Eagles Over Earth
Chapter 8: Cut and Bleed
April 8, 2020
Shenzhen, China
Taking a deep breath of stale air and looking at the city lights speeding by, Michael McNeil dimly wondered how many more breaths he had remaining. Perhaps some hundreds of millions more, perhaps only a few thousand – if not fewer.
After his squad's explosive mission in Hong Kong, GDI intelligence tracked down a Nod cell headquartered in nearby Shenzhen, where their unwelcome visitors had originated from. Having apparently fought aliens as eagerly as XCOM, the Nod group was assumed to be in possession of alien technology and thus authorized for termination.
McNeil's squad, with him, Parnell, Navarro, and Torres, had landed here to find a covert operative, rookie Guo Sun, who'd gone undercover to confirm the Nod cell's location but was compromised during his data transmission. Zhang, their contact from Hong Kong, had volunteered to go instead but was rejected out of hand; he was a wanted man and would surely be hunted down.
In the meanwhile, they could only hope that Guo was still alive, as the last word from him came about an hour ago – taking shelter in a warehouse, armed with only a pistol while being pursued by at least two Nod squads.
Thanks to the possibility of Nod anti-aircraft defenses, the Commander didn't approve the Skyranger landing too close, so they were first dropped off in a distant field and taxied to the site by a masked driver who didn't speak a word. In addition, communications with XCOM HQ would also be kept to a bare minimum. With Nod already on high alert, any long-range communications might tip them off.
As they quickly hopped out and the taxi sped away, McNeil finally felt comfortable enough to speak.
"Parnell, so how was Portland?" he asked, continuing the conversation they had on the Skyranger about an anti-abduction mission in Oregon last week, led by the Russian squad with Parnell in tow. "I heard you destroyed half a neighborhood."
Parnell chuckled. "That's right. I think we improved the property values there."
"Oh? You want to become a realtor now?"
"Why not?" He switched to his best salesman voice. "Buy this fine suburban three bedroom, two bathroom now! Please ignore the crater where the kitchen was. Not included: one kickass XCOM squad and ten dead aliens."
"Good thing later me will get paid more than you," Navarro teased him.
"I don't know what it's like in Spain, but since when were professors paid more than realtors? Or generals?"
Navarro stood her ground. "It's simple. The best ones are."
"Mhm," he said, his voice dropping for an imminent insult. "Except the only way you could get that far is by blowing the best."
"I wouldn't even mind as long as they don't smell like you, Parnell."
"Guys," Torres interrupted, trying not to laugh. "Can we stay focused, please?"
Parnell looked utterly livid but McNeil seconded the proposal and reminded them this was supposed to be a quick mission. With Guo's intel, a larger and more appropriately armed GDI force could eliminate the Nod cell for good. Though the present XCOM squad would have to kill some enemy operatives trying to reach their man.
Reaching a road intersection, deserted and with most of the lights off, McNeil decided to split up the team.
"Navarro, Torres, go high," he ordered, pointing to the tall brick building. On the ground level, several faded signs in Chinese were loosely held together while the rest of the building appeared residential in nature, though every window was shuttered. If anyone lived here, they were smart enough not to attract the XCOM squad's attention – or Nod's.
"We'll stay ground-pounders, huh?" Parnell remarked as the two women took the nearest ladder up and disappeared from sight.
"Hey, I like my feet on solid earth. If you'd seen the air battle in Hong Kong…"
"Mhm, I heard about that, plus your little hand-holding at the end."
"What?" McNeil's left hand buzzed with uncalled-for warmth.
"Nothing. Just… Korba is a talkative guy."
"Okay, I'll shoot him when we get back."
Parnell chuckled and the two pressed forwards to the next street, Navarro and Torres running on the rooftops parallel to them. They were getting closer and closer to the warehouse where Guo was last seen, but McNeil had no idea if Guo was still inside, or even alive. All he did know was that the enemy was all around him.
"Halt!" Torres snapped over short-range radio. "I see something!"
Parnell and McNeil dashed to opposite sides of the street – McNeil sought cover behind an overflowing dumpster, while Parnell went for a large stack of packing crates.
"What is it?" McNeil whispered back.
"There's a Nod squad ahead," Navarro reported. "Are we engaging now?"
"Absolutely." McNeil responded, poking his head of cover to see four silhouettes, idling in the distance. If they were staying still, rather than actively patrolling, McNeil guessed that Guo had to be close.
