Kamiko Komics: The Valley of Strange Occurrences, Part 1

A Firefight by the Waterfalls.

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Kamiko and her patrol mates Miyori Sakamoto (Pinky) and Jitsuko (Gogo) Yamaguchi were slowly making their way back down the cliff on the side of the waterfalls.  They had found signs of the barbarians they were seeking, tracks, old camp sites, human waste, but no barbarians.  But as they were getting close to the bottom, Kamiko's danger sense began to twitch, and the little voice in the back of her head told her to be careful.  Not wanting to alarm her friends, she said nothing, but Pinky knew Kamiko all too well now and knew it when her friend was sensing danger.  Then Gogo who was walking point began to sense it also.  Without a word, safety catches were quietly switched off and trigger fingers moved ever closer to their triggers. 

Kamiko had barely climbed down from the boulder she was standing on when suddenly, a bloodcurdling scream filled the air, overheard above even the sound of the nearby waterfalls.  Tactically, it would have been better if the three were to climb back up on the rocks, but there was no time, so Kamiko ordered Miyori down, shifting her own position to the right flank. Before her and her comrades, a war party of at least fifty barbarians had emerged from  the rocks to in front of the small patrol.  They wielded spears, axes and hatchets, machetes, old long bayonets and even the occasional sword or two, but fortunately, this group had no guns.  It would be a tough fight, but they had sprung their ambush too soon.  

 To the far left of the line, Gogo stood up and brought her powerful German-built G-3 battle rifle to the shoulder.  It was a big rifle for a Japanese girl and and she knew too well that if she survived the fight, it would be with a bruised shoulder that would hurt for at least a couple of days.  But she loved the rifle for its reliability and stopping power. She never needed more than one shot to drop even the biggest barbarian or road bandit and kept the selector on semi-automatic as she sighted in on the barbarian leading the charge.  But Kamiko was letting them get too close, she thought. Much too close.

After what seemed like an eternity, Kamiko finally gave the order to fire.  She brought her Howa Type 89 rifle no further up than the hip moved the selector to full auto.  Kamiko had always been good at hip shooting with a full auto weapon, and the light recoil of her 5.56mm assault rifle was something she controlled with ease.  

And suddenly, the shady little haven was alive with gunfire; the deep, booming sound of Gogo's 7.62mm battle rifle, the short staccato of Miyori's Sterling sub machine gun, and the ear-piercing crack of Kamiko's assault rifle, being fired in short, accurate bursts into the densely packed horde to their front.  Bullets struck flesh, smashed bones, perforated and exploded human skulls as the front ranks of the barbarian horde were brought down in a matter of thee or four seconds. The attackers paused, stumbled, tried to organize a final push for the last twenty meters or so, but they just kept falling before the well-aimed and well-controlled fire of Kamiko's party. And suddenly, with three fourths of their original number either dead or crawling on the ground, wounded, the war party broke and ran for the rear, disappearing behind the same boulders they had emerged from.  

Miyori and Gogo both breathed a sigh of relief as the charge was beaten back, though Kamiko appeared unmoved and as always, as cool as ice.  Miyori had always said that Kamiko simply didn't know the use of fear, as Kipling would have written.  

"Change magazines," Kamiko ordered, only raising her voice to make herself heard--all three had been temporarily deafened by their own gunshots and it would take several seconds for their hearing to return to normal and when it did it was the moans and screams from the wounded in front of them that assaulted their ears in a different way, signifying there remained some killing to be done.  There were no Geneva conventions out here and most of the wounded would die of their wounds or infection anyway.  There was no point in taking the chance that any of them might survive their wounds and come back to fight them again one day and so once again, shots rang out, but this time at a slow, deliberate rate. 

 

Once the dirty work had been done, the weapons that could somehow be used by the Pin-Up Patrol or sold off to their allies as tools were collected, and the others thrown broken and over the edge of a cliff and into the pool at the bottom of the falls. The patrol then continued their descent to meet up with the rest of the platoon, but not before reflecting on how such a beautiful place could be despoiled by such pointless violence.