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I'm no angel, I'm no savior, and I've never been a saint.
Well, I know I'm not the devil, ‘cause I still can feel the pain.
Walk through fire and through brimstone, and there were no pearly gates.
I'll be sure to ask about it on my final Judgement Day.
- Judgement Day, Five Finger Death Punch
———★———
The sandbox sucked.
Dust and dirt got everywhere; nothing was safe from it. The heat was, bluntly, oppressive, especially for some fucker who came from the Canadian prairies. What he wouldn’t give for one day of 40 below. Just one.
Hell, even just a bag of ice. That’d be pretty damn good right about now.
Why Canada had gotten so heavily involved in this, he wasn't sure. What he was sure of, was that sending the CIMR into what was basically an oven should have counted as a war crime of some sort.
All that said, Fangs couldn’t fault the comradery that had developed on this FOB in the past almost year he had been stuck there.
Sure, they were in combat more days than not.
Sure, they could get bags of letters from kids who had no idea what a war was, but god forbid someone’s mother successfully sent a care package to the front lines. (Those letters were comedy gold, though, and Fangs would die on that hill. Most of the guys here would agree. One of the few good things, really.)
Sure, he saw his best friend from basic training get absolutely shredded by sub-munitions in an artillery strike. Sure, he clutched the lifeless body sobbing, blood staining his plate carrier so deep it never did all come out.
Sure, they could get boxes upon boxes of Recon Girl biscuits, even when they couldn’t get rations. ‘Too dangerous for the transport drivers’, command said. To which his Lieutenant would fire back with ‘the what the fuck is it for us? A walk in the fuckin’ park?’
Sure, a common joke was ‘how much worse can this deployment get?’
Oh, if only any of them knew. If only.
———★———
Fangs kicked some chunk of concrete with the toe of his boot, watching it thud in the sand a short distance away from where he stood in the shadow of a busted wall. Around the corner, the patrol vehicle sat, internal speakers blaring some hyper pop song. The kind heard in clubs with a bunch of university-age gals drunk-dancing to said song.
“Hey! Tell Cascade to turn that shit down!” Someone—Dash—yelled from the other side of the ruined building.
“If you don't like it, come turn it down yourself!” Cascade challenged, popping around from the passenger side of the vehicle.
“It ain't that I don't like girlypop music. It's cause fuckin insurges could hear us from 10 klicks out, you half-deaf moron!” Dash snapped back. The volume dropped a good few levels after that little exchange.
Time ticked by, boredom seeping into every pore of Fangs' skin, an itch settling into his bones. Fuck, he'd even take a firefight just for something to do. Blinking lazily, he watched as one of the marines approached him. He idly recognized him, not recalling his name for a moment, but instead that he came from a cattle farm outside Calgary.
‘Ah, right. Prime.’ He reminded himself after a moment; Prime, as in prime rib.
“Hey, sarge, any idea how much longer we're gonna be out here for?” The Albertan adjusted his grip on his rifle as he asked Fangs.
Sarge. Sergeant. Still so fuckin' weird to Fangs that he was a Sergeant now. 24, going on 25—fuck, he was gonna have a birthday in the sandbox. Fuck that. If you had asked him just one year ago, if Fangs thought this is where he'd be, he'd have laughed at you. Likely call you some insult and carried on with whatever he was doing.
War has a funny way of changing one’s priorities, of changing the path one’s life took.
“Couple more hours, probably, before we RTB.” He answered with a slight sigh, kicking the sand underfoot.
“Rog, sir.” Prime responded with a nod. God, privates shouldn't have been sent out here. Too goddamn young, too new, in his opinion.
“Too hot…” Fangs grumbled as the private walked back to wherever he was standing before. He squinted into the distance, the heat shimmering over the fairly barren landscape.
A panicked “Sir” caught his attention not long after.
“Sir, it's for you. S’the Lieutenant, and she sounds uhhh… not good.” Jumper, the Corporal in the vehicle, called out for him, handing the satellite phone to Fangs.
“Lieut-” he began to greet, only to be immediately cut off.
“Get to safety.”
“What?”
“Get to fucking safety, Thompson! You and all your guys! That's a fucking order! A cave, a ravine, a fucking bunker if you've got one!” She snapped, her nerves clearly shot to shit.
“Wilco.” Fangs’ choked out, his voice uneven with uncertainty. This was extremely uncharacteristic for his Lieutenant. She was nigh unflappable, even when she got hazed back in boot. He had heard the stories, and never wanted to cross her.
