Soldiers One
- Warriors of Misfortune -
Short Stories
by Pj Belanger
Cover Art by RB
Soldiers One
Warriors of Misfortune
Short Stories
By
Pj Belanger
Copyright 2014
BRP Publishing
All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproductions or authorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of BRP Publishing.
All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
BRP PUBLISHING
Contact Author at mailto:
[email protected] Addition information at https://www.pjbelanger.com
Table of Contents
PROLOG
Untenable Situation
Heart Strings
Thank You
Also by Pj Belanger
The Triad
PROLOG
These first two short stories in “Soldiers One” came to me while I was riding from Connecticut to Florida. As I waiting on the New Jersey turnpike for over an hour in a stop and go situation, I thought about what the human spirit can endure. Here I was, just totally fed up with sitting in a car - how insignificant compared to what soldiers have to undergo. Thus, my mind went to my Sci-Fi and Fantasy world and a short story series took shape.
“Untenable Situation” and “Heart Strings” reflect the true grit of the human spirit. Thus by reflecting on the serious situations of these soldiers, I came to realize the insignificance of my own situations. I hope you enjoy these two short stories and will follow as I continue the plight of other “Warriors of Misfortune” in my Sci-Fi/Fantasy World.
Untenable Situation
“Dumbass!”
“Yup.”
“You never say anything. It’s like living with a mule,” I yelled at the figure stretched out on the cot. I hadn’t remembered Lars Obera being that docile when we had taken up residency at the outpost five months ago. Five months! It seemed like five years. One more month to go and that will seem like a year, I thought. I hadn’t realized a six-month stint would seem such a long time, when as a newly recruited soldier, I had volunteered for this assignment. I had been excited - Stu Chapman and Lars Obera, what a team we were going to be!
My eyes scanned the small miserable room. Five months! When the two of us had first been brought to this rugged outpost on this forsaken planet, as good soldiers we both had kept it spotless. Now look at it, I thought, as my eyes focused on one messy pile of shit after another. I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d swept the floor.
“You need to get up,” I addressed the naked on-the-cot soldier. He was lying in the dark shadows since the windows slats were closed. Obera lay nude, sweating in the near 100 degree room. The man smelled. That was another point of contention - Lars had given up all pretense of normal hygiene. Every other day we were supposed to enter the sterilization booth. Lars had not decontaminated himself in several days. “Why aren’t you taking a shower?” I yelled at him, “I can smell you all the way over here!”
“It ain’t no shower,” Lars spumed as he sat up. “It takes water to make a shower!” He’d even grown a small scraggily beard. The naked man would be brought up on charges if superiors ever saw him, but then what officer would see us? We’d been left here and forgotten. I wondered if Command had indeed forgotten the two of us. Had their Captain left the two of us to die slowly in this hell hole? It wasn’t unheard of. Rumor had it they would forget to pick up and switch for a new team every so often. It was like playing a game of roulette. Spin the wheel and forget to pick up the idiots that had stupidly volunteered for this senseless mission.
Stop it! I chastised myself. I am a soldier, a Federation soldier - one of the proud elite, a Marine! I had volunteered for this, time to pull myself up by my boot straps, man up! No sooner had the thought entered my head than it dissipated - who was I kidding? I’d done it for the extra money. I looked over at the filthy naked Lars wondering why my roommate had also volunteered for this assignment. Unlike me, Lars didn’t have a family to support. Each of us had our reasons for being here but we had never discussed our personal motives. We just knew that we were volunteers. Only stupid naive recruits get sent to this hell hole. Guess we are easy to fool.
Both of us had run out of things to say to each other after the first few months. It became tedious discussing the same old things. Making it worse, we had been afraid to leave the confines of the small rustic cabin. This did not make for good living conditions and was driving us to the brink of the insane.
“Let’s open up the windows, let some fresh air in,” I suggested, the tediousness of the situation making me foolishly brave.
“Go ahead but wait until I get behind the bathroom door. I don’t want to get hit by an arrow. You’re not the best medic,” Lars said.
“I patched you up pretty good,” I reminded him. In the dim light, Lars’ scar was white against his dark brown arm. He’d gotten himself stabbed by a wild boar shortly after arriving before us two Marines knew enough to watch out for the dangerous wild life that lived on this god-forsaken shit hole planet. Obera’s wound had gotten infected and I had to use a surgical knife to dig the poison-ridden flesh out of Lars’ arm. Then the deep cut had to be sewn to close it all up. It had taken Lars over a month to recover from the fevers and diarrhea.
“You almost killed me,” he grumbled. His hand went to the deep disfigurement on his arm. Frowning, his hand went up to his chin stroking his grizzly beard. He took out a cigarette. I had given up trying to get him not to smoke in the close confines of our torturous hole. Unfortunately, the tobacco smell had just mixed in with all the other raunchy odors. I wondered how many of the odorous nicotine sticks he had left.
“You ungrateful bastard,” I spat. He was irritating me as was usual and by midday we couldn’t stand each other. When Obera had been sick, I had been up night after night swiping his brow, putting some of our precious ice on his wound. Ice, the thought, what I wouldn’t do for a glass of cold water - cold anything! We hadn’t had regular ice for four months.
When the copter had left us off, the escort soldiers had left us with a new air conditioning unit and a new refrigerator. We had been at the outpost only four days when the air conditioning broke down. During the day the cabin got to at least ninety degrees. Then at night it dropped to below freezing. This planet was an abyss of agony and it was getting worse.
A loud bumping sound announced that our limping fridge unit was shutting down again. The refrigerator first would defrost, spreading water all over the floor and then would freeze the cooling unit’s door shut. We had to depend on our MRE rations as we lost anything that needed to be kept fresh.
I looked over at our water supply. We had several large containers that were filled when it rained. We soon realized that it didn’t rain that much and if we didn’t keep our water consumption down we’d run out. My dry mouth reminded me it had been over a day since I had taken any water. We had to depend on the blower and the ultra violet rays in the decontaminator to keep us clean. Every couple of days we could take a washcloth and dampen it, washing the best we could with it. At least I did, Lars had stopped even trying to keep clean.
It was getting toward evening as the little light that filtered in through the slats was beginning to dim. I wanted to run outside, see something different than the inside of the outpost cabin, but we’d learned early on that the minute we stepped outside, arrows
with bright red feathers adorning the back of the sharp projectiles, came out of nowhere. We’d been lucky that the long red decorated shafts hit the door and not us.
Several times we’d tried to escape the confines of the small cabin but the arrows flew. We couldn’t see who was aiming, only that they must have been taking cover in the jungle that surrounded the clearing that our little cabin sat on.
“I’m fucking sick of this.” To my surprise Lars jumped off his cot and ran to the door. I tried to get to him before he opened the latch but I was too late. The afternoon dimmed light - we rarely saw sunlight - flooded the room. Clouds were the norm; during the day I could see patches of the overcast sky through the window’s narrow shades. The gray sunlight made shadows cover the room as the door flew opened.
“You bastards!” He yelled out, “You bastards show yourself.” He grabbed one of our guns that was leaning by the door, firing it towards the thick foliage that lay across the road.
“Lars, stop.” I yanked at his arm, making him spray bullets everywhere outside. “We have to save our ammo!”
He turned to me, pointing the barrel of the gun at my chest. His eyes were wild, wide and his look was of the insane. I don’t believe he knew who I was. “Lars!” I screamed at him. His eyes dulled, he flung his gun across the room. An arrow hit the door right