Evelyn May was the operations officer at the headquarters of Tapstrike, Ltd. She was a stark, severe woman, prim and focused.

She watched the clock on her monitor counting upward. At three o'clock precisely, the communications blackout would be lifted, according to plan.

Ever since she had taken over operations at Tapstrike, not a single operation had begun late. No part of any plan had not been fulfilled. Not a single bullet point had been left unaddressed. She ruled with an elegant iron fist. Order and predictability were her familiars, marching in lockstep with her will.

Her digital timepiece ticked up from 2:58 to 2:59. She waited patiently. In one minute, she would activate the console, sending the signal to stop scrambling and jamming communications.

If the plan were going well, the soldiers would be finished with the operation, have cleaned up any evidence, and would be flying back to headquarters right now. She expected them back sometime between 21:00 and 23:30 tonight.

There was room in the time budget to flex, of course-- Evelyn May's world could run according to her timetable, but the soldiers had to deal with... contingencies. Unknowns. Her eyes narrowed. Her job was to make sure everything was where it needed to be, when it needed to be there. The soldiers' job was to be thorough. That sometimes led to some uncertainty in scheduling.

With ruthless efficiency, she had ground out as much of that uncertainty as she could manage, making Tapstrike Ltd. a world-class operator, respected and sought after. In a very real way, the ascendancy of Tapstrike was a resounding validation of her process and model.

Her finger pressed the button to deactivate jamming exactly as the digital timepiece flicked over to 3:00. She smiled thinly and began transmitting.

"The time is now 1500 hours, Linwood Standard Time. The communications blackout is lifted. Field Operative Alpha One, please report."

Silence filled her small office. The corners of her mouth dipped.

"Field Alpha One, report."

Still nothing. Most unusual.

"Field Beta One, please report."

"Oh thank you!" blared her speakers. Her eyebrows rose, and she actually leaned back from her 90-degree sitting angle. The audio was indistinct and choppy, as though it were being transmitted from a field radio, and not the comms panel of the transport aircraft.

"We are still engaged in the operation," the voice continued. "There's some kind of crazy force out here, they're wiping us out! Alpha team is gone. Hankins, Damewood and I are all that's left of Beta. Gamma is still out searching."

Evelyn May's features stiffened. So many questions, but one thing at a time.

"What is the status of the operation, Beta One?"

"Uh, primaries were silenced. There was a minor hiccup in the execution, but we tracked down and verified that all targets were eliminated. We found evidence that there may have been one or more witnesses. But now there's some bunch of--"

"What is Field Team Gamma searching for, Beta One?"

"The guys! Witnesses! Or ghosts, or assassins or whatever! They're killing us! We're down to half strength, we can't even find most of our casualties."

"Every Tapstrike body must be retrieved for the operation to be considered complete, Beta One."

"How? We can't even save ourselves! Every time we turn around, there's someone else missing! We don't even know who we're looking for! This crazy swamp is eating us alive!"

"Focus, Beta One. What is your motto?"

"Lady, forget your motto! You're not the one getting stabbed out here!"

Her icy disapproval cannoned down the airwaves in silence, driven by pure force of will.

"Uh, sorry about that Ops One. Apologies. We're under some strain here."

"Motto."

"Thoroughness is the watchword of the Tapstrike soldier."

"And what does thoroughness mean in this operation?"

"Elimination of all primaries. Elimination of all witnesses. Removal of all evidence."

"And a Tapstrike soldier's body is?"

"Evidence, ma'am. Yes ma'am. You're right. We'll take care of it."

"See to it. Keep me apprised. Operations One out."

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D'khara washed out of the culvert, clinging grimly to his shotgun. His head pounded with angry fuzz as he got to his feet in the knee-deep sludgewater, his sinuses streaming unspeakable noisome fluids.

This was not helping his illness.

The culvert, or pipe, or whatever it was had fallen silent. He'd thought it would be a quick way to get to Oliver and Little Timmy unseen, but whatever mysterious plumbing things it was doing caused it to vomit out great gluts of silty swamp water from time to time.

Fruitlessly attempting to dash water out of his magnificent mustache, he took in his stagnant surroundings. Patches of thick, green algae floated on the surface of the shallow pond he found himself in, jockeying for space with clumps of thick, round leaves that floated on the water. Tall cypress trees soared out of the pond, weeping moss and sad leaves.

