Extinction: The Will of the Protectors

by Jay Korza

  The sergeant paused and the reporter took advantage of that moment to interject her own adjective, “Triumph? Triumph at ending this man’s killing?”

  The sergeant’s previously placid face morphed into one of anger. “Triumph? We weren’t triumphant in anything here tonight. We didn’t stop anything. We tried, but we didn’t. Can’t you see the bodies lying around us? Where is the triumph in that?

  “Even if we had saved the family, I don’t know that ‘triumph’ would be the word to use. Maybe”, the sergeant looked at the ground as he tried to find the right word, “success? Success at saving the family and ending the threat.

  “My job isn’t to be the judge, jury, or executioner. But sometimes, we have to be the Reaper. We have to collect the souls of those who are broken, who can’t be a part of society no matter how much we want them to be. Sometimes we have to practice a bit of preventive medicine to make sure others won’t be hurt in the future.”

  Bryce knew that last part was directed at his father, and maybe him as well. Bryce suddenly realized that his father wasn’t sitting there anymore; he had gone to bed. Bryce watched the news for another twenty minutes or so, taking over his father’s chair, before he also went to bed. In the morning, it was as though nothing had changed. His father was doing a good job of compartmentalizing his emotions and making everything as normal as he could for his family. It took a few months before Bryce felt like his father was truly back to being himself, and a couple more months after that before Bryce was allowed to again visit his dad at work.

  It wasn’t too long before Bryce started high school and joined the ROTC program. He planned to be a doctor and follow in most of his father’s footsteps. He was still more interested in internal medicine and diagnostic medicine but he couldn’t wait to make his father proud of his trauma rotations once he got to medical school.

  Part of his ROTC training allowed him to go to the Navy’s Hospital Corpsman School when he was fifteen. The program was the exact same training as the adults got but the class was full of high school students in the delayed entry program. The idea was to get them excited about service so they would enlist right out of high school. With their technical school already done, it put them in the field that much quicker after boot camp.

  When he was sixteen, he went to the Corpsman Field Medical Services School, where corpsman go to learn how to be field medics with the marines. Bryce was involved in a lot of extra-curricular sports activities with school so he was fit and enjoyed the hard work they put in during training. He loved being outdoors and working as a team. He was no stranger to teamwork with his involvement in sports and working alongside his father in the emergency room, but this kind of teamwork was different, better somehow on an emotional level.

  He also enjoyed learning about firearms. He was pretty good with the weapons and was a little sad to find out that corpsman usually only carried a defensive sidearm in combat, or at least that’s all they were supposed to carry. One of the gunnery sergeants told Bryce that he should think about Special Forces if he was so interested in the firearms portion of training. The SpecOps Corpsman carried a full loadout of weapons in addition to their medical gear.

  Bryce told the gunny that he was planning to become an officer and going to medical school on the Navy’s dime. The gunny just rolled his eyes and made a comment about Bryce wasting his talents in order to go get an officer lobotomy. Bryce reminded the gunny that a lobotomy didn’t actually decrease a person’s intelligence; it actually affected the emotional center in the patient’s brain. This earned Bryce and his company a five-mile run.

  The next day, Bryce found himself riding in an armored personnel carrier, shoulder to shoulder with actual marines. Bryce always felt like an adult when he was in school; his size and maturity level made him feel as if he was standing with a bunch of kids. But now, sitting next to combat veterans, he realized just how small he really was and that he was several years away from being a real adult.

  The unit was transported to the forward area of the training exercise, the last test for Bryce’s class and a group of marines trying to graduate from boot camp. The battle exercises included veteran marines intermixed into the units of marine recruits and the corpsman from Bryce’s FMF school were also put in to companies as they would be if this were a real situation.

  Bryce had been had assigned to an eight-man fire team that was made up of all real marines, no recruits in the bunch. Their team call sign was “Echo Blue” and they were on the side of the good guys in this scenario. They were being deployed to an area that required some cleanup of enemy forces that had been bypassed or missed when the company made its push through the area. The bad guys couldn’t be left to the rear of the advancing force; that was just poor tactics.

