It was beautiful.
At least I thought it was until I saw the eyes of every sentient creature.
Forlorn and resigned, their eyes betrayed their apparent motivated work ethic. I could only guess at the literal hell each one of them had seen. Slaves with no way to communicate, no secrets to share, no possible rebellion; they were living in hell.
More than one set of eyes caught mine, and I saw tears well up. Whether joy or sorrow, I couldn't tell, but I prayed it was the former
It must take energy to camouflage themselves because there were no squids walking around that I couldn't see with the naked eye. I checked and rechecked more than once to see if some hidden asshole was waiting around.
How do you guesstimate the population of a city? In recon, they taught us to do simple math. If there are fifty people in a block, and there are ten blocks, then there must be five hundred people. Of course, anyone with half a brain can see the stupidity of that simple math. If I go to the main street in any town, USA, I will see a considerably more number of people than if I go to Tenth street.
There could have been a thousand squids or two hundred or a million for all I knew.
So what do you do? You can't save everyone. Getting yourself killed or enslaved helps no one.
Let me break it down Barney style for all you marines who are reading this. Also, sorry about not having crayons. There you are no shit, sitting outside of Auschwitz with an M1 Garand, two frags, and the will but not the means to kill every fucking Nazi piece of shit.
I know Godwin's Law, comparing assholes to Nazi, blah blah blah, whatever, just imagine the scenario.
What does killing two or three of the guards do for you? It makes you feel good, sure, but in the grand scheme of things, Jews will continue to be exterminated, and a dead marine will be forgotten.
Now imagine you're a soldier and not a crayon munching marine. You figure out how to get the most people to safety, find some weaknesses, and come back later to bend Squidward over a barrel and ride him with no lube.
Marine or soldier, that was the question.
By the way, for you all you asshole jarheads who just got offended, I'm sorry. Sorry, you weren't part of the largest amphibious landing in history.
Anyway, like I said, I needed to be smart about it. If everything went south, I could always go to plan B.
"I wish I had another claymore," I whispered.
I then checked my ruck, hopefully. As expected, nothing changed.
"Damn."
I needed a clearly defined, obtainable objective. Unlike the fucktards running Afghanistan or Vietnam, I needed to have something to work towards.
The objective seemed obvious, rescue as many sentient beings as possible, including Arsch.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
I needed to break down my objective into sub-tasks. Some would be linear, some could be achieved in any order.
I didn't have a lot of time.
So my first task was to buy more time. I assumed the squids didn't have some sort of telepathic or radio communication, because if they did, then squiddy number two would have actually been a platoon of squiddies with like a battalion of crickets.
Most likely, dead squid asshole number two, who was not quite as dead as I wanted him to be, was on his way back with ten crickets.
If I were an asshole, and I am pretty sure that I have been called one in the past, I would have the crickets surrounding me. I would also be moving as quickly as possible, camouflaged and scared back to the city, to ring the alarm.
He needed to be intercepted.
I extinguished my torch and left my ruck. I needed speed.
I put my NODs down and activated the high laser on my PEQ-15.
If I needed to shoot, I wanted to be as far from the city as possible, although I doubted any distance I traveled would muffle the sound of my carbine.
I would love to tell you that I set up some sort of super cool ambush, or I did some Jackie Chan super ninja moves to kill the squid.
Nope.
Literally, the dumbass was running back full speed towards the city in a total panic: no cricket escort, no tactical awareness, nothing. I saw him headed towards me with his two bright and two dim lights bouncing in the darkness.
I stepped to the side behind a stalac thingy and waited.
The four-foot-tall squidheads could not outrun my six-foot-tall primate ass.
I heard him pass by with heavy thuds hitting the sand on the trail.
Let me tell you, squid necks are not nearly as difficult to sever as an oraks. Squids don't have bones, nor do they have thick tendons or ligaments. They have squishy little sacks.
I felt like an Isis pro when I took his head off in one neat cleave.
I know, same basic joke as the Taliban thing, but there is a shortage of decapitating assholes in the world. I really need to think of something different.
Anyway, I figured these dudes were on a five-hour rotation. I had five hours to complete my job.
Task one, complete.
Task two, find Arsch.
Wandering around a city filled with bad guys might seem like a dumb, even suicidal idea, but it wasn't. The squids were so confident in their apex predator status that they had become complacent.
I just stuck to the outskirts, stayed away from other sentients, and wound around the city until I found a deserted area.
It was a narrow trail of sewage leading from the city center to a chasm deep in the ground.
Like Toucan Sam, I followed my nose.
The city was about ten kilometers wide and five kilometers high, with one giant stalag from the ceiling thing.
I'm about to wax philosophic, so pay attention. How do you know if a culture is evil or bad? How can you tell?
I have a very simple litmus test.
How do they treat innocent people?
Do they target innocents? In war, do they do their best to avoid innocent casualties? Do they try to stop children from dying?
