Madness.

Is he naturally sane, or experiencing the unnaturally real?

  Am I going insane? Have I lost my mind?
  These thoughts twist and turn in my head again as I stand over my enemy. He had come around a corner, his weapon raised and his finger on the trigger. On sheer instinct, I reacted by pulling the trigger on my own weapon. His shots went wild, my dove into their mark. He was dead and I still stood.
  Now, as my team calls out the all-clear, I stand over him shaking now. Not because I fear death, or have never taken a life before, these things are old news to me. I shake because I instantly recalled back to a time where I was in his place.

  The twin bullets hitting me like a baseball, no pain but force. The feeling of the pieces of metal swimming through my body before exiting through a new hole behind me. My legs giving out as they lose the strength to support me, my body tumbling onto the ground as the air escapes my lunges. Darkness enveloping me.
  All the sensations come rushing back to me. I had woken up with a yell inside the belly of a helicopter, my team medic holding me down. They had told me that I was a stiff when I was brought aboard.
  They told me I died. Then I came back.
  It took me weeks to heal up, being confined to that bed in medical made me feel like prisoner. It almost wouldn't have been that bad, except that was when I first saw her.
  A woman dressed in a gray uniform with no visible markings. Her hair was crimson red, her eyes almost a radiant, almost metallic silver. Her gaze was fixed on me, sometimes shifting to another wounded man or a doctor if they made enough attention, but her focus never left me.
  What had concerned me the most about her, however, was how no one else seemed to notice her standing over my bed. I had also never seen her come into medical, further making the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.
  "Many have come and gone during your war...but you aren't one of them. Not yet." she said. The way she spoke, the tone she used and the words she employed only solidified the feeling that there was something 'wrong' about her.
  I blinked, and she was gone. Not walking out of the room, not checking on someone else, just plain gone. My mind raced, my heartbeat climbed, which only drew the attention of the medical staff. I tried to brushed it off, saying that nothing was wrong all the while telling myself I had only imagined what I saw.

  During the weeks in Post-Op, the woman never returned. It was a relief for me, the last thing I needed was to be seeing a non-existent person when surrounded by medical professionals.
  When I was declared fit for duty again, however, things changed. As me and my team were returning from another mission, all of us sitting in the bay of another helicopter, I saw her again. She was sitting directly across from me, and no one else in the bay seemed to notice her.
  My mind reeled, my heart pounded, and my already sweating brow went into overdrive. Despite my every instinct, I held my tongue and my rifle, not daring to acknowledge the woman in gray. I wanted to shout, I wanted to demand answers, but I dared not open my mouth to her in front of my fellows.
  Again, she just watched. Never saying anything, despite her gaze being affixed to me. Occasionally she examined my team members, looking them up and down, though none of them even seemed to acknowledge.
  She returned her gaze to me, then left her seat as she moved closer to me. When she was close enough, she whispered three words in my ear. "You will endure." she said. I blinked, and she was gone.
  No sooner had she disappeared had the bay warning alarms went off. "Incoming! Going evasive!" One of the pilots yelled over the radio. I grabbed one of the handholds in the bay as the helicopter twisted and dipped, trying to evade a projectile that I couldn't see.
  With a sudden slam, I knew that the missile struck us in the rear rotor. A couple pieces of debris blew past the windows as our ride began to spin. The force of the spin sent a number of our team tumbling throughout the bay, and put my entire body weight into the single handle I held on to.
  With a forceful slam and lurch, the wounded helicopter struck the ground and came to a groaning stop. Any thoughts I had of the woman in gray were gone, replaced by the realization we were under fire. Our enemy was firing at any openings in the craft, or going for the windows if there was nothing else. Those of us that weren't injured picked ourselves up, grabbed our rifles, and set to work.

  After an hour of fighting, we were finally back on the ground at base. A couple members of my squad were gone, many more injured. Most of us all had our minds on the previous fight, wondering what we might have done better to have improved our odds. My mind, however, was on the woman. Her eyes, the way they seemed to radiate, sent chills down my spine. Then there was what she said before the missile struck...
  I finally managed to separate myself from anyone else, getting some time to myself. Almost on queue, the woman reappeared alongside me in the barracks. "I think it's time we had a proper conversation. No one is around to overhear us." she said.
  I shook my head, placing my hands to my temples. "You aren't real. No one can simply vanish and reappear like that. You're something from my own damn imagination." I told her, my tone making it obvious that I was anxious.
  She smirked, "I fail to see how that explanation could give you any comfort, for it implies you are losing your own sanity."
  "If that's not it, then what the hell are you? What do you want with me?" I demanded.
  "What am I? I suppose you could say I am your...'guide'. Someone to make sure that you don't leave this world too soon, while keeping you on a certain path. What I want is also exactly that." she explained, sitting down on one of the empty bunks nearest to me.
  "Is that so? Well I am calling bullshit. Sorry, but you're still nothing more than a figment of my own mind. Even if you were real, why me? What would be so special about my a*s that I'd need some 'guide'?" I countered. No outcome of this conversation would bode well for me, I knew.
  I'm sitting here arguing with a figment of my own insanity, what does that really say about me?
  "Simple. At the time you were shot, your team was pursuing what your men would call a...'high value target'. This one, in particular, is meant to meet his end. As for why I would come to you, also simple. You died, but you came back. Part of you is in this world, while a fragment of you is in the next. It is that connection that lets you see me." she explained.
  I rubbed my hands over my face, closing my eyes. Inwardly, I hoped that this was just one messed up dream, some nightmare I would wake up from. When I opened my eyes again, however, I was still sitting on my bunk, though the woman was gone.
  That's it...I'm losing it. There is no way this can be real. The only guys you ever hear saying s**t like this wind up in padded cells.
  I waited a couple minutes before I got up and headed off to the showers. I kept telling myself over and over that it was just some messed up day-dream. As it was, I had only 'seen' this woman, never obscuring or even being detrimental to anything else. On that count, and that count only, I steered clear of a counselors office.

