A/N: I can smell the slowburn filler chapter reeking from this chapter.
I want to say I don't like writing torture scenes, but then again, I take pleasure in knowing not many people do them. I guess it's more of a pride thing. Sorry for any uncomfortable feelings stemming from that of course, but this story is based on making you feel uncomfortable.
Screwthis - I see you've gotten on that "What the fuck is Lelei's deal" train too. I'm impressed people are picking up on it in general.
Axcel - Look, we all like to imagine that every time a Special Ops team goes out they do things 90 degrees, straight line, by the books 100%. They probably do reach for that. But for everyday grunts? Look to Faust1812 and his story if you want a pretty spot on replication of what it means to disregard that code and conduct in idle moments. I'm not too worried about my radio discipline portrayal, mostly because I'm self aware enough that I know it's being stepped on at times.
Major Simi - To be honest I could probably be a better writer if I focused on those nuances: the culture and economic clashes, isntead of the heavy handed stuff I do (such as the torture). Thanks for the kind words. Xavier Rall pretty much sums that up: I don't pull my punches.
In General - Perhaps I made the Maids guilty by association just because it was a reckless thing to do, and you may all pick up on those small things I try to do: Make people reckless in their decision making. Perhaps the most obvious piece of this is the Luger, but I like to litter mistakes all over the place just so I can say "hey, that can be a plot thread later".
Anyway, read and review, Dragon takedown in four~ chapters.
Section 2-16
Posted on 10/6/16
Tea.
The sort that smelled a bit like tobacco leaves and sweet, warm to the nose, the senses. Inviting, almost. A hint of Vanilla and perhaps a generous pinch of sugar had been Bannon's preferred inclusion into the tea she smelled.
It was Rooibos.
She remembered drinking it her entire life, her parents having acquired the taste by living in that dead state they ran away from during the Cold War: Rhodesia.
Her grandparents, to the best of her knowledge, had been English lords of some sort in Rhodesia during its day of British ownership. When independence was declared they had bankrolled Ian Smith's country.
When it all came tumbling down they took their money back.
That was the secret of the Bannon's family money; at one time the money which Bannon had grown up and used in all of its millions.
She had made a million on her own however now. She was ready to get rid of that heritage; pruned like a dead limb from a tree. Some could remain though, most namely the tea that had gradually awoken her.
That smell of tea had, given how she fell asleep, consummated with the smell of Itami. It wasn't exactly a kind smell, but it was a smell she had been used to regarding men. Still the lieutenant had been kind and he had deserved, as Bannon shifted him for his weight to be held by the side of her bike, a quick pat on the cheek before she had done anything else.
It was that pat that had stirred Itami awake, one eye open first in some slow start up. Bannon had gone and put a hand on her rifle as she had crossed Itami's over to him.
He groaned, his nose audibly sniffing as he smelled what Bannon smelled. "I didn't wake up in England, did I?" he sloppily said in his best English he could muster, a hand wiping at his face, only for a finger to gesture toward an ammo can put in front of them: on its side.
The ammo can hadn't been what had been odd however. It was the two cups of tea on it in two used tin cans from the food already eaten, the whispers of steam emanating from them, two tea bags providing what was undoubtedly the smell of the morning.
Bannon would've sat up fully, look over her bike and ask who had been responsible for that. It was a remarkably thoughtful thing to do, in her opinion, as Itami had put on a glove and touched one of the cans.
"Fresh." He observed, taking an experimental sip at the drink that usually only Bannon and Lelei sipped at.
Before Bannon could question, the answer came.
The answer came flanked by Doc and Lelei, and although Lelei hadn't show much in her face, Doc had made up for it with an impression of sorrow that burrowed through his blue eyes and made them cold.
It was the look of failure.
"Good morning father!" Chuka had been her ever cheery self. After waking up was she at her safest: when her subconscious mind didn't grapple with the shield that she had put on her that had accepted Itami as Hodor. She had naturally leaned down and embraced her father, and as the two hugged it out in the morning Bannon had only looked silently at those who followed her.
Lelei, in a rare show of uncomfortableness, had looked away from Bannon's gaze as she held her staff tight, the 9mm round around her neck with a necklace gleaming in the morning light.
Doc had looked exasperated, his hands constantly moving as if wanting to form words with them, but eventually settling as Chuka separated from Itami.
Lumaban had rounded with Poindexter, Wilbur also tagging along as he had muttered to them, sharing that same dreadful look that Doc did. "There's a saying in Arabic." Yao was on his arm as she realized what he was going to say. It was a phrase he had taught her before when dealing with the people that denied them help in regards to the Flame Dragon:
It was a saying that made clear the guilt in people's eyes.
A saying learned from his time in the Middle East and Africa, clogging burning oil wells while trying to find their replacements.
"What?" Lumaban asked.
"What you hide in your heart, is read in your eyes."
Bannon could hardly comprehend the whisper as her own eyes told the story of her soul as the events transpired as they did.
Suddenly Chuka's grasp had been around Bannon's waist, a smooch pressed to her cheek as the Ranger was caught off guard and Itami's gaze widening.
There was a reason for this show of affection though. It was the same shock that Itami felt when he first heard Chuka call him father.
The trapdoor beneath Bannon's form had opened as she had instinctually returned the hug, her words failing her as Chuka spoke with much love:
"Good morning, Mother."
The bike fell over as Bannon recoiled back, Itami going as well as the entire pack had seen the fear in Bannon's eyes take over that morning.
D-Day + 64
Falmart – The Old Arunn Kingdom – Outside the Labyrinth
The horses of Falmart were beasts I could appreciate beyond words. They didn't complain when the eleven of us had packed ourselves on top of them and got them out to graze and for some water.
They had complained less than the females I had in my group, but they had a reason as they huffed behind their gas masks: kept on them by the fear of turning into something we had to put down.
