The Enemy.

The parachute flare hissed as it roared into bluish starburst. Geoff sat in the muck of the trenches, his rifle propped against his trenchcoat's shoulder. A sergeant rushed down the lines, knocking kevlar helmets with a gloved palm, making sure the soldiers were awake to go over the top. The war had lasted longer than the entirety of Geoff's adult life. Then again, as far as Geoff could tell, he had been going over the top, lunging forth from trenches, longer than the entirety of his adult life.

Having grown up in the shelled remains of what had been a vast city named Chicago, having survived on leftover rations of soldiers and the what few materials fit for human consumption the enemy carried. Trial and error had proved a harsh mistress Geoff's childhood and early adolescence, but she had also proven a great instructor for his later life. That was assuming one could call going on eight years in trenches, being hustled over a third of the North American continental landmass in rickety underground trains, stopping every twenty minutes or so to let a supply train pass by, any means of a later life.

Whistles blew along the line and soldiers in ragged trenchcoats, soldiers with ragged haircuts and unshaven faces, leapt up sandbag steps to the allegedly smooth plain between trenches above. Although the sergeants and captains promised a clean run, the run was anything but. Craters, both earthen and glassed, interrupted the storm of soldiers across virtually ancient streets, beneath ruined expressway overpasses. Trenches were distinctly not part of the enemy's repertoire of cover. The enemy hid behind walls erected of metal, sloped outward to help prevent climbing.

Geoff scrambled out of a glassed crater, left from enemy bombardment, and threw himself up the wall. Grabbing the top of the embankment with his right arm, gripping his rifle with his left, Geoff rolled down the wall's inner side. The enemy was much thinner on the ground than were Geoff's comrades. Two of the little, apparently mechanical ones were operating a mounted rapid-fire weapon, leaving neat little holes, cauterized perfectly though the advancing soldiers. Geoff gripped the rifle to his shoulder, and fired two rounds. The head of the nearer little one disintegrated, in a puff of blue and white. The second caught the bullet in its bulbous shoulder, and spun into the ground, whining and screeching. Geoff pounced the distance between it and himself, and stomped its head, feeling the metal or stone or artificially calcified skeleton or whatever was in these things. And that was when he heard it.

The apelike grunting of one of the big ones echoed down the metal trench. Geoff panicked. The big ones were terrifying from a distance, and he had no interest in seeing one up close ever again. Trying to scramble back up the metal wall got him nowhere, and the pounding, reverberating steps of the big one were approaching quickly. He used the butt of his rifle to try and jostle a portion of the wall to no avail. Suddenly, it was upon him.

It howled as it rose him, gripping his trenchcoat, and glared into his eyes. The rage burning in its inhuman pupils made Geoff flinch. It huffed, staring Geoff down from less than an arm's reach. Its face was just as the other's had been, except of a lighter hue: it had visible eyes, no hair of any sort, no visible nose, no mouth. It had gill-like structures to either side of what Geoff would call its chin, which scintillated and flared in the dimming flarelight. The gills seemed to be where it breathed and made its grunting and howling noises.

Geoff fired the rifle, still in his hands. The round missed, but it startled the big thing enough to release its catch with enough force to send it sprawling over the wall. Geoff caught his shoulder on the metal, and was flung into the asphalt below. Pulling himself to his feet, he dove into the nearest crater he could, trying to avoid the strange, invisible projectiles of the enemy. He hugged the wall of the crater, his shoulder screaming. The flares hit the ground, throwing failing light over the craters and bulletholes. The flares died one by one, sputtering out in the blackness of what might once have been called a Pennsylvanian spring's night.

He breathed relief within the crater, knowing that soon enough he could sneak back to his own trenches. He closed his eyes and rubbed his shoulder through the thick fabric of the trenchcoat, resting his rifle over his lap. Laughter found its way softly over his lips. He felt his eyes start shaking in their sockets. A low hum rose over the field, and suddenly bright spots appeared on the field, moving back and forth. Chattering drones floated from behind the enemy's lines out over no-man's-land, looking for survivors. One focused on Geoff, swooped down on him, and its camera rotated in its vicious, swooped skull. Geoff suddenly wished he hadn't let that laugh slip, and then he felt the electric shock. And, then, he felt nothing.