  As the months had dragged on, and the missions came and went, I had seen more of the woman. Each time, I tried to tell myself I was imagining things, that she wasn't real. I also told myself that it was just something I ate, because I felt fully in control over myself, her presence never being a detriment to our missions. She had only ever offered encouragement, affirmation that we would get the HVT we were in pursuit of.
  Finally, after a couple months, she was right. We received word from an intelligence operative that our target was located in an abandoned industrial complex. The entire way to the mission location, she never left my side. Even as we began storming the building, she was always out of the way, never obstructing us or our goal. In a strange way, I felt a sense of comfort with her around this time. It felt like we were reaching the end of some unseen chapter.
  By the time we approached the main offices, we had silently eliminated a small number of guards. As I approached the T-junction that led into the offices, the dim lighting was proving hard to work with for finding targets.
  "Enemy to your left." the woman said. I looked as she suggested, and there was a hostile charging at me with the butt of his rifle. I stepped around the blow, grabbed my combat knife, and drove it into his neck. As I pulled the blade free from the now motionless body, I reflected back as to the fact that if she had not alerted me, he might have connected with his strike, and things could have been much different.
  "You okay?" my team member asked me.
  I gave him the thumbs up as we stacked up outside the doorway into the office. With one smooth motion, one man kicked the door open, I rolled a frag grenade inside, waited a few seconds for the detonation, and then we all moved in.
  Five hostiles were inside the room, two of them taken down by the frag, the other taken down as we swept into and cleared the room. Of our target, there was no trace. A side-office in the room, however, showed some promise. I kicked the door open, and was face to face with our target as he came around the door frame, his rifle raised. His shots went wild, where as mine found their mark as he fell down to the ground, a few fresh holes in him.
  "Target down, I repeat target is down." I said into the comms, letting the rest of the men come into the verify the target. I stood there shaking for a moment, remembering when I had been the man who had the rounds go through my own body. It felt so long ago now.
  "That target is done and over with." The woman said, appearing next to me as we stood back and let the squad take over examination and verification of the body. "More targets will come, however. Are you ready?" she asked.
  I was silent. I had thought for so long that she had been a figment of my own broken psych, but the way everything had gone had begun to raise doubts in my mind. If what she had told me was true, about what she was and why she was hear, then the sense of fulfillment that I had seemed even more pronounced.
  I nodded silently, out of sight of the rest of the men. Maybe I was right before, maybe I was insane and she wasn't real. Maybe she was right, maybe she was indeed some kind of 'guide'. With the satisfaction of achieving this mission, however, and perhaps the prospect that she was right, I wasn't sure I cared anymore.

Author's Note

I wanted to write up something outside of both poetry, and my book. Kind of wanted a stand-alone thing, I guess. Overall, I am rather satisfied with it, considering I also never usually write short-stories.

I do want to make something rather clear, since I think there might have been some confusion in some of my previous work. What all I write is entirely fiction, and in no way am I a member of the Armed Services. Everything I write that is meant to showcase the emotions and other aspects of these events are fictitious, based only off of second-hand accounts. I just wanted to make that clear, so there was no misunderstanding.

Reviews

[Sarah J. Mendonca]

In most cases having a flash back in the middle of an action scene takes away from the piece. But this is the exception. When a person experiences something that insane their mind goes into hyper drive and you took advantage of that.

There are very few sentences that pop out as needing revision. Reading the piece out loud will help you find these types of problems.
" As the months had dragged on, and the missions came and went, I (revise: had seen) more of the woman."

[NA]

Beautiful and well constructed. I always tell people that write war works that I'm jealous of them, but I've never seen someone tap into the idea of something psychotic (or supernatural, perhaps) being involved in it. Wonderful.

[schmevavikman]

gripping stuff,really strong. i like it

[alexis]

AMAZING!!!!