The Army. What a retard move.

The TV and Internet ads always made it seem like a noble job: Unsung heroes marching through uncharted lands in pursuit of protecting ‘The Free World.’ Boomers always talk about it like it’s just an unsightly shortcut to a prosperous life as if it sets you up with skills you can immediately bring back home, and everybody will want to hire you. They’re damn wrong.

I’d never felt more capable— no, willing to tear the head from a small child than during a minor disagreement with my bunkmate during basic training. Roid rage was real, and everyone had it. The world’s premier fighting force doesn’t come with a population the size of a small country without something being swept under the media’s rug— of course, performance enhancers were the norm. There was an Article 15 disciplinary form written up because a particularly enormous dinosaur bent the plate steel door of an armored vehicle like it was wet clay. The 91B Mechanic First Sergeant who watched him do it was molten with rage; I prepared for the concrete to be drenched with blood in a similar fashion to the few other fights I had witnessed.

The Army doesn’t teach you duty, respect, honor, integrity, or any of that shit. The Army teaches you aggression. I didn’t plan for that, so I was along for the fucking ride.

Basic training was ten weeks of trying to stay alive while wishing I was dead. The consequences for quitting were worse than death— the drill sergeants ensured that. I was the only human in my company, apparently intentionally, to ‘better integrate with the dinos.’ All it got me was a unit I could never trust— the meteor dodgers in my team consistently conspired against me in every way they could, earning me verbal and literal beatings from the drill sergeants, who ate it up. They probably even knew it was all bogus. I was unfortunate enough to learn that humans can survive a gut punch from an eleven-foot-tall, seven-hundred-pound Therizinosaurus with no permanent injury— or so medical told me.

The only part I actually enjoyed was the weapons training. We were assigned weapons primarily by weight class: Humans and smaller dinos near my weight were issued an H&K M110A1 in 7.62x51. You can’t have enough firepower for meteor dodgers, I guess. Most of the heavier dinos got AR-10s in 30-06, and some of the brutes got short-barrelled Barrett M82s or even Browning M2s. Nice, light M4s in 5.56 were only for the tiniest dinos, usually females, microraptors, or both. Fuckin’ barrack bunnies. It amazed me that they weren’t pregnant and discharged before rifle qual rolled around.

I was happy with my weapon despite the paint job being worn so harshly that it was apparent we weren’t even close to the first group to have been issued the guns since they were made. My rifle served me well, and I appreciated it for the superior ‘government cash’ construction and the ‘forbidden switch’ I had always heard so much about.

Our childlike glee for our new toys didn’t last long. We shot, we missed, we got beat, and we carried the weapons with us on hikes of such insane distances that one raptor of my company had to be emphatically talked out of drilling into the barrel shroud of his rifle with a Dremel just to shave some weight off the thing. I loved and appreciated my rifle, but after a 20-mile ruck march, I did not feel bad about dropping it straight into the dirt, followed by my ruck, then myself.

Throwing grenades was a’ight.

Graduation was… cold. I didn’t graduate because of my team; I graduated despite them. No one visited me during the ceremony. I wasn’t surprised; the Army only invited blood and legal family, no friends. I thought about writing to Lucy, but I decided against it. I really missed her, but it was better she didn’t stop what she was doing to come see me. Something felt wrong about what we had— not morally, but there was something that needed to happen that I couldn’t see. I hoped she was doing well.

I loaded straight into the bus and kept my eyes front, ignoring my backstabbing scum of a team who cried over the shoulders of their loved ones on the pavement outside. The bus driver gave me an odd look for being the only one on board, but I didn’t return his gaze. I fought harder than anyone else to get where I was; I didn’t need to take shit from him.

Things began to look up once I got to my job training: 46R, Public Affairs Broadcast Specialist. I hoped it would mean being a fancy shitposter, and it almost was— just a little more boring. There was a human in my office from another company, so I didn’t see him much besides in training and at work. Still, I was fortunate enough to be placed in a bunk with one of the few dinos I would come to trust: A miniature Carnotaurus, Corporal Klepp. He was the team leader in the unit I ended up residing in: 10th Mountain Division, Third Battalion, Charlie Company, First Platoon, First Squad, Bravo Team. Thankfully, Klepp was in charge of remembering all that, not me, so I didn’t have to keep track of all that organizational soup. Klepp was a much more relaxed leader than the others I had met before, including the ones at my job. He left us to our devices for the most part but would try his best to reign us in before we got ourselves into real trouble.

