THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (2025 Edit)

SF story of DARPA's intent to genetically mutate humans into amoral monster soldiers.

Dedicated to Julian Assange
A great Australian and a great fighter for the truth!
[Nothing in this story came from WikiLeaks, which does not seem to be accessible from Australia]

1.
REPORT BY SERGEANT OTIS P. WAUGH.

“One short!” Those were the two words that caused a nationwide manhunt across the continental U.S.A. in late 2184 AD, for a super killer whose existence DARPA had never dared reveal to the American public.


The day had started like any other day in the death camp. That is only what the human staff call them. The official name is Induction and Control Enclosures.

“Sergeant Waugh!” snapped Murray Williams, a tall, anæmic-looking youth, at my approach across the gravel-covered compound.

At his words, fifty-two human troopers wearing backpacks snapped to attention. And in a metal cage behind them, fifty-one never-dying monster soldiers also snapped to attention.

Looking more like gorillas than the human beings that they had been genetically mutated from, the monster soldiers lived and died for the army. They were bred for absolute obedience, so, despite their greatly reduced I.Q., they knew more about military protocol than most of the human soldiers under my command would ever do.

“Stand easy,” I said, and both human and monster soldiers did so.

“Otis,” said another sergeant at my approach.

Sergeant Lesley Phelps was a long-time friend of mine. He was also the sergeant of the monster soldiers who (unbeknownst to them) had been brought to the camp to be liquidated.

Having reached the end of their long military life, we could not risk unleashing them upon the unsuspecting American public. After all, look what had happened two centuries earlier after the Vietnam War. Dozens of veterans had gone mad after their return to normal society and had gone upon killing sprees. And the Vietnam vets had not been genetically modified to take away all human emotions, all respect for human life, all sense of right and wrong, all hesitancy to kill.

As the never-dying monster soldiers had been.

In truth, they were not really never-dying; only very hard to kill. As they were about to discover when Doc Hanley called them in for a routine vaccination. Only this time, they would die writhing in agony after being injected with strychnine.

“How are they hanging?” asked Lesley Phelps.

“About as low as yours,” I said, making him roar with laughter.

As did the fifty-two human soldiers. And behind them, the fifty-one monster soldiers, although they were too far away to have heard my quip.

“So that’s what the never-dying soldiers look like?” said Murray Williams, newly assigned to the death camp straight from basic training.

“That’s them,” agreed Phelps. “But they’re not quite never-dying, as they’re about to discover.”

“Ugly-looking bastards,” said Williams.

One of the ape-like monster soldiers snorted at him, as though taking offence at the remark, although he could not have heard it.

“They were mutated from human beings to be bullet-proof and all but grenade-proof. And to have an active fighting life of sixty to seventy years.”

“But why?” asked Williams, not the first nor the last person to question the ethics of mutating human beings into monster soldiers. I had questioned it to Doc Hanley more than once down the years.

“Because DARPA, that’s the organisation that creates the monster soldiers, did a survey of World War Two vets two hundred years ago. They found that despite being subjected to a massive amount of military propaganda during the war, sixty per cent of U.S. soldiers in that war never fired their weapons at the enemy. Not out of cowardice, that would have been bad enough. But much worse, because they had been too human to murder another human being just because propagandists told them they were only the Nasty old Hun, or the Evil Nips, or whoever. Sixty Percent were too human to murder the enemy.”

“That’s great in peacetime,” I put in, “but in wartime, you need soldiers to be amoral, unquestioning killers. Those who do not hesitate to slaughter anyone they are told is the enemy.”

“In war, there is no place for right and wrong,” continued Les Phelps. “Only kill or be killed. That motto is bred into the monster soldiers from the moment that they cease to be human beings.”

“It seems a bit harsh to murder them after their military career is over,” said Lance Corporal Williams.

“Maybe … ” I started, stopping at the sound of boots crunching upon the gravel behind me. Turning to see the C.O. of the death camp, Doctor Carlos Hanley, approaching, I barked out, “Commanding Officer on parade.”

Behind me, fifty-two human soldiers and fifty-odd monster soldiers all snapped to attention.

“Stand the men easy,” said Doc Hanley, and I did as instructed. “And start bringing the monster soldiers into my hut one at a time for their vaccinations.”

“Sir!” I said, saluting.

Hanley was already striding back across the gravel-covered compound to the black Quonset hut, in which the monster soldiers would be taken one at a time to be murdered.

“I’ll take care of bringing them inside,” offered Les Phelps, so Murray Williams and I strode across to the Quonset hut to join Doc Hanley.


“The first one should be here in about a minute,” I assured Carlos Hanley as Williams and I entered his office near the front of the corrugated-iron hut.

“Good, good,” said Hanley as we heard footsteps in the outer office.

Seconds later, Lesley Phelps entered, leading the first gorilla-like monster soldier.

Both snapped to attention at the sight of Hanley, who returned their salute and gave the order to stand easy.

“Come on, soldier,” said Doc Hanley, standing to lead the way.

Moments later, we were in the next room where the monster soldier was instructed to lie upon a long bench like a dentist’s chair. Although reinforced, it groaned audibly as the monster soldier lowered his great bulk onto it.

“As you know, soldier,” lied Carlos Hanley, “you are here for a routine vaccination. Due to the possibility of side effects of the new-style vaccine, you need to be strapped down to the bench for your own safety.”

As Doc Hanley spoke, Les Phelps and I started to strap down the monster soldier. For a moment, the soldier looked worried at the straps, and I feared that we would have trouble with him. But monster soldiers are bred to obey orders, so after a second or so, he relaxed and allowed us to continue to strap him down.

After we had finished, Doc Hanley carefully measured a dosage of strychnine into the syringe and lied. “This will only hurt a little.”

Hanley had barely injected the monster soldier when the soldier began to shriek inhumanely, writhing wildly in a desperate attempt to break free of his bindings.

Lesley Phelps, Doc Hanley, Murray Williams, and myself all backed away as the soldier continued to shriek and writhe, and for a moment it looked as though he might tear his way out of the secure chair.

“Holy shit!” said Carlos Hanley, looking as though he was about to turn and run for his life, which would have been useless since monster soldiers can almost keep up with a loping cheetah, let alone a slow-coach human being.

Then the soldier’s eyes glazed over as though his soul had just fled from his carcase (if monster soldiers even have souls). And with a crash, the soldier collapsed lifeless back onto the chair.

“Are … are they all like that?” asked Murray Williams.

“Pretty much,” said Doc Hanley, although I had never seen him looking so terrified during a liquidation before. “I’d like to be able to say you get used to it in time, lad. But to be honest, you never really do.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” agreed Lesley Phelps.

Still looking shaken, Doc Hanley headed back toward the outer office, saying as he went, “Get rid of that carcase, Lesley. Then bring in the next soldier right away.”

“Sir!” said Les, and he and I snapped to attention.

“Still seems ungrateful to murder them like that after they fought for America for sixty or seventy years,” said Murray Williams, who had been too shocked to even snap to attention as Doc Williams departed the room.

“What else can we do?” I asked as Les went out the back exit to get human soldiers to dispose of the monster soldier’s remains.

“Couldn’t they be held in detention camps in the desert somewhere for the rest of their lives?”

“For a hundred years or more?” I asked, seeing him look visibly startled. “That’s how long monster soldiers live. At least one hundred and eighty to two hundred years. And do you know how many monster soldiers DARPA has mutated?”

“No,” Williams admitted.

“Neither do I exactly. But there are thousands of them. Possibly even tens of thousands of them all up. How could we possibly contain tens of thousands of obviously non-human creatures in the U.S. desert for more than a century, without some nosy bloody journalist stumbling across them and doing a Watergate upon us? You don’t know what kind of feeding frenzy the news media would go into if they ever were to uncover a secret like this. They’d blow the whole thing out of proportion, and we’d probably all be dishonourably discharged and possibly even charged with human rights violations as well. No, never trust the nosy bloody news media.”


It seemed like days later, not merely eight hours, when we watched the fiftieth monster soldier writhing and shrieking in his death agony, trying in vain to break free of his binding.

For just a second, it looked as though he would get free, as to our horror, one of the arm-bindings suddenly snapped in two.

“Look out!” shouted Lesley Phelps, and we almost fell over each other in our attempts to back out of the room. But the monster soldier was already falling back onto the restraint chair.

“Is … is he dead?” asked Murray Williams.

“God, I hope so,” said Lesley, mirroring the thoughts of us all.

Almost hyperventilating from anxiety, Carlos Hanley turned to Lesley Phelps and said, “Get rid of that carcase, and then bring the last one in.”

“Sir!” said Phelps, saluting.

“But that’s the last one,” said one of the privates helping to dispose of the soldier's carcases.

“What!” cried Doc Hanley, as he, Les, and I all turned to stare at the private.

“That … that is the last one, sir,” he said, saluting for no reason.

“That was the fiftieth, wasn’t it?” demanded Hanley.

“Sir,” agreed the private.

“There are supposed to be fifty-one,” said the Doc, almost shrieking like one of the monster soldiers in its death throes.

“Sir … I …?” said the flustered private.

“There should be one more,” I said, stating the obvious. To myself, I thought: There has to be one more!

“I’m afraid there isn’t,” said the private.

“Do a recount of the carcases, to make certain that there are only fifty,” ordered Doc Hanley. Although he had been ticking them off on a list of serial numbers on his computer handset after each kill, as I also had been doing, so there seemed little chance that we could have both miscounted.

Lesley Phelps and the privates, plus Murray Williams, raced out to count the monster soldier carcases, which would already have been getting a little ripe in the bright sun.

Leaving them to it, Doc Hanley and I returned to his office next door.

Looking down at his handheld PC, the Doc said, “LV11470.”

“Sir?” I said, at first, not understanding.

“If a monster soldier has escaped, that’s its designation.”

“Of course, sir,” I said, confirming that on my handset. “Does that matter, sir? A monster soldier is a monster soldier.”

“Not this one,” disagreed the Doc. “LV11470 is the first of a new breed of monster soldiers with a slightly higher than usual I.Q. Just enough to not be feeble-minded like the average monster soldier.”

“Jesus,” I prayed as an icy chill set into my spine. “Whose bloody stupid idea was that?”

“One of America’s feeble-minded presidents. About nine presidents back. She thought that it wasn’t fair to make them all feeble-minded.”

“God save us from presidents with a conscience,” I said.

“Here, here!” said Doc Hanley, taking a half-full bottle of whisky from his desk to pour us each a generous slug.


Eventually, Lesley Phelps returned with the words we were both dreading. “One short, sir. A monster soldier has escaped.”

“But how?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” said Doc Hanley, a corpse-like pallor coming over his face.

Reaching for his key chain, he removed a large golden key and unlocked the top drawer of his desk. Taking out a red landline phone, he depressed a button on the telephone, and alarms started blaring around the compound.

Seconds later, the red phone rang.

Picking up the receiver so nervously that he almost dropped it again, Carlos Hanley said, “Madam President … we have an escaped monster soldier.”

“What do you suggest we should do?” asked the president.

So much for help from the top! I thought.

“Find it! Kill it and burn the carcase!” Doc Hanley almost shrieked into the receiver. “Hopefully, before it starts killing.”

“Maybe it won’t start killing?” said the president, sounding more hopeful than confident. “Maybe it will try to stay undetected?”

“Monster soldiers are mutated to kill or be killed,” reminded Carlos Hanley. “It’s branded onto their souls, if they have souls. They know nothing else. They have no conscience, no guilt, no sense of compassion or mercy, no sense of right and wrong … And possibly worst of all … No fear of dying. Unless we kill him first, he will kill every civilian he comes into contact with.”


Doc Hanley was still trying to convince the president of the need for immediate and ruthless action when the first of the explosions went off.

“What the hell is …?” cried Lesley Phelps as we were all thrown to the floor of the Quonset hut. But before he could finish his question, a great cannonade of explosions began like a series of linked fireworks.

“What in Christ’s name …?” said the president over the phone.

“Come on!” I shouted, and, leaving Doc Hanley talking with Madam President, I started toward the outside, with the sound of running feet behind me, as Lesley and the others followed.

I had just touched down on the gravel path (having leapt from the top step of the doorway), when a great explosion resounded in Carlos Hanley’s office in the Quonset hut behind me.

“Shit!” I shouted as I was picked up by what seemed like a giant invisible hand and thrown a hundred metres across the compound, careful to bury my face in my arms before crashing painfully to the gravel.

Behind me, I could hear moaning and shrill, almost inhuman shrieking, but for the time being, all I could do was lie in excruciating agony upon the gravel-coated compound, only hoping that I had sustained no critical injuries.

After a few minutes, I tried to push myself to my hands and knees and failed, collapsing painfully back onto the gravel. Five minutes later, I tried and failed again. But on my third attempt, I was finally able to get onto my hands and knees. Then, getting unsteadily to my feet (despite my instincts for self-preservation shrieking at me to stay down), I hobbled back to the black Quonset hut.

I found my lifelong friend Lesley Phelps blown almost in two, his screaming having died with him. The moaning came from Murray Williams, who was still unconscious but slowly reviving.

“Easy, easy,” I comforted him. Then, as my instincts for self-preservation went into overload, I grabbed him under the armpits and as quickly as I could, dragged him a good fifty metres from the burning hut. An action which saved both of our lives as another great explosion resounded from the doorway of the corrugated-iron hut.

Dropping the lance corporal, I nose-dived to the gravel, unable to block out the sounds of screaming from around the death camp, as the camp lived up to its name, this awful autumn day.


The screaming, intermittently cut off by near-deafening explosions, seemed to go on forever.

“Jesus, am I in Hell?” asked Murray Williams as he finally awakened.

