Day 297 - The War Corp. - Chapter 3.4 (1009 Words)

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THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3.4

Sharpe did not respond at once, and then slowly began to tell the story of how they had made it through the section of the trap, to unlistening ears. Liam was not interested in the experience of Sharpe’s team, the Acidic cloud they avoided, the swimming section and the sprinting to the door before the hazards caught them.

It was done and there were two more teams to get back to waypoint where they had gathered and would move on through the maze. There were ten more recruits and so far only one of the four minimum required lives had been lost. Of course Brodie and Morris would likely be trying to save them all, but it was a need in Liam, set by the objective and held in check by the numbers, but they had to be culled. They had to zero out.

The door to the rear of the room they were in opened suddenly and in rushed the team belonging to Brodie and his four recruits. All five of them unharmed and unscathed, not a sign of anything bad happening to them. There was a hunted look in the eyes of the leader, but not one injury meant all five were still green on the NINE when Liam scanned them.  Liam did not make any query and it was left to Sharpe and Brodie to start discussing the various traps and obstacles that got in the way.

That left Morris and his four men, and there was no indication on Liam’s NINE that anything was affecting them in any negative way.

“BOOM.” The sound of a nearby explosion made the small room shudder a little and then Liam saw the entry for Morris flicker to Orange and then a little while later go red.

A new explosion, this one louder and closer than the last one had been. This time there was no change in the entries and then one more loud BOOM followed by the scrabbling at the door by the four surviving recruits, piling in and coming to a breathless halt, running at full speed into safety.

Morris was not among them.

Liam pried open the door as it tried to shut and he could see a pool of blood and Morris lying in it a few meters from the door, his legs were a blur of flesh and sinew, no longer forming anything remotely resembling the legs they had once been. Morris was still alive, but the red state he was in flickered.

“Let me go.” He shouted hoarsely and looked up at Liam, standing in the doorway, keeping his body in the gap and forcing the door to remain ajar, constantly trying to push him back out of the gap. He levered a little more space and managed to get through, the door clicking behind him softly despite the force of the motors closing it.

Liam jogged to the spot where Morris was bleeding out and then looked backwards behind him to see what they had come through. The whole area was covered in beige sand and back a few dozen meters there were craters, scorch marks and some shrapnel in the sand.

Land mines, the dunes that were in the middle chamber were littered with them and Morris had obviously been taking the lead and walked right onto one. Like the poor unfortunate recruit that Liam had sent into the firewall trap in the outer corridor. He was the canary in the mine and had taken one for the team.

From the blood and flesh strewn path behind him it looked like Morris had taken the example of his Team Leader to heart and had sacrificed the already injured recruit, in this case himself, to clear the way for the others.

A trail of blood, gore and craters showed the safe route for the team to make it through the sand dune maze to the inner doors. Whatever had forced them to speed up and take on the unknown and obviously dangerous dunes was gone. There must have been something behind them; some threat pressing them forwards otherwise there would have been no need to step onto the sand without checking for mines first.

Survival was preprogrammed and checking the environment when you expected traps was a second nature to them, unless pressed for time.

Morris was flickering on the red, the life in him ebbing away. He was making a whimpering sound, and the top half of his body was convulsing and wracked with shivers and shakes, how much of it nerves being shredded and how much of it mental was impossible to tell.

Liam pulled his knife once more and lifted the torso of his squad leader up and stabbed it through a hold in the upper back of his uniform. The blade slid in between bruises and blood, severing the recruit’s spinal cord and cutting off all feeling from the neck down.

The pain was turned off like a switch being thrown and unexpectedly Liam got a broad smile from his recruit as the relief set in. The blissful feeling was a shared experience as Liam saw the dropping off that he had been hoping would be his. Instead he watched first hand as the light in the man’s eyes dimmed and faded from view, slower and more gracefully than the previous deaths he had seen close up. This was more personal, more grateful and more giving in its intensity and duration.

Then the red light around his name went blank and Morris zeroed out in the NINEs for all the team, and the door behind where the central room was and the teams were assembled, opened with a noise of compressed air.

Liam looked over his shoulder to see his team staring at him, and it was then that he realized that tears were streaming down his eyes. It was not sadness for the fallen, it was not the overwhelming emotion of the noble death, it was frustration and jealousy in him.

It should have been me.