"Gresit, Cordova, Argol, Lupu, the list goes on." Ceramic mugs clink against the table, files are turned, and glasses are adjusted. The woman clears her throat and thumbs the top right corner of the document before laying it flat on the table. Spreading her fingers over it, she eyes the councilmen around the oval. "Thousands are dead and hundreds will die by tonight. The body count is growing as we speak."
"And what are you expecting us to do about it?" One man in the group asks. He's furious, with broad shoulders slumped in defeat. The furrow of his eyebrows is deep enough to resemble a trench. "Send more men? Sacrifice more troops for a fruitless cause? They have families just like the rest of us-"
A man across from him folds his arms and scoffs, "If they weren't willing to sacrifice their lives in the first place then they shouldn't have joined the army."
The first man slams his fist on the table. "How dare you come out your spoon-fed mouth and call my men weak-"
"Did I say 'weak'? It's nice that you picked up on it though."
"You goddamn politi-"
"Enough!" The woman shouts over the two; they glare at her, but she meets their venom with her own. The room runs silent until the first man — a general, by the show of three stars on his shoulder — sits back and looks aside. The shuffling begins soon after. Ceramic mugs clink against the table, files are turned, and glasses are adjusted.
She folds her hands over her lap and sighs. In her peripheral, she sees a bird land on the balcony and stare into the presidential office.
"We're exhausted; our troops, our homes, ourselves. I know that it seems as though fate…or God… has only devastation in store for us, and so far that has been true. This past year has been so, so very difficult for us all." She pauses here to think, to allow the severity of their situation to resonate through the room. The bird flaps its wings as coffee mugs stop clinking, death certificates stop being turned, and eyeglasses stop being adjusted. She waits until the room is still, and then she raises her head and meets the eyes of all her men.
"But we will not allow this reign of terror to wage on. We will not allow our country to be buried under the ashes of burning homes and heritage. We will not allow our men, women, and children to die while we sit aside and do nothing. I don't know what it will take, but I refuse to give up, not when we still have our trump card."
A young man sitting at the foot of the table raises his hand hesitantly. When he speaks, his voice is quivering, "Trump card, Admiral?"
The woman's lips curl into a smile. "General Hartmann?" she says, and the agitated man from earlier raises an eyebrow.
"Ma'am?" he answers in confidence, but when she meets his gaze it turns to furious confusion. Flustered, General Hartmann straightens and grips his coffee until his knuckles turn white. "Admiral, you cannot be serious. Are you sure?"
Her smile remains unfazed. "Like you said earlier, what are we supposed to do? Do you have any ideas? If so, speak now," she offers the floor but his silence says enough. It's loud enough to answer for everyone. And with that, she takes a deep breath and looks out the window.
There's a smear of blood on the glass from where the bird has been slaughtered.
"Call in Demons, Taskforce Echo. As much as I hate to say this…I think it's about time we wake the Sleeping Soldier."
Trevor rests with his head against the doorframe and his vision obscured by greasy hair. It's ruffled more than usual, but proper grooming is the last of everyone's worries now; he wouldn't have cared, regardless. The roar of the humvee's engine has faded into background noise as they traverse a barren countryside. Remnants of foundation and brick sit where houses used to stand, and from the brown and grey colored grass and lack of trees Trevor can tell that they're only a few miles away from a fallout zone. But he only thinks about this absentmindedly, when the realization of how dreary everything has become is too surreal to ignore.
Grass used to be green, and trees were commonplace. They were tall and green in the spring and summer, and would turn a vibrant array of red, orange, and yellow during fall. And though their leaves fell in the winter, the trees weren't dead; they would live for centuries and repeat the process every year. They were survivors.
He slaps a hand over his face and groans into his palm. It's useless remembering such details when he will never see them again. Forcing the thoughts away, Trevor stretches his back to get comfortable — or as comfortable as sitting cramped in the back of a truck can allow. He kicks the back of the driver's seat to get the man's attention.
"How much longer?" he asks.
The man is older than him by at least thirty years. His cheeks are hollow, and wrinkles shape his face like topography, but his hair is a mixed pattern of grey and white, and his eyes are a striking hazel that keeps him looking strangely young. He looks at Trevor with a dull expression through the rear view mirror. "Half an hour, if we don't run into anything," he says.
Trevor smirks. "Run into what? Traffic?"
"How about a horde of ghouls?" The man quirks an eyebrow, and when Trevor's smirk drops into a frown he chuckles to himself and turns back to the dirt road.
They've been travelling for five long hours by now with nothing more than the sun and occasional town for entertainment. While the driver had initially tried to strike conversation with Trevor, an hour of stunted gruffs and sass killed his motivation and he resigned himself to dishing out whatever the younger man gave. To say the least, they stopped talking long ago. Which has left Trevor to suffer a backache (along with a shoulder ache, stomachache — his entire body is rigid) in silence while failing at choking his thoughts into submission.
And damn if he isn't failing tremendously.