To think that our idea of procuring transportation had been horses had created some odd serenity in our minds that reminded us what year we operated in: two thousand or so years before our own, comparatively.
I, perhaps, was not the best to speak for the Special Task Force, but we assumed aspects of this world on our skin. The wolf head hoods, the pelts, the signifiers that we were knights of Italica and the Rose Order, had existed on top of our gear like the decorations of the Legionnaires we killed to claim that right.
The refugees, Pina, the MPs, us; we were the people in the middle: between an Empire and a Special Task Force.
So we rode our horses while armed with our carbines and rifles, on this quest to appease the people of Crety so as to foster cooperation.
There was some quaint feeling that came with me and my Rangers just trotting down the dirt path as the great gardens of the Old Arunn Kingdom came into view over a hill. Cam had been all too willing to vocalize that feeling.
"You know why I trained for the Rangers, Kay?" he said casually as he brought his horse up to trot with me, the rest of our men following closely behind, those who shared a horse having their passenger ready their rifles as we stopped at the crest of that hill.
Below had been a forest that I'm sure the elves would've been impressed with.
Chuka had always talked to me kindly, as if kin, but I could only write it off as her still painting an impression of me as a Dark Elf. Not that I had any say about it. I fell into the role easily, even if the tips of my ears rubbed against my helmet more than I had appreciated.
"Yes."
"Well you see," He had kept going as if I said no, bringing my binoculars up and down upon the forest and the very blatant sprawling stone complex within its center. "I grew up idolizing the Texas Rangers, you know, the original frontiersmen of my state. They protected the original Texans from the evil Meh-hicans and the Injuns."
"Really now Cam?" I said, still looking through my binoculars at the not-so-pretty picture I was looking at.
"Naw. Just kidding." He leaned over, taking out my e-cigar from my admin pouch, lighting it, putting it in between my lips as a sign of him not being serious. I knew he didn't mean it anyway, but the smoke was a nice touch. I only took a momentary pause to glance at the man and all of his Western glory. He looked the part of the people he idolized. He kept his back straight as he rolled his shoulders, the reins of his black horse firmly within his grasp. "As a kid, I was always led to believe that the Texas Rangers were the first men to properly see Texas as it was meant to be: in all of its awe and splendor, seeing that big blue sky and the plains below."
"Even moreso than the Indians Sergeant Masterson?" Tony implored.
Cam nodded at that, without a doubt. "The natives been on that land for centuries before us, knew it before even my ancestors planted their heels before Santa Ana. You live in a place for a long enough time you tend to forget what makes that place so great. You forget how easy it is to see it gone, to see it burn, to see it sucked bone dry."
"Are you really claiming to appreciate the land of Texas better than the natives?"
"Yes. And no beatnik Indian better tell me that I could never appreciate the land as much as they do. That land is my land as much as it is theirs. It's a fuckin' state of the union, ain't it? Besides, you think every fucking Chickasaw is any better knowledgeable of what's going on with the land than the average American?"
"God, why do I keep you around Cam." I muttered, purposefully letting him hear it.
"Because you love me and my purty voice."
"Oh right, because Sergeant Bannon is out hunting dragons." I answered myself after the fact as he chuckled, the tones of our voices falling into that serious that we needed.
"What do you see Kay?" He asked.
"Forest looks to be about twenty miles, square, there to there." I gestured to the edges of the trees before us, most of the squad confirming with a nod or a general affirmative noise. "Structure in the middle reads maybe four hundred acres by my guess. Big motherfucker."
He had nodded thoughtfully for a second before he discarded his gloves, bringing his hands together in a rather elaborate fashion, bringing his mouth up to a hole made with them:
The whistle that came from his hand had startled the horses, just barely, but soon enough the more outdoorsy of my chalk had recognized it as a bird call. We all looked out again at the forest, but hardly a branch had moved, hardly an iota of evidence toward a forest that was alive.
"That being said I did learn that from a Chickasaw."
"What?" One of my Rangers asked in some disbelief.
"When I ran away originally I holed up with some Indians up the 35 near Davis. Stayed with them a bit. Two summers worth."
"Right," I remembered frankly. "Dohosan."
In Native American vernacular, to my knowledge, that meant liar. "Little Bluff" otherwise. Masterson had been given a new name by the Chickasaw Nation for a period of time.
"Orders captain?" Omar asked behind me, his horse stirring a bit as it looked down below.
"Keep pushing through. Pears gotta be in there somewhere if I know any better."
"Do you know any better?" Another of my Rangers asked.
I rolled my head a bit in consideration. "Yes, generally. I know that Lelei and Cato have a garden in the Corridor in which they grew the local produce for their own magical things. I know that we can just order up a flight from the airbase and have them drop what we need right here."
"And why don't we do that?" Peters deadpanned in his question, Khan draped like a bag across their horse's back in his usual absentmindedness.
I had gestured with my hand for the rest of the group to follow as I led my horse slowly forward, down the hill. "Source of this damned thing might be there. That and we might as well do some forward recon on this thing, not like we're going to forget such a place."
"Of course, if it were easy why bother?" Masterson had sarcastically went on.
"I mean, we're technically still part of RCTs, right?" Tony stated the broad inquiry to all, most of it being returned with shrugs and ehs. My Rangers hadn't really bonded with the other RCTs as much as they had with RCT3. Obvious reasons of course, given Itami and I's rapport and the general things we shared in experience.
"It's not like we're gonna see, like, I dunno, a bunch of fucking Imperials in those walls, just waiting to ambush us."
"But what if there is?"
"Have they given us any trouble before?" I didn't need to ponder the question running through my team as they responded in their own way: a dismissal there, a reminder to never underestimate the enemy otherwise.
