Phagocytosis

Baltimore Maryland, March 2038

The bar smelled like spilled beer and old wood, the kind of place where the walls had soaked up decades of smoke and spilled drinks. Andrew was waiting at the far end, a half-drained bottle of cheap beer sweating on the counter beside him.

Even from across the room, he stood out, not because he wanted to, but because he couldn't help it. His skin was pale under the harsh neon, almost translucent in spots, like paper that had been rubbed thin. He was wiry, his thin frame curled forward as if the weight of the stool was too much. There were faint scratch marks along his forearms, jagged crescents that looked fresh enough to sting. His red, glassy eyes not leaving the TV screen, watching the images of French, German, Italian, Indonesian and a hot pot of Asian marines landing on the eastern coast of India.

When I sat beside him. There was a twitch under his eye that didn't stop, like something just beneath his skin wouldn't let him rest. His fingers tapped the bar in an uneven rhythm, too fast, then suddenly still, before he switched to scratching the label off his bottle.

"You're late," he said in French, his voice low but edged with something sharp. His mother was from Quebec, and it showed in the way he curved the vowels, soft but deliberate.

"I know," I answered, sliding onto the stool. "Took me ages to get out of the airport. Some guy at the bus stop tried to blackmail me for twenty bucks because he bumped into me."

"Must be Snot. Black guy? White hair? About five two?" Andrew asked. He shot me a quick, nervous smile, the kind that didn't last long enough to mean anything. He looked at me like he was already ten steps ahead in a conversation I hadn't even started.

"I don't know. Yeah, maybe. He looked like that." I signaled the barman for the same beer Andrew was drinking.

"Look at those chumps," Andrew said, nodding at the TV.

"Fucking waltzing around on those beaches, man. Those Indians will rob them blind before the night's over," he added, scratching at his arm like he couldn't sit still.

"I don't know. Three hundred thousand men isn't something to scoff at," I said.

"You pay first," the barman grunted.

"I thought you Americans paid when leaving the bar," I said, swiping my phone across the reader.

"Not with this freak here, you're not," the barman said before walking away.

"Three hundred thousand, all you want," Andrew continued. "The first Indians they meet will welcome them with open arms, sure, but only until their backs are turned."

"Crabs didn't show you the same hospitality?" I ask.

"From Ellis island to those beaches all we got was shit day and night. Like what, 5 months of training? Marine corps unlike the army didn't slash the training, even for the draftees. Some joined the marines like me because they were sure the war would be over by the time they were issued a rifle. Ha how wrong they were. Most were gung ho bastards ready to stick their bayonet through the crabs queen mother or something, unless they got to stick their dicks inside of her first. Yo Barman! Another!" he yells out.

"Keep it down." I ask him.

"Fags had even less survival instincts than the crabs. We had a few vets from the global war on terror period with us, older guys, don't know why they even reenlisted." He continues.

"To liberate Europe maybe." I tell him, paying for his beer.

"Fucking Dwight D Eisenhower over here. Fuck me if those fucks didn't look like they were asking to be blown in two. For years they were fantasizing about our ships landing in Shanghai and shit, to wipe the floor with the Chinese and then running back home taking their girls with us. Once they were done playing barbie dress up with themselves inside the locker room in whatever ship we were in, I saw on their face sitting in the AAV that maybe this wasn't the smartest decision, that just maybe they should have made sure they were going to serve in the engineering corps or something."

"Fucking retards," he continues lighting a cigarette.

"Where were you in all of this." I ask.

"My ass on the seat, making sure my M249 was oiled up well enough." He says.

"No, why did you join the marines." I ask.

"Old man was in it, why not me I suppose. The man said I had to serve somewhere. Didn't think I'd make it at first on account of me not handling the sight of blood."

"And you made it through Camp Pendleton?" I asked.

"Camp Geiger, actually. I might not look like much now, but I always had farmer strength in me. Even when our AAV took a hit before we touched ground, I swam my ass to shore, plates, machine gun, everything. One good thing about military leadership—you always know who to look at and ask, what the fuck do we do now, when things go from bad to worse. Crabs sniffed out our landing. Took out half the vehicles before they even touched sand. Half our platoon was packed in a second AAV. That one went straight down when it got hit. I didn't see it happen, but the fact we never found a trace tells me they couldn't get the cargo hatches open. They all drowned in there.

