Disclaimer: I don't own Human Target and intend no copyright infringement.
Winston would have never noticed Chance leaving if he hadn't coincidentally looked out the window the very moment his business partner crossed the building in front of the hall of residence where they were accommodated. Where the hell was he going? What was he up to? He seemed to be heading straight for the Minster.
Pressing his lips together, Winston checked his cell phone although he was pretty sure it hadn't signaled. No message. Chance hadn't tried contacting him. That could only mean one thing: He didn't want him to know where he was going.
No shit, Sherlock. But why?
Come to think of it, from the very beginning Chance had been very supportive of that lowlife Guerrero's request that they take this job. The two could be in cahoots…
Winston tried to unthink that thought, but of course it now wouldn't leave him alone. He believed Chance that he was done with contract killing, but the Minster was full of valuable objects and their finances, although they had been in the business for only three months yet, were scarce, mildly put. Maybe Chance thought with a quick B & E he could provide them with a probably soon much needed shot in the arm.
That was the most harmless explanation Winston could think of. Others were a lot more sinister and involved him being wrong about Chance's recent reformation.
Sudden rustling and grunting inside Abby's room interrupted his musings and made him retreat further into the shadows. A moment later her door moved and out she stepped, clad in nothing but a strangely out of fashion night gown (From whom did she inherit it? Her Grandma?). Barefooted, she padded to the toilet.
Winston already felt like some sort of a creep, watching a woman go to the toilet in the middle of the night, so he tried not to listen to the typical sounds people produced while staying there. What he couldn't ignore, though, was a sudden, loud CRACK sound, followed by a strange, metallic wheezing and then the rushing of water.
Lots of water.
… … …
Chance hadn't even thought of contacting Winston. He had briefly debated waking Guerrero, but even that idea had been wiped away by his growing curiosity in the last few minutes. The sound that had attracted his attention was the distant sound of a horn, increasingly becoming louder.
A horn, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a city. Of course Chance wanted to know what was behind that.
The distance between their quarters and the Minster was short, Chance covered it in less than five minutes. Street lighting was poor around this time of night, apparently the municipal county figured people should be in bed after Last Call in the pubs. Silent and smooth as a cat he slinked through an ancient Roman town gate and down a narrow street lined with pubs, leading directly to the cathedral. The horn sound, however, was coming from somewhere behind the building.
Becoming almost invisible, melting with the shadows the huge church was casting in the dim gray light, Chance approached a magnificent looking mansion in a park like garden. He didn't catch much of the building, though, since his attention was instantly drawn to a group of people and horses, barely perceptible in the darkness.
Chance halted and squinted his eyes, wishing he had brought a pair of binoculars. The horses looked stout and surprisingly small, more like big ponies. They were surrounded and ridden by men in the strangest attire – linen undershirts and tunics. Everybody was equipped with spears, short swords and shields. Chance could clearly see golden bulls on their shield bosses.
Was this one of those reenactment groups he had heard about? York, back then called Eboracum, had a long Roman history, beginning with its founding as a Roman fortress in AD 71 . Constantine the Great had been proclaimed Augustus there in AD 306, which was why there was a modern bronze statue of him right next to the Minster.
Maybe some sort of show for the tourists. But there were no onlookers… Probably the dress rehearsal. If they didn't want an audience it made sense practicing in the middle of the night. Chance had seen placards advertising various thematic tours of the city and a mystery festival in the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. What was odd, at least to Chance, who had never seen a reenactment group in action before, was the state of the men's costumes and the men themselves. They all looked terribly exhausted, their clothes and shields were damaged, some were holding broken swords. One of the horses was limping pitifully. It was all outdone, however, by the expression on their haggard faces. They truly looked like men who had seen war.
Most unnerving, though, was the fact that Chance could only see the soldiers and the horses from the knee up. Damn poor lighting!
The sounds of the bells of the Minster reminded him that it was almost time to release Winston from his sentry duty. Quietly he slipped away again, back to their quarters.
Where, in the meantime, all hell had broken loose.
At least on their floor, but judging from the light in the various windows, the whole building was awake.
"She broke the toilet handle and apparently that caused the flushing to go into nonstop mode", an unnerved Winston explained. "I wanted to call a plumber, but he said he…"
"Dude, I AM fixing it", Guerrero, doing something behind the toilet with a wrench, snapped.
"I'm so sorry! I'm so terribly sorry!", a very pale and very shaken Abigail kept repeating whenever one of the group members accommodated on the floor peeked into the corridor to check how much longer they would have to endure all this ruckus at this unholy hour.
"IT IS OKAY!", both Winston and Guerrero told her, in unison. Judging from their sharp tone, she must have been doing this "I'm sorry"-litany for quite a while now.
"Maybe a cup of tea would be a good idea", Chance suggested, trying to cushion the impact of Winston and Guerrero's words, but Winston with his "I've been a cop for twenty years FREEZE" voice and Guerrero with his "Drop your gun, hand me the money NOW" voice didn't leave much room for interpretation. Chance would have needed a truck full of feathers to reduce the blow they had just delivered to Abby's already careening composure.
"No, I… no…" She bolted away from Chance, fled into her room, quite obviously ready to finally let the tears flow that she had fought so desperately to hold back ever since she had broken the darn handle.
Chance sighed. He felt sorry for her, but at the moment there was nothing he could do to make her feel better. Sometimes people needed to be alone with their misery.
And anyways, he was more urgently needed right here.
"Shouldn't you better adjust that screw over there?"
"Dude, isn't there some vending machine around you can plunder?"
Predictably, Winston exploded. "Oh, funny, another crack at my size. You know what? This is getting old! Think of something else!
"The really good ones are yet to come, dude."
Chance quickly checked if any of them was armed.
When the toilet finally stopped flushing a couple of minutes later, they were all exhausted. Winston and Guerrero retreated to bed and Chance took up his shift, which luckily passed by without any further incidents. Eventually even the sobs from Abby's room died down. In the early morning, however, when Guerrero came to release Chance, he didn't go straight to bed. He switched on his computer and dug around a bit. It didn't take him long to find what he was looking for, although it wasn't exactly what he had expected:
In 1953, a young apprentice plumber was installing a new central heating system in the cellar of the Treasurer's House behind York Minster. Suddenly he heard a horn and then, coming out of a wall, appeared a disheveled troop of Roman soldiers. They marched through the wall into the cellar, heading in the direction of York Minster. What was most horrifying to the poor plumber, though, was that he could only see the soldiers from the knee up. Apparently they were walking along the old Roman road, 15 inches below the cellar floor. Thanks to all sorts of rubble and organic material accumulating wherever people live, ground levels in general tend to rise through the centuries. Judging from the golden bull on the shield bosses that the young man could describe in detail, the soldiers stemmed from the Legio Nona Hispana, the 9th legion, which had been stationed at Eboracum but around AD 117 suddenly disappeared from all official records.
Jeez, Chance thought. That reenactment group has done a damn good job of recreating them.