NOVEL NEXT Chapter 4: Soldier Boy
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=== [Chapter 4: Soldier Boy] ===
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Work was brutal. There was no other way to put it. Eli’s brown complexion took on a shade of burned red. He felt sunburn crawl its way across his body. The sleeves of his prisoner uniform were rolled as far as they could go, and yet the sweat still poured over him. The cheap plastic of the material wasn’t helping at all, and in some moments, it felt like Eli was being steamed alive inside of his prisoner’s uniform.
In his hands was a shovel. Digging away at the red earth to create a trench. Overwatch insisted that the prisoners get to work building defenses across the base. Some prisoners labored away installing what Eli could identify as anti-air weapons and artillery. Some built machine gun nests and walls of sandbags across the defensive line outside of the base’s perimeter. And others – like Eli and Rafael – dug trenches in the dirt.
Rafael had taken his uniform off and tossed it to the side, his tawny body bare for all to see. Normally, taking your uniform off would be a violation of conduct. Enough of an excuse for the patrolling guards to single someone out and beat them until their ribs had cracked and the message got through. But it was oppressively hot. So hot even the regulars looked fatigued – and they were the ones who got consistent water rations. They cared less, as they leaned their backs lazily against the other fence of the base, watching as prisoners tossed away their uniforms. Some prisoners even went so far as to strip down to their underwear and socks. If the temperatures rose any further, Eli might join them.
As Eli dug the shovel into the almost clay-like soil, he could hear two metal plates clanging from underneath his uniform. Hating the way they scratched his already irritated skin; he grabbed the two dog tags and pulled them out to hang loose around his neck. Rafael noticed them as they glistened in the sunlight.
“You a soldier boy?”
“A what?” Eli asked.
“Military? You served?”
Eli nodded, “Yeah, US Army. Korea.”
Rafael whistled, “Korea,” He repeated the name, “You were there when they nuked Seoul?”
“Adjacent. By then I already left.”
“You finished your contract?”
“Left as in deserted.”
“Oh.”
Of course, Rafael didn’t know the full story. He wasn’t there. Nobody alive was there. Except of course, Eli himself. He had deserted from the battlefield and that’s why he was a prisoner. That much was mostly true. But not completely. Luckily, there was nobody left alive to recall exactly what had happened, and Eli wanted to keep it that way. The Coalition, as far as he knew, believed he had just deserted and so had everyone else around him. It was easier that way.
He gave Rafael a leery smile, hoping that the Brazilian man hadn’t taken notice of his sudden bout of self-contemplation, “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Hey, there’s no shame in that, Soldier Boy. You got tired of it, and you made a stand to defend yourself.”
“And yet, all I got was a role in the Penal Unit. So much for ‘making a stand’.”
Rafael tutted, “You know I was in the army too. Briefly though, before the government collapsed,” he rummaged into his pockets, pulling out what looked like a slip of paper.
The image had faded briefly to time, damaged and cracked in some places. Yet he could make out a young man. His face riddled with acne, eyes straight, head covered by a green beret, dressed in a military uniform. A rifle was tucked into his arms. He lowered the picture, looking back at Rafael. He must’ve been ten years younger in the photo, a far cry from the grown man standing in front of him, “Handsome, eh?”
“Not bad,” Eli cracked a smile, handing the photo back.
“That was me before the civil war. I was there for less than a year before we got the news. At first, I thought I’d stick with the Army but as the time passed, I realized they were doing more harm than good. A lot more harm. I saw homes being burned on suspicion of having a connection with the cartels and rebels. And then, I got the news that my friend had been killed by their hands.”
“Bombed?”
Rafael shook his head, “The Army thought his favela was a lair for the narcos. They rounded up everyone out of their homes, took the people they thought looked suspicious and tortured them.”
Eli listened as Rafael’s voice became husky. Recalling the events, “My best friend since I was a child. I never saw his body but the news got to me by my aunt, and I swore to myself that I wouldn’t do it anymore. I joined the rebels when the government shut down communications, became a runner that delivered messages by hand.”
“How’d you end up here then?”
Rafael’s eyes glazed over.
“It had been going well. We targeted the police stations and federal armories for weapons. Sold them for cash, used what was left to protect and feed our families. There was nothing else you could do. It was either that, join the Army, or a gang. But in the morning, there was a raid. Somehow, they knew our hideouts, found each of us. Killed most of us. The survivors were handed over to the Coalition as prisoners.”
“The Coalition backed the army?”
