Going Feet First Ch. 01

Wincing with every move, he removed everything he had over his shoulders and undid the buttons of his uniform. Pulling the tunic down revealed a nasty gouge torn open by the glass. He bit down and tore open the medical package with his teeth, spitting away the excess and fumbled with a packet of white sulphonamide powder, dumping the whole of the contents into the wound.

When the packet was empty, Galen pulled the white bandage from the med kit and began winding it around his arm. It took two tries to get the proper pressure but he managed to put a knot in it the best he could and pull it tight. With his arm dressed, Galen buttoned up his uniform and lay back against his parachute pack while giving a long sigh.

I survived. I live to jump once more.

The thought passed through his head with a bit of a chuckle. He inspected his body for any other signs of wounds, which, to his comfort, were only a few scrapes and cuts so minor as to not even be worth worrying about. What he needed to do next was see if anyone else had survived, or if he was the only one. A dark cloud of horror came over the Private's head as he realized what task was ahead of him.

Galen swallowed hard on the new lump that developed in his throat. There was a nauseous wave through his stomach as he unsteadily rose to his feet. Pulling the straps of his pack over his shoulders, he turned and opened up the door to the cockpit behind him for any sign of life from the pilots. From the fact that the scene looked like a flak round had blown off half the face of the plane, and half the pilot's head for that matter, both him and his co-pilot likely bought it long before the crash.

The other bodies in the craft didn't fare much better. A bit of bile worked its way up Galen's throat at the sight of the jump master. All his strength went to barely containing his stomach as he saw the man had been cut in half by a propeller. One that probably came off one of the engines that was missing along with the right wing.

The four other paratroopers on the plane were riddled with bits of shrapnel, blood soaking through their uniforms and coating the floor of the craft. And at that point it became too much for Galen. Nausea finally got the better of him as he moved for the side of the plane, leaning out a hole and throwing up the last bits of the breakfast he had eaten that morning.

Retching out his guts knocked his vision out of whack and sent his mind further into a state of light-headedness. For several minutes he stared at the ground over the side of the Hercules, not particularity looking at anything, only spitting what remained in his mouth and waiting for his sickness to pass. It had to eventually.

When his vision finally returned, Galen stumbled toward the starboard door of the plane, his steps awkward with his equipment still attached to his front. The whole craft had tilted toward the intact wing on the left side, leaving him stuck with a six foot drop to the ground. It wasn't much higher than some of the practice drops in jump training, so the Private grabbed hold his gear and went for it.

Unfortunately for him in his dazed state, crash was the better word to use for his landing as he hit the ground. New pain pierced into his injured arm as it connected with the dirt after he failed to properly break his fall and he was sent into a wail. Tears escaped his eyes as he grasped onto his bicep with one hand and his knees with the other. He started trying to massage the pain away, rubbing soft circles before it partially faded and the senses returned to his head. Eventually, he managed to coax his wobbly legs into standing once again as he braced against the plane.

Taking that first step though brought about an unexpected jolt that yanked Galen back and dropped him to the ground. The flap of his parachute pack spilling open.

The static line, he mentally grumbled to himself.

He pulled off the pack and unhooked the wire from his parachute before shoving the whole mess aside. Free of the burden on his back he unhooked his rucksack from his front and started sorting out his gear. Getting his combat webbing straightened out, attaching grenades to his shoulder straps, double checking his pockets to ensure nothing had fallen out.

When his equipment was squared away and he took in his surroundings, the first sight that greeted him to the jungle was the corpse of another paratrooper ten feet from the plane. The sight of that body finally shut Galen down. He tried to move, to look away, but his eyes remained locked on it. Like something wouldn't let him pull away from the sight.

Yeah, so am I. Just keep your head down and your rifle ready. We'll be back at base before you know it.

