Heart trilling against my ribs in nervous anticipation, sweat slick down my back despite the brisk night air, we moved through the first room. Clearing each level as quickly as possible, signs of life were non-existent. Our footprints left on the dusty floors were the first to grace this house in years. Even the enemy hadn’t entered this condemned building since moving in and taking hold.
Four flights of stairs later, we emerged on the roof and collapsed to our knees, crawling forward. Bernie laid down beside me as I slithered like an inchworm toward the edge of the stone ledge that would serve as my protection for this mission.
Not a sound of the night played over the stale atmosphere. Deathly quiet like it had been during our first mission did nothing to ease my nerves.
“Crow in position, all clear,” Bernie radioed with a whisper. Such a strange sensation hearing his voice in my ear through the comms but also a mere half a foot away.
As quickly as possible, I slid my sniper rifle from my back and propped it up off to the side as his footsteps receded from behind me. Using the torn blankets and discarded wooden containers around me, I settled between the debris in a makeshift ghillie suit of sorts.
“First sweep, Crow. Report,” Dom’s voice answered the call in my ear as I quickly set up my sniper rifle. Sliding the muzzle of the gun through a deteriorated fissure in the stone wall, I packed the cold metal against my shoulder and peered through the scope.
The positioning was even more perfect than I had hoped. Cover provided by the cracking rock around me would keep me safe, but it also offered me a clear line of sight to the building that the rest of the team was now currently pressed flush up against.
Narrowing in my sights, I did a slow scan of the surrounding area. Rusted vehicle parts littered the dirt street. An old, flat soccer ball covered in sand rested in a patch of dead weeds. Stone that had once been a part of the buildings around them littered the road that seemed too trodden on for a completely abandoned town.
Then movement caught my eye.
“Hold your position, Phoenix. Second floor, neighboring building, your ten o’clock,” I whispered into the radio, training my scope on the window that a shadow had briefly filtered across.
“Holding,” Dom answered in my ear.
This neighboring structure and the intended building the team would breach shared a wall, much like townhouses built back home. Crisp adrenaline pumped through my veins. I waited. Watching for any signs of movement in either of the three windows along the second floor. But after several minutes of nothing, I exhaled slowly and resumed my sweep. “Must have been a rug or something in the breeze. All clear, sorry, Phoenix,” I muttered, disappointed in myself.
Returning my sights to the single door the team was about to breach, I sucked in air through the tiny slit of my parted lips. Bernie emerged like slime morphing from the sewers around the corner, just as Dom raised a hand, signaling their entrance.
“Going dark,” he said, and like a feather in the wind, their five barely visible shadows slipped through the front door.
Alone.
That word had never scared me. Loneliness was something I was used to, but being by myself on this roof held a different sensation to it. The stone beneath my awkwardly angled, prone position turned warm as silence fell thick like the blankets around me. No matter how many sweeps I made, no matter how often I narrowed my scope back on that single room on the second floor that had alerted me to movement earlier, there was nothing.
Not a single insect that craved the night joined me in my solitude.
Minutes ticked by as I kept my breathing steady. Seconds that weighed heavily on my shoulders. I knew that my perception of time wasn’t accurate to the reality of it. But mere minutes translated to hours of potential injury and fatalities out here.
I’d only been waiting and scanning for maybe five minutes before a muffled crack rippled through the air.
Its origin: the very building my team had entered.
“Viper! Report!” Dom’s voice snapped into my earpiece.
But the radio barely buzzed with no response.
My heart hammered in my chest, drumming rapidly against the cement I lay upon. I had no sights, I had no idea what was happening, but Mikey didn’t answer.
“Viper!” This time it was Bernie who spoke through the comm.
Still nothing.
Please, I silently begged.
There was absolutely nothing in response. Not a sign of movement, not a sound of even pain. Not a faint whisper of desperation for help flooded my senses. And I felt useless out here.
Lying in wait, as their eyes, did nothing out here.
Until I caught sight of movement again.
Second floor, same window.