'Find the cost of freedom
burried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you.
Lay your body down.'
-CSN&Y
Deep beneath the chaos that rattled the bloodied earth above, a faint orange flame flickered, illuminating the earthen walls, ceiling and ground as it pulsed and crumbled here and there, and suddenly died out. The flame's extinguishing left the small space's only live inhabitant to face the barrage of a bomb raid topside alone, trembling and sobbing like mad in her subterranean hole away.
More explosions struck wickedly and the world around her rocked once more. Her entire body- most notably, her stomach- jolted right along with it as she fumbled with a damp match book, praying to God that the little sticks inside - the lifeblood of her survival as of late - hadn't become too sodden from their collapse to the muddy floor to work.
She struck a match with trembling hands and her heart plummeted when she was not greeted with that familiar orange glow. Out of desperation, amongst the noise that pummeled her eardrums and racked her temples, she struck the match to its box again ... and again, and again.
"Damn it, come ON!" Her last syllable was drowned out entirely by a blast so ungodly loud and powerful that the reverb of it knocked her straight to the muddied floor. The boxes, tins, cans and cot around her clamored and jolted, the ceiling above her shook and dirt from the like flaked off in a moderate shower of soil. The matches, however, she grinned ruefully from where her face was all but pushed flat into the mud, were safe.
She sat up, poised for even more blasting from above, continuing to hold the matchbox in the air as she had instinctively done when she fell. She didn't bother opening her eyes as she fumbled for and struck a new match, her entire face coated in sticky mud goo... however, the sound of flint sparing to life and the warmth that faired at her fingertips was a welcome sensation, by far.
Fire. She still had the fire... inside and out.
"You'll make it out of here yet, Lainey girl, you just watch," she muttered to herself as she often did here, stuck in her own personal hell. The sound of her own voice, despite the racket growing fainter from above ground, made her jump with a start. She had heard the direly missed sound of human speech so rarely in the past months that even her own soft spoken murmur seemed odd to her. Alien.
Mopping the mud from her eyes, Lainey fumbled with the match, fast dwindling in size, and thrust it into a kerosene lamp that was sorely low on its namesake fuel. The wick flared to life and, as the bomb raid above seemed to have finally seised, she let the lamp radiate full force through the small earthen cabin, the warm glow of the like glinting off of the metal tins, shelves and cot that made up her little underground world, just missing the annexed room to her right - the munitions storage, of which seemed to have done her so little good since its discovery.
The light, unfortunately, didn't manage to miss the horribly positioned clothe-clad lump slung haphazardly into the far semi-corner of the Bunker. Lainey scoffed at the body that lie there, with a hatred that ran so deep it was almost painful. Rigor mortis had long since set into the corpse, its features drying oddly from the cold damp underground atmosphere. It almost seemed to be mummifying where it lay - and hadn't even smelled too horribly bad, at least not like a dead body should. Not until now, that is. That last blast had made the graying Vietnamese corpse lurch right along with everything else in the Bunker... it must have been shaken at least a foot away from its initial pose from the bomb raid as a whole, and, good God, the smell that had bee rustled up because of it was ... disturbingly sickening.
Lainey coughed a short, restricted wheeze as the odor struck her in a wave, and she covered her nose with a muddied hand. The hatred in her gaze was lessened only due to the swift shot of nausea that flooded her innards, making them form discreet, painful knots. Her eyes watered again, and the headache that had been brewing from her terrified sobs during the bomb raid kicked up a few decibels.
This had not been a good day.
"You'd think by now you'd be used to the raids, you pansy ass," Lainey sighed cynically, not wanting to inhale shortly after due to the smell that perforated the small quarters. In all honesty, the level of terror that she felt during each bomb raid seemed to be, of all things, increasing, as of late. She had been stuck deep within her solitary confinement for so long, she reckoned, that the war raging in the Real World above was taking an even more villainistic, demonic persona. Just the noise in and of its self, and the earth shaking around her, was slowly becoming the enemy, and every time it raided her small safe haven, it seemed to further penetrate her already vastly shattered sense of well being.