Loke was prone to getting stabbed, and asides from a few cuts and bruises and bludgeoning from Imperials during the early days of this operation, as far as I knew, none of the Special Task Force had been grievously injured.
Of course, all this minus Bannon and her loss of her eye.
We had bucked up collectively, and the gap between us and the Empire was widened even more.
That bucking up had made us, inadvertently, silent. It was the silence that we held that made us uncomfortable, awkward, if not anything else.
We weren't supposed to be here, having casual conversation, while out on duty. That's not who the Pentagon wanted us to be: talking of life, the cultural and political ramifications of what we were doing as we, in perhaps an all too conscious sense, knew what could've been.
Maybe it would've been better for us if we were just shooting Arabs or the Chinese.
At least my thoughts wouldn't have wandered as such if I had been back at home waiting for China to try some stupid shit.
Only now I was worried about our horses losing their step as we made our way down the hill: a singular dirt path that led into the forest painting our way in.
I was half way anticipating to keep going down that path with little trouble until the forest was now level with us and the horses had brought their senses to bare on it. One by one they all had stopped just short of entering the affair, much to Masterson's detriment as he held his reins tight.
"Come on you lousy bitch. Ain't that scary." As much as Masterson talked down on the horses, I doubted he would've fully persuaded the creatures from going forward. I didn't even need to tell him to stop as I disembarked my own, taking my ruck off of it only to tie it to a nearby tree.
I had grown fond of the horses here in the Special Region.
They were relatively free of the plight of Imperial politics, and as far as I knew the Marines always spared the horses when their Imperial riders were either subdued or killed. Then again horses were simple creatures with simple needs and simple uses…
Minus of course that one completely sentient horse I met in Akusho.
Very friendly fellow, helped Foulke's horse, otherwise known to me as Foulke, adjust to me being his owner.
Seyton and Samnu probably were taking care of my steed as far as I knew.
"Don't you know the old belief Masterson?" Sanders had went on as she disembarked her own horse, taking her ruck with her and shoulder her rifle, Hauvsbaum doing the same from her passenger position. "Horses know when stuff is funky."
Khan, on the other hand, had been dead silent: ears perked up as he looked into the forest with scanning eyes befit of wolves. He was better at handling whatever the horses had sensed.
Masterson had spit at the ground before his horse before relenting and patting at his animal's neck. He didn't mean nothing by the language, just how he was raised. "Horse was always a tool in my neck of the woods, Mia." He started. "Spaniards had the right idea when they introduced them to America. Gotta listen to a man, otherwise they're useless to me. And right now they ain't listening."
Pragmatics asides, Masterson knew he couldn't fight nature as he disembarked and got his rifle ready. "Orders captain?" Tony had asked, tying his horse down with a generous amount of rope.
I couldn't see much through the brush, but I knew we had to move forward. A simple proposition as long as I thought of ourselves in a fucking Elder Scrolls game.
This forest however, it was odd: from a distance one would assume that it was grand enough for an enclave of elves to have taken up residence here. Up close however, I didn't think so.
The bark, the leaves, the wind, the very fact that it felt very sterile there: this forest was alive and dead at the same time. It was an unnatural state of being. A walk in the woods this was not to be as I did a brass check on my AR.
These trees had trunks as large as the red woods of California, but sickly and strung together like mutated poles.
"Tie the horses up, we push forward, make it up as we go."
Masterson had nodded at the side of my vision as he snapped his fingers, pointing for those who hadn't gotten off to disembark.
"Suppressors on. We gonna do this shit as by the books as we can."
"Because doing a fucking fetch quest is by the books."
The horses hadn't enjoyed being tied down, constantly whining and ruffling against their bounds, but they had meant something by it. A warning perhaps.
The unmistakable form of a coffin had manifested itself against this outcropping of walls we had approached as we made our way through this forest, joined by more and more copies. I knew the maneuver to an extent though: the eeriness of having bodies literally line the walls of a compound of medical sort tended to keep onlookers away. The more maniacal wizards often employed such scarecrow like tactics.
The problem here was stated outright by Cam.
"All these coffins and not one body in them."
The women had all tightened their masks even further at the reminder of what, exactly, had been awaiting them if they took it off. It was a reminder for us men as well.
"Masks on." I ordered swiftly, our masks out again and quickly sealing our faces tight.
Still even then Masterson kept his worn Stetson on. He bent down to one of them: the traits they all shared being, disturbingly, they had been open. Running a finger along the inside, dirt collecting on his pads.
"Broken recently."
Judging based on how the doors and lids to the coffins were bent, they had been broke from the inside out.
"So you said that this Arunn Kingdom tried to use longevity magic and what not?" Sanders asked in disbelief.
I answered bluntly. "Ah, things of that nature. When the lights are out the lights are out, however the corpse can be made perfect again… it was a certain liability of a certain ilk at the Capital apparently."
There was something more left behind however. No two coffins were the same with their left-behind contents: faded sheets, beads, candles and waxes given to the dead for their sake. Some of them had a bag of coin in there as well, the ones left in their mouths having tumbled out and back into the coffin.
"Put it down Cam." I had hurriedly told Masterson to place a doll he found within that broken coffin back where he found it. He had spooked himself into placing it back in as soon as he could, a loud sigh muffled.
"That's the running theory, right? These people came as Romans?" Peters asked, Khan staying between his legs obediently. The gas mask did nothing to hide his deep voice.
"Unofficially." I responded once, tiredly. "Not like my college level Latin is helping me any."
Sanders had snorted. "It was an easy language enough to learn, this Lingua Franca."
"Try becoming an Imperial, Sanders. Different case then."
"Well it took you about a month to become an Imperial icon of sin, can't be that bad." She shot back.
"Kay changes himself very easily, y'all should know this already."