“I think we both are, son,” I said to him.

He turned and stared at me with a wide-eyed, child-afraid-of-the-dark look. Then, as another explosion resounded, we both ducked into the gravel-topped compound.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the explosions became rare, then finally stopped.

“Is that it?” asked the lance corporal, as we both looked up from where we lay. “Is it all over?”

“No, the worst is yet to come,” I said, slowly, painfully pulling myself back to my feet, as the wailing screams continued from around the burnt-out ruin of the death camp.

“What do you mean?”

“Now we have to go look at the dead and dying,” I said, crouching again. “In the hope that there are still some troopers alive besides us two.”

Around us, shrilling screams continued to resonate until slowly dying away to soul-rending moaning as the fifty-two good troopers either died or passed out from their injuries.

Low, gurgling moaning still haunted the mournful afternoon as I slowly looked around the ruined camp. Within my sight were a dozen dead or dying troopers, some so hideously injured that I would never dare give detailed descriptions within this report. Suffice it to say that you would not want to discover their ill-treated remains just after eating.

Roaring flames whooshed up from a dozen or more burning buildings, leaving just four undamaged buildings that I could see.

Hearing moaning, I looked around and saw Murray Williams trying without much success to sit up.

“Easy, lad, easy,” I cautioned, giving him a hand to sit up. Only hoping that I was not aggravating any serious internal injuries that he may have sustained.

Looking around again at the sound of loud moaning, I saw fallen troopers with horrific injuries, which it would have been impossible to live with. But half of them were moaning, trying to sit up, or trying to stand upon legs that they no longer had.

Following my stunned look, Murray Williams said, “I see now why it’s called a death camp.”

I started to berate him for his lack of taste, then thought. What the Hell, he’s right! “You’ll see a lot worse sights before we finally kill the monster soldier,” I said.

“Or before he finally kills us,” insisted the lance corporal.

“Or before he finally kills us,” I agreed, deciding that there was no point in lying to Williams.

The stench of blood, death, burning flesh, and fæces filled the warm air from where the dead lay.

Despite my better judgment, I knew that as the senior surviving soldier, I had to do a check of the dead and dying. And do it soon in the hope of saving the troopers who were not already dead.

“Are you all right yet?” I asked Murray Williams, as I climbed unsteadily to my feet, which almost gave way under me.

Seeing the lance corporal watching my unsteady tottering, I knew that he must be wondering the same thing about me.

Trying, without much success, to smile as Murray Williams started ungainfully to his own feet, I asked, “Do I look as shithouse as I feel?”

“Worse,” said Williams in one of his brutally frank comments, which often had me shouting at him. Then, “Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” I said, wiping a mix of gravel and blood from my face with a khaki handkerchief, “I never did win any prizes for my looks.”

“That’s … ” said the lance corporal, starting to put his foot deeper into his mouth. Before wisely deciding not to.


Despite my intentions, though, it was another few minutes before Murray Williams or myself were capable of attempting to assess the loss of life. Loss of property was obvious. Only four black Quonset Huts remained of the seventeen which had once stood within the gravel-clad confines of the barbed wire-fenced death camp.

“Come on,” I ordered, feeling as reluctant to look over the mutilated men and women as the lance corporal looked.

Going across to where a dozen troopers lay not far from us, we began to check them over.

“Hold on, soldier,” I said to no one in particular as we shambled across to help them. I carefully checked the first man for hæmorrhages, and then did the same to the next man.

“This one’s dead,” said Murray Williams, kneeling almost on a shard of corrugated iron as he examined a soldier.

“Look out,” I said, pointing to the shrapnel.

“Thanks,” said Williams before checking another soldier.

“This one’s dead also,” I said.

“Here too,” agreed the lance corporal.

“What about me? Am I alive? Am I alive?” shrieked a youth who looked no more than fourteen or fifteen.

Looking around, I was shocked to see that he was, since he had a hole the size of my fist in his chest.

“Hold on, son,” I said. I placed my left hand over his eyes to shut them. I withdrew my revolver from my holster with my left hand. Clicking off the safety, I pointed it between his eyes and said, “Just relax, son.”

Then I pulled the trigger, blowing off the top of his head.

“Holy shit!” shouted Murray Williams, falling on top of another soldier he was examining. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“Kindness,” I said, pointing to the hole in his chest. “He didn’t have a chance in hell.”

“Jesus Christ!” said Williams, despite being Jewish.

Then, seeing where I was pointing, he started to calm down. Although I could sense the others staring at me warily.

“Come on,” I said, indicating the other injured troopers, “let’s get them checked out.”

We confirmed that four were dead. Three were mutilated so badly that they had little chance of survival, and five, to my surprise, were climbing unsteadily to their feet. I had to shoot another poor bastard to the horror of the others, then we did our best to bandage the last badly injured soldier, a woman named Martina.

“They had no chance,” I explained to the remaining troopers, who looked shocked at me having shot two of my people. “Would you have preferred them to be screaming in agony for hours before finally dying?”

They all mumbled a half-hearted (at best) agreement.

“Now what?” asked Murray Williams.

“Now, the worst is yet to come,” I said again, waving across to where we could hear more men and women moaning.

Singling out a beautiful blonde private, whose name tag identified her as Private Rae Lawson, I asked. “Rae, will you stay to look after the injured here, while we go on?”

“Sure, Serg,” she said.

“Come on,” I said to Murray Williams and the other four, all of whom seemed reluctant to follow after me. They looked at each other, uncertainly, and then finally, obviously still unsure, started after me.

By one of the burning buildings, alerted by the aroma of burning flesh, we found five more troopers. Three were dead and burnt beyond recognition; one was alive and relatively unharmed. The last was alive, but also burnt beyond recognition, with fourth-, fifth-, and even sixth-degree burns. Most of her lower body had been reduced to carbon.

“Am I going to be all right? Am I going to be all right?” the poor bitch suddenly started shrieking.

“Relax, relax,” I said, placing a hand over her eyes. Then, to the relief, I think, of Murray Williams and the others this time, I drew my service revolver and shot her through the forehead.

“Let’s go,” I ordered. And this time, the others followed me without hesitation, I suspect relieved that they no longer had to see the poor woman who had been reduced to something akin to charcoal.


It seemed to take forever to check the entire camp. Perhaps because each new horror increased our hesitation at what we might find next. Finally, though, we had accounted for all of the troops. Out of fifty-two, fourteen had been killed by the explosions, and seven more had had to be shot dead by me to put the poor bastards out of their misery. Seven more would pull through, but were in no fit condition to take part in a manhunt – or should that be monster hunt?

That left just twenty-six, including Murray Williams and me.

“Twenty-six,” I said, thinking aloud. “With one series of explosions, he has managed to wipe out or disable half of us.”

Then, seeing the troubled looks on the faces of the remaining troops, I regretted having spoken out loud.

“What … what do we do now?” asked a freckle-faced redheaded private, whose name tag identified him as Deke.

“Now we find out how the monster soldier got out of here,” I said.

“Assuming that he did,” said Murray Williams, making the troops look about themselves nervously. “Maybe after setting the charges, he just hid out in one of the remaining four buildings.”

As he spoke, the troopers started looking around again. Some even looked as though they could not wait for the order to hit the ground.

Instead, I said, “He’d have to be a fool not to have used the cover of the explosions to get far away?”

“But aren’t the monster soldiers little more than imbeciles?” asked Rae Lawson, having rejoined our group.

“Usually, yes. But this one was allowed to retain more of his I.Q. to make him a more effective killer,” I said, silently cursing my stupidity as soon as I had spoken.

“A more efficient killer!” Murray Williams almost squealed, looking around the bombed-out buildings and horrifically burnt corpses. “I’d have to say that they bloody well succeeded!”

“Relax!” I ordered, knowing it was a futile thing to say.

“He’s probably just waiting for us to separate, so that he can pick us all off one by one.”

“We won’t be separating, we’ll stick together,” I insisted, finally saying something that seemed to calm the remaining troops a little. “We’ll stick together as we check around the boundary fence.”

“We could do it faster in two or three groups,” said Rae.

Of course, she was right, but having finally calmed down the troopers a little, I wasn’t about to risk spooking them again.

“No,” I said, “we’ll stick together. Just in case he is relying on us separating.”

So, slowly, we crunched across the gravel-covered compound toward the barbed wire fences, which reached nearly three metres in height. Taller even than most monster soldiers.

“Well, so far, so good,” I said, managing to raise smiles from Rae Lawson and a couple of the others.

“But the worst is yet to come, remember?” she reminded me, causing a few nervous snickers among the troops.

“That’s right,” I agreed as we started along the boundary fence to the left.

“It’s a pity that they didn’t think to electrify this thing,” said Murray Williams as we strode along.

“They did,” I said, “but after a few of our men were electrocuted, they de-electrified it.”

We continued along for more than twenty-five minutes before we located where a large section of the barbed wire had been cut away with tin snips.

Looking back, Rae said, “We’re at the furthest possible point from where the buildings were.”

“Presumably that’s why he picked this spot,” I said.

Beyond the cut-out section was a couple of kilometres of grassland, followed by a forest of towering pines, plus a few Australian Eucalyptus trees.

“Where he was least likely to be seen,” I said, thinking: And where we are least likely to find any protective cover if he is waiting out there at the edge of the forest!

“Do … do we follow him?” asked Private Rae Lawson.

“Not yet,” I said. Reaching into my shirt pocket, I removed a small container housing a pocket-sized PC-tablet, upon which I would later start making this report.

“What’s that?” asked Murray Williams.

“The pocket equivalent of a Presidential Hotline,” I explained. “It can be used in the field to get help from anywhere in the world, by uplinking to Com-Sat-Dar.”

“A great Idea,” said Rae, as I started to uplink to the satellite.

“That’s what the president who approved it thought,” I explained. “But he soon changed his mind after it brought him down after a drunken orgy in which he used it to talk dirty to his mistress for forty minutes, before finding that he had dialled the wrong number and was actually talking to a Washington Post journalist.”

Hearing the giggles of the troopers, I was pleased to be getting them back at their ease.

“It also has a small hard drive, barely seven hundred yottabytes [a yottabyte is 1,125,899,906,842,624 gigabytes - Philip Roberts]. This allows me to record observations in the field.”

Moments later, I was talking to Madam President (as she likes to be called), the U.S.A.’s fifth female president. I quickly updated her from the moment that Doc Hanley had been blown up while talking to her.

“Do you have any weapons on you, besides firearms?” she asked.

Looking around, I could see the corrugated iron munitions hut, luckily undamaged and said, “Plenty, the ammo hut is still standing. But we will need rocket launchers to be sure of liquidating the monster soldier. They’re not easy to kill.”

“I am well aware of that, Sergeant,” she said angrily. There was a clinking, and then silence, making me think she had hung up. I was just about to say. “Prissy bitch!” when she came back on the line and said:

“Very well, take whatever weapons you can carry and start after the soldier. We’re already arranging to airlift you more men and weapons en route."

She continued to give me (mainly useless) instructions for another ten minutes before ringing off. This time I was careful to hang up before saying. “Prissy bitch!”

Pressing a green button on the handset, I placed it into its little box and back into my shirt pocket, then explained to the troops, “Now they can track us over Com-Sat-Dar to drop more weapons and troops to help out.”

The troops seemed relieved, with Rae, who looked young enough to be a debutante, grinning broadly. Until Murray Williams added, “Let’s just hope that the monster soldier doesn’t have any tracking devices with him. Or else he can also use Com-Sat-Dar to follow our whereabouts.”

Seeing the broad grin vanishing from Rae’s face as though God himself had used a magic eraser to wipe it away, I glared at Williams, snapping:

“Shut up! Let’s just get the damn weapons.”

Without waiting for an argument, I started quick marching toward the black corrugated-iron hut, relieved to hear the sound of boots crunching on the gravel behind me. We’ll all feel better to have some real weapons with us! I thought.

We were almost up to the munitions store when Murray Williams did it again, saying, “It seems strange that with all the explosives he had, he didn’t blow up the ammo dump.”

Stopping in my tracks, less than five metres from the Quonset hut, I was about to shout, “Hit the gravel!” When the first of the new series of explosions lifted me like the hand of God and tossed me back the way that I had just come.

Knocked out for a moment, I was unable to talk at first, but I heard the lance corporal shout. “Get down! For God’s sake, get down!”

Yet, as a great series of explosions started to go off in sync. I knew that it was too late to save all of the troopers.

Unable to raise myself off the gravel yet, I managed to look around to see what looked like every Fourth of July I’d ever witnessed going off all at once. Except that amid the explosions, troopers were screaming, and bodies and body parts were flying about the compound as though someone had shot down Santa’s sledge. Except that these presents were human limbs, or shattered corpses looking like life-sized rag dolls.


For seemingly hours, the explosions continued, until finally (half) convinced that they were over, I managed to pull myself painfully to my knees. Resisting the urge to shriek in agony as blades of raw pain lanced through my back, I started at a crawl back to the burning wreckage of the ammo store. Each crawling step was shooting rockets of pain through my back and less rocket-like gravel-rash through my now almost fleshless knees.

Seeing me crawling toward her, Rae Lawson started to her feet, until I waved her back down again.

“Keep down,” I whispered, “let me get to you first.”

Though what I could do armed only with a handgun, if the monster soldier was still there, is anybody’s guess.

Trying not to grimace as the gravel rash started to burn my knees with hot flushes, I continued slowly toward Rae and the others. Then, tentatively, I climbed back to my feet, almost falling twice, just relieved to find that the shooting pains in my back were already abating.

Seeing Murray Williams looking like he was getting ready to cry, I patted him on the back in an avuncular way, saying:

“Cheer up, man, the worst is over.”

