"It's a fucking alien alright. Or should that be aliens?"
For O'Neil, it had been a long night, to say the fucking least. Not only had they completely deviated from their objective, but now they were up against, well, fucking aliens. Fucking aliens that could take bullets and slaughter Ranger squads, apparently. This entire situation felt so much like some sort of surreal bad dream that for now he was taking it in stride. Hopefully he'd wake up at some point, and he back at camp, with his nose in someone's armpit hair.
"Some first contact." muttered one of the Canadians.
"Actually," said one of the other Marines, "I have a friend in the LAPD who once told me about..."
"We haven't got time for that now." snapped Charles. "The fact is, we have several hostile beings going around murdering NATO troops. We're going after them, before they kill anyone else. If any one of you fuckers hasn't got the balls, say so now."
Silence.
"Glad to hear that. We can't tell command, so it's lone wolf mode for us now, unless we can meet with anyone else."
"But how do we start?" said one of the SAS squads. "I mean, those fucking things can jump across rooftops and turn invisible. How exactly do we track something like that?"
"They are hunters." mused Hassan suddenly. "It is the only logical explanation for all the carnage they are causing. And to draw out a hunter, you must present worthy prey."
"Enough with the fortune cookie shit and get to the point." snapped Charles.
"We should find an optimal ambush place and wait for them there." said Hassan. "We wounded or killed one of their own. Naturally, they will want revenge, or will want to eliminate us a threat."
"How do we know they won't be preparing to ambush us?" asked Sean.
"That is a chance we have to take."
"If you say they're hunters," said O'Neil, speaking up, "then they'll be heading to the place where they can get the most prey. That would be wherever the worst fighting's taking place in this town."
"And more opportunity to link up with friendlies." mused Charles. "Glad there's at least one motherfucker with his brains still in his head. Alright, assholes, you ready to move?"
"Did you see that? They...they...shot at the demon!"
From behind the front window of a darkened grocer's, Hamidi and the handful of militants who had managed to evade the invisible demons with him watched the infidels fire at what he guessed was one of the demons down the street, one of them manning a machinegun from atop one of their armored vehicles. After a few moments, they ceased fire, looking confused, before they began a conversation of some sorts.
"And the demon did not strike back." mused Hamidi. "Either they killed it, or wounded it enough for it to run away."
"Then more of the demons will come for them!" said one of the other insurgents in panic. "We must kill them, so they will not have a need to return here!"
"Don't be foolish." snapped the soldier to his side. "They have more and better guns than us, including that...a 'Hamveei', I think they call it. We must be patient."
"Patient?" said the first one. "We are being preyed upon by demons! We have infidels crawling all around us! We must act now, or we are doomed!"
"Shut up, or they'll hear us!" snapped Hamidi. The foreign soldiers, including the traitor Afghans with them, were still talking. He wondered just what about.
"Argh!" The panicking militant finally grabbed his Kalashnikov, as the conversation seemingly began to draw to an end. "I'm sorry, brothers! I cannot take it anymore!"
He smashed through the window in front of them with his rifle butt, screaming and crying to himself. Hamidi tried to hold him back, but the man swung at him with his rifle, forcing him to lurch back. He desperately began to scramble for the back of the shop as the man charged towards the foreigners, firing wildly-he was riddled with bullets moments later.
"Stupid fool!" cried Hamidi as he began smashing down a door at the back of the room. Ironically, even now as he tried to hide from them, he had a plan to follow those infidels-they at least had firepower, and he felt safer near that than wandering around with demons on the loose tonight.
Driving through one of the larger streets, beset by sporadic gunfire and mortar strikes, a column of US supply trucks, escorted by Humvees, moved towards where they guessed friendly troops were positioned-even though they could no longer communicate, they still intended to deliver ammunition and supplies to the men holed up here. Anything had to be done to make them last longer.
In the forward Humvee, the drivers kept an eye out for RPGs on the rooftops and car bombs-the Taliban had many nasty tricks when it came to urban warfare, they knew, and they had already had to stop the convoy to push aside roadblocks. Black Hawks also being sent in for supply were being harassed by RPGs, with at least one shot down-it was like fucking Mogadishu all over again, some veteran soldiers mused.
The driver was, however, momentarily confused when three little red dots in a triangular pattern appeared on the windscreen.
The convoy came to a halt seconds later when the Humvee was blown apart by what looked like a pulsing blue bolt, with the truck driver immediately behind it trying to trace where it had come from-he couldn't see anything on the rooftops. To the rear, another explosion flared as the Humvee at the back was also blown apart, hemming the trucks and their remaining escorts in. The drivers and troops with them began to panic-the Taliban surely didn't have anything this powerful, so what had happened? Had they seized anti-vehicle munitions?
All those questions would soon be forgotten as a pair of figures jumped down from the rooftops, having got the convoy just where they wanted.