Her eyes hadn’t changed much.
“You know you were my first, Rach.”
“Yeah… you were my first too… that night.”
“Yeah. That was a good night.” He moved swiftly, before she had a chance to protest. He pulled out his pistol and shot her. Her eyes canted backwards, as if looking at the wound in her forehead. Then she fell forward and was still.
He breathed out a shuddering breath. It was hard to believe. “They’re all dead…”
All of them. Hot tears… Rachel Steele lay in front of him, shredded and pathetic. The reflected firelight diffused idiotically. Her rictus was too wide, and her neck’s angle was all wrong. He kept thinking about the pitcher-and-a-half of beer that Phillips owed him. He lifted his goggles and wiped salty wetness, and thought about the Mechanic’s sacrifice.
Silence and bodies. Steele was dead. Raxx was dead. His one-time lover, and his only friend left on Earth. “They’re all dead…”
“Yeah, they are.”
His pistol snapped up. He didn’t have the strength to hold it with both hands, his left was steadying him on the stairs, but his aim didn’t waiver.
“Whoa, relax man, it’s me.”
He blinked a couple times before lowering the weapon. “How the hell are you still alive?”
Raxx grinned, “Well, my momma always said; when somebody says duck, you’d best damn-well duck, boy!”
Master Corporal Shaffer was sucking air and coughing up blood. The dressing on his chest had come loose, and air was entering the cavity and collapsing his lung. It hurt with a deep, low pain. He just couldn’t hold the dressing in place anymore. The tourniquet tied around his arm was keeping him from bleeding out, but it had also made his hand go numb.
Part of him was detached, morbidly fascinated by how much pain he was feeling. Each breath felt like a knife stabbing him in the chest, his arm tingled as if a frost-fire were consuming it, while his uninjured legs felt warm and fuzzy. Beneath him the cement was cold. It was odd, he thought, how the pain was making his eyes bulge open. His good hand kept trying to grab something, anything, but it was too weak. He could barely lift it.
He couldn’t remember how long he’d been here. He couldn’t tell if the ambient glow was from the fire he’d seen earlier, or if it was just the red haze of pain. Suddenly the light changed. Yellow lines swept across him and a face swung into view. Sergeant Iain Wentworth. Behind transparent goggles the man looked down sadly, a pity that Shaffer felt he deserved. His accomplice stood behind him, indifferent and wrapped in shadows, with several weapons slung across his back. They’d looted the rest of the Section. The others would all be dead. “Traitor…” he said.
Wentworth’s lips moved, but his words travelled as if through deep water. “I’m no traitor. It’s the CO and his officers who are traitors. They betrayed all of us.” He continued speaking, but the details were lost, and Shaffer didn’t feel like arguing. Then he said something else; he was offering to end it. Shaffer’s wounds were going to kill him, he said.
“No…” his voice croaked. He could barely speak, barely think. If his life was over then it was over, but before he died he was going to suck up every last bit of it. This might be all he had left but he’d make the most of it. “Light…” it was difficult to speak. “Sun…” Wentworth and his friend looked at each other. They spoke but he couldn’t make out the words.
Putting down the looted kit, they picked him up by the shoulders. It hurt, but everything hurt, so he didn’t mind. Between them, they carried him up to the surface.
It was funny, he thought, how he wasn’t angry at Wentworth for doing this to him. He hadn’t forgiven him; Wentworth was still his enemy. He’d carry that to the grave — the thought almost made him laugh — but still, he felt no bitterness.
A memory came to him then. His first girlfriend, what was her name? She was in the Service Battalion when she died. He remembered how it felt the first time he’d slid his hand up her shirt and cupped her breasts through the training bra. They’d kissed for hours but he’d been too nervous to touch the nipple with his fingers, the hard nub had been pressing into the palm of his hand while his fingers played with the straps.
By the time Raxx and Wentworth reached the surface Master Corporal Schaffer was dead.
The sun had returned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Davis M.J. Aurini was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario before moving to Aidrie, Alberta in the late- eighties. After High School he traveled back and forth across the country, spent seven years serving as an Infantry soldier in Canada’s military reserve, and studied History at McMaster University.
He currently lives in Calgary, and contributes to the alternative-right blogosphere at StaresAtTheWorld.com
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Davis M.J. Aurini
All Rights Reserved
ISBN-13: 978-1480121829
ISBN-10: 1480121827
BISAC: Fiction / Science Fiction / Military
