SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

Deeming him more trouble than he was worth the creature lanced Hooky through the gut, the tip spearing out of his lower back, dripping with his viscera. Blood flooded his mouth, but he turned to me, his eyes pleading. You can do it, his expression said.

OK, Sarge, mine said.

I shot him in the face.

The creature must have sensed his instant demise, because it suddenly whipped half a dozen lances into him and they scissored, chunks of bloody flesh and splintered bones flying overhead. Then those lances whipped towards me.

I tripped, but good job, because my fall took me back out of the door and I slid down the short incline to the pavement. Before I’d got my arse under me, the monster was forcing its gelatinous bulk out of the doorway, reminiscent of the way an octopus can contort and constrict to negotiate seemingly impossible places. As its compressed form cleared the doorjamb, it grew exponentially, almost flooding the ground around the exit with barely recognisable shapes. The heads had absorbed into the mass, but now they began popping out on those stalks. Rolling eyes searched for and then fixed on me. Sitting there, I fired, and my rounds took some of those faces, some of those bilious eyes, but for each one I obliterated a couple more oozed out of hiding.

It began pouring towards me, and those waving arms that came through the door reached out. But they didn’t snatch at me; they simply wavered overhead, the fingers moving like an impatient pianist’s.

I didn’t run.

Why bother?

Something squirmed in my chest and I knew.

I allowed my handgun to slip from my fingers and reached down to fasten it over the splinter of rib bone that had pierced my vest when Brainpan let loose with that first grenade. The bone was red with gore as you’d expect, but the red was too jellified to be human. I pushed down on the rib and felt a corresponding scratch against my own sternum.

Sonofabitch…

The bone had punctured my vest, got through my fatigues to the skin beneath, made a shallow groove in my flesh. The wound was so inconsequential that it hadn’t really registered when I’d expected to be torn to ribbons by the detonation. Shit, at the time I’d only been thankful that the rib hadn’t sliced through my windpipe. Now I wasn’t as sure.

The squirming was in my throat in the next instant, and in my gut and groin. I felt as if I needed to shit. I did pee; there was no controlling it. I rolled back my head and peered up at the hands above me. They now gestured, coaxed me, soothed me with their gently waving motions.

Now…

I am becoming.

Bill Grover is a memory, one that will be forever lost, forgotten, no more. Muppet barely exists anymore. I can’t recall the names of my teammates. They aren’t important. They were a threat but they have been dealt with. I shouldn’t be troubled with their memories. They… are… no… more…

I look to the greater part of me. Those welcoming hands, those faces that are me, those lancing spines that will protect me, and I reach up to accept.

A noise.

Some dim recollection tells me what it is.

Something called an ‘officer’ once watched me.

Abandoned me.

Called in this rocket strike.

I don’t know what a rocket is any more.

I don’t even recognise these final words that play through my fleeting conscience, but I know they are dangerous.

Offsuuu… I moan in warning to my beautiful brethren.

Rohcutt…

My words lose meaning.

I am become.

White and heat and burning…

I am…

The Slog Neal F. Litherland

Vietnam smelled like an off-season slaughterhouse. It had been washed by rain and perfumed by flowers, but even after Mother Nature scrubbed and polished the sprawl it was impossible to forget what was underneath. Impossible to forget the sharp tang of cordite and the fresh shit smell of bladders and bowels being emptied. The jungle had blood on its breath, and once that abattoir stink got in the nose you never forgot you were in a cattle chute.

They all coped with that the memory of that smell in different ways. Baxter stripped and cleaned his 60 from belts to barrel every night, his hands assembling and disassembling the pins and latches like it was a lethal rosary. Hawkins read and re-read his letters from home until they were smeared and smudged, tattered around the edges like he’d sucked all the well-wishes out of them. Big Billy Watts built card houses in the moonlight, and before he rolled into his fox hole he knocked ‘em down like a kid with building blocks. They brought their rituals and their talismans, their whispered prayers and their good luck charms. They didn’t really believe those things would keep them safe, but they needed something to hold fast to when the sun went down and the shadows grew bold.