Alternate Realities

Choking

Graphic depictions of war and death.

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Rigor has yet to settle in. The surface beneath his feet squishes soft and pliable. He can't breath with his mouth covered, but he can't without it either. His lungs suck the fabric of the flimsy filter onto his tongue with each heaving breath. He tastes ash and bile and smoke.

He cannot run. The bodies aren't even and there is no soil between the limbs for him to find the footing needed to carry him. So he hops from one place to another scarcely scanning for movement before landing his boot onto a thigh or a chest or... something that used to move.

He falls...

... Face to face with the exposed jaw of a soldier still limp under his weight, he jolts back. Hands and feet scrapping and receding away from the death mar of brilliant, white teeth, he comes to a seated position on the lap of a woman with bright red hair and blue eyes still crystal clear and jarringly familial. He steals her last breath out of the air before launching himself in any direction that could mean being away from that place. Away from the death and the blood and the bombs and the strongarm hurtling debris in nonsensical patterns. He is flying until he is slammed back down, but the leg under his chin is stiff and cold and old.

Then he is flying again thinking only of the barracks, only of the safety of the underground depths where the only thing that lingers of the battlefield is the constant smell of putrid decay and the animated corpses that have yet to die.

Beds are tossed to the outer edges and soldiers are busy cleaning gear like a thousand of them didn't just die outside on the soil. But he is not judging them, only himself. Safe and winded and a hundred yards from where he was just a moment before, heaving acid onto the cloth that covers his nose and watching it drip down to his boots. Nothing about the unreal field of death has followed him except the splatter of brown-red on his uniform. He is thankful to have left the memory of his dash between his last scramble and the relative safety of his surroundings far behind him.

If he didn't know better, he would have thought he teleported.