Two examples that are gonna piss some people off. The first is my own land. Shortly after the Civil War, that is, the war of northern aggression as my racist great uncle would say, the United States was expanding outward towards California.
In their trek west, they decided the stone age society that had occupied the space first needed to pretty much get off of the land they intended to conquer. Now people have declared war and conquered other people for millennia. It sucks, its bullshit, but it's a fact. We were supposed to be above that, but we weren't. We, as in the US Army, decided to massacre some women and children. Not cool.
I would say, a society that allows that is not OK. That doesn't mean every member of that society deserves to die. It just means the structure of that society needs to be reevaluated.
Yeah, my great uncle will read that and say something like they were savages, or some of them there injuns were cannibals.
Probably true, but it doesn't excuse the killing of innocents.
Second example. There is a country that is oppressed economically. This small patch of sand in the Middle-East routinely sends suicide bombers, random rockets, and anything else that you can think of at innocent people. Not soldiers, not politicians, not police; innocent women and children.
If you target innocents, you are a piece of shit, and seriously fuck you.
So how do you target a squid that doesn't have visible weapons? Are there soldier squids and politician squids? How about child squids?
I came to the moral conclusion that I would not target squids that were half the height of other squids.
Look, some people and things need killing, but even a baby Hitler is a baby. I would not shoot baby Hitler.
For some reason, these deep philosophical questions were hitting me hard. Maybe it was the situation I was in or the fact that I was exhausted --even though I didn't feel exhausted--but I knew I had to make a choice.
Somehow I knew.
I did my best to slog throug
h the sewage without stepping knee-deep into it. That was stupid. It didn't take long for me to slip and get nutsack deep into slow-moving water, piss, and shit.
I made my way up the slight incline until I reached the city center, or what I assumed was the city center.
The trough of shit went through a hole in a large cliff face that went up more than one hundred feet.
I heard weird sounds coming from beyond the three hundred-foot tunnels.
Not having much of a choice, I slogged through the thinning sewage until I reached the most horrendous and perverse spectacle imagination could prescribe.
I realized I was essentially in a colosseum—a colosseum of total terror.
I also realized a portion of the offal I was slogging through was blood, guts, and other pieces of a once sentient being.
I will describe a limited selection of what I saw so I can illustrate the atrocities committed by the gherrinfresser.
I saw a woman, I presume to be a mother, rip her child apart with her bare hands. I saw a father commit unspeakable atrocities on his daughter. I saw four children pull apart what I believed to be their grandmother.
There were other unmentionables that I will not go into detail with, but I watched for ten minutes, sick to my stomach.
During that time, I studied the layout of the arena. I had no idea if that was where they sent the malcontents, if that was even possible, of the sentient, or if the squids just got bored and wanted to show the most horrific of scenes.
There was one entrance to the killing floor and one exit. The exit was the sewage chute I was standing in.
I wasn't sure how many times they cleaned their arena, but based on the lack of crap around my feet, I assumed it was at least daily.
I figured the location they were holding the prisoners set for their games was on the other side near the entrance.
What happens when an entire society has absolute control over its slaves? No slave rebellion, no possible chance of escape, nothing? They worry about external threats only. There were no crickets patrolling the roads, no Soviet checkpoints asking for papers; they were completely comfortable in their security.
I made my way back down the sewage system and took a left. I saw no squids back behind the area, most likely they didn't want to be near the disease-causing waste.
After sneaking for about ten minutes, I found what I was looking for. A single functionary stood at the door, writing or scratching something into a scroll as different people and animals walked orderly through a gate.
The functionary then took a series of eight different stamps and marked the thing coming in.
I decided to clover leaf the area and find out if there were other guards. There weren't.
Did the squids know if someone was controlled? Could they sense the control, or did they assume someone was controlled from their lack of reaction? Could I just jump in line and gain entrance?
No, I decided. None of the creatures in line had anything in their hands and wore only the barest garb.
I wanted to sit and wait, observe the whole process for a while, but I wasn't exactly sure of the timeframe I was working with.
Fuck.
I was at an impasse. I needed to find Arsch, but I was sure the moment someone realized the guard wasn't back, or they found two dead assholes in a tunnel, the city was going to go apeshit.
Like my friend Captain Wade Wilson always said, I had reached fuck it.
I know I don't necessarily have to justify myself to you, and I know I went through this whole diatribe where I made fun of marines and talked about how smart soldiers are and whatnot, but sometimes you gotta take a bite from that bright red tasty crayon, and go hey diddle diddle, right up the middle.
I circled around the edge of the building that was receiving the slaves for the colosseum, or auction or whatever the fuck was going on with that line, and walked up to the corner.
I had ten meters between me and the target. I had a knife. Sneaking up to him was not an option. Unless the guy was completely retarded, there was no way I could make that distance without him noticing.
So fuck it.
I turned the corner and ran as hard as could.
Squidward looked towards me to see what the commotion was, saw a human with a big fucking knife headed towards him, and vanished.