“Or yet to come,” he said, looking loath to leave the imagined safety of the gravel path, but allowing me to drag him back to his feet.

“Come on,” I said. Then, when he still hesitated, “We have to check out the latest casualties.”

“You mean the latest fatalities,” he said.

I sighed in frustration at his petulant tone, but did not correct him, since he was undoubtedly right.

Seeing his face whiten as though he had been dipped in a vat of correction fluid, I said, “Don’t worry. It won’t be as bad this time.”

Of course, it was, though. It was worse, if that is possible.

Before half of the troops had been well away from the exploding buildings. This time, we had all been almost close enough to touch the corrugated iron of the ammo store when the first of the explosions had gone off. Last time, many of the troops had survived, or had been killed relatively cleanly. This time, we had human heads, torsos, arms and legs scattered across the compound, making it hard to even do an accurate body count.

After a ghoulish and frustrating hunt around the compound, doing our best to make heads or tails of the human detritus, we compared notes, and Murray Williams said:

“Seventeen dead and eleven alive … twelve including you, Sergeant Waugh.”

“That’s twenty-nine,” said Rae Lawson, “there were only twenty-six of us to start with.”

“Oh, yeah,” said the lance corporal.

So we went through the grisly business again and this time established that there were fourteen dead or too injured to take part in the manhunt, and twelve of us were still able to take part. Although most of us were carrying some kind of injuries.

“Twelve remaining,” I said.

“He’s done it again,” whined Murray Williams. Then, before I could stop him, “This is the second time that he’s halved our ranks.”

“Calm down!” I ordered. “With only a dozen of us to hunt him, it will be easier for us to watch each other and take more care in future.” To myself, I thought: That is for me to take more bloody care in future, instead of leading them all into another trap!

“Don’t forget that they’ll be dropping us more troops and supplies,” said Rae, smiling half-heartedly at Williams.

“It’ll be too late by then!” the lance corporal shrieked hysterically. “With only twelve of us left, he’ll have wiped us all out by then!”

“No, he won’t have!” I shouted back.

“Why don’t we just wait here till help arrives?” whined Murray Williams.

“Because it is our job to see that he doesn’t escape before help arrives.”

“He doesn’t escape!” shrieked Williams. “He doesn’t want to escape; he’s having too much fun slaughtering us all!”

“Calm down, dammit!”

“You know their motto!” shouted the lance corporal, “kill or be killed. That’s all the monster soldiers know. It’s what they thrive on. And this one is thriving on killing us!”

Hating myself even as I did it, I punched Murray Williams full in the face, knocking him to the gravel.

Rae Lawson gasped, covering her mouth, and some of the surviving troopers backed away from me as I knelt on the gravel to check out the lance corporal. Just hoping that he hadn’t hit his head on the hard compound.

Slapping his face gently, I said, “Wake up, Murray boy.”

Fortunately, he seemed to be unharmed and, with a little more assistance, was soon starting to revive.

“Sorry, Serg,” said Williams, trying to sit up.

“Easy, son, easy,” I said, helping him to a seated position.

“What do we do now?” asked Rae Lawson. “Start after the monster soldier.”

“Not yet,” I said, as with our help, Williams started back to his feet. “First, we check out what’s left of the ammo dump. Although unlikely, we might find a few weapons still in usable condition.”

“And anything would be better than just our sidearms,” she said.

“That’s right, Rae,” I said, making her smile.

So we started slowly back toward the still-burning hut. At first, I thought that we were completely out of luck, since nothing usable remained within the hut. We were lucky not to be all blown to pieces with the ammo that went up in this hut! I thought, and then wondered. Depending on how much of it the monster soldier had scavenged before blowing up the hut? I wondered if the sole reason that we had survived was because of a massive weapons advantage that the soldier now had over us. Super-strong monster soldiers are supposed to be able to carry six or seven times their weight, I realised, just hoping that Murray Williams would not realise it and blurt it out to the already rattled troops. The last thing I needed was a mutiny on my hands!

Then I heard Rae shout, “Over here, Serg.”

Looking round, I saw her blonde figure kneeling ten metres away, to the left of the ammo hut.

Hurrying over, we found her looking at three AK-179s, which must have been thrown clear of the huts by the explosions.

“Good girl,” I said. Turning to the others who were visibly less downhearted at the sight of the semi-automatic rifles, I said, “Look around … carefully … in case there is anything else.”

No longer as grim-faced, the troopers spread out and began searching around the hut.

A few minutes later, there came a cry of, “Over here, Serg.”

Another soldier had found another AK-179 and a battered box of clips.

“Let me check them out first, before picking them up,” I ordered, starting to search for trip wires or anything else the monster soldier might have done, if he had planted the rifles and ammo.

“What’s he looking for?” asked the young soldier who had found them.

“Trip wire to a bomb,” said Murray Williams, and they all quickly backed away, leaving me to my fate.

Finally, though, I confirmed that they were safe and we picked them up.

In total, we found six AK-179s, the box of ammo, and two machine pistols. Nowhere near as good as the automatic rifles, but a hell of a lot better than our sidearms.

Of course, none of these weapons would stop one of the genetically mutated monster soldiers. But at least they gave the troopers confidence that they were not completely unarmed.

Before I could stop him, though, Murray Williams blurted out, “But if the monster soldiers are bullet-proof, none of these weapons are of any use at all.”

Hearing the frustrated sighs of the other troopers, I turned to glare toward the lance corporal. Somehow, though, I managed to resist the temptation to punch him in the face again. But it wasn’t easy!

“Come on!” I barked, snapping the troops to attention.

Then, without waiting for them, I started striding as fast as my gravel-burnt knees would allow me, toward the cutaway section in the barbed wire fence. After a moment, I could hear boots crunching on gravel as the others started after me.


I had stormed through the gap in the fence, my anger at Williams’s latest faux pas affecting my judgment, when from behind me, Rae Lawson shouted.

“Trip wire! I’ve just broken a trip wire!”

“Run for it!” I shouted, cursing my stupidity for allowing Murray Williams’s tactlessness to get me to drop my guard. Thinking: So much for me staying alert and not letting them down again! As I led the stampede.

I got perhaps twenty metres from the fence before diving face-first onto the long grass, which was cooler and much softer than the gravel-coated compound.

Still waiting for the first explosion, I heard the sound of grunting and gasping troopers as the others charged across like a football team determined to prove that no one tackles better than them.

Then one by one they leapt on top of me as though I had shouted. “Stacks on the mill.”

For ten minutes or more, we lay in the scrum, until finally I began to push the troopers off me.

“Sorry,” I apologised to Rae as I pushed her left breast unintentionally.

“S’kay Serge, just don’t make a habit of it,” she teased.

For a moment, I sat gathering my breath. Then, despite my better instincts, I started back toward the gap in the barbed wire fence.”

“You all stay here,” I said, and the troopers seemed only too happy to oblige.

Hunting through the cool grass, I soon found the trip wire and carefully hunted along it to the right-hand end. Where it was simply tied to the barbed wire fence. Retracing my steps, I headed to the left, where I found the other end tied to a small, black plastic mini-disc recorder.

Carefully, lifting the black disc-shaped object, I pressed the green play button, and we heard a loud, almost snake-like hissing.

“What is it?” asked Rae, as she led the others across to where I stood.

Looking at her, I explained, “He’s laughing at us. That’s as close to laughter as a monster soldier can manage.”

“Oh,” said Rae.

Winding my arm up in imitation of my teen baseball pitching days, I hurled the palm-sized recorder as far as I could.

Just in time, since the recorder exploded as it hit the grass.

As everyone ducked to the cool grass, I said, “Damn the new mini-explosives.” But in a tone that I hoped would make the others smile.

No such luck. I doubt if the Marx Brothers could have got a smile out of any of them at that moment.

“Okay, terror's over,” I said.

Reluctantly, I climbed back to my feet and started across the grassland.

It was already starting to get dark, and I wanted to get into the relative safety of the pine forest before darkfall.

Equally reluctantly, Rae, Murray Williams, and the others started after me.

Hearing muttering behind me, I said, “Just be grateful that none of us were hurt this time.”

“If it had gone off in your hand, we would have all been killed,” said Murray Williams.

Resisting the urge to turn around and slug him again, I marched on, pleased to hear the sound of the others marching after me.

Twelve minutes of fast marching later, we reached the pine forest and were immediately overwhelmed by a pine scent like a million freshly mopped kitchen floors.

“All right, everybody; look around for some hint of his trek through the pine forest.”

We spread out and began to search, with some troopers taking a small, but powerful military flashlight from their packs to light the way.

A few minutes later, the freckle-faced redheaded youth, Deke, said, “Tracks!”

As we all raced across to him, he pointed to where a set of large footprints led through the carpet of pine needles.

“Big tracks,” said Murray Williams.

And he was right.

“At least an eighteen broad fitting at a guess,” said Rae, making the others laugh a little nervously.

“So either it’s the monster soldier, or a West Indian pace bowler,” I said, the sport of cricket having started to seriously compete with baseball in the U.S.A. over the last century or so.

“Nah, we’re too far from the Caribbean,” said Rae, getting the laughter from the troops that I seemed incapable of getting. “Besides, the West Indies aren’t touring America this year.”

Still smiling, I said, “Okay, let’s follow them.” And we set off.

We had just started into the aromatic pine forest, however, when Murray Williams came up with another of his brainstorms.

“Strangely, he isn’t even trying to cover his tracks,” said the lance corporal, “almost as though he wants us to follow him into the forest.”

“Hit the ground!” I shouted.

With a lot of grunting and cursing, the twelve of us nose-dived into the pine needles. Which lived up to their name, sticking us as though we had dived into a pile of used syringes.

Behind me, I heard coughing and wheezing and covered my face with my hands in the hope of keeping the needles out of my throat.

“That’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut while nose diving into a pile of pine needles,” said Rae. But this time only Deke laughed.

We lay sneezing and coughing upon the pine carpet for eight or nine minutes before I hesitantly started to my feet. Looking around in the rapidly fading light, I could see our prints in the pine forest behind us, and the monster soldier’s eighteen-plus broad fittings in the pine needles ahead of us. But nothing else besides hundreds of trees, some seeming, like the Tower of Babel, to reach up to Heaven itself.

“Come on,” I said, "nap time’s over. We seem to be okay; there’s no sign of him.”

“How can you tell?” demanded Murray Williams, “he could be just ahead of us, hidden behind the pine trees.”

Resisting the urge to belt him again, I said, “He’s too big. The pine trees give us excellent cover, but he’s built like a gorilla. Part of him would show out on either side of any tree that he tried to hide behind.”

“He could hide behind a cluster of trees,” insisted Williams. He pointed to where four ancient trees grew so close together that you could hide a Jeep behind them.

“Perhaps,” I said, no longer angry, now fearing that he was right. Signalling to Rae, whom I now trusted more than the lance corporal, I whispered, “Circle round to the left. I’ll go right.”

She nodded, and we started crawling in our respective directions toward the pine clump. On our bellies, it took nearly ten minutes, but finally we reached the reverse side of the clump and were able to point our rifles.

Where nothing but the clump of trees stood.

Sighing in relief, I slowly stood up.

“Good work,” I said to Rae, determined to put her in for a promotion. Assuming that we both got out of this alive.

Turning back to the others, I called, “All right, you can get back to your feet now.”

Looking more than a little embarrassed, they started back to their feet. The first of a small series of explosions started at the beginning of the pine forest.

“Run for it!” I shouted, and Murray Williams and four other troopers, including Deke and a brunette with pixie-cut hair, raced forward toward Rae and me … and survived.

Instinctively, the other five nose-dived to the pine needles. And landed upon the explosives, even as they began to detonate.

It was the Fourth of July again, with body parts raining down upon us as though an airliner had exploded overhead.

“Run, dammit, run!” I shouted to the five. But they had already sealed their fates, making a fatal mistake when they nosedived to the forest floor, instead of running forward.

For six or seven minutes, a great series of explosions went off. The burnt plastic odour told us that the monster soldier had used small recorder bombs like the one he had planted at the cutout section of the barbed wire fence. Instead of full-sized grenades, as he had used to devastate the death camp.

Rae finally started back toward the latest slaughter, but I stopped her, saying, “No point. No one could have lived through that. And we don’t know if all the bombs have gone off.” Besides, there was no screaming or moaning this time, telling us there were no survivors.

“Jesus, and Jehovah,” said Murray Williams, looking about the body parts scattered around the pine forest. Including a silently screaming head three metres up a pine tree, balancing precariously in a fork in the tree. “It’s like there was an explosion in an abattoir!”

This time, I spun around to hit him. But sensing my intent, he jumped back a pace and almost fell over, causing the survivors to snicker.

Looking around to count the survivors, I said, “And now we are seven!” quoting Yul Brynner from an ancient cowboy movie I had seen as a kid.

“What?” asked the freckle-faced youth, Deke, not understanding. But I saw Rae smiling.

“Nothing,” I said, turning to look around at the carnage behind us.

“He’s done it again, hasn’t he?” said Murray Williams, with more than a hint of hysteria in his voice. “He’s halved our numbers again. The monster soldier.”

“Not quite, this time,” corrected Rae, “before we were twelve, now we are seven. So he failed this time.”

Still looking at the scattered body parts, I thought, If that’s failure, I’d hate to see him have a colossal success against us! But unlike Williams, I was careful to keep my fears to myself.

For a moment, the lance corporal looked as though he was going to argue with Rae. Then he looked noncommittally down at the pine forest floor.

“Come on; let’s get away from here,” I said, “no point waiting around.”

“Be thankful he can’t see us through the pine trees,” said Rae.

