Stamp
The Japanese artillery stamped the ground like a child crushing a bug. Rain fell from a gray sky as John Stanford buried his head deep in his foxhole. From where he stood, Dan Masters thought the army olive green made the men look like turtles scattered across an open field, their shells pressed low while the soldiers inside cowered in their holes.
Then, for a moment, the ungodly pounding of artillery stopped, something it had not done all morning.
“For fuck’s sake, men, advance! Move, you pussy-ass maggots, now!” Dan Masters screamed at the top of his lungs. He ripped his pistol from its holster and charged forward, leading his men through the smoking remains of what had once been dense jungle, now blasted into a shattered field of mud, splintered trees, and drifting ash.
He ran through the mud with his pistol raised, boots slamming into craters still steaming from the bombardment. The jungle that once stood thick and green was now a graveyard of shattered trunks and smoking roots. Men stumbled out of their holes behind him, some screaming, some silent, all running because stopping meant dying. Rain mixed with ash and dirt until it ran down their faces like gray tears. Somewhere ahead, a machine gun cracked to life, its sharp bursts tearing through the ruined field and snapping branches like dry bones. Masters did not slow. He only waved his pistol forward and kept running into the smoke.
John cowered in his hole, trying to work up the courage to run, but before he could, a hand grabbed the collar of his fatigues and yanked him to his feet.
“Let’s go, John, now!” Tom yelled. The shout faded into a wet gurgle as bullets ripped through his chest, turning him into a fresh slice of Swiss cheese.
“Oh my fucking God!” John cried. He ran, stumbling through the mud as rain hammered the ground harder than the machine gun had hammered Tom.
His bones ached. At nineteen, he felt sixty. The war had aged him decades in months. He drifted from himself, the screams of dying brothers reduced to a dull murmur in the background.
John burst into the dense jungle where the enemy hid. Branches clawed at him as he pushed forward, breath ragged, heart pounding. Then he stopped abruptly.
Pain.
It surged through him, hot and immediate. He looked down and saw it, his guts spilling out before him.
Ahead, two Japanese machine gunners stared back, the source of the agony tearing through his body. The scene felt unreal, like a horror comic he once read as a boy.
He fell to his knees as gunfire erupted behind him, his comrades cutting the gunners down. Even his sturdy thighs felt like twigs beneath him. He clawed at his stomach, trying to hold himself together, trying to keep life from slipping out through his fingers.
Slowly, everything turned white. His body hit the soggy ground with a dull thud.
He wondered how God saw him. Maybe as a stamp pressed into the jungle, one of hundreds, thousands, each one marking the cost of the message sent upward. A letter written in blood, paid for in lives, to show the pain of the human race.
Life drained from him slowly.
And then the maker was met by a man who wished he had been even half of what he now faced.
The cold ground could not warm a soul that no longer breathed the earth’s air.