Pulp Fiction 1

Note: This is going to be completely stream of consciousness garbage, not meant to be a finished work. I just figure, I better practice if I want to get to the point where I'm actually writing good stuff.
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We stood in the frozen darkness, dripping with sweat and dampness, fear clouding the air in every direction. Shots tore from the left. I had a bandaged wound on my left arm, which was mostly useless, but I kept marching on... Gallax needed me. He was my buddy, we used the buddy system in those days... before ionic cannons and blast matrices.

"Get behind that pillar, I'll try to draw them out from behind the rubble. We've got to make a stand here." Gallax's voice was pretty tremulous.

I bolted like a scared deer to the right hand side where a half-fallen pillar leaned into the wind, grasping at the last dregs of inanimate life. It was a structural strut, and it had held together this side of the building with the blunt force of sheer determination. On my way to my new command post, I felt the icy heat of my left arm go numb.. it was now completely useless, its nerve endings shorted by an enemy blast. I would never be able to do pushups again. But I could still hold a gun... with the other hand. I pointed it at my assailant and let loose with a pure beam of frustration. The sizzle of burnt flesh was close at hand. Too close. He rushed me and I was forced to drop to a crouch, kicking out at his shin. Blood ran down my shoe as he screamed freakily in the inky blackness. I leaped atop him and crushed his neck between my elbow and my knee in a sick, sick cruntch. It was messy and clumsy, but he didn't move much after that. My left arm dangled behind me like a phone off the hook.

"You there yet?" Gallax sounded harried.

"Yeah! Let's give 'em heck!" I yelled back, my eyes swimming but my aim instinctually straight.

Our enemies could no longer sit behind the electrical panel that had been the controls for the Mars mining operation we were ordered to infiltrate. Me and Gallax were Space Marines for the Earth government. We were sent out here from time to time whenever there was a mutiny in the mining company. The "skipper of the ship" up here, Dr. Orson Fellows, had been brutally murdered in his sleep. A sleeper agent had relayed the message Earthside... nothing else was known, except that a group of about fifty to seventy-five men was behind the mutiny, and that they were reportedly holing up in the upper floors of the mining facility. They were well-organized... we had lost many men just breaking into the hive... sometimes I wish we had some convenient way to smoke 'em out instead of having to hit the hive with a stick every time. Anyway, here we were... putting down the rebellion. Every time someone tries to resist, we are forced to show them who's boss. Gets tiresome sometimes.

Our enemies were forced to advance in a rough, risky formation, shooting over each other's shoulders. I used a fragment of the building's former ceiling, which had been ripped aside like the tin lid of a sardine can by our ship's high-powered laser, as a makeshift gamma ray shield. If I was going to die here tonight, it wasn't going to be radiation that did me in. I could see the whites of their eyes now. It was now or never. Gulping down a sob of fear, I peeked around the corner -- and was shot in the face at close range, incinerating my entire skull. My body must have fallen with a wrong sound to the ground, headless. I don't know, because at that point, I didn't have a head. It was gone.