossal damage they had received. In a corner of the room, propped against one of the consoles was a corpse that was mostly intact except for a gargantuan chunk of glass skived into the scientist’s face just above the lower teeth, severing his head in half, and lodging into the machinery behind him. The upper portion of the man’s skull was nestled in his lap, smothered in gore, eyes wide with terror and begrimed in blood. Just beyond so much overwhelming carnage, Alabama located the exit to the room—a massive, blast-proof sliding door that had literally been ripped apart like a piece of paper, massive metal chunks littered throughout the room amongst the glass and gore. However, not only was the door dislodged from the wall, but most of the wall had been invalidated as well, debris and rebar surrounding the doorway, overall suggesting that a bulldozer had barged into the room… But where was that bulldozer?

  Alabama couldn’t turn around in his stasis, but based on the shattered glass surrounding him, he couldn’t have been the only one enduring stasis in that room, meaning…

  The life was just about to fade from the eyes of the man when suddenly, a massive, blood-caked, fleshy spike tore into his backside, drilling a solid hole through his midriff, and gouging a fracture into the floor beneath him. The man’s body immediately stiffened as it was paralyzed with pain, blood and bone chunks slurring from the corners of the scientist’s mouth as he yawped in agony. Then instantaneously, a behemoth body skittered atop the man, two more death-spikes joining the anterior appendage, suddenly revealing to be legs that connected to a monstrous, gore-caked abdomen, the rest of the titan’s body disappearing behind the splotches of blood on Alabama’s cell except for two, freakishly long, lanky arms that concluded in clawed, ensanguined fingers.

  Without warning, one of these hands suddenly surged downwards with startling speed, grasping the scientist by his head, its needling fingers easily spanning the circumference of the man’s skull before two of those morbidly cuspidate fingertips suddenly sunk brain-deep into their victim’s eye sockets. The scientist brayed with torment, his strident screams resounding from the cruor-daubed walls, but only for a moment before his fracas shifted into a RRRRRIIIPP as the monstrous hand jerked back, effortlessly tearing the man’s head from his shoulders. The hand and the disembodied head disappeared beyond the blood-smeared glass only for gore-caked shards of the skull and diffused brain matter to deluge the corpse simultaneous to several deafening, grotesque, repulsive crunching noises.

  Alabama watched in awe-struck horror, literally baffled by the existence of such a creature. What he was seeing in that very moment couldn’t have possibly been happening, yet his senses were far too stimulated for this entire ordeal to simply be a nightmare. This was reality—

  --No, hell.

  --And hell quickly escalated when the monster suddenly ceased its movements, and based on its sullen body language—despite the fact he couldn’t see its face through the sanguineous glass—Alabama knew it was looking right at him. Not even a second later, its goliath, claw-fingered hand perforated the glass, quickly wrapping around his throat before yanking him out his chilly confinement in a violent, ripping furor. Alabama howled not only with pain as the entire tube around him shattered, lancinating chunks of glass into his bare flesh, but also out of sheer terror as the lurid creature lifted him several feet from the ground with a single arm, holding his face level with its, which at first appeared as a crimson glow laced in white, speckling chunks, but Alabama quickly discovered they were just the heaping red masses of slivered nerve-bundles and minced bones that bespattered its ashen, demoniac skull.

  Grasping its direful arm with either of his enfeebled own, Alabama could only squirm impetuously, suspended helplessly in its grip, his legs hanging delicately below, unmoving, debilitated and rendered immobile due to his detainment in stasis. He was forced to stare back into the deep-set, black void of its eyes, eyes so philistine and livid that a soul couldn’t possibly belong to the creature. Gazing past its harrowing eyes, Alabama quickly observed that in place of a nose, it contained an indentation shrouded in scar tissue. Worst of all was its flesh-drenched maw that Alabama’s skull hovered before, a mouth lined with several serrated, gore-smirched, shark-like teeth set awkwardly in its jaws alongside two malignant insect-like mandibles that clicked and grinded in an odious manner.