Wasn't I diagnosed with a bipolar disorder before I got the okay for West Point? I tended to not remember that hazy period between that day at Syracuse, graduating, being lost in my thoughts between psychiatrist visits and advising from those who wanted to employ me.
"I forgot what my shrink thought of me officially, but she said I had a problem about thinking of myself as a good person after he beat the shit out of me."
"How the hell do you have that sort of problem?" Hauvsbaum had asked, the pragmatic, indifferent New Yorker in both of us connecting at that moment.
"I still don't know man." I relegated. I really didn't know why I became who I was. I told myself that it was a problem everyone had however. The only difference between them and me was the fact I had gone to a shrink because of it.
My favorite Texan spoke up. "Right, John told me you were a nerd once. Valedictorian and all that good stuff." I still wanted to be a politician at the end of it. That's what I told myself as all my online assignments at the college I was attending over their online program had been dangerously wandering into 'never going to be done' territory.
Perhaps Cam had reminded me of that for a good reason.
"Look, I'll tell you what I told her: I had a long time to think about why that fucking professor beat the shit out of me. Realistically, he was just drunk, and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but my head man, my head…" I lowered my rifle for a second as I looked up into the trees and the rays of light that came through the leaves. "I thought he beat me because he didn't like me as a person. I thought I deserved to be beaten."
Omar had winged my back with his elbow as he pushed forward. He knew that this was no time to get mopey, and I had agreed as I snapped out of it.
There was also another reason why he pushed forward. He was, in lieu of Loke's absence, our pointman for this mission. He had the refinement to do so. "Footmobile on our twelve. Non-hostile?"
We heard it: the ruffling of leaves, the patter of slow footsteps.
We took a knee as we heard what Omar heard, he taking his boonie cap and tilting it forward, blocking the sun from his eyes as he looked forward to confirm what he reported.
He raised his fist up in a ball as we all habitually fanned out.
If this was contact, it was calm.
And perhaps there was a little overreaction as, on this dusty path, a woman came hobbling forward in her petty pace.
The clothes of a regular woman here. Neither exemplary nor exceptional. Just a woman. A regular woman caught alone in an apparently bone dry, infected forest. Sure, the blouse she was wearing was low cut, her hair unkempt, but she was par for course as far as they went. She was pretty.
Perhaps that was part of the inadvertent trap as we raised our rifles slowly at her. She moved like a doll on strings, slowly, without reason, and limply. Though she was alive in a sense.
"She what I think it is?" Tony had leveled his offset sights on her.
"Yeah, she is, Private Rockwell."
She wasn't more than a few yards away from us, spitting distance. She opened her mouth as if expecting a meal from a hand that wasn't there, and we saw her dry tongue, dry teeth, pestilence from the inside out and the sandy groan of a woman that was not there.
If I had known the hearts and minds of the Empire, I suppose I had some idea of their souls, paying tribute to the gods that governed this world. They were real, I couldn't doubt that as I did back in our world, and if there was some respect I had to show, and I had given my piece already, I knew I had to pay that respect.
Perhaps it was that reverence and fear for the gods and their apostles that had made faith so important here: it was real.
My hand habitually went to my belt, fumbling inside a small pouch filled with thirty aught six rounds, the bullet themselves rounded down due to the nature of my rifle.
Not the one of polymer and aluminum however.
My Winchester had been propped in a scabbard along my hydration pack, it going out smoothly.
"Stand back." I ordered, one round going into the Winchester as I had flipped the gun one way, my fingers in the loop, cocking it by gravity.
"And here we go." One of my Rangers sarcastically groaned. I could feel Masterson's eyes burning into the back of my head, but I couldn't blame him.
We had this discussion once: about our feelings about killing. It didn't matter by the time we had that discussion, weeks after Ginza as we trained to go past the Gate for the first time. He had been used to putting down the suffering, the cattle and animals in the Texan farmland that still existed and had been saved by his parents, but he had more concern for me.
A concern that I was capable of killing too easily, and I knew it, and I had fallen into the easy grooves of making the act of killing a business I wanted to partake in.
I once thought if I had to kill, it would've been in a place and time where all other options had been expended and it was the only action left to take on.
It was a belief I still held to today as the words of an apostle and a prayer echoed in my head and silently fell off my lips.
"Emroy, please lend your power to save those who have strayed from nature's laws. Liberate this soul, suffering inside this abomination."
Her eyes were dead, so I felt nothing as I held the rifle level to her head in one hand.
My own sight had flickered, between pulling the trigger and the boom, the flash of the shot. When it returned to me the body had been on the ground like any dead body should've been. The blood however, was odd. It was red, but much paler than any I had seen erupt from a human body.
I think I would've been a good judge given how much I had drawn at that point.
I let the rifle fall, my fingers around the lever still as it cycled.
"Ain't Hardy supposed to be the one stopping this sorta shit from happening? You know, keeping the dead dead?" Masterson had brought my attention out of it, a breath I was holding let out as the Winchester went back into its place. He had a point he found. He always did.
My Rangers turned around to see the, within context, clean mess I had made. Her head had burst into a neat pile on the ground, her body flat against its back on the dirt ground.
I had went for my shirt pocket, my lighter there alongside the e-cigar. I didn't light up actual cigars often, but a lighter was always handy to have around. "Cam, take five men forward for recon. We'll meet up with you after we deal with this body."
Masterson had been ambivalent as he looked at the corpse and the way forward, his rifle across his back, as he nodded considerately. "Copy. We see any more of these… things, we pop 'em?"
"With extreme prejudice."
Cam had lived for this shit, I knew. He loved operating more than he let on in some machismo self-relegation to the art of war, and seeing as they were zombies, he couldn't argue. Not when the double barrel shotgun strapped across his back was brought out, the man checking the shells before flicking the safety off on his M4. He pointed to five of his men, Peters and Khan included.