"You sure?" Navarro asked. "We could stay under cover, and find Guo sooner."
"We're getting into a fight sooner or later. May as well be on our terms."
"Understood."
"What's the squad composition?" McNeil asked next.
"Two riflemen and a machine gunner… a sniper, too."
"Okay. You and Torres, prioritize the sniper. Parnell, can you hit the other three?"
"Well, let's take a look," Parnell said, shouldering his rocket launcher and peeking through its sights. "Yes I can. I'll fire on your mark."
McNeil nodded, taking a deep breath. "Navarro, Torres, are you ready?"
"Yes," both replied.
"Three, two, one, mark!"
Parnell pulled the twin triggers of his launcher, and the high-explosive rocket screeched out and engulfed the Nod group in a fireball. Two streams of automatic rifle fire hosed from above, and Navarro confirmed their kill of the sniper. McNeil began to advance, confident that no one survived their ambush.
But out of the corner of his eye, he realized someone was getting back up.
Incredibly, it was the Nod gunner Parnell had blown up. In seemingly slow motion, the severely bloodied soldier pulled out a rocket launcher of his own and aimed it high, at Navarro and Torres' position. McNeil tried to shout a warning, but his voice was much too slow. The building was riven by a devastating explosion, even as the Nod soldier's weapon and body were torn apart by a fresh burst from Parnell's LMG.
"Navarro! Torres! Are you all right?" McNeil screamed, running towards the smoking crater on the edge.
To his relief, Torres' face appeared. The relief died an instant after.
"McNeil!" she cried out.
"What?" McNeil shouted back, pricking up at Torres' panicked tone.
"Navarro is down! Can you get up here?"
Navarro is down. The words sent a shockwave of acid through him, an afterimage of her face before his eyes as he began to look at the building. The rocket had demolished the nearest ladder, and he doubted any elevator would work after an impact like that.
"I can. Parnell, watch my back."
Taking a deep breath, McNeil grit his teeth, put aside his rifle, and began climbing freehand, using the ledges and a few iron-barred windows for a grip, trying to ignore the pounding pain in his heart. Sometimes his gloves and boots failed to find purchase on the smooth metal surfaces, but he kept his momentum up and did his best to ignore the intense burning in his arms. In moments, he'd ascended all three stories and joined Torres, who was urgently treating their downed comrade. There was so much blood around. McNeil couldn't believe anyone could have this much blood.
"I don't want to die. Don't want to die," Navarro was saying, her eyes darting back and forth. Those eyes that made his heart flutter were now screaming for help where her voice couldn't fully express.
"You won't," Torres replied, but her voice was just as shaky, an emptied XCOM medkit laying a short distance away. McNeil tried to say something too, but it only came off as a mumble – his voice failed at the personal carnage presented in front of him.
"Don't let me die. Don't let me die, please..." Navarro's voice grew weaker.
"Come on, Fran, come on." Torres tried to put on a brave face, but it was steadily cracking. "You'll be okay. Just breathe. McNeil." She turned around. "Get these tourniquets on her arms." Torres handed him two, and he immediately began applying them to her arms, which had been horribly torn apart by shrapnel. They were so damaged he wasn't sure where to put the tourniquets before Torres pointed to below her elbows. He managed to secure one around her left, but when he tried to secure her right, the arm simply came off, leaving an even wider trail of bright blood.
"McNeil…?" Navarro whispered, perhaps not even aware her right arm was missing. "Tell me… I'm not going to die…"
"McNeil, I have contact!" Parnell shouted at full volume. "Another Nod squad!"
Of course their opening ambush had attracted the attention of enemy units. As Parnell's machine gun sounded and rifle fire replied, McNeil was torn between helping Navarro here or Parnell below.
"Torres, can you take care of Navarro?" he asked.
"Just one more thing – please, Fran, just keep breathing – can you deliver another analgesic shot, McNeil?"
McNeil dug through his pack to find one, and messily jabbed Navarro in the left shoulder, sloppier than Torres' frenzied yet through handiwork. With that finished, he sprinted back to the edge of the building, seeing six muzzle flashes at the end of the street, as Parnell held the line with his LMG and ample rude language.
"Come get your tickets to hell!" he was screaming.
McNeil put a single bullet into one of the Nod's soldiers' faceplates, a spurt of dark blood blasting out, then switched his fire to another, who ducked in time from McNeil but then took a burst from Parnell, sending him tumbling down all the same.