  Alabama and the demon had not even made eye contact for a second when its head vehemently snapped back, its menacing, gore-satiated mouth unbarring in a deplorable demeanor, its mandibles poised to envelop Alabama’s skull in a gluttonous chomp of execrable euphoria—

  --CHT-BOOM!!!

  Alabama cried out in surprise when suddenly, a massive wall of flames dispersed across the monster’s back in an explosive manner that Alabama easily recognized as the ignition of a forty-millimeter grenade, and in reaction to the blast, the beast tossed Alabama across the room, and into a surfeit pile of glass that instantly incised the muscle fibers of Alabama’s backside as he was grounded. Alabama howled with pain as shards of glass embezzled his flesh, some seeping deep beneath the skin, and clinging to his body like parasites. Disoriented and trying to recover from his scarifying, glass-laced plunder, he heard voices, followed by fully automatic gunfire, clearly 5.56X45 millimeter.

  “HOLY SHIT!” roared an outraged soul. “THE THING HAD FEAR!”

  “SHOOT IT!” boomed in another, but the stream of bullets from their arsenal of M16s and M249s didn’t last.

  Looking up, Alabama watched in a state of hopeless negation as the monster that had grappled him—its back now charred, and peeling with burnt, crispy, steaming flesh—whirled to the doorway where Alabama instantly recognized a few of his fellow Marines, the first being Quan, the one who had fired the forty-millimeter from an M203A1 under barrel grenade launcher attachment on his rifle, and one of the leaders of the other teams in his platoon. Behind him, Chuck and Roy, the twin bodybuilder machine gun team who had often been classified as human tanks based on their tremendous bulk that even dwarfed Alabama’s, were poking their LMG’s into the room past Quan, unloading on the lanky, three-legged monstrosity as it emitted a bloodthirsty howl that suggested that a forty-millimeter to the back at close-range had not hurt it, but instead, further enraged it.

  “FALL BACK! FALL BACK, NOW!” Quan hollered, and he and the twins began to back away quickly while continuing to open fire on the monster, blasting away massive chunks out of its body, speckling the walls and ceiling in its cruor—

  --But the blood-ravenous, rabid colossus didn’t even seem to notice the 5.56X45 millimeter rounds that chiseled its flesh, skiving holes into its vitals. Instead, without mercy, it charged through the storm of bullets, and as its bulk engulfed the image of the three Marines, the next thing Alabama heard was ripping and screaming with the stroke of one of its massive, lanky arms. As a result, Alabama was suddenly more sober than he had been in his entire life when his fear mutated into a primal, uncontrollable, unstoppable rage.

  “NO!” he roared in a state of indispensible anger as a mammoth sheet of gore washed over the brawn of the monster, and poured into the chamber behind it in a wave-like fashion, strewing what was doubtlessly Quan’s blood and guts throughout the room. “NO! YOU FUCKING BASTARD!”

  Teeth clenched and eyes narrowed in a despicable manner, Alabama launched himself forward, and gasped as he simply belly-flopped weakly into a pool of blood and gore, still unable to move his legs. Glancing up, Alabama watched, hopelessly engulfed in enmity as the gore-caked abomination then charged through the doorway, swinging its arms relentlessly in what became a cacophony of enraged, feral growls, bruta
lized screams of unimaginable agony, the ominous grating and grinding sounds of metal being refabricated, and the grotesque, splatter-rich sound of flesh ripping from bone.

  “FUCK YOU, GOD DAMN IT!” Alabama screamed furiously as he limply dragged himself across the glass and gore-littered floor with his hands, intent on getting to his fellow Marines before the monster could get to any more of them—