“He doesn’t need to,” said Williams, stating the obvious, “the way the pine needles crunch underfoot, he can follow us by sound alone.”

I stopped for a second to glare at Williams, wondering if I should just put a bullet between his eyes. Then I forced myself to look forward and start onward again. I no longer gave a damn if any of the others followed after me.

“From now on, I’m only using lemon-scented cleaner,” said Rae as we all continued to wheeze a little from the overwhelming aroma of pine.


For a couple of hours, we continued through the pine forest until I ordered a stop.

It was all but pitch black now, and we had all been using our mini flashlights for over an hour, so I did not want us to use them up on the first night. In case we had to hunt the monster soldier for days.

“All right,” I said, “we’ll camp here for the night.”

“But won’t he get away while we’re sleeping?” asked the redheaded youth, Deke.

“We’ll just take five hours to refresh ourselves a little,” I said, noticing that most of the survivors were already yawning. “The monster soldiers have been modified so that they can go three or four days without sleep, without it affecting their performance or coordination. But we haven’t, so even at the risk of giving him a bigger lead, we have to have a few hours' sleep.”

“Don’t worry,” said Murray Williams, “he probably won’t move a centimetre while we’re sleeping. He’s trying to lead us into a trap, so he’s not likely to run away.”

“Feel free to spend the five hours wide-awake on guard duty if you like,” I said.

“Good idea,” said Williams, “in case he doubles back on us.”

“I was joking,” I said angrily, “but we can have one-hour shifts if you like. You first, then Rae, then she can awaken me.” I went on to name two other troopers for guard duty.

“That’s more like it,” said Williams, making me shake my head in amusement.

“Just don’t keep talking while the rest of us are trying to get a few hours of much-needed sleep.”


As it was, though, my anxiety at the creature we were chasing meant that when it was Rae’s turn, I still hadn’t had a wink of sleep. As she started to get up off the pine needles, I said, “That’s okay, Rae, I’ll take your shift. I haven’t been able to get to sleep.”

“Neither have I,” she said, getting up to join me as I went over to sit with my back against an ancient, gnarled pine tree.

Sitting down together, I put my arm around her in a fatherly fashion, and we both promptly fell sound asleep.


I awakened nine hours later, yawning and rubbing at my eyes, surprised to see the sun shining through the pine trees.

“Holy …!” I said, realising that we had fallen asleep on guard duty and had well and truly overslept.

“Wakey, wakey,” I teased, hoping to start the troopers in a better frame of mind today than they had been yesterday after all of the massacres.

“What time is it, Serg?” asked young Deke, yawning widely, and then staring at the sight of the sun shining brightly through the trees. He checked his watch and said, in amazement, “It’s after seven o’clock?”

I looked around to Rae, who had also awakened and was looking as guilty as I was.

“Yes, I decided to let you all have a full night’s sleep,” I lied, “we might be after the soldier for days. So five hours a night isn’t enough.”

“Thanks, Serg,” said the young soldier.

Though I could see Murray Williams looking sceptically at me. Not as gullible as the young private.

Seeing from his name tag that Deke’s last name was Becket, I asked. “Any relation to Thomas A’Becket?”

“Very distantly, Serg,” said the redheaded youth, looking embarrassed by the attention.

“Hey, everyone,” said Rae, “we’ve got a celebrity in our midst.”

“Well, hardly,” said Deke Becket, blushing profusely.

“Okay,” I said to change the subject, “let’s get about our business. First things first, breakfast.”

We reached into our kits to take out what looked like tubes of toothpaste. “Remember it’s concentrated, so don’t go wolfing it down.”

“I don’t think there’s much danger of that, Serg,” said Rae, grimacing after a single lick of the food paste.

“Hey, astronauts can live on the moon with that stuff,” I teased her.

“They’re welcome to it,” she said.

Pleased to hear the others laughing, I forced myself to eat some of the hideous-tasting food concentrate.

Then the next order of business was toileting.

“You women go to the left,” I said, pointing into the pine trees. “We men’ll go to the right.”

“Has anyone got any toilet paper in their packs?” asked a young pixie-cut brunette, whose name tag identified her as Suzette Waterman.

“Just use pine needles,” suggested Rae.

“Ouch, no thanks,” said Private Waterman, making us laugh.

“Don’t worry if you can’t wipe yourself,” I said, “we’re troopers in the field, not beauty pageant contestants. Although if you’re too smelly, try not to stand too close to me.”

“Thanks, Serg, you’re a big help,” said Suzette.

After toileting, we set off again through the trees, still following the monster soldier’s eighteen broad-fitting tracks, which he had still not attempted to conceal. As though we were still his lambs being led to whatever slaughter he had planned for us next.

After a couple of hours, the pine trees gradually began to thin out. Meaning that we had less cover, but also less worry about pine needles crunching underfoot and giving away our location. And less trouble with the overpowering aroma of pine.

Finally, we came out into the outskirts of a ranch. Way off in the distance, we could just make out a few decrepit wooden buildings.

“This is more like it,” I said, hoping to cheer up the last six troops.

“What do you mean?” demanded Murray Williams. “At least we had cover in the pine forest.”

“And crunching pine needles underfoot,” reminded Suzette Waterman.

“Besides, we don’t need cover,” Rae said, waving a hand around, “we can see for kilometres in any direction. He can’t possibly attack us without us seeing him.”

“Unless he’s got an AK-179 with a telescopic sight,” suggested Williams.

This time, I did turn around and start after Williams to slug him. But wisely, he ran away a few metres back toward the pine forest.

Laughing, Rae said, “Are we going on? Or heading back into the forest?”

Glaring at Williams a moment longer, I finally turned back to Rae and Suzette and said, “Onwards.”

Behind me, as I started, I heard five sets of footsteps, making me wonder if the lance corporal was planning on going A.W.O.L. But finally, I heard him tramping along at the rear of our small band.


It was perhaps an hour later that we stopped again.

“Why have we stopped?” asked young Deke Becket.

I pointed toward the ploughed field in front of us. A field which ran as far as I could see in either direction, making it difficult, if not impossible, to skirt around it. Certainly not without wasting many hours. Besides, the oversized boot prints continued through the ploughed field.

“A farmer’s field? So what?” asked Murray Williams, who had gradually returned to near the front of the small procession.

“So there could be mines buried in the field,” I pointed out.

“The soldier hasn’t had enough time to plough up an entire field,” insisted Murray Williams.

“Yeah, even if he ploughed all night,” agreed Suzette.

“While we were sleeping,” said Williams, pointedly.

Ignoring his barb, I said, “No, but he has had time to bury a few mines in a field a farmer has already conveniently ploughed for him.”

“Then we just have to follow his footsteps through the field,” suggested redheaded Deke.

“No can do,” I said, pointing to the random pattern of size eighteen prints. They started cleanly enough at our side of the field, and seemed to come out cleanly at the other end. But in the middle, they were all over the place as though the monster soldier had decided to confuse us after all.

“With all that mess, he could have planted mines almost anywhere in the field,” said Rae.

“So what do we do?” asked pixie-cut Suzette Waterman.

“Everyone down … ” I started to say.

Before I could finish, they had all dived to the ground.

Sighing in frustration, I said, “I was going to say everybody down onto your hands and knees. We’ll crawl through the field, carefully checking the ground every few centimetres using our bayonets.

“Oh,” said Rae, blushing from embarrassment as the six troopers returned to their knees and removed their bayonets from their scabbards.

I couldn’t help laughing at their embarrassment, although after the Hell we had gone through already at the hands of the monster soldier over the last twenty-six hours or so, it was understandable that they would all be a bit jumpy by now.

Going rather gingerly down onto my knees, I took out my bayonet and started to lead the way.

“It’ll take us hours to get across the field this way,” protested Murray Williams.

Sighing aloud, I said, “Hit him for me, Rae.”

She spun round as though meaning to do so, and the lance corporal dived to the ground again, drawing laughter from Suzette, Deke, and the other two privates. George Annapolis, a thirty plus soldier with pince nez glasses, and Lizabetta Hume, a teenager, like Deke Becket looking as though she had signed up underage (as she quite possibly had, since with fifteen Percent unemployment in the U.S.A., ‘a job is a job is a job,” as Madam President likes to say, and the American Armed Services has never been too particular about such technicalities as minimum age requirements). Her acne-coated face made her look fourteen or fifteen at best.

“Come on, everybody,” I said. So we started on hands and knees through the ploughed field, hoping against hope that that’s all it was, a farmer’s ploughed field.


After a very frustrating hour, I was starting to wonder if it might have been faster to have marched around the ploughed field. Even if it did look as though it went on to the horizon in each direction.

I was almost at the other end of the field, having to force myself not to hurry the last few metres and get myself blown up, when suddenly young Deke Becket shouted. “Hey! Hey! Hey! I think I’m kneeling on a mine!”

“Calm down, I’m on my way to you,” I said, reversing directions even as I stood up. By backtracking in my knee tracks, I was able to get back to Deke much faster than I had originally crossed the field.

“There’s something here,” said Rae, who had got to the panicked soldier before me. On her hands and knees, she was slowly feeling around in the dirt under his left knee with both hands.

“Back up carefully, and let me have a feel around,” I said.

As Rae and Murray Williams backed off a little, I felt around in the dirt where the redheaded youth had placed his knee and could feel a cold metallic disc underneath him.

“My … my knee’s on it,” said Deke, sounding as though he was about to cry.

“Relax, honey,” said Rae in a motherly tone as I began to ever so carefully wipe the dirt from above the disc.

“Yes’m,” said Deke, sounding very embarrassed. I suspect because it was the first time a beautiful blonde had ever called him honey.

“Watch out, Rae, don’t get him too excited,” I teased, without looking up from my task.

Finally, I revealed a large tin disc, about the size of an old Frisbee Flyer, but sporting the words, “DARPA SUPPLIES.”

“DARPA?” asked Rae.

“That’s who we all work for,” I explained. “They created the monster soldiers, and they pay us to kill them.”

“Then how come our stuff all says U.S. ARMED SERVICES?”

“That’s for show purposes for the public. In reality, the U.S. Army was swallowed into DARPA over a century ago.”

“Well … what is it?” asked Suzette Waterman.

“It’s a damn dinner plate,” I said.

“Why would he bury a dinner plate?” asked Rae.

“Presumably that’s his idea of a joke,” I said. Grabbing the tin plate, I ripped it from the ground and Frisbeed it deep into the ploughed field.

Too late, I saw the string running from the bottom of the dinner plate to the mini-grenade beneath it. A string connected to the pin of the grenade. A pin which I had ripped out of the grenade and sent hurtling into the field along with the dinner plate!

“Live grenade! Run for it!” I shouted, even as I leapt to my feet.

As the others hesitated, I grabbed Deke Becket and Rae Lawson and all but carried them both as I raced back down the ploughed field, trying my best to keep to my knee prints from my first crossing.

“Oh, Jesus,” I heard Murray Williams cry as he raced after us.

A few seconds later, there was an explosion, and a woman’s shrill shriek rang out from behind us as she was splattered across the ploughed field. Only hoping that it was not Suzette Waterman, whom I had started to grow close to, as I had with Rae and Deke, I looked back and saw instead the scattered remains of young Lizabetta Hume. Her acne-coated face made her easy to identify.

“Shit!” I cursed myself, wondering if she had been only fourteen or fifteen as she had looked.

Then, before I had time to chastise myself any further, Suzette Waterman and George Annapolis came racing up to us.

“Wait! Stop!” I called as they raced on. Leaping desperately forward, I managed to grab the left ankle of Suzette and pull her, squealing in terror, down to the ground with Rae, Murray Williams, Deke, and me.

But poor George Annapolis raced to almost the end of the ploughed field, making me hope that he might make it to safety.

Then there was a loud explosion, and with his dying shriek, George was hurtled into the air. Only to land upon a second mine a few metres from the first, to be splattered further apart as he was hurled into the air again.

“Oh, Jesus,” said pixie-cut Suzette, looking as though she was about to throw up.

So once more, we were coated in the blood and entrails of our troop. Two good troopers had died in the ploughed field, and we weren’t out of it yet.

“Christ!” I said, cursing myself, thinking, I must keep on my toes, dammit. Anyone else would have expected there to be a grenade under the dinner plate!

As Suzette started to cry, I put a fatherly arm around her, and she wept against my chest for more than five minutes.

“Oh, God,” said Rae, looking down at her blood-coated hands.

“Don’t worry,” said Murray Williams, “it’s not yours.”

“I know,” said Rae, looking as though she also was about to cry, with Deke only just avoiding crying.

Rubbing her hands off on the dirt, Rae looked at me and asked, “Now what?”

“Now we get out of this damn death field, as fast as we safely can,” I said. I stood, picking Suzette up in my arms and said, “Okay, let’s get out of here.” Pointing to my knee tracks ahead of us, I said, “Stick to my old tracks and you can get safely to the end of the field.”

“Come on, then,” urged Murray Williams, and for once, I agreed with him.

“Yessir,” said Deke, leading the way, followed by Rae, then Williams, then me, carrying Suzette Waterman.

Even in my old tracks, now more wary than ever, it took more than eleven minutes for all five of us to reach the imagined safety of the grasslands beyond the ploughed field.

“So what do we do now?” asked Rae as we sat together on the cool grass, with me still nursing young Suzette, who showed no indication of wanting to climb down off my lap onto the grass yet.

“We continue with our mission, of course,” I said.

“Just the five of us?” demanded Murray Williams.

“Just the five of us,” I agreed.

“But we haven’t got a hope in hell. There were fifty-two of us to start with. And in a day and a bit, he’s reduced us to just five.