“They were the ones who ratted us out. Gave the Army the intel that they used to capture us. The whole neighborhood was placed under army rule from what I could recall,” Rafael briefly looked away, his eyes averting from Eli’s gaze, “I never heard from them since.”
“And how long ago was this?”
Rafael shrugged, “I want to say… five years? Every day I spend in the Penal Unit feels the same. I lost count.”
“Hm,” The two got back to digging into the red dirt. Their brief conversation was short enough that the guards who tried to seek shelter from the sun on their patrols hadn’t noticed them stopping. Yet, Eli kept his eye on them. His mind was still fuddled from the environment. He couldn’t come up with an explanation, not one that made sense, “What do you think about this?”
“You mean Kovic?”
“I mean all of it. This place. Where do you think we are?”
Rafael shrugged, “Looks familiar, but not familiar enough. It’s got that tropical feel, y’know?”
“Like Brazil?”
“No. It’s all different from Brazil. Maybe it’s Argentina. Dirt’s a bit drier, like they’ve got in the mountains. The ocean’s downhill so it can’t be Bolivia. It could be Spain or Portugal. Or we can be somewhere in Africa… or the Pacific or… really anywhere.”
“Yeah,” Eli sighed, realizing the futility of trying to pinpoint exactly where they were.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it was a portal. Some kind of gate, y’know.”
“You really think it’s a portal?”
“What else could it be? We were in the mountains of North America one minute, and the next – we’re in the jungle. It has to be a portal! I just didn’t think - well I never thought…”
“You don’t think it’s possible.”
“I didn’t think it was possible. But there’s no other explanation for it. It has to be some kind of superweapon that the Coalition’s been keeping secret. In fact, I’m sure that’s exactly what The Utopia Project is. Only question now is, where on Earth are we?”
Eli sighed, looking up at the environment around them. A lone palm tree stood a few feet away, its crown leaves swaying in the wind. Further behind it, the Nexus, and the rolling mountains. Clouds were rolling in. Grey and black. They looked angry. The wind was growing stronger than it had before. A storm was approaching.
“What about the kid? Omar?” Rafael gestured over to their left. Eli glanced over. The rest of Misfit shoveled dirt and built the trench a little while away from Eli and Rafael, just outside of talking range. There Omar was. Small and fragile, laboring away as the sweat covered his face and dirt stained his body.
“He’s twenty-one, apparently,” Eli said to him.
“You believe that?”
“No," He shrugged, "What about him?”
“They’ve got kids fighting for them now? Child soldiers?”
“He must’ve done something bad.”
“Bad enough to get sent here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know because you don’t want to find out. If they’re bringing in child soldiers to fight for them, what does that say about us?”
“It says we’re expendable.”
“Exactly. And aren’t you tired of feeling expendable? Isn’t your life worth living outside of the chains of this prison?”
“Rebels end up as dead men,” Eli told him, hoping to nip Rafael’s revolutionary speak in the bud, “Not free. Dead.”
“Would you rather be a slave?”
“I won’t have to. I have six months left in my sentence and I’m not going to give that up. I’ve already told you.”
“You’ll never get out of this place. Not by being obedient. They’ll keep you in here for as long as they can, and once you are no longer useful, they’ll get rid of you. You know that, right? Soldier Boy?” Rafael leaned in closer, “After almost every mission they swap us around. They reassign the squads. They make sure prisoners can’t bond. If you can’t form relationships with each other, then you can’t effectively resist. You’ll have nothing to fight for. It’s all about killing that part in you. Drowning it.”
“Six months,” Eli repeated, “I’m not giving that up. Nothing you say can change that.”
Rafael tutted, “Nothing I say maybe. But you’ll see. They won’t let us out of here. Not free. Not unless we’re in a body bag.”
Eli gritted his teeth. He grabbed his shovel and plowed into the dirt to continue working – ignoring Rafael’s words. Or at the very least trying to. If it was freedom that Rafael wanted so badly, he was free to go ahead and take it for himself. He didn’t need Eli, or any of Misfit for that matter, to do it. It was his grave and his grave alone.
Yet even still, a pang of guilt ebbed its way through Eli’s heart as he kept working. Again, those memories of Korea and the ones he left behind flooded back to him. If he abandoned Rafael, wouldn’t that be akin to betrayal? Something so fundamentally despised between Phantoms that it was on the same level as murder…
He ignored his thoughts again, saying nothing, as he went back to work.