  --But it was already too late as the monster disappeared through the hole in the door it had extirpated, and in the hematic trail it left behind were the butchered corpses of Quan, Chuck, and Roy, their limbs torn off like the arms and legs of dolls, their insides messily doused across the walls and ceiling, pieces of their intestines even deluging from the rafters alike the scientist before. Squirming closer to the doorway, Alabama felt his flesh beginning to boil as averting sensations suffused. Just in the midst of the doorway, Alabama began to make out more of the blood-splattered hall outside, which lacked quality lighting as the bulbs that illuminated the generic, grey, industrial corridor hung lopsided, flashing in a strobe-like effect. As these lights flickered on and off malignantly, Alabama struggled to further see the remnants of his three comrades, but eventually made out the three gore-smeared lumps concealed in dismaying dimness. Quan, Chuck, and Roy’s disembodied heads all lay close together, rocking gently due to their imbalance on the catwalk-like floors of the hall, the expressions on their bloodied faces immortally stained with disgust and horror. Beyond their severed limbs and strewn entrails were the remains of their center-masses, once massive, powerful slabs of muscle now transformed into pulps of gore, tattered in shredded, blood-drenched armor with ribcage and vertebrae visibly curving out of the raw nerve-endings.

  Just outside the door and to the right, Alabama heard more gunfire, followed by swears then screams of pain and terror that were quickly drowned out by the inhuman growls of the beast and the tearing of bodies. Hearing these screams, Alabama knew he had to push himself to move faster or he’d never get to his Marines, and crawling through the carnage-imbrued crater of a doorway, Alabama entered the massive hall-like corridor outside. Just like the room he had served his detainment in, this hall was permeated in blood and gore as well, and all around on either side were multiple blast-slide doors leading to rooms marked: cells. To his left at the very end of the hallway was an even bigger blast-slide door labeled: mess hall, and at the very end on his right which was nearly double the distance from his location was another alike door labeled: living quarters.

  Alabama hesitated for a moment as he reached the ocean of dismembered carnage Quan, Chuck, and Roy had been reduced to. Reaching out towards their bodies, Alabama pulled back giant heaps of shattered armor that despite being bulletproof had been abrogated to small, puzzle piece chunks. Examining the carnage even further, Alabama discovered that their rifles and machineguns had been undermined as well, literally torn to metallic shards, the bodies of the pieces snapped like toothpicks. What the hell kind of three-legged demon were they up against?!

  Almost overwhelmed in despair as much as he was melting with the burning, fiery, embers of rage, Alabama couldn’t help but stray amongst the brutalized corpses of his comrades, struggling to accept the thick, meaty chunks of gore they had been quelled to. Unable to validate his surroundings, Alabama reached forward and picked up Quan’s head, turning it to face him. He couldn’t even see Quan’s lifeless eyes beneath the satiate crimson sheets that besmeared them, and all Alabama could think of was the times they had spent in the service together. Quan had been a role-model Marine, a well-respected, merciless, diehard warrior and a gentle, law-abiding citizen in times of peace at the same time. He was possibly the greatest team leader in their platoon, and Alabama could vouch for it on the things their teams had coordinated in both war and simple, everyday life. Alabama was even the one who nominated him for a promotion to squad leader, a promotion that was likely to happen… His death was unforgivable.

  Dropping Quan’s head, Alabama let out an indistinguishable roar of unrelenting rage and anguish. His gaze quickly drifted to the two human tanks: Chuck and Roy. They were astounding specimens of inhuman bulk, possessing a hulk that even proved superior to Alabama’s colossal slabs of muscle. Alabama would not only forget the time he had spent fighting alongside the two human tanks on the front, but the quality gym-time they spent on the home front, where Alabama would try to adapt to obscene workout programs the two testosterone-junkies had designed to torment him… Their deaths were unforgivable.

  “AL…!”

  He heard the voice to his right, followed by a gurgling croak, and as his head jerked in that direction, Alabama saw another one of his fellow Marines at the top of a flight of nearby stairs, extending either of his hemoglobin-suffused hands towards Alabama, his eyes wide with fear, his face livid with certain death as blood and bone chunks burst from his mouth in vehement vomiting.

  “BILLY?!” Alabama shouted, instantly recognizing his compatriot, and in response, reached his hand out as if he could grasp it beyond the colossal distance, yet he knew he had no hopes of making it to Billy’s aid in time; not without legs.

