The Gaming Outpost

The eltee Chen ran back in his weird slap-step fashion to check on Bill, the country music singer, heartbreaker of young girls, and cold-blooded sniper while I chugged onward up a curve between two large magnolia trees.  Around me, a full two dozen Norte Americanos, of all genders and ages, ran for their lives.  Behind us, the lynch mob of perhaps a thousand, incited by the same folk that had messed them over the first time, and got to use them a second time, came after us, hungry for blood and vengeance.

I was carrying a four year old Asian doll named Kelly on my left arm, and my eighty pound backpack on my back (where else?), and my SAW and an ammo box with my right.  As big, no huge, as I am, and practised, I was beginning to hurt.

The eltee, strange fellow but the first decent officer, the first man I had ever met who deserved my allegiance, Chen No First Name, came up alongside me as we hustled under the magnolia trees.

Hold here, he signed, and I dropped off the roadside, and rolled behind a tree.  Kelly came with me, and grinning in her excitement as I pulled a couple squishies, a type of ear plug from my front pocket.  Into her ears they went as she watched me with the kind of intense curiousity I often feel, but fear to show.

The SAW was set up between two split trunks, chest-high, and I hooked the refeed to the SAW from the very heavy metal box that was about to get lighter….

“For the gifts we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.” I murmured as I always do before setting the SAW, which theoretically needed two men to operate, or one Big Ray, on to ‘rock and roll’.  The little girl to my right gave me a thumbs up, probably learned from a televsion show, and I grinned back as adrenalin raced down the lines of my body, and made me feel as if I were floating.

“Yeah, baby, come get some!” I roared as I let loose with the first ranging burst, which landed providentially right in the midst of the mob, splintering bone, and shredding bodies in one long brraaaapppp.  Shocked, the whole thousand paused a half-second, and I dropped my barrel to rake the leaders across the chest.  Holes appeared in their chests, for some reason mostly on the right side to me, and the left to them, just fluke chance, which plays a big part in battle, and the front row was gone, and the second row had gaps in it.

Here was the moment.

Either they ran, or they never would.

Stung, maddened, and enraged, they came at me with a fury the unblooded would call ‘inhuman’.  I knew better.  It was very human.

I began shooting, in bursts, knowing I could not break the line, knowing I had to save as much ammunition as I could.  Wanting to tell little Kelly to run, to help me, I did not.  It would be a waste of time, for she was fixed to my side at eight inches to my left, and it would have taken a grenade to pry her loose from her protector.

Shots came toward me, but they hit the tree trunks when they were lucky, and the rocks around me mostly.  The rest of the folks up hill, who had turned the curve, and were now going up the last rise before the beach and the getaway microckets were in more danger than me from the shots aimed at me.

Charging under light machine gun fire, uphill, and shooting with eyes half-squinched shut from fear a not very clean pistol is no way to hit a target smaller than a mountain.  They would do better to stop firing, and concentrate on running uphill as fast as they could.  Which is why every bullet that hit the trunk above my head lightened my spirits.

I played the SAW back and forth over the line, trying to hold the lynch mob back like a firefighter holds back an out of control fire with his firehose.  They slowed, but now they sensed victory as they came up the last bit, and I tossed my two grenades, and yanked the SAW with the belt still fixed to the now two-thirds empty box, and took little Kelly with the wide eyes up to my chest where my huge chest would provide a bulletstop.

Twin booms behind me as I plunged uphill, and the resulting screams turned to gleeful wrath as they realized their tormentor was running.  Already, I had killed perhaps eighty of the thousand, add in Bill with his sniper rifle doing for ‘twelve’ (and when he said ‘twelve’ I said ‘twelve’ for he meant ‘I shot them in the left eye’.)  A few would have died in the running over the ground, being trampled, heart attacks, and tripping and breaking their necks or some such thing.

Call it an even hundred we had killed.  That left nine hundred who really wanted to roast me for dinner, and Kelly for dessert.  Not happening, I vowed, and began to feel the burn as I passed the curve.  Bullets plucked around my feet, and one twitched my combat green pants, but I made the curve.

The flat eased my legs, and so I stretched out my lumbering legs, and made shaky serve desperate.  If I were not so huge, I could have run this easier.  But then, if I were not so huge, I could not tote a SAW by myself.

Behind me, I heard the whoops and carols of the men who wanted to be hyenas even as they imagined themselves lions.  There were even a few women among them, which is one of the barbarities of the !Revolutionary!.  Civilized societies keep as many as they can out of the line of fire.

They crested the hill’s curve on the path behind me, and I prepared to die.  There was no way, even some very poor shots, were going to miss a man in a clear pasture forty feet down a track, when they had the time to take dozens of shots.  My goal was to fall in such a way as to completely cover little Kelly.