"Five meter spread. We advance till I say stop."
With little argument they had assumed their line and moved forward into the brush. With little pause between them disappearing had the first suppressed gunshots rung out.
Tony had whistled impressed, he being left with me, looking down at her body. "That was a real life, goodness to honest zombie… flesh doesn't look right though."
I knew what he meant as I knelt down, bringing her arms in from their spread eagle.
"I think they call this Death's Makeup, or Death's Kiss, something like that." I had drawn from what I knew of this particular syndrome. The Imperial Libraries Pina had let me roam certainly gave me an insight that I'm sure Beckett would've loved to see firsthand. The revelation to me during our trip back to Japan that he had been CIA was disconcerting to me, but still, I like to think he had been friendly with me when I knew him only as an MP.
"How much you know about these things?" he asked again, kneeling besides me as further gunfire went on. The rest of the Rangers I kept had wisened up and took a knee, covering their sectors.
"The Arunn Kingdom," I gestured up at the walls above the trees. "They were always one to test with the medical and magic fields as we know it. Empire conquered them about two hundred years ago in order to put a stop to that."
Hauvsbaum had grumbled through her gas mask. I knew her well, if only because we both came from NYC. She knew me from before my service even, if only because she had seen my face on the news report after Professor Jie beat my shit in. She had been Hitman's biggest woman in build, her hair cut fuck boy style, about as tall as me and Masterson. Despite her size she had been Hitman's designated sniper, Black only being the designated marksman. "I'm guessing the Empire didn't want this Kingdom to have a leg up on them, right?"
"Tony, go get some branches, would ya?"
"Yes sir."
"And Danielle, I guess the problem was more, as far as I know, was that the Arunn Kingdom was trying to get a monopoly on medical and longevity magic. Empire doesn't mind weaponized magic, Rondel was, historically, where their court mages and battle wizards were trained."
Hauvsbaum had considered my words for a second, she looking over her Mk13 rifle in some disdain. She had loved her rifle and was hard pressed for a force that could stop it (She told me once or twice Chris Kyle had been her inspiration for her trade). The harpy in Rory's MP force had used her own magic skills against our rounds to an effect and that always been a contention in the Special Task Force's combat effectiveness.
She was welcomed into the MP's force with much love however, but still, someone needed to have the balls to ask her exactly what she had practiced to stop our bullets from doing things to her.
Rumor had it, and the theory seemed to work, that she had offered some small amount of radio interference whenever she strayed near a set and had been fresh off of using magic.
Blackburn had come through recently in his ever diligent supplying of us, and as such we had our wrist mounted computer units back: communications and GPS devices which curved along our wrists underneath a protective sheath. Hauvsbaum had glanced at her own for a second.
"Ain't Rondel like, a stone's throw away?"
"Yeah. Over a river. Might be the reason why they didn't get hit with this shit, because I know Pina always got reports from Rondel regarding one of her knights: turns out she was a natural at magic."
Tony had arrived with the branches, I motioned for him to dump it over the corpse, playing with my lighter in one hand.
It was pretty clear what I was gonna do at this point. I was always good at using fire, all things considered: back home, during the riots, fires had risen from the Bronx as if it had been under siege. It was, I reasoned at the time, as I set fire to tires walling off the neighborhood from both the 101st Airborne and the rioters.
I try not to remember what I did in the hood much. Not much of me that I showed today had stemmed from there, but I knew the use of fire more than most, and I could recognize at least that from my past as I took a bundle of dried leaves and started that impromptu funeral pyre.
"Do you remember that wizard we had to confront during our last mission?" Tony had asked innocently, looking into the fire as it began, rose, and did its job.
I nodded thoughtfully, knowing what he was getting at. The wizard which had been buying slaves to test on had burnt the bodies of his deceased rather pointedly, turning them into ash before including them into further potions for further testing. When word had come that the Special Task Force meant to punish any owners of slaves he had quickly tried to burn them all, dead or alive.
The napalm employed by Rapier squadron during the Battle of Italica had introduced the Empire to something worse than a Flame Dragon; fire had been refined into a human weapon for a human war, and those that had survived it had walked among the Corridor, just thankful to have looked into the fires of Hell and come out alive, even with their skin and bones melted.
I overheard once, Mobius One, Lieutenant Colonel Noelle, belly ache to the Harrier pilots as to why there were any survivors.
He didn't want to see the broken forms of human bodies before him every day.
"Do we still have the White Phosphorus shells for the mortars?" I asked sincerely, trying to not think too hard about the pretenses of why we had to use them.
My Rangers nodded as the form of the flames took over the body of the woman, her clothes adding to the flame.
The sound of fire had been its almost silent cackle, ringing out through our ears as we saw this body burn. Italica's burning funeral pyre had gone on for days as the bodies were collected from its defense. It intermingled with the sounds of bullet careening into bone and branches further on, the suppressors on our rifles hiding their signature as intended.
"We waiting for something?" Wilkes had asked. He was our mortar man, a thirty something with a pirate beard like the Confederate generals of old. A civilized man who kept silent in most pretenses, a gruffness to him that harkened back to the old image of special operators who were the backbone of the War on Terror.
He carried our lone LMG: a MK46, a handle strutting forty five degrees up and right from the heatshield welded on by him.
I always thought of him as dependable, if not too involved with our squad's dramatics in this world.
His husband had been a stage actor surprisingly.
"Tony, Hauvsbaum, check our rear sector, everyone eyes forward." I finished off my order by raising my first closed before limply using two fingers to motion forward, our fox trot started, seeing through our optics with the flames behind us.
My earpiece buzzed. "Hey, captain, reconvene with us. We hit a wall."
Cam's literal assessment was not wrong as we put ourselves past all the bodies of women he had left behind in his advance.
