SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

Spencer looked up, his narrow face white as bone under his brown crewcut. “I got a little boy at home, Sarge. He’s gonna be two next month. I’m due home in time for his birthday. I missed his first.”

Coulthard patted Spencer’s shoulder. “We’ll get out and get you on a transport home just when you’re supposed to be.”

“We won’t, Sarge. None of us are getting out.” He pointed at the spires and tower filling the cavern. “What the fuck even is that, Sarge? We’re gonna die here.” He sounded perfectly calm about it.

“We’re getting out,” Coulthard said firmly.

“My wife always worried I’d come home with no legs from an IED. ‘You won’t get killed,’ she said one night when we’d been drinking. ‘I can feel that.’ She was always what she called spiritual. Thought she was fucking psychic, you know? But it was harmless. ‘You won’t get killed,’ she said, ‘but I have a terrible feeling you’re going to be maimed by a mine.’ Great fucking prophecy, eh, Sarge? For all her spirituality, she certainly didn’t foresee this shit!”

Coulthard laughed. “I don’t think anyone foresaw this shit.”

“I was supposed to go home in two weeks, Sarge.” Spencer’s eyes brimmed with tears.

Brown gaped as Coulthard did something he would never have anticipated. The sergeant gathered Spencer into a tight hug and held the man against his chest.

“Let it out, solider,” Coulthard said, and Spencer sobbed.

Brown stood uncomfortably off to one side for a good minute while Spencer bawled. The medic wondered why he felt so calm, so cold inside, and realised he had his terror, his panic, locked up in his chest. His true self and all the emotions it harboured was in a sealed box inside him and at some point he would have to unlock that box. It frightened him to think what might happen when he did, but for now, it stopped him falling to pieces. Did that make him a better soldier than Spencer? A worse human being? For all the atrocities he’d seen, all the wounds and trauma he’d become accustomed to, surely this day’s experiences should break him. He had no wife or kids like Spencer to yearn for. But the sergeant did and he was holding it together too. Maybe Spencer had just lost control of his locked box for now.

Coulthard pushed the man away. “Right. Now on your feet, son. Feel better.”

“Sorry, Sarge, I just…”

“Fuck sorry, Spencer, it’s all done. You ready to move out?”

“Yes, Sarge.” Spencer’s voice still quavered, but there was some confidence back in it.

“Brown?”

The medic nodded, shook himself. “Yes, Sarge.” At least, he thought, as ready as I possibly can be.

Coulthard sniffed and settled his pack. “Well, I am certainly not going back the way we came. That thing in the tunnel, whatever it is, seems to want to stay there, so we’ll leave it well alone. There must be another way out. Nothing that size,” he pointed at the monumental structure filling the cave, “can possibly only have one tiny tunnel leading in. Let’s go.”

“Sarge,” Brown said, finally ready to give voice to a nagging worry that had tickled his hindbrain since they had emerged onto the rocky ledge.

“What?”

“The thing in the tunnel hasn’t followed us out. Maybe you’re right and it’s too bright in here.”

“Yeah. And?”

“Well, if it’s meant to guard this place, but hasn’t followed us out, that must mean something.”

The Sergeant narrowed his eyes. “Like maybe there’s something else in here to do the same job and that thing only worries about its tunnel?”

“Something like that.”

“You have a point. Better keep your weapon ready. Let’s go.”

They moved along the ledge, heading for the giant stairway the insurgents had used. Brown whistled softly as they came abreast of a massive bronze plate pressed into the wall, ten metres high and five wide, inscribed with strange cursive symbols and patterns that made him dizzy to look upon. His eyes kept sliding away as he tried to make sense of them and nausea began to stir his guts.

“Over there,” Spencer said. “And there.”

They followed his pointing finger and saw other plaques on other ledges dotted around the cave. Small tunnel openings here and there accompanied them just like the one they had entered through.

“Any of those tunnels could have a fucking monster like the one that attacked us,” Brown said.

“We have to assume each one does,” Coulthard said. “We have to keep looking for something else. Move on.”

Another twenty metres along their ledge gave them a vantage point past the monumental structure and they all saw it at once. On the far side of the vast cave, at the top of another giant staircase that went even higher than where they currently stood, a huge tunnel mouth yawned.

“That must be fifty metres wide,” Coulthard said. “We have a fighting chance in a space like that.”

“Probably where the insurgents were heading too,” Brown said. “Means going through that structure though.”

“Or around it on ground level.”

A scream ripped through the air. High pitched and horrified, it was the voice of a man staring into hideous death and it cut suddenly short.