Abandon by, Alexandre

I don’t remember it all… But the things I do remember, I wish I forgot. I was eighteen, I was the rookie in the battalion. When I first came into the Galactic Ranger Facility, it was so surreal. A childhood dream, and I was living it. The Galactic Ranger Battalion was an elite fighting force who stayed docked in a Cruiser floating in deep space. The rangers are expected to be able to respond on a short notice to deep space threats. The most a ranger would ever see is an engineering shuttle getting raided by pirates, then the rangers get sent in to exterminate the threat. When I first entered the living quarters, Captain Lex escorted me in to introduce me to the rest of the team. It wasn’t a large room, but it was big enough to fit all nine members of the Battalion, with the addition of me there was now Ten members. Lex was the team captain, Anderson was the teams breacher, Dominguez the team sniper, Mcraney was a Grunt, Parker was a Grunt, Smith was the technician, Davis was a Grunt, Sharp was demolitions specialist, Griffin was the field medic, and then there was me, Pfc. Reed who was also a Grunt. When I entered the Barracks, I heard the chit chat mummers from the guys. Lex cleared his throat and said “Alright ladies, I want everyone to meet our newest family member, Pfc.Reed.” As he said this the mummers settled down, but immediately reignited as I walked down the stairs to my bunk. I only had one luggage with me, I placed it on my bed and began unpacking. It must have taken me about ten minutes to settle in unpack all my s***. I looked at my watch, it was 22:00 hours. I took out the small pocket Bible I had in my pocket, flipped to a random page and began to read. I layed down on my bed and oh boy, it was actually kinda comfortable. As I’m reading, I hear someone say, “You know all that biblical stuff ain’t gonna save you when you’re lookin’ a space pirate eye to eye.” I looked at his name tag, it was “DAVIS” as redirected my attention to him, I hear someone say, “Back off Davis, quit trying to force that atheist s*** down our throats.” I looked at where the voice was coming from. A brute looking dark skinned man, His name tag said “Griffin”, Him and Davis exchanged a look and then Davis left my bunk. “The names Griffin, Don’t pay him any mind, he’s always like that.” As I open my mouth to respond, I heard the click of the loudspeakers going on “SCRAMBLE, SCRAMBLE, SCRAMBLE” I look around to see everyone strapping up their boots, vests, and helmets, Griffin left my bedside the moment he heard the first “SCRAMBLE” over the loudspeakers. Naturally I followed everyone else lead, and put all my s*** on too. We all lined up and went up the stairs, out of our living quarters.They ran to the weapons wall, Anderson put in some code I didn’t get to see, and the weapons were unlocked, everyone got their weapons of choice, for a moment, all you could hear was a symphony of loading weapons. For me, I just chose a standard issue M4A1, and I loaded up a Glock pistol and grabbed as much ammo as I could fit into my clip holders.  When we were all done picking up our weapons, I followed everyone else as they ran to the docking port of the Space Cruiser. As we were all standing there, we heard a loud “ATTENTION” from behind us everyone quieted down and stood straight faced towards Captain Lex.
              “Alright Listen up, we are responding to a deep space Distress call, a civilian shuttle has gone dark, normally we don’t respond to these type of situations, but given the fact that this shuttle distress call was cut off by what sounded like the caller being disemboweled is why we are being sent in. So I'm assuming we are gonna be in a firefight with some of those space pirates from L-08816, it a basic rodeo, Any questions?” 
Nobody said anything, Captain walked his way to the front of our line,everyone waited for us to get in the landing zone to board the Dark Shuttle. After about 3 minutes of light speed traveling through space, the landing dock doors opened, and we entered a large pod attached to the ship, The was more than enough room to fit us all in there, We were all suddenly sprayed by a sanitizing gas, and then the lights went out. about two seconds later, the lights went back on, but they were red, which meant the mission is a go.
          The large pod we were standing in began slowly floating towards the Dark Shuttle, and after about a minute we are were locked in with the Dark Shuttle, it was silent, the only sound you heard was everyone cocking their weapons and tweaking their radios. The Pod doors opened, and the shuttle was literally Pitch Black. The only light the shuttle had, was a few Swinging LED lights, the rest were out. “Flashlights.” whispered Lex, and as if we were all Bee’s in Synch  everyone flicked their flashlights on at the same time, except for me, mines was like a half second off. We all began to move out the Pod and sweep our weapons across the view in front of us, keeping an eye out for any hostiles in the area. From the back of the line I could hear Lex say “Split up, two groups of Five, Me, Reeds, Griffin, Mcraney, and Anderson, we’ll take left, Dominguez, Smith, you two stay at the pod in case anything goes wrong, the rest of you take right, Keep Radio comms up, communications is key people, Move out” and just like that, we were split into two groups. We came across layout map of the shuttle on the wall, the “YOU ARE HERE” was right above the “Infirmary”, as we continued past the infirmary we heard sound behind us, as if something just ran past us, We all turned,
I was already sweating and you could tell everyone in the room was beginning to tense up. Lex moved closer to where we saw the figure run to, and he said in a loud stern voice “This Captain Lex with the GRB, if you are armed, surrender yourself immediately.” Our radio went off, it was Davis reporting loud noises from the east hallways, “Hey Captain.. This is Davis, and there’s some weird stuff going on over here, we’re moving in further to investigate.”  and if it were on cue, Davis side of the radio burst into chaos, gunfire and yells was all you could here, we were given the order to all get to Davis position immediately, after about 2 minutes of running we got there. There was bullet holes all around them, but the first thing I saw was Anderson laying on the floor with the whole squad working on him. When Griffin saw that, he immediately ran over and took the med kit out to begin work. it only took about thirty minutes for the guys to realize the wounds to Andersons neck and torso were fatal, Griffin took Andersons tag and brought them over to Lex. I called Dominguez and Smith to tell them what happened But as if they were watching us, we were attacked again, and they weren’t space pirates, they were disgusting, they were rotting, long, lanky, and what had been there arms were not long claws. There was so many of them, it was like they were coming out of the Wood works, we were all falling one by one, first was After Anderson it was Davis, it was Sharp, and then it was me, stabbed through the abdomen,I collapsed but was soon pulled up as the order was given to retreat the things we were fighting were what used to be space pirates and the crew. How many space pirates were on here? And why were there so many of these things around us? We had gotten back to the Pod, and there was no sign of Dominguez and Smith, Lex had dragged me  in the Pod, and we were the only ones back there, but I was fading out, I saw the rest of the team coming, someone had set the Pod to Retract, so it was slowly getting smaller,  Now the thing about these pods, when they Retract, they only get big enough for one person, so I had to do it. with all my strength I reached up from the floor and pressed for the Pod to go back to our cruiser as the doors began closing Lex turned around and yelled “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” one of those things pulled him out the Pod, and the doors closed and I slowly came back to our mother ship. From inside the Pod I could see my team fighting and trying to survive, but they were outnumbered, and I was safe.