I felt like giving up halfway across, until I felt Bodie grab me by my plate carrier. One of the few guys I actually liked. Kid was from Baltimore. Inner city youth in crisis, his words, not mine. It was either a gun charge or the Marine Corps for him. I watched him go from a hood rat with an attitude to a stone-cold killer."

Andrew gave a faint, bitter smile. "Thought I was the one that wasn't supposed to know how to swim," the dumbass told me.

Just sprinted out of the surf and down the beach, blaster shots flying over my head. Some hitting the sand, covering me with shit until I threw myself behind a dune I had correctly guessed what was left of my squad was behind off.

"So I was laid out on a sand dune, firing into a treeline where the shots were coming from. Everyone else was too. No screaming, no wasted breath, just the crack of rifles. That's when I heard it, like a waterfall roaring right behind my ears. First thought was the LCAC that had taken a hit earlier, a huge hovercraft that could carry two Abrams tanks. This one was hauling our trucks filled with ammo, thought maybe it must've blown underwater and sent waves crashing up the beach. But no. I turned my head toward the platoon commander, the XO, a couple other leaders hunched behind a half-shredded AAV. They weren't looking at me. They were looking up. Wondering what the hell that shadow was that had just swallowed them."

"And then it dropped. A leg the width of a small truck, all steel and mud and even some algae, slammed straight down on them. Platoon commander, XO, the others, gone in a blink. No screams, no blood spray, just the sound of the earth shaking and armor turning to paste under that metal foot. The whole beach shook like someone had taken a hammer to the earth. I didn't even breathe. Just watched the tripod pull its leg free, slow and deliberate, like it wasn't even in a hurry to kill us all. It lift it up, saw some metal, sand and what I make was bits of meat and uniform crushed together fall from it."

"Did not have time to think about how recon had missed those tripods hiding in the water. How the frogmen had failed to spot them when they dove on the beach the day before. It was there, towering over us. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. We just stared at it like dumb kids. We had expected the crabs to fold like they had everywhere else in Europe, but instead we stood frozen, waiting our turn to die. On the northern front we were being pushed back, on the southern one they were losing seventy thousand men a day. And here it was, steel dripping with seawater as if the ocean itself had coughed it up. Ten of them, maybe fifteen, standing guard on the beaches we had just stormed.

Derek fired an Carl Gustav into its lower armor and that shock snapped me out of it. I threw my SAW up and fired lying on my back, muzzle climbing, bullets snapping high. A fucked up way to shoot, but everyone was doing the same. We just poured lead into it, all of us, like maybe noise alone could save us. I had little chance of fucking it up, you were just able to fuck up its hydraulics like that, but you take any chance you get.

The first burst it gave off wasn't even aimed. Like it was testing the air. White flash and half the dune behind us folded inward like wet cardboard. Men disappeared without even screaming. Just a spray of blood and sand raining down on the rest of us. The shockwave kicked me half a meter off the ground, ears ringing like someone had shoved church bells inside my skull.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Derek's assistant was reloading, hands shaking like he was trying to fuck the tube into the launcher. They never got the second shot off. That leg, the one that had crushed our XO, swung sideways and came down on him. No sound except steel hitting sand and bones popping like twigs. His torso was flat, a manhole cover with boots sticking out.

Everyone scattered but there was nowhere to go. The AAV and LAV husks were burning, and the beach behind us was nothing but water and wreckage. Those who tried to crawl back into the surf drowned in their own panic, weighed down by their kit.

I just kept firing. Didn't even know if the bullets were hitting. The tripod's head swiveled, slow, mechanical, like it had all the time in the world. Blaster fire again, a long beam cutting the sand ridge in half. The men who had been crawling along the top were turned into black smears, nothing left that you could even call a body.

I suppose the ships realized if they waited too long there wouldn't be any friendlies left to accidentally hit. The frigates off the coast opened fire. First salvo tore overhead, a sound like the sky being ripped apart. Then the rounds slammed in, giant geysers of steel and seawater erupting against the legs and hull of the tripod. Those guns didn't miss.

But accuracy didn't save us. The air itself turned into a hammer. Shockwaves punched through the sand, lifted men off their feet, burst eardrums. Shrapnel, chunks of the beach, even fragments of the tripod itself scythed through us. Helmets rang like bells, lungs rattled in our chests. Some guys just crumpled without a mark on them, cooked by the concussion alone. Others were shredded, cut down by the same fire meant to save us.