“The best five,” I said, hoping that it was true. “Most of the others caused their own deaths by panicking.” Although this wasn’t entirely true, I hoped it would reassure the others a little. “So if we don’t panic, we have a chance,” I said, as the pixie-cut brunette, finally, I suspect, reluctantly, climbed off my lap onto the cool grass.

Shaking his head, Williams repeated, “We haven’t got a hope against a monster soldier. That’s why they’re now the only soldiers used in combat situations anymore … they’re so much better than the rest of us.”

“He’s not better than us!”

“Better at killing than us!”

“Maybe he’s right,” said Rae, surprising me, “what hope do we have of fighting him?”

“We don’t have to fight him,” I explained, “we just have to keep track of him until reinforcements arrive with rocket launchers. Even he can’t survive a rocket strike.”

“Assuming any of us are still alive by the time that reinforcements get here!” insisted Murray Williams.

This time I did not yell at him. Since I knew in my heart he was right. A hopeless mission to begin with, had become almost certainly a suicide mission.

“And why haven’t they arrived yet?” asked Rae.

I only shrugged, careful not to suggest that Com-Sat-Dar had broken down or could not track us for some reason.

So what do we do? I asked myself. Go on to almost certain defeat and massacre? Or risk being court-martialled for cowardice under fire by turning back?

“Lunch time,” I said to change the subject. “Who wants some yummy, scrummy food concentrate?”

“I sent mine to the astronauts living on the moon,” teased Rae. However, as I started to eat mine, reluctantly, Rae and the others took out their tubes of horrible-tasting food paste and started to slowly eat it.


I was still sitting on the cool grass, wrestling with my conscience, as we ate the horrific-tasting food concentrate for lunch, when a great series of explosions began far off in the distance.

“Down!” shouted Murray Williams, and we all nosedived into the grass. However, as we lay in the cool, slightly damp grass, it became obvious that these latest explosions were nowhere near us.

“What’s happening?” asked Rae, through a mouthful of food paste.

“Are they trying to bomb the monster soldier?” asked Deke, sounding hopeful for the first time in many hours.

“Not likely, I’m afraid. They only agreed to airlift us troops and ammo so that we could do the dirty work for them,” I said.

Reaching into my right breast pocket, I removed a pair of mini binoculars and tried focusing them upon the distant explosions which were still resounding like New Year’s Eve fireworks.

I programmed the computerised mini-oculars for distance and received the information that the town of Springfield, in Springfield State, was just under twenty-five kilometres from our position.

“Springfield,” I said, “that’s where the explosions are occurring.”

“Springfield?” asked Deke. “That’s over in Springfield State, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” I agreed, “apparently we crossed over the state line at some time without knowing it.”

Holding the mini-oculars to my eyes, I adjusted them till I could see the town of Springfield.

As I watched, the bell tower of a small church exploded, raining debris down onto passersby. Then a procession of five or six cars outside the church exploded in turn.

“What’s happening?” asked Suzette.

“He’s blowing up a church,” said Murray Williams, who also had a pair of mini-oculars trained on the town.

“Jesus, that’s him,” I said, hearing Williams gasp as he also saw the monster soldier for the first time since we had started after him.

“Who, Jesus? What’s he doing here?” asked Rae.

“No, the monster soldier,” said the lance corporal.

“What’s he look like?” asked Suzette, although she had seen the other monster soldiers at the death camp.

“One of TV’s Retard Ninja Turkeys, but in a gorilla suit,” said Murray Williams.

And that was pretty much what the soldier looked like. A giant, mutant cross between a super-heavyweight boxer and a gorilla. Wearing a camouflage uniform, carrying a sack of weapons big enough to stop Santa’s sledge from taking off in one hand, and a loaded rocket launcher in the other.

“Shit, look at that bag of weapons,” said Williams.

“Yes, he’s got us outgunned,” I said, before I could stop myself.

As he stood there, either defying us or to terrify the townsfolk, a great series of explosions rang out around the town as schools, stores, and houses exploded into lethal shards of shrapnel. Potentially killing more people as it flew away than the explosions themselves were doing.

“Christ, he must have spent the night planting explosives around the town while we were sleeping,” I said.

“But why do that?” asked Deke. “When we’re his main targets?”

“Doesn’t mean he can’t have secondary targets,” said Murray Williams.

As we watched, a school bus across the road tried to pull away from the scene of devastation.

Hearing the motor, the monster soldier spun around, aimed the rocket launcher and fired the rocket into perhaps forty or fifty kids.

“Jesus!” I said as the bus exploded, scattering about burning body parts of junior high school kids.

As though hearing my curse, the monster soldier dropped the empty rocket launcher, reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a much larger set of binoculars, which he trained straight at me. Seeing me, he grinned like a Cheshire cat and waved toward the burning bus as though asking for my approval of his actions.

“Christ!” said Murray Williams.

“What’s he doing?” demanded Rae Lawson.

“He’s just blown up a bus full of kids,” said Williams, “and now he’s grinning idiotically straight at us.”

“What?” asked Rae, reaching for his glasses.

“Don’t let her look,” I commanded Williams, who dutifully held onto his glasses. Not because I didn’t want her to see the monster soldier, but rather the burning children.

“Come on,” demanded Rae.

“Trust me, you don’t want to see,” said Murray Williams, unable to take his own eyes away from the devastated town where explosions still rang out all around the soldier.

“Either he knows exactly how far each of the explosives is planted from him,” said the lance corporal, “or he just doesn’t care if he gets accidentally blown up.”

“I suspect the latter,” I said, “he’s having too much fun to worry about his own fate.”

“But if he’s got his binoculars …?” said Suzette.

“That’s why he’s always been one step ahead of us,” Williams finished for her. “While we were following his footsteps, he could see us all the time.”

“Most of the time,” I corrected, “probably not when we were in the pine forest.” Standing to my feet wearily, I said, “Come on, let’s get after him again.”

“Then why is he wasting time and ammo blowing up a whole town?” asked Deke Becket, as he and the others started to climb back to their feet, trying their best not to shudder each time a new explosion went off.

“To lure us into his latest trap,” said Williams.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Then why let us know where he is?” asked Rae.

“To finish us off,” insisted Murray Williams. “He’s done so well without us even seeing him that he’s decided to up the ante.”

“I don’t think so,” I repeated, “remember, he was mutated to kill or be killed. That’s all he knows. Whenever he sees someone who isn’t another monster soldier, his urge to murder them takes over, and his instinct for self-preservation shuts down. DARPA has successfully mutated out all perceived weaknesses such as the desire for self-preservation, mercy, smoking, drinking, et cetera.”

Perhaps thinking out loud, Rae said, “I bet he still knows how to rape any female troopers he captures alive.”

Seeing Suzette looking as though she were about to faint, I put a fatherly arm around her as I said, “Regrettably, yes. The sex urge turned out to be the one human urge too powerful for DARPA to remove from the monster soldiers.”

I let them compose themselves for a few moments longer, then said, “Come on, double-quick marching, we have nearly twenty-five kilometres to get through before we can help anyone still alive in Springfield.”

“We’re not walking straight into his trap?” demanded Murray Williams.

“No, double-quick marching,” said Rae, making me smile at her courage.

“Come on,” I said, starting. And after a second’s hesitation, I heard the lance corporal and the others start after me.

Briefly raising the mini-oculars to look through with difficulty as we ran, I could see the gorilla-like figure of the soldier grinning like a Southern diplomat at election time as we trotted toward our first meeting with him.

“Is he still watching us?” asked Deke ten minutes later.

“Yep,” I said, “looks like he’s going to watch us all the way there.”

Then there was a sudden blast, and a great burst of blood flew from the soldier’s chest, making him drop his binoculars, which shattered upon the dirty grey concrete where he was standing outside the ruins of the church he had just blown up.

The monster soldier looked down at himself, surprised, as I looked around to see an elderly priest pointing a shotgun at the gorilla-like figure.

Snarling like an angry lion, the soldier raced across to the priest and tore him limb from limb as I watched in terror. Too horrified at first to even take the glasses off my eyes.

When I finally did, Rae asked, “What’s up, Serg?”

“He just … ” I muttered, deciding not to tell the others, “never mind.”

With that, I stopped using the mini-oculars as we accelerated toward the town of Springfield, where explosions were still going off, like the Fourth of July in Hell.

I just hoped that we were not accelerating toward our deaths.

As we ran, I wondered, not for the first time, what the Hell chance we had against the monster soldier? If a blast from a double-barreled shotgun had only made him angry. What chance did we have with three rifles, two machine-pistols, and our sidearms?

“Why so silent?” asked Rae, as we got within a few kilometres of the burning, broken town.

“Just saving my strength. I’m not as fit as you young whipper-snappers.” But even Rae did not respond to my false cheer.


Finally, we reached the town of Springfield. It looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. Burning buildings still occasionally exploded. Bricks, girders, planks, corpses, and hundreds of scattered body parts lined the streets.

“Holy … Now I know what it must have been like in London during the Blitz,” said Rae.

“Or Switzerland in World War Three,” said Suzette Waterman.

“You’re not wrong there,” I said to both of them, slowly looking around the death-blasted town. Not wanting them to stay too long in any one place, I said, “Come on, we’d better check for survivors.”

And slowly, we started looking around the town, trying our best not to walk on human body parts. Although in some parts of the death town, it was almost impossible, with blood and human entrails seemingly plastered around the streets as though Salvador Dali had come back to life and taken up street art.

“How could one soldier do all of this?” asked freckle-faced Deke Becket. “It looks like he drove a tank through the town … many times.”

“He must have taken a hell of a lot of explosives with him from the weapons store,” said Rae.

“A hell of a lot more than we’ve got,” I admitted. “Troopers are stronger than weight-lifters; they can carry hundreds of kilograms of weaponry.”

“Even so, he must be almost out of ammo by now, surely?” asked Suzette Waterman, sounding desperately hopeful.

“Let’s hope so,” I said to reassure her. However, the bag I had seen him carrying earlier had looked almost full. I turned to smile at her, then, seeing movement behind the young brunette, warned, “Down!”

Spinning round, we all crouched as low as possible, without nose diving into the blood and entrails.

Aiming my AK-179 at a pile of fallen bricks and masonry, I said, “He’s behind that pile.”

Then a small voice called. “D … don’t shoot!” And a boy of perhaps twelve came out leading two tiny girls and what looked like a tiny Yorkshire terrier.

Straightening up again, we tried to pretend that we had not been afraid.

“Kids,” said Rae.

“Hello,” said a tiny blonde girl, who looked no more than two at most. “My name’s Mary. My brother is Don.”

Without hesitation, Rae strode across and scooped up the blonde girl, who could easily have passed for her daughter.

“What do we do now?” asked Murray Williams.

Of course, he was right. Although this time he had been careful not to say it, his tone made it plain that the last thing we needed was to have young kids in tow while hunting for a bulletproof monster soldier.

“Now, we stop chasing him and wait for reinforcements,” I said. Reaching into my left breast pocket, I lifted out the small box and removed the tiny mobile phone. I clicked the red button off, counted to five, and then clicked it back on.

“Yes,” a female voice immediately came over the phone.

“We’re at the town of Springfield, Springfield State,” I said.

“We know we’ve got you on Com-Sat-Dar.”

“We’re going to wait here for the reinforcements.”

There was a few seconds’ silence as though she was checking this with her superiors. Finally, she said, “DARPA command thinks you should stay on the hunt.”

“No way,” I insisted, “he’s been leading us around like a three-legged dog on roller-blades, picking us off whenever he feels like it. We’re down to five troopers, two straight out of high school. We’re waiting here.”

“What if he gets away?”

“No danger of that,” I said, “whenever he’s got too far ahead of us, he’s slowed down to let us catch up. The last thing he wants is to get away from us.” I almost added, ‘While we’re still alive,’ but caught myself just in time, not wanting to spook Suzette or Deke.

Again, there was silence for a moment, and then she said, “Okay, the chopper is in the air. We’ve directed it to head to Springfield.”

“And we’ve got survivors to pick up,” I remembered, hearing young Mary laughing as Rae tried to cheer her up.

“Okay. We’ll send a separate chopper from nearby Weaver State Air Force Base for that.”

“Thanks,” I said. But she had already rung off.

I walked across to where Rae and the others were trying to cheer up the terrified children.

“It was a gorilla in a soldier’s suit,” said the boy, Don, as I approached. “A gorilla carrying a massive sack and half a dozen large, wooden boxes.”

“I thought he was Santa come early, at first,” said young Mary.

Yeah, Evil Santa! I thought, careful not to voice my thoughts.

“But then it started shooting people,” said the boy.

“And throwing bombs,” said the second girl, a redhead of perhaps four or five, with a great crop of Orphan Annie hair.

We listened to the kids' tales in horror for ten minutes or so. Then I asked the boy, “Are you able to help us check around the town for other survivors?”

He hesitated for just a second, then said, “Yes, sir.”

“We can’t take them around all of this,” protested Rae.

“We can’t leave them here,” I said.

“Suzette and I can stay with them while you, Deke and Murray check around the rest of the town.”

“And help the soldier divide and conquer us?” asked Murray Williams.

“He’s right, Rae,” I said, “if you two stay here, you’re at his mercy. And our defences have been cut by forty Percent.”

Looking unconvinced, she finally said, “Well … okay.”

Walking over to pick up the older girl, I said, “You carry Mary, and I’ll carry Annie here.”

“My name’s Jacqui,” corrected the redheaded girl.

“Sorry,” I said, although she still reminded me of Little Orphan Annie. “Okay, let’s go … slowly, and stay alert.”

“Kids, you can help us look for any movement in the rubble,” said Rae, making me proud of her, wishing I had thought of that.

“Like a game?” asked little Mary.

