Tanlon and his gaggle of friends rested under the shade of Hemlock Mountain. The troopers had taken to calling that imposing pile of rock and sand that name because to touch it meant death. Every probe the regiments had sent up to investigate the mountain had been repelled and only ended in pitch, frantic battles between the Yabanchi coming down their mountain and the Imperials dug into their hill. Yet on this day the four comrades in arms were relieved from their usual machine gun duties and allowed to rest, the first break they had in three weeks. Naturally, they lounged, so Tanlon and Snell preferred the shade, jackets on to provide just enough comfort, while Haylock and Mad had their jackets off while they lay in the sun.
“Perhaps I’ll get a tan. Maybe then the ladies will pay me more attention.” Haylock yawned out this statement and rolled over so his other side could get some sunlight.
"More like you'll get a sunburn and complain about it to us all week," Tanlon replied. “Besides, what ladies do you know?”
“There was this one gal I knew in my academy days, a blonde with a figure eight.” Haylock stopped and motioned with his hands. “I danced with her at the graduate ball.”
“Did she have a unibrow?” Tanlon’s question got everyone laughing except for Snell. The tall soldier had been moody lately and he spoke without looking at them. “She’s probably dead. Just like everyone else we knew back home.”
Their laughter died in their throats and settled into uncomfortable silence. Mad leaned over and punched Snell in the leg, eliciting a grunted challenge, “What did you do that for?”
“We’s got a day off and you’re glooming our sunshine with your attitude! Talking like some sort of defeatist.” Mad growled back at his friend.
“Ksh, ksh,” Tanlon propped his head up on an arm and broke into their arguing. “Don’t go punching people, Mad, unless you want them to punch back, and Snell, what do you think we’re fighting for?”
Snell settled back on the ground and shook his head, “I don’t know what you mean by that. We’re fighting because we have to. We’d get shot by the Commissars if we didn’t.”
“We’re fighting for Haylock’s girl back home. She may be dead, but she had daughters and they did too. I guarantee you, if we make it out, that there’s probably so many women without husbands that even Mad with that ugly mug of his has a chance of landing a steady squeeze.”
Tanlon had no idea if Mad was ugly or not since they never took off their masks on Paradise, but Mad was clued in enough to pick up the lead.
"You should have seen Lover Boy back at the academy," Mad said, cupping his hands, "Snell here had every woman eating out of his palms with that syrupy poetry he loves so much."
“Forsooth, the night and day meet in one glance, my eye caught by this strange beauty’s trance,” Snell recited a line, his eyes closed and meditating on one of his favorite authors. Haylock mockingly gagged and asked, “Do you mean to tell me that girls really fall for that junk?”
Snell shrugged and replied, “Only the ones without unibrows.” This time when they laughed, Snell joined in and they all temporarily forgot the horrors they had experienced thus far, being transported back to better times in the moment. Yet beneath them, something stirred, and the men of the regiment were not prepared for what was coming next.
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On that night it had been nearly a week since the Yabanchi had last tried any sort of attack against their machine gun positions. Their enemy had lost so many Screamers to the futile attacks that a third mountain was starting to take shape in the walls of dead, rotting Yabanchi piling up. If the troopers were not manning one of the machine gun pits, then they were on carcass duty. Four-man teams would grab a dead Screamer and carry it to the mass grave sites they were getting too good at digging. Of course, Tamil made sure that Tanlon and friends always got the short end of the stick and got carcass duty in the heat of the day where they would sweat and exert themselves the most. Not that they minded too much though, since every trooper heard the horror stories of carcass squads trying to lift a body in the pitch black of night and finding out that their cargo was not quite dead yet.