  When the team first loaded up, they were all joking around and giving one another shit; they seemed to be a tight unit and probably worked together at their real duty stations. When the driver announced over the PA that they were two minutes from their drop-off, all of the chatter stopped and each marine took up deployment positions at the two doors in the vehicles. Bryce was caught off guard at their sudden intensity. This was only training; he wondered how they were on real missions.

  As the vehicle came to a stop, the first marine at each door was already on the ground and moving to a firing position that gave the rest of the men cover as they disembarked the vehicle. Bryce was close to being the last man out and as he was moving forward, he saw that there were still three rifles in the vehicle’s weapons closet. Bryce instinctively grabbed one, along with a shoulder-slung bandolier of ammunition that held six magazines.

  Bryce took up a firing position near one of the marines who looked down and saw the weapon Bryce held. “Hey, kid, you’re a corpsman. You’re not supposed to be carrying a rifle.”

  Bryce didn’t take his eyes off his field of fire as he spoke. “Do you think that when the shooting starts the other guys won’t aim at me? Or their bullets will magically miss the medic?” No response. “I didn’t think so.”

  The team leader walked up to Bryce. “I like you, kid, but if you’re going to carry a rifle, at least load it. Okay?”

  The rest of the team snickered as Bryce realized that his weapon was indeed empty. He knew from training that no loaded weapon was ever stored in a vehicle. He reached into his bandolier and pulled out a magazine of training ammunition and put it into the weapon. Bryce cycled the bolt and checked to make sure the safety was engaged. The team was already moving out so Bryce took up a position towards the rear of the element.

  After about an hour of working through the area of dense buildings, they had their first contact. Echo Blue was victorious and no one in the unit was taken out. When a training round hit a person, the training uniform sensed the hit and delivered a momentarily paralyzing shock to the soldier. If you were hit, regardless of where, you were out of the scenario. Bryce emptied a whole magazine during their first engagement but hadn’t hit any targets, much to his dismay. Maybe there was a reason corpsman shouldn’t carry guns?

  Echo Blue had several more engagements over the next few miles. Bryce actually scored a couple of hits, though it took him another four magazines to do so. The rest of the fire team was razing him in a good-natured sort of way, a way that made him feel as though they were actually starting to like him.

  As the team entered a small courtyard, Bryce heard a round being fired and then felt the light breeze of a training bullet passing by his head. The round struck the marine in front of Bryce, dead center of his back and the marine went down. In that moment of the adrenaline dump that Bryce was experiencing, he saw the time-dilation effect of the flight-fight-or-freeze mechanism kicking in. Everyone was moving in slow motion as the next two rounds passed by his head and two more marines were instantly locked up on the invisible electric leash that now held them in place and dropped them to the ground.

  Bryce slid to his right, unsure of where the attack was coming from. He could be moving towards it but
his training and instinct together told him that moving in any direction was better than not moving at all. As he slid, he turned his body around and brought his weapon to bear towards where he thought the attack was coming from.

  Bryce saw the marine on rear security was facing the rest of the team with his weapon pointed at them, firing. His brain couldn’t figure out what was going on. He looked in the direction the marine was firing, thinking that the enemy must be ahead of them as well and that’s what he was shooting at. But as the marine fired again, Bryce followed the shot and saw that it was heading directly towards another one of the marines on his team.

  Bryce didn’t hesitate any longer. He brought his weapon up and put three rounds into the rogue marine’s chest. At this close distance, the training rounds still had a lot of kinetic energy so the marine not only got three uniform shocks, he had three distinct thuds in his chest as well. The shooter went down and Bryce followed the target with his weapon to make sure that the threat was truly gone. Bryce had to clear his head as he kept repeating to himself that this was only training; he hadn’t really killed a marine from his own team.

