Finish the Fiction Story Contest - Week #21

The Border

In the scant shadow of the guardhouse, a greenhorn Border Legionnaire was waiting for the end of his first watch shift, gasping for the heat.

Below him, there was the stretch of sandy desert that the XIX Floating Fortress patrolled incessantly, moving back and forth in the sky like a surreal and phlegmatic cetacean, with the low and incessant buzz of the managems that powered it.

Behind the line of Fortresses, the Lands of Man ideally began. In that marginal strip, there were meager pastures and stretches of scrubby bushes, attacked for miles and miles by a fine sand, like yellowish talcum powder, that made the desert gain extension every year.

"This year the wind has put so much sand down," the marshal told him, biting a gray mustache, one of the last days before the Duty Beginning ceremony. "And behind the sand, the Those arrive".

He was glad he no longer had just a stunner to defend him from the Those, like the guardians of the border in former times, before the Legions. Once, it was thought to direct the Those into reserves to prevent them from doing too much damage with their insatiable hunger, but then they started to run away, to strip the flesh off every head of cattle, to waste fields and orchards, to devour even the people... and more and more came from the desert.

He had been among the first in his leverage class in combat and shooting exercises, but in his heart he was afraid of when he would found himself in front of a real That, and not an illusory image created by the trainers. It took him months to get used to the slouching and snappy movements of those lean and black illusions, all teeth, which he found horrifying.

During that first day of service, however, only an armored convoy had passed, transporting ordered and dull clusters of goleminers to the mysterious and vital mines of managems, on the other side of the desert. The Those did not find goleminers edible, luckily.

The Horn of Danger snatched him cruelly from his thoughts. Intruders in the fortress! How did they get in? How did they pass under our noses?

He grabbed the heavy terminator and ran down the spiral staircase, toward his team's collection point, his heart in his throat.

A scraping noise from a corridor to his right made him stop. Pointing the terminator in the dark, with a trembling grip, he shouted "Who goes there?!?"

The Those came out, completely different from the illusions of the trainers...

My Entry:

The greenhorn Border Legionnaire fired the terminator into the darkness. He heard the squishing sound of lead on flesh and the click of teeth. Then a lean black slouching Those snapped in from under his chin eating the smile from his face. Man down.

It stood over the dying man digesting his jaw and teeth; the tongue actually delicious. He wanted to eat more of this soldier. Not only to feed its hunger. It also wanted revenge for Those brothers shot down.

More Those stood in the corridor looking at him as a leader. They didn’t have a plan. Somehow they’d found their way inside during the movement of large steel creatures. However, they could smell flesh. Somewhat dismayed by the sound of The Horn of Danger it kept moving into the complex looking for more people to feast upon.

More Those followed it through the door and up the stairs. Some of Those ate on the greenhorn Border Legionnaire like an hor’dourve before filing passed into the foyer. There met with sweeter delights of tasty morsels.

The team had met at the collecting point. Everyone made it except the new guy. Women and children were running their way as well. They could hear the terminator, and knew Those would be here soon. And they were. The Border Legionnaire fought their best fight only could not save all the women and children from Those who would wish them harm.

These Border Legionnaire more seasoned with the waves of Those monstrous creatures with chopping teeth. Black snake skin on legs bobbing like a boxer while biting the air. They just didn’t seem to care.

Only these Border Legionnaire did care about law and order on the border of the desert in their hovering XIX Floating Fortress. And so they repelled the hoards of flesh eating goblins with the power of terminators revolving bullets through barrels toward strangers from the otherworld. Mowing them down or mopping them up whatever the metaphor. Only the Border Legionnaire did not eat them, and so the carnage of wasted bodies turned to waste and spoiled fast in the light of two suns.

What God summoned Those creatures to serve its purpose? Just some alien world with a mythology yet to be discovered by Earthlings. In the Milky Way not too far away. Just around the bend in the outer rim. A couple of light years ahead in the spin around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Yes, these Border Legionnaires fought here minutes before this Steemit post got posted. Hot off the press, as a new way of communication has recently been discovered by NASA. These tales from other nearby planets only allowed to be told as pulp fiction as Earth’s population prepares for Martian contact on the big screen. Not the revolution so it can be televised. We are at the forefront of the migration to space consciousness. Don’t worry, they all use Bitcoin here.

Thank you,
Cyrus Emerson

Fear and Loathing in the State of Jefferson
https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B079R5KLPN&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_GsURAbAVDYNEM

Rike Luxx

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