Eagles in Gear

Chapter 1

Slow grunting...the sounds of welders in the garage with their hand tools...they sound so excruciating... Slow moving rustled the cot and a figure sat up and rubbed his eyes. The figure looks out of the window at his bedside and he sees the distant orange lights as well as the sounds of metal melting vibrate throughout his tent. He groans and gets up.  The man walks by his bunk mates, who are slightly or more so older than him.

Out of all the noise outside, the man still doesn't know how his komrades sleep. He shakes his head while smiling slightly as he goes into the tent's weekly rations. He pulls out a stale piece of bread that he hid a week or two prior to the operations he and everyone in Quarter 79 attended. They went in with 18 men in the first operation. Came back with seven.

He grimaces as the thoughts of those horrid screams fill his mind. His thoughts were interrupted when the sudden rustling of a older man sitting up and yawning like a bear waking from hibernation. "Aye..give me some of your coffee..." The older man says as he too rubs his eyes of soot. 

"Go get your own, Orlin. Get your wrinkled ass off the cot and get some yourself."

Orlin shoots the young man a stare and gets up in a groggy state. "Alarik, you should respect your elders more often." Alarik sighs and rolls his eyes as he takes another sip. "You still have enough bones to move and arms to wave and all four appendages to use. I say you're perfectly capable to do it." Orlin brushes his scuffed beard with his fingers as he pours some of the instant coffee they had stored. It was still dawn so it was unlikely anybody else will be awake for the next few hours.

Alarik looks back at Orlin. He is mildly built for someone in their late 50s and the oldest one in all the tents whose role is a pilot, something meant for highly trained grunts like Orlin to handle. "He certainly needs to shave or else his wife will have to beat him back to shape." Alarik thought.

 Alarik finishes his coffee and heads back to his bunk and lays down. He pulls out his duffel bag and pulls out his old journal entries a year prior. All of them described his excitement, his thrill of being a fellow pilot of the Imperial Cog Walker Company. Then he comes to the entries a few months before, describing the walkers as "two meter death coffins on stilts". His machine was being worked on in the garage in a few distances away. He named her "Gehende Sonnenblume"- Walking Sunflower. She was a older model, one that worked on the ancient power of steam. It was the pilot's job to maintain their chosen walker, and it was the repair crew's job to fix them if the pilot doesn't do his/her's job.

He closes the journal and a small family photo comes out. It shows his family smiling when he was just 4. Before he could even tear up, an explosion ripples throughout the camp and shakes everything in the tent and then comes a plume of smoke coming from the northwest perimeter of the camp. The sirens start to wail.