A Reward for the Impossible
I sat with my back against a shattered concrete wall, staring down at the blood-slick floor.
I had emptied my last magazine. Even my knife had broken.
My hands were trembling uselessly.
All around me, the corpses of enemies whose breath had already fled lay scattered through the dirt and dust.
Blood from the gunshot wound that had punched clean through my right thigh soaked the earthen floor a dark, ugly red.
This was the end.
The ragged edge of the kill zone.
Humanity's survival.
The final stretch of my mission.
And now I am going to die…
Then—
The dust filtering down through the collapsed ceiling froze in midair.
Even the sound of the wind vanished in an instant.
And in that moment—
A gray shadow stood before me.
As if it had been there from the very beginning.
A shape whose face could not be discerned.
Even the air against the tip of my nose seemed to stop.
"A reward?"
I managed the question through a vision already going dim.
Who was this?
And what did it mean by a reward…
"I…"