Lucky me, Galen thought.
When he was done looking at what was left of the wing, he got out of that flat section of the forest and back to the scar. Too much open space with no cover around him could get him shot.
The Private kept pressing on up the hill, his breath growing weary as the incline made him do more climbing than walking. Galen ordered himself to keep going, no matter what. He needed to regroup with the Company, and there was still one more body he needed to find.
The end of the scar was fast approaching, which would mean the top of the hill. This put a hup-two in Galen's step as he picked up his pace as he climbed rapidly up the hill. At last he found himself on even ground, though still surrounded by trees twenty feet tall that obscured his view of anything beyond them. If he wanted to figure out where he was, he needed to climb one.
Swallowing hard, the soldier brought his head up and pushed the thoughts of the height out of his mind. He wouldn't be a good paratrooper if he was scared of some damned tree!
Galen began to wander around the hill top, searching for a decent place to climb. It had to be taller than the other trees, and it had to have branches all the way up or else he was going to have one short trip.
He didn't have to go far to find one. A pine tree.
At first, Galen rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn't hallucinating. Why the Hell is there a pine tree in Vietnam?
The question only had a second to occupy Galen's mind before he shoved it out and refocused on his task.
At once, he dropped his pack against the tree and set his rifle down, leaving its safety on for once as he approached the soaring pine. All the way up its trunk were considerably large knots, withered limbs, and needled branches protruding every which way from its bark. This tree was the only one of its kind in the entire area, the others being simple deciduous trees that had claimed rest of the hill and much of the forest below.
The Private took one look up the evergreen before him then spat onto his palms, rubbing the saliva around and taking hold of the pine's bark. One branch at a time, he began his way up, one arm reaching forward, one leg pushing up.
"Not much farther... I'll be... Urrghh, back in US hands... dammit... by t'night."
The bandage wrapped around his left arm started to bleed through, pain working its way into the muscle once again. Hard, stabbing pains made his bicep throb, but Galen hung on for dear life.
Forcing himself past the pain in his arms, he fought for every inch toward the top. He grunted as he pulled himself up another few branches, bringing him in close to his goal. He managed to get his boots onto two separate little nubs before his objective was in sight. Just a few feet above hung a wide branch, possibly thick enough to support the young soldier's weight.
Snap!
"Whoa, shit!" he yelled as a branch snapped in his lead hand. He desperately clawed for the branches around him around him as his body tipped backwards, almost pulling him off the tree.
"Shit!" he swore as he dug his fingers into the sides of the trunk and reeled himself in.
He fought the queasy feeling surging up in his stomach, he leaned over to peer down at the ground he had come so close into meeting again. His breathing suddenly got very heavy; the rapid thumping in his chest sank down into his stomach.Taking his first step brought about an unexpected force that yanked Galen back and dropped him back to the ground, the flap of his parachute pack coming open.
The static line, he cursed.
He pulled off the pack and unhooked the wire from his parachute, removing the whole canvas bag from his pack and shoving it aside. He did decide to keep his reserve chute, just in case. Survival training told him that in the event of emergencies, a parachute doubled as a tent canvas. That and a reserve was a Hell of a lot easier to hoof through a jungle than a full-sized parachute.
When he threw his pack on again, the first sight that greeted him to the jungle was the corpse of another paratrooper ten feet from the plane. The sight of that body finally shut Galen down. He tried to move, to look away, but his eyes remained locked on that body, unable to pull away from the sight.
"Yeah, so am I. Just keep your head down and your rifle ready. We'll be back at base before you know it."
The words hung in Galen's mind, fresh from not even half an hour before. They had come from the mouth of the very trooper that now lay at his feet, his gut impaled by a long strip of aluminum. Galen dropped his pack again and walked over to the man's side. A terrible tremble took over his hand as he knelt down, pressing two fingers to the neck of his comrade and prayed for a pulse. However, all that he could feel in that touch was stillness. No breath, no pulse, no life.
I'm the only one left, he thought. The only survivor.
The realization sent a dark chill down Galen's spine as he turned back toward the crash. The wrecked plane was torn to shreds; entire sections of the body had torn away or peeled back like a banana. What hit him even harder was the reality of his entire situation, the harsh truth that plunged into his stomach like a drop of cold steel.
He was alone, in hostile territory, probably being hunted at this very moment. In minutes, Charlies could swarm in around him, and then his next stop would be either getting himself shot to bits by AK-47s, or a one-way ticket to the luxurious Hanoi Hilton, an option that Galen would much rather shoot himself than accept.
What he really needed at the moment was to regroup with the rest of the Company. Galen looked back at the long scar of mutilated trees slicing through the sea of green foliage down the hillside. Somewhere in that direction would be the city they were jumping into to help push back the North Vietnamese. There, the rest of his Company would be fighting waves of Viet Cong while waiting for air and tank support.
