Even after palming the living shit out of the bolt the heap of scrap wouldn't budge an inch. Darius had worked up a sweat pounding away at his rifle, though whether that was through exertion or panic sweat was a little uncertain. The gravity of the situation certainly didn't escape him, the more rounds downrange the company placed the more time they bought away from the barbaric monstrosities that threatened to descend upon them. After over a minute of unsuccessful whipping on his weapon the man resorted to drastic measures, pulled out his E-tool, and hammered the damn thing like a cheap nail on plasterboard. After a few hard swings the bolt snapped and moved, although roughly. Darius charged the bolt over and over to work out the kinks, but it never got smooth even after all the cleaning and maintenance he'd done to it the night before. Fuckin' [i]swell[/i]. Probably some brass that snapped off in the bolt assembly, that's what happens when you recycle your material like a poor family with eight kids hand-me-downing a pair of ratty jeans. The man kept manhandling the rifle even still, hoping to at least snap and bend something into working for at least one more Godforsaken day. It could break in its own time, but this was crunch time.

As he sat racking the bolt back and snapping it reluctantly forward, he noticed a familiar face in his periphery take a seat next to him and look at him purposefully. Drawing his gaze, it was the soldier he pulled in to take his place at the firing line. A kid, college age, swept up in this hot mess just like the rest of them. Guess war couldn't wait until a young man had a little time to start his life first. He'd barely recognized him, everything had been a blur in his hustle to throw rounds into bodies. The kid looked... different from what he'd seen of most. Resolute maybe, like the tiniest glimmer of hope was living within him. With an expectant expression he gave Darius a solemn nod. The man knew what it meant. They were in the thick of it, but even in this hellhole a man could recognize what was what. Their position as equals, what awaited them at the end of the dusty plains, it was that sort of kinship that made soldiers strong. A complete stripping down of all concepts, what mood you were in, what you believed... They were all people in a struggle. Everyone could see the end, everyone understood. To think he'd find such humanity at the end of it.

Darius chewed on his tongue as he responded in kind with an equally-knowing nod. The larger man turned his gaze toward the approaching mob growing closer with its cloak of dust and gave the boy a firm slap on the back. It was an odd sort of moment, the two of them staring down impending death hobbling along with slobbering jaws. Someone get the camera. But Darius didn't sit still for long, an impossible feat when there was work to be done.
[color=007236]"Back in..."[/color] he muttered as he saw a place open up on the line, charging his rifle with a little difficulty as he sprung up to stalk in a crouch back toward the trenches as if he'd never slowed down in the first place.

Maybe this time would be different. Once more the fledgling soldier shouldered his firearm, wrapping his arm through his worn sling as he sighted in. Not terribly difficult considering the Grik were hardly more than a few hundred meters out now. With a firm trigger squeeze a round popped off with a loud [i]CRACK[/i]. Darius grinned wind, breathing in and out for his next few shots.

[i]CRACK[/i]

[i]CRACK[/i]

[i]Pop![/i]

[i]...Click, click![/i]

[color=007236]"Deadass no-good muthafucka!"[/color] he shouted in frustration, spiking his rifle powerfully into the ground with his rage, bending the barrel slightly as it hit the hard clay. As anticipated, Darius's weapon was irreversibly fucked. He was almost ashamed he'd gotten his hopes up. But the Grik were upon them, not even 50 meters from the line, some even further. He could feel the rumbling ground underneath their mindless feet, smell the... pastries? The [i]fuck?[/i] Darius had just enough time before the Grik met the trenches to eject his magazine and place it back into his ammo pouch, sling his rifle, and grab his E-tool. Gotta use what's available to you and right now that wasn't any gun. He was more prepared than most when the mindless zombies broke through the barbed wire. Their scent of freshly-baked goodies just like grandma used to make sickened the senses, contrasting against the gore they began to unleash. While his comrades emptied their weapons more frantically into the enemy Darius held something with a little more stopping power on the line. Acting completely on reflex, as a Grik charged his position he lashed out with the sharp edge of his shovel, catching the pale mutant in the eye but only stunning it slightly as the abomination twisted its neck up toward him to hiss a banana-scented warning.

Now there were several people in the world, but all of them fell into three groups when the shit hit the fan. Fight, Flight, or Freeze. All were evident as soon as the melee began, with some soldiers abandoning their posts in full-blown terror, others emptying their magazines more frantically or lashing out with the stocks of their rifles, or freezing only to be caught in the jaw with a stray blade from a sickly-looking crime against nature. Darius had always been the Fighting type. With a guttural roar not out of place for the enemy, the man brought his shovel down on the neck of the Grik, causing it to lurch and raise its hunk of metal again. He swung twice more like a madman as the alien almost collapsed against him, head hanging loosely and barely attached as it gurgled thick, syrupy blood from its neck.