Lainey, not really even thinking beyond the numbness of habit, crawled into her long camo overcoat, shrugged on her canvas ruck sack, and started up the ascending ground to the trapdoor that lead to the surface above. She always left the bunker directly after the bomb raids that struck ground zero above the bunker. It was the only time she could ever be safe enough to freely roam the jungle outside without any major risk of being caught, killed, or more then likely, both: if anyone with ill intentions were alive enough to find her after a raid like today's, they were always too far gone or missing too many appendages to harm her.
Her short above ground romps served greater purpose then an excuse for fresh air, however. They were a chance to restock her diminishing stockpile of survival supplies that the bunker withheld. Artillery, clothing, and occasionally, food rations could be found amongst the mangled remains of the dead soldiers that littered the charred jungle grounds above.
She didn't even second guess stealing the shirts off of the backs of corpses anymore. It just didn't seem to faze her like it had in the past, if at all- it was just an oozing thing lying there, not a person. For God's sake, she was living with a rotting corpse - the presence of a fresh one seemed like a bit of a relief anymore. At least the new ones didn't reek... yet.
Lainey's searing headache hit a falsetto as the blinding natural light from the world outside hit her field of vision. She blinked like mad, entirely still for a moment, trying to adjust her eyes from where she stood, propping the well hidden wood plank door to the long forgotten Bunker up just a couple of inches from ground-level with one hand and the top of her mousey-brown haired head.
Through the sting in the pits of her eyeballs at the light that was unnaturally bright to eyes that had been wrought with darkness for so long, the marred, singed and equally unnaturally quiet jungle that lie on the Outside came into focus. Again, her movements rigid with numb routine, Lainey emerged from the Bunker and covered up its entrance as quickly and swiftly as she could, pausing only for a moment in a low, poised stance, her experienced eyes and ears studying everything about the space around her. Sounds, sights, smells- nothing but silence with an undertone of death wafted through the charred foliage. Lainey retrieved a firearm from her rucksack, regardless.
If there *was* anyone around with intentions of hurting her, she had every intention of severely fucking them up before they ever landed a clean shot her way. Lainey pad-footed through the leaf litter silently, her eyes wide, her brow wet and her heart thrumming in her chest. She was undeniably phobic about this jungle any more. After all, it aided the enemy- hid it. In every sense, the jungle was the enemy, really, and she was stuck trying to survive in the heart of it.
Minutes passed like sloths in the humid, heavy air. Lainey managed to pry a singed and burnt ruck sack from the death grip of a mangled Vietnamese, kicking he corpse for good measure before she skittered off to the base of a nearby tree and crouched, prying at the pouch's draw strings, her eyes flitting about her surroundings even as she drew her attention to the bag's inner contents.
"Bingo," Lainey grumbled, her heart fluttering a bit as her eyes lay to rest on the fair portion of rations that the sack contained. She would have smiled, had the notion to do so not seemed so awkward. She's not had a reason to smile in months, and now her features, molded into a heavy grimace from thousands of hours of relentless fear, seemed incapable of even the merest form of mirth.
Yanking the drawstrings tight and slinging the new knap sack to rest over her shoulder with her own, Lainey stood at a crouch and started numbly back for the Bunker. She'd found all she cared to look for at that point. The longer, it seemed, that she stayed above ground, so horribly exposed to The Enemy, the more bone-rattling neurotic she felt. The nervous paralysis she felt slowly creeping upon her - more so by the minute- was frightening as hell, and she by all means had no intentions of seeing just what effect the deadening sensation would have on her if it were to completely over come her.
