The following is an excerpt from a short story I wrote. Let me know what you think.

WHAT MAKES THE GRASS GROW?! BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!

For some reason that shouted chant was the first real thought Pvt. Simeon Prayner had when he regained consciousness. It rose sharply through the swirling confusion of blurry images buried in his neocortex… a birthday cake, a red ball on a hardwood floor, tears on a smooth cheek… and stuck on the back of his eyes like flypaper on a hot summer day.

“Eyes… open them, open your eyes,” he spoke to himself as he recalled their existence. His eyelids fluttered open grudgingly as if they wanted to spare him the reality of his condition. There was nothing to see. Literally. It was so black, he doubted whether his eyes were even open. A series of rapid, hard blinks told him they were. That is when the panic started. It kicked in at the base of his skull and thrashed about like a caged bird searching for escape. It flew up to his clenched jaws and forced him to bark aloud, “Lights On,” before he had a chance to stop those words. It was instinct, pure and simple. A need to see. A need to banish the darkness. Under the circumstances, not knowing where he was or what was out there to see him, it was not an overly brilliant move and certainly not a part of the Marines Powered Infantry Handbook. For as soon as the sounds left his mouth, strong halogen lights located on top of his helmet and chest plate immediately popped up and illuminated his surroundings. Almost as fast, they went out. Blackness again.

That was when Pvt. Simeon saw the small green light on his face shield which told him that the “brain” in his powered suit had reoriented itself after his crash and had gone into safety mode. Crash? “That’s right, I fell,” he recalled. The memory of it trickled back into his mind in shard-like pieces of jagged thoughts. There was the lonely claustrophobic confine of the bullet shaped delivery module, the hair-raising descent, the hissing sounds as layers of the module disengaged when the atmosphere burned them into uselessness. That was normal. Those were things that he at least expected. He remembered hearing in his helmet the calm, confident voice of his Sergeant organizing his squad while they were in free fall a thousand meters over the planets surface. Again, that was normal.

In fact, it seems like things only started to go oddly wrong when the polished, two thousand pound battle suit he was wearing, with its incredibly intricate DNA computer brain, couldn’t seem to give him a coherent reading on the ground below. He was about five hundred meters up and had just orchestrated a graceful flip from a head down fall to a foot down descent, so that the gyro-jets in the suits feet had time to slow his momentum, when the glowing altimeter display on his faceplate changed from five hundred meters to nine hundred. A four hundred meter difference? Then it changed back to five hundred meters. Then nine hundred and back to five. “What the hell?” He had thought. He had no time to think about it and neither did his suit. The ground was rushing up and the gyros were on full burn…
Two hundred meters…
heel jets kick in, nudging him forward…
the display reads six hundred…
stabilizers switch on at his toes…
Snoopers engaged, searching for enemy targets…
one hundred meters…
five hundred…
I miss my little girl…
speed, ninety kilometers an hour… slowing…
fifty meters up, speed fifty…
Contact. Contact?