Knightskye

“FIRE!” Came the order from our bumbling idiot of a leader.
“Are you sure that’s wise, sir?”
“Don’t question me, cadet, you know how I feel about insubordination.”
“Yes sir,” I said as I saluted the big oaf.

Barrages of raking, sporadic machine gun fire struck the behemoth from the circumvented positions of the other soldiers. The bullets hadn’t seemed to even phase the creature. Its thoroughly coated shell consisted of falcate metallic spikes. The bullets hadn’t seemed to even phase the creature. Its shell must have been thick. Good thing though, at least the monster wasn’t able to move too swiftly, even though nothing we did could pierce its mighty armor. The eyes of the beast were dark and crimson. When they were focused on someone, it cast stark fear throughout the body of the victim, paralyzing them almost instantly. If it were standing as it was, at night, it would not have been visible. The color of the scales of the beast mimicked the sky was in the midst of the midnight hour. It was quite a sight, and would be exciting to study such a creature if it hadn’t been terrorizing us at that exact moment.

The creature stomped its colossal foot down to the ground with blistering speed. Chasms opened up in the earth before it. Soldiers almost flew back because of the near sonic boom released by the impact of its foot. A handful of soldiers convulsed on the edge of the newly created cliff, but they hadn’t fell into it. The monster let loose a deep, raspy growl from within. Who was his voice coach? I felt like rather whacking our squadron leader in the back of the head with the butt of my rifle than futilely bombard this leviathan with tens of thousands of bullets. Those poor unknowing taxpaying citizens, they obviously or hopefully knew that there was a monster ravaging about the lands of their town, but what they didn’t know was what their money was being spent on. The firing of the weapons raged on, yet no look of weakening came from the creature. It stood holding its arms out, as if it needed to block the bullets. Perhaps it was ticklish and could take no more laughing. Our leader marched around as he usually did and ordered the troops. He had this odd-looking smile on his face, the kind of smile he would have if we were actually making headway.

What I wanted to know was why we were attacking something that wasn’t moving at all. Maybe the leader thought that if we stopped, it would have attacked us. But, nothing was stopping it from marching on past us and stomping on each and every one of the soldiers, including him. This whole thing didn’t make any sense. None of us knew where the monster came from. The leader might have participated in some secret conference in which he was filled in on information, but whatever it was, it didn’t help. How long were we going to keep this up? I would have said until we were out of ammunition. But while we were busy at work, I observed the leader on his walkie-talkie, summoning up some more. Several minutes went by and eight camouflaged trucks pulled up, surrounding us. They had dark green canvases acting as roofs.

With the snap of his fingers, a contingent of troops made their way to each truck and unloaded each of them. They carted off crates that had “AMMO” stamped diagonally across them in black ink. One of them timorously hobbled over with a crowbar clenched in their dirt-ridden fingers. They jimmied open the crates one at a time and then the soldiers darted back and forth from them to reload their weaponry. I could quite easily compare them to the very beast we were shooting at. Were at least some of them thinking the same thing that I was? Or were they just the leader’s pawns, drones to sit and beg and listen for orders to mindlessly follow. If he ordered all of them to march forward and hop into the crevice between the creature and us, they would ask how far away to jump from.

If it wasn’t ammo that would stop the madness, it could have been fatigue. All that trigger pushing had to be exhausting. But that would not have been a factor were they robots. They would just keep shooting until the creature had disposed of them or it had given up and ran away to be shot upon in some foreign land. Maybe the bullets would pile up higher than the monster’s ears, or the shells would form mountains around each soldier, burying them. No one had seemed to notice that I stopped shooting. However I stayed in the prone position with my gun held tightly while I looked through the scope, pretending to fire. I even jerked the gun up every couple of seconds to fake the recoiling action of the gun.

Because I hadn’t been actually firing the weapon I was holding, I had time to think. I had thought of an idea that was yet to be implemented. Why hadn’t they used tanks? Certainly they would have been more effective than bullets. Or instead of tanks, they could have tried dropping a few bombs onto it. I had heard of “bunker busters”. If they could make an impression three times the size of an airplane into a building, or a mountain, or the ground, why couldn’t they make one in this behemoth? It was possible that they just didn’t want to. They just wanted to drag this thing as long as they could. For whatever reason, they wanted people to remember this. I wasn’t too bright, but I would have thought a small town like that could have easily remembered that week where a monster walked throughout the downtown area, knocking down half of the town bank or library, and committing petty offenses such as jaywalking that would necessitate a ticket. But the police were either too frightened of fining a nearly two hundred foot tall beast, or they didn’t know where its windshield was.

