Arcadia

A Story by John

My multiverse

TRAPPED

· The small group of armed men sprinted rapidly through the webbed, unbeaten trail. It wasn’t a hiking trail, and they weren’t hiking. It was a labyrinthine tunnel, caked with scum and shells of the creature they now ran from. The low ceiling brushed against many of their helmets, but no foul was given. They were on the run. Running from what may have been the worst possible thing for anyone to run from. The man in the front, their sergeant, led the way with a small, yellow flashlight protruding from his armor, which was painted a dark green, scratched, and field-worn. He checked his Gauss rifle, an older model, rapid-fire for less fire-power, but with it came less kick. He could cut through a forest with it if he needed to, but he hardly did. The large, plug-like shells could punch though a thousand different metals and a thousand more types of rock, but he hardly needed it to. When it came down to it, he hardly needed the rifle at all, he barely used it. He used his men. Like a magazine of ammunition. As much as he hated it, he used them. He had to. In corridors like the one he now found himself running through, it often came down to the last bullet. But somehow, just somehow, he and his old-model Gauss had made it through every corridor thus far. He was an ancient warrior, a man of war, made for war. Born to kill. He had two passions in life thus far, and doubted he would be blessed with many others: life and death. Living and killing. Far as he cared, he could live for eternity and kill for the leftovers. On his battered armor, an exoskeleton that bulged with gears and different wires running two and fro from limb to limb with an astronaut’s helmet over his head, tinted gold, was painted the Reaper. A God of old was the Reaper, for he had been prayed to by Man since Man had known prayer. Even longer than The thousand Suns that dotted Mankind’s great expanse, giving life to Man’s existence, the Reaper had held dominance over the religious battlefield for many millennia. So, as he had done many times over, in many dark, dank corridors before, the sergeant prayed. He prayed to the Reaper, his God of Favor, as his father’s before had been. He prayed that the corridor he now ran through, running point for his platoon of about 3 dozen Eagles, Royal Marines in the service of His Majesty’s Royal Galactic Navy, would not end in a cul-de-sac of rubble or even worse, a hatchery or larva pad of the godless creature he was running from. He prayed that he would be able to stand with his back against a wall when the end came, but he did not want the end to come. Not yet. He wasn’t ready. He had so much more killing to do. So he ran. His men, warriors like unto himself, would follow him until they fell to either the treacherous tunnels or the creature that followed them ever so hungrily.