“Little darling,” I said, near crying for I did so want to live. “I might not move much in a bit. But you listen to your Uncle Big Ray.  Don’t move, Uncle Big Ray is tired. He needs a pillow. You can get out when the sun goes down.”

I’d fall on her, and hopefully the mob behind her would not see her tiny body under my corpse.  It was my last plan, and I prayed even as I planned on how to fall.

A whining noise. Another. A small boom. Three more whines.

Behind me, the sound of melons being tossed on the supermarket floor.

“Run, you big lug.” The eltee shouted from the crest of the hill.  Bill had no mental space to yell at me as he was fully in the zone.  He pointed, and a man died.  Before you could read the words, another man died.  The eltee was helping with his carbine, but it was definitely the apprentice helping the master at this moment.

In this place and time, Bill was Death.

I ran, and a few bullets came after me.  One hit the armored box, and another my back.  But I’m a real big guy, and no way was some puny .38 revolver going to stop Big Ray!

Yeah!  My feet went up, my feet went down.  My arms screamed at me, and I screamed back at them.  My lungs volunteered to give up and die, and I coldly informed them in the eltee’s voice that they did not have permission to die, so request not approved.  All of this occurred in my head, as I went up the last crest before the beach.

Bullets ran all over the place, some hitting in front of my feet, some off to the right where Bill had changed to his pistol as he had no more rifle bullets.  That meant, he had killed seventy-one people today plus whatever his pistol accounted for.

In a rising hailstorm of fire as the whole mob reached the flat place before the last crest, I dove over the top ridgeline, and lay gasping on my stomach. The eltee kicked me in the ribs to make me roll over.

And I saw as I lay on my back with my head down to the beach that the others we were protecting were scrambling downhill as fast as they could to the beach where the strap-on rockets would blast them out to sea for them to parachute into international waters.  And one of them, a young man, and a very fast runner, was reaching for little Kelly.

“We must go, Kelly. Now.”

“I want Unca Beegray.” She wailed.

“I love you too, little darling.” I said as I forced myself to sit up, still gasping and shaking like a leaf. “I got something I need to do right now. Go with…”

“Sam.” The boy said realizing quickly I didn’t remember his name. Smart kid.

“Go with Sam.”

She gave me piteous eyes.

“Do me a favor. Sam will watch that movie with the fuzzy bears with you, so when I catch up, you can tell me about it.”

“K.” She said, and I hated lying to her, but then Sam had her, and he was leaping and springing down the path like a panicked antelope.  I wanted to weep.  But I forced myself to crawl forward to the crest.

The bad people were coming, and only me and my SAW could stop them.  And then I heard the eltee whispering in my ear, nonsense words, and suddenly I forgot my fear, I forgot my grief, and there was only the SAW and its bullets in the universe.

I did not have enough to kill them all.

But, I flipped the SAW to single shot, and began using it like a rifle.  Crouched on the hillside, because a prone position offered a better chance of hitting my targets, I began to reap what fools had sown.

If they had not listened to liars who promised them a better life stolen from others.  If they had thought about what they were being told, if, but they had not.  And now they paid for their ignorance.

Each bullet punched out, and hit a man.  I’m not Bill.  I hit them in the chest, or in the arm, or the foot.  But, I did not miss.  And a SAW bullet is a mighty huge thing.  I literally disarmed many in the unforgiving minutes that it took them to charge the hill.  Others, I killed two mobbists with one bullet, through the chest, and through the man behind them.

But they came, and so at the end, as my bullets were nigh gone, I gave one last brraaaap to clear space so that I could stand in the face of the charging crowd a mere two yards in front of my face, and then I stood.  In my hands was the empty SAW, but my hands were not empty.  And I stood and towered on the crestline, and was taller than any of them.

I flailed about with my weapon, many times, spattering brain and bone, screaming my vengeance, giving the escapees one extra second, and two extra seconds, until finally I fell under the charging weight of the dozens who ran over the dead bodies of their comrades.

It hurt like nothing I had ever felt before, and even as I lay dying, as my fless was being torn, I reached out and broke one more man’s neck with my bare hands.  And then I too was broken, unable to move, and a boot came down on my face.

But I knew in my heart that little Kelly had escaped.

===========

It was with some surprise that I looked up into the smiling face of the eltee. Chen No First Name grinned broadly down at me.

“You’re not Michael Archangel, or even Lucifer.” I had faith in Jesus that I was going Up, but there had been some slightly niggling doubt.  But I was dead sure that no matter how weird the eltee was, he was not an Archangel.

“You’re alive.”

“Impossible.” I said, and sat up, in a deep wood, and I felt just fine.  No bones were broken, no ear was chewed off, no skull was caved in, and even my legs were not burning from running.

My SAW lay nearby, and the backpack with the grenades I had not had time to get out of their box inside it, was there too.  And just a bit across the ground, I saw Bill groan, and wake up.

