Jennings peered across the no man’s land using a short periscope. Tangles of barbed wire snaked over the muddy ground. Wooden posts meant to support the once twenty-foot high barrier leaned in every direction like broken teeth. Nothing moved, but that didn’t mean they weren’t being watched.
The light patter of rain tapped insistently on his helmet and insulated poncho. Despite all that protection, the persistent humidity soaked him just as thoroughly as if he was swimming. He barely noticed the wet anymore. It had been raining for about a month straight and this day almost qualified as sunny. Great care had been taken to ensure proper drainage but the wooden planks at the bottom of the trench had been submerged for days now.
Jennings was perched on a crate and could have pitched a tarp overhead but with all the humidity, he would have been just as wet. He paused to wipe some water out of his eyebrows before it spilled over into his eyes again. When he looked back, motion caught his eye.
“Contact!” He shouted. The call was quickly taken up by the soldiers within hearing and in moments a hundred rifle barrels poked over the earthwork. A pair of machine gunners unsealed their waxed crates of ammunition and fed fresh belts into their weapons. Jennings secured his periscope and unslung his rifle too. He chambered a round, flipped off the safety, whispered a quiet prayer, and joined his rifle-team at the berm.
“Where are they?” Hissed Hendrix just before the whump of a dozen mortar rounds being launched throbbed in their chests. Two of the rounds exploded into brilliant red flares, bathing the shining mud in a macabre light which glinted off of the barbed wire fence evilly. A few breathless seconds later, the earth erupted in a line as the ten firebombs sprayed napalm in every direction. In the flare of light, one of them spotted the silhouette racing across the no man’s land.
“2 O’clock!” Shouted Gordon. The rifle squad turned as one. Jennings caught a glimpse of movement and his squad began sending hot lead downrange. Aiming was secondary to filling the air with enough munitions to pin them down long enough for the mortar teams to drop a few pounds of high explosives in their laps. The tracer rounds painted yellow streaks just a few feet above the pockmarked ground and other rifle teams quickly zeroed in on their target.
The shadowy figure darted with inhuman speed. Puddles splashed in its wake but the water couldn't seem to keep up with the creature even as it began to dodge the incoming fire. It had little difficulty threading through the defenses until the machine gunners opened up. When they did, Jennings couldn’t hear anything over the chainsaw like blare of a thousand high-caliber rounds a minute. It was a worthwhile sacrifice though. The creature dove into a muddy crater, taking shelter from the onslaught.
Another round of mortar fire whumped from the second line of defense but before they could celebrate, another kind of artillery struck. A jagged fork of lightning crashed into the trench more loudly than any of the gunfire. A nearby cache of ammo went up like a backpack full of bootleg fireworks even as the water underfoot exploded in a superheated gout of steam. Jennings was momentarily stunned and blinded, the strike came down only fifty feet away, right on top of the machine gun nest. He could already smell charred flesh and burnt ozone. Many had fared worse than him though. Standing on his crate, he was spared the worst of the shock, many others were killed instantly by the electricity coursing through the muddy river at the bottom of their shelter. Hendrix lay face-down, steaming liberally.
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Gordon brought Jennings back into the moment by squeezing his shoulder with his vice-like hands. “Get back on the line!” He shouted into the soldier’s ringing ears. He also made the appropriate hand signal so the message wasn’t wasted. Jenning found his rifle and laid against the berm again. His skin burnt from the sudden gout of steam the lightning released but he could see, and he could squeeze a trigger. A frantic need to keep the monsters at a safe range overtook him and he unloaded clip after clip at the attacker who had taken the distraction to get out from under the mortars and close another fifty yards.
The lithe shadow raced closer at an alarming rate while the rifle squads recovered. As it closed with the trench, the rifle-fire grew more dangerous. It was mired down again only twenty feet from the fence and two mortars landed nearby almost simultaneously, followed by a third that blasted the monster into the air. The riflemen knew their business and the figure was shredded by their combined fire as it pinwheeled through the air, no longer able to dodge. Four more mortars finished the job the moment before it made contact with the ground, and two followup firebombs sanitized the area.
Jennings gave out a whoop that was echoed up and down the trench but when he turned to solicit a high five from Gordon he stopped short. His squad leader was lying prone, unmoving, with a white-fletched arrow protruding a good foot out of his left eye.
“Incoming” He shouted even as he rolled to the side, avoiding the arrow meant for him. Only one of his rifle team took cover with him in the trench. The rest were already studded with arrows.
“Holy shit! What the hell are we supposed to do now?” Asked Bert. The bookish conscript wasn’t prepared to outlast his squadmates and he looked at Jennings, panic writ large across his face. With a sinking feeling, Jennings realized that he was suddenly in charge.
“Switch to tracking shells, twenty-degree arc,” He ordered, “and keep your head down if you don’t want any new holes in it.”
Jennings pulled the special clip from his hip-pack, fitted it to his rifle which he switched over to full-auto. When Bert was ready as well, they pushed their rifles over the berm and fired blindly, sweeping the barrels from left to right. Glowing blue shells streaked off into the sky, but two of them shifted to green and dove back towards the ground. Four mortars chased the green rounds into the sniper’s hidden position, but they were too slow. Another shadowy figure leapt out from behind a fallen tree just before it exploded into splinters and was coated in fire. The elf shook a fist at us before retreating back to the treeline. There were two more engagements playing out down the line but Jennings and Bert slid back down into the trench. Bert started sobbing and Jennings tried to redeploy his periscope but his hands were shaking too much for him to use it properly. That didn’t stop him from clinging to it and pressing his eyes up to the glass. The medics had to sedate him before they could pry him away from his post.