“Yes, it’s called spot the survivors,” I said. Careful not to mention that we also had to be on guard in case any movement signalled the monster soldier waiting to leap out at us.

We had barely started when Murray Williams dived to the rubble, saying, “Movement to the right.”

Little Mary giggled and said, “He’s funny.”

Not wanting to spook the kids, Rae and I crouched, putting down the children slowly, pleased when the boy, Don, also crouched low.

Taking up my rifle, I called, “Come out from there.”

“Please … please don’t hurt us,” said a blue-rinsed old lady in her eighties, leading from the wreckage of a fallen garage two elderly men. One of whom looked at least a hundred.

“Relax,” said Rae, “we’re the first relief here to help you.”

“Only five of you?” asked the blue-rinse lady.

“The first wave,” I said, “the main team will be here soon from Weaver State Air Force Base.”

“I used to work at Weaver State Air Force Base,” right after World War Four,” said the one-hundred-year-old man. Who then proceeded to tell us a long-winded tale of his working life, while we did our level best not to look completely bored. Which, of course, we were.

Right after World War Four! I thought: Jesus, he must be every day of a hundred!

As we finally moved off again, Rae asked, “Will you get in trouble with DARPA if the soldier escapes while we stay here?”

“He won’t escape,” I explained, “he’s been leading us around on his terms for the last thirty hours. Watching to make certain that we kept following, never getting too far ahead of us. When he sees we aren’t moving on this time. He’ll stay somewhere close by.”

“His desire to slaughter us all will override his desire to get away,” said Murray Williams, before I could stop him.

Glaring at the lance corporal, I said, “For the first time, we’re fighting on our terms.”

“Maybe,” said Williams, refusing to be convinced, “or maybe we’re still doing exactly what he wants us to do.”

Refusing to be baited, I turned to see how everyone was doing.


With the elderly trio needing to stop regularly to rest, our trek around the township was much slower than I had anticipated. From time to time, we found terrified survivors, until gradually, by mid-afternoon, we were back to the fifty-plus we had started with. Except out of the fifty-five or so we now had, only five were trained fighters, and many of the others were young children or the elderly.

Fifty-plus survivors out of a town of fifteen hundred! I thought, both terrified and enraged by the monster soldier’s barbarity.

Finding the hunt for survivors, with its constant stop-starting, was more fatiguing than hunting the monster soldier. By four o’clock, I was ready to give it up. When, one last time, Rae called:

“Movement in the debris.” She was pointing to what looked like a pile of firewood to the left of where we stood.

Seeing the broken wooden cross, though, I realised that it had been a church.

“No-De-Nom,” read Rae, “what does that mean?”

“It’s the Non-Denominational Church of Jesus Christ,” said the blue-rinse lady.

“We used to go there,” said little Jacqui, whom I was carrying again.

Putting down Jacqui as Rae put down a little boy she was now carrying, I raised my rifle, and the five troopers started slowly toward the ruined church building.

“Come on out!” I called, just praying to the Non-Denominational Jesus Christ that it wasn’t the monster soldier. Recalling how he had charged the priest after being shot with both barrels of a shotgun, I realised that our AK-179s would be as effective as pea-shooters against him.

Finally, as we approached, the planking fell away and we saw three elderly ladies, purple-rinsed, pink-rinsed, and lime green-rinsed respectively.

Suddenly, I stopped as I noticed something strange about them.

The three old ladies all had masking tape across their mouths.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” I called to the others, and Rae and Murray Williams stopped and looked back toward me.

“Everyone back,” I called, and Rae and Williams started back toward me, although Suzette Waterman and Deke Becket seemed not to have noticed anything out of place yet.

“Hit the ground!” I shrieked, and Suzette and Deke spun around, almost in time to save them as the three old ladies suddenly burst outwards in an explosion of blood, bone, and entrails, like the living bombs that they were.

Not for the first time, I was hurled through the air, this time with Rae and Murray Williams following me, along with the shattered remnants of Suzette and Deke.

This time, my fall was broken by the survivors, six of whom died as Rae, Williams, and I were fired into them like living bullets.

“Oh, Jesus!” I cried/prayed, certain this time that I must have been killed.

At first, it was impossible to distinguish the screaming of the survivors we had ploughed into from the screams of Rae, Suzette, Murray Williams, and Deke behind me.

For minutes, we lay upon the injured survivors, many of whom were now crying, before I finally regained enough strength to try to crawl out of the pile of human debris, hoping that I was not doing any more injury to the damaged human beings as I crawled across them.

“Rae? Murray? Are you alive?" I called. Then, less hopefully, since the pixie-cut brunette and redheaded youth had been the closest to the three old-lady bombs when they had detonated. “Suzette? Deke?”

“No, I’m dead,” said Rae, like Murray Williams and me starting to crawl out of the morass of mangled survivors.

“Same here,” said Williams, “or at least that’s what it feels like it.”

Their black humour fell like lead bars, however, as we looked round and saw Suzette Waterman and Deke Becket lying face down as though dead.

Although my first instinct was to go to my fallen troopers, I knew that I had to tend to the Springfield survivors. That was one important difference between monster soldiers and human soldiers; we recognise the importance of protecting innocent civilians at all costs. Monster soldiers do not recognise the existence of innocent bystanders. If you are in their path and are not a monster soldier yourself, then you are a viable target … to be killed both mercilessly and ruthlessly.

“Come on,” I said to Rae and Murray Williams, “the civilians come first.”

“But Suzette and Deke?” protested Rae, looking to where they both lay face down.

“They’ll keep,” I said, thinking: They’re probably dead already by the looks of them. I could see that Deke Becket had lost most of his right arm, but no blood was flowing from the stump, telling me that he was at least dead. I just hoped that I wasn’t dooming Suzette to die waiting for our help while we attended to the survivors.

“Civilians come first,” I repeated.

“He’s right,” agreed Murray Williams.

Looking unhappy, Rae joined Williams and me, intending to address the townsfolk.

“There, there,” I said to a crying child, trying to calm her, wondering what we could do for the more badly injured survivors.

Seeing twelve-year-old Don, I asked, “Are you all right?”

“I think Mary is dead,” he said, ashen-faced as he held the tiny corpse of his youngest sister up for inspection, as though he believed that I was the Non-Denominational Jesus Christ and could somehow resurrect her from the dead like Lazarus.

“Shit!” I hissed, angry now at DARPA that they had thought that they could morally justify the evil concept of creating genetically mutated, bullet-proof monster soldiers, without conscience, without compassion, without any moral sense of right and wrong.

As Don started to cry, I put an arm around him, saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll see that she gets a proper Christian burial. I’m sure her soul is with God now.”

As Don pressed against me, I wondered if this was what it was like to be a father. Not for the first time, I wondered why I had married the army instead of finding a loving woman to marry to have a son like Don and the daughter I had always wanted, like Rae.

I hugged Don for as long as I could, but finally had to let go to check out the rest of the survivors. Most of whose screams had abated to sobbing or low moaning by then.

Altogether six people had died and seven were injured. One of the deaths was the blue-rinse old lady, who lay at the feet of the hundred-year-old man who was her father. His hangdog expression told me what he was thinking: That there’s nothing worse than a man living long enough to see his only daughter die.

I almost said, “Don’t worry, she’s in the arms of God now,” but realised in time how banal it would sound. So I settled for patting him gently on the shoulder, saying, “I’m terribly sorry.” That’s when the tears started to stream down his wrinkled cheeks.

Fortunately, by then, some of the survivors had calmed down enough to be able to help us as we eventually patched up the injured as much as we could.

Finally, we started across to where Deke Becket lay face down, silent. Beside him, Suzette Waterman was trying to sit up without much success.

“Hold on, honey,” called Rae as she and Murray Williams hurried across to the young brunette, while I went to check out Deke.

“Deke, are you?” I asked, tapping his cold shoulder. Then, gently turning him over, I looked away hurriedly, dropping his carcase in my haste to get away, as one look at the empty hollow where his face and brain had once been told me that the redheaded youth was dead.

Trying my best not to throw up, I turned him again so that he was face down, and then almost ran across to where Ray and Murray were looking at Suzette.

“Will she be all right?” I asked.

Not wanting to speak in front of the pixie-cut brunette who was only just alive, ashen-faced Rae turned to look at me and shook her head slowly.

“You … you were right,” said Suzette, “when we didn’t follow after him, the monster soldier stayed by the blitzed town.”

Then she shut her brown eyes and died in Rae’s arms.

“Jesus!” said Murray Williams, just beating me to it.

Not sure if the brunette’s last words had been meant as a rebuke to me, or just a statement of fact, I blushed in shame. But I was saved from having to consider it at length by the sound of rotors overhead as the pick-up helicopter approached from the direction of Weaver State.

“Help is on the way,” I called to the traumatised survivors, raising a wild cheer. Then, putting a hand on the shoulder of each of Rae and Murray, I repeated more softly, “Help is on the way.”

They looked up at me with war-weary looks as though once again the cavalry had arrived too late.

Looking around the ravaged town of Springfield for I hoped the last time, having decided that the three of us would be airlifted out with the others, I thought: It’s more like a wrecker’s yard than a rural town! Piles of bricks, lumber, and broken furniture lay everywhere in sight. On second thought, no wrecker’s yard would be this messy! I decided. Also, of course, a wrecker’s yard would not be splattered in blood, entrails, and human body parts. And would not have almost fifteen hundred corpses spread throughout its piles of bricks and lumber.

“Come on,” I said to Rae and Murray, as the chopper started to land, fifty metres from where we stood.

“I thought we had to stay and wait for reinforcements?” asked Murray Williams.

“Just the three of us?” I asked. “No, let the reinforcements tackle the monster soldier.”

Yet, when we reached the chopper, where cheering survivors were being helped aboard, the crew refused to allow us to enter.

“Sorry,” said a black-leather-clad soldier, looking like a stormtrooper out of Blake’s 7, “we’re heading straight for Station 19.”

“Station 19!” said Murray Williams, sounding as shocked as I felt.

“What is Station 19?” asked Rae.

Trying not to let the townsfolk hear, I whispered, “Station 19 is the official designation of one of the death camps. The largest camp in the U.S.A., with the greatest capacity for torture and mass murder.”

“What!” shouted Rae in disbelief, making some of the survivors hesitate and stare at us for a moment before allowing themselves to be herded aboard the giant chopper.

“‘Fraid so,” said the trooper quietly. “Not the sort of place you three would want to go to. But the second chopper should be here in less than an hour. Once they unload, I’m sure they’ll be only too happy to take you three straight back to base … Jesus, you three sure look like you need relieving, where have you been, Hell?”

“Yes,” said Rae and Murray together.

“Okay, come on,” I said, and reluctantly we stood back and watched, occasionally waving back, as now happy townsfolk were helped aboard the chopper, grateful to be out of the death zone. Unaware that they were being taken away to be slaughtered, so that they could not tell the world the dreadful truth about the evil of DARPA and the genetically mutated, never-dying monster soldiers.

“Station 19,” said Rae. She started forward as though to snatch up little Jacqui, as my Little Orphan Annie started up into the massive helicopter.

With a heavy heart, I grabbed Rae’s arm, seeing her wince in pain, to stop her.

“Don’t,” I whispered, nodding to where the storm troopers had weapons greatly superior to anything that we had, “you wouldn’t stand a chance.”

When she looked like trying to break out of my grip, Murray Williams grabbed her other arm and whispered, “He’s right. They’d kill us as soon as look at us if we tried to interfere.”

I was able to forgive the lance corporal for all of his faux pas for that one act.

Backing away a little, we waved back at the smiling faces of the forty-plus survivors, who would not be surviving much longer, thanks to the malignant organisation that we were employed by.

“But … but they all say it was a gorilla that came into town,” Rae tried reasoning with the last of the storm troopers as he was heading toward the chopper.

“That’s what they say now,” he agreed, as the gangway to the main body of the chopper was slowly raised and locked into place. “But in time they’ll think back, talk amongst themselves, and finally work out what they really saw happen to the town of Springfield.”

“But …?” protested Rae as the storm trooper started into the cabin of the Lockheed trooper carrier.

So, with Rae still half trying to break away from our grip, Murray and I led her back out of range of the chopper’s rotors, just in time before they roared back into life.

With Rae and Murray looking as depressed as I felt, we watched as the chopper turned, not toward Weaver State, but in the more ominous direction of Dane County, which DARPA employees called Death County, since it had three times as many death camps as any other similarly sized part of the U.S.A.

Then, releasing Rae at last, I took out my mini-oculars and started scouring around for the monster soldier.

“Any sign of him?” asked Rae as Murray Williams seemingly reluctantly took out his binoculars to join in the monster soldier hunt.

“No, but he’s out there, not far away, I can almost smell him.”

“You’ve got smell-o-vision binoculars?” asked Rae in a desperate bid to raise our spirits.

“Just a figure of speech,” I said with a half-hearted chuckle as I continued to scan the piles of still burning debris, which only hours earlier had been a small rural American town.


Darkfall was descending when we finally heard the far-off sound of rotors whirring in the twilight sky.

Seeing Rae smile in relief, I smiled back at her and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon.”

“Don’t say that, Serg,” said Murray Williams as though he had developed precognitive powers, “you never know when you might be right.”

I tried to smile at him, but my attempted bonhomie fell flat as I realised that he could be right. We had lost sight of the soldier hours ago. Despite sensing his presence ever since, we had failed to spot him again.

For twelve minutes, we watched as the distant chopper became larger and larger until it was almost on top of us.

Forgetting all of Murray Williams’s seemingly prophetic cynicism over the last day and a bit, I foolishly said, “Once the chopper lands, we’ll be home safe!” shouting to make myself heard over the near-deafening roar of the rotors.

