2121 - Mountains - Brint - A million little explosions - Yayeva - A sacrifice - Rats - An empty stairwell - Eventualities - 1, 2, 3 - Six drinks - Weaponless - So be it - A creak across the ceiling - Outnumbered - Cut - Piece by piece - Bravo - Seen.

Amstead's army pressed ever onward across the Ossan landscape. A mountain range loomed to the north, breaking the horizon in a blend of reds and blues, hazy but nevertheless hungry—a hateful challenge always threatening, a topographical tear along the lacquertops of desk-tethered generals overseeing the arrangement of their ground forces. In the vast plateau before that change in elevation, towns and villages lay scattered. These hideaways were known to harbor insurgents masquerading as humble civilians; full of first time mothers claiming boys who, by traditional approximation, were not even close to being related. Any house became a safe house for Ossa's guerilla rebellion, so Amstead saw fit to discourage such an effort with artillery. Gifts rained from the skies. First in propagandic flyers from unarmed single engine props, then in a flurry of shelling accented with the rapid chittering of cannon fire from low-altitude death dealers. The invading forces left the red clay plastered and pockmarked, then she sent in her clean-up crews.

A small convoy of canvas-wrapped trucks ambled across the uneven desert terrain carrying the most dispensable of what the foreign army had to offer: infantrymen. A squad of twelve was split among three vehicles and given a direction—south, northeast, northwest—where each would take a pair of three man fireteams to their location except for northwest, who were tasked to go it alone. PFCs Kasse Sejan and Eoran Toriet were assigned to that third vehicle. Their team leader was huddled near the cab, hand over an ear as he shouted a string of jargon confirming their orders into the mouthpiece of his radio.

Between the yelling and the loud chugging of the diesel engine that moved them, Eoran glanced sidelong to Kasse. His nerves betrayed him in the frantic shifting of his eyes, the way they flitted back and forth, the way he clutched his weapon's stock with white-knuckled fingers. As the truck slid to a sudden halt, his shoulder was forced to collide with his friends’. Eoran apologized but the noise surrounding them stole his sound from the shape of his mouth.

They were dropped at the crumbling perimeter of Biko township and told to work their way inward to clear what was left of the rebel stronghold that planted its roots there. Before the war, Biko was a thriving place, a town that was quickly outgrowing its meager boundaries, huts and homesteads upgraded and partially replaced with mid-rise apartment complexes whose arguable affordability made them only half-inhabited—and then mostly by out-of-towners who saw fit to have a place to stay as a midway point between the sizable city of Lasandet and Amstead’s ever encroaching border. A fresh barrage of air support reduced a majority of the buildings to rubble earlier that day, but crumbling facades proved to be valuable hideaways for shadow-stalking rebels. Despite Amstead’s best efforts to nip hostile activity in the bud, Biko remained resilient, even in its death throes.

“I gotta tell you kids,” their CO said, moving to sit before his pair of subordinates. “It was a real fight to get assigned with you two. The whole squad thinks you’re like, lucky charms or some shit.” He was in his late twenties and his voice possessed a natural grit to it, exacerbated by the dry air of the desert. He had dark hair like the younger boys he was speaking to but his features were pale and wide, mismatched against the subtle differences in their skin tone and eye shape and understanding of what this war was even about. His age and rank painted him as a career soldier; the man had apparently been at war for some time now, re-upping and upping and upping. Maybe he was addicted to the thrill of the fight, or maybe he just didn’t have much to go back home to. A nametape across his chest read BRINT in thick black letters, near a trio of chevrons monogrammed to a patch velcroed to the center of his uniform.

“So listen,” Sergeant Brint continued, leaning in, forearms resting on his spread knees, “I know it sucks that we got the short end of the stick and are the only team approaching from the west, but if we’re smart about this, we can do it and get it done better than Alpha and Beta positions combined, ok? Command seems to think that there won’t be much left to clean up here but they’re back home watching this shit on a wall of screens like it’s a movie. What we’re gonna do is stay close and move under as much cover as possible. Slow and steady. Watch your backs. Watch my back and I’ll watch yours. I want so much back watching happening that it's unclear if you’re trying to see a laser sight or checking out my ass. Understood? Good. Safeties off. Let’s move out.”