"Why the fuck was Pina and them impressed by Tokyo? This shit's tall as fuck!" Masterson widened his arms at the foot of these walls. Perhaps no bigger than the city walls of Italica before the battle, but exaggerated by the trees around it perhaps.
A few of my men had poked to a large opening in that wall: the supposed entrance to the complex we had seen from the outside hills surrounding this forest, more coffins also scattered about. Dipping their heads in they were only greeted by hallways leading left or right, flanked by those same giant walls that left no secret as to their intent.
Still it was always good to confirm what, exactly, we were seeing.
"Sir, mind if I take a climb up?" Hauvsbaum had asked, slinging her rifle over her shoulder and motioning to a tree behind us all.
"Don't break a leg." I answered ambivalently, breathing out as I cocked my hips, Cam coming over to me. I shook my head somewhat frustrated as I tossed around the idea of what it was we were standing before. "Jesus Christ Cam, remember when we were being trained to fight in Beijing? Urban jungle and shit like that?"
"Vaguely. Why?"
"This shit here is probably one of them famous mazes."
"Wha…?"
Despite her size she had been limber enough to make the journey up, her bolt action rifle along her back as she climbed. Chuka would've been impressed, I know.
A lot of the conversations me and the elf had in the sparse moments we had been together had been lost on me, admittedly, but we talked about trees once: talked about where I grew up there hadn't been any. She talked to me about the types of trees, how a certain sort could be used for housing and housing only: filling out roles as nature dictated in conjunction with the elves of the world.
"Do you ever use those trees to get elevated positions on an enemy, say, like a raider?" I asked her once during lunch when Itami was busy attending to Rory and Lelei.
"Oh heavens no! The great spirits of the forests would never allow us to wage war from them."
Danielle made it up there, shouldering her rifle as she crossed her legs on a branch, back securely against the trunk.
"You see anything Hauvsbaum?!" I yelled up at the trees.
She had comfortably adjusted herself onto the branch, her .300 sniper rifle brought to her cheek, draped in a flurry of camouflage netting by her own customization. "Yo captain! You know that thing with the minotaur and the maze where you can't escape because it's just too damned much?!"
"Yeah? Why?!"
"There's just giant fucking maze that's too damned much blocking us off from getting straight to the center!" The woman had gotten her phone out, taking a picture. As odd as it was the picture had been texted down the tree to me, my phone buzzing as I took it out.
Masterson leaned over my shoulder looking at what Hauvsbaum saw:
What Hauvsbaum was describing had been, classically, the Labyrinth. The Arunn Kingdom built it, to my knowledge, to keep any test subjects (or creations) from inside the place from escaping. It was a fair enough reason to build it, minus the human testing of course.
But then again I was in a place where sex slaves were currency and gladiators had their pick of them.
Common sensibilities, or, at least, my own, had been out the window as my mind dealt with the facts:
Between us and what we wanted was a Labyrinth, interwoven with the natural designs of the forest: hiding multiple plazas and the structure that had been the supposed laboratory in the middle.
Thankfully we were us and equipped with the right tools.
"Alright, Danielle, get down from there. I got a plan."
"Aight sir."
As Corporal Hauvsbaum started climbing back down I had made a motion with my finger for Cam to turn around, his ruck being accessed by me.
"You know, I was always a fan of corn mazes. I mean, I hate corn in general, but making mazes out of it was a great idea in my opinion." He went on as I grabbed a few black squares, no bigger than regular posters. We all had such equipment with us, if only because we were well equipped for our excursions, but we always found a use for modern tools in this world. "There's just something so satisfying in getting lost in fields and fields of vegetation for a five dollars a pop. You know, give back to the local aggie community and-"
"Shut up Cam." I groaned as I got the black squares up and into his hands. Hauvsbaum had made hes way back down, a school circle formed around me as I looked to the entrance and the start of that stone maze. I bounced the photo to the other phones of my team, they looking at it in some annoyance. "Alright. We don't got time to get lost, and I'm sure you want those gas masks off ladies."
"Damn straight sir." Hauvsbaum responded. She was always comfortable talking to me, if only because we both hailed from NYC. She was from Queens though. Not that I had a problem with that.
"Because we're not Pathfinders, we're just gonna keep blowing holes straight through this maze we got until we run out of boom or we get there. Anyone with the thermite charges or the C4, have 'em ready. If I know walkers like I think I do, we might be, well, you know, that zombie swarm bullshit."
A few of the squad had shrugged, some of them scratching their cheeks in consideration. I knew we didn't feel invincible outright, but there was some sort of rite of passage that we had gone through ever since Italica that had numbed us to the thought of any threat from this world: whether it be 20,000 men at Italica, a Flame Dragon, or the Empire itself.
Zombies were zombies, and if a gunshot was a gunshot to them then we'd be fine.
"What about that minotaur I'm led to believe that lives here? Seems like one would be in there." Peters had asked, Khan still antsy, but subservient. "I mean, assuming there is one… Do they exist in this world?"
I was the man to ask as I went for my e-cigar, cringing as I realized I had the mask on. "I ain't seen one in person, but I heard that Zorzal tried to breed a few of them a few years back as a personal guard. So yeah, I assume they are real. Probably ain't much worse than a giant troll though."
"You got a read on what it takes to take them down?" Sanders asked, her MP7 slung over her back.
"Well, if I'm going off a troll, and the Capital has a few in service with the defensive legions in case of dragon attacks, chained underneath the hills, explosives should work with highly concentrated gunfire." I fiddled with my M16's M203, sliding it up to see the round I had equipped in it.
A few of my Rangers had the handheld mortars slung across their back: capable of direct fire application if needed, the rest having bloop tubes of their own, the stand out being an M25 airburster carried by Sanders. To top it off our standard issue Carl Gustav launcher had been with Masterson, the man having a back strong enough to it along with his gear.
