Buck

Buck planted his elbows on his desk, and rested his forehead in his hands. He let himself close his eyes, just for a minute. Not a nap. He didn’t have time for a nap. He just needed to shut the world out for one minute.

What was he going to do?

He had twenty recruits in his care. Twenty young men and women, kids really, who relied on him to get them through this. And he had no idea what “this” even was. He was every bit as lost and adrift as them. 

He’d pull his own teeth out with rusty pliers before he ever admitted that. It wasn’t pride. It was because they depended on him. As long as Buck kept giving orders, kept up morale, kept up the front that all of this would make sense eventually, they didn’t panic. He couldn’t admit that he had no idea where they were, no idea how to contact anyone outside their little bubble of barracks and tarmac, had no idea what the creatures attacking them even were and finally had no idea what the Hell he was going to feed them all.

What was he going to do? 

Twenty lives in his hands, and he had no grip on anything. 

First off, there were the monsters. He had no other word for the creatures that shambled out of the surrounding mists at random, thankfully rare intervals. The first one kind of looked like a giant preying mantis crossed with a person. It had stumbled out of the mists, wandered around in circles for a bit, and then noticed the recruits grouped around staring at it. It had leaped for poor Reynolds, knocked the poor kid flat on his back and swiped at his face. Albertson and Buck had tackled it off of him, and then Johnson had ripped a flag pole off one of the barracks and started whaling on the thing. Mathews and Pratt joined in while Nguyen dragged Reynolds clear and patched up his face. He seemed okay, only needed a couple butterfly bandages, but there’d be a scar. He handled it pretty well, affecting a pirate accent and insisting on carrying a small origami parrot on one shoulder. Buck allowed it. Hey, the kid got his face ripped up by a freaking monster. If a paper birdie kept him calm, then damn it the paper birdie was staying.

Since then, there had been two monster incursions. One looked like a walking tree and one was more of a blob than anything. They were lucky in that the part of the armory that had survived happened to contain their few boxes of live ammunition for target practice, as well as functional P-90s. They were not lucky in any other respect, as both monsters took hails of machine gun fire like it was nothing, only disintegrating after each of the dozen armed recruits had emptied a full magazine into the damn things. They could handle maybe one, two more of those and then they were swinging empty guns as clubs. 

Maybe Buck should have them pull down the rest of the flag poles. Blunt force trauma had done pretty well for that first monster.

Ignoring the monsters, if you could ignore something like that, there was the rather desperate food and water situation. 

The mess hall hadn’t made it with them. So the only food they have was what was in the barracks, and in Buck’s office. He had a couple cases of granola bars and some fruit he kept on hand in the likely event of a recruit falling out because they forgot to eat. Good thing he bought in bulk. There were vending machines in the basements of the barracks. The snacks in there were mostly healthy, so that was something. There were sports drinks, too. And inevitably a few recruits had snuck treats from home. He’d write them up but, hey, every scrap was one more thing they could eat. When that ran out, well. 

That wouldn’t be much of a problem if they couldn’t manage the water situation though. They had four cases of sports drinks and five of water bottles. Each recruit had their full water bottles ready for PT, and that was it. It looked like a lot at the moment, but in three, maybe four days they would run out. Buck had already ordered the recruits to set up rain water collectors. If it rained in this weird place. If the water that fell from that bruise mottled sky was potable. If. If. If.

Buck picked up the phone handset on his desk and pressed it to his ear. The same damn silence. No ring tone. No static. Just silence.

No help there. 

He didn’t bother looking at the cell phone. He’d drained that, trying and trying and trying to get through to anyone. Hell, he’d called the nearest pizza place. They didn’t answer either.

Now he had choices to make. 

Did they carry on as they had, under the assumption that rescue was coming? Or did they set out into that mist, hoping to find a way home?

So far no one wanted to step off of the familiar safety of the tarmac into that swirling miasma of the unknown. Buck had assigned patrols in four shifts, each one covering a section of their too small “base”. The rest he kept in the barracks, half doing inventory and half sleeping. No more physical training. They needed to conserve their energy. Physical exertion would make them run through their water supply too damn fast. 

“Sergeant?”

Buck turned at the voice. Jader stood there, his hands fumbling around the grip of his gun. Buck lifted one eyebrow and the gun snapped up to his chest properly. 

“What is it, Recruit Jader?” he asked.

“Something new has come out of the mist, Sergeant.”

“A new monster?” Buck asked, standing up.

“I’m not sure, Sergeant,” Jader said. “It... it looks like a kid. A little girl.”