No Man's Land

Chapter 2

        Don't go. It's so early. Don't go. I have to. Please don't go. I have to. Come back to bed. Ten more minutes. Ten more minutes. Ten more minutes.

        His eyes snapped open as the acrid air entered his lungs. Wheezing, like a fish gasping out of water, he shook violently and sucked in the grimy oxygen. Ash. Soot. The taste of fallout and decay permeated his tongue. His breathing slowed to a normal pace as he acclimated to his situation. He still felt numb. He moved his hands across his body quickly, to make sure no piece of himself was left behind. He found himself physically still strapped to the flight chair. Relieved, he began to take in the surroundings. The flight seat sat in the graveyard of a corn field. Scorched stalks of long dead plants, wilted and bent down to the earth, were laid around him for miles in every direction caked in thick layers of ash. They sky was dim and gray. Nothing was around. He was in No Man's Land.

        No Man's Land. A piece of the United States, slain by conflict and burned unceremoniously on a funeral pyre of nuclear fire. A place caught in the middle of a war and removed from existence entirely, caught between forces familiar and alien. He never saw it so up close and personal before. It looked so ugly and dead like innocence taken before its time. He remembered the way the burned earth looked like a rippling, black scab across the heartland. A wound inflicted by brute force only to be cauterized with clumsy hands. He never thought he would ever actually see first-hand the true cost of the war. He clasped his hands around the restraints that kept him bound, unlatching the buckle on his chest. Upon freeing himself he stumbled on the loose, blackened soil.

        "Shit," he said to himself nervously. The full weight of his situation started piling itself upon his mind. He was in a warzone. He was alone. He was lost. No amount of training could prepare him for this. It was a graveyard where man was bound to die. Attempting to brush his anxieties aside, he focused his mind. Survival he thought. I need to stay alive. I need to get home. I must return. Throwing down his flight helmet, he walked uneasily to the back of the flight seat. Removing the tethers and cables of the parachute, which preceded to be blown away from him by the warm wind, he unlatched a crash survival kit from the chair's backing. He held the padded green box, tearing it open to take inventory. Two bottles of water. An MRE. A flashlight with a spare battery. A small first aid kit containing: aspirin, a roll of gauze, and small adhesive bandages. A flare gun and three flares. Barely enough provision. He put his hand on the side of his hip. Latched onto the belt of his flight suit, he removed the standard issue 9mm, examining it for damage. He removed the clip with a quickness, inspecting, and sliding it back into the butt. One clip. One clip was all he had in this cruel world. He reached around to the other side of his hip. His combat knife was still in place.

        In the distance, he could see steady wafts of black smoke drifting high into the air. That had to be his plane. He thought to himself that it would be a good idea to go to the crash site and examine the damage and see if the radio had survived the fall, however unlikely it would be. As he started to move in direction of the crash he stopped himself. He noticed the silence of the land with only the wind making the occasional whisper past his ear. Not a good idea, he thought. The noise and smoke set against the silence. Scavengers. Human or not, would be attracted. He had heard the stories of what remained here. He turned in the opposite direction and began walking.

        The asphalt of the highway was cracked and broken apart like peeling, dry paint, creating an awkward and uneven terrain. He had been walking for what seemed like an eternity. His feet occasionally stumbled over the small canyons in the pavement causing blisters to form and pop with great pain under his rhythmic steps. He moved despite his body's exhaustion. Will, the need to return, drove him. East, he thought, he needs to keep traveling east. He had not seen a road sign in a long time but the highway did not change direction. He was still traveling east. His bones ached and his clothes were bathed in the filth of sweat and spent adrenaline. For miles all he had thought about was rest. He passed a few small houses and establishments that peppered the highway but the back of his mind gnawed at him. It spoke to him, urging his rigid muscles to move despite their pain. Human will was a hard beast to break. The sky was quickly dimming. The slim pains of light that pierced the ash gray clouds began to grow thinner. He realized that to travel at night would be foolish. He would have no visibility, no way of seeing any approaching danger. His senses were still recovering from the whiplash of his ordeal. He would be dead for sure. Will destroyed by fear. In the distance, about two miles he judged, a town gripped itself like a stiff, dead hand around the highway. He could observe the faint outline of a gas station, old farm houses, and even the cross of a ruined abandoned church jutting just above the skyline.