Just something I wrote today, but thought up yesterday. I couldn't figure out what to do with the ending, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. Here's the story:
The group of six men made their way through the dense jungle, the foliage damp from the recent downpour. Making as little noise as possible, they crept through tangled messes that one would normally need a machete to hack through.
Approaching a clearing, the man at the head of the group suddenly stopped and motioned with his hand for the others to ready their weapons. The others in the group unslung their rifles, checking the chamber and flicking off the safeties, as the leader of the group unslung his shotgun, checking the magazine. The squad spread out in a skirmish line, and, keeping visual contact began to circle around the clearing.
Their caution paid off soon enough, as movement became evident in the jungle on the far side of the clearing. Three soldiers emerged, wearing the same uniform as those circling the clearing, a light green camouflage. A member of the squad of six started to step out into the clearing, but then he noticed his companion’s warnings and paused a second before ignoring their frantic signals and continuing into the clearing, facing the three men.
“What’s the signal?” He asked. The man in the center replied, “You don’t know?”
“Yes, I do know,” the soldier who had originally stepped out replied as he visibly relaxed.
“I’m Frederic, with squad five. I see that you’re missing three men. Did the shifters attack?”
“We ambushed a party of six just outside the Amazon district, South of Firebase Haven. We got them all, but only after we lost three of our men to the touch.” The center soldier replied.
“Your squad, 10, isn’t it? They didn’t see any other shifter activity in the area, did you?”
“Yes, we're the survivors of squad 10, and I'm the captain. We didn't see any other shifter activity around the area, but we did see some evidence that a shaper had passed through the area somewhat recently. We decided to head back to base to report instead of looking for that shaper, as we weren’t equipped to handle one. We had lost our support gunner in the ambush.” The center soldier looked as if he was going to continue, but suddenly stopped.
“What?” Frederic asked.
“Oh, I was just thinking about the outsiders. After all, if they could seem to be anyone they wanted, why did they settle here?” The captain asked Frederic.
Frederic motioned for the rest of the squad to come out of hiding, and watched as three of his fellow squad members joined him. “I don’t know, maybe they just wanted to live in peace?” He inquired.
“Yeah, I was thinking that myself if only we- I mean they had kept to themselves, we could have just lived in peace with each other.”
“Wait, did you just say we?” Frederic asked in a panicked tone. He and the others backed away, clearing the line of fire for their comrades.
“Yes, I did say we. We here had this same conversation with your human friends in squad 10- before we killed them.” The captain replied, his face twisting into a mask of rage.
He and the other two soldiers beside him suddenly turned visibly darker, their skin and clothing fading away to reveal a writhing, glossy exterior, almost like a panther’s fur. They had unslung their weapons and jumped forward at an inhumanly fast speed, rifles spitting bullets at the soldiers of squad 6.
Frederic blindly held down the trigger in panic as the shifters closed the short distance between them and his squad. His gun sprayed the silver-laced bullets at the shifters, swinging out of control. Then, the shifters reached the hastily formed skirmish line.
The first of the three outsiders leapt at the soldier to Frederic’s left, and he scrambled backwards as he watched the terrifying charge take place. The soldier shuddered as the shifter’s fist impacted him, his entire body shaking as he hit the ground and one of his squadmates did the same. The third soldier had more luck, as he had managed not to panic and instead had been directing bursts at the outsider charging him. The bullets impacted, penetrated into the outsider’s body- and he realized that this was no ordinary shifter- this was a shaper.
The outsider stopped ten feet in front of him, even as the soldier continued to direct his fire at him, and the bullets drew out of his body, formed a sharp point in the shaper’s hand, and were flung at him, all in the space of one second.
The spike of lead and silver struck the soldier’s neck at an upward angle, tearing through the skin and bone to tear into the brain. He flew back into the air for a good five feet before hitting the ground and digging a shallow furrow into the soft earth.
The sight of this shocked Frederick into awareness. He released the trigger, took aim at a shifter, and started firing single shots as he backed up. Two shots struck the shifter in the upper chest, tearing the muscle and sending it flat on his back. As he did so, the continual stream of shots from the left side of the clearing started to impact, hitting the remaining shifter and following it down.
The shaper, seeing his two companions struck down, sprinted for the soldier concealed in the left side of the clearing. The soldier broke out of cover and started to run.
The shaper looked as if it were going to catch him, but it was not to be, as the captain of squad six stepped from the jungle beside Frederic and sprinted towards the shaper, firing his shotgun.
The cyanide-filled pellets thudded into the shaper’s torso, turning the skin a deep red where they impacted. The shaper staggered back, and started to pull more bullets from his body, but was stopped a split second before he could throw the spike by one last blast from the captain’s shotgun. His body thudded onto the soft ground and began to dissolve.
The three survivors of squad six walked back towards their base camp, with their dead squadmates’ remains in separate containers.
“I just have one question to ask, sir.” Frederic asked the captain.
“What is it?”
“If the outsiders wanted to have peace, then why did they attack our people?” Asked Frederic.
“I don’t know, Frederic, and you will probably never know either. We can’t understand them yet, and right now it doesn’t look like we’re going to get much time to study them. Let’s get back to camp.”
Could we maybe do the session Sunday?