The words hung in Galen's mind, fresh from not even half an hour before. They had come from the mouth of the very trooper that now lay before him, his gut impaled by a long strip of aluminum off the body of the plane. The surviving trooper got up off the ground and walked over to the man's side. A terrible tremble took over his left hand as he knelt down and pressed two fingers to the neck of his comrade. His eyes closed as he prayed for a pulse. But all that he could feel in that touch was stillness. No breath, no pulse, no life.

I'm the only one left, he thought, opening his eyes. The only survivor.

The realization sent a dark chill down Galen's spine as he turned back toward the crash. The wrecked plane was torn to shreds; entire sections of the body had been torn away or peeled back like a banana. What hit him even harder was the reality of his entire situation, the harsh truth that plunged into his stomach like a drop of cold steel.

He was alone, in hostile territory, probably being hunted at this very moment. In minutes, Charlies could swarm in around him, and then his next stop would be either getting himself shot to bits, or getting a one-way ticket to the luxurious Hanoi Hilton. An option that he would much rather shoot himself than accept.

What he really needed at the moment was to regroup with the rest of the company, only he didn't know exactly how far away his plane had carried him away from them. His only clue being that he was far enough that he couldn't even hear the flak guns go off. Galen looked back at the long scar of mutilated trees slicing through the green foliage down the hillside. Somewhere in that direction, very far in that direction, would be the city they were jumping into to help push back the North Vietnamese. There, the rest of his company would be fighting waves of Viet Cong while waiting for air and tank support.

Where are the aircraft? he wondered, staring at the vast, empty, blue sky.

If his plane had crashed, shouldn't a couple of 'Huey' helicopters come roaring over the hilltop? A squad of soldiers or marines roping in to check for survivors and extract the wounded? Where were the Soviet-made jets that were supposedly patrolling the area?

Galen scratched the back of his head underneath his helmet and looked down to the body lying beside him. Corporal Isle's eyes still stared into the horizon as it were his last beacon of hope of surviving this Hell. Galen knelt down beside his comrade and rolled him over onto his back. Swallowing hard, he ran a hand over his face and shut his eye lids before removing one of his dog tags.

It took several sickening tugs, but Galen pulled the aluminum spike from the corporal's gut and retrieved the dead man's chute from his pack. If he was going to do the man one honor, it was going to be a proper burial before any enemy troops came through and defiled his corpse. And doing so would burn time before rescue arrived. Besides, if the MiGs weren't buzzing around, it probably meant the NVA were too busy with trying to hold back the tide of US troops in the city to bother with one downed plane.

After carefully wrapping Isles' body up in the parachute, the private pulled out his entrenchment tool and began to dig. The soil was soft and the shovel easily sunk into the earth because so much of it had been disturbed by the aircraft when it crashed. It made Galen's self-appointed task easier and kept his mind off the situation around him.

He plunged the shovel deep into the soil and began pulling large scoops out at a time. In the time it took for the sun to cross the sky, he managed to dig eight holes.

..............................

Curious, leaf-green eyes of a shadowed creature sat in a tree above the wrecked metal monster. The entire time that the human in the odd clothes had spent digging into the earth, the eyes never once pulled their gaze away from him. They continued to watch as he climbed back up into the belly of the beast, pulling six and two half-bodies out from inside to group them with the man who had died outside the beast. From there he started removing necklaces from them along with several other strange items. Finally, he wrapped the dead in wide, green sheets he pulled from their packs.

The human then placed the bodies in the holes he had dug and continued to say a few words, giving them their "last rites" as their priests called it. When his friends were cast to the ground, he lashed together several crosses from the skin of the metal beast to mark the graves. What the watching creature found unique was how the human proceeded to hang the necklaces off of the crosses and say a few more words.

But why are the crosses fashioned from the metal-skinned beast? the creature wondered. Is he honoring their deaths with the skin of a slain foe? Very curious.

