Excerpt: Tear-Stained Wings

Lucas sighed and pushed the canopy of his plane off, carefully avoiding cutting his hand on the jagged edges of the shattered glass. It opened up easily enough, flipping over to the side and out of his way as he got up and climbed out of the plane, being careful to land with most of his weight on the leg that didn't hurt quite so bad so as to not risk further injuring it.

"Okay, so time to take stock," he muttered, looking around. "I've got no food, no water, nowhere to go, and a bad leg to get there on. What the bloody hell? I suppose that I should be glad that I'm alive after that crash, but that's like being glad that you only lost your arm in a freak accident that left you stranded in a desert. This bites."

With a sigh, he walked around the crash site, looking for anything he could use as a crutch or a walking stick. He didn't find anything immediately around the plane, but as he went further back he found the top of a tree that had been sheared off by one of the wings when he crashed. It was a bit big and he would have to take some of the branches off of it, but overall it would work. He picked it up and turned it over appraisingly, then dragged it back over to the plane to strip it of its branches. Using the sharp pieces of the wing where it came off the plane it didn't take too long to clean the trunk of the tree off, and soon Lucas was left holding what was basicaly an oversized walking stick.

"I must have really pissed someone off up there," Lucas mused as he tapped the staff on the ground a few times. "Keep me in a war that I don't want to be in, kill my girlfriend, kill my best friend in front of my eyes, and then dump me in the middle of a wasteland with an injured leg. Either God has a horrible sense of humor or I must have pissed him off somehow. Either way, wonderful for me."

Lucas sighed grumpily as he leaned on his new walking stick and pulled the german eagle pendant off of his chest and his goggles off of his head, throwing them down onto the ground by the plane. "Time to go before any Americans find me, and time to leave Germany and all of its problems behind. I knew I should have moved out of Germany and stayed with my cousin in Switzerland. Now look where the hell I am."

It took him longer than he had hoped to get used to walking without his leg bothering him, a problem which was aided by the fact that with the warmth from his smoldering plane no longer around his leg was starting to go numb from the cold. Every so often, he would look at his watch and up at the sky to make sure that he was still headed southwest, for the landscape was so desolate that there wasn't much to gauge his direction off of. All he could see for miles was dirt and more dirt, peppered with clumps of trees and mounds of dirt. Overall, not the type of place he wanted to be stuck in, but he had no choice in the matter, and turning back would leave his fate in the hands of the people his country was currently trying to kill.