Stratagy Game

You revel in the stench of death. It seeps from the clothing, the tent, and most of all your skin. This is your love; you need nothing but this and the grey-brown lifeless environment that stretches for miles and miles. In the sticky sweet sun you hoist your gun, black and shining. You take better care of it then you do yourself. You don't have friends, a woman, or even enemies you love to hate. Instead this gun is everything, it has personality, you live and die with it as you would live and die with any comrade.

Standard issue camo, sure. All of this comes with the part, but you have made it exceptional. Boots, heavy, scuffed with devotion. Instead of a shirt, white Hanes wife beater, grey streaked with desert and sweat stained. If you weren't so terrifying you could be Brad Pitt's next big role. Pants, neat but by no means clean. Dirt is caked around you shins and crusts slowly off, leaving small whirlwinds in your wake. All this is nothing to the maniacal elation in your eye as you level the M16, waiting, watching and waiting.

A month, how long you were calculated to survive out here. Who knows, you have been here a day, a year, perhaps you have died already and your body has yet to notice and stop functioning. Except for killing, you have left your senses safely behind with your humanity. Grey eyes, blue once perhaps, vapid and dessert worn.

The wind flaps at the remains of your tent, now a single piece of nylon stretched across the ground that your crawl beneath at night. Today it bothers you, noise bothers you-gently place the gun on the ground and kick sand maliciously at the sound, burying your shelter without thought of the future. Your hands are cracked and sand now is buried deep in the rivets, your flesh is slowly becoming part of the desert.

Out on the horizon something white, fluttering briefly then disappearing. Nature does not flutter, not out here. Slowly you drop to one knee, cradling your companion. Lying belly down in the sand, your patience has now run out. Waiting, watching, they are fine, but here is Action and you want it now.

Someone is coming this way, someone clad in white, an ironic shroud. Did they know today would be their death-day? The figure must be a great distance away, an ant on the horizon. But they are coming this way at a good clip, running and stumbling across the dunes. A piece of black falls from beneath the white, whips and dances. Hair, you realize. A woman. More like a girl, alone out here in this wasteland. She is half running half dancing to the top of the sand drifts, she pauses now and cloth the white fall from her head. Floating out behind her the white shroud reveals her long hair and uplifted face. Wings, floating behind her, she is free and so very alive.

Too far away for a direct shot, and a direct shot is what is needed. You know she is not a girl, not a human even. A dot to be exterminated before it grows to it's full monster potential. You trust no one, not even Death.

She slips down her small sand wave and spins, face turned upward and eyes closed. Arms out she turns, letting centrifugal force take over her body.

A squint, a tensed finger, and a crack. The spinning ceases and the shape crashes to the ground. The white cloth takes on a life of it's own, no longer a captive of grasping fingers. You don't even pause to think. You know one shot was all it takes, and even if you did the unthinkable and failed to cause death instantaneously, the desert soon would.

Spring up from the sand and grab the only corner of nylon that the wind hasn't completely covered. Your shelter in one hand, gun in the other, stride away from the once human life form and off towards the distance, already thinking about your next opportunity to kill.