"Jesus, girls," Monroe roared, clutching the sides of his shiny grey seat so hard his knuckles turned white, "keep it steady!"
"Shut up, Sergeant," the Captain hissed from the cockpit, then turning to the two women in the cockpit, "are we going to land?"
One of them found time to answer him, "Oh, we'll land alright, that's the easy part!"
Out the back of the shuttle, Caporal Napoleon Ross was praying in french, something he hadn't done since D-Day.
"We don't crash!" The Captain declared with finality, "This thing crashes, I'll hold both of you responsible!"
The second pilot scoffed, but her reply, something about exploding in mid-air, was drowned in the sound of metal falling off their ride.
"Ross, Groulx!" The Captain made his way to the hatch, in the back of the ship, and shook the two shell-shocked troopers sitting on either sides of it, "You boys are on point! 'soon as we hit, you get out there and cover the plane!"
"What's left of it!" Monroe quipped in, earning a hard look.
Both soldiers shook themselves back in combat mode and nodded, accepting the cigarettes their squad leader offered.
Somebody cursed from the front, one of the machine gunners, Jackson, his nose glued to the small glass circle on the left wall, "Captain, check this out! It's the Washington …" he flew in the air and slammed on the floor as the shuttle hit another patch of turbulence, but just scrambled back up to look out the porthole again.
The Captain forced him back in his seat then checked outside. A white spike jutted out of the scorched landscape, towering above most everything and clearly identifying the city as Washington DC, Jackson's birthplace and America's fucking capital.
Which, as mentioned, had been totally bombed to shit at some point in the past.
"Fucking Japs got this far!?" Monroe sounded incredulous, but he always had that lost tone to his voice and they all knew Japan had nothing to do with this, no way in hell they could have just blasted this much shit without them hearing about it.
He watched scorched, hollowed out shells fly by, pretending to be apartment and office buildings, slowly rising to meet the plane he flew in, until they cleared the city, upon which there was nothing to look at but dust and rocks, so he sat down and braced himself.
Near the hatch, Ross armed his BAR and helped adjust Groulx's bayonet under the M1's muzzle, unfazed by the deafening rumble of dust stroking the fuselage.
Groulx held his weapon nose down as they ricocheted off the ground two Devils accidentally discharging their weapons, but none getting thrown off.
Time seemed to slow as they floated in the air, silent screams painted on mostly everyone's face and random items floating around the troop bay. Two smoking shells drifted past the Captain's eyes in an aerial dance, then reality settled back and the shuttle plunged headlong into the dirt, all but Ross and Groulx getting smashed into a tangle mess while the two soldiers crawled out of the twisted wreckage.
To anyone but them, it felt like the plane still moved, but it was quite still, as Ross would find out upon emerging under the cloudy sky. A massive boulder, which, upon further inspection turned out to be a highway pillar, had seen to that.
Just in the time it took him to survey the surrounding plain, the amount of cracks in the concrete tripled. Groulx gave him a weary look, to check if they'd seen the same thing, and found confirmation on his teammate's face.
"Out!" The metis roared to the Devils, "Get out now!"
Both men had been on the frontline for the better part of five years, they knew whistling bullets when they heard them and both sought cover a split second before the rounds actually pinged off the wreckage.
"Contact!" Groulx spat out like a curse, squeezing two rounds into a far away muzzle flash.
Ross also spat a few bursts in the opposite direction, though his target was at just about spitting distance.
"I'll rip you heart and eat your…" The green monstrosity ended up losing its brain over that threat, though it was Monroe and his Springfield that did it.
The sniper raked his rifle's bolt and squeezed off another shot before turning to help his pals squeeze out the deformed hatch.
"I count ten on my side." Ross called in between a burst and a curse.
Groulx fired a grenade before replying, to be certain his number would be accurate, "Sixteen here!"
That these things looked nothing like Nazis and used upsized Tommy guns didn't faze them all that much at this point, not after these little green men who shot blue magma, back in the ship.
000
00
0
Ross yawned and took a hand off the butt of the BAR to wiggle his fingers a bit.
He wasn't a member of the Devil's Brigade and they weren't in southern France, looking to blow up a munitions depot… And he was absolutely not sleep deprived.
"Doing okay, Nape?" Sergeant Monroe whispered, somewhere to the left.
"Osti qu'il fait frette!" Replied the Canadian. He was used to cold weather, of course, but they had been outfitted for Mediterranean weather, which is quite different from what you'll find in the Alpes…
Fortunately, Ross, Groulx and Connor were all experienced hunters and provided the Black Devils with furs to stuff in their uniforms for insulation.
Groulx, especially, was a rare gem; a Canadian-Inuit Metis with a gift for wilderness survival, even by the 1SSFR's standards, who, in the few weeks since deployment, had managed to craft a reliable bow and four arrows for it.
He was out there right now, mapping out enemy territory and looking for small patrols to dispatch in silence.
Monroe and Ross still had an hour left to stand watch, then it would be Bianca and Sophie's turn…
It still felt wrong to both men, even after all this time, to be fighting alongside female soldiers, especially pilots like these two, but the initial plan required someone to fly the escape plane and someone somewhere thought sending WASPs on commando ops sounded like a damn good idea.
Hell, Ross knew better than anyone how it feels to be treated like you're inferior because of bad luck at birth, so did a lot of the boys, but this was beyond just sexism; women can't carry as much, they simply lack the upper body strength, then you have to set up separate sleeping areas, not to mention the awkwardness of huddling together when things get very cold, and these two had never even been trained! Trained U.S. Marines struggled to keep up with the Brigade, how could anyone expect untrained young ladies to actually follow?
Or, well, that was his thoughts at first, and though still partly valid, the last months had been quite educational.
For one, both pilots did keep up, one having been raised in a hunter family, somewhere in the north bloody pole and the other actually being a French resistance member, then, they both ate far less than the gorillas they rode around with, in addition to being quite a bit smaller and harder to spot, which, combined to their perfect vision (That came from being pilots, not women…), earned them the honorary status of designated snipers.
About eighteen steps ahead, the vegetation got really thick, too much for the naked eye to see through. There, between a rock and a pine tree, a large bush shivered. Ross squeezed his left eye shut, finger on the trigger, and drew in a deep breath…
The thing moved again, causing both Monroe and his subordinate to relax. Groulx crouch-walked the distance between the wood and the cave, stopping just a second to nod at the lookouts.
No catches today. Odd, considering how excited the Germans on the radio had seemed, just a few minutes earlier. The thing was quiet now, but it could just be that the Captain got tired of hearing gibberish.
Both men would have loved to go inside and find out, but the watch came first, newbies might have let uriosity get the better of them, but the Devil's Brigade was anything but new, and this particular unit had been on the frontline for nearly a year.
"You reckon something's going on up there?" Monroe whispered, breaking silence protocol for a precious second. Monroe might be a Sarge, he remained a grunt and couldn't resist good old gossip…
Both men looked up just in time to get blinded by a circular halo of pulsing light, floating so close to them they could have spat on it.
"Fucking fritz!" Yelled Monroe before spitting a large blob of mucus in the air.
