DevilD
The rain was maddening. The dark thunderheads gave the day a dismal quality as we wove our way among the ruins of the small town. There were three of us: Shovel took point, Split watched our flanks, and I covered our six.
Shovel tapped a locked door with the barrel of his M4A1. We all tensed, but nothing came.
"Split, get us in there," I ordered a bit sternly. I was still expecting some unknown complication.
"Yeah, I'm on it," came the aggravated reply; the rain was working its magic.
He locked the safety on his UMP .45 and tightened the shoulder strap. He took a deep breath, and with a crack like thunder, Split's boot kicked the door inward. He immediately grabbed his M9 pistol and scanned the unlit room.
"Clear," he whispered.
I hefted my M240 to my back and switched to my own pistol, backing up slowly with my group. Shovel took point again, the mounted light on his automatic rifle casting eerie shadows.
The place used to be a single-floor office building, but it now resembled something more like a garbage heap. There were a few desks here and there, but they were all turned on their sides, the papers that once sat on them were strewn about the room.
"I don't like the look of this," I whispered. I could smell spent gunpowder in the air, and I thought I saw bullet holes in some of the desks, but it was too dark to be certain. "I'd bet a week's coffee rations that we're not too far behind the action."
Shovel grimaced from behind one of the upturned desks, "I'd have taken you on that bet, D, but I'm pretty sure you're right."
When I got a look at his center of attention, I groaned inwardly. On the ground before us was a still-warm corpse riddled with gun wounds. The body didn't belong to any of the units that were sent before us, and every man had been accounted for, both dead and alive.
I crouched down and peered at his neck, hoping to work some information out from his dog tags. What I saw confounded and disturbed me.
"Whyte Deryll
41356-"
I stopped reading there. The tags were mine, or at least exact replicas. The corpse's face was too riddled with wounds to make out a positive ID, but the thought unnerved me. My hand traveled unbidden to my own tags, but finding that they were still there didn't soothe my racing heart.
"D... Colonel... I got the tags off this guy... But there's gotta be something wrong..." Shovel's confused call came across the room, "They're m-" "Yeah, your tags," I cut him off. "Don't touch anything, there's some seriously crazy shit going on."
The blast of Split's M9 shocked me back to my senses and I nearly smacked him. "Thought I saw the fucker move," he muttered.
"You're a soldier, damn it! He's missing a face and half his brains are on the floor next to you! I'd say the bastard's dead!"
Shovel's pissed off reply made me crack a smile. It had been a while since I saw him crack down on the private like that.
"Either way, I don't think anyone's here now," Split hollered. "Looks like the guys who did it are laying in the next room."
I kicked "my" corpse's boot and sat down next to him.
"Must have been a wild party, eh?" I sighed and lit up my last cig.
"You don't know the half of it, D," the shattered mouth twisted into what I can only imagine was hell's semblance of a smile. "See you on the other side."
The bastard's hands were around my neck before I even had time to aim my pistol.