"Damn, he's good," McNeil muttered under his breath. The reinforcing Nod squad – well, what was left of it – was completely pinned down against Parnell's machine gun. McNeil reminded himself to bring a smoke grenade or two the next time they engaged Nod, lest the XCOM squad be placed in such an unenviable position. Before McNeil could think of a means to outflank and destroy that squad, a strong beep! of a critical-priority incoming message sounded in his ear.
"Strike One, come in!" the Commander called.
"Yes, sir?!" McNeil responded, his panic rocketing even higher. If the Commander dared to break radio silence, it couldn't mean anything good.
"There's a fresh Nod squad approaching your building from the east. They may climb it directly or take the other rooftops to reach you. Stay alert!"
"Yes, sir!" McNeil hoped he didn't sound as panicked as he really was. They needed to find their operative right away or else the entire Nod cell might arrive. "Parnell, can you hold that squad?" he screamed down.
"I can fucking kill them all! Why?"
"I've got some new friends incoming, up here!"
"Alright! Good luck!"
McNeil darted back and ran towards the opposite side, where on the street, a black minivan screeched to a halt. The side and back doors opened and six men with guns came out, only to flee as McNeil tossed his grenade at them. One of the men stepped towards the grenade rather than away – an act of bravery or idiocy, McNeil couldn't tell – and absorbed most of the blast as the other five scattered behind other structures. With Torres still treating Navarro, McNeil had to cover three sides alone, and needed to determine who would they go for first: him or Parnell?
Perhaps both. McNeil sprinted to his left and caught one of the Nod soldiers clambering up a ladder; three shots to the head and the Nod man was back on earth, not moving a muscle.
"Parnell, check your right!" McNeil hollered next.
"Yeah, I see them!" Parnell shifted his MG over, the resounding tear of his weapon echoing through the street shortly later. "Got two!"
Seizing the moment, the pinned-down Nod squad surged forwards, launching multiple grenades towards Parnell, who wasn't able to fully duck before they went off just in front of his cover. McNeil fired a few more rounds at the moving Nod squad but couldn't come close to the raw firepower of Parnell, and they pressed even closer.
"Parnell, you okay?" he called.
"I'm fine! They just nicked me!"
McNeil would've jumped down to check, but a scream of surprise forced him to halt and turn around. He saw the last two Nod soldiers, on his roof – one of them pressing a bayonet towards Torres' jugular, the other aiming a shotgun at a helpless Navarro. McNeil shot the bayonet-wielder in the neck, but the shotgunner switched his gun towards McNeil. The next blast splintered a skull into two.
McNeil winced as the XCOM covert operative lowered his handgun and wiped away the bits of bone that had landed on his weapon, the Nod soldier falling to his knees, and then onto his bloody stump of a neck.
"Guo? How'd you find us?" McNeil asked.
"I followed the gunfire," Guo simply replied, shooting the other Nod man again.
"Is anyone following you?"
"They were in the car you blew up. I don't think they were any more."
"Okay. Good… Torres!" McNeil snapped his head to their medic, who was starting to get back up. "Are you all right?!"
"I'm okay." She crawled back over to Navarro, painted with fresh blood from the two dead Nod soldiers.
"How is—?"
"Get back to the fight, both of you!" Torres snapped, not turning around. Guo picked up the Nod shotgun and both went to the edge.
The last Nod troops were less than twenty meters from Parnell, who was lying flat on the ground, clutching his machine gun and desperately firing back. He'd be overrun in moments without help. But with Guo and McNeil commanding the height, the Nod squad was suddenly in the most vulnerable position.
Thirty seconds and twenty rounds later, McNeil kept scanning, mindful of any last-minute attacks, but all of the Nod soldiers were dead or too wounded to fight. One of them, lying face-up less than thirty meters away – Guo had put two slugs into his gut – was calling for his mother, in a high pitched whine. Mama, mama, mama…
The cries were horrible and unsettling and for a little moment McNeil wanted to question everything about being a soldier. For all the destruction he had witnessed, and all the people he'd seen killed, nothing had warned him of the simple humanity of the enemy. Aliens never cried, at least not in a language that McNeil understood, and that had made him forget men did. Hearing that soldier die, part of him wanted to crawl back to the mother he'd never known and hear the words that everything would be okay.
