Horror corner

A LONELY MACHINE

Roger glanced around the desert once more. Nothing but the cloudless sky and the sand scattering in the wind, with a few cacti dotted around the landscape. With nothing else to do, he checked his magazine, already knowing how many bullets he had. Full. Adjusting his helmet, Roger sighed and turned back to face Elliot.

“What a waste of time. It’s hot as hell in this uniform. I fucking hate being deployed in the desert. The sand’s more of a threat than anything I’ve seen so far.” Roger picked up a handful of the yellowish dust, letting it slip between his gloved fingers.

“Yeah, if there were any actual threats out here. I can’t remember the last time we actually saw anything.” Elliot replied, staring off into the horizon, his visor dampening the bright sunshine. His heavy boots were sinking slightly into the ground, causing him to constantly have to re-position his feet.

“Me neither. Still, better than just sticking around back at base, getting yelled at by Sergeant Brills.”

Elliot narrowed his eyes. “Hills. Sergeant Hills.”

“Right.”

The sun beat down heavily upon the pair as they moved onward, barely bothering to check their surroundings. The landscape was almost completely flat, not a single incline in sight apart from a cluster of curved dunes lying in the distance.

“Some guys were telling me about out here,” Elliot spoke up.

“What did they say?”

“Eh, it was some weird conspiracy theory kind of story. Allegedly, the army developed some weird cyber-robot thing, trying to make the ultimate soldier. Like in the movies. The thing, they said it was like…like a synth from Fallout. Exposed wires, metal plating. In the shape of a human, right?”

“Yeah, go on.”

“So, they made the frame and the consciousness of the thing, and they wanted to give it emotions as a test before they gave it organs and such, y’know, to try and make it as close to a human as they could, so it would blend in. They also gave it a bunch of special abilities, like superpowers. Nobody knew what kind of powers, but there were a lot of suggestions from everyone. Stuff like laser vision and secret machine guns hidden in its arms.”

"Sounds like a load of shit to me. Soldiers are always making up stuff to entertain themselves.”

“Yeah, but here’s the thing. When they gave it emotions, they went too far. Ended up making it too real. So it didn’t want to fight and stuff, it just wanted a normal life. And before they could disassemble it and start over again, it ran off into the desert. Some of the guys said they saw it the other day, moping around in its metal frame.”

“Heh. Maybe we can catch a glimpse, make this deployment useful. Let’s head over to the dunes, there might be a few targets camping there.”

Nodding, Elliot walked calmly by Roger’s side, noting an increasingly ominous feeling as the dunes moved closer. They were mostly smooth and curvy, with some large chunks of rock scattered around, poking up from the sand. Roger headed up to the top of one of the slopes, staring out across the horizon.

A small opening was poking out from the side of one of the dunes, seeming to lead into a cavern of some sort. Intrigued, Elliot quietly stepped inside, forgetting to report the discovery to Roger in his curiousness.

It took a few seconds of adjustment before Elliot’s eyes could make out anything. The cavern walls were covered in bizarre etchings, stretching out across the ceiling. Strange footprints were etched in the sand where Elliot’s boots lay, not like that of another soldier or animal. Elliot traced his hand across the marks. The longer he looked, the more similar they looked to words or phrases. He could just make one of them out.