Clearly, to survive in the swamp, you either had to live above the water, or learn to live in it.

The air out here was no cooler than the tent, even in the open. Thick humidity stored the heat, and the complete lack of a breeze made it sit sizzling against his skin.

The heat didn't seem to bother the mosquitoes, which were robust, multitudinous, and ravenous. Slapping at them was the most fruitless of exercises, since the clouds of hungry insects were so thick as to be clearly visible, but the maddening prickles of hundreds of needle-nosed parasites demanded slapping.

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Wearily flailing at himself, he stepped further into the pond. It never got any deeper, for a blessing, but it never got any shallower either. He sloshed forward, looking for land.

A sudden resurgence of gunfire to the west indicated where Oliver and Little Timmy were having their trouble.

He tried to pick up the pace, but the knee-deep water and the sucking mud under his feet kept him slow. His body, too, protested that it was fighting its own battle against the viral enemy within, and let him know in no uncertain terms how profoundly unfair it was that it should have to contend with his swamp-stomping shenanigans on top of everything else.

As he drew closer, the gunfire clarified itself. Short bursts, repeated frequently. Probably to keep someone pinned down while the rest of the squad flanked the enemy.

The only question: Who was pinning down who?

Whom? Pinning down whom? Or who? Is whom more correct? It sounds too formal, D'khara wondered as he sniffed mightily and trudged forward. Maybe it's just easier to re-word the sentence. Does it make more sense if these guys have guns what the oh no oh what bupbupbupbupbupbupbupbupbup

Two soldiers floated dead in front of him. It took him a moment of staring stupidly at the end of his smoking shotgun to realize that he had been firing it. Into these soldiers. Who had been very surprised to come across him. But were not surprised by anything any more.

One of their radios crackled to life.

"Whidden, do you read me? We heard gunfire, are you guys okay? Have you flanked them?"

D'khara stared at the chattering radio for a minute. Tapstrike must have stopped jamming. He sloshed on.

After a few more minutes of wandering, he stumbled into a clearing. The trees opened up, blessed clouds covered the sun and there was even some solid land under his feet. A tiny breeze trickled in, cooling his skin wonderfully.

He was immediately fired on from two sides.

He dropped straight down behind a rotten log, thankful once again that he was built so close to the ground.

"D'khara?" yelled Oliver, from the south. "What are you doing here? You should be in bed."

"Sounded like trouble," croaked the miserable dwarf. "Thought I'd come help."

"You're surrounded! Give up!" shouted the soldiers to the north. "We won't kill you if you give up!"

These guys, marveled D'khara.

"Your men are dead!" D'khara yelled back hoarsely.

"What?" they yelled back.

"I said, your men are dead!"

A brief consultation could be heard through the trees.

"We still can't hear you!"

D'khara cleared his throat and spat.

"Your! Men! Are! Dead!" he yelled, straining his voice.

"Okay!" came the reply.

D'khara sighed.

"What's a bread?" they called back. "Sorry, we still can't hear you."

Blowing his lips out in frustration, he decided to reply with a grenade. His hand patted his empty belt for a moment before he realized he'd forgotten to grab anything but his gun when he left the tent.

He peeked over the log, scanning for the enemy, but the lush, dense foliage was too thick to see through. He checked his ammo. He had plenty of that, at least.

Time, then, for the most dwarvish of strategies.

"I'm going to charge you now," he said quietly.

"Are you crazy?" the soldier called back. "There's like five of us over here."

"Wait, you heard that?" he yelled.

"Uh, yeah, when you're speaking clearly."

Grimacing, he laid one hand on top of the rotten log, preparing to pull himself up and over. Every muscle and aching joint screamed in protest. He wanted nothing so much as to lie down for a year and sleep.

But the Riotfish were in trouble.

From the foliage to the north came the clanking, ripsaw roar of Oliver's twin Strauss. Limbs fell and leaves jetted into the air, driven by a lot of very, very angry lead.

"We got 'em!" yelled Little Timmy. "We're coming out, don't shoot!"

D'khara peeked over the log again.

Oliver crashed into the clearing, trailing vines and greenery. Built for the jungle, he was not. Little Timmy came behind him, pointing the two barrels of his guns in seven different directions at once.

Oliver lumbered over to where D'khara lay behind the log.

