Chapter 2 (or 3) - Plain Crazy
He lay flat on his front in the blistering heat of the Wiltshire afternoon. His face was covered in a mixture of boot polish and moss, and he was clad head to foot in old, ragged camouflage. The ground beneath him shook and he covered his ears as a Challenger Tank rolled to a halt next to him. There was a whirring sound as the turret of the tank adjusted to find a firing position, and he buried his face in to the dirt for the huge bang that was about to follow.

For a few seconds, the world went white, and he could hear nothing but a ringing in his ears. The only sense he had that the tank had moved on was the vibrations that were now filling his chest cavity. Cautiosly, he removed his hand from his ears, and looked up. The coast, it seemed, was clear. Slowly, he got to his knees, and surveyed the horizon.

There were tanks, it seemed, everywhere. Off all the days, he reasoned, to come here, and it has to be a day that the range is working. Puffs of dirt exploded hither and thither as massive ordinance ploughed in to the ground against the backdrop of rattling machine-gun fire. The small dot of humanity did some rapid calculations in his mind, and found that, sooner or later, he was bound to be hit. He wasn’t sure of the standard procedure, but he felt that it involved a lot of sudden, hot pain, followed by a vast expanse of nothingness.

All in all not something he fancied, really. So then, time to get the job done and get the heck out of there. Be back at the B&B for four o’clock, in to the pub by seven, steak by half past. Marvellous.

He dropped down flat on the ground once more, and began worming his way across Salisbury Plain. In between tanks and blasts of smoke he went, tracking and back tracking, looking for the one thing that would make this worthwhile. Several times he stopped, consulted a small scrap of paper, swore to himself, and carried on. After an hour of this, he found himself on the slope of a small hillock, somewhere in the middle of the plain. And, sunning its wings on the top of the hillock, sat a butterfly of pure gold.

It gleamed. Its wings appeared fragile like Gold-Leaf, the thickness of its body appearing weighty and supported by impossibly thin legs. The proboscis of the creature slipped forward in to a buttercup, and he was sure he could hear the excited slurps as the butterfly drank of the flower. He was breathless, the creature was beautiful and, unless he was very much mistaken, this was the last remaining Storm Butterfly. As he watched, the butterfly stretched its wings and he was sure that some time later a village in Papua New-Guinea would see the devastating effect this would have.

Slowly, he reached back, slipping a tiny net from his utility belt. He gripped this between thumb and forefinger of his left hand, while he held a small piece of card in his right. Careful now, he thought, careful. Don’t want to get careless and destroy Tokyo, do we?

With glacial speed, he reached forward. He placed the net in front of the butterfly, and slowly placed the pice of card behind it, his aim to gently push the creature in to the net. Just as he was in position, just as he was about to complete his goal, he heard a high-pitched whine in the air. He craned over his shoulder, just in time to see the canon shell approaching to meet him with great, terminal speed.

“Bugger this,” thought Darwin, “For a game of soldiers”.

And then he died.
( Devil_In_Tights the *real* DiT!, Fri 29 Aug 2008, 10:41, Reply)