Fireteam Delta, J. Halpin [online e book reading .txt] 📗

To his surprise, Summers heard the engine first struggle, then turn over. It actually ran.

“Oh, hell yes!” Cortez said with a smile. “We got our ride out of here.”

“Kill it. We need to preserve gas as much as possible,” Nowak said. He had his hands in the suit’s pockets.

Summers flipped the corpse over, helping his sergeant. “You got used to this whole grave-robbing thing fast.”

“Not grave-robbing. I just want some answers. Here we go.” At that, Nowak pulled a cracked phone from the suit’s pocket. Like the Humvee, it still had a charge. “Shit, it’s locked.”

“Give it here,” Summers said. As Nowak handed it over, Summers held up the corpse’s face to the camera. The phone flashed in recognition, and the home screen appeared as he handed it back.

Adams watched all of this with a look of absolute horror. “You people need some goddamn therapy.”

“Given the kind of shit we’re in, you should probably get used to it,” Summers replied.

Asle was prodding at the suit on the ground. “See? She ain’t scared,” Summers added. Asle opened her mouth, taking an experimental bite of the man’s finger.

“Never mind.” Summers quickly moved to the girl’s side, gently pulling the dead man’s hand from her grip. “We don’t eat dead people.”

Asle pouted, so Summers took one of the dead men’s MREs and handed to the girl. After showing her how to open the package, she seemed satisfied. So now he had to deal with a cannibal elf. Great.

“Actually, I guess it’s not cannibalism, if she’s not human?” Summers muttered. Cortez had roped Adams into checking over the Humvee. Nowak was still screwing with the phone, and Asle sat happily eating a burrito bowl.

“Got a med kit,” Cortez announced.

Nowak looked up from the phone. “Toss it here. I’ll head back to camp and make sure our friend is okay. Summers, you stick with the Humvee and watch for any funny shit coming out of these woods.”

“Roger,” Summers said in reply.

As Nowak headed off, Summers did his best to scan the horizon. Without all the crazy shit, it was actually kind of beautiful. Trees, birdsong—all the nature he could take. He could see twin mountains in the distance, just like the kind back at base . . . no, exactly like the kind back at base.

“Hey, Adams,” Summers asked.

“What?”

“Those mountains look familiar to you?”

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“Maybe it’s like fucking time travel or something!” Adams said.

They’d managed to get the Humvee back to their little encampment. Cortez had had to change out a flat and a dozen other little problems once they were back in the relative safety of the cave entrance, but it looked like they at least had transportation.

“I don’t think people have ever had pointy ears,” Summers replied.

“Those mountains are definitely the same ones we had back home,” Cortez shouted down. She stood on a high rock above the cave. “I’d bet my ass on it.”

“Maybe it’s just a different Earth? Like one where the first fish to walk on land went left instead of right?” Summers suggested.

He glanced over at Nowak, who was still on the suit’s phone. Every now and again, his hand would dart to a notebook at his side, jotting down a few words. “Sarge, questioning the nature of the world, here. Wanna chime in?”

“Shut up,” Nowak muttered.

“Screw you, too. Have you found anything we can use?”

“Yeah. They cracked into this world about two years ago. I’m looking through the general’s correspondence now. But this is just his personal phone, so I have to piece a lot of it together,” Nowak replied. “Now, leave me alone. I got about an hour or two of battery left, and I don’t want to waste it.”

“All right. Sure.” Summers backed away. He found Adams sitting with Asle and Logan. She looked concerned for the man, whose breathing was becoming even more ragged in his sleep. Summers moved over to the group and sat down across from them. It looked like Nowak had done a quick-and-dirty patch job on the leg. None of them were really trained medics, so they’d shoved a few pills in his mouth and kept an eye on the leg, which resembled a burst hotdog more than anything. Hell, even if they did get him back home, they’d still probably have to take it off soon or the tissue would start to necrotize.

“Been telling the kid he’ll be all right,” Adams said, nodding to the worried Asle.

“Well, you’re lying. Good chance he’s fucked. I know it, he knows it—the kid knows it, too,” Summers replied. He half-expected to hear crying a moment later, but Asle just watched him in response.

“We’ll do what we can for him. And hope for the best,” Summers added. Her shoulders seemed to relax, and he guessed she took that statement a little better. “It’s getting late. We should set up a watch. You all right taking the first shift if I leave you with Nowak?”

Adams nodded in response. “I know how to watch shit. That’s basically all they trained me to do, actually.”

“I’ll let Cortez know. Wake me up in about three hours.” With that, Summers headed off.

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“Holy shit!” Nowak shouted. Summers’ head snapped up from a dead sleep. He’d laid down with his gun and nearly blew his foot off. “What?”

Cortez was awake now, too. Adams looked over from his perch above the cave. They all waited for some kind of explanation, but Nowak just kept staring at the phone.

“Start talking, jackass,” Cortez yelled over.

“Sorry. Sorry. I just found a way to get us back home. Shut up a second. I need to get this down,” Nowak said, scribbling something in the journal at his side.

“You what?” was the general consensus from around the camp.

Nowak ignored all of them until he was