While the four friends had been sleeping, neither on machine gun duty nor carcass duty, cries from the fire watch had woken them out of their stupor. The roar of machine guns was noticeably absent, but sporadic IM-3 fire told of some sort of battle. Every man of the combined regimental forces not at a position rushed toward the center of the camp, toward the sounds of screams and gunfire, and found a massive hole had opened up and swallowed one of the supply tents. Worse than that, things were coming out of the hole. By their pale bodies and massive musculature, every trooper recognized the screamers on sight and immediately opened fire at their burrowing foes, sending the creatures tumbling back into the grave they had dug for themselves. Yet it was not Screamers alone, for the air had rent with a horrible buzzing, and some of the Midders and High Enders wailed when they heard the noise coming from Mount Hemlock.
Tanlon was too absorbed in popping screamer heads as soon as they came over the edge of their pit to pay any mind to the buzzing, but his concentration was broken by the man next to him giving a blood-curdling scream. Something wet had squirted from the dark shapes flying above them and the men hit by this fluid were to a man sent into a manic frenzy that drove them to commit acts of insanity. When he realized the trooper next to him was trying to rip off his gas mask, Tanlon grabbed his arms and tried to stop him. Unfortunately, the fellow had strength multiplied by his madness and threw Tanlon off of him. Tanlon was helpless to help as he jumped up off the ground and watched the other soldier take his last gasp as Paradise’s poisonous atmosphere melted his lungs.
Even then, with the new flying enemy and the hole in their camp, they might have salvaged the situation and beat the enemy back, but a new sound joined the orchestra of panic, one that sent Tanlon scrambling to run with the fleeing pack of soldiers up the slope of the hill. The machine guns pointed at the mountain started firing.
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With the red glare of emergency flares being their main source of light, the battle scene looked like a surrealist nightmare as monsters crawled from the pit and fell upon the mass of men before them. Men fought in the dying red light, grouped in tight packs, with rifles, bayonets, and fists, but the tide was against them. For every Yabanchi that fell, two more took its place and they were implacable. There would be no parlay, no negotiations for prisoners with this inhuman foe.
“Fall back to sector C, fall back to sector C!” Tamil’s voice was one of the few voices of reason shouting along with the other company and regimental commanders. Sector C was the command area, the commanders' cave filled with maps made of sticks and stones. If there was one small grace that night, it was the paranoia of the regimental leadership to place two machine gun positions in cross-firing positions at sector C. It made the difference that only a few minutes extra could.
Tanlon was near the back of the retreating soldiers, but not the last one. Those poor souls he could hear behind him, either taking a last stand and taking a few of the enemy with them or shouting for help from their fleeing comrades as the Screamers jumped them. Either way, they ended the same, and their screams were just another part of the chorus of panic they were all instruments in.
By the time they passed the hill's machine gun positions, Tanlon was one of the last men to make it. On seeing him and no one else behind him, the watch commander gave the signal to the gunners and they let their bullets fly at the enemy. For a brief moment, as the brutes were cut off at the knees or stitched across their torsos with lead, Tanlon felt like it would be enough, but the final small pinprick of light from a flare below them was snuffed out, some alien foot had trodden over it and there was only boiling darkness below in the valleys and dune underneath their hill. Yet the eye can adjust to the dark, revealing truths that men would better prefer hidden and Tanlon froze when he caught on to what he was seeing.
Thousands of Screamers, so many that the dark of the night rippled with movement across their camp and to the slopes of Mount Hemlock leering above them. They were coming for them, charging up the slopes and casting themselves at the last two machine gun positions, heedless of the cost, for they knew that the few hundred soldiers huddled up there were the only ones left and victory would soon belong to the Yabanchi.
“Square up, square up!” A voice was shouting, Tanlon was not sure who it was, but even in the time of their imminent deaths, the Imperial Vanguard refused to lay down and die. “Three ranks at the front, two on the sides and rear! Squad leaders, get your men moving!”
It was such a mess. The Vanguard’s system of quick battlefield promotions left holes in the chain of command that were not efficiently filled. Men lingered, unsure of where they were supposed to go, Tanlon one of them, and it was up to the more hardened veterans to start pushing and shoving Ones and Twos where to go. A rough hand snagged the back of Tanlon’s uniform and dragged him to the middle line of the front of the square, from there Tanlon had a full view of the oncoming horde and he waited for further command.