“I would like to see my Aunt Ruth, if that’s okay.” He announced to the air.

“Sniper, Tech Sergeant, atten-hut!” Lieutenant Chen ordered, and before we knew it, we had scrambled to our feet, and stood in attention.

He was smaller and shorter than both of us, but I still remember the time I met him in a bar.  It was our first meeting.  He said something mocking to a friend of mine, so I poked him in the chest with one big finger, and told him to shut up.

He hit me.

Right in the stomach, and I went back five feet, and hit the ground.  That made me very mad, and I got back up.  We were well on our way to demolishing the bar when the MP’s showed up, and dumped us all into lockup.

Chen got out right away, and then he came back.

“You’re the first man I’ve ever met who could get up after being hit by a Deathhand.  I want you on my team.”

Considering that I could A. Stay in lockup for two weeks and accept a downgrade in rank. OR B. Go join this genuine tough guy who seemed to like me, I chose B.

We added Bill later when he was drunk and shooting the lights off the top of cop cars from half a mile away while sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of Santa Fe Boulevard.  Officially, no one knew who had done it, and it was an open case for Homeland Security with ‘a terrorist sniper’.  Unofficially, Bill and I realized our eltee had some serious pull behind the scenes.  Since Bill had the choice of twenty years hard time, well, that made his choice very easy.

Bill had complained at being labelled a terrorist even anonymously.

“Should be obvious I was not trying to hit anyone. I mean, I hit no one, and I fired over a hundred bullets. Now I’m some big, bad terrorist! I was just funnin’ with the cops.”

“Shut up.” We both had said.  And the eltee had added. “You are not to discuss this incident with anyone again.  And if I catch you drinking whiskey again, I will be….displeased.”

Bill had gone pale about that moment, and I wondered what their earlier conversation had involved, and how many bruises Bill had collected.  Nowadays, Bill drank beer, and limited his recreational shooting to fireflies.

I focused back on the present moment, and Chen was still standing there, letting us cope in our own way.

“I tried to explain this easy, but you’re both hardheads, so we’ll do this the military way.”

He raised one finger.

1. You died, and now live because you followed me even into death, and beyond.

2. You’re immortal of sorts. You can be killed, but you’ll simply go to a different reality.

Bill scoffed. Chen pointed up. Two moons, one purple, the other bright yellow floated in a sky full of stars that even a suburban guy like me knew were wrong.

“Toto, we’re…” Bill began.

“Not in Kansas anymore.” Chen and I finished.

“Well good, I hated Kansas anyways.” Bill added.  I grinned. It was good to hear his good humor back on board.

“Sooo….” I asked Chen.

“I was hoping you two would join me.  Fight the good fight as you did in your world, but in this case all over the Realities.”

I blinked. Sure, sounded good.

“Raise your right hand.” The eltee said.

“And so, that was how The Company was born.  You wanted to know how we were different.  We told you’d that we might tell you at the appropriate time.” Big Ray said looking out over the campfire in the midst of the burnt village they had found.  Across from him was Pierre Jacquard, Crusader who fought the Muslim invader, or had.  Then to the left sat Gaius Pkarius, Legionairre, and Jason Rogers, SOG on very extended detachment from saving the Hmong from the VC, and Twiliaard the Atlantaen, and Bill the Sniper and Country Music Singer, and then Jessamine the Bard who competed with Bill, and then back to Big Ray who looked down at his hands and then to the youngest man there, even though he had a few grey hairs.

Hugh O’Clair, clan warchief of O’Clair, had fought for two dozen years in the Irish winters and summers, and the easy way he handled a claymore, or looked about for trouble confirmed it.

“So my people are still back then, in that other world I came from?”

“Aye.” Said a grim-faced and deadly calm Scottish Covenanter, Matthew Reilly.

Hugh nodded, for all men knew that the Covenanter would never lie.

“So, its you wanting me to join The Company, and fight among many worlds?” He asked. Chen stepped forward, and all fourteen of us stood.

“Its up to you, Hugh. I would be right glad to have you. You’re deadly in a sword fight and only Falling Tree can outsneak you, and only Ojimbwe can outrun you.”  Chen pointed to our Cherokee scout, and to the Christian Ethiope warrior who was blacker even than Big Ray.

“I’m your man, Eltee Chen. In life and death, I will serve you, and never betray The Company, and live according to the dictates of the Lord of Hosts.” Hugh said, and Chen grinned, and then leapt the fire to be the first to clasp our new brother by the shoulder.

After that, it was a night of rejoicing.  The next day, we found out where and when we were.  1972 Vietnam.  Nixon was trying to extricate the US without dooming the free, if corrupt South.  The Opposition was planning on giving the Southern Army two clips of ammo and two grenades and tossing them to the ideological friends of the Opposition.

Well, The Company would just have to see about that!