Rapid Fire Challenge: Attrition - December 2020

[Race Bannon]

Prompt: Attrition

Maximum length: 500 words

Deadline: 31 December 2020

Where to post submissions: In this thread

Note - please make sure all submissions adhere to the forum rules. Any entry that breaks one or more rules shall be removed.

[his_light]

“I need another power pack over here!”

 

Pavo threw Messala a power pack seconds later, shouting something about how he “fething better not waste it”, although it was doubtful whether anyone really heard what he was cursing above the infernal noise of those things. In any case, Messala barely noticed. He was too busy trying to force the pack into his lasgun with fumbling hands that were rapidly failing him.

 

The bugs had come at them for three days straight. It had been easy enough. Just the small ones. They had been quickly dispatched in a hail of lasbolts and heavy ordnance. Then those worms… no that wasn’t right…. they were too big to be worms…. those snakes had appeared in the rear. There had been even more of the small ones too, spilling out of the ground as if it was doomsday. The men there had put up a good fight, that was true. But it hadn’t made a difference. Not when those things crawled over the corpses of their dead, taking no notice of the certainty of death, ignoring bayonets and blades in their rush to kill. The boys broke eventually, and the few who made it to the walls of the complex had been dragged down and ripped apart as they desperately tried to reach safety. You had heard some of the plead, beg, even threaten the men behind the gate to open it. But that would have been suicide.

 

Not that it had made much difference in the end. It had just granted you an extra day or so of living, if it would last that long. There was barely enough ammo to go around before they cut the road, and now there was practically none left. Wonderful, you thought to yourself, just in time for them pouring through the breach in the wall. The din was so loud. You could hardly hear yourself think. Maybe that was a good thing. All your mind was doing was screaming, searching for a way out.

 

Click. Click. CLICK. Empty. Doesn’t matter how hard you pull the trigger. Nothing’s coming out.

 

“Where’s the fething ammo?!? Whose taken it all?!?”

 

Nobody hears you shouting, even when you scream at the top of your lungs as if your life depended on it. Nobody hears you. Or maybe nobody cares to react, too caught up in trying to survive to care.

 

You need to get out. You can’t shoot them without bullets, and you can’t bayonet the fething things either. Yes, you need to get out. You stumble from the firing line, which is little more than a swirling morass of man and abomination fighting for life, and run. All you can see is death, everywhere you look. Its all you have watched for the past three days, and it has finally won. It has destroyed you, wearing you down and tearing out hope. It has won.

 

Something behind you screams, an unnatural, alien, guttural roar. A second later, everything goes dark.