  Billy was one of the younger Marines in the platoon, and due to his age and extreme cockiness, he had received the nickname: Billy the Kid. But Alabama could only watch in hopeless horror as Billy the Kid’s legacy came to a sudden, tragic, and very grisly end. The doomed Marine’s armor was already torn to shreds, and his legs despoiled and relocated somewhere down the stairs. Alabama could see chains of viscera oozing from Billy’s abdominal region and streaking down the flight, and beyond his visual—

  --Where suddenly, like a fishing line straining as a whopper took the bait, Billy’s entrails suddenly straightened out as something down the stairs—something demonic and depraved—snagged on them.

  “AL-AL!!!” Billy screamed helplessly as more blood and gall trickled from his mouth, and with a single yank, he was pulled down the stairs by his own intestines, his nails grinding across the steps as he clawed adamantly at the ground, eventually disappearing down the flight where the ripping and tearing of flesh and armor commenced.

  “BILLY!” Alabama yelled once more before he quickly salvaged a sidearm from one of his fallen Marine’s corpses—a M9A1 9X19 millimeter parabellum semi-automatic handgun—and lunged forward, proceeding to drag himself across the gore-swamped floor as fast as his arms could possibly move after their attenuating duration in stasis. “BILLY, NO! YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

  The strain of rage pumping throughout Alabama’s bloodstream like an infectious disease was so pure that he could no longer feel the dagger-like sting of glass shards that incised his flesh, grating against the bone. His anger was so collateral that he felt molten lava suffusing his veins, demanding an eruption of volcanic proportions. His fury grew ever more as he heard more gunfire resound below only to be silenced by screaming and ripping caterwauling seconds later, the growls of the beast reverberating back up the stairs. The cacophony below was doubtlessly the sound of an entire squad being boorishly liquidated; a section in Alabama’s platoon that he was certain had been deployed to rescue him from his confinement. Officially perceiving a world coated in red, Alabama decided he would butcher the three-legged demon below no matter what it took.

  Finally reaching the stairs, Alabama attempted to double time it by propelling his body forward with full exertion, only to pitch beyond his balance, hit his face, and begin tumbling down the entire flight. Alabama blustered with pain as some of his stitches tore lose and the metallic bulk of the stairs battered his flesh. He winced as his limbs dipped in pools of blood and raked over butchered bodies on the way down. Then, as his calamitous falling ceased, the floor he had crumpled to became too moistly soft to possibly be the actual floor.

  Opening his eyes and tilting his head up, Alabama then gasped in total shock, his brows twitching in a dismaying manner at the raunchy sight. Below him was assumed the appearance of a mass grave—a mountain of butchered, dismembered, pulpy corpses ranging from scientists t
o sanitary workers and other employees of the facility, to militant figures, some of which were his fellow Marines and other soldiers belonging to the enemy. Not even on the fields of war had Alabama seen death so thick. Clustered up in the small hall at the base of the double-deck of stairs was what must’ve been a hundred brutalized corpses stacked halfway to the blood-doused ceiling. Severed limbs and skeletal, ensanguined corpses amongst piles of shredded organs and exenterated intestines were strewn throughout the narrow hall, and as Alabama followed the trail of gore to where it thinned out at a doorway down the dim-lit hall—

  --He spotted the demon he so odiously sought to raze. Alabama trembled, not out of fear, but out of unstable, unrelenting rage as his bloodthirsty, animalistic eyes twitched irresistibly. The grotesque, three-legged abomination stood just past the doorway, stooping near what appeared to be a monorail track that ascended into a void-like sheet of black beyond. Around the beast, several of Alabama’s fellow Marines were strewn throughout the subway as brutalized carcasses torn in halves and thirds and fourths, and in the midst of the carnage, the monster could be seen snatching up its final victim—a gore-battered, blood-caked corpse that had been ripped diagonally in half from the shoulder to the opposing ribcage, several chains of intestines extending to the floor, and the still-beating heart of the somehow still-living victim visible through the skinless cavity of the sternum. The Marine twitched with hellish agony before the monster’s head suddenly surged forward, clasping its mandibles around the man’s entire scalp, and biting it off, swallowing his skull in one piece.