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Inside Iowa

Sergeant Harkson had been yelling, “Fall back! Fall back!”, as a beam of blue energy had cut him neatly in half. His torso slid off his legs dropping onto the dirt of the battlefield. That's the wonderful thing about being a part of the infantry; one never really knows what they are getting into most of the time until it's too late. As a kid, I used to dream of growing up to be a soldier, too bad I got my wish. I learned the hard way that war is not a game of honor, glory, and how many of the enemy you take out before they finally get you. It's a living nightmare that haunts you even after it's over. This is not the first war I have been in, but I think it will be my last.

The sound of automatic rifles chattering all around was the only dampened by the occasional crackle of the enemies' energy beams as they returned fire. I lay with my back towards the enemy advance inside a half natural, half hurriedly dug, fox hole. The air stank of smoke and burnt flesh. Private first class Regina Watson lay beside me in the hole, all except for her head. I imagined it rolling around out there on the field somewhere as I stared at the crisp, blackened flesh at the top of her neck where blood was trying to ooze through the grizzle.

I reached into the pocket of my uniform and produced a cigarette. I lit up listening to the screams. I figured we were all dead anyway. My division had been the best of the best, the elite heavy hitters of the new world state army, but today we were getting our asses handed to us big-time.

Before we had been sent out here to Iowa , two squads of tanks and four other infantry divisions had led the way before us. Pretty much the same thing happened to them. Only about a hundred of the poor bastards had made it back out alive and the tanks had been lost completely. Air strikes were out of the question as Iowa 's new guests had instantly set up a kind of energy field in the air over the country they occupied the moment they arrived. It glowed a strange green, blocking out the light of the sun and the stars alike and was undentable by anything tried against it so far. A ground assault was the only way to clear the buggers out or so the big wigs in the new world Gov. thought. They hadn't even considered using nukes yet, but from what I had heard as my division rolled into Iowa , that day was not far off. Of course the only thing that mattered to me now was getting the hell out of here alive.

An enemy skimmer blazed over me, roaring through the air. It was a tiny one man craft that flew near the ground at high speeds and was equipped with an even deadly version of the Zenax's hand, energy weapons like the one that had finished off Harkson just a few moments earlier. No one had ever managed to capture one of the skimmers but the think tank boys guessed the things were powered by a small fusion reactor tucked away in its underbelly.

Just about the only two things our world had going for it were that this first wave of Zenax, to actually make through the Earth's defensive field in orbit, was without an armor division of their own and too small to launch any kind of offensive outside of Iowa. Well, those two things and the fact that purple skinned buggers bled just like a man and died if you shot them.

The screams were more distance and less frequent now and the gunfire confined to somewhere south of my position. I had no idea if the Zenax forces had already over ran where I was or if I crawled up and peeked out I would be staring into a pair of solid white eyes. You see, the Zenax don't have pupils or irises, just white slits where their eyes should have been.

I ground out my cigarette in the dirt and rolled over onto my stomach, edging my way up the short distance to the mouth of the hole I was in and peered out. There were bodies everywhere, mostly humans. I could see maybe one dead or dying Zenax to about every twenty or so human bodies that I saw. There were no live or active troops from either side running around on my part of the field. The battle had indeed carried itself south as my division or what was left of it high-tailed it for the southern Iowa border.

I slumped back down into the hole trying to decide to just what in the hell I was going to do now. That choice was made for me however as I saw her. She lay about twenty feet to the right of my fox hole and one of her legs had been sliced off at the knee. There was no doubt that she was alive though. Her uniform and short, chopped blonde hair was soiled with her own blood and mud. Her body was twitching as if it were in some kind of state of shock. Hell, I guess if I had just lost a leg, I would be in shock too. Her helmet was gone which meant trying to call out to her over the comm. link the division shared was pointless. Besides, I didn't think I wanted to cut on the one in my own helmet anyway, I had heard enough screaming already for one day.

Taking another look around to make sure the field was still clear in my general area, I hopped up out of my hole and ran to her. I wasn't a medic but I knew she was in bad shape. My only hope to save her was to get her to one as quickly as I could. I scooped her up in my arms, juggling around my rifle so that I could still at least fire it from underneath where her body was cradled in my arms, I set out at a dead run towards the south. I figured the division had only been able to press about a mile or two inside Iowa before the shit had hit the fan so to speak, so I didn't have that far to carry her if luck was with me. Too bad luck's a bitch, eh?

I heard it before I saw it. It's little fusion engine howling full-stream as it came rowing back from the battle in the south towards me. A lance of blue energy struck the ground in front of us and sent us flying in separate directions from the force of the blast as dirt and rock sprayed up all around us. I hit the ground rolling with the blast and came up with my rifle ready. It shook in my hands as it chattered and bullets pinged off the skimmer's metal body and tore the exposed back of it's driver to shreds. A high pitched hiss cut the air as the skimmer swerved off to the left and slammed into the ground not far away. It didn't explode or anything so grand. It merely mangled it's front section and the driver's purple corpse rolled off it with a soft, wet thud.

I whirled around to check on the blonde private but she was dead. Tiny flecks of gravel spotted her face with fresh patches of blood and her eyes were rolled up inside her head. It was the one large, nearly molten slab of edged rock that protruded from her neck that got to me though. I fell to my knees right then and there and threw up onto the field.

As I stood up, wiping my mouth, I could see the Zenax forces advancing towards me as they returned victoriously from the south, nearly a hundred of them, marching proudly. Apparently they saw me as well. Several small groups of them broke off from the main body of the force, running at me, hissing in their odd language, which I had no hope of understanding.

Inwardly, I nodded, accepting the hand fate had dealt me. I said a quick prayer for the dead, the Earth, and those yet to die before I hurled myself towards them. I ran to meet them with my rifle blazing on full-auto as the first beams of blue energy crackled and sliced towards me.