Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-5543592-20190330040916/@comment-5583506-20190402010903

Something with the Vertibird brought Shanks back to some memory from before the war. He had a strange feeling in his guts. A sensation of anxiety that overwhelmed him and was reflected in his doglike face. He tried to steady himself as he felt the soft pads underneath his feet beginning to drum uncontrollably against the steel floor. He had experienced this before somewhere, and he knew when and where.

Mongolia, he recalled as he remembered the unbearable heat of the Gobi Desert.

Their Vertibird had been hit by a rocket and they had been forced to evacuate by parachute. He had been the last one out, mere moments before the fire had spread to the engines and blown the vehicle to smithereens. He had remembered the anticipation of watching one soldier after another jump out, fearing that he would be the one who didn't make it. Yet somehow, he had survived. Not that it had mattered much in the end. As they dropped from the sky, they beheld the smoldering surface below. The sand dunes were coated red with the blood of the fallen on either side. Shrapnels and parts from tanks and downed Vertibirds lay strewn out acroos the landscape like toys in a child's bedroom.

He remembered the fear that had gripped him. The fear that he wouldn't make it. Not because of the gunfire from the cannons and the rifles plucking down his comrades like flies, but because of his parachute: the fear that it wouldn't open and that he would die the instant he hit the sands.

He remembered vividly how he had laughed. He had laughed so loudly, surrounded by the deafening roars of burning Vertibirds, gunfire, explosions and the dampened grunts of parachuters as they were hit, that tears had welled up in his eyes.

I went mad, he remembered. Mad with fear.

There wasn't much that scared him, save for the idea of going insane out of pure terror. Mongolia had been one of those places. Loaded with a packing almost his own weight, wearing a uniform that had been too thick for the climate, half deaf from all the commotion and the cause around him, his face covered in blood from when the bullets struck a man next to him. And all in a blazing heat that made his brain boil inside his skull.

He couldn't remember how he had managed to reach the ground in one piece. Had he managed to somehow activate his parachute? He didn't know, and he would never get an answer. He had at that time presumed that the Almighty One had spared him his life. Saved him so that he could see his daughter again.

Once down among the dunes he had stumbled forward, his boots filling up with sand as he tried to make his way across the battlefield to the rendez-vous point. He was out of breath. His hands shaking with anxiety and terror.

I will not make it, he thought. ''I am dead. I am dead. I am dead.''

He had repeated the last in his head over and over, almost like a prayer. A prayer that God would once again save his hide. He wouldn't die here. He wouldn't die as some nameless grunt to the Commies. That wasn't happening. Not while he still had a rifle tightly clutched in his hands to the point where thought that his fingers would simply merge with the grip and the trigger.

A commando in Chinese called out from somewhere behind him. He flinched and spun around. His finger squeezed down hard in an act of pure reflex. Bullets sprayed the Chinaman open from groin to chestbone.

Red petals...

As the body collapsed and tumbled down the dune in obscene spins, he had unleashed another barrage of bullets into the corpse. It was still twitching. The Chinaman was still groaning. Panic had overtook him. He wasn't dead. The Chinaman wasn't dead either. He couldn't afford to waste more bullets. He still needed them to survive. He had thought of them as compensation. Like a toll that needed to eventually be paid.

''I need to conserve them to pay the toll! If I can pay the toll, I get to live!''

He tossed the rifle to the side and drew his combat knife from his belt. He approached the groaning Chinaman on unsteady legs, almost tumbling down himself. Gunshots echoed in the distance. A storm brewing on the horizon. None of that mattered. He was going to settle the score between them here and now.

I am going to pay my toll.

He fell down to his knees next to the Chinaman. The fallen soldier gazed up at him with a mix of anger and confusion, yelling something at him in a foreign tongue. It could have been an insult, it could have been a plea for mercy, or simply an urge that he finish him off quickly. There was no way this man was going to recover even if he had spared him.

He had raised his combat knife over his head and struck the blade down through the Chinaman's shoulder blade. The man gasped out in pain as his lung was punctured. He had raised his blade over and over again, delivering blows into the soft body by his knees. Even continuing long after the man was the dead and ropes of crimson followed the combat knife whenever he withdrew.

"Private!" a voice called in the distance, trying to overcome the cacophony of explosions and gunfire. "Private Wain!"

The young soldier with the dead Chinaman before him had tears in his eyes, they mixed with the blood on his cheeks as they fell to the sand. He was overcome with grief, fear and madness. Was there anything as cruel as a man who didn't even know whether he was alive or dead? A man or a monster?

"Private Wain!" the voice called out again.

But the soldier hadn't reply, and instead just kept stabbing the enemy. His grunts had turned into hysterical sobs, and by the time the Corporal had grabbed him by the shoulder, trying to shake some sense into the young man. He had dropped the knife to his side. The Corporal had soon been joined by the arrival of reinforcements. They were met with a most gruesome sight. The young private's face was distorted in a silent expression of pain and terror. He was as stiff as a corpse and had to be dragged from the dead Chinaman. The moment they had touched him, they were met with the inhuman sound that could only be expected from the death shriek of some bewildered beast. But the young man was neither human nor beast anymore. There was no word for those who had betrayed their very God given nature. The private had screamed in anguish till his lungs collapsed.

Shanks' trembled slightly, making it an effort to steady his body as the Vertibird took off. He rubbed his fuzzy paws, trying to think of the sights outside the windows.