Under the bright moon, the man and woman standing on opposite sides of the canyon were flirting across the gap when unexpected visitors interrupted them. The faintly romantic atmosphere shattered in an instant as tracer rounds came screaming through.
Amid the gunsmoke, gleaming brass machine-gun casings kept falling onto the terrace's concrete floor with crisp, metallic clinks.
Seeing Dahlia across the canyon start sweeping the cliff beneath her with the DShK machine gun, Nick raised his M4A1 and aimed down below himself as well.
Dark shapes were also clinging to the cliff beneath his West Watchtower, climbing upward.
There were no automated turrets where the watchtower stood. Aside from some proximity mines suspended in midair, its only defense was a ring of metal anti-climbing fencing.
But clearly, anything capable of scaling a nearly vertical cliff cared little about a mere layer of metal fencing. Nick noticed that they were even deliberately avoiding the suspended proximity mines.
What the hell were these things?
As the searchlight moved, Nick finally got a clear look at the so-called "Hollow Men" through his four-power scope.
Even he, who had fought zombies with his own hands, was shocked by these monsters' appearance.
These "Hollow Men" were covered in vines and branches, their biological tissue grotesquely fused with plants, like hybrids of the mutant plants in horror movies and the fleshy monsters from Silent Hill.
Nick pulled the trigger, trying two shots at a monster nearing the base of the watchtower.
He could clearly see wooden splinters and disgusting fluid spraying from the bullet wounds in its shoulder and chest, but the "Hollow Men" merely shuddered twice before continuing to climb as though nothing had happened.
Nick hesitated no longer. He held down the trigger and fired a long burst into the thing.
Bullets poured into this bio-mutant version of "Groot," punching seven or eight holes through its head and shoulder.
With a strange screech that set his teeth on edge, the monster, its upper body almost shot to pieces, finally toppled backward and fell into the canyon, striking several protruding rocks on the cliff before the darkness swallowed it.
Nick shifted his muzzle and opened fire on another "Hollow Men." This time, he still fired single shots, trying to find the monsters' weaknesses by hitting different parts of their bodies.
After taking five or six 5.56 mm rifle rounds, his test subject finally gave out as well, losing its grip and falling into the canyon with its head blasted to a pulp.
On its way down, it also had the bad luck to strike a suspended proximity mine below. Fire flashed, and the enormous blast hurled several half-climbed "Hollow Men" away from the cliff.
Even Nick, up at the top of the watchtower, nearly caught a faceful of debris carried by the blast. Fortunately, Lightning Reflexes saved his ass again, letting him step back in time to escape.
As though some chain reaction had occurred, scarcely had the proximity mine by the West Watchtower exploded when another ball of fire lit up beneath the East Watchtower.
Having confirmed that these monsters were not some unkillable supernatural entities, Nick turned, pressed the button on the wall, and stepped up to the heavy machine-gun mount.
This time, however, he did not fire directly beneath himself. Instead, he squeezed the trigger hard, aiming below the East Watchtower across the canyon.
Thud-thud-thud... thud-thud-thud...
The M2HB "Lao Gan Ma" let out a deafening roar. With one tracer every five rounds in its ammunition belt, it drew a straight, laserlike line through the night sky.
Dahlia caught on across the canyon and swung her DShK toward the West Watchtower where Nick stood, unleashing a long burst.
Two brilliant orange streams of fire crossed above the canyon as each cleared the enemies beneath the other.
Before long, "Hollow Men" climbing up from other directions triggered the nearby automated turrets, and the Gatling Minigun six-barrel rotary machine guns joined the chorus of gunfire.
For a time, intersecting fields of fire turned the entire canyon into an enormous battlefield, the rhythmic machine-gun fire seeming to perform Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture."
The occasional explosions of proximity mines perfectly matched the real cannon fire in the orchestral piece, driving the performance to its climax.
The sky gradually brightened. Although the actual battle against the "Hollow Men" had lasted no more than ten minutes before automated fire wiped out the monsters climbing from the canyon hundreds of meters below, Nick still spent the entire night lying on the terrace behind the Barrett, keeping watch.
Dahlia, over in the eastern tower, had been rather unlucky: a fragment from an exploding suspended mine had lodged in her shoulder.
Watching through his scope as she closed the wound with a surgical skin stapler resembling an office stapler, Nick could not help smiling.
It was not that he was enjoying her misfortune. He had simply never met a girl so beautiful and so capable in a fight. She was just too interesting.
Leaning against the railing, Dahlia applied disinfectant gel to her wound and covered it with gauze. She turned to glance at the opposite watchtower, then struggled over to the wall and bent her head to write something on her writing board.
"Best birthday ever. Nothing else comes close."
Nick nearly snorted with laughter when he saw the board she held up. This girl looked a little crazy, but she was not unlikable. When they had worked together earlier, there had even been a sense of complete, natural rapport.
But his expression soon darkened as he realized that this interesting girl with so much personality did not belong to the same world as him.
In a year-no, in less than ten months at most-whether he succeeded in his mission or not, this trip into a movie would probably end, just like the previous two.
The moment that thought occurred to him, Nick's mood soured. For no particular reason, he thought again of the girl who had shared his desk at school and secretly taken his hand during class.
If that had been a turning point in my life, and I'd understood that coy, half-resisting shyness between teenage boys and girls, could things have turned out differently?
Nick did not know. After all, there were no possibilities left in his past. All he knew was that he seemed to have fallen for someone again, yet this time, even the possibility of a choice did not exist.
Whether this world was destroyed or not, he seemingly could have no future with Dahlia.
As this body passed beyond its most restless years, Nick had stopped yielding to his hormones over the years, and had come to loathe more and more the emptiness of waking alone in the morning after a night of indulgence.
Just like last night: after a whole night of blazing gunfire, cleaning up the aftermath once daylight came was enough to kill a man.
The metal anti-climbing fencing on the cliff needed repairing, and the suspended mines hanging from iron chains needed resetting. Worst of all were those automated turrets, which had burned through at least half their ammunition reserves in mere minutes. The workload of resupplying them manually was enough to make his scalp crawl.
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