Distracted by the reclining landscape beauty, it took Sgt. Harpa a while before he began to notice that he was being tenderly lifted by a mound that was growing underneath him. Large, smooth, gentle knolls slowly began to rise all around Sgt. Harpa as the goddess began to get goose bumps. The mild bumps were as tall as a city bus, its diameter effortlessly fitting a small garage. Mesmerized, Sgt. Harpa was momentarily distracted by the sight of these gentle knolls as they slowly began to rise like bread. When Sgt. Harpa gaze returned to her face, he froze, instantly scared out of his mind.
Her head tilted forward, Gisele’s brown eyes were piercing down upon him. And with a huff that struck Harpa like a burst of hurricane winds, the goddess began to lift her right arm. As the ground began shake underneath him, Harpa spotted Gisele’s hand rise over the horizon of her right hip, heading towards him at a frightening speed.
Harpa struggled to his feet, yanking out the blade from her skin. He raised his rifle and impulsively fired at her encroaching hand as his mind drowned in panic. Knowing the absolute hopelessness of the situation, he wildly swung his rifle up towards the goddesses’ blank stare and blazed away, emptying the rest of his clip. He threw down his weapon and dashed back down the knoll into the dense forest of her pubic hairs. As the shadow of her hand engulfed him, He hoped to…
“Sergeant!”
Harpa snapped awake, just in time to see a massive cloud of brown smoke rising violently above the sierra ahead.
He was nearly knocked unconscious as the shockwave slammed into his HUMVEE, shoving it violently into a spin. His vision was instantly blurred, his ears pierced in bell-ringing pain, his head knocked into another dimension. Yet as the dazed Sgt. was thrown in his armored car, Harpa swiftly gripped the handle above his doorframe, hanging on dearly as both he and the convoy lost control. The foliage outside his windshield whipped past him as the armored vehicle continued to whirl, but as pyrrhic-luck would have it, his driver managed to wrangle the car out of its spin and into the concrete median. The vehicle smashed into the divider at an angle; a display that was nothing short of a metallic body slam. He barely heard the tire explode as the armored car struck the wall in a hail of shrieking metal and chiming glass. The collision tore Harpa from the handle, slamming his head into the deployed airbag. There, the car bounced off the shattered concrete and skidded sideways to a rest in the outside lane.
Other passengers in the convoy were not so lucky. They continued screaming and shouting as their cars and trucks careened into each other, skidding into the ditches and rolling onto their sides. The sounds of crunching metal, shattering glass and squealing tires filled the air, competing to be heard over the echoing, ominous rumbling that rattled through the countryside. After a few moments, the earth settled and soldiers began climbing out of their ragdoll vehicles. And as the distant moans of the goddess reached their ears, Sgt. Harpa weakly opened the door, falling out onto the concrete like a sack of bricks. Faint and confused, he looked into the thick, billowing walls of smoke that obscured his view of Gisele. And there Harpa laid on the edge of consciousness, the enormous dust cloud washing over them like a sand storm, imagining a merciless goddess beyond the shifting, blinding clouds of ash and dust, crushing everything in her path.