Then the lance corporal said, “Unless the monster soldier is hidden nearby and shoots it down with a rocket launcher, when it’s right above us …!”

We stared at each other in shock for a second or two.

“Jesus! Run for it!” I shouted, and we spun around and raced off to what we desperately hoped was a safe distance.

Let’s just hope the chopper, seeing us run away, doesn’t think we’re the enemy and decide to machine gun us down! I thought, careful not to give voice to my fears.

As we started running, we heard a loud whoosh from the edge of town. Followed by a massive explosion as the rocket struck the chopper overhead.

“Holy Mother of God!” shouted Rae as the chopper plummeted toward us.

Even as it fell, a great series of after explosions began, lighting up the sky as the crates of ammunition aboard the Lockheed detonated with enough force to have levelled the entire town of Springfield. If the monster soldier had not already levelled the town twelve hours earlier.

For minutes that seemed a lifetime, and for one of us was, the explosions went off, even as shrapnel, body parts, burning troopers, and exploding weapons rained down upon us.

Two more rockets whooshed into the night sky, making Rae shriek. “What the hell is he doing? He’s already killed them!”

“Now he’s just having fun,” guessed Murray Williams.

“It’s not him,” I shouted as the main portion of the Lockheed troop-carrier started to plummet toward us. “They’re ammo in the chopper, detonated by the explosions.”

“So now we’re being bombed by DARPA as well as the monster soldier?” shouted Murray Williams.

“Afraid so,” I said as I picked up my mini-oculars, despite searing pain in my lower body, to have one last look at the mutant killer.

This time, the monster soldier was not trying to hide. He stood out in the open, grinning like a Megamouth shark on dope, all but doing handstands in delight.

“The bastard!” I hissed, dropping the binoculars as the pain became too bad to stand, and I finally started to pass out.

2.

REPORT FROM PRIVATE RAE LAWSON, MADE ONE MONTH AFTER SERGEANT OTIS P. WAUGH’S REPORT

After the chopper exploded, I dived to the ground, covering my head with my hands, as though that could somehow save my life if a major portion of the troop carrier fell on top of me.

After more than ten minutes, I finally dared to look up at a scene that looked like it came from Salvador Dali’s vision of hell. Burning crates, burning troopers, and severed, burning limbs, heads, and torsos were scattered for hundreds of metres in all directions.

Finally, the light of the fires began to die out a little, and the awful sights around me began to fade into the darkness.

Hearing Sergeant Waugh groaning, I reached into my backpack for a small flashlight, and, despite my reluctance to re-illuminate the gruesome killing field, I switched on the torch and crept across to where the sergeant and Lance Corporal Williams lay together, face down on the ground a short distance away.

“Oh, Lord!” I said, seeing them both coated in their own and each other’s blood.

“Holy … !” I said in shock, realising that it was only Lance Corporal Williams’s head and chest that lay beside the sergeant.

Trying my best not to look at the half-soldier, whose death seemed as pointless as the deaths of the fifty-plus troopers and fifteen hundred townsfolk before him, I turned toward Sergeant Waugh, who had become like a second father to me over the last thirty-six hours or so.

“Oh, God … !” I said, seeing that his left leg had been severed above the knee, and his right leg was peppered with lethal-looking chunks of shrapnel sticking out of it.

Doing my best not to throw up, I hurriedly removed what bandages remained in my backpack and tied the tightest tourniquet that I could manage above the lost leg, then tried to bandage his other leg as best I could (having found more bandages in the sergeant’s backpack), knowing better than to even think of trying to remove the imbedded shrapnel shards.

I was feeling less light-headed now, as though working to save the life of this man I admired had given me renewed strength of character and physique amid this loathsome death zone. So, reaching into the sergeant’s breast pocket, I extracted the red mobile phone and, recalling what Sergeant Waugh had done earlier, I depressed the red light, waited five seconds, and then turned it back on.

“Yes?” came what sounded like the same female voice.

As concisely as I could, I related what had happened.

“Hold on,” she said, and the line went dead for a couple of minutes. Finally, she said, “We will send three helicopters from Weaver State Air Force Base. Two to hunt the monster soldier; one to airlift you both to safety.”

“When?” I asked.

“They should arrive just after first light.”

“What!” I demanded. “That’s ten hours off. Sergeant Waugh will probably be dead if he doesn’t get medical attention before then.”

“Sorry, but DARPA won’t risk losing any more troops or equipment by coming at night.”

I tried to reason with the bitch, but she suddenly hung up on me. And even when I depressed the red light off and on again, she did not respond.

“Shit! Bitch!” I said, giving up after my fifth unsuccessful attempt to get her to come back on the line.

Placing the mobile phone back into the sergeant’s breast pocket, I continued to try to tend to his wounds, without really knowing what I should be doing.

My efforts to help him became substantially harder an hour or so later, when Sergeant Waugh finally awakened and started shrilling in agony.

“Oh, Jesus, just let me die!” he shrieked.

“Hold on, Serg,” I said.

Hunting through our packs for the last remaining medical supplies, I found six metacaine tablets and managed to coerce three of them down his throat. This stopped his screaming as he fell asleep.

Sitting, cradling the old soldier’s head in my lap, I only hoped that I had not killed him by giving him such a strong dose. But soon he was in a deep, but fitful sleep.

Near dawn, I gave him the last three painkillers, hoping that rescue could not be far off now. Looking at his shattered body and thinking of the remains of poor Murray Williams, I wondered, What the hell do I do if the monster soldier turns up before the choppers arrive? With Murray dead, me with no experience at killing, and frankly, the Serg in no state to fight off a little old lady wielding a bunch of daffodils. Let alone a monster soldier with a rocket launcher!

Despite the bitch’s reassurance that it would be just after dawn that the choppers would rescue us, in fact, it was more than two hours after dawn when I finally heard the distant drone of rotors.

Removing the mini-oculars from Sergeant Waugh’s coat pocket, I started to look around for the monster soldier.

For seven or eight minutes, it seemed as though he had departed the burnt-out ruin of Springfield. Then, I saw a hint of movement amongst the rubble near the northernmost end of town. I watched the rubble intently until the three choppers were nearly at the outskirts of town.

“Easy, sleeping warrior,” I said to the man whose head I cradled in my lap, “help is almost here.”

Yet, even as I spoke, the rubble fell away as the monster soldier stood up, holding a loaded rocket launcher.

“Jesus!” I said, dropping the mini-oculars, not caring when I heard them shatter.

Hurriedly grabbing the mobile phone from the Serg’s other breast pocket, I depressed the red button, not sure if the stuck-up bitch would answer this time. And for a moment, it seemed that she was not going to. But finally, sounding as weary as I felt, she said, “What is it now?”

“The soldier is in the rubble with a rocket launcher,” I said.

“Why are you telling me?” she said to my surprise. “Depress the yellow light and you can speak directly to the chopper pilots.”

Doing as instructed, I repeated the message to the pilots.

“Thanks, you’re a lifesaver,” said the pilot of the command chopper, gratefully, surprising me after the surliness of the bitch telephonist.

The two armed helicopters wheeled off toward the Northern end of town.

For a moment, I wondered if they were just hastening to their doom. Then they started firing their rockets with roaring whoosh after whoosh toward where the monster soldier was now standing out in the open, no longer even bothering to hide.

As explosion followed explosion, I put the mobile phone back into the sergeant’s breast pocket, without bothering to try to see if the choppers had got the soldier. The sergeant’s mini-oculars were broken, and although Murray Williams had had a pair also, I had no intention of going over to the truncated remains of the lance corporal to ferret through his shirt pockets.

Overhead, I heard the approaching whir-whir-whir as the third Lockheed took advantage of the raging rocket battle to land unseen by the monster soldier.

“Over here!” I shouted as medics raced from the chopper, ducking to avoid decapitation from the rotors, which had slowed but not stopped.

“Relax,” said a female medic, “we’ll soon get you both to the Weaver State Military Hospital.”

Then, with what seemed like obscene haste, she checked the sergeant over, applying a better tourniquet over the stump of his severed leg, although she praised my efforts. Then, removing the largest syringe I ever hope to see in my life, she gave the sergeant three injections in rapid succession. After each of which, the soldier screamed aloud in his sleep.

“Relax,” said the medic, as though she thought that the unconscious man could somehow hear her.

Still with obscene haste, they heave-hoed the sergeant onto a stretcher, making him scream out again and almost awaken, although I realised by then that one of the injections must have been a powerful sleeping draught.

Then, hefting the stretcher, they almost ran back to the chopper, crouching under the revolving rotors without even slowing.

“You’d better run if you don’t want to be left behind,” said the female medic, “we aren’t stopping here a second longer than necessary.”

Taking her at her word, I almost fell on top of the stretcher in my haste to get aboard the chopper.

Even as the door was slammed into place, the female medic hammered on the connecting wall to the cockpit, calling, “Go! Go! Go!”

Since they had never completely stopped the rotors, we were able to swiftly take off, throwing myself and the chief medic (as I assumed she was) both to the floor of the surprisingly small passenger section of the chopper.

“Shit in a hand basket!” said the female medic, reminding me of the old saying, ‘There is no room for ladylike behaviour in the U.S. military.’ Mind you, that predated Bill Clinton's cracking down on homophobia in the armed services.

Climbing back to a sitting position, she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll soon be back at Weaver State Hospital. They’ve got some of the best medical facilities in the U.S.”

As she spoke, there was a massive explosion from behind us.”

“I think they got him,” said the chief medic, whose name tag said Jessica Cortez, too optimistically.

As we watched out the back window of the chopper, with a roaring whoosh, a rocket zoomed out of the rubble, exploding on impact with the command helicopter.

“Jesus wept!” I said as the chopper exploded, the rotors flying off in different directions. One of them was just falling short of our copter.

With another eerie whoosh, a second rocket zoomed out, as the second armed Lockheed tried too late to abort the mission to run for safety.

“Holy …?” said Jessica Cortez, knowing in advance what would happen, even before the rocket struck the second chopper, which went off like a giant, flying grenade, raining metal and body parts down upon the murdered township.

“Go! Go! Go!” shrieked Cortez frantically as a third rocket zoomed out after us.

“Oh, Jesus!” I said, thinking: He’s going to win after all, wiping us all out, along with four helicopters and God knows how much munitions!

“Relax,” said Jessica Cortez, sounding anything but relaxed herself, “we’re safely out of range.”

And almost as she spoke, the trailing rocket looped back down to explode harmlessly in the long grass outside the dead township.

“Told you,” said Cortez, sounding every bit as relieved as I felt, although both of us were doing our level best not to do an Al Gore and be the first to sigh out loud in relief.

The flight to Weaver State took less than an hour; however, it seemed to take infinitely longer, since we were all on edge, half expecting to be hit by a rocket fired by the monster soldier, even when we had left him well behind. Although much faster on foot than any human troops, even a monster soldier could not keep up with a helicopter in panicked flight.

“We’re here,” said Jessica Cortez, stating the obvious as we finally landed on the heliport upon the roof of the massive military hospital, which seemed almost as large as the whole town of Springfield had once been.

“Come on,” she called to another medic, sliding the door to the passenger section open.

Two male medics lifted the stretcher, which they had been kneeling beside, holding onto throughout the flight to steady it, and we started outside.

Outside where two orderlies were waiting with a metal trolley to race Sergeant Waugh into an operating theatre.

Helping to push the trolley as we charged down corridor after corridor, I suddenly found my path blocked by a burly orderly as we finally reached the theatre.

“Please wait here,” he said, making it plain that it was an order, not a request, as they wheeled the sergeant into the theatre.

“All right,” I said, frustrated, but not wanting to cause a scene when the Serg’s life was on the line.


Sitting on a hard wooden bench just outside the operating theatre, I waited for what seemed like days. Then, finally, the chief surgeon emerged.

“How … how is he?” I asked.

“He’ll live,” said the surgeon, “but we weren’t able to save his other leg.”

“Oh, shit!” I said, standing in shock and almost falling. “When … when can I see him?”

“Not for at least a week or two. It’ll take that long for him to get over the worst of the trauma. Though he could be in the hospital for a year or longer.”

“A year …?” I said, realising as I started to speak that that could be an understatement considering the amount of injuries he had sustained.


It was nearly a month before I was allowed to visit Sergeant Waugh. When I finally walked into the private ward, carrying flowers and a big box of chocolates, not sure what else to bring him, I saw the sergeant sitting up in bed, holding onto the handrail of a lifting mechanism suspended above the bed.

He had the red mobile phone in his hands and was recording the last of his report about the time we had marched through the valley of the shadow of death, with an almost supernatural mutant monster leading us to our doom.

Doing my best not to wrinkle up my nose at the smell of antiseptic, blood, and faeces, I said, “How are you doing, Serg?” and immediately regretted my stupidity.

“Sorry … I,” I stammered.

The sergeant smiled an ironic smile and said, “Don’t worry, Rae, I’m doing a hell of a lot better than poor Murray Williams, Suzette, Deke, and the others.”

Not knowing what else to do, I held out the flowers toward him.

“Rae, you shouldn’t have,” he said, taking them.

“That’s okay,” I said lamely.

“No, really, you shouldn’t have,” he teased in a bid to cheer me up; “I would have preferred a half bottle of Bundaberg Rum. As a rule, men aren’t overly keen on receiving flowers.”

Dropping the candy onto the bed, where his legs should have been, I leant across to give him a long hug. Doing my best not to burst out into tears.

“Calm down, Rae,” he said, putting his arms around me. “At least I’m alive. That’s more than you can say for anyone from the abandoned town of Springfield.”

