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The caves were dank and musty before. Now, they also smelled of smoke, fire and blood. The Cold Force teams had finally managed to take the caves from the snakemen holed up inside. They weren't unscarred. Against the wall of the cave, laying on his sleeping bag was Lieutenant Robert Clark, minus one hand. Captain Sam Wychin sat by his side.
"Come on man. You're gonna make it. Don't die on me." Wychin said softly.
He then turned to look at the rest of the cave chamber. A bundle of miscellaneous weaponry lay cluttered around a stalagmite. The team had set up several tents inside the cave - several troopers were milling about, while Sam knew a few were standing guard at the entrance. Most of the cave system had been isolated by the explosive firewords unleashed by the Cold Force and the aliens, so Sam didn't worry much about the rest of the once-presumably-massive cave system.
Near another wall lay a group of bodies. Some of them wore russian uniforms, but one had a US patch on his shoulder. A gibbering man was sitting next to one of the corpses, dressed in a uniform with a russian flag. Nobody in the Cold Force who was left alive could speak Russian. Thus, communication was impossible with the man. He accepted food and drink offered to him. Once he realized nobody could understand him, he ceased trying to say anything. Now he just sat and stared at the corpse pile.
Wychin turned to his 3rd-in-command - 1st Lieutenant Kevin Harrison.
"All right, Kevin. As soon as it stops snowing out there, I want those corpses out of here. We'll give them all a proper burial. Even the alien bastards. Collect their equipment before you toss 'em out of course." Wychin finished with a glance towards the charred corpse of a snakeman.
"Yes sir." Kevin responded. "You think Clark's gonna make it?"
Sam turned towards the shivering man below.
"I hope so. I really hope so." Sam responded. Then his face hardened. "Have the sentries rotate every two hours. I think we'll be sticking around here for a while. It's no good out there now."
"All right sir." Harrison responded. "He'll make it."
Giving his superior a pat on the shoulder, Harrison walked off into the caves.
The next day, the snow slowed down, and then stopped falling. Troopers carried the corpses a fair distance out into the snow fields, dug holes in the hard ground, and buried them, marking their graves with a simple cross. Sam Wychin held Tim Johnson's dogtag in his hand and bowed his head. Nobody made funeral speeches anymore. The dead men had nothing to say about themselves - neither did the living. After standing in the snow for a few minutes, the Cold Force soldiers began slowly walking single file towards the caves.
"So we found four alien guns with an unknown amount of ammo, and one alien grenade?" Clark asked Wychin.
"Yeah... damn aliens are stringy with their ammo - granted they used most of it on us, but still..."
"Well, at least we live another day." Clark said, looking out into the distant snow fields. "... Hey, what's that?"
A high-pitched whine passed overhead, along with a familiar blue saucer craft. The UFO flew quite a distance, then stopped, and descended beyond view, below the tree-line of a small forest.
"I think we've got a problem ... " Clark stated flatly.
Written on August 21 by Andrew Pokrovski AKA Captain Samuel Wychin.
Copyright Notice: If you want to put this stuff up on your webpage for some reason, than
go ahead. If you try to publish it and make money off of it, and assuming you don't get
turned down, then I'm gonna hunt you down and squash you like the puny human that you are.