Then a machine gun barked and the road went dead quiet.
"Area clear!" Parnell declared, back to his full height and looking up at McNeil and Guo's shocked faces. "What? Thanks for the help, though I told you I'd be fine."
When the two kept staring at Parnell, he rolled his eyes, and only then did McNeil notice sheens of fresh blood all over his face and chest.
"Yeah, I'm a little scratched." Parnell dismissively brushed some of the blood away. "How are Navarro and Torres?"
McNeil turned yet again, only to see Torres crouched over, her hands over her head. When he tried to approach her, the face that turned to him became stamped into his memory: one of pain not of her body but experienced all the worse. And then her voice spoke four words that forever stained the nightmare of this battle.
"I couldn't save her."
McNeil knew what to expect from the funeral, but that didn't make it any easier to bear. First, Francisca Navarro was called forwards three times, and answered with silence three times. Then the Commander, standing in the front of the assembled soldiers and staff, struck her name from the roll, the act a final declaration that she was killed in action. Torres and Guo next brought forwards a GDI battle flag, setting the gold eagle on the steel coffin to be interred at XCOM HQ until their victory. Her family wouldn't be notified of the circumstances of her passing or receive her body; they were simply more secrets to be kept within these halls.
Watching the coffin be lowered into the vault, McNeil tried to hear her voice again, his mind standing in a garden among graves, pink cherry blossoms settling on their armor.
This is a really pretty place, she'd said.
It's prettier now that you're here, he'd replied.
Now, all he had was a profile picture pinned to the memorial wall. Being an official portrait, Navarro's picture had the same stern, neutral expression as Aerts'. It said nothing of her ambitions to become a professor – not a teacher – or her willingness to talk with a thoughtful quote or reasoned assessment about their situation, backed up by ample humor.
Most of the audience left within minutes; Torres stumbled away with glistening tears streaming down her face. McNeil lingered, lost in thought, until Parnell, his face half-covered in bandages, walked up.
"You holding up, McNeil?" Parnell asked. He'd suffered serious blood loss from over a dozen "minor" wounds, but had recovered enough to stand for the funeral.
"I'm fine." McNeil looked away.
"People who are fine never say they're fine." Parnell paused. "I'm… sorry about it all. For what it's worth, I don't think it was your fault."
McNeil didn't answer this time, instead looking up at the picture again, picturing her smile and twinkling eyes. And her final words to him: Tell me I'm not going to die. He hadn't said anything back, too afraid of being a liar to comfort his dying friend.
"Parnell. Do you ever think about the people you kill?"
"Uhh… the people I kill? Like Nod? No. I don't."
"Nothing at all?"
"Nothing at all," Parnell echoed. "They got in my way, and that's all there is to it."
Something in McNeil's heart panged. Empathy he'd never so fully felt suddenly welled, as another human's dying words rushed back: mama, mama, mama…
"Wait," he started. "All those people blown away and you can't spare a thought? Or, shit, that guy who was crying for his mother? You heard him, didn't you? Guo and I could, from up there."
"Oh, I heard him – and I don't care." Parnell's face briefly morphed into a window of shadow that made McNeil jump. "You and I and everyone here can't lose sleep over killing the enemy. They're no different from the aliens. Especially when they kill one of our own. You think Navarro wasn't thinking of her mother when she bled out?"
"I... don't know."
Parnell's voice dropped to a low whisper. "I've read that parents intuitively know what's happening to their kids, even without any official news. I think it's true. When I broke my arms in middle school, my mom reached the hospital before I did. Now that Navarro is dead, believe me, there's only one mother you should even start worrying about. And it isn't some Noddie's."
McNeil kept himself still, trying to make sense while his friend's cold words mixed with his troubled soul. In the space, Parnell decided to offer some parting advice.
"This war isn't over yet McNeil, and there's a lot more killing to do. Make sure we're the ones doing it."
Author's Note: This chapter's title is based on another Tib Sun quote, this time Kane's bastardization of Shakespeare: "if I am cut, do I not bleed?". Other inspiration came from my first time fighting EXALT, when I bunched up three of my soldiers next to a car while an enemy Heavy was still on the field. You can guess what happened next.
Also, I promise to all of you that if (when) I ship-tease again, the couple will last more than one chapter.
Next time, the squad gets to visit Russia. Get ready to re-meet XCOM's latest soldiers as they prepare to stop a terror attack...