Free Lesser Gods by Duncan Long

soldiers firing at the tree row, with several in the squad having fallen.
    There was a renewed clang of bullets snapping against the underside of our chopper.
    “More ground fire,” Stan yelled needlessly. “From the east end of the tree row. I can take them if you bring us around.”
    I threw the Cobra toward the end of the tree row, going in low. When we were nearly there, I shoved the control column forward so we rushed the area where the muzzle flashes came from.
    “Look out!” Stan yelled. “Pull up, pull up. It’s a trap.”
    His warning came too late. We plowed into the thick steel cable the Cong had strung between the trees. I cursed myself for allowing us to be lured into their trap.
    The rotor blades whipped into the cable and wire that had been invisible to us just a moment before. The strands quickly wound around the main blades, causing us to lose lift.
    As the slack of the cable vanished, the line slashed along the nose of our aircraft before slashing into the cabin ahead of me, decapitating Stan before snagging on the frame and then glancing upward just inches above my canopy as the cable was reeled in, strangling the main rotor.
    A blade hacked like a giant machete through a treetop on my right, sending shuddering vibrations through the hull as the chopper wobbled through the air. I slapped down the collective pitch lever to slow the speed of the rotors, hoping they wouldn’t come apart.
    After that I fought the nightmare of twisting blades and groaning metal, trying to bring the chopper to earth in one piece, even though it was an impossible task. The ground rushed toward us. We crashed with a scream of steel, snapping tree limbs slowing the last 20 feet of our descent.
    I was unconscious for a few moments. I awakened to see Stan trying to pull me out of my cockpit. “Come on buddy,” he said. “The Cong are comin’ and this thing’s about to blow.”
    I couldn’t believe my eyes. “I thought you were… dead.”
    “The cable only knocked my helmet off — gave me a shiner. Lucky I hadn’t buckled the strap on my helmet or I’d for sure have lost my second most important appendage. Now get up. Can’t lift you out on my own, big guy.”
    I released my harness and pushed with my legs. In a moment I tumbled clear of the wreckage and was back on my feet. Then we were scrambling toward the American line, bullets cracking above our heads. We stumbled down a narrow path, racing toward the American patrol — or so I hoped. I wasn’t too sure about my directions anymore.
    Without warning two Cong, dressed in black pajamas and armed with SKS rifles, jumped from the brush ahead of us.
    Stan and I drew our revolvers as we dived into the underbrush; the same instant the semiauto fire erupted ahead of us, kicking up plumes of damp earth in the path where we’d been.
    We crashed through the foliage, heads low, as our opponents fired blindly into the scrub.
    “Buddy, if we stay here we’ll be dead meat,” Stan told me as we dropped down to avoid the heavy fire now erupting from both directions. “I’ve got an idea.”
    “What’s the plan?” I asked.
    “You ready to call an end to this game?”
    For a moment I was confused. “Game?”
    “Don’t fade out now. We’re in the middle of a SupeR-G game, remember? If we keep playing, I know we’re going to be deader than dead.”
    The humid smells, heat, and noise of the environment argued this was real. I had memories clear back to my childhood in Alabama. Then I vaguely remembered another life, a goggled, motionless body sitting in a chair, his head full of jet, somewhere far in the future in a drab world not nearly as alive as the one I was in now.
    I became conscious of where I was. And I had a hunch. “The only person I know of that could get out of the middle of a jet game would be Huntington. You’re Huntington, right?”
    “Do you want out or do you want to die.”
    The Vietcong were closer now. I was getting desperate. “Yeah, sure, I