The impossible had occurred. The leader rose his arm into the air. Every one of the troops, including myself glanced, lost in the obscurity of that rigid stillness of his hand there in the midday sky. The birds that hadn’t flown south for the autumn still chirped. Such beautiful music during the most wretched of battles, it really made you think. I hadn’t understood anything that was going on, but maybe now we would at least get a break from all of this. The bullets had stopped, and some of the guns dropped to the ground. Most of them fell at the same time, one collective sound, followed by several hundred sighs of relief. I looked around and watched as a few soldiers’ hands were spastically shaking. They had to grasp one of their wrists in order to control it. But if they managed to get their hands to stop shaking, their arms or their legs began to shake. It was almost as if they were dancing.

“At ease.” Came the order from the head honcho.

I would have thought him to say that before or while he rose his hand to the sky. I hadn’t questioned his illogicality however, for fear of being court marshaled. The general had spun around on the heels of his polished black shoes and pointed in that direction. Every step he took was followed by the footsteps of every other soldier, every soldier except for me that was. I stayed behind. I wanted to know about the creature I had been pretending to fire at for the past nineteen hours. I wanted to study its behavior. Why did it stand there and do nothing but a singular foot stomp. It hadn’t killed anyone, so why were we attempting to kill it? If we were following the motto “An eye for an eye”, all that it was justified to do was go to the village of the beast and knock down a few stop signs, whoever was capable of stopping one of those.

I approached it. I hadn’t previously studied in a textbook the anatomy of leviathans, so I wasn’t sure of the gender. But if it was a male, I think it would have marched forth and swung those claws at somebody, rather than stand there while it let the bullets lightly massage them. When the creature had rose its arms up, it must have been like someone who tried to warm up their hands in front of a fireplace. The creature was a female, in my mind anyway. Did that make me an idealist? For a moment, I had wondered why people had called and talked about boats as if they were women. I looked about the creature and it looked back at me, bewildered. It thumped its feet and scraped its toes along the ground as it turned around and doddered quickly down the street. Fortunately, it had not alerted the attention of the lovable general. The creature hid behind a building by crouching, as hidden as it could have been.

I made my way, following its path, and strolled as I traced the outline of the footprint it had left in the road. I wasn’t longer than one of the toes. There was a thought that was on its way through my mind; did monsters have a way of cleaning their teeth? It could have just let out a yawn and felled the entire platoon. I looked up at the horns protruding from the top of the creature’s head. Something astonishing happened, the creature shrank. Its head lowered and its width decreased severely. The creature was disappearing before my eyes. I quickened my pace and dashed around the corner. I looked high, and then gradually descended my eyes. I hadn’t seen a trace of the beast. Against the side of a large building lie a green dumpster with a black lid. On the wall beside it hung a sign that read “BEWARE OF DOG”, but no sign of the creature. It was just a sleazy, dirty alleyway where the mice would have liked to roam around in at night. Silver trash cans lay on the side of the dumpster. My eyes had reached the ground. I saw a pair of light pink shoes. They were ragged and torn from wear. I followed from that pair of shoes to the legs of the person who wore those shoes.

My eyes slowly traveled up the delicate ankles and legs, and stopped at a white skirt that came to the middle of this girl’s knees. She wore a dark blue, collared T-shirt. Both her shirt and her skirt were torn. I looked upon her face. There were marks, as if she were struck by something. By the look of her clothes, I would have said that she was attacked by some kind of animal, possibly a dog. Her eyes were closed. She was unconscious. What if she was hurt? I should take her to get checked out. I crouched and lay my knees on the ground. I slid my gloved hands on the asphalt. One of them I slid underneath her back, the other under her legs. I lifted her up, with a groan. I was trained to carry things, unfortunately a person wasn’t part of that. I hauled her up as I got to my feet. There was a hospital down the block. Would the general have taken notice of my absence for such a long period of time? I had suspected that the troops were at the moment being debriefed. They were missing more than I was. I left the alleyway, slowly. My labored steps complimented my breathing. I wasn’t used to carrying a teenage girl down a sidewalk on a Sunday afternoon.

Cars drove by, the drivers and passengers rubbernecked on their way by. What? Couldn’t a guy march down the street with an unconscious girl in his arms without being gawked at? I arrived at the hospital and one of the nurses graciously held the door open for me. I felt like wiping the sweat from my brow, but my hands were a little busy at that moment. I waited in line until I was at the front desk. The receptionist looked from the girl to me.

“Can I help you?”
“I sure hope you can. I was wondering if you guys could check this little lady out.”
“Yes, we have a couple of rooms open.” She spun her chair to the side and cupped a hand around the side of her mouth. “LARRY! GET A STRETCHER OVER HERE, STAT!”