Where are the aircraft? he wondered, staring at the vast, empty, blue sky.
If his plane had crashed, shouldn't a couple of 'Huey' helicopters come roaring over the hilltop? A squad of marines roping in to check for survivors and extract the wounded? Where were the Soviet jets that were supposedly patrolling the area?
Galen scratched the back of his head underneath his helmet and looked down to the body lying beside him. Corporal Isle's eyes still stared into the horizon as it were his last beacon of hope of surviving this Hell. Galen knelt down beside his comrade and rolled him over onto his back. Swallowing hard, he ran a hand over his face and shut his eye lids before removing his dog tags.
It took several sickening tugs, but Galen pulled the aluminum spike from the corporal's gut and retrieved the dead man's chute from his pack. If he was going to do the man one honor, it was going to be a proper burial before any enemy troops came through and defiled his corpse. Besides, if the MiGs weren't buzzing around, it probably meant the NVA were too busy with trying to hold back the tide of US troops in the city to bother with one downed plane.
After carefully wrapping Isles' body up in the parachute, the Private pulled out his entrenchment tool and began to dig. The soil was soft and the shovel easily sunk into the earth because so much of it had been disturbed by the aircraft when it crashed. It made Galen's self-appointed task easier and kept his mind off the situation around him.
He plunged the shovel deep into the soil and began pulling large scoops out at a time, and in the time it took for the sun to cross the sky, he managed to dig eight holes.
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Curious, leaf-green eyes of a shadowed creature sat in a tree above the wrecked metal monster. The entire time that the human in the odd clothes had spent digging into the earth, the eyes never once pulled their gaze away from him. They continued to watch as he climbed back up into the belly of the beast, pulling six and two half-bodies out from inside and removing necklaces from their necks. After removing several other items from the dead, he wrapped them in wide, green sheets pulled from their packs.
The human placed the bodies in the holes he had dug and continued to say a few words, giving them their "last rites" as their priests c
alled it. When the bodies were cast to the ground, he lashed together several crosses from the skin of the metal beast and marked the graves. What the watching creature found unique was how the human proceeded to hang the necklaces off of the crosses and say a few more words.
But why are the crosses fashioned from the metal skin beast? the creature wondered. Is he honoring their deaths with the skin of a slain foe? Very curious.
The beast itself held no lack of interest for the watcher, either. It was no dragon, for those legendary beasts did not have square scales or glass faces. Their wings did not fall off when they crashed and they certainly did not have hollow bellies that one could pass in and out of like some cave. This beast, if it was even a beast at all, was foreign to this land. Alien to this world. By whatever means the human and his comrades had slain it, must have proven more effective than he could've known if he had lost his friends in its demise.
When the human climbed back into the metal beast, the watching creature began to move. It scaled down its tree and prowled along the forest floor, crawling across the open clearing and over to the crosses the human fashioned.
The creature mumbled to itself as it inspected the curious designs. It checked the intriguing knots that tied the pieces together and investigated if what exactly the beast was made. The metal was not one with which the creature was familiar with; it had the appearance of silver, only with more strength and less shine. How heavy it was, it could not tell without pulling the cross and alerting the human to its presence.
The necklaces pulled from the bodies seemed to be made of the same metal, however, and they proved feather-light, far lighter than a bit of steel or iron of the same size. Adding even more to the already overflowing mystery of this human, there were a series of characters stamped into the surface of the necklace disks that the creature had never seen before.
Wherever this human had come from, it must have been pretty far to have a written scripture that even this creature did not recognize. Its ears perked up at something rattled within the belly of the giant metal beast, and in a second, it darted off from the graves back to the shadows of the trees, slipping back into the forest without so much as ruffling the grass. In a split second, it scaled a tree and took its perch on a branch.
When the human came back out from the beast, he began collecting the items pulled from the bodies and taking them back into the beast.
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Galen gathered what supplies he could and stuffed them into a couple M60 and M14 transport crates that had been brought aboard the aircraft. Weapons, ammo, food, water, equipment, medical supplies, anything he could find was gathered up. Galen even broke open the weapons locker and added what he found to his growing stash of supplies.
After he sorted through the weapons that hadn't been destroyed in the crash, he was left with one M60 machine gun, two M14 rifles, one of which was scoped, six colt M1911 pistols, several broken M16 rifles, and one Ithaca 37 shotgun. Enough parts were left over from the mangled weapons that he could maintain what he had and assemble an extra rifle or two, but even in this state, Galen still had enough weapons for a squad and more than enough ammo for an entire platoon. He could easily hold out until evac arrived but he wouldn't be waiting for the choppers to come. Not when his Company needed him.