“Too many of these guys take their jobs so seriously, man,” he told me one night as we sat on the balcony of our barrack room. “Like they’re supposed to be God over their Joes.”

“Isn’t that what the Army does?” I asked.

“I mean— sometimes… Look; bad people get into the wrong positions for the wrong reasons sometimes. They do it for the raise, or the status, or whatever, and the only way they figure out how to lead their people is with fear, because they don’t really give a shit. But in the Army, that works, so they get promoted. But when they go home, their families are terrified of them.”

I pulled a carton of cigarettes from my pocket, and he quickly cut off his speech to comment.

“Those things’ll kill you, man. Life’s meant to last.”

I shamefully tucked the cigarettes back into my pocket, and he began his speech again.

“You’re supposed to lead people with trust, and trust is different from fear. It gets you farther. People do things you say, but they can also enjoy themselves when you’re around. It’s a different sort of connection, y’know?”

I nodded, trying to relate from my position at the bottom of the totem pole.

“Pay attention to the leaders you see, Anon. I’ll never be a General, but you may be in my shoes one of these days. I hear what they say about ‘skinnies’ as much as the next guy, but the nice thing about the Army is that looks don’t mean shit. Pick who you’re gonna learn from early on. I’ll do my best for ya, but just know I’ll still fuck up sometimes. Do better than me.”

He was the only one on our team besides my battle buddy who addressed me on a first-name basis. I was Anon to him, and he was Klepp to me. He told me I could call him Spencer as long as the brass didn’t see, but it would’ve felt weird to be so casual with my boss.

I didn’t want to be a leader; I just had to remember names, and that was hard enough: The first I learned after Klepp’s was of our automatic rifleman and my battle buddy, one Specialist Denver. I only called him Denver once or twice before his nickname took over for our whole team: Goose. Why the nickname, one may wonder? He was a brontosaurus standing ten feet tall, and three or four of those were all neck. He tolerated the name well enough, and no one bothered to ask. He was my battle buddy, which meant that he and I were joined at the hip on every exercise we did. In the meantime, he was a troublemaker, and I was his unwilling and often unwitting accomplice; we got along swimmingly.

I wasn’t around the other two team members nearly as much as Klepp and Goose, but their names were Olson and Rodriguez. Specialist Olson was a stegosaurus standing barely taller than me. He was the second in command of the team, which mostly meant he’d pick up the radio if Klepp went down, so he had to learn all that organizational soup. It also meant that if it came down to it, we’d have to follow his orders, and he didn’t let us forget that. He tended to get upset when his sliver of seniority wasn’t recognized as if he were an officer, so I managed to keep my distance from him. The other guys would shrug him off, but after the incident with the therizino, I didn’t want to risk another near-death experience because of my human fragility.

As for Rodriguez… oh, Rodriguez… He was our token Mexican ankylo, the biggest on our team besides Goose, so as the story often goes, his ego was the second smallest. Nobody made us laugh harder than him. If we needed someone to take point when we raided the other teams’ barracks in our underwear, plate carriers, and broomstick rifles, it was him. And he sold it. The whole room could laugh, and he would still be in character. Whenever anyone circumstantially brought up anything relating to Mexico, especially if they didn’t know him well, he’d butt in and pretend to be offended, talking them further and further into their corner and building the ultimate case about what a racist bigot they are. His charade never lasted long after a while because we all knew about it and would blow his cover by laughing too early.

I worked with Klepp and the rest of Bravo during training exercises— combat-related stuff we trained and kept up to speed on in case we were deployed, which was regarded with an air of fear. Most of the new blood, like me, were scared of being deployed and worried themselves about it. The guys who had already been deployed once or twice treated it like a superstition, not allowing any enlisted to speak of it in their presence— like they’d jinx it. The more grizzled guys, though, treated it like a grim inevitability. We would be deployed, then deployed again, for we existed to be meat for the meat grinder and nothing more.