[b][i]BRUMAAAAK![/i][/b]

As Darius shoved the limp corpse off of himself to fall with the bodies at the front of the firing line, both man and beast, he could see the rocks flying through the air crashing on his left and right flank by tens of meters. The rolling boulders skipped and bounced through the Grik ranks, crushing the sweet-scented lunatics before skidding across the line turning once capable soldiers into paste on the foreign clay. He could hear the anguished screams from the men trapped under rocks, those being sliced into or riddled with bullet holes and the panicked shouts of people scrambling away from the trenches as the pale menaces began to filter their way through the holes. Time stood still for Darius, a spectator in the bloodbath around him when the shock took over. In slow motion he could see the men to his left flank begin to edge back from the sandbags, drifting his eyes to the team to his right shouting in bloody rage as the flashes strobed from the front of their weapons in a dangerous light show. And toward the front a Grik was charging straight for him with an axed limb held high, the drool flying from its mouth in a guttural scream of murder.

The soldier flinched and brought up his E-tool, holding it out defensively as the rusted metal crashed down into the tungsten. It hit Darius like a freight train, smashing and snapping through the shovel, digging into his body armor, and cleaving into his sternum. The force of the blow knocked him back to sprawl with his back to the dug-up dirt like a boxer on the ropes. But he wasn't dead yet. The blade might have pierced the center of his chest all the way to the bone, but it was dead center and halted after getting a few millimeters into his ribcage. Worst he could notice was that it knocked the wind out of him with the adrenaline coursing through his veins but the Grik was soon on top of him, spreading its disgusting body across the length of the trench as it tried to finish the job. And then the first stroke of luck Darius had had all day. As the monster bore down on him with clacking teeth, dripping jowls, and tropical scent it was viciously ripped in half in a hail of bullets, flopping on the ground like a fish as it reached for any living thing within its grasp with its death throes.

[b][i]FALL BACK! FALL BACK![/i][/b]

Darius didn't need to hear it a second time. They were already in the trenches and marauding about the FOB in a gory rampage. The line was long gone. The wounded soldier forgot all heroism as he vaulted from the dugout and sprinted through the vicious melee like a rabbit among the wolves, ducking swings of jagged metal with friendly bullets whizzing past him with harsh cracks. It felt like it had taken minutes when it was really less than half of one. And then he pushed to the clearing where the scraps of his company were backpedaling against the invading threat stripping them clean like locusts.

The ragged man looked behind him heaving in heavy breaths, covered in blood both black and red. He gazed back at the dregs of those still inside the FOB fighting for their lives and realized that he had failed them. Darius ran. Soldiers didn't run. He didn't even take anyone with him, he just powered through to save his own skin and now here he was, useless and without a weapon with whoever was left. A whole fireteam... among them himself, the Captain, Intel Sergeant Murphy, the kid, a girl that couldn't have been an adult that long, a fierce man bigger than him, and the older woman with the bionic that was digging into his blood-stained torn-up vest.The man nearly jumped a mile when she shouted about covering her, grabbing his grenade and the grenades of others as she charged forward back into the bloodbath. It wasn't until then that he felt the sting, the ache, the driving pain in his chest rocketing across to his shoulders. The wounded soldier winced. It was like a heart attack, robbing him of breath as the blood oozed slowly from the almost 3-inch long gash.

But Darius wasn't about to be useless when his fellow soldiers weren't quite willing to lay down and die yet. Setting his jaw, the man grunted with hurt as he undid the only buckle holding his body armor on after nearly getting chopped into bits. 
[color=007236]"Hey!"[/color] he called out, tossing the bloody thing to the feet of the remnants of the company.
[color=007236]"Four mags! Make'em count!"[/color] The wounded soldier had, more or less, not fired most of his ammunition. An extra magazine for a handful of soldiers would be a lot more useful than what he was about to do. Darius gave the group a wide berth to avoid the outgoing gunfire as he charged toward the enemy without a weapon, armor, or helmet like the madman he was. No one else but a madman would sprint straight into the mouth of Hell eager to stab the Devil in the eye.

As Darius ran he slowed down for a moment in his reckless bullrush to pick up a nasty-looking cleaver one of the alien scumsuckers had dropped. It looked like a chef's knife if someone had bent it out of sheet metal, the blade bigger than he was from the waist up. The notched killing instrument looked like it belonged more in a horror movie than on a battlefield and the damn thing weighed at least 15 pounds. And Darius was gonna jam it down their abominable throats.
[color=007236]"RrrrrrRRRRRAAARGH!"[/color] he shouted as he charged with the blade forward, ramming it deep into the chest of one of the advancing Grik to the middle of the blade.

Karma's a bitch, motherfucker.