Trying to crack his spine to see if that'll help, he jerks his back again and accidentally swipes the butt of his rifle. It slides, and he would have been fine if a perfectly timed bump in the road didn't bounce the truck, which sends the gun into the air and hitting not only the window, but also Trevor's knee. "Shit," he winces, and snatches the gun from the floor. When he looks up, the driver is staring right at him.
"Dear god… What?"
"Perhaps if you relaxed a bit you'd find that this ride isn't as bad as it seems."
"Or maybe if you'd stop driving like an old man this ride would go by faster," Trevor mutters, to which the driver shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head. They sit in awkward silence for the next few minutes, and despite himself Trevor is about to speak when the driver's voice floods the vehicle.
"You're a Covenant soldier, right? From Targoviste?"
The answer should be obvious, so Trevor just stares at him through the mirror. When the driver refuses to look at him, he begrudgingly answers, "Of course I am. Shouldn't this have been explained to you already? And, I mean," he pats the space beside him hard enough to hear a hollow thud, "we are in a military vehicle."
"We may be in one, yes, but that does not mean that you are military personnel. As I was given only your name, photo for recognition, and a destination to take you, I don't know much about you." The man says this as if he's confused, and Trevor can sympathize.
Why didn't they tell him? While he can think of a few reasons not to, Trevor had figured that assigning him a driver for this long meant that the man was trustworthy enough to be awarded some details about his occupant, but apparently not. Feeling uncomfortable, Trevor shifts in his seat so that he's no longer slouching. Something glints in the mirror, and the driver must have seen it too, for his expression twitches into something abstract before settling.
The driver glances at Trevor briefly. "You're not using the standard issue firearm for C-soldiers," he says. "That's an HK416 Carbine, 5.56 millimeters, standard issue arm for special operations."
Trevor tightens his grip on the rifle and narrows his eyes at the driver's reflection. "And your point is?"
"You're not in uniform, either. Your armor is new, isn't it? Non-Newtonian fluid based, and it's painted," the man squints at the mirror, and the glance to Trevor's breast is impossible to miss.
He should have known this was coming. It was inevitable. And to think that it happened five hours in…
Trevor is aiming his gun at the back of the driver's head just as the man is raising his hand. "Drop it," he commands, but when he slaps the man's hand to make him drop whatever weapon he has Trevor finds no such thing. He leans forward, now pressing the muzzle of the rifle against the driver's neck, and holds on to the passenger seat for leverage. "Where's your weapon?"
"You're a Belmont, aren't you?" The driver says through gritted teeth. He's staring down the road intensely, stepping on the gas slowly. Trevor can see a rotting tree form over the horizon.
He taps his gun on the man's ear. "You didn't answer my question."
The driver tries to move away but to no avail. "That symbol on your chest is the Belmont family crest, is it not?" he shouts, and the words sound as if they are being torn from his throat. Sweat builds on his forehead and starts to trail down the side of his face; he's panicking, and the vehicle won't stop accelerating. Trevor feels his arm start to pull away from the man, but he stops himself.
No. He can't risk it.
"They refused to tell me anything about you, they told me that your name was, was Trevor," he shakes his head again and the truck almost swerves. "But you're a Belmont. That's…that's impossible."
"And why is that? What about Belmonts do you hate so much that just the thought of them being alive makes you this disturbed?" Trevor spits, and pushes the muzzle into the man's neck. "Why are you so freaked out? What did we ever do to you?" His heart is hammering. This was inevitable, as always, yet it always catches him off guard.
The driver shakes his head more vehemently now, completely closing his eyes and steering wildly. The wheels screech against gravel, and Trevor jumps to take control when the world stops spinning and the car freezes dead in its tracks. The driver, who is now pressing his entire weight on the brakes, looks up at Trevor with tears clouding his eyes.
"Because I fought with them," he whispers, and the words are utterly broken. "I watched them die."
His name is Sergeant Major Lance Jericho, 11 Bravo Infantry soldier. He fought in the Last Great War, the one that brought almost complete fallout to every developed nation in the world; it was a game of mutual destruction, played until cities were flooded with blood and neither side had the strength to turn sticks and stones into weapons. There was no food, no water, no shelter, and yet it all ended in a stalemate.
When the European sector fell, the bombs were dropped.
And then… Then came the demons.
The rotten tree's trunk is rough against his back. Its ragged and sharp bark stabs into the spaces of Trevor's armor that aren't plated, so he twists his back and slouches until his chin is buried in the fold of his crossed arms. One hand secures the rifle to his person, but his grip is out of preparation rather than suspicion. A few feet away from him, Sergeant Jericho paces the side of the humvee in shock. Trevor watches him curiously.
After a while of letting the realization settle, he rolls his head to the side to stare off at the brown blur of tall grass, and asks, "How long were you with them?"
"Two deployments that lasted about three years each," Jericho says in a heartbeat, as if he was anticipating the question. The man taps his grey beard. "No, that can't be right… Our last deployment must have ended a month or two before the attack, so I was with them for four years that time."
"Seven total, huh." Trevor closes his eyes. "Delta was supposed to be a unique operative, with only four members instead of the usual ten. You must have been close to them," he flexes his fingers, "my father."