And as they predicted, so it was.

The plane ride over the Atlantic was dark and silent. The air hung heavy with dread, broken only by the muffled sobs of the dinos who understood where we were going. I would’ve thought less of them for such a thing on any typical day in any other part of the world, but I didn’t that day. They didn’t fear for their own lives— they feared for their loved ones, and for the first time, I did too. We weren’t heading to Japan, Germany, India, England, or some other happy tourist trip; we were heading for the Middle East. Ramadi fucking Iraq, still torn in half by an impossible war gone unresolved for longer than some of us have been alive. There was no worse dangerous place to be deployed to than there. The grizzled men back in the States weren’t apathetic because they were unafraid, but because after the deaths of their friends in that very place, there was nothing left for them to lose. When these men looked at us, they didn’t see us; their vision was overcast by flashes of the Hell they had come back from and were now returning to again. Some even seemed to enjoy it— they had become accustomed to fighting for every living minute, so the safety of American soil made them woefully uncomfortable. Iraq felt more like home to them because, at least in Iraq, sometimes their paranoia was right.

If I wasn’t already regretting joining the Army, I sure was now; I told Lucy I wouldn’t be doing anything dangerous, but then there I was: Just another infantryman going into the heat of the forge. Focus, Anon, I thought. I needed to keep a clear head. I’d be fine. Keep my head down, don’t be a hero, wait out the deployment, and get home. Maybe next time, I’d be deployed to somewhere nicer than here. I tried to imagine the struggles Lucy battled in a world that no longer existed. What is she up to? I wondered on the plane. Hopefully, making friends, improving herself, keeping her promise. The few people I brought her up to were convinced she was at home getting railed by the Jodys. Such was life in the service, but I still clung to that memory.

“College, or the service,” I heard my dad’s ultimatum again. He didn’t care which.

My grades weren’t good enough to get into college, and I wouldn’t want to study anything there anyway, but there must’ve been another option than this. Maybe floating as a homeless bum for a while would’ve worked out. After getting to know the Army, Lucy’s dad didn’t seem all that bad anymore. Maybe he would’ve let me couch surf if I asked nicely. Whatever happened, there was no way I would enlist again after this contract.

These thoughts, among many others, occupied the 15-hour flight across the globe. Some men got to sleep, but I didn’t. I took inventory of my life and looked back on everything I had done before I enlisted. What was my life? I wondered if I had done anything worthwhile, anything notable or significant. Hell, even anything good for anyone. I knew it was an unproductive train of thought, but I wondered: What would be my mark on the world if I didn’t return home? The grim conclusion didn’t escape me: I had lived a life of utter fucking inconsequence. So I cried, too. And the men around me understood.

After an eternity of being processed by the air base in our new shithole away from home, we embarked on a journey in vehicles that rattled so violently I couldn’t hear myself think over the sound of my teeth clattering together. They were Humvees. The control panel of the vehicle’s radio jiggled loosely, barely hanging from its frame. The vics looked like necromantic 91B engineers had raised them from sandy graves. The heat, though, was something new to us. Most military vehicles had air conditioning, except for the one my lucky team and I landed in. Bickering turned to bitter acceptance as we realized there would be no reprieve from the baking heat that compounded inside the walls of armored steel. The windows were immovable, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The wind was hot enough to sting our faces; we were better off leaving them closed.

Several hours of heat-induced semiconsciousness later, we arrived at our new home: a Combat Operations Post named Muhit. The locals named it; it was some Arabic word for house or something. Clearly, nothing had been planned out as well as it should’ve been. The post was far too spacious for the number of men that arrived with us. We were only half a platoon— the other platoons that made up Charlie company either remained at the air base or were dispatched to different locations around the Al-Anbar province. The second half of our platoon was still either going through Advanced Individual Training or teaching it back stateside. We cleaned up most of the empty post until nightfall and topped off the dirt-filled HESCO barriers that had been robbed of some of their loose earth by the raging overnight winds.

A few weeks passed, and some solace from the scorching sun came: The night. They got longer as winter crept in, and they turned colder and colder. By day, our squad had been making tiny presence patrols, only daring to mark our territory along the roads that connected us to small villages and crossings. Our base was woefully undermanned, so we couldn’t execute offensives or any greater efforts without exposing the base. The plus side was that we got shot at a little less, but because we weren’t going out of our base a lot, the enemy took notice. We could sometimes see them watching us with binoculars through the hills— we figured it was only a matter of time before they launched an attack that would wipe us out. I paid meticulous attention to the mounted machine guns in the watch towers for this purpose. If we were going down, we should take some of them with us.

The small patrols we did conduct never really accomplished anything because we didn’t dare to enter villages or towns. We secured roads here and there, ensuring we still had the means to connect to the “outside world” and our sister base, COP Jahim. They were a tiny airstrip with a dirt runway, so they were small but essential. One of our duties at COP Muhit was to mutually support them and run as a quick-reaction force, or QRF, if they get attacked. We had only had to do it once while undermanned; it was a puny effort that might’ve proven inconsequential had the call not been a false alarm: A jumpy officer freshly deployed at Jahim thought he saw a hostile armored vehicle. It was a rock, seven hundred meters away, and he didn’t have binoculars. Ridiculous.

Every outing, though, without fail, rendered getting shot at or attacked in some capacity. There was a main service road that we called Route Missouri that we would often take during our patrols. None of us knew why it was called that, as it had been named before our time there, but we knew it well; we couldn’t drive down Route Missouri without getting shot at, and usually, there would be an IED or two. The Iraqi lizards were pretty poor in their engineering skill and even worse in their marksmanship, but it didn’t make the danger any less real. Death lurked behind every corner; we all knew it would take one lucky shot, and our beloved Goose would be done for, then the rest of us would follow. Such was a routine we had come to accept: another day, another chance to die. There was no “laying low” in Iraq, and our lives back home were no more. We adopted an understanding that there would be the now, the combat of the near future, and then probably death. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a few weeks. So, for many of us, there came a certain blissful acceptance. An inexplicable, unique, but somehow beautiful phenomenon takes place when a group of forty to fifty combat-trained men accept their deaths. Without regard for their own futures but intensely passionate for each other’s well-being in the short term. It was the only thing that was real to us. It’s through this phenomenon, I’ve learned, that the most lethal fighting force in the world is born— and lethal is what we were.

Klepp finally gave us some good news: More people were on the way. The remainder of our platoon was finished stateside and flying over in the next few days. Two squads of personnel, each containing four teams of five or six. It would more than double our manpower, and we were getting a second medic out of the deal, too. Morale to do the everyday shit nosedived— we all wanted to do nothing but hunker down and wait for our friends to join us, myself included. I knew there probably wouldn’t be any humans joining us, but the hope that there might be at least one was exciting. The only other human at the time was the Platoon leader, Captain Foster. He’s a young dude, shorter than me. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much camaraderie to be had between an E-3 and an O-3: fancy numbers that mean the man makes in a month what I make in a year.

“Anon,” I heard. My attention was grabbed by Klepp, the only one besides Goose who used my first name out here. To everyone else, I was “Mouse,” a classic mispronunciation of my last name that, fittingly, reminded me how much smaller I was than everyone else.

“Yes,” I said reflexively as I looked up from my spiral notebook, chock-full of lettering, with my cheap ballpoint pen clenched between my fingers. I saw a familiar carno face hanging inside the entrance to my team’s bunk tent. He met my eyes and smiled a very intentional, devious, toothy smile.

“Fresh meat.”

I matched his smile as I dropped my notebook and writing utensil onto my cot and stood up, ready to brave into the scorching midday sun. Journaling was a pastime I didn’t expect to pick up, but it had been surprisingly therapeutic. Just had to make sure I didn’t write any sadsack shit in it, lest I look like a pussy to whoever has to go through my stuff when I go home in a body bag. I pitied them already. Having successfully roused me, Klepp conclusively pat the inside of the tent’s wall and walked off.

I lowered my Croakley’s over my eyes and picked up my helmet, lazily dropping it over my head without bothering to clasp the strap. Stepping into the sand, the hostile heat immediately began piercing my boots. I didn’t waste time— I marched with purpose toward the entrance to the facility. Rounding the corner of the admin tent, I was just in time to catch the crowd of our few squads greeting the late deployers. Their plate carriers rose and jutted from their chests as they straightened their backs and stretched their arms— and wings and tails, respectively. I watched a raptor with jet-black scales and feathers shake his head to wake himself up before walking around to the back of his vehicle. He pretended not to notice us gawkers as he unclipped the tarp covering the back of the crates in the back of the Humvee to release the containers to the unloaders.

I spotted a unique patch on the arm of one shorter dino that read: The louder you scream, the faster we come! With it was pictured a provocative dino woman in skimpy clothes with a red cross emblazoned on her helmet. So this is the medic, I chuckled to myself. I scrutinized the soldier from afar, noticing a large-backed purple head and four horns protruding from their helmet. Shit. Something screamed at me that I recognized this dino. It couldn’t be…

But it was.

Sensing my gaze, the soldier turned around and locked eyes with me immediately.

“Trish,” I whispered under my breath. I froze under her gaze, dumbfounded, wearing only my ACH helmet, sunglasses, and tee-shirt uniform. I watched her watch me, and then her gaze dropped to the dirt between us. She sighed, and her face sank. Turning around, she resumed work, picked up one side of a large green crate, and began to haul it away with her assistant. Fuck, Trish, what are you doing here? There’s no way it’s really you. She… She would’ve done something— reacted somehow, right?

“Yo, Mouse, you awake?” My eyes fixed on my battle buddy, Goose, looking at me expectantly. “Help out, man.” He gestured to a crate at his feet. I noticed the chaotic but organized flow of dinos unloading large green crates from the backs of the vehicles and carrying them to either the armory or the medical building, depending on their markings.

“Yeah, rog’,” I said, jogging over to meet him and take up the other side of the box he held onto; no doubt more ammunition for his prized M2 heavy machine gun. The trigga would have to wait.

“Dude, I’ve been short for weeks, man. Fuckin’ low on this, low on that— I’ve only got four belts of fifty for mine; the other guys used more. It’s about damn time we get some more ammo, and this crate right here? I’m putting it in my special spot, man. Bravo team exclusive, hooah?” The dark green dino was almost as wide as a civilian truck— one of those comically small European ones for our lesser-endowed brethren across the pond. He lifted half of the colossal ammo box effortlessly with one arm three feet off the ground, and I heaved with all my might and got the box a few inches above the dirt. This was enough, and I began to waddle along as he guided our path.

I rewarded his ‘hooah’ with one of my own, though it was more a product of exertion than chatter. He continued his rambling as we moved the crate: “Irresponsible bastards don’t know how to use less ammo, so they run out— of course they do. They want to shred walls like they’re fuckin’ terminators, but we can’t do that! There are civvies out here, man; IEDs and shit. Trigger-happy bullet sponges are gonna get the rest of us Article Fifteen’d or killed. So here’s the plan, Mouse,” he went on. I really enjoyed being on a team with Goose. His mouth was a bit of a loose cannon, but he was in it for us. I went along with most of his schemes, and he seemed to view me as his little partner in crime. Despite being tall for a human, I certainly was little with him around.

“... We’re gonna put this crate in a neat little spot, yeah? Scratch it up, make it look like it’s not ammo, and it’ll be just for me. I’ll spare the other guys a belt here and there, but as long as they’re low!” He dropped his side of the box after I dropped mine, and with a grunt, he loudly slid it against the wall. “They’ll learn to fuckin’ behave a little.”

He unbuckled the clips on three sides of the container and popped the lid, revealing the foggy brass of mil-spec .50BMG ammunition already loaded into belts. He reached a colossal hand into the case and slowly pulled one of the belts off from the top of the pile. The rounds made a delightful clinking noise as they rubbed against one another, muted by the belts that held them in line. Goose lifted the giant ammunition to his eye level and inspected it with a loving grin.

“Foster!” A new voice startled us from outside the armory; we didn’t recognize it. Goose dropped the belt back into the case and let the lid fall loudly atop the ammunition a split second before the canvas tarp partition to our section of the armory was pulled open, pouring bright light across the guiltiest-possible-looking scene: Two lower enlisted, alone, with a shit ton of ammunition. The light revealed the silhouette of a dark-skinned raptor, about my height, in full kit— one of the late deployers. His rank insignia was hardly visible, but it definitely had more than two echelons. We were screwed.

“Where the fuck is Foster? You guys seen him?” He asked us with a raspy but well-enunciated reptilian voice.

“Admin tent, Staff Sergeant,” Goose replied dutifully— probably lying.

The raptor sighed: “If you see him, tell him to get on thirty.” He made to leave but then paused to examine our circumstances. I watched in terror as his bright orange eyes flickered between Goose and me, then squinted in accusation.

“No more gay shit. Don’t try me.” He quickly stepped out of the entrance, letting the heavy canvas flap behind him. “Fuckin’ sauropods,” I heard him mutter as he left.

What the fuck.

“Not a fucking word,” Goose said grumbly.

Memory unlocked: Back stateside, he only ever got in one fight. A particularly fruity ptero mortarman invited Goose to “come to his bunk and show him what that neck does.” Such was a common insult for him, but this particular soldier, some guy named Kevin, made a wildly miscalculated but very serious inquiry. The fight was over before it began, but the beating didn’t end until Goose was removed by force. We never knew if the bird recovered before we deployed, but we didn’t hear anything else, so everyone assumed Goose was in the clear. We didn’t condone what he did, but we all silently understood.

“Who knew racial profiling would save the day?” I offered in condolence.

The bronto huffed in frustration: “Can’t say I’m happy about it, but it is better than the alternative.”

We began our walk back to the convoy, where the commotion had settled. The platoon commander, Captain Foster, had called a briefing. At least, we assumed he did because everyone was shuffling toward the admin tent. We’d need some orientation with all the new blood afoot.

“What do you make of the newbies?” I asked Goose on our stroll towards the gathering area.

“‘Sides that one Staffy, I dunno. He’s alright, though; something tells me he knew we were up to some shit and chose to play it off.”

“You catch his name?”

“Nah. Can’t miss him, though. Black raptor, tall as you. ‘Sure there ain’t many like him here.”

“Hmm,” I concluded as we approached the crowd and fell in towards the rear. Almost on cue, Captain Foster jumped up the stairs onto the small stage. The formation straightened up into parade rest as he approached the center.

He stopped, looking over us, and paused before giving his “at ease.” The pause was a hallmark of a new officer— enjoying his authority. We relaxed, and the bulk of the troops in the center took their seats. Goose and I were late, so we stood around the outskirts of the formation alongside the others who didn’t get chairs, and we watched.

Foster began his speech, welcoming the two squads that had joined us, laying out the plan for the barracks, the watch rotations, and other administrative duties, most of which was a big “To Be Determined” for the squad leaders to hash out. I looked over the crowd, sizing up the new arrivals. All shapes and sizes, but I was looking for humans. I thought I spotted one, but it was just a herbie dino with a fine scale pattern and a humanoid coloration.

In the crowd’s front row, I spotted the black raptor that Goose seemed to have a hankerin’ for. His eyes sat on the flanks of his large head, but he kept them locked forward on Foster during his speech, no doubt wanting to signal others to do the same. The miniature soldier to his right turned back to look at others in the crowd, and again, I saw Trish’s purple face. Jesus, I must be fucking hallucinating. I’d almost rather have seen a haji sitting up there with them. I rubbed my temples with my left thumb and fingers, trying to play off the dump of adrenaline I was feeling; then, I looked back up to see the soldier facing forward— their neck still a dark purple. Foster’s speech droned on, and I felt a nudge from Goose on my left. I diverted my eyes to his direction and saw a canteen in his massive hand turned to my direction in offering. I surreptitiously accepted it, still pretending to pay attention to the speech, and drank some of the deliciously lukewarm water inside.

The speech agonized on, addended by an excruciatingly long questions segment filled mainly by the privates from the late deployer squads. Stupid question after stupid question; Foster kept entertaining them. He seemed to enjoy being on stage. His boots were still shiny.

“Captain,” came a voice from the front row. It was the raptor. He subtly tapped his wristwatch with his claw, and the officer nodded hastily. Foster concluded the briefing with barely enough time for us to head over to the chow hall.

“You seein’ ghosts, man?” Goose asked. “You looked fuckin’ whacked back there.”

I chuckled, “yeah, guess so. I’ve made enough of ’em, haven’t I? It’s about time I start meetin’ ’em.”

‘Confirmed kills’ wasn’t something I expected would be part of my resume when I got home, and it didn’t feel too great. I’d rather have been a cook.

Goose stopped. “Hey, man…” He got my attention and took a knee, craning his neck to put himself at eye level with me. “If you’re actually seein’ shit, you need to get checked.”

“Nah, man, I’m-”

“I’m serious.” He looked at me wide-eyed. “The desert ain’t exactly our natural habitat. I had to get checked for heat stroke a week back. Felt like I was losing my balance standing still.”

“...Alright,” I relented. “I’ll check with Holliday; tell him what’s up. I’m sure it’s nothing, man.”

Goose patted my shoulder forcefully and stood, “hey man, better nothing than something.” Yeah, his pseudo-intellectual ass would say something like that.

Holliday was our medic. We called him Doc at first, then he got caught saying a retarded-ass line like “never tell me the odds” or something, so we called him Doc Holliday. After the gambler? We thought it was funny. I didn’t know his real name, but he responded to whatever.

I arose early in the morning, finally relieved from night watch by some fresh meat, and dressed to head to the medical building. It was cold as balls in the mornings before sunrise. I carefully slid my uniform over my underclothes, leaving the top unzipped until I was outside. My nightcap silently wrapped over my smooth head, protecting my ears from the winter desert’s cold. I pulled the zipper of the barrack entryway slowly to avoid making noise— all it did was make a lower-pitched noise and take longer. I felt cold air wash into the barrack and hurriedly stepped out to limit the heat loss, zipping up faster this time.

Making my way under the LED lights, I walked towards the medical building, keeping my hands tight to my chest under my arms. My breath fogged impressively in the cold. I came upon the medical building and saw its lights were on; climbing the few stairs to its elevated floor, I entered the structure and poked around, listening for any sign of occupancy.

“Holliday?” I asked.

“Jesus, man!” A sharp voice came from around the corner. “You scared the hell outta me,” I saw the pale blue parasaur emerge in his loose uniform and a nightcap, clutching his paper coffee cup with two hands. His large plastic glasses accentuated his sullen face. Holliday was a younger guy, kind of a wuss for everything besides medical. Blood and guts were his playground, but if bullets came in, he vanished— as any good medic should, I say. “Mous? It’s early as shit, dude, you okay? Can’t sleep?”

“Nah, Doc, it’s nothin’. Just… might be seeing things, I guess.”

“Seeing things, huh? Well, I’ll be damned. Nobody told me we had a prophet on the base.” I chuckled at his joke, relieved that he wasn’t taking my problems too seriously. Half of a good doctor’s job is making people feel better on the inside, too, and even though I didn’t know Holliday too well, he was someone you just felt safer around. “So what do you see, private? Tell me your revelations,” he said, gesturing to a chair. I sat in it as he retrieved a thermometer from the wall and handed it to me. I held it against my forehead.

“You’re gonna laugh, but… When the late deployers arrived yesterday, I thought I recognized one.”

“Oh yeah? Where from?” The thermometer beeped, and he took it back from me, sipping his coffee as he read the screen.

“High school. Some girl who hated my guts.”

He swallowed his sip of coffee before he could respond. “Interesting. You have the hots for her?” He returned to the counter and set down his coffee, retrieving a sterilizing wipe and beginning to rub the thermometer probe.

“Nah; I mean, she was hot, but I was scared of her back then. Ended up getting with her best friend.”

“That’s always fun,” he said. “You were scared of her, you say… Do you think this might be a manifestation of stress? Have you been sleeping well? Drinking water?”

“Yeah. Enough, anyway. I’ve felt fine. As fine as someone can feel out here, you know.”

“Yeah, buddy, I know it. Fuckin’ heat gets to just about everybody here but the lizards. This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with hallucinations. You’re not on the brink of death, though.”

I chuckled. “Always good to hear, Doc.”

He let out a muffled giggle of his own; “I should be a motivational speaker… Alright, look: I don’t think you’re hallucinating; you seem fine to me. Where did you see this girl?”

“I saw her during the brief yesterday, sat next to that NCO that showed up with the late
deployers. A raptor, black, I think he’s a Staff Sergeant.”

“Oh,” he said, “that really is a girl, at least. Purple triceratops, right? Kinda short?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Does the name ‘Van Der Kolk’ ring a bell?” He asked.

My blood went cold. “Y… yeah… it kinda does.”

A knock came to the side door, which was around a corner obscured from my vision, followed by the sound of the door opening.

Holliday’s head perked up to observe the visitor. “Well, if it isn’t the ghost of Christmas past in the flesh! You’ve got cute sister or a doppelgänger, miss.”

“What on Earth are y-” she stopped after rounding the corner, her eyes locked with mine. “Anon?”

“Orr… maybe not,” Holliday said. “Well, ain’t that one for the books.”

Her jaw hung open as she stared at me. She looked different— she was visibly wider than back in high school. Her uniform was pulled taught by her new muscular frame and familiarly impressive bust. She was only wearing her uniform, no kit. It was far too early for anyone to be working yet. I glanced at her horns, and I swore they glared at me.

Holliday was a skilled medic and a good man, but there was no hope he’d intervene for me in this fight. He was only a tiny parasaur. Trish finally had me where she wanted me.

“Hi, Trish.” I stood up and straightened myself, accepting my fate. There wasn’t any other way it could go down; the trigga gets her revenge, after all.

I braced myself as she rushed toward me, and for some reason I couldn’t explain, I didn’t try to stop her. She slammed into my chest with force, and I didn’t feel the sting of her horns immediately. In fact, it didn’t hurt much at all. Adrenaline is a helluva drug, they say. I felt arms wrapped around the back of me, squeezing my chest. Looking down, I didn’t see the back of her crown like I thought I’d find— with her horns buried inside my chest. Instead, I saw her horns pointing up at me, with her snout angled to her left and pressed against me. She’s… hugging me?

My eyes widened, and somehow, I began to panic even worse than before.

Shit, what the fuck, what do I do…?

I nervously wrapped my arms, limp as noodles, around her back to return her embrace.

Holliday spoke up wearily: “I’ll uhh… give you two a minute. Let me know when you’re done, alright?”

He left, and I looked back down at Trish, still in my arms. She loosened her grip on me and backed up, letting her arms fall away. I let out a tiny bit of the breath I had unknowingly been holding in.

“Sorry,” Trish muttered. “It’s just… been a while since I’ve seen a familiar face.” She slowly turned around and stepped to the counter on the opposite side of the room, where the coffee machine resided with a pot full of hot but no longer steaming dark black coffee.

“You mean… you don’t hate me?”

Trish shrugged as she poured coffee into a paper cup. “Not at the moment. Should I?”

"But… in high school…"

“Yeah, I’ve done a lot of thinking since then. It’s time we talked.” She returned with two paper cups in her hands and offered me one. I wearily accepted and sat back down in my chair. She took up Doc’s office chair in the middle of the floor, opposite me.

“So…” she began.

“The fucking Army?” I interrupted. She laughed at my moronic question, and I followed, my chest still tight from adrenaline. I felt the tension ease, but she seemed cool as ice. Her laugh was calm, not sporadic like I would’ve expected.

“What a retard move,” she agreed.