ALICE

Chapter 33: BASE

 Chapter 33: BASE

 After another hour of moving up, with more then a few close scrapes of being compromised again, they arrived to a break in the trees. A bright light peered through the trees rougly every twenty seconds. As they realized this, the team hit the dirt, scout crawling slowly to the front. Anton pulled a map out of his pack and looked at it.

 "What the... How the (Italics) hell (Italics) did we get all the way over here?"

 "How far off course are we?" Redd asked, scanning to assess the threats with his scope. 

 "We..." He rustled the map some more. "Are on the wrong bloody side of the base! This is the front!"

 Alice looked at the base, peering through her own ACOG scope that provided 8X zoom. A truck full of men was being searched vigourously by men in gas-masks. Searchlights swooped over every inch of ground, leaving no place unlit for more then ten seconds. 

 "We'll have to move around, get to the other side." Taco said.

 "No, look, we have patrols all over the perimeter. That's why we had to start so far out."

 "So... What do we do?" Alice said, going over her rifle.

 "We're going to go for it." Redd said, peering down his rifle. "Angel, spot."

 "Got it." This was the first time he had spoke. It was a British accent, and it gave Alice nostalgia of home. London.

 "Alice, I'm taking out the guards, I need you to shoot out the spotlights. Two or three rounds should put em' out for good." Redd said to her as he twiddled a knob on his scope, lining up his shot. "I take out the guard, you take out the light. Once enough are out, we're just gonna go for it, head for that trench."

 Alice saw what he was talking about, a dry moat all around the base, with the occasional makeshift two-by-four bridge overtop.

 "Okay, guy straight across from us. He's by himself, no wind, two-hundred feet."

 "Shot."

 Redd pulled the trigger, and the man slumped backwards. Immediatley, Alice shot out the light with four bullets. No immediate reaction.

 The action was repeated four more times, until there was a large black patch on the ground.

 "Let's rock and roll!"

 The team surged forward, sprinting wildly. Alice pushed past an LSF that was dazed and confused, standing in the dark. She turned around to take him out, but he was already on the ground in a pool of his own fluids.

 The dark mud was now getting dangerously slippery, and as she neared the edge of the trench, her feet slid out from under her and she slid, covering her fatigues, and she went over the edge. She saw a terrifed LSF sitting on a crate, eating a bowl of steaming ramen. At this point, Alice was in midair, and she put a bullet through him. She then hit the other dry wall of the trench hard, and crumpled into a ball. 

 The rest of the team jumped down more conventionally, and Krew helped her up. Alice walked it off, and they moved through the trench, accompanied by yelling from the LSF on the roof who had found the bodies by now, and the thunder.

 There were small clusters of LSF throughout the moat, but they were dispatched of easily. It wasn't until they came to a place where the trench had been widened by about three times as much, and filled with about twenty LSF. Redd told the team to get down with a motion of his hand as they neared the clearing. 

 "Ah... We can't take them all out, we'll have to go back..." Anton said, as he punched the mud he was lying in.

 "No, they're most likely moving up the trench behind us. We've got no choice." Angel said. He snapped the bolt back on his MP5. 

 "Hold up." Redd said. "I hear a radio going up there." He leaned over, and looked at it. "It's stuck on transmit, so any sound from us taking them out, they hear everything."

 "We could shoot it out..." Alice said, offering some real input to the team for the frist time.

 Redd looked at Angel, who nodded behind his mask. Angel double-checked the silencer on his MP5, because if it wasn't properly screwed on, or it had broke from too many snots being fired through it, the team would be compromised and killed.

 Angel leaned over the corner, and squeezed off a few rounds. The sound was quiet, but not silent, and one of the quicker LSF stood up as the useless radio hit the ground.

 "Go hot." Redd said as he pulled his sidearm from his vest and shot into the crowd of LSF. 

 Alice shot in quiet burst, conserving ammo and doing her best to be accurate. She fell three men, who hit the mud hard. Anton had a close scrape with a guy who had a revolver handy, but Krew put a round in his neck. The ambush went on for only a few seconds, but it felt like longer. Alice looked at the bodies, and found one, still squirming in the dark mud. She bent down, for some reason looking at the man's wounds. She saw a bullet hole in his stoumach. The look of fear in his eyes was intoxicating. Alice's heart warmed at the sight of this dying man. She leaned down over him, and whispered into his ear;

 "Everything will be alright. Everything will be alright. Everything will be alright..." At this moment, the silenced barrel of her M1911 was pressed to his temple. She squeezed the trigger, spattering blood all over her face. The warm, red fluid was like candy for her. She bowed her head, a little bit, so that the rest of the team couldn't see her face, and she licked her upper lip, taking in the tin-foil taste of the man she had just murdered.

 She looked up, to see a disgusted Redd keeping his hand on his gun.