Extensis Vitae
Authors: Gregory Mattix
Extensis Vitae
By
Gregory Mattix
Extensis Vitae
Copyright © 2013 by
Gregory Mattix
Cover Art by
Michael Gauss
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, business establishments, events, locales is entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
“C
an you hear me?” a distant voice asked. “Are you awake? You’ve been injured… There was an accident. You are going to recover, but you may feel disoriented for a while.”
Somewhere far off in the darkness, the white noise of humming machinery droned on endlessly. As time passed, another sound became discernable, this one nearby.
Beep…beep…beep
. Slow and constant, like a fine-tuned watch.
The comatose man slowly began to gain awareness. The beeping sound was like a beacon, and he was able to focus on it. Slowly, he tried to open his gummy eyes, but grunted in shock as harsh light seared his retinas. After a moment, he tried again, this time averting his gaze from the overhead lights. Squinting and allowing his eyes to adjust for a moment, he was able to make out a gray metal ceiling with a track of LED lights. Everything slowly came into focus around him.
The man couldn’t feel anything. It seemed that his sight and hearing were the only senses available to him. He turned his head and took in what appeared to be some sort of laboratory. A mix of unfamiliar machinery and computer terminals were along one wall. A sink and some storage cabinets lined the other side of the room. The source of the constant beeping was a machine on a wheeled rack next to the steel table he lay on.
There was nobody else in the room. He didn’t know if the voice he had heard was real or a dream.
Opening his mouth to take a breath, his gag reflex took over as he choked on the tube running down his throat. As his body convulsed, he instinctively tried to grasp for the tube, but he realized that he couldn’t move his arms. A brief moment of panic struck as he realized that he was unable to draw breath or move any of his limbs. The machine began beeping more rapidly in response to his elevated pulse. After a moment or two of thrashing around, some protective instinct kicked in and he fought to calm himself. Eventually he was able to relax enough to the point where he could breathe through his nose. Relief flooded through him, and once he was breathing calmly and relaxed again, he drifted back into the darkness.
***
“Reznik! Hey, are you ready?” A man wearing camouflage fatigues and face paint was beside him, looking at him expectantly. The man’s face was familiar to him, yet he couldn’t quite place it. “You’re losing it, man. What’s with the thousand-yard stare?”
Reznik grunted in acknowledgment. Before he could reply, some chatter came through his earpiece. A voice was talking about the ETA for air support that had been radioed in.
The two of them lay prone behind a boulder. A steep slope rose in front of them up into the tree line. Glancing sideways, Reznik noticed another pair of soldiers crouched behind a fallen tree about thirty yards away. Seeing his glance, one of them nodded and turned back toward the high ground.
“This time, these fuckers aren’t gonna escape back into the hills. We’ve got them surrounded on all sides, and Williams’s squad is waiting on the other side of the ridgeline, ready to cut them down when they run. Hopefully they won’t make it that far, though.” The other soldier had an eager gleam in his blue eyes.
Nash
…the name came back to him now. He didn’t look much like a normal soldier due to the growth of beard covering his face and mop of unruly blond hair sticking out from under his boonie hat. His fatigues were totally unmarked.
“You okay, buddy?” Nash asked. “You better get your head in the game!” Reznik nodded, looking at the rifle in his hands. It was a standard issue M-4 with a night vision scope.
“Lock and load, everyone! Move into position!” barked the voice over the radio. Reznik checked his weapon without thinking about it, his hands moving of their own accord. He had been through this routine thousands of times before.
Muscle memory
, he thought as he chambered a round and switched off the safety.
“Let’s go, hoss.” Nash moved out from behind the boulder in a crouch, M-4 held at the ready. The pair on their right flank began advancing, as well.
Reznik and Nash crept up the slope for about seventy yards, taking care to move quietly. After a few minutes, Nash waved him to a halt and they went prone again behind a bush. “Bravo in position,” Nash called softly into the mic.
They waited until everyone had checked in. Reznik could see a slender column of smoke rising through the trees from a campfire above them. He guessed it to be about fifty yards away.
“Okay, hold your positions… Air strike in T minus five,” the voice announced again. “You won’t hear the drone coming, so once it goes boom, move in and take them out.”
