“Thursday Prompts” were something an online writing group I was in would offer as writing exercises. The moderator would post a short “prompt”, and you would write a short story based off that. The only rule was you couldn’t take more than a set amount of time to write it… I don’t remember what the time limit was, but I strained it every time. For this one, the prompt was “Campfire”. I think I had been reading David Drake or someone similar at the time.
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“You think that’ll keep ’em off us for a while?” Phil asked, slinging a brass casing over the sandbags. The augmented muscles of his combat armor sent the shell one hundred yards away, raising a small doughnut of gray ash when it hit.
Gaelen shivered and sub-vocalized to bring up his suit’s menu. Amber icons scrolled across his helmet display as he quickly flipped through them to SUIT ENVIRONMENTAL. Another flurry of characters brought him to TEMP as he nudged the suit heaters up a couple of notches. “Shit, man, who knows. Maybe a couple of days.” He leaned on the receiver of the pintle-mounted heavy machine gun in front of him, causing the mount servos to chatter slightly as they compensated for the weight. A thin gust of near-arctic wind blew across the blasted plain, carrying a cloud of dark ash with it into the bunker.
Gaelen shivered again, this time with the memory of the assault he had just survived. Who thought the wogs had that many soldiers in this sector? Wave after wave of ebon cloaked figures emerging from the treeline several hundred yards away; seeming to walk across the shimmering tracers that snapped across the grassy field. How many had he himself killed in that frantic hour? Hundreds, certainly; but they kept coming from the trees, along with poorly aimed low-tech mortar rounds and rockets. What sort of idiot sent a wave attack against armor and heavy weapons? But even so, they had damn near made it across through the minefields and over the berm. So many of them, with the same blank expressions; not crying out even when his .52 rounds tore through their light armor and exploded in a pink mist. They just fell, their bodies trampled by the soldiers behind them. If it hadn’t been for the incendiary rounds screaming in from over the horizon, so close that the heat from their plasma flash-baked the outer layer of sandbags to glass, they might have made it into the firebase.
The wind gusted again, keening through the upright supports of the bunker; stirring the smoking, shattered timbers of what had been an observation tower into sullen flame. The faint scent of charred wood, roasted flesh, and the acrid, biting vapor from the incendiaries carried through his suit filters. Phil turned and popped the release lever on the machine gun, sliding the barrel from the receiver and tossing it to the floor with a resounding clang. “Well,” he said, hefting a replacement barrel from the crate at his feet, “At least we’ve got a seat next to the campfire tonight.”