Shadows of JiangXi

[arvg]

It was hunting him, he kept his back to the broken piece of concrete, clutching the AK in his hands as he listened through the howling wind and the rain for the slight scrabbling that gave a hint to the location of his stalker.

The hood of his flektarn poncho was up, and the dark green shemagh kept him warm against the cold and bitter rain that was falling in sheets from the relentlessly dark sky above. His gas mask hung close to him, ready for him to pull on at a need, but the rain had the small blessing of keeping the radiation down from the air, leaving him a rare moment of being able to breath without the need of a filter.

Not that it mattered, he was probably going to die at a young age anyway, all of the troops stationed in the Exclusion Zone were destined for a sterile, cancerous, and mercifully short existence anyway. That was, if they survived the carnivorous beasts that were native to JiangXi, driven half mad by radiation sickness.

Lieutenant Elias eased the fire selector of his assault rifle up to full auto, knowing that whatever was out there, trying to get his scent, wasn’t afraid of the rain or lightening, and was probably sporting a mouth full of razor sharp teeth to boot.

Elias would have killed right about then to have a cigarette to steady his nerves.

The Zone was fraught with perils, corrosive fog, gravity traps, radiation sink holes, and those were just the benign, not about to hunt you down and snack on your pink squishy bits kind of perils.

He’d had enough of being thought of as dinner, stepping from cover he opened fire on the hairy beast, the 7.65 slugs tearing out of his weapon as he hammered the thing with automatic fire. Easing off the trigger when he was satisfied the thing was definitely dead.

“Yeah, sucks to be you!” Elias remarked in his clipped Bretonian accent, squinting up at the sound of engines, as the silvery hull of a Storm class gunboat swung around to drop into a small clearing in the middle of what had once been a village.

Elias sighed, “great, nuggets…” he rolled his eyes and went down to meet the ship.

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