Sweat trickled down Reznik’s back as the minutes seemed to last forever. He was just thinking that it might have been a good idea to take a piss before they had moved up into position when he detected a faint hissing sound, which swiftly became a loud roar. Reznik could see the vapor trail of the missile, and then a deafening explosion rocked the hillside as fire exploded above them. Debris rained down upon the soldiers.
For a brief second, all was quiet, and then everything happened at once. Screams of pain and curses in a foreign tongue rose from the campsite. Nash and others nearby were yelling to attack as they leapt up and charged the campsite.
Reznik reacted instantly, rising and sprinting alongside Nash, making sure to stay lined up with the others at his flank in order to keep their field of fire open.
A dirty, bearded face rose out of the smoke in front of him, and Reznik squeezed off a couple rounds into the man’s chest. As the jihadist fell, Reznik double-tapped him with a bullet to the head for good measure.
Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Nash was firing to his left, and gunshots were coming from all around him. The smoke slowly began to clear as they entered the campsite.
Reznik saw a muzzle flash ahead of him, and a spray of bullets tore up the ground near his feet. He smoothly pivoted and dropped to a knee, firing a burst into the face of the jihadist that had popped up from cover. The 5.56 mm rounds tore the man’s head apart in a spray of blood.
The gunfire lasted another moment or so, and then it was quiet. Reznik looked around and saw quite a few enemy corpses. Intel had put the number in the camp at about twenty, but it was hard to tell the real number with the amount of body parts strewn about after the missile strike.
Reznik was looking around for Nash and the others when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. One of the corpses had been shoved asides and he saw the barrel of an assault rifle pointing at him. He whipped his M-4 around, but it was too late. The AK-47 gave a bark, and Reznik was thrown to the ground as bullets slammed into his midsection.
His companions returned fire, and a hail of bullets ripped through the wounded jihadist and the corpse that he had been hiding under.
“Man down,” someone called out.
Reznik gasped for breath as a hot knife of pain hammered his side. He fumbled with his vest, trying to unfasten it with hands that were now sticky with blood.
Nash loomed over him. “Let me take a look.” His jaw was clenched as he pushed Reznik’s hands away. He pulled open the body armor and squinted at the damage. “Looks like the ballistic plates took most of it, but one got you in the side here—lucky for you, it looks like it was mainly just a graze.” Nash poked at the wound and Reznik gasped as burning pain raced through his nerves.
“It probably hurts like a bitch, huh?” Nash asked helpfully over Reznik’s groans. “You should be fine, but you’re sure as hell gonna be buying the first round when we get back stateside, asshole.” Reznik suddenly felt cold all over, and the last thing he saw was Nash’s grin before darkness closed in.
***
The man awoke in a cold sweat, thrashing on the stainless steel table. The room and table were chilly, and he could feel goosebumps on his skin as a shiver ran through his body.
He was no longer alone in the room. An attractive young woman turned away from one of the computer terminals at the sound of his thrashing. She had shoulder-length chestnut hair and wore a white lab coat.
“Welcome back to the world of the living,” she said as she approached. Her striking green eyes were narrowed with concern as she peered down at him. “I’m Myrna Kane. You must be disoriented, which is normal, I’d imagine.” She looked away and checked his vitals on the machine next to him. “Everything looks good here… Can you speak?”
He opened his mouth and gagged on the tube.
“Oh, sorry. It might help if I removed that. Hold still.” She slowly began pulling the tube out of his mouth. He unsuccessfully fought not to gag again as it slid out of his throat.
“Is that better?” Myrna asked. She coiled the tube up neatly on the rack with the beeping machine.
“Yes,” he gasped. He realized his throat was as dry as a bone. “Water.”
“Of course,” she replied and walked over to the sink and filled a glass with water. As she turned back toward him, her lab coat swung open and he noticed she was wearing some sort of dark uniform beneath it.
“Let me help you sit up first.” She reached down and unfastened the restraint from one wrist and then walked around to the other side of the table to undo the other. He was shirtless, wearing only some type of thin hospital pants. Her hand was warm on his back as she helped him sit up. A wave of dizziness hit him, but it quickly passed.
She held the glass up to his lips. “Drink slowly; you don’t want to get sick. You haven’t really had anything in your stomach in, well—forever, I guess.” The water was cool and refreshing on his parched throat. Now that he was sitting up, he noticed there was an IV in his arm. Myrna was watching him intently.
“Where am I? Is this a military hospital?”