"I was."
"So tell me, if you were so close to them, fought beside them, then where were you when my family was herded into our home like cattle and burned alive? When we were hunted down like rodents for protecting our country." It was their job, their purpose. His family only ever tried to help, but the world couldn't see that. The world refused to see anything outside of their strength and power, and that's why they are always betrayed. This fate is carved into their destiny.
He spits on the dirt instead of the man. "You watched them die, didn't you? So where were you?"
Jericho doesn't answer, so Trevor pushes himself off the ground and approaches him with his palms out. His gun is left lying on a root, and every knife holster is latched tight. He moves with delicate confidence in spite of the frustration boiling in his soul. "I just…I'm not sorry, but I need to know. Where were you when my family was murdered, and –" He can't say it, so he ends his question there.
The pacing has stopped by now, but Trevor can clearly see Jericho's mind churning as distress and fear takes over his features. His hands are trembling at his side, and the youth once shown in his eyes and hair has vanished and left deterioration in its wake. He's looks no more than a skeleton of who he was before, and the image is frightening.
"I was…restrained to a chair at headquarters, watching everything unfold on a large monitor…"
"They forced you to watch my family's death?"
"I was gagged and told that if I tried anything the next to die would be mine own. I couldn't help them, no matter how much I wanted to I-I was useless. Someone had to be blamed for Dracula's return, and your family they were so easy-"
Trevor growls. "To what? Be a scapegoat? We dedicated our lives to the people, not the war, and when Dracula came back to scavenge the leftovers of humanity we were chosen to take the punishment? Because it was easy? Because my family and the Vlad already had a history?"
"I tried to convince the people!"
"But the church had already done so." Trevor can't help the way his teeth grit.
Jericho answers with silence, and it takes Trevor a considerable amount of control to keep himself from punching something. Even if his family had served under the military for years, when all was said and done with the war lost and the wrath of an eternal being to awaken fear, someone had to be blamed.
But there is one thing he doesn't understand. Balling his hands into fists, Trevor steels his gaze on Jericho, waiting for the man to meet his stare.
"…Why did they spare me, then? If they wanted to butcher the entire bloodline, then why did they cast me away?"
"Because they wanted one left. One – just in case all else failed. And it did."
The sob that comes after is ear-splitting.
They stand there, parked on the side of some abandoned road in the middle of nowhere, until sunlight begins to fade behind the peak of a mountain's silhouette. The sunset shadows patches of erosion on the mountainside where forestry used to be, yet casts a greater shadow over the hills.
The orange hue of the sky grants Trevor's uniform a glow, and in their stillness Jericho picks up his head, wipes his eyes, and whispers, "You carry your clan's heirloom on your hip and their crest on your back, but in your hand you hold the army's weapon. Trevor Belmont, last son of the House of Belmont, I do not mean to intrude, but for why are you doing this? Why are you working with the church regardless?"
In the light dimly escaping the barrier of the mountain, blaring bright from the sun, Trevor stands before a rotten tree and feels the earth rotate beneath his feet. He touches his whip and the feel of it is grounding.
"They were both created to destroy monsters," he says, and only after a minute does Jericho nod in understanding.
This time, the air isn't as crippled with tension as before. If anything it feels comfortable, and that's a description Trevor hasn't used in a while. The window he's leaning on is cool to touch while inside the truck is about room temperature, which means that the air outside is decently cold. Trevor glances back at his fur coat, which is now spread flat opposite him, and for the first time he catches a whiff of the foul odor coming from it.
What's worse, though, is that no matter how hard he tries he can't seem to wrap his head around the coincidence of his and Jericho's meeting. For the last remaining Belmont to be escorted by the last man who fought with his father — the chances are astronomical, and the more he thinks about it the more suffocating the feeling of dread becomes.
He's about to ask Jericho how he was assigned to him when the truck suddenly turns on to a gravel road. In the distance, Trevor can make out small dots of light and a few ruined buildings, and soon enough a small town comes into full view.
The town is situated off road in a stretch of wasteland between the next medium sized township, so when Trevor sees an array of cattle, wagons, and carriages, he's genuinely surprised. They're too far away to see the integrity of the housing — more like sheds — but from here it looks as though this place was barely touched.
Trevor scoots to the middle seat and starts shrugging on the coat; it drapes over his arms nicely, and when his outfit is situated he puts his rifle in his lap and leans forward.
The homes would crumble under any sort of attack, but since the town is so far away from any conflict they work perfectly. Each one has a torch tied to either the front door or window, and the more he looks around, the more bits and pieces of information gravitate together. This place looks like a picture taken from the medieval period, and if it isn't because of war then there could only be one explanation for it.
Jericho must have picked up on his thoughts because the man chuckles to himself and slows the truck to a stop. Leaning over the steering wheel, he points to the right of the windshield. "We're here," he announces as Trevor follows his finger to a group of people clad in large blue robes. There, right in the center of the robe, is an easily recognizable silver pendant.
Trevor rolls his eyes. "Speakers," he sighs, and as he opens the door the feeling of dread shifts on to a new target.