“Fangs, it's nukes. It's fucking nuclear warheads.”
He felt his stomach drop through his boots and into the sand, and swallowed the lump in his throat.
“It was good knowing you. Godspeed, L.T.” He didn't hear her response as his ears began thudding like a bass drum. The sound felt like it should be shaking the ground apart, not just be the beating of his heart.
“Everyone in the Vee, now!” He barked, clambering into the driver's seat. Everyone froze, staring as he yelled again.
“Fuckin’ mount up!”
They scrambled in, not even getting their safety harnesses buckled across their chests before Fangs floored the massive armoured vehicle.
As he drove, he slapped the shitty old music player away from the console, only to receive cries of dismay as the song was cut off.
“Hey, Jumper! Get the sat phone hooked into the speakers.” Fangs barked, not taking his eyes off the landscape in front of the vehicle. Jumper fumbled the satellite phone a little, doing their best to get it hooked in fast.
Seconds later, the satellite phone was handed to Fangs, who simply shoved it down his plate carrier with the mouthpiece by his chin.
“Mac, you're on the speakers. How bad is it?” He asked as soon as she picked up.
“You sure they should all-”
“I'm sure. If it's what I think, they should all know.” He cut her off. “I'd want to know what's got my COs so worked up.”
“Everyone, I'm- I'm sorry. It was good serving with you all. But nuclear ICBMs have been launched—almost every country that signed the treaty broke it within a couple hours of each other.” Mac sounded moments from crying herself. A woman who never cries. Christ. That's a bad sign.
Silence fell over the vehicle, and Fangs was sure he heard a choked-back sob or three. ‘Fuck, these kids should be at home with their families. Their loved ones…’ Fangs wished he could feel the same about himself, but now, a death in the vast desert seemed to be an apropos end for him. Born in a hospital with the power out from a freak snowstorm, and died in a sand dune from a nuclear war. Fitting, somehow.
“I had to fight Jameson to know. The Major wasn't going to tell anyone.” She continued, obvious disdain in her voice, before it turned unprofessional.
“I hate that man. I hope he's right at ground zero.” Mac tacked on; both her and Fangs despised Major J. Jonah Jameson. The fact he was going to let every fuckin Marine under his command die without knowing the truth made Fangs bristle in a way he couldn't articulate, even if given ample time to try.
“Wh- who started it? Ma'am.” Someone asked, Fangs wasn't sure who. Prime, maybe. He was too focused on getting them all to the nearby cliff face; he remembered there was a cave along it. He hoped he remembered right. Maybe it would be large enough for all of them, with the vehicle parked across the front as a makeshift door.
Maybe they had a chance. A slim, minuscule, molecular-scale of a chance. But a chance was a chance.
“What's it matter who started it?! We're all fucked!” Cascade's voice wavered with emotion.
Fangs didn’t hear a lot of the following conversations, just snippets here and there as he nearly crashed the armoured vehicle into the side of the cave's mouth. He ushered everyone into the cave first, before repositioning the heavy six-wheeler across the (thankfully) small opening. It was just slightly smaller than the vehicle was sideways. Would it do much? Probably not, but anything was better than nothing.
Fangs slid out of the driver's door, doing a check around the outside before going into the cave himself. A bright flash on the horizon line caught his attention, freezing his body in place like Medusa's stare.
There was an odd beauty in the telltale shape, the mushroom cloud extending miles into the setting sun sky. That red-orange glow was magnified by the explosion, making the whole sky, even the land, appear enraged.
Despite being so far away, Fangs could have swore he felt the heat on his skin. It felt like his skin was blistering and peeling instantly. So much goddamn worse that when he tried to deep-fry snacks in the bricks with his roommate years ago. The hot oil burns were nothing compared to this.
The Sergeant tore himself from where he was half-rooted at a yell from the other side of the vehicle. Throwing himself through the door, he closed the heavy panel behind himself, and barreled through to the other side. It was fairly dark inside, a small mercy on sensitive eyes after the light he had seen.
He stumbled further in, joining the others. He looked like he was collapsing against the wall in slow-motion, sinking to the ground with a pained groan.
“Ha. Worst deployment ever.” He grumbled, exhaustion settling into him. Preparing to die.
Most of the world would die.
In some twist of fate, Fangs would not be one of the many.
His story was not ending, but only just beginning.