Saturday 29 April 2017

Those That Dream Of Demons - 02






Glancing back at my body I try and estimate if I can walk, I drag myself up onto my side and slowly put pressure onto my legs. A sharp pain shoots all the way up my right leg as I slowly balance out onto both my feet. Sporadic gunfire shooting all over the place around me, I draw my Glock 17 pistol and put a bullet in the chamber. I begin limping my way to where I think my team would be.


“Has anyone sent a contact report yet?!”


“Contact Wait Out!” Another yells into the radio, I limp in the direction of the voice, trying to keep my head down as much as possible to avoid getting shot.


“Friendly to your twelve!” I shout at them to make myself known but it comes out drier and weaker than I expected.


“Friendly front! Check fire!”


““Check Fire!”” A chorus of men also yell out to be heard.


When I get close enough I can begin to see them through the dust and sand being kicked up in the air, they spot me too as well. They’re taking cover of what was the building turned IED, its rubble providing protection from sight more than anything.


“Corporal!”

Eric, what do we do?”

“Get anything they can to assist us!” I yell at the signaller.


“Zero this is callsign two-one-delta, we need immediate support over!” He quickly yells into the radio and he very quickly gets a reply. “Anything! Get us anything over!” A couple more seconds of more sporadic gunfire before he gets another reply. “ETA ten minutes!”


We may not survive that long, the dust and sand is beginning to settle and it looks like they know exactly where we are, we just have to do anything we can to survive now.


“RPG!”


And the last thing I felt before darkness was a huge impact from the wall I was using as cover.


Those That Dream Of Demons - 01 Part 1

Part One Of The Ascension Ark


“You cannot begin the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.” Michael McMillan.

A line of men scanned their surroundings in the broken city, dust and rubble, buildings standing like skeletons and no life to be seen. Spread out over twenty meters, twelve men wearing desert DPM carrying various weapon systems. They seemed casual as if this was their daily walk as their attention began to slip from observing their surroundings to just getting to their location.

My headset crackled to life with a short burst of static, “This is fuckin’ wank.” Kirk ‘Swany’ Swanson transmitted through the radio to my team. He received a few chuckles and grins while someone else started up a bit of banter.

“Don’t worry ‘bout it, Swany, soon you’ll be back home with your missus and cheating behind her back.” A Northern Irish accent pitched in with a sing-song melody from Ross “Paddy” O’Brady teased.

“Ya know if you weren’t taking point, I’d kick the shit outta you again!” Swany countered Army banter has always been weird. It reminds me of the game hot potato, I mused for a little while about that by myself and stopped when I spotted what I thought to be a person in one of those skeleton buildings.

“Comms, comms, comms! Look alive, Fives and twenties, Paddy start calling it.” I cleared the airwaves and started waking my men up again for situational awareness. Paddy began scanning every intersection and alleyway he thought the enemy could try and ambush us from.

Then all hell broke loose.

An explosion rocketed from my left, the concrete used from the building was turned into shrapnel by placing an IED behind it and using it to attack us. It kicked up a massive amount of dust, I fell to the floor in pain and heard shouting both in Arabic and English.

“Eric is down!”

“Two I.C?!”

“Go firm! Go Firm!”

“We need to get out of here!”

“Move! Move! Move!”

Gunfire resounds around me as I try and work out the daze from my head, I push a smaller block of concrete off my body and first look for my rifle. I spot it, however, it’s in pieces, the trigger mechanism housing has shattered off the but of the rifle and is completely useless.