1st armoured chronices (chapter 7)

Day 1,379, 02:52 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Henry Hank Moody

Brayford watched in horror as the truck in front of his Humvee began to swerve violently across the empty French highway. It seemed to play out in slow motion. First the back end began to lose its traction on the road before the weight of the vehicle began to pull it slowly but surely onto its side.

“F**k!” Private Hagler screamed as he swung the Humvee wide around the screeching Truck. Sparks flew from the vehicle as it slid along the road. The private swung the vehicle wide around the truck and pulled it to a stop just as the truck came to the end of its journey.

Brayford grabbed his rifle and jumped from the Humvee before it had even rolled to a stop. The two soldiers in the back followed suit and before their transport had even come to a stop they were halfway to the truck and the horror that lay within. The Humvees behind and ahead in the convoy were also coming to a stop, the soldiers within in rushing to the accident, each one with the same though rushing through their minds.

Dakota.

If only the brave men of the 1st armoured had known the truth. They would quickly have turned around headed quickly to the nearest airport, grabbed a bottle of whiskey, drank it on the plane, grabbed another one at the next airport and gone to bed in a drunken haze with a lot of nightmares waiting for them. But they didn’t know the truth and the nightmares were about to become far more terrifying.

Brayford quickly climbed onto the trucks bonnet his rifles light peering into the dark gloom beyond the window. And he immediately screamed and fell from the truck gibbering and shaking with fear. His men were around him within a second, their eyes filled with fear and rifles searching the truck, in the split second of silence that descended upon the world they heard it.
It began as a scratching at the back of their mind, much like the sound of a mouse running through the coving of a house, and it grew, it grew until it consumed their whole mind and nothing else could be heard. A crunching sound hit through the silence and slurping, a horrific slurping sound followed as a laugh, deep and dripping with venom sounded from the deep recesses of the truck.

Brayfords mind was a reeling mass of horror and chaos as it struggled to right itself back into the conscious world. The face was flashing over and over, the pale gaunt face with the skin stretched across the bones so tight it just looked like a skull, the few strands of hair and the toothless grin that stared at him as the beast noticed his presence.

The metal bent outwards and cracked. The gaping hole seethed darkness.

Soldiers shone their lights into the trucks interior but the tiny bulbs made no impression on the darkness, the black seemed to eat the light and feast upon it becoming darker and darker.

It was then that Dakota sprang.