We were brimming with weapons to use and spoiled for equipment, but I suppose being SOCOM came with its perks, in this world and our own.
"So we good?" One of my Rangers asked, almost unbelieving.
"I mean, yeah, in theory."
"Shit, is it really that easy? Just shoot them?"
I rolled my eyes as I took off my helmet for a second, feeling my tipped ears. "In the arena, like, only two people I had to shoot ever gave me problems, and they were exceptions. One was a magic user, from the post battle reports I think Masterson and Harris encountered something like it during Italica: basically a force field was put up by them that stopped munitions. That kind of protective magic is rare, so that is that's caveat."
Gunfire never changed I knew. A bullet built in one world, fired in this one, had as much killing potential as a bullet fired on home ground. No laws of physics changed outright as far as weaponry was concerned, and weaponry had a way of existing outside the realm of reason.
"And the other?"
I shifted my own ruck as I considered for a second. Along with the Winchester, I admit now, one of the only other modern implements I had brought with Pina had been boots. The reasoning behind them had been simply I forgot to take them off when I was first carted over. "Golem. Rocks and shit. You can only kill them if you get rid of the life force that subsists outside of their body."
"What?"
"So basically you just throw fucking gems and crystals at them to absorb the spirit and then you smash them with your boot… the crowd was very willing to provide me the tools."
"Ah, interesting."
…
"Good conversation."
"Yep."
"Come on, let's get this done."
It was habit that we all rose our rifles as we moved into the entrance of the maze: left and right presented to those who dared go into this labyrinth. But we weren't just any who dared.
If the motto of Britain's premiers meant anything, who dared win, and I had carefully placed the square block with its thermite lining along a mansized shape. They all just generally stood at ease as I did so, a stark contrast to how we usually were when these things were used. Back during Ginza we had used them to breach through connected stores to take out the then entrenched unknown enemy.
"Come on kids, stack up. Gonna do this right."
With little argument they had all, reluctantly, stacked up against the wall both ways from the explosive, backing up as I did as I twitched my left arm back into the man behind me, the movement sent back down and sent back up in short order. When it came back up to me the clacker was squeezed and the routine boom wrecked its way through.
Stone and rubble thrown in or out, pulverized in a boom of concentrated explosive force.
I elected to be pointman as I shifted forward, rifle up.
I didn't know I could've been pleasantly surprised in it having blasted all the way through these supposedly thick walls, pushing through the dust and taking my position on the other side as we all flowed in like water.
Like a flower blooming, we had all assumed the bell shape, guns out: finding ourselves just a little bit further into the maze then the creator intentioned.
"Clear."
"Clear."
Peters had Khan were the last through, but the man had taken his sweet time as he stood in the middle of that gap, running his gloved hands along the edges: a slit in the middle present between sides of the wall. Walls were hollow, apparently.
"Eh?" I asked.
"Yeah, that seemed to work." Masterson had obliged, the squad loosening up. Only then did we realize the echo of the explosion had bounced up and down the walls of this maze. "Spooky."
I primed another one as we all stacked up again.
"Punching it." Another hole in the wall, another booming echo.
And so that had repeated itself for an uncountable number of times into the day, a tenuous process at the very least that defied what great challenge the creator of this maze intended for do gooders such as ourselves.
My Rangers talked as we made our way through.
"Do you think the creator would've been offended and shit about the fact we're doing this?"
"I personally like the idea he would be offended."
"Well he probably made it for a reason. Probably might be extremely taken aback that we're destroying this all."
"Nothing ever stays completely sacred. Time makes sure of that." We passed through another hole in the wall as I spoke.
"What you mean?"
"I remembered learning in college," I went on as we had casually breached that new hole in the maze, making our cheated progress. "Siege of Mecca, 1979."
"Never heard of it, Kay." Cam had said as he prepped another charge.
Not many people did. Mecca was still buried underneath the sand, as far as I knew, but still the Muslims of the world still went to their Holy City during Hajj, trying their best to dig up the Kaaba. Hundreds of expeditions by the international community, private ventures, and more had gone out to the dunes to try and reclaim Islam's holiest site. All those who went however were unable to uncover it, dead, given up, or bogged down by the sand.
The remaining, de-facto exiled royal family of Saudi Arabia that had survived the rebellions and the anarchy that came with the sandstorms were housed in Paris as far as I knew, and the remaining regional powers sustained a patrol of the old borders in the hopes of stopping both the warring bands of raiders and those on pilgrimage from getting caught within the old country.
My father had been Muslim; an American Muslim convert, and it was only because of him did I know of his own travels to Mecca, November, 1979.
"We don't hear about it too much in regards to Middle Eastern politics before 9/11, mostly because it was covered by the Iranian Revolution, but it was a hell of an event." I made note of.
"Oh yeah?" Masterson had flattened out the explosive padding along the proposed hole we needed for the next wall, the rest of the squad getting ready. "You know anything about this Moho?" He referred to Omar, his first name Mohammed.
He had shrugged, he watching down the corridors we had breached into.
I continued as I recollected my memory of college, scared out of my wits about studying the Middle East out of fear of being put on a watch list; especially as an American History major. "Around Thanksgiving in '79 about four hundred or so Islamic extremist who tried to introduce Islam's version of Christ's Coming raided Mecca and seized the Kaaba, took hostages, and all that."
"Oh shit." Masterson had always loved to hear me talk of history, he giving the explosive board one last tap before the squad had moved away from it, the man having the clacker in hand. "Breaching."
Another boom, another heaving and groan of stone being blown and moved in a way that was not supposed to be.
We had stepped through again with little difficulty.
"What happened?" Peters had asked, kicking away some debris for Khan to walk through. "Sounds like a terrible thing."