Kasse and Eo, since their first meeting on the deployment craft, were inseparable. Fast friends now best, Kasse squeezed Eoran's shoulder like he was building the other boy up before a dare, more at home on their first platform training jump than it was here in Amstead's active conflict that made murderers of them both.

“You look so nervous,” the street rat said, sly grin wide around his boyish laugh. Kasse tugged the other PFC to standing as he checked over his shoulder for the sergeant—and sure he was out of earshot, the boy continued, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. “Just watch that ass, keep it close keep it tight—orders from the top, Toriet.”

For all of Eo's pale nerves in combat, Kasse matched him in boisterous swagger, so cavalier when the threat of death was involved that it seemed like he had no real concept of his own mortality. In actuality, Kasse's middle-fingers-up grandstanding was less due to ignorance and more related to a lack of solid tethers to the world he'd be leaving behind because really,

what was there to lose?

Kasse's eyes lingered on Brint overlong, a little too studious. They connected in transport, permission to speak freely yielding jokes and banter to break the dread quiet of impending violence. Kasse warmed to their CO quickly, keeping a minor focus on the sergeant even as he spoke plainly to his best friend, an earnest reassurance for the Toriet boy's justified fear. “It’s just business as usual, right? We'll be back to base in no time, Eo, don't look so serious.”

"Yeah. Yeah, okay." Eoran swallowed hard. He knew that the nerves were a detriment, that they hindered the automation that was drilled into them during basic training, however the humanity in that young thing was hard to set aside. His prelude to every battlefield was visceral, struck through him to the bone—that was normal though, it always did. Every time. This was just how the Toriet boy was made. The relative security of his upbringing was courtesy of watchful parents and an older brother. Up until very recently, that gregarious boy was fearful only for things that were fixable with the fluttering of his eyelashes, but it certainly was impossible to deter a bullet with a pretty face. Velocity didn't give a shit about looks.

"I'm ready," Eoran’s lidded eyes turned away from his friend, focusing down on the SCAR in his hands, thumb clicking the safety from on to three round burst. Back up to Kasse, then: "We gotta go or we're going to be down an ass. Come on...!"

There it was: a smile. Coaxed by the kindness of his friend, business as usual. Eoran turned and the expression ebbed into a grimace. How fucked up was it to smile before going shooting? Was that the correct response? Maybe it didn't matter. At least he was feeling something other than nervous now.

Radio static was the last noise they heard before the grieving breaths of the desert. Brint squelched his radio and moved them forward, the plopping of boots replaced with shuffling cloth and coarse grit crushed beneath the careful placement of six legs. He took them to a wall blasted into a serrated edge, a courtyard nevermore poorly surrounding the skeletal timbers of a house no longer.

Flat palm up signaled to pause. A pair of intense green eyes watched through a gouge in clay-stained concrete.

The silence was chilling for how recently alive the town felt. Billowing tufts of dust and smoke from the barrage earlier that day were still being swept up by the push of the afternoon, covering the landscape like it was an inverse of the sky. The fog was a weather pattern all its own, made from particulate that likely shouldn't be inhaled. A tumbleweed of bright pink insulation bounced by and Brint shifted like he expected it to be wearing a suicide vest. His trigger finger relaxed as it kept moving.

Clear. Onward.

A structure stood down the road that looked to be an apartment complex whose exterior had been shorn off and collapsed in a slide and now rested at the foot of the building in a mess of rubble and broken lawn chairs. Sun and shadow played betwixt the remnants of twisted clothing racks whose sheets had resigned themselves to their concrete captivity. The sergeant turned back to his boys, fingers continuing their arcane motions in the air.