“Then they …?” I began, thinking of little Jacqui, Don, and the old man whose eighty-year-old daughter had been killed.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that,” apologised the Serg. “But yes … they did. So there were no survivors from Springfield in the end.”

Who were the real monster soldiers? I thought in anger at the brutal insensitivity of DARPA and the U.S. military.

“Oh, well,” he said, “at least I’ll never have to deal with a monster soldier again.”

We lay like that for half an hour. But hearing footsteps approaching from the corridor, I reluctantly straightened up again.

Just in time, as Doctor Jethro Samuelson, a DARPA special medical surgeon, entered the room.

“Sergeant! Private!” he said curtly, by way of greeting. “How are you getting along with your report, Sergeant Waugh?”

“Fine, fine, I should have it finished by tomorrow.”

“Good, DARPA are getting a little impatient, since they hope it may shed some light on how to deal with escaped monster soldiers in future.”

“You could always stop mutating troopers to turn them into amoral killing machines,” I said, ignoring the sergeant’s shaking head. “Then there would be no need to deal with escaped soldiers.”

“My dear girl,” said Doctor Samuelson patronisingly. “That is hardly a practical solution, considering the increasingly dirty and dangerous wars that the United States has been waging against the Arab world for over two hundred years now! Without monster soldiers, we would be at the mercy of terrorist nations.”

I was tempted to suggest that perhaps the United States was the biggest terrorist nation we had to worry about, when, perhaps sensing my intent, Sergeant Waugh cleared his throat noisily and asked:

“What about this particular monster soldier … LV11470?”

“You have a good memory, for military details, sergeant,” said Samuelson, sounding genuinely impressed. “He seems to have gone to ground at the moment. They sent in waves of choppers to bomb the remnants of Springfield and the surrounding countryside to oblivion. But found no monster soldier corpse in the rubble.”

“Then the Springfield survivors were murdered in vain!” I demanded.

“Liquidated,” corrected Doctor Samuelson. “Not at all, we will find and liquidate the monster soldier before he is identified as anything but a human terrorist.”

“Still, why did you have to murder the townsfolk when they thought it was a rogue gorilla?”

“Because,” he said, sighing in obvious contempt at my stupidity, “in time they would have realised that even rogue gorillas do not carry tonnes of weaponry around with them. And that even if they did, they would not know how to use them. A brilliant gorilla has an I.Q. of fifteen or less on the human scale. Even the monster soldiers have I.Q.s at least three times that level!”

“Well, why couldn’t they have been locked up?” I protested. “If necessary for the rest of their lives.”

“The United States Constitution does not allow for American citizens to be imprisoned without trial or legal representation for more than twenty-four days.”

“But it does allow DARPA to murder innocent Americans?”

“In rare cases when the interests of national security are at stake,” confirmed Jethro Samuelson. Looking at Sergeant Waugh, he said, “I think I’ll return later when you are alone.”

Then, before I could say anything more, the doctor turned and almost goose-stepped out into the corridor.

“Rae, you haven’t made any friends there,” said the Serg, laughing for perhaps the first time since he had awakened to discover that he had no legs.

“Ah, I’m not afraid of him,” I said, making the sergeant laugh again.

I stayed until nine PM when the nurses all but carried me out into the corridor, having been reminded by the Serg about the half bottle of Bundaberg next time instead of flowers.


Over the next ten days, I spent as much time as I could visiting Sergeant Waugh to cheer us both up. DARPA were already bugging me to return to active service.

On the Serg’s recommendation, I was being promoted to sergeant to replace him and would soon take command of my own squad of fifty-two troopers. I had been offered the role of sergeant of a troop of monster soldiers to replace Sergeant Lesley Phelps (at twice the pay of a sergeant of human troops). But understandably, I had declined.

Sergeant Waugh had been in hospital for nearly six weeks when I visited him for the last time. By that time, the sergeant had finished his report on our futile hunt for the monster soldier and had submitted it to DARPA. I had also finished my report, or so I thought, but I would soon have to update it.

The last time I visited Sergeant Waugh, I was in my civvies, enjoying a few days' rest in my parents’ house before starting my new posting.

“Ah, Rae, you almost look like a woman,” teased the sergeant as I came into the ward carrying a large box of chocolates and smuggling in a half bottle of Bundaberg Rum. Being careful not to let the nurses see it.

“I do my best,” I responded. Looking round to see that we were alone, I quickly slipped the Bundaberg to the Serg. Who equally quickly sneaked it into the bedside cabinet.

Patting the bed beside him, he said, “Sit down.”

Opening the box of chocolates, I held them out so he could take a couple. Then I took a couple, also.

“So what did your parents say about your promotion to sergeant?”

“Not much,” I said, struggling to talk around a mouthful of cherry ripe. “They were never very keen on me going into the army.”

“What did they want you to do?”

“Take up a traditional job such as a brain surgeon, beauty technician, or even a newsreader.”

“Oh ... I see,” said Sergeant Waugh.

“Of course, they assumed that as a soldier I’d be in the thick of battle. Unaware that we have monster soldiers to do the fighting for us these days.”

“That’s true,” he said, taking a couple more chocolates. “But you were in the thick of battle a month and a half back.”

“Yes, I was,” I agreed. “What about you? What did your parents think of you becoming a soldier?”

“Oh, I come from a long line of killers,” said the sergeant. “My father was a soldier, my grandfather on both sides, my great-grandparents all were, and so on back to the days of the ancient wars in the twentieth century. Waugh by name, war by nature.”

“So they were supportive?” I asked.

“No, they were terrified that I’d get killed. They wanted me to be a science-fiction cartoonist or something safe like that.”

I laughed, not sure if he was joking or not.

The sergeant reached into the drawer of the bedside cabinet to remove the half bottle of Bundaberg, broke the seal and handed the bottle to me.

After a moment’s hesitation, I took the bottle, swigged deeply and immediately started coughing as my throat seemed to burst into flames.

Grabbing the bottle before I could drop it, the sergeant said, “Easy, Rae, sip, don’t gulp.”

“Now you tell me,” I gasped out, struggling not to throw up.

Reaching over, he started patting me on the back until I recovered.

Then we continued sharing the chocolates with Sergeant Waugh, occasionally taking sips of the rum.

“Just for medicinal purposes,” he said, making me grin like a schoolgirl sharing a guilty secret.

Eventually, though, it was time to leave, so I leant across to hug the sergeant. Unaware as I did so that it would be the last time that I ever saw him.

“Well, I’d better be going,” I said as the alarm went off to signal that first visiting hours were over.

“I guess so,” agreed the Serg, though neither of us wanted me to leave. Holding up the Bundaberg, he said, “Thanks for this.”

“I’ll bring you another bottle tomorrow if you think you can get through that one in a day.”

“Trust me … I can,” said the sergeant, and we both laughed as I waved, then reluctantly turned and walked out into the corridor.

I headed down the sterile white corridor toward the elevators, receiving disapproving looks from pink-uniformed nurses, who I think suspected that I was smuggling alcohol into the Serg.

I hadn’t told Sergeant Waugh that, on being offered the promotion, I had asked about being discharged. But had been told by a DARPA colonel. “These days, we won’t grant honourable discharges without you proving severe medical grounds, until you have served your minimum of twenty years.”

Although my parents had not wanted me to be a soldier, I knew that they would be devastated if I were dishonourably discharged. So, I had reluctantly accepted the promotion instead.

Lost in my thoughts, I had taken the elevator to the ground floor and almost walked into the twin glass doors when I was recalled from my reverie by hysterical screaming coming from the lawn outside the hospital.

“What …?” I said, pushing the doors open to step outside.

Just in time to avoid being pushed back inside by the stampede of hysterical patients and visitors running into the imagined safety of the military hospital.

“What’s up?” I shouted.

“A gorilla’s out on the lawn!” shouted a tall brunette racing past me even as she spoke.

“A gorilla …?” I said, feeling the blood rush from my face.

Despite my inclination to spin around and race after the brunette, I forced myself to push through the rapidly thinning crowd to reach the concrete path outside.

As I had suspected, the monster soldier stood on the recently mown lawn, glaring up toward the sixth floor of the hospital.

Stepping a little out onto the lawn, I looked up and could clearly see Sergeant Waugh enjoying his last ever sip of Bundaberg Rum.

Still having not seen me, the monster soldier reached onto the clean-smelling lawn behind him to pick up a rocket launcher. He grabbed a small rocket beside it, slammed the rocket into the front of the rocket launcher and began to raise it.

“Nooooooooo!” I shrieked as he aimed the rocket launcher at the Serg and fired, all in one motion.

With the awful whooshing sound I had heard too many times already, the rocket zoomed to the sixth floor and exploded, raining deadly shrapnel, bricks, mortar, and body parts toward me again.

Staring up in disbelief at the blackened, burning hole in the side of the damaged hospital, where my friend and mentor had just died, I did not even bother to duck as the deadly chunks of broken building fell all around me.

“Nooooooooo!” I shrieked again, crying unashamedly.

Looking around and seeing me for the first time, the monster soldier’s eyes lit up as he recognised me as the last of the hunters that he had to kill. Grinning like an insane politician at election time, he reached behind him for a second rocket, rammed it into the rocket launcher and began aiming it in my direction.

In civvies, without even a sidearm, I was defenceless. Nonetheless, rather than submit to being killed, I reached into my handbag and desperately started hunting through my great collection of knick-knacks.

Just in time, I found what I was looking for.

Raising the black saucer-shaped object over my head, I lobbed the plastic object at the feet of the soldier.

Shrieking in terror, the soldier dropped the rocket launcher, spun round on his heels and raced off across the newly shorn grass, screeching in terror as he loped.

Reversing direction myself, I raced back into the hospital building, running up three flights of stairs, before stopping.

3.

REPORT BY DARPA CHIEF MEDICAL SPECIALIST JETHRO T. SAMUELSON

Having read the above two reports with a mixture of interest, scepticism, and outright contempt, I find myself wondering if Sergeant Otis P. Waugh and Sergeant Raelene Michelle Lawson should have been liquidated along with the folk from Springfield to help tidy up the soldier LV11470 matter.

They both seemed too highly motivated by old-fashioned concepts of right and wrong to be reliable DARPA troopers truly. Potentially letting them live presented us with the same danger as we would have faced if we had been foolish enough not to liquidate the Springfield massacre survivors!


Fortunately, I had been in another wing of the hospital during the rocket attack. Although it had felt as though we were going through an earthquake, our wing of the building did not collapse.

“Oh God!” cried a pink-clad nurse staring out the window.

“What …?” I asked, striding across to the window to look out. To my amazement, I saw the smoking ruin of G-Wing, which was slowly falling in upon itself.

“What is that?” demanded the nurse, looking down at the lawn.

Looking where she was pointing, I saw the ape-like figure of the rogue monster soldier.

In front of the soldier stood the figure of Sergeant Raelene Lawson. Dressed in civilian clothing, she had no weaponry and (I thought) no chance of surviving against the monster soldier.

Then, to my surprise, she reached into her purse and took out a black cylindrical object, which she threw at the soldier.

“What did she throw?” asked the nurse beside me.

Dropping the rocket launcher, the monster soldier raced off into the distance, allowing Sergeant Lawson to race back to the relative safety of the damaged hospital.

“Don’t ask me,” I said, taking a pair of mini-oculars from my lab coat. I focused on the black cylinder, which had fallen open to spill out eye shadow, rouge, and lip gloss. Lowering the binoculars, I said, “My God, she scared it off with her makeup kit.”

“What?” asked the nurse, staring wide-eyed at me.

“She threw her compact at it,” I explained, making the nurse look as astonished as I felt. “It was just a compact. But it saved her life!”

Having taken an instant dislike to Raelene Lawson, I now felt a grudging admiration for her. If only all troopers today had that kind of will to survive!


With alarms blaring like I had stepped into an episode of Star Trek, I was forced to put away this report for nearly a week.

Having returned to this report, though, I would like to recommend Sergeant Otis P. Waugh for a posthumous Purple Heart for valour under fire.

I also recommend that in future, all never-dying monster soldiers have a small device like a pacemaker inserted near their hearts. So that when they have to be liquidated, instead of the time-consuming process of poisoning them one at a time, they can be killed at the push of a button. Which would activate the ‘pacemaker’ to stop their hearts and kill them.

Then, in the advent of a soldier escaping. Instead of having to airlift in vast amounts of weaponry that would possibly be useless against the monster soldier anyway, the human troopers need only carry a remote device. As they hunt, they would press the liquidate button from time to time, and when they got within range, the pacemaker would kill the monster soldier without the troopers ever having to put themselves in any real danger.

Even monster soldiers, cunning as they may be, cannot perform open-heart surgery upon themselves to remove the pacemakers, even in the unlikely event that they somehow found out about the pacemakers.

I also recommend the termination of the program to slightly increase the I.Q. of soldiers so that they are no longer quite imbeciles. And I recommend the immediate liquidation of all second-generation ‘smart’ soldiers.

Regarding the latest attack by the monster soldier, I recommend that you continue to claim that an escaped gorilla did the attack, since this is what eyewitnesses are claiming.

I further recommend that these latest witnesses not be liquidated, since it would be too difficult to explain. If they start to change their stories, we can always use drug-assisted hypnosis to make them return to believing that it was a gorilla all along. Although some will die and others suffer permanent brain damage due to this procedure, we can explain that away as ‘trauma caused by the gorilla attack.’

Lastly, I advise DARPA that when this soldier is finally killed, we need only take a gorilla from a safari park, if necessary, burning the entire park and all of its animal and human occupants to the ground. Then we can dress the gorilla in a soldier costume, kill it, and present it to the news media as the ‘rogue gorilla’ that did all of the killings!

THE END
© Copyright 2025 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia