the soldiers in the long truck

the soldiers in the long truck

fiction
edward w pritchard

Entrance and exits to combat situations were executed with precision, always the same, always according to procedure. Long yellow trucks contained one hundred twenty soldiers per vehicle. The number of trucks depended on the severity of the combat situation but always one hundred twenty soldiers per vehicle. Sometimes a few soldiers died on a mission but that was rare for these were invincibles, highly trained, superbly equipped and always successful.

The truck looked like a yellow bee hive as I moved in over top of it for the attack.  The soldiers were sitting in two long rows talking quietly in the open truck wearing the yellow swat helmets and my impression was of a bee hive full of drones at rest as I prepared to annihilate the men. My perception was from up and over the truck but also from inside the truck in the seats from the point of view of the soldiers for I was also one of the troops today.

The soldiers were confident today for they were coming to take on only one enemy soldier. Today's adversary was only one mere demon. A demon, was the enemy but still just one demon to be faced and contrary to common myth a demon is not one thousand times more powerful than a man, but maybe only twenty five times more ferocious.

 Still as I made my presence felt as a man sitting among the other one hundred and nineteen soldiers the confidence of the troops vanished and an ominous fear began to creep down through the line of soldiers sapping morale and quieting the vehicle. The sergeant began to yell but by then I had come in up and over the long yellow truck and viciously destroyed all of the sitting soldiers but the one near the rear in the left sixteenth seat from the end.

Later that surviving soldier came under suspicion as the only surviving member of the elite corps but I had no genuine interest in the fate of that man being by then involved with other attacks elsewhere.