Blitzkreig

BLITZKREIG


Carl Medrig winced as one of his platoon members’ faces was shredded by shrapnel. The corpse made a soft sucking sound as it hit the marshy ground below.
“Stay low!” Carl roared to the remainder of his squad. He knew they were dead men if air support didn’t arrive soon.
He slapped a fresh clip into his semi-automatic 9mm M-12 Carbine, leapt from behind the log he had been using for cover, and pumped three rounds into a Shak-Dren insurgent. A pink spray spewed up as one of the rounds tore through the terrorist’s neck.
“Captain!” Carl heard a voice calling out to him. He ducked back into cover and glanced at the direction the voice was coming from. It was his brother, Steve. Though he was of a higher rank, Carl had always looked up to his older brother. Carl sprinted over to him.
“Captain, the air support isn’t coming,” Steve said with a sigh. He was holding the squad’s backup GPS phone. The first had been destroyed when Ben, the communication specialist, had had a small run-in with an anti-tank mine.
“The remaining helicopters were taken out, and the bombers have all disappeared. Sir.”
“Damn.” Carl muttered.
“And” Steve added, “There’s been some serious hitches in the Colonel’s plan.”
The Colonel’s plan had been to sweep through terrorist controlled countryside with spy planes and precision bombers first, then send in the all terrain tanks and halftracks, and finally sweep the area with infantry. It was a German technique known as Blitzkrieg.
It was used in WWII by The Third Reich. The colonel used it often. He had hoped this victory would get him General.
“So what went wrong?” Asked Carl. He had to yell over the chattering of a .50 caliber machine gun set up on the ridge opposing the swamp the platoon was stuck in.
“Well, I can’t tell, but…by the reports…” Muttered Steve.
“Spit it out, Private!” Carl shouted.
“We’re losing. Badly. There’s reports and messages flying around about hostile tanks, copters, Humvees, and infantry. Not just a couple of psychos with AKs and car bombs, either. Real troops. Machine guns, grenades, RPGs, flak jackets, the whole works. And by the sounds of it, the rest of the marines are sending a group of Humvees to retrieve-” He stopped.
“What’s wrong Steve?” asked Carl. Steve was staring blankly, concentrating. “Steve!” Carl repeated, louder this time.
“Shhhhh,” Steve whispered. “They stopped firing.”
Carl stuck his head out from cover. The remaining terrorists were staring at the marines. They had their mouths open. One was halfway into reloading, the banana clip held loosely in his hand. That was when Carl realized that they weren’t looking at the squad, they were looking past them. He turned around, shaking. He nearly wet himself when he saw what was trudging through the swamp.



The treads of the massive vehicles were so huge, a person could stand up in the spaces in between. Carl wondered how they were so silent. He saw the huge hinges on the front and understood. They were transports. The monstrous machines must have been one hundred forty feet tall and ninety feet across, with side-mounted cannons. A machine gun turret was mounted on top. Carl counted six of the behemoths total. They stopped twenty feet from him.
The monstrous war machine in the lead opened it’s massive jaws. The inside of the transport contained only one man, who began to walk forward. The steel clappers on his boots clanged each time they hit the floor. It seemed like the only noise in the world.
As the man approached, Carl began to make out his features. He had scraggly black hair with a scarlet cape. He wore no armor, but carried an extremely large gun of some sort on a back holster.
He reached back for the weapon slowly, then suddenly whipped it out and started blasting away. It was an automatic weapon, and he just sprayed the marine position with lead.
Carl jumped over to the other side of the quickly disintegrating log just in time. He heard the screams of his squad mates as the rounds killed them, ripped them to pieces, tore them open…..
He leapt up and began pumping off rounds with his carbine. He stopped when he heard a clicking noise. He realized his clip was empty. He opened his eyes and saw he was firing at only the transports. He whipped around to find the strange man with the gun standing behind him.
“What? How-” he was cut off by the man’s gun crunching against his left temple.


When Carl came to, he was in one of the gargantuan transports, on the floor face up. He felt nothing at first, but once he tried to move pain exploded from his head.
"I see you are awake." A voice nearby said. Carl watched as the man with the red cape came into his line of sight. He wanted to leap up and uppercut the man's chin, then elbow him in the gut and kick out his knees, but he had only enough strenght to move his fingers.
"Wh-wa-where" Carl found it a monumental task just to speak.
"The remainder of your squad is doing just fine, if that's what you were trying to get at." An evil smile crept onto the man's pointy features. "In fact they are doing even better that they were when they were human." A slow, thick laugh began to flow from the man's mouth. It was then that Carl realized that they were not alone. Shadowy figures swam at the edge of his vision, creeping closer.
"Welcome, Carl!" the man began to shout "To the true world! The world that has been kept hidden from you for so long! Welcome to the world of the Vampire!"