Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-02 21:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | adrian march, ~plot: memories |
What: memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing
Warning, this memory contains: Some violence
You are alone.
The air is heavy and hot and the cotton across your nose and mouth thickens each breath but it is better than the bite of the sand against the exposed skin, your forearms, the flat of your nose, the flesh of your chin. It is heavy shadow and the night above you is pin-pricked with stars but all you see is washed with green. Your attention is fixed and grim. Now is not the time to admire the deadly beauty of the desert. You’ve seen it before and no doubt you’ll see it again. It is an irrelevance and you will certainly die if you get caught up on irrelevance now.
Your eyes are gritty behind the goggles and your throat is thickly dry. There is water in the canteen beneath your knee but you’re holding extremely still. To move will be to break cover and to do so without purpose is to die. There is no one else. This is not a traditional battlefield. There is no back-up. No command teetering just out of reach and no base-camp. There is you and the gun in your hands and, as an afterthought the knife taped to the body armor beneath your shirt. It is hot, the body armor. It is not standard issue, you’re one of the lucky bastards for whom a moderate upgrade is considered necessary. It is therefore not nearly so thick and so heavy but here, where sweat puddles at the back of your neck, in your clavicle and in the creases of your elbows, the punishing lack of breathability counts. It is an afterthought, an additional chip in a game of deeply high-stakes poker.
The earpiece is dead in your ear, beyond range. It is the only connection to the world that is not here. There is, you know, a voice on the end of it. That voice will be steady and it will be abrupt and it will be quiet because they are all qualities that are necessary in whoever is on the end of it. You will make contact when you are back in range and you will only be back in range if you live through this.
The likelihood of that is vanishingly slim. But this is why you are here. It’s known as a fighting chance, which you find ironic. It is a fraction of a motion, not even a motion at all to curl a lip under the swathe of cotton. There is somebody on the other side of that building, and they are important. They are important enough for a helicopter and a trio of men in the desert who no one knows about. You are focused on this to the exclusion of all else. You are either to retreat with that person, or to put a bullet into their head. You are focused but that does not mean you are not in this moment. You are exquisitely aware of this moment. You can feel the desire to take a piss, the cotton feel of your tongue in your mouth, the locked feeling of muscle tension held too long. There is an itch below your hairline.
But it doesn’t matter. There is a flicker of light ahead of you and all of it falls away. A man, it might be a woman, it is of adult height and build. It doesn’t matter. They will either die now or they’ll die later. You have little remorse left. These are orders.
You flinch into position. There is a cavalcade of fire, the bright stutter in darkness and you squeeze off a shot and watch the shape fall. You are on your feet, and you are running. Running toward the shape of the place on the land, running toward death, and the earpiece dangles from thick rubbery wire below your ear.
You surge forward on adrenaline and core certainty holds you fast and you run in silence without expecting that you will ever leave. The desert is beautiful but it is deadly.