The air was stagnant, damp and crushing with its thick, dazing heat. Bugs swarmed and nipped at her skin as she scurried back in the direction she had come, her muscles and sinews burning with adrenaline and the tightness they had acquired from her slowly welling panic. Dodging branches here and smarmy, raucous flies there, her senses took second place to her blunt determination to get back to her cool, underground seclusion. She was safe there. Away from the Enemy there... and away from these God damned flies...
The slight rustle and sickening, guttural gurgle that suddenly shot up from the dead silence of the desolate jungle around her from somewhere far too close sent Lainey yelping in an uncharacteristically high-pitched shriek, and nearly jumping a foot out of her boots. She stood, painfully poised and ridged, trembling, wide eyed, with her gun jutted out in front of her at such an odd angle that one couldn't be sure upon sight whether she planned to shoot the source of the wanton noise with the fire arm or beat him with it.
She stood in her unfashionably panicked stance for one moment, and then two, her eyes trying to scout out the noise's source beyond her swarming head and her ears trying to pinpoint its return over the rasps of her panicked breathing. She heard it again moments later, the noise fluttering faintly from close by at her right. It was a wheeze of sorts- pitifully pained and weak- followed by a cough restricted by deep, radiating pain.
Lainey's eyes narrowed to cold, sly slits, her breathing slowing, her pulse brought under check as her weapon was lowered, though not entirely. These were death sounds. She'd heard them hundreds of times before here in her mangled jungle haven and, months that seemed like years ago, in the make shift hospital back at the Base.
Her muscles laxing enough to permit movement whilst curiosity got the better of her, Lainey inched over in the direction of the sounds of a man struggling to grasp what little was left of his life. Her eyes caught the vested, profusely bleeding figure, crumpled face-down in a heap on the ground in a position that, ironically enough, seemed to mimic the corpse that lay back in the far corner of the Bunker. The man's chest rose and fell in sporadic flutters, the gaping holes in his shoulder obvious, even from where Lainey stood, a good fifteen feet away. What was even more obvious was the massive amount of blood that soaked the man's attire and the ground around him. He didn't have much time left, it was obvious.
"Fucking Vietnamese," Lainey squinted soullessly through the foliage at the dying form, using the barrel of her gun to push a branch out of her way to allot a better view, "Good--" she blinked for a moment, her expression turning to that of confusion, "R-ridance?" Her eyes took in the man's pale complexion and dusty brown hair as if noticing both for the first time, and her continence hit rock bottom sorrow, "Fucking hell... he's one of ours."
She dropped her newly discovered rations pack and sprinted for the fallen man, amazed at the humanity his pained wheezing suddenly took on with her realization that he was, in fact, an American. She paused for a brief moment, shrunk down beside the crumpled form, palm at rest on his pain-shuttering back and she instinctively scanned her surroundings through the hair that had fallen in her face, worried that her careless sprint had caught the eye of The Enemy.
Moments later, only once she was convince the coast was clear, did she dare peer down at the man who's blood was seeping through her fingers. Moving a Bleeder was never a terribly brilliant move, she knew, whilst getting a firm grip on the man's blood drenched vest, but this man didn't have enough time left for warranted precautions. She pulled towards her with all the strength she had in her - strength mixed with a cautious ease that was undeniably natural, and the man gasp-whimpered pitifully as he was pulled onto his back, his eyes blinking deliriously at the swirling sky.
She knew he didn't see her. He was slipping away too fast... absorbed in the obvious agony he was in. His flesh had been bullet-mangled from a couple close-range shots to his shoulder, the bullets of which having gone in clean and blown out rather nastily from the opposite end. Lainey tore a strap from her knap sack, the tearing sound making the man jump and wince, his shallow breaths catching up in his chest.
"Easy, hun, easy," within moments, her skilled hands had his wounds tied as tightly as she could manage, and her attention was drawn back into the jungle around her. Again, with the coast all clear, her grip fastening its self at the shoulders of the nameless American soldier's reddened vest, she went to work at pulling him back towards the Bunker with every ounce of strength that her small frame would allow. |