They continued hacking away at the dirt in front of them. The trench grew deeper and wider, yet it seemed the list of things that needed to be done only grew. There was always more to do. A stuffy guard would eyeball their work, tell them that a new section of the trench needed to be reinforced with wooden planks, or that a machine gun nest had to be installed, or that they had done a terrible job and would have to keep digging. Or better yet, would have to undo all of their work and do it again to the exact specifications... again and again.
Hours passed by, and yet the job was nowhere near finished. Eli again, let his shovel rest when a guard turned his back on the prisoners. He heaved, quietly, looking up to the skies…
The dark clouds were getting closer.
The air was still. Not just from the lack of a breeze, but there was something about the air itself that was dreadful. Sending a chill down Eli’s spine. He swiped at his forehead, wiping away a waterfall of sweat. He sighed, about to pick up the shovel once again to continue working, when he heard something.
Thunder, but it wasn't thunder. Faint, barely audible over the sounds of prisoners working and guards yelling. One could mistake the sound for a faint choir of drums in the distance. Thudding and rumbling. It sounded strangely mechanical.
The noise was strange, but Eli chalked it up to some type of machinery the Coalition was using. Whatever it was, it was coming from downhill near the coast. So far, quite a while removed from any of their concern in The Nexus. He continued working. Trying to ignore it. But he swore that the noise was getting louder.
After another grueling sprint of work, he noticed that it had become loud enough to drown out the sound of even mundane chatter. The prisoners stopped working to look up towards the skies. A flock of distressed birds flew up from the tree line and away from the noise. What Eli had previously assumed was just the normal sound of construction, had grown into something so distinct. Something he was unfortunately quite familiar with.
Gunfire.
Memories of Seoul and of New Cairo sprung forth into his mind, the sound of war grew nearer. Yet the guards did not seem impressed, “Don’t stop working! That has nothing to do with you! Get back to work!” Shouted one, standing over the trench with his gun held tight to his chest. Reluctantly the prisoners obeyed, Eli stole a glance at the chaos before turning his back fully. His eyes met Rafael’s when he did so. Rafael only shrugged.
But once more they were dragged back into the chaos when the ground itself shook with the fury of an explosion deep within the jungle. Everybody turned to look, breathless as they listened to the sounds of warfare draw nearer. No matter what the guards said, the prisoners did not listen.
Suddenly, alarms throughout the Nexus began to blare. Sirens went off. A automated voice read out loud, “ALL COMBAT UNITS AND PRISONERS, REPORT TO BATTLE STATIONS. RESPONSE CODE: DEFEND, EXECUTE, CONTAIN.”
Everyone burst into excited movement. Guards ordered prisoners around, telling them to get their assigned equipment. Eli and Rafael looked to each other, and they moved over to the rest of Misfit.
“What’s going on?” Badger asked when they came close.
“Hell if I know, but it sounds like a warzone out there!” Rafael told her.
“We’re fighting POA out here? Why didn’t Overwatch tell us?” Dutch frantically asked, as he stole nervous glances over at the jungle.
Eli picked up his pack of equipment and hauled it over his back, as did the rest of Misfit. His monitor buzzed on his arm with notifications and alerts. Reports of attacks on Coalition positions, pleas for assistance from the forward units, emergencies, orders, and assignments, all flooded in as he watched his monitor glow.
He did a headcount of the squad in his mind. Dutch, Cato, Omar, Rafael, Badger, himself and…
He raised an eyebrow in confusion. There was supposed to be seven of them. They were missing one.
“Matteo,” Eli said, “Where did Matteo go? The Italian dude?”
Shrugs, murmurs of possibilities, “I think I saw him somewhere with the regulars,” Badger suggested, "Something about his medic work, but I'm not sure."
“Damn it,” Eli muttered as he strapped his bag over himself.
Just as Misfit grabbed their bags, all the notifications fell silent. The messages from Overwatch ceased, the reports stopped. His monitor lost signal. He saw the rest of the prisoners, even the guards, staring at each other – confused. All the monitors had lost their signals.
“They’re jamming our communications!” A guard shouted, “I can’t get shit through!” said another.
A rumble from the forest interrupted them. Everyone froze in their tracks. Something major was coming. Eli’s eyes searched the skies for anything, expecting a jet or a aircraft of some sort.
From behind the tree line, a massive dark figure pierced through the skies. Eli’s initial reaction was that of fear, but it quickly morphed into confusion. It wasn’t a jet. Nor a aircraft.
Its construction was almost organic, but still mechanical. It carried hard sharp angular features. Horns, scales… claws and eyes.
His eyes widened when he realized what he was looking at. It wasn't an aircraft at all...
It was a…
“Dragon…”
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