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Private Johnson and Colonel Harris step out of their cyan-striped BSF pickup. Sand and dust pelts them, with the intense sandstorm from Bukharam having moved into the Firelands.
Johnson slams the passenger seat door behind him, the sound almost muted by the bombardment of sand against the truck.
“Damn shame what happened in South Eindhoven. This is why I think we shouldn’t just hand out assault rifles to citizens”
“Yeah, I guess”
They trudge along, the asphalt road ending under their feet, blending into a brown, dry wasteland.
Waves of dust sweep over the road in a flood of brown.
“Wind speed, Johnson?”
“75 miles per hour, sir”
Harris shines his lamp into the murkiness of the sandstorm. Visibility begins to lower. 50 feet. 30 feet. 10 feet.
“W-what are we doing here anyways?”
Johnson’s voice sounds like it has reverberated a thousand miles and back.
“It’s just a routine patrol mission. Trust me kid, you’ll get used to it.”
“I d-don’t think we’ll find any drug traffickers out here, colonel…”
The pickup truck creaks and sways in the distance. They don’t know where they’re going, but the Colonel seems confident.
“There!”
A large silhouette sways in the distance.
“It’s probably a crate of illegal shit,” shouts the Colonel, “go check it out!”
The private swings his rifle into his hands and disappears into the thickening brown dust.
The Colonel pulls out his watch. “6:13 PM,” he mutters, “we’ll be back in five minutes.” Impatient, he grabs his walkie-talkie and thrusts it to his mouth.
“Johnson, what do you see?”
Silence.
“Johnson…?”
The wind howls. The pickup rattles in the distance.
The familiar sound of the private’s handheld transceiver beeps. It only sounds a few feet away. The little red light on the transceiver lights up the brown fog like a buoy in a storm. The Colonel shuffles towards it.
The corpse didn’t even look human at this point. Burnt, black, shattered bone fragments covered the area for a few hundred yards. A pair of shiny white teeth against a black, charred jaw piece tumble through the wind and get caught in the Colonel’s gear pouch. Johnson’s durable, carbon-fibre Mark 5 Standard Issue rifle is shattered like a fallen vase. Impossible, thought Harris. No way in hell a carbon-fibre rifle can shatter like that.
A cold wave flows through the Colonel’s body. He runs towards the pickup, fighting against the wind.
The pickup is nowhere to be seen.
Colonel Harris whips out his compass, the needle spinning violently.
He feels as if he is falling a thousand times over, clawing at the dark air like a drowning swimmer. The Colonel’s arm reaches out in the murky air, touching something cold.
His heart falls down into his chest as his eyes converge on what his hand has discovered.
It’s just the truck. The cold, rattling, metal pickup.
He instinctively jumps into the driver's seat, slamming his foot on the accelerator for the love of all that is holy, in his mind praying to god, to any gods, hoping to be heard.
The wind and dust batters the pickup from side to side, the anemometer reading “WIND SPEED 103 MPH.”
The Colonel spots the familiar red fencing in the distance, and the silhouettes of some guards, but it feels as if something will reach his destination before him.
The pickup screeches as the blowout strips force the rubber off of it’s wheels, the vehicle spinning to a halt in a trench a few yards past the border checkpoint.
A group of guards crowd the BSF pickup, opening the cabin to find the driver, Colonel Harris, screaming for his life.
His scream is unending, heard for a million miles, shrieking, shrieking into the endless abyss.
The guards rush him to a medical triage, their ears tortured by the most horrific scream to ever come out of a man.
BONITANA SECURITY FORCES
CASUALTY REPORT
FATALITIES - 2 (COLONEL HARRIS, PRIVATE JOHNSON)
BOTH MEN SENT ON ROUTINE PATROL MISSION SOUTH OF EINDHOVEN. PRIVATE JOHNSON NOT RETURNED TO THE BORDER POST FOR 6 DAYS; PRESUMED DEAD AFTER BONE FRAGMENTS MATCHING HIS IDENTIFICATION WERE RECOVERED. COLONEL HARRIS DEAD AFTER SEVERE HEART ATTACK AND STROKE PRECEDED BY SCREAMING AND INTENSE SENSE OF TERROR. CRASHED INTO DITCH AT EINDHOVEN BORDER POST, DIED AT 7:38 LORIKEET MEDICAL CENTRE.
DATE 11/8/2018 CLASSIFIED