In the Dark

I shifted my gaze to my surroundings and could see nothing but the smoke-filled night air and rubble scattered everywhere. In some places bullet holes decoratied busted walls, and in other places chewed up corpses lay still in large puddles of blood and rancid water. It was certainly a ghastly sight but the acrid stench in the air was even less tolerable. The air wafted the odor of dozens of dead men and the recognizable scent of burnt powder straight into my lungs.

The hellish vision before me almost didn’t seem real. This was, before to today that is, a quaint little town full of charming people. Now damn near half of the structures were caved in or slowly burning to the ground whilst filling the air with coal black smoke. A gruff voice called out from behind me “You see anything out there?” I swiveled around to meet the commanding officer’s gaze. I looked at him for a moment trying to review the information I’d just absorbed. As I collected my thoughts I glanced at the large medals on his uniform. He grew impatient and barked “Well, spit it out son!” I was a bit taken back and meekly replied “No signs of movement sir. Just debris and smoke out there as best as I can tell.” The commander nodded in acknowledgement and stood up in a sort of half hunched over position. He walked to the edge of our cover, a still standing wall, and asked another soldier for a scope.

The commander was scanning over the ruined landscape before us and I could almost see the level of focus he was exerting by the expression on his face. I looked over at the other soldiers I was sharing this piece of cover with. Everyone here was a stranger to me apart from one fellow by the name of Santori. From what I could infer the other men in our little ragtag group were from other cohorts which had been chewed up as bad or worse than ours. I focused my eyes on Santori trying to study what I could from his reserved demeanor. He was an exceptionally thin man so his uniform looked rather baggy on his small frame. His face was covered in soot as was his helmet.

The commander shifted his feet and moved some rubble underneath him when he done so. This caught my attention so I took a quick glance over at him. Just as my head had stopped turning something struck him from afar. In an instant, the side of his head was burst open showering a man sitting close to him with gore. Like a sack of dirt, he collapsed straight to the ground with an audible thud. Everyone shuffled like rats to get behind something sturdy in case any more shots were to come our way.

After a rather tense few minutes a couple of the other soldiers began to shift around repositioning either out of comfort or to get a better view of their surroundings. I couldn’t help but look over at the commander but I wished I hadn’t. His brain was half out of the newly formed hole and blood was running along the debris he had been standing on. I didn’t even know who the poor bastard was either; I just knew that he was a higher rank than me and all these other troops. Santori, the thin fellow, crawled from his position up to the commander. Stopping once he was close enough to reach out to the dead man’s neck he felt around near the man’s collarbone. I looked over at Santori and asked “you checking his vitals or something? It’s pretty obvious he’s dead as a doorstop.” He shot me an angered expression and said “Emperor help you Alexi! Show some respect for the dead. I know he’s dead; I’m searching for his identification.”

After finally grabbing hold of something, Santori pulled firmly on whatever he’d grabbed a hold of. Holding his hand up as he crawled back I could see the tags in his hand along with a strand of leather which he had just snapped. I looked out at the bodies that were in the streets and let out a shaky breath. We sat in silence for a few minutes listening for a hint of sound and sharing frightened expressions with one another. Something rumbled the ground and in the distance, I could hear the echo of artillery fire. I mumbled to myself “I sure hope that’s ours.”

I looked over at the other fellows and spoke up saying “I think we’ve got two options. We can stay here and be wait for the enemy to send a patrol to search this area for more,” I point to the commander who had just been killed “or we can slink away from here and look for others. Maybe even find a way back to one of our strongholds. Thoughts?” I was nervous, terrified even that they might just want to stay right here but that faded as one of the others said, “I refuse to wait here and die.” More gave their thoughts which were of a similar nature and everyone began gathering their rucksacks. As we lined up to get ready to move I discovered I had somehow become the point man. Probably because I opened my stupid mouth and put the idea to leave out there. Santori walked up the line and told me, “I took a head count. We’re nine strong in total. There’s seven of us riflemen and two of the anti-armor boys.” I nodded and with that we set off.

We were now leaving the relative safety of our position and running into the darkness of the debris filled streets. There were all sorts of things laying on the ground like rubble, furniture, and body parts. It wasn’t all that long before we came upon an assortment of corpses laying silently in the street. I looked back at the others and told them to search the dead for supplies. I found a body lying face down in a mixture of blood and muck. I nudged it with my foot and then proceeded to roll it over. My eyes met the foul visage of this dead invader. Even in death he had a snarling expression exposing his gnarly teeth. As I knelt to search him I noticed his face had a large brand on it, some sort of weird star. His uniform was hardly worthy of being called a uniform, looked more like a produce sack that had been in the mud for years. His only piece of kit was a bandoleer full of ammunition that was of no use to me. I looked back to the others and saw them collecting rations and magazines off our dead and spitting on our fallen foes.

I let the others know it’s time to start moving and we fall back into formation and keep trudging through the ruined city-scape.