1, 2, 3: Brint, Toriet, Sejan.

A sweep forward: Ahead —> to the complex.

Single finger, elevated: Single file.

A pair of fingers to his eyes, their eyes: Watch me. Watch you. And you.

Fist: Ready————and

Knife hand, swept forward twice: Move.

As Brint began to move out, Kasse turned to Eo for one more moment of levity—mouthing THAT ASS and serving an exaggerated chef's kiss.

The friends, in their year or so of bonding, spent a great deal of time talking about all things in all manner of depth: their vitally different upbringings (or lack thereof), their backgrounds known and speculative, foods they missed, places they wanted to go, things they planned on doing when they got out, music, sights and sounds, films—anything.

But never once did the boys discuss their love lives, sexual histories, orientation—and though they lived in a world where being gay wasn't an offense to be persecuted, feelings were still something Kasse knew complicated friendships, destroyed camaraderie,

and fuck if he was going to complicate the only friend he had.

The jokes delivered as they moved out may have been innocent jabs or a fleeting Freudian confession to preference—perhaps both. Kasse didn't think too hard about it. So long as his all-inclusive preferences didn't fuck up his one relationship in this parched hellscape with a bunch of drama, Kasse could deal with just friends. He kept a close guard on where his fondness for Eo fell, kept his behavior toward his friend in rigid check.

Brint, however, was different. Brint wasn't his friend. Not even a regular member of his squad and he seemed cool enough that a playful hint toward fraternizing would be accepted or rescinded without a write up. That seemed to make expressing an interest okay.

So after a brisk shuffle across open terrain, vigilantly checking the tops of structures for snipers with both scope and his still-secret utility, Kasse risked being too close to their CO, shoulder grazing and lingering against the sergeant's back when they came to rest at their landing point.

A cloud quickly passed before the sinking westward sun. Its aftermath was a spotlight too large to see the circumference of, an intense glare reducing the robust depth of the world into simple, sharp-edged shapes.

Brint was peering around the side of the building beneath an awning that used to be a patio, when his hand blindly reached back to pat Kasse's leg and squeeze his knee. The older man’s field experience honed him into somewhat of an ideal team leader: not only did Brint always know exactly how he wanted to approach a skirmish, he was good at praising his men for the thankless duty they'd been tasked with.

But was that what that was?

Caught in the radiance of the outbound afternoon, Eoran's eyes flashed Kasse a look. It was a confusing thing, harsh—vacillating somewhere between the sentiments ‘get fucking serious’ and ‘get the fuck over here’—but gentle in its retreat. Perhaps an apology for overstepping his boundaries, or perhaps a resurgence of nerves, or perhaps a mild measure of longing.

Was that what that was? Longing. For what? To get this over with? To go back to base? Or something different—something else?

Eoran wasn't sure of himself either, but his face had its ways of tattling on him. It threatened his deepest secrets in ways he may not have even thought to attempt hiding. Only in a very particular light was a peculiar trait of that boy revealed: his eyes didn't match. The blacks were somewhat off, like they were paint mixed by a single manufacturer but with subtle variances in formula yielding batches that differed in chroma. The young PFC looked beyond his friend.

Brint was on the move again and the Toriet boy jumped up to follow close behind with an uncharacteristic eagerness. The road before them stretched long and since the area was cleared, the sergeant thought to chance it with a longer sprint between points of cover. If the enemy was not yet enticed with their movement enough to take some pot shots and reveal their locations, then this effort might help in drawing them out. Boots scampered across roads half-paved. They made it to a clearing encircled by the remnants of a neighborhood. The atmosphere seized up—

And then they heard it. The sound. All encompassing. Oppressive and overwhelming, like resurfacing from a deep dive to the teeming of life, a bubble popped, a crack in their soundscape through which bled the calamity of a million little explosions of gunpowder. They were surrounded by popping and whinging, grazing. Metal on metal, metal on rock, metal on sand.

Metal on meat.