Broadsword '22

Excellence Award in the 'Spread The Word 2017' competition

Corporal Alexander Pembroke had gotten through the Great War. An artilleryman he was, and so he managed to keep away from the worst of it for the most part. He had heard all the stories about seeing your friends die beside you and the horrible burning of the mustard gas, but all that time he had been standing on the sidelines, safe behind miles of trenches and no-man’s-land. To survive all that was, he supposed, extraordinarily lucky.
“…full retreat, I repeat-” The radio’s fading crackles finally ceased as the Corporal gave a chuckle and a bloody cough, pressing harder on the singed hole in his chest. Feebly, Pembroke fingered the strange weapon in his other hand. He’d picked up the alien sidearm a few minutes ago, from the body of one of the dead Greys, while they were tearing up Robertson and -
No. Now was not the time to think about them. His tattered leather gloves tightened around the grip of his plasma pistol. He had held the aliens off with the thing after his rifle was shot to pieces, allowing his squadmates to escape and in doing so, warn HQ about the threat so they could send reinforcements. A dark smile crept onto his face – perhaps because of him, millions of lives would be saved. Tilting the gun feebly, a translucent display on the side showed one glowing white pip; when he first picked it up, he had counted twenty-four. So that meant that he had one shot left.
While he was fighting, the hit he took had barely registered, but now that the immediate danger had gone away, he could feel the burning, stinging pain creep in. His right hand was numb from pressing down on his bloody wound, what little that would do, and he could hear scurrying footsteps to his right. The field bunkers hastily erected around the crash site previous day had done very little in slowing the Greys down - at least it could do some good as a grave. But he wasn’t going down without a fight. With a ragged exhale, Alexander tried his best to control his trembling arm as, with a bead of sweat trickling down his forehead, he levelled his last shot down the corridor.
The scurrying grew louder. Alexander’s heart beat hard and the pain once more sunk into dull numbness, and in his ears grew a piercingly loud whine and the corners of his vision blurred and it seemed like the moment was thick as blood. As the first Grey popped its bulbous head around the corner, Alexander felt like he had prepared his whole life for this moment. With an almighty roar, the pistol spat a bolt of green flame into the creature, causing it to fly backwards as its head exploded in yellowish goo. And as the rest of them went around the corner, he kept pulling the trigger, clicking with no further effects until he could feel the plasma bolts melting his arm and-

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