In combatives, that is hand to hand combat training that the army teaches, it takes about a second and a half to close ten meters from a standstill. That's why a knife is more useful in a close-quarters fight than an M4 if the M4 is not already at the ready.
Dick munch turned invisible. You know who doesn't give two fucks about visibility? Mister Pointy. That's what I decided to call my knife. That may or may not be a reference about a show I watched when I was a kid that had something to do with vampires. If you get the reference, I have one word for you: nerd! If you don't, just remember, I am super badass masculine awesomeness.
Anyway, as I mentioned before, I am not greedy with my stabs. I decided that the invisible squid functionary needed a lot of stabs. Like at least five, maybe six.
I watched in mild amusement as a body landed on the ground and slowly faded from perfect camouflage to brown with yellow stripes.
I quickly scanned the area to see if anyone noticed my little event.
Even the damn drones didn't do anything.
I spit in disgust. The asshole obviously wasn't controlling them.
A dwarf stood in front of me. He was older with a grey beard, piercing silver eyes, and white hair sticking out of his ears. Like all dwarves, he was stout, like a strong man competitor. He wasn't ripped, you couldn't make out every muscle in his body, but you knew he could probably bench press more than you.
His eyes, like all of their eyes, were full of a mixture of panic and sadness. I realized he was focusing on me.
I turned to him, looked him in the eyes, and said, "I have an idea of how to help you, but I'm not sure if it will kill you."
He just looked back intently.
"Look up twice if you understand me," I said.
Both eyeballs looked up, very deliberately, twice.
"I'm going to try to cut that thing off the back of your neck," I said, grabbing him by the shoulders. "This might kill you," I paused. "Do you understand?" I asked.
He looked up twice again.
"Do you want me to do this?" I asked.
He looked up like fifteen times.
Mister Pointy assisted me one more time as I placed the edge of the blade underneath the disgusting mold that was on the back of every slave's neck. I slowly sawed and pried down. It was like pulling off a scab.
Once I got to the center, I felt my knife meet resistance, and I pushed a little harder.
A small pop sounded, and I saw yellow puss start to seep from the edge of the fungus-like a scab. A weird smell like a butcher shop hit my nose.
The dwarf collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.
"Fuck," I said, realizing I just killed a dwarf.
How was I supposed to rescue these people if I couldn't sever their connections?
I turned towards the entrance to go see if I could find Arsch when I heard a voice from behind me. "Oy, fook me in da arse that shite hurt."
"Scottish? Really? That's a little fucking cliche, isn't it?" I said aloud.
"Arnt sure what dat means, but thank Donker, you rescued me," he said, standing up.
I didn't have time to fill in a dwarf.
I pulled out Mister Pointy, flipped him, and handed him to the dwarf. "Work quickly to get these people free. Go around the corner, and meet me at the bottom of the sewage dump."
"Where ya going?" he asked, grabbing the knife.
"Finding a friend," I replied.
He nodded.
I turned back around and made my way inside the green room.
My drill sergeant couldn't have been prouder. There was a division's worth of slaves organized in perfect unity. Shortest on the front and right, tallest in the ba
ck, and left. Bipedal with bipedal, quadruped with quadruped, and all else lined up with precision.
Multiple squids examined and prodded the thousands of creatures.
It was an auction house. Nothing more.
There were two dozen squids bickering, prodding, and deciding on what pieces of meat they wanted to buy or sell.
The numbers didn't add up.
The auction house had about a quarter of the slave population of the whole city. If they did this every day, then the city would be overpopulated within a week or less.
I didn't have time to analyze it. I crept forward behind the line of centipedes, cave fishers, and other large insects, towards the gnomes. Unfortunately, the gnomes were the smallest of the slaves, and I was on the large side.
After three minutes of slinking, I made it to the back of the gnomish ranks.
I know you are probably tired of my philosophical ramblings, but it's important to understand some things. First, you can never save everyone. Second, you can't administer justice to everyone. Once you understand these simple axioms, you will live properly.
I could not save everyone.
I needed to save Arsch.
Arsch wasn't tall or short for a gnome. He was pretty average. He also had some very specific badges, badges that no one else would have.
It took only a couple of minutes to find him.
I crawled, slinked, and bullied my way through the formation to the near center.
I found the back of Arsch.
He had the same weird bullshit orange slave mold on the back of his neck as the dwarf.
Fuck it.
I ripped at the scab and started to pull. A nasty string, the diameter of a spaghetti noodle pulled with it.
"Sorry, buddy," I whispered, as I yanked on the mold.
A loud pop, followed by the crumpling of Arsch, filled the empty void.
I looked around to see if the squids had heard the disturbance.
None had.
I stared intently at Arsch, willing him to stand up, get ready.
As I looked around, I caught the glimpses of the eyes of the damned. Their sorrow, their pain, and their fear struck me straight in my soul.
How do you leave so many innocents behind? Was there even a slight chance that I could save them?
Of Gods & Grunts Page 20