Exerpt - Sci-fi Novel (WIP)
It had all happened before.
He’d seen this same exact scenario play out over and over and over in his head, in the midst of confused dreams and exhaustion-induced hallucinations, each time more detailed and yet more frenetic than the one preceding.
Stumbling, crawling, lying with his face in the scorched earth. Eyes unseeing through the mangled, twisted remains of his ops helmet, ash and dust mixed with tears like paste over his eyes. His head, ringing like the prayer-hall bell tower at mid-day.
He coughed, choking on the acrid smoke — real, this time, even if the rest of him felt more imaginary than ever. The ash in the air forced itself on to him with every laboured breath, an abrasive force against the back of his throat and heaving, burning lungs. His eyes watered, diluting and veiling the scene before him, until all he could see were ghosts running aimlessly among the threads of water woven into his eyelashes, flickering and disappearing among the blazing orange of dancing flames.
“Karaya!” His voice did not sound his own; distant, hollow — a child shouting through a metal tube at the dim light on the other end.
The only dim light he’d seen in days.
“Oijak!” He had put all the strength he’d had in his vocal chords; and yet he’d wondered if the noise he made was more than a whisper.
“Wykora!” A painful force wrapped itself around his foot, dragged him down to the ground. He hissed as the gashes on his hands filled with dirt and gravel, forced into his flesh by the impact. Unseeing through his burning eyes, he kicked blindly at the thing holding him captive. Each kick sent a jolt of deep, numbing pain up his left leg, the infringing force wrapping tighter around his foot.
Stop; breathe. Where are you?
He bent forward, head ringing at each movement, felt around his ankle. His left foot had gotten caught in the root of an up-turned tree, twisted around as he’d fallen — but that didn’t explain all of the pain. The ankle must have been twisted when he was thrown away in the explosion. He pried at the root, scooted forward to release some of the pressure on the tangled appendage. His hands were numb and unfeeling, slicked in something wet and sticky, but his fingers finally found purchase on the gnarled root, loosening it further.
His foot free, he grasped at what was left of his ops helmet, pulled the shattered remains off from around his jaw. His comm link hissed and crackled in his ear, dead noise. He tapped at the plating on his wrist cuffs, willing it to come back online.
“Wykora.” He gritted through his teeth. “Gil, Gil — come in. It’s Wyat.”
His answer was only static… Or maybe even the static was just the ringing in his head.
He dropped on to his stomach, feeling the bulges of every single content of his pockets and packs dig in against his protesting ribs, and listened.
The fresh breeze ruffled through his freed hair, shed some sunlight into his clearing but still watery eyes. There were birds in the trees, it seemed — little birds singing songs full of questions. He must have been out for a while. The wind blew through the foreign light-green leaves of the forest edging into the nearest side of the valley.
He crawled, slowly — painfully slowly. His left ankle didn’t bend all the way, so he dragged it behind him. His fingers collided with something — rubber, it felt like charged rubber and broken armoured plating. He blinked — swiped at his face with the rough tooth of the fastens on his cuff plates. His eyes cleared, the close-up image slowly coalescing before him.
It was a shoe; a standard, Dharan-manufactured armed assault boot. The plating was half-dislodged off of one side; the tread burned off at the heel. It felt too heavy for a standard Dharan boot.
The foot — and half of a charred tibia — was still inside.
The static in the comm link inside his jaw cracked like lightning.
He heard a noise through the slowly-dissipating fog in his head.
Vehicles. Multiple, incoming, from the road at the western edge of the valley. The engines were loud, noisy, wheels thudding over pot-holes in the untended roads.
Perhaps the residents of Kakavec-Under-The-Sun heard the noise from the distance and came to investigate. Perhaps they heard the explosion in the mill and were bringing the local hapless volunteer doctor.
Something there didn’t sit right. Something about the engine noise… the lack of a poorly-maintained skip to one of the cylinders as they propelled the loaded vehicle up the mountain.
He rolled over, needles of pain shooting up his arms, torso, legs. Boot cradled in the crook of his arm, he crawled on elbows and knees towards the cover of trees — the vanguard of the forest blown and frozen in surprise, covered in settling soot and ash. His legs gave out under the patch of shrubbery; he sank into the soft, moist earth, his cheek relishing the old winter cold that the alien-smelling moss still clung to.
The trucks drew nearer. He could hear the screaming of gravel under the worn-out rubber tires as they ran to a complete stop. Boots hit the ground, and voices flew — only male, adult — raised and free of fear, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about the carnage in front of them. He’d began to remember some of the language faded from his childhood memory in the last few months here, but these men were not speaking in the Eastern Island dialect.
Delicately, he propped himself up and squinted through the tiny dark green leaves of his hiding place. The men who arrived were definitely not locals — he didn’t recognize any faces, any mannerisms of movement. He had spent the major part of this mission with the men from Kakavec — sometimes in quarters more close than he would’ve liked. He knew how they moved — knew the subservient, worn-down stoop that none of these new men possessed. The delicate colourful embroidery on the jackets and collars of these new men was not the rough handiwork of any of the local women either.
And yet, these strangers strode around the obliterated factory as if they owned the place. One of them spat at something on the ground and grinned a gap-tooth smile through the black of his beard at the man beside him. His hands were tucked into the arm holes of an over-sized stained vest — big enough to suit a man of greater stature with heavy ballistic armor. Each pocket’s loop-hole decorated with a standard-issue ESOF frag grenade — a necklace of skulls, their blind, unlit eyes of arming lights sparkling in the sun. His red-headed companion was dressed in a garish light blue robe with the same delicate embroidery at the hems and collar. His red hair and beard were braided with bead-work Wyat could not place as Hjali, even if the man’s pale skin and beard — just like Wyat’s own — left no mystery to his heritage. His over-armor, however, was clearly his own; fitted perfectly to his upper body, cinched at the arms — Dharan made, laser-fitted, with the same meticulous level of perfectionism.
There was only one way he could’ve gotten such a well-fitted set… which meant that someone, somewhere, was running a second fucking op right underneath the first one. Their first one.
Or he was something completely different. Something unheard of.
Something that just did not fucking happen to the men who passed the Al-Dharan selection process.
The armored man gestured to something on the ground a few feet away from them. They both laughed — Black Beard barking and gleeful, Armor more of a chuckle, barely audible above the first. He said something else, in the same quiet, rapid Hjali. The first man bent over, slapping his side like some kind of a barn animal. But the armored redhead turned, and looked — straight into Wyat’s eyes, piercing through the little leaves and lower branches of the white-barked trees. Wyat’s breath froze in his throat, burning the flesh. His knuckles were small white pebbles, half-dug into the dirt. For an eternity he stared into the moss-green eyes — covered in a recognizable permafrost of a seasoned shooter.
Then the redhead looked away, throwing a bored glance towards the further edge of the sunlit valley. A call came from within the destroyed mill — Wyat made it out as a dialect-distorted call for attention or interest towards something specific. The two Hjali turned and walked, black-beard’s grenade decorations softly clinking in tune to a familiar bawdy song he was badly intoning.
Wyat’s breath returned when the two men were swallowed by the factory’s gaping, broken mouth of a door. He pulled back and ran, his left ankle stabbing straight through the bone with each step. He ran, deeper into the forest — further into the dark.
The boot was still securely clenched in his hand.