Galen stocked up on whatever ammo he could for his battle rifle and sidearm and he packed a couple extra canteens of water before shutting the rest of the supplies in the crates. He took the time to set up a claymore next to the stash, hiding it underneath several bits of metal and hooking its trip wire up to each lid of the crates.
Unless they could read English, there would be nothing left of anyone attempting to raid the stash after the claymore was done. He had carved the words "Protected by claymore" into the front of the crates just in case the choppers did come.
Loaded with his gear, Galen hopped out of the ruins of the C-130 and began marching along the scar toward the top of the hill. The crest wasn't far; two or three hundred yards at the most. Any wild life that may have been nearby would've been scared off by the crashing plane, which made his only enemy the sun.
The flaming orb in the sky was beginning to turn red as it neared the earth. Galen thought for a moment as he counted how many finger widths high it was above the horizon, and he guessed that there were roughly two hours of daylight left before the night would consume the land.
The last place Galen wanted to be was near a wrecked aircraft while the NVA would be poking around for any survivors. If he was lucky, he might run into someone else from the Company. Or if he got to the top of the hill and managed to find himself a good vantage point, he could perhaps find out exactly where the Hell he was.
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The creature leaped down from its tree after the human left, landing on all fours as it hit the ground, yet it came to stand up on two legs. It stepped out from the shadows and into the light, giving a feline purr as the setting sun cast its warm glow down upon her.
A pair of black leather shorts hugged over her ample hips, barely coming over her cheeks on her well-toned thighs. Over the back of her shorts descended a long tail that flicked casually between her legs. The soft, thin coat of fur that covered her body was a light brown, with a series of dark brown stripes running across her arms. Her head sported a long, elegant flow of a dark, reddish brown hair that reached halfway down her back. Some coils of hair came down over her chest to partially cover the wide cloth strips of fabric that crossed over each other between her well-rounded breasts before sweeping up over her shoulders.
Her hands, while somewhat human in nature, sported thin silts in her fingers for her full set of retractable claws; her feet, however, purely matched the physiology of a cat. Atop her head stood two feline ears that twitched and turned, moving with the sound of nature around her. Her eyes, her leaf-green eyes, remained fixed upon the human walking away from the metal beast it had slain without so much as a trophy to claim.
Curious, she mouthed the words, very curious.
With a bit of a smile across her face, she tapped a finger on her chin while silently thinking to herself, contemplating how she would interact with this human. How should she approach him?
All in due time, she thought as she turned to the metal monster that had fallen from the sky. Now was her chance to take a closer look now that he was gone.
Leaping gracefully up through the entry way, she scanned the cabin around her. At once, she was taken back and fascinated with its internals. She saw now that this monster was not only armored on the outside, but on its inside as well. Many thick, black veins ran along its skin, some of which were leaking oily, thick, purple blood over the walls.
In the head of the beast, a hole had sundered half of its glass eyes from their sockets and sprayed the beast's blood over the ground. However, what the feline woman found curious was the boards of metal within the beast's head that were painted with the characters of this human's language. This ultimately brought her back to the question, Is this truly a beast at all?
She turned for the exit, leaping down onto the grass and diving into a low crawl. Her ears twitched constantly as her heart rate began to pick up; dusk was fast approaching and this human was headed toward dangerous territory. Moving silent as the dead wind, she crawled across the clearing away from the beast and into the trees.
Never once did she try to move ahead of the human or attempt to move in closer to him as he trampled noisily through the scar. She made sure he stayed a fair distance ahead, and that she stayed hidden within the shadow's embrace. Unlike this human, who walked carefree in the center of the destruction wrought by the beast's descent from the sky, any creature with any sense of self-preservation would keep to where the forest was still whole, would use the bush as cover and the shadows to hide from hungry eyes.
Then again, this human was different from the others. This one re
eked of fear, yet oozed with strength. He carried himself like a warrior, though he had no blade; he kept himself in the open, as if he were taunting a predator to strike. Everything she discovered about this young man intrigued her so much.
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Galen marched down the center of the scar, his eyes constantly scanning the area around him. Every few seconds, he found himself toying with the safety of his rifle, flipping the weapon from full auto to semi and back again but not once setting it to safe. If anybody decided to open fire on him, he wanted to make damn sure that he didn't go down without a fight.
Even with this resolve, a shaky hand came off the front of his rifle to itch his nose, instantly snapping back to its place as something rustled in a bush to his right. The Private nearly jumped clean from his skin as he brought his rifle to bear, watching as a pair of birds hopped from the bush and took flight.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy Erotica: Volume 2 (Sci-Fi & Fantasy Erotica Series) Page 3