"Your distraction was precisely what we needed," he said. "It gave us the opportunity to slip in around them and flank them. There were two. We've eliminated them."

"Swell," D'khara replied, his puffy eyes staring at the agonizingly blue sky. "Can I go back to bed now?"

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Daugereaux was huffing as he ran through the swamp. He was fast for his age, and knew the swamp well, but he was well past the age he should be running around like this, and the four men chasing him were ridiculously fit.

He ran with a disconnected, rambling motion, rolling under low branches, shuffling sideways between thickets of thorns, and dashing along an 8-inch wide land bridge that ran between two shallow bodies of water. His pursuers splashed, tripped, bounced off trees and swore, but they were still gaining.

The darkening sunset closed in as they all ran.

Daugereaux reached an old oak tree with huge gnarled roots rolling up out of the ground, and a trunk as thick through as a family dinner table. He scampered up the rough bark like a squirrel, losing himself in the leaves. He tried to moderate his heaving breaths, which only made him need to breathe more.

"Sarge, I think he went up the tree," one of the black ops called out as they approached. They were also out of breath, but unlike Daugereaux, they were covered with scratches and lumps from thorns and tree roots which had tripped them, and soaked to the hip by a brief journey into snake-infested waters.

"Fine. Take a minute and catch your breath. I don't think he's armed. He'd have been shooting by now if he was."

They took up positions around the tree, and all huffed quietly for a few minutes. Then Sarge stepped forward.

"Old man, we have you surrounded," he called. "Come down and you will be... handled mercifully."

Silence replied.

"Can you see him?" one asked.

"No, let's get some lights up there."

Four actinic beams stabbed upward in the darkness to play along the dense, dark foliage.

Still nothing.

"I hate to just start shooting up there at random," said one of them, "but I'm not climbing up that thing."

"Old man," Sarge called again, "If we have to come up and pull you out of that tree, it's going to go poorly for you."

An unsteady groan erupted from the tree. The four soldiers clustered to one side where the noise was coming from.

"Ohhhhhh, me! Oh woe is me!" called old man Daugereaux from his perch. "Who is goin' to come save my poor ol' soul?"

"Your friends are already dead. You have nowhere to run. Come down," Sarge said.

"Oh, ain't nobody gwine to come help a poor ol' man in de swamp? I done been treed like a coon, me. I got no hope, I guess I will come on down and get killed to deat' by dese bad men here." He paused. "Nah, I'm just joshin' you all. I got dis button here, she say she gon' help me." And so saying, he pressed an old doorbell button that had been nailed to the branch of the tree.

Shortly after Daugereaux had returned home from the war forty years before, he'd had the idea to start booby-trapping his land. A couple small tests highlighted the folly of this. He'd tripped his own traps more than once, and after a few embarrassing rounds of Ma bandaging him up, he'd abandoned the idea. It was impractical to remember all the places he'd trapped, and he had a lot of land to cover.

One thing stuck, though. He'd started burying shotshells in the soft dirt around the base of the giant oak tree, chained together to a battery. He'd shallowly cover them, wrap them with cling wrap to keep out the moisture, and point them upwards. As the years went by, he would add a few more to the chain as he passed through, and replace any that were looking ragged. It was more a hobby than anything else by now.

After forty years, the ground beneath the tree was a thin layer of dirt over a carpet of ordnance. It's amazing what you can accomplish with a little consistency over a long period of time.

More than once he'd toyed with the idea of setting them all off, just to see what would happen, but he knew he'd never have the motivation to reset the trap.

Now, he got to see.

The doorbell made a sad little "ding-dong", which was immediately drowned out by a mighty roar. Hundreds of buried shotshells simultaneously fired their loads upward like a giant pancake mine, shredding foliage and hurling bodies. One of the soldiers bounced off the bottom of the limb Daugereaux rested on. Bodies and parts of bodies were flung far and wide, and there was a brief patter, like rain, as blood fell back onto the leaves below the mighty oak.

Daugereaux remained huddled on top of the thickest part of the branch as the roar subsided. After a moment he peeked over the edge of the branch.

"Hooo, now ain't dat a thing," he marveled. "Dem boys ain't doin' dat dirty bidness no more, shah."

He made his way back down the tree and, dodging around the mess, wandered off into the growing darkness.