  The team leader came to Bryce and put a hand on his rifle, helping Bryce to lower it to the ready position. “Why did you shoot Marcus?”

  Bryce looked at the man whose name tag read O’Connor. “I, uh, he was shooting our own guys.”

  O’Connor looked at him. “And? Do you know why he was doing that? Did you stop to think about what was going on before you just lit him up?”

  Bryce felt as if his feet were starting to get back under his body again so he spoke with a little more confidence this time. “Once I realized it was him shooting at us, I thought to myself ‘WHY?!’ But then as I looked back towards him, I realized that it didn’t matter why, he just was, and he had to be stopped. The why was irrelevant at that point.” An old memory came back to Bryce and he added, “Sometimes, we have to be the Reaper. We have to collect the souls of those who are broken, who can’t be a part of society no matter how much we want them to be. I’m a corpsman, and this was preventive medicine. I kept him from hurting any more of my men.”

  O’Connor smiled at Bryce. “Reaper, huh? That’s your new name, kid.” The marine who Bryce had shot was starting to get up and Bryce brought his rifle back up but O’Connor stopped him. “Easy, Reaper, all part of the game today.”

  The marine got up fully. “Nice shooting, killer.” He dusted himself off a bit. “Sorry, Gunny, you know how it goes, orders and all that.”

  Bryce looked around with confusion so the marine filled him in. “Sometimes in these scenarios they give a soldier secret orders to attack their own unit. It simulates the real possibility that one of your own guys goes nuts in a firefight or maybe you have a double-crosser in your unit. There’s plenty of reasons for that shit to happen in real life and it HAS happened. That’s why they throw it in every now and then.” He looked back at O’Connor with a huge smile. “Honestly, though, I was pretty excited they picked me. I couldn’t wait to nail some of you turds.”

  O’Connor patted his buddy on the shoulder. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Everyone who’s still alive, rally up and get ready to move out. We still have a mission to complete. Those of you who are dead, make your way back to staging and get something to eat, clean your weapons and get some rest—in that order.”

  As the rest of the team moved out, O’Connor could see that Bryce was still conflicted with what just happened. “Look, son, you did the right thing. I know that even in a training scenario doing something like can rattle your cage, but let it go. I have a fourteen-year-old son at home, Mike Junior, and I always want to make it home to him and his mother. So I don’t care who’s shooting at us, bad guys, good guys, it doesn’t matter; shoot everyone who is shooting in your direction. You got that, Reaper? Everyone.”

  “Copy that, Gunny.” Reaper moved out with the rest of his unit and eventually caught up with the larger force that had been through the area first.

  Two days later, Reaper finally got to shower and sleep in a real rack and not on the ground. After the graduation ceremony, O’Connor found Reaper and introduced him to his wife and son. Then O’Connor took him to a major who was talking with a bunch of new marine graduates.

  “This is the major.” O’Connor introduced Reaper to the officer.

  Reaper came to attention and saluted. “Good to meet you, sir.”

  The major returned the salute. “Reaper, huh? I like it. The irony of a corpsman being called that makes me smile.” The major put a friendly hand on Reaper’s shoulder as they spoke.

  “This is the kid who saw through your mind-fuck, sir. Shot Jinx without a second thought. Well, maybe without a third thought.” O’Connor was obviously proud of him.

  “Good going, kid. I love that old gag. I got to do it when I was a young lieutenant and it made my day. Not to mention that after you get shot, you get to go back to staging for some rest.” The major waved at some unseen person in the crowd. “I’ve got to go talk to an old friend. I’ll see you two later. And Reaper, I know you want to be a doctor but if you change your mind, let me know and I’ll be sure to get you a great assignment right out of the gate if you’re interested. And even if you do become a doctor, make sure you look me up. I’ve got some pretty good assignments for officers, too. A lot of fun, I tell ya.” The last words he said with an eerily excited tone in his voice.

  Reaper looked at O’Connor. “How do I look him up? I don’t even know his name.” Reaper realized that the major was the only uniformed person he had ever seen without a nametag on his chest.

