Black and Green (Part 2)

So, apparently, this is going to turn into a serial. It's my tricky way of making sure you all keep reading. If anyone has an opinion on the ending, send me a comment, and I'll see what I can do. Thanks for reading!





The Black and The Green (Part 2)
 
Green:
    He woke into silence. His mind went at once to the last time he had woken alone and bleeding, left for dead by his fleeing unit, but he pushed the memory back before it could swallow him. The fire lay dead in a heap of gray ash and charcoal. It was still dark, but he could sense dawn coming. A blade of pain stabbed and twisted in his left eye as he sat up. He thought he would be sick, but his stomach twisted on nothing. He sat there for a long time with his hands steadying him against the ground. When he was sure his head wouldn’t explode if he moved again, he felt cautiously along the ground for his gun. That was when he smelled them, a thick, sweet stench like rotting fruit.
    He had never even heard of them before he’d entered the forest. They were thin and dark with knobbed limbs like tree branches, and they oozed stench like mucous. He called them sarks for the sound they made before they attacked. Ssss-ark! Sss-ark! Even the thought of them made him shiver. They appeared frail, harmless even, but they were strong and bloodthirsty. They liked their meat fresh and screaming, which was probably why they’d left him.
    He found his gun, half-hidden beneath the roots of a tree. Moving slowly, to avoid jolting his aching head, he cleared the jam and pushed the gun back into his holster. He got to his feet and staggered over a cloth pack. Searching through the pack by touch, he found several packs of sealed MRE’s and a canteen as well as a med kit. He drank greedily and ate in the dark, not wanting to risk a fire with sarks anywhere nearby. He burned his fingers on the heating packet as he pulled it out of the bottom of the MRE and pushed it into his breast pocket.
    A scream started in the distance, echoing eerily through the jagged ravines and early morning mists. Risen’s stomach tightened around the meal he’d just eaten while the muscles in his shoulders pulled tight. He touched the tender lump above his left ear to remind himself why he shouldn’t care.
    He was green, and the other was black. So whatever happened to the other man was nothing to do with him. But the screaming kept on. It was agonized and human, and it drilled into Risen’s head, cutting along the raw nerves so it felt like it was jabbing into his eye as well.
    He thought of his father, who had disowned him when he’d said he was going to fight. It didn’t matter to his father that the choices he’d had were confined to battle or prison.
    “They’re just men, Zed,” his father had said. “Good, bad and otherwise, they’re men and boys like you.”
    Risen winced as the screams started again. He’d nearly fallen in the sarks’ nest himself a few weeks before, so he knew where the man was. It would have been easy to walk the opposite direction until he could no longer hear the screams–but he had nowhere to go. He’d been lost for weeks himself, stuck behind and beyond enemy lines. And, he thought grimly, as far as everyone else was concerned I'm already dead. He checked his gun, took up the pack, and started through the hills as the first light of the sun broke through the sky.
    His head throbbed every time he put his foot down, but the food had done him good. After a while, the screaming stopped. He paused for breath, wondering if he had any reason to keep going. The violent cries of the sarks smashed through the silence. Sss-ark! Sss-ark! Another cry fled before them, not a scream, but a whimper.
    Risen crossed the last ridge cautiously and drew his gun. He loosened his knife in its sheath and peered down into the nest.