Movement Orders

Movement Orders

“Medic!”

I looked across and saw the young soldier who had just arrived, slumped on the floor. I grabbed my bag and walked over, assessing the wound as I approached. The stain spread from just above the neck of his flak jacket, slick black on the camouflage material. Not a gunshot. Ricocheted shrapnel? A blast injury? No sign of flash or burns.

Closer now I saw the characteristic wide mouth grin with sharp edges. A knife then.

I twisted open a large field dressing and pressed it to his wound.

“There. Hold it there and press hard.”

“How bad?”

“It’s fine.”

His tongue flicked repeatedly, snake like, across blue lips.

“It doesn’t hurt - can’t be that bad, can it?”

“No.”

His pale sweaty face held eye whites highlighted by contrast with black camo smears across his smooth cheeks.

“My wife. I’ve got to tell my wife.”

“She’s been told. You’ve got to go now.”

“Go? Where?”

I grabbed his rough, dusty fatigues and pulled him to his feet, pushed him towards the two doors in the end wall.

He dropped the dressing; the stain no longer spreading. He turned.

“Which one?”

“You’ll know.”

They all did in the end.

200 words

@nickjohns999

This story was written to a prompt from Inspiration Monday

Genesis Revelation

Genesis Revelation

‘Let there be light, and there was light’.

Every light that was ever lit created shadows.

Once created, they do not go away.

From the earliest times our primitive ancestors knew something that we, in our arrogance had forgotten. Myth, story, religion, all were devised by wise men to pass on this primordial message.  We came to believe that these tales were allegorical; we lost sight of the literal truth. Mankind needs light to survive.

Throughout the whole of civilisation we had used light to drive them away. As science progressed, we developed better and better ways of lighting our world and we forgot them, dismissed them.

But they were only driven off, not destroyed. They receded, resentful, like circus tigers before a whip, but like the tigers they waited for a moment’s inattention. They lurked, just out of sight, waiting, watching, serried ranks of patient malevolence, distorted phantasms, cruel parodies of our symmetry, biding their time. Once the light died, they returned. When the electricity failed, millions died, overwhelmed by the sentient darkness, a flood tide no longer held back by our artificial defences.

Darkness is the natural order of things.

Here, now, in the flickering, guttering embers of my last fuel, I know the truth. Just beyond sight, they wait for me.

Hungry for my soul.

‘the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

238 words

@nickjohns999

This story was written from a prompt in the Inspiration Monday Challenge