I squinted with my left eye. Through my right, I watched as the receptionist spun back toward me with her eyes down at a keyboard as she typed away. Larry moseyed over the tile floor as he rolled the stretcher in front of me. He slapped his hand on the end of it, signaling me to lay her down onto it. I set her down as gently as I could. Larry continued pushing the cart down the long corridor. I held my hand on the metal bar on the side of the stretcher. Larry was headed toward double doors at the end of the hallway. I sped up past him and the stretcher and held the door open for him, as to protect the girl’s head from getting an unneeded bump on the top of it. The room had a lot of cabinets and tools. Most of them looked sharp. Why did doctors have to decorate their rooms so that they scared the patients? The doctor walked into the room minutes after Larry and I had. He had an assistant with him who held a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other, and boy was he busy jotting something down. He said “mmhmm” enough times for someone to think that he wasn’t paying attention to what was being said.

The doctor turned to me, in his green scrubs and rubber gloves. “Sir, I can’t tell if you’re sick if I can’t see your face.”
I still had my helmet on, and the visor was down. I took the helmet off completely and placed it neatly on a table beside me. “Now you can see my face, but I’m not the patient. She is.” I said as I pointed to the girl who was still unconscious on the stretcher.
“How did you get her here?”
“I carried her.”
“Are you her brother?”
“No.”
“Are you her boyfriend?”
That question was a little harder for me to answer, but the answer was the same. “No.”
“Then who are you?”
“I’m the guy who found her leaning against a wall, unconscious, with bruises on her face, in a dark alley. Are you going to take care of her or what?”
“Alright, alright, calm down. Did you see what happened to her before she was in the alley?”
“Well…I suppose I did.”
“What happened to her?”
“Sh—She was…shot.” I stammered.
“SHOT!? But, she isn’t bleeding. What are you talking about?”
“Well, she was this really big monster, and the army was shooting her, and then the army went away, but I stayed. She walked behind a building and shrank, and I came over and found her.”
“Are you sure you’re not the patient?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“No, not at all.”
“Fine, but there’s still a girl lying there on a stretcher and you haven’t done a thing yet to help her.”

The doctor grunted and walked over to her. He reached behind him and grabbed one of the glass jars. He popped the top off as one would with a cookie jar. He slipped out a tiny piece of paper. It was a band-aid. He lay the glass jar behind him on the counter and opened the band-aid. He lay it on her cheek over one of her wounds. The only ones I had seen were on her face, but there could have been more in other places. He scratched the top of his head, and then the bottom of his chin. It definitely was not good news when a doctor was puzzled about what his next move should have been. But maybe he was just a little itchy. She was unconscious and she wasn’t sleepwalking, so he should have just woken her up. I wouldn’t have known how to wake her up besides shaking her or by the use of an alarm clock., and I didn’t want to be the one to disturb her.

“Don’t you know how to fix her?”
“She’s not a machine.”
“And you’re not funny. You’re a doctor, you should be making her feel better, or at least awake.”
“Get this man out of here.” He said with his head turned toward the little man with the clipboard.

The man with the clipboard hobbled over to me as he scribbled something down. There wasn’t really anything to write down, or anything that the doctor had told him to, so he must have just been doodling the whole time. He flapped his arms underhand, signaling me to “Shoo”, so I turned around and kicked the door open, even though it was the doctor I wanted to kick. The door swung back in to the doctor’s room and stopped when it met the door on the opposing wall. I kept my head down, facing the floor. I knew people, employees, and patients were staring at me, but I didn’t care, I didn’t do anything wrong. It wasn’t like I kicked the door down. I didn’t even kick that hard. I sat down on the bench juxtaposed to the doctor’s room. The bench was leather, with buttons in neatly positioned places as the black squares on a checkerboard. It was funny how they made you feel physically comfortable, but not mentally as you sat outside the operating room, or the emergency room, or just if someone was getting a checkup.

What were they doing to her? The smart thing to do would have been to have a MRI done, or take a CAT scan of her. Doctors should think logically. If she was unconscious, you know she probably got hit in the head, so why not look there instead of putting a band-aid on one bruise that wasn’t bleeding? He was wearing that mouth guard, so germs could have been ruled out as an excuse. Did they have to operate on her? I sure hope they knew where to start. The doctor would probably give her a lobotomy to try to find out if she knew what to do. Was she in a coma? Were they going to put her into one? That would have been redundant. Why was I thinking about her so much? I picked up a girl in an alley and took her to the hospital that’s all. How can someone develop feelings for someone who was unconscious? Maybe I was just worried about her. I’m going crazy just sitting here without any updates. The doctor should have been sending his assistant out with notes written neatly on his clipboard about what was happening to the girl.

I wanted to just storm right into that room and get some answers out of that doctor, but I was afraid that they would threaten me by telling me that they wouldn’t take care of her. What was I supposed to do while I sat there, waiting for them to tell me what they were doing to her, or what was wrong with her? Was I supposed to visit a vending machine and sit there, eating? I felt too distracted to eat, besides not being hungry at all. I was hungry though, for information. I wanted to hit something: that doctor, his little shrimp of an assistant, the bench, the wall behind me. “A hospital is a cruel and horrifying place, even if you weren’t the patient,” I thought to myself.