The Next Warrior

Proving Grounds - Part 3

In his fear and frustration to reload his empty M-27 rifle, Romero made a cardinal error in the art of the escape - watch where you are going. While he was successful in reloading the weapon, in his flash of distraction, and while moving at full stride, he crashed directly into a low hanging branch of a tree that hung uncompromisingly in his path. The force of the collision knocked the breath from his lungs and sent him reeling dizzily. For an instant, he lost consciousness and fell to the ground.

A few seconds later, he awoke. Panicked, confused, and stricken with a throbbing pain from deep within his skull, he wondered how long he had been out and what had happened to him. He fought desperately to regain his composure with the complete desire to keep moving at any cost. By then, Nathaniel's brief duel had surely alerted the comrades of his enemy to his location. They were no doubt all coordinating there and would envelope him in minutes. If he didn't steady himself quickly and flee with an equal sense of immediacy, he'd either be captured or worse, become just another statistical variable on some intelligence officer's case study analysis of the encounter weeks from now.

He clumsily stumbled back to a disoriented run, not unlike the town drunk in a futilely attempted escape from arrest. Still unsteady, he was unable to differentiate his frantic thoughts of navigating the forest, with his preoccupation of the enemy to his rear, and perhaps by then, he thought, all round surrounding him. Unable to negotiate his conflicting focus, he caught a root with his toe of his boot and fell again, with a hard impact behind a patch of bushes.

There he laid for what seemed like several minutes. He was gasping for air as his heart raced. While his view of the trees and the sunlight above spun, the sensor indicators on the visor he wore danced chaotically in his vision. It was a nauseating spiral of blue tinted sun with green flashes of light, lettering, and data streams. It was like a demon in the machine was working against him, too. As thoughts of his pursuers slowly slipped from the forefront of his thoughts, he felt an almost uncontrollable sensation to vomit.

It wasn't his physical conditioning that had failed him. Under normal conditions, he could outrun almost any of the other Marines in his platoon, especially the other non-NCO's. His last year had made him physically fit near Olympic standards. Even exhausted as he was, it wasn't his strength giving out that had him reeling under that bush; it was more. It was as if his body had simply given completely up on him taking even one single step more under these conditions. It revolted against the intolerable maltreatment he had forced onto it. 

In spite of his body's insurrection against itself, Nathaniel had just enough intestinal fortitude remaining to prevent himself from coating the enclosed helmet with the little remaining contents of his stomach. He rolled over and raised his visor with just enough time. As the contents of the meal-ready-to-eat he had consumed sometime around three that morning violently left his body, he felt the sense of uncontrollable vertigo leave him as well. A great deal of the mental anguish and momentary trauma he was feeling seemed to slip away in the seconds after he raised his visor. The demon in the machine no longer taunted him. He could no longer see the spinning, flashing, and blinking highlights and indicators of this informative, but nauseating heads-up display.

The spinning around him slowed. Soon he could see again at a distance. The world around him was unclouded by the virtual projections of his heads up display. In his time of absolute desolation, Romero was embraced by the natural presence of the forest itself; the ashy greens of the fir trees, grass dried to a winter pigment between hues of goldenrod and olive, and the brilliant golds and fiery reds of the last autumn leaves, unwavering in their unwillingness to fall to the onslaught of winter. Winter was here though, whether he or the leaves wanted it or not. 

He could see the cloud of breath drift from his mouth as he heaved heavily for air. He was breathing in the biting chill and refreshingly crisp morning air through his helmet. It was a stark contrast to the dank, sweat soaked musk within his kevlar. The winter cold, which he once counted among his numerable enemies, had then taken pity on him to wake him with the tender kiss of frigid respite. The winter's chill embraced him so that he might recover and carry on.