  “You don’t really look him up; he looks you up.” O’Connor was leading them towards the food tent where his wife and kid were waiting for them. “Trust me, you’ll hear from the major again someday, regardless of what path you choose.”

  ~

  Gradually the food tent faded from Reaper’s mind and he could hear a beeping near his left ear. He was acutely aware of a dripping sound coming from somewhere in the…room? Was he in a room? A bed? He had no idea of where he was or what was happening. Reaper’s mind was foggy even though every sound he heard was crystal clear and almost too loud for him to think it was a comfortable level.

  He started to talk, to yell, to something, anything to find out whether there were other people around him. He felt his mouth was unnaturally closed, something holding it shut. As he worked his mouth, he felt a plastic tube between his teeth. His senses were coming back to him now, and he could also feel something pushing air into his lungs, lungs that hurt with each breath, lungs that were being used by both him and some unseen force trying to make them move at a rhythm different than his own.

  In his cloudy mind, he started to put the pieces together. He was on a ventilator; a tube was in his trachea and the machine was breathing for him, or at least trying to. He couldn’t see and everything was blurry because he still had the surgical tape over his eyelids to keep them closed so his eyeballs wouldn’t dry out. He tried to move his hand to his face to remove the tape so he could see. Damn, his arms were restrained—standard practice for a sedated and tubed patient in the ICU.

  He could feel his breathing changing even more, still fighting the machine that was trying its best to keep up with the parameters someone had given it to fulfill. Then the machine to his left started beeping more and he realized it was his ventilator, telling the nurse the patient was starting to buck the machine, starting to wake up.

  He heard footsteps near his bed and a soft feminine voice. “Hey kiddo, just relax, you’re safe now. You’re okay.”

  He reached again for the tape covering his eyes, already forgetting that he was tied to the railing.

  “No, no, dear, don’t pull, that’s bad. We can’t have you taking your tube out yet; you’ll hurt yourself. Just hold on for a few more minutes and we’ll have it out of your throat.” He felt her hands covering his and holding them down.

  I know! He screamed in his head. I’m not trying to pull my own tube.
I’m not an idiot. I just want this damn tape off my eyes. Please!

  Reaper heard another set of footsteps and then felt gentle fingers pulling the tape off his eyes and another hand shielding the harsh light above from entering his likely over-dilated pupils. He blinked a few times, his eyelids now free from their unjust imprisonment. When he was able to focus, he saw his dad standing over him. A tear escaped Reaper’s eyes and even more came from his father.

  Reaper’s dad leaned down and kissed his son on the forehead and then hugged him as best he could given the circumstances. Reaper tried to nuzzle him back with his face but the equipment holding his breathing tube in place didn’t allow his head to travel far enough.

  His dad looked him in the eyes. “Hey son. I’m going to untie your hands but you can’t reach for your tube, all right?” Reaper nodded his agreement. “I’m not your doctor, so I can’t take it out for you but I’ll unhook the ventilator so you can breathe on your own. My buddy Hal is on his way up, should be here any second to get this out of you. He did a great job on your surgery. You’re going to be just fine.”

  Reaper saw his medical chart sitting on his legs; his dad must have set it down there. He pointed at it and made a “give me” motion with his hand. His dad just chuckled at his son wanting to read his own medical chart while he was still intubated.

  Reaper took the chart that was handed to him, found the writing stylus at the top of the tablet and then flipped through his chart until he got to a blank screen that was for doctors to free-hand patient notes that didn’t fit any of the pre-made forms in the electronic chart. He scribbled, “Did the man live?”

  His father looked at the chart. “Yes, he did, thanks to you. They brought you two in with your hand still in his chest. I have no idea how that worked for the entire transport but it did. They separated you two in the ER. Tim took over for you and Hal took you straight to the OR. Not a single trauma surgeon here could’ve done better. I’m very proud of you, son.”