Not Even Not Zen 405: The Mood War, Scene 8

 

copyright 2025 Acacia Gallagher

[VIII] Incident Report (Partial) Defendant, Mood Battle

Cell 3C, ICC Detention Center, the Hague
Scheveningen, the Netherlands

My memories after I got shot are foggy. I saw lights. Blurred shapes. My guts started churning. My legs wobbled. I got dizzy. My unit leader pulled me to my feet. He dragged me by the arm. He kept us dodging in different directions. That made my dizziness worse. I thought I was going to throw up inside my suit.

Man, that’s the one thing they tell you over and over when they issue you a suit. Don’t throw up in it.

When we held still for a minute behind a shrub ... oh, wait, I should mention there was no cover. Every other shrub was taken. So you know the monks above were firing at the shrubs. Scouts who were lying in ditches had it better. Anyway, after we held still long enough for my suit to administer medicine and my head to clear, I gawked at the scene upslope.

The nuns and monks were all gone except for one. They’d run up from the UAZs to their gate, I guess. The only one remaining, right in the middle of the open gate, was lying face down. He had a blood stain in the middle of his back. One of our scouts must have shot him.

I’d never seen a person dying before. I must have stared for a second because a bullet hit my armor. My suit stiffened. Then it encouraged me to lie down. So I did. I could feel my armor sections relaxing. When I removed my glove, there was no resistance. Next, I reactivated my rifle with my thumbprint. Within a second, the rifle communicated with my armor. It beeped. It wanted me to put my glove back on. After I did, the suit made a complete circuit check. It switched me into combat mode. My vision cleared. My eyes naturally focused on an overlay of target tracking that appeared.

When I glanced up the hill, my systems showed me that two of the temple tower windows had become red-outline targets. The UAZs out front had gotten overlays of yellow outlines. They were an option to kill. My suit was fine with me taking out the vehicles.

What stopped me was that everyone else seemed to be sane. I mean, a handful of scouts near the front were shooting a lot, yeah, but they were aiming at the snipers in the tower windows. They weren’t trying for wholesale destruction. None of the army vets were taking potshots at the UAZs. No one aimed at anything inside the compound except for the snipers.

“Hit!” someone yelled.

I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. Petrov, who had been with the leaders, had propped his rifle on the hood of the right-most UAZ. He’d fired off three shots, no more. With bullet number three, he’d managed to tag one of the snipers who was under cover, probably armored, twenty meters in the air. This was at the distance of one and a half football fields. The sniper would have been a dot if he were even in view and not hiding. I literally could not see the hit. A smart bullet from a smart rifle had to tell me about it.

Petrov turned back to the rest of us and grinned. That was when someone on the other side pulled out their hand-held missile launcher. There was a bright light on top of the wall above the temple gate.

“Holy shit!”