Didn't matter if we were too close. Didn't matter if we were scattered like broken toys across the beach. The Navy had made its choice.

Whole sections of sand were turned into a blender. Men were flung into the surf, some coming up screaming, some never coming up at all.

But it worked. One of those bastards shuddered and took a step back like it had finally felt pain. Half its leg gave way, and the whole thing toppled into the shallows with a sound like a skyscraper collapsing. The water swallowed half of it, steam rising where hot metal met surf. I just stared at it like a dumb kid before the crabs from earlier showed their noses again. Guess they wanted to try their luck and send whoever was left on the beach back to the sea. As I was vomiting my guts from the concussion blasts, I quickly swallowed whatever was left in my mouth and forced myself to get some lead downrange. Took me a while. I was wet, miserable, my head hurt so bad it felt like my brains wanted to get the fuck out of dodge, find any hole in which they could escape my skull.

Andrew's hands trembled as he traced the rim of his half-empty bottle, not from cold or fatigue, but from something deeper, something that had never really left him. His eyes, red and glassy, stared past the TV flickering with images of far-off landings, seeing something only he could see.

He shivered, though he was inside the warm bar. "Guys I knew, screaming and crawling, gone before they hit the sand. And you? You're lying there, heart pounding, trying not to puke, trying not to think about the guys around you, just… survive. And the Navy? Fuck, the Navy was dropping steel on them like it was raining. You'd think that'd help, right? But it didn't. Not really. The shockwaves hit you, shredded your ears, rattled your chest, and you just… kept firing, because if you stopped… you wouldn't be here to tell the story."

"Guys with girlfriends, wives, kids, parents waiting back home. Just gone, wiped out in seconds. Didn't matter they had helmets worth a months' mortgage, didn't matter they'd had hundreds of thousands poured into training, weapons that would've made a Korean War vet green with envy. All of it—nothing. Just meat on the sand."

He stopped, jaw working, his eyes shining wet in the bar's neon glow. His fingers wouldn't stay still, scratching at his wrist, his forearm, anything, as if the memory was crawling up under his skin.

"I walked out of there. Don't ask me why. Don't ask me how. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. Every night I see their faces, every morning I wake up and wonder what makes me so special when they didn't even get to scream."

"You took the beach. That's what matters," the barman said. I hadn't even realized he'd been listening, but his voice cut through the haze. He slid us another round, this one on the house, like some kind of consolation prize.

"Yeah, if you throw enough bodies at a problem, you'll fix anything," Andrew muttered, his fingers picking at the label on his bottle until it shredded into wet scraps. We were just lucky there were more of us, and that we had General Dynamics, Dassault, and NORINCO on our side. Numbers and toys. That's all it was."

He stared into the foam of his beer for a long second before his voice sharpened again.

Anyway, the second wave hit the beach, we got more armour, more men. They all walked and rolled past us as if they were kids in a haunted house, seeing ghouls and zombies reaching for them. They tried their best not to look at us. Be it the Japanese or the Swedish guys, they all pretended to watch their sector as the injured were screaming for medics, water, any help what so ever. I thought I was injured, laying there in the sand. My staff sergeant told me it was shut up and suck it up time. Lifted me up, sand in my ears, in my wounds. Fucking wet all over. Barely had time to get a clean ammo band in my '249, that what was left of our squad was ordered to push forward. Fucking bastard in battalion staff, probably the S3 was convinced we were still operational.

Bodie was next to me when we tried to push inland. Kid had this laugh, real stupid, real loud. You couldn't shut him up when things were calm.Our squad was behind a Swedish Leopard. It was chewing its way forward, slow and steady, and we hugged the rear, rifles up, waiting for the next burst of fire.

Sure enough, the crabs weren't finished. Whatever spooked the tank made it fire downrange, the cannon roaring so loud it rattled my teeth. Some kid from Tennessee was just ahead of me. Maybe he didn't have his ear protection in, maybe the blast was just too much, but he flinched and staggered away from cover. Hands clamped over his ears, he stumbled a few meters out from the Leopard's shadow.

That was all it took. He popped like a balloon, shredded in an instant by one of the ten or so blaster bolts screaming toward us. I felt the spray hit my face before I even processed what had happened. Blood, had it all over my face, by the time I wiped it away from my glasses, the Leopard took the rest of the barrage, armor sizzling and buckling under the hits, but it didn't matter. There were four more tanks on the beach, and Super Cobras overhead unloading rockets, Hellfires, and autocannon fire into the treeline.

