Instead, the entire moon seemed covered with them. For as far as his eye could see, horizon to horizon, the surface was nothing but socks.
This was nuts, of course, and Hunter knew there was no way the Mad Russian would be found here. He quickly retrieved his quadtrol and asked if it could locate the next ticket booth. It quickly replied, "No." So much for the spy's navigation information. Hunter asked the quad if there were any man-made objects on this moon. The answer came back: everything here is man-made. A stupid question.
Finally he asked if there were any computers close by. The device snorted and burped for a couple moments and came back with a reply that yes, a computer was almost in sight, just about a mile away. Hunter got to his feet and tried to walk as best he could in the direction indicated by the quadtrol, but it was no dice. The mountains of socks were just too loose, too soft to support his weight. It would be impossible for him to hike on top of the piles to get where he had to go.
He would have to crawl.
This was obviously another example of the Mad Russian's sense of humor. But Hunter was not laughing at the moment. His only saving grace was his belief that all the socks around him seemed clean. As if they'd just been washed. Of course, that was part of the joke.
He asked the quadtrol what else was unusual about this crazy place, this as he was crawling along. The reply was: no two socks were the same. They were all socks, but they were all just one half of a pair. Interesting… but why?
After a while Hunter was reduced to crawling up and rolling down the mountains of socks, this as the day began, and sunlight appeared, this time out of a totally false, yellow sky. The new glow just confirmed what he already knew: that there was nothing but socks everywhere he looked on the strange little satellite. All of them missing the other mate.
It took him what seemed like hours, but he finally spotted the ticket booth. It was at the peak of an extraordinarily high mound of mismatched socks, standing next to an ancient washing machine-clothes dryer combination. His only clue as to where he was going next was a sign on the booth that read: Next Stop: World of Mirrors.
Hunter climbed up to the booth and booted up the PC. He quickly filled in all the applicable fields, then took another look around.
Thousands, millions, billions? of socks, all without mates? An ancient washer-dryer. Land of the Lost?
Even as he hit the Enter button, he had to admit, he still didn't get the joke.
An explosion…
Yellow flames. Red. Orange. Then pure, pure white.
Hunter was tumbling again, but this time across very hard ground. His head was going over his heels and was bouncing viciously off anything that got in his way.
Even worse, whenever he bounced, he seemed to stay in the air way too long — long enough to see that he was bleeding from his hands, his knees, from his head and ears. He burst through a cloud of smoke to see that he was tumbling down a hill in the middle of a massive battlefield. Churned-up sections of ground, water-filled bomb craters, and flames were everywhere.
He finally bounced one last time and landed — hard — on a battered roll of barbed wire. It was coiled like a spring, which, lucky for him, allowed him to spring right off, only to land in a pool of putrid water. Suddenly all his wounds were being stung by numerous filthy liquids. He rolled himself out of this disgusting puddle, and the next thing he knew, he was tumbling down another hill, colliding with many other things, all of them big and sharp. More barbed wire, depleted shell casings, discarded military equipment. Bodies…
He came to a stop again, finally, at the bottom of this hill. Only then could he see the top of the slope where he'd started his great fall. An aircraft of some kind was up there, burning furiously. He'd been in a crash; a bad one, but he'd somehow survived.
"I guess that was one aircraft I couldn't fly," he muttered painfully.
Startled though he was, he tried to make some sense of his surroundings. For as far as he could see, there was nothing but devastation. Horizon to horizon, the smell, the taste, the feel of death and war. Hunter was familiar with these things. Too familiar. But never had he seen anything like this.
He took all this in over just a few heartbeats before a huge explosion went off not fifty feet away from him. He put his face in the mud just in time to allow a small storm of shrapnel to go over his head. No sooner had his eardrums popped when another blast went off, this one to his left. Then another, just north of him. And another, right in front of him.
What the fuck kind of ride is this?
He was breathing in the mud now, and thankful for it. The ground was moving like he was floating on water. He reached up and felt his left ear. Blood was pouring out of it.
This was not good.
He managed to roll over on his back. Eyes looking straight up, he could see a formation of huge airplanes passing overhead. Strings of bombs were falling from their bellies. Quick but fuzzy calculations told him the bombs had already passed over him. They fell a half mile away, but he could still feel the ground rumble as each one hit. He was sure another wave was coming over, though. He could already hear the airplanes, and their bombs whistling through the air, heading right for him.
Damn…
He began crawling up the hill, thinking this was the most likely path to safety. But he was surprised to see four men carrying a stretcher coming down the hill toward him. At the same moment, the air was suddenly filled with small arms fire. Bullets zinging back and forth, sizzling as they went by. Then mortar shells began landing all around him. Then artillery shells.
Then the aerial bombs hit.
The ground shook with such ferocity, Hunter swore he could feel his bones breaking simply from the concussion of the bombs hitting so close by. They went on exploding for sixty long seconds, some not one hundred feet away. Somehow they all hit around him, missing him completely. But he couldn't imagine anyone within a quarter mile being able to survive.
Yet when he looked up, he was astonished to see the four men with the stretcher jump up from the smoke and continue racing down the hill toward him, undaunted. Gunfire began again. The stretcher bearers ducked and zigged and zagged their way through the blizzard of lead apparently intent on retrieving Hunter from his very precarious position. And somehow they made it. That's when he saw the large red crosses on their armbands. They were medics. And at that moment, he was damn glad to see them.
They jumped into the crater next to him and without a word began tending his injuries. A bandage was quickly applied to his ear. Two more were applied to his leg wounds.
One of the medics shoved a pill into his mouth; another unloaded a gigantic load of something from a giant syringe into his arm. A second later, Hunter felt his body begin to rise off the bloody, muddy ground.
Morphine…
There was nothing else like it.
Everything got different after that. No more pain. No more worries. No more war, battlefield, muck, or yuck. They put him on the stretcher and began lugging him up the hill. The bullets were still flying all over the place, but they sounded like notes on a violin as they went zinging by him now. The four stretcher bearers, tripping and scrambling in their ascent, were showing uncommon bravery in the face of near-certain death.
Somehow they reached the top of the hill and managed to dive for the relative cover of a trench beyond. Hunter's stretcher fell to the mud of the ditch, the four medics fell on top of him, protecting him from the artillery bursts that came in just seconds later. It went on like this for at least five minutes, but even more so now, the explosions sounded like the kettle drums in an orchestra to Hunter, thanks again to sister morphine.