It took far too long to get everyone in position, nearly a minute. The flying Yabanchi overhead did not help matters, as men were either blindly firing into the sky to hit them or else being hit by their strange spray and driven to madness. They got it eventually, five hundred troopers gathered in a square, just in time to hear the final machine gun positions cease their operation and to feel the ground underneath them quaking.
“Tempo fire, tempo fire! By line, tempo fire!” A voice shouted from the middle of the square, squad leaders picked up what he said and repeated it. "Lines, take aim!"
They came, surging like a black tide from the base of the hill and squeezing all around them. Yabanchi Screamers driven by hunger, hate, and the invisible commands of their masters tore through sand and rock, eager to latch their teeth around the throats of their enemies. Only a few dozen meters separated the two parties, a space that could be covered in seconds.
“First rank fire, second rank fire, third rank fire!” It was like before, when they had first jumped onto Paradise and had to react to the enemy’s counterassault. Back then Tanlon had never fired a weapon in anger and his training took over, the thousands of drills done with instructors at the academy paid off. Yet unlike that first encounter, the battle did not end in a frantic, quick skirmish. They kept coming. Piling on the fallen and jumping over the slain, the beasts knew their prey was at the limit and that they would feast soon enough.
Aside from an occasional man being hit by the insanity spray of the flyers above them, the Vanguard's square did not break from men running for the last little bit of ground up the hill. It was their last stand and the Yabanchi would have to pay dearly for every inch of it. Yet despite their training, the reality was that they only had a limited amount of rifle ammo on each man, and as the volleyfire went on, their supply steadily decreased. "Ammo! Out of ammo!" The cry started to pick up in the ranks like they thought there was some sort of ammo runner coming to bring them more, but it was not to be. The leadership knew this and gave orders accordingly, "Raise bayonets!"
There was a space of five seconds between that order and when the first Screamer reached their lines. The beast was unfortunate to be so quick, as multiple bayonet points reached it at once, driving their tips through muscles and teeth and it was brought down into a gurgling mess. The next Screamer grabbed a man's leg and dragged him away, into the frothing chaos of bodies piling closer to the troopers.
Tanlon watched as the man in front of him had his head caved in by a ferocious blow, a consequence of not having his helmet on. There was no time to mourn for his comrade, another nameless fellow soldier in a list growing too long; Tanlon stepped forward and jabbed his bayonet into the Screamer’s throat. It looked like it tried to howl, but it only hissed once, grabbing at its neck, and stumbled away from him. Another took its place, fresh, and this one batted away his strike like it was swatting a fly. It roared and clawed for Tanlon’s face, trying to rip off his mask, but the trooper next to Tanlon in line ran his bayonet through the Yabanchi’s ribs, catching its attention long enough for Tanlon to strike again, this time landing a hit right in one of its eyes.
Shoving his bayonet into the pulped mass was harder than Tanlon cared to think about, but he drove the blade with all his weight behind it, too hard. The Screamer collapsed away from him, taking Tanlon’s rifle with it as the weapon was wrenched by his hands from being stuck in its skull.
Tanlon had only a moment to frantically place a boot on the fallen enemy’s chest and attempt to dislodge his weapon when the next Screamer tackled him to the ground. It hit him with such force that Tanlon’s head hit the ground with a ferocious bump and the dark of the night flashed on and off and with the darker black of unconsciousness for one second.
The Screamer was on top of him and it raked into Tanlon’s chest with inch-long claws that parted through hardened armor fibers and skin like they were not even there. Despite his best efforts to buck it off, legs pushing and fist pounding into the side of its face, the beast would not budge. The Screamer's gasps of hunger and pleasure were stopped when half its head dematerialized from an IM-3's round and it slumped on Tanlon, dead.
Though he was alive, Tanlon could not move, the Screamer weighed at least five hundred pounds. Another body fell on top of the one covering him and the mass increased and then another and another until even his sight was blocked by the weight of the dead. Tanlon screamed, but his was just another voice amongst the dying.