Combined arms warfare looked great on a map. On the ground, even when you were on the winning side, it was nothing but a meat grinder. The earth shook, we all looked like dumb kids looking at their parents fighting, wondering what to do as the earth shook, as the air around us hit us in waves from the blasts.

The tank just stopped. Didn't know what was happening inside that tin can, whether it would continue forward, reverse and roll us over, or if it would explode.

Sure enough, I got my answer. The guys closest to the tank spun around, shouted something, and bolted back toward the beach. Then the shoo fell.

Whatever had popped that guy like a balloon also could fuck up a multi million dollar tank.

The Leopard's ammo cooked off, tearing the hull apart. The blast shook the sand, knocking everyone flat. And then the turret lifted clean off the hull, twisting and spinning high into the air. For a moment, time froze.

Then it came down.

Bodie was just behind the tank, trying to stay close enough for cover, when the turret slammed into the sand. He didn't have time to move. One of its edges caught his leg, pinning him hard. The metal pressed down like a vice, grinding him into the sand. He screamed, clawing at the steel, kicking, but it didn't budge.

A second guy, unlucky enough to be near the other side of the turret, got crushed completely under its weight, leaving nothing but a smear in the sand. Fire and smoke erupted from the hull, the acrid smell of burning fuel and metal filling the air.

Of course it took me a while to realize that shit. I was on the sand god knows how long.

Andrew flinched as another boom rolled in from the TV speakers, some newscaster voice drowned out by footage of bombardments. For a second he wasn't in Baltimore, wasn't in that bar, wasn't clutching a sweating beer bottle. He was back on that beach.

"Explosions never stop," he muttered, voice rough, like the words were scraped raw out of his throat. "Back then it was the Navy, the Cobras, the Swedes firing their Leopards, hell even our own guys with Gustav tubes. Whole world was falling apart in ten-second bursts. Every time I thought it was done, the ground shook again. Couldn't tell if it was the enemy or us, didn't matter—every time, it felt like the earth was trying to bury me alive."

His hands wouldn't stop moving, peeling at the label, scratching at his wrist.

"Bodie was pinned, screaming, leg trapped under that fucking turret. I tried to pull him out, but every blast made the sand jump, made the metal grind deeper into him. He looked at me like I was supposed to save him, but what the hell was I gonna do? I was half deaf, half blind, holding on to a jammed '249 and puking blood in the sand."

Andrew's jaw tightened. "And then the radios lit up. Platoon net, battalion net, doesn't matter—they were shouting coordinates, giving fire missions, shifting symbols on some damn map. Moving arrows on a screen like they were playing a game of chess. But for every arrow they pushed forward, it cost us pounds of meat. A body here, a leg there, a whole squad turned into fucking paste. That's how it works. Steel and symbols up top, blood and screaming down below."

He took a hard pull from his glass, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"You ever seen what it looks like when leadership decides to 'pivot the axis of advance'? Looks clean on the tactical map, just a couple lines sliding right. But on the ground? It's guys like me and Bodie, trying to breathe through the smoke, crawling under fire, watching friends get diced up by blaster bolts. You don't see that on the map. You don't smell the burning meat. You don't hear the guys who can't scream anymore because their lungs are full of sand and blood."

Andrew shook his head, eyes fixed on nothing. "To them it was doctrine. To us, it was a butcher's bill. Paid in full."

Andrew's eyes glazed, like he wasn't really talking to me anymore. Just spilling it out.

"We thought we were winning, you know? Cut the crabs off, boxed 'em in, dropped artillery on their villages, burned them out from the air. Tactics looked clean on paper. Encirclements, breakthroughs, textbook shit. Even when we buried Bodie right there in the sand, I was told we'd pulled it off faster than anyone planned. A week's worth of fighting done in a day. On some map, it was a victory."

He snorted, bitter.

"Didn't feel like one. Never felt like a winner in my life. And sure as hell not then. Even when the last strongholds in the Baltics were sealed off, even when they pinned medals on us and told us to smile for the cameras, even when they de mobilized us with parades and flags… felt even less like a winner. The cause was just, I know that. But the blood, I never could handle the sight of it."