The beast itself held no lack of interest for the watcher, either. It was no dragon, for those legendary monsters did not have square scales or glass faces. Their wings did not fall off when they crashed and they certainly did not have hollow bellies that one could pass in and out of like some cave. This beast, if it was even a beast at all, was foreign to this land. Alien to this world even. By whatever means the human and his comrades had slain it must have proven more effective than he could've known if his friends were lost along with it in its demise.

When the human climbed back into the metal beast, the watching creature went on the move. It scaled down its tree and prowled along the forest floor, crawling across the open clearing and over to the crosses the human fashioned.

In its own language it mumbled to itself as it inspected what it found to be curious designs. It checked the knots that tied the pieces together and tried to find of what exactly this beast was made. The metal was not one with which it was familiar with. Despite its initial appearance to be of silver, this guess proved false as the material had more strength and less shine. One could not accurately gauge its weight either without pulling the cross and alerting the human to its presence.

Further investigation revealed the necklaces to apparently be the same metal, and they proved feather-light. Far lighter than a bit of steel or iron of the same size. Adding further to the already overflowing mystery of this human, there were a series of characters stamped into the surface of the necklace disks that the creature had never seen before.

Wherever this human had come from, it must have been pretty far to have a written scripture that it did not recognize. Suddenly its ears perked up as something rattled within the belly of the giant metal beast, and in a split-second, it darted off from the graves back to the shadows of the trees. From there, it scaled back up to its perch on a high branch and watched.

When the human came back out from the beast, he began collecting the items pulled from the bodies and taking them back inside.

.......................

Galen gathered what supplies he could and stuffed them into a couple M60 and M14 transport crates that had been aboard the aircraft. Weapons, ammo, food, water, equipment, medical supplies, anything he could scrounge was rounded up. He even broke open the plane's weapons locker and added what he found to his growing stash of supplies.

After he sorted through the weapons that hadn't been destroyed in the crash, he was left with one M60 machine gun, two M14 rifles, one of which was scoped, six colt M1911 pistols, several broken M16 rifles, and one Ithaca 37 shotgun. Enough parts were left over from the mangled weapons that he could maintain what he had and assemble an extra rifle or two, but even in this state, Galen still had enough weapons for a squad and enough ammo for an entire platoon. He could easily hold out until evac arrived; only now he was getting worried that they wouldn't come. He needed to get to a vantage point and get a lay of the land.

Galen stocked up on whatever ammo he could for his battle rifle and sidearm and he packed two extra canteens of water before shutting the rest of the supplies in the crates. He took the time to set up a claymore next to the stash, hiding it underneath several bits of metal and hooking its trip wire up to each lid of the crates.

Unless they could read English, there would be nothing left of anyone attempting to raid the stash after the claymore was done with them. Just to be safe, he had carved the words "Protected by claymore" into the front of the crates in several places as visibly as he could. Just in case any American troops did come he didn't want them to fall victim to his trap.

Loaded with his gear, Galen hopped out of the C-130 and began marching along the scar toward the top of the hill. The crest wasn't far; a couple hundred yards, or a mile at most. Any wild life that may have been nearby would've been scared off by the crashing plane, which made his only enemy the sun.

The flaming orb in the sky was beginning to turn red as it neared the earth. Galen thought for a moment as he counted how many finger widths high it was above the horizon, and he guessed that there were roughly two hours of daylight left before the night would consume the land.

The last place he wanted to be was near a wrecked aircraft while the NVA could come poking around for any survivors. If he was lucky, he might run into someone else from the company. Or if he got to the top of the hill and managed to find himself a good vantage point, he could perhaps find out exactly where the Hell he was.

.............................

The creature leaped down from its tree after the human left. It landed on all fours as it hit the ground, yet it came to stand up on two legs. It stepped out from the shadows and into the light, giving a feline purr as the setting sun cast its warm glow down upon her.

A pair of black, leather shorts hugged over her ample hips, barely coming over her cheeks on her well-toned thighs. Between her legs descended a long tail that flicked casually at her calves. The soft, thin coat of fur that covered her body was a light brown, with a series of darker brown stripes running across her arms. Her head sported a long, elegant flow of a dark, reddish-brown hair that reached halfway down her back with some of its coils descending over her chest. Holding her moderate bust in place were wide, cloth strips of fabric that crossed over each other between her breasts before sweeping up over her shoulders.

While somewhat human in nature, her hands sported thin silts in her fingers for her full set of retractable claws. Her feet, however, purely matched the physiology of a cat, with paws extending up into swept-back feet that bent forward at the ankle into curved calves joined to more "normal" knees and thighs. Atop her head stood two feline ears that twitched and turned with the sounds of nature around her while her leaf-green eyes remained curiously fixed upon the human ahead of her.

While he didn't notice her presence, she was trying to figure out why he was walking away from the metal beast he had slain without so much as a trophy to claim.

Curious, she mouthed the words, very curious.

With a bit of a smile across her face, she tapped a finger on her chin while silently thinking to herself. There were several options for her to contemplate in how she would interact with this human. The biggest question was how should she approach him?

Turning to the metal monster that had fallen from the sky beside her, she thought, All in due time.

Now was her chance to take a closer look inside now that he was gone.

Leaping gracefully up through the entry way he had used, she crouched on her haunches and scanned the cabin around her. At once, she was taken back and fascinated all at once with its internals. She saw now that this monster was not only armored on the outside, but on its inside as well. Many thick, black veins ran along its skin, some of which were leaking oily, thick, purple blood over the walls.

In the head of the beast, a hole had sundered half of its glass eyes from their sockets and sprayed blood all over the floor. However, what the feline woman found odd was the boards of metal within this monster's head that were painted with the characters of this human's language. In fact, all over the inside of the creature were signs and scribblings with their scripture. This ultimately brought her back to the question, Is this truly a beast at all?

She turned for the exit, leaping down onto the grass and diving into a low crawl to trail after the human. It didn't take long for her to catch up as he wasn't moving at a hurried pace. But once she shadowed him again, she didn't dare move ahead of him or attempt to close too much distance between them as he trampled noisily through the scar. She made sure he stayed a fair ways ahead, and that she stayed hidden within the shadow's embrace.

Unlike this human, who walked carefree in the center of the of this fresh destruction, any creature with any sense of self-preservation would keep to where the forest was still whole. They would use the bush as cover and the shadows to hide from hungry eyes. Then again, this human was different from the others. He reeked of fear, yet oozed with strength. He carried himself like a warrior, though he had no blade. And then there was how he kept himself in the open as though he were taunting a predator to strike.

Everything she observed about this young man intrigued her so much. She only hoped he knew which direction he was going, or knew what signs to watch for before he wandered into territory that he didn't want to be in.

................................

Galen marched down the center of the scar with his eyes constantly scanning the area around him. Every few seconds, he found himself prodding at the safety of his rifle, or flipping the weapon from full auto to semi and back again. But not once did he set it to safe. If anybody decided to open fire on him, he wanted to make damn sure that he didn't go down without a fight.

Even with this resolve, a shaky hand came off the front of his rifle to itch his nose, instantly snapping back to its place as something rustled in a bush to his right. The private nearly jumped clean from his skin as he brought his rifle to bear, watching as a pair of birds hopped from the bush and took flight.

He uneasily wiped the sweat from his forehead and chuckled silently to himself as he stared up toward the sky and mutilated remains of the tree tops. Even though the C130 had done a good job at trimming them, most of the trees around him still stood a good ten or fifteen feet tall. Had their tops not been ripped off, they may have been closer to twenty or thirty.

Regardless, the height of these trees didn't concern him so long as their trunks could still provide cover. It was one small detail that gave him a sense of comfort because with every step he took, he felt like hitting the dirt. His gut told him that something was watching him, something more than a bug or a jungle rat. What he didn't know was if he was being drawn in on the sights of an AK-47, or simply being eyed by a local. Either way, something or someone was keeping tabs on him, and he didn't like it one bit.