"Saudis were not prepared for such a thing to happen, especially seeing as violence within Mecca was not permitted by the faith."
Omar had nodded as he recalled such a rule. He had been born a Muslim too late to ever have taken a Hajj before Mecca disappeared. "Only way that can be taken back is with a Fatwa, right?"
A religious declaration or statement as far as I knew in the Islamic faith.
"Apparently." I responded, wiping some dust off my mask. "So the local Saudis tried to counter-attack and they were beaten back badly. The Saudi National Guard and Military were mobilized to respond."
"How come I ain't never heard of this shit?"
I shrugged as I continued. "Apparently the French had GIGN inserted to assist the Saudi military take back the place… but the thing was they couldn't actually step in foot in Mecca."
"Because only Muslims are allowed in the city." Omar knew.
"Yeah, so, in order to carry out the operation the GIGN operators had to actually convert to Islam… To be honest, I thought about them a bit when I was in the capital."
I tried to leave an implication there that I hope my men would've picked up on. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't as we kept pushing through.
The stone walls of this maze were old and aged: as fantastical as many of the old fairytales and legends of our own Greek and Roman would lead us to believe. Surrounded by these giant walls might've had Cam himself on edge, those who had grown up in suburbia and the Mid-West as well, but to me, despite the legends, it didn't phase me.
The idea of Roman mythics went away when the Gate opened, even as interest was renewed on the other side about the Roman Empire: because, in a sense, the ideas of Romulus, Remus, the Gods, the legends of legions, were all true now in blood and flesh.
To me, that humanized these walls, made them familiar. The concrete jungle of where I grew up desensitized me to these tall structures supposedly entrapping, ensnaring us.
"Man, where did all those bodies went from those coffins?"
Somewhere along the way one of my Rangers had wised up and remembered that there was, apparently, an epidemic afoot. Sure there were wandering dead outside these walls, but not enough to explain the broken coffins seen.
That was why, after a while, as we delved deeper into the maze we ended up actually seriously breaching each time just in case. Zombies were drawn to sounds, as Romero had taught us.
I thought we had the answer as the sound of what sounded like a chicken coop had emanated from beyond the wall we were stuck at, we having lost our minds to simple routine of breaching again and again.
"Shh, shh, hear that?"
I looked to the ground we were standing and then back through the holes we made. There was a considerable amount of moss in those passages we came through compared to where we stood now: against a flat wall. I glanced at my phone again and the picture Hauvsbaum took.
"A plaza is on the other side." I said simply.
"More than a plaza dawg." Wilkes had said, knocking his hand against the stone, the minute vibrations of a large creature on the other side evident. Our grips around our weapons had tightened at that moment.
"Cockatrice, maybe." I said immediately, kneejerking.
"A what?"
Rolled my head as I looked into my mind and remembered Pina's lesson on them to me. She was scared that one of the beast owners would send one out to fight me. "Half chicken, half lizard. Hates living things, even plants. Breaths numbing, toxic smog. Definitely a hostile, and not like we can avoid it."
There was a certain casualness we all talked with, as if everything that was happening was underneath us as people. Here we were blowing pieces of a testament to Roman engineering up while on a quest for a epidemic remedy, and we talked as if we were out for a walk in the park.
We were annoyed almost, but I suppose we wanted that detachment.
"So, kill a chicken?"
"Kill a chicken." I agreed.
Tony rolled his shoulders as his face contorted, head tilting. "Well how the fuck do we do that?"
"Well, I know the things rather bulletproof to an extent. Might give us problems, and I don't want to count on Masterson's aim with the Gustav in closer quarters." I licked my lips behind my mask, considering what, exactly we could do.
Eleven heads were better than one however.
"Sir, if I may make a suggestion." Wilkes spoke up, getting the tube on his back out and ready.
The 60mm mortar tube which half of us had were specially designed for our usage as SOCOM operators: special forces who requested the ability to rain down artillery at our own leisure in tight spots.
He didn't even need to speak for me to know what he wanted to put forth, his ruck taken off and revealing the amount of ammunition for the tubes we all had. He alone carried the ammunition.
What that ammunition was comprised of was the usual: smoke, high explosives and of the like. The most dangerous however was one that Lieutenant Commander Blackburn had delivered to us discretely, as per our role as light infantry.
If we needed a legion decimated, we knew what to use:
It was the same stuff that was loaded into my grenade launcher, in our smoke grenades, albeit in a less lethal scale: White Phosphorus.
"Not that I intend to be racist, Kay, but I think some fried chicken might be in our future." Cam had went on as I furrowed my brow at him, I ignoring the inclination to tell him to shut the fuck up for once. It was certainly a solution.
It wasn't as if we were using it on people after all.
But still I caught myself thinking about what would happen if we did use it on people at some people. Napalm had the same horror, and I knew what it did to the raiders of Italica. Fire was man's first tool, in my opinion: to harness nature as I presume the cavemen did. This was only a major refinement of that.
"What do we need to do for a saturation Specialist Wilkes? Willie Pete." I asked in earnest.
He had looked to the ground and then to the wall, some mental math being played through his head until he pursed his lips, satisfied with his answer. "Go a few walls back and then I'll set the elevation for each of us. Two volleys should do it."
"Practice then." Masterson said plainly.
"What? For the real thing? This feels pretty real."
"Artillery is a thinking man's game Sanders, this is just a practice problem." Wilkes gruffed, hauling his tube off as he pointed at those that had them, taking them a few walls back as we also, cautiously, made a buffer between us and area of fire.
He had handed out two, yellow colored mortar shells to each mortarman, the plate of the launchers placed against the wall almost against the preceding one: as was the tightness of the gap.
I had faith in him however as he silently adjusted each tube to its correct heading and aim, occasionally looking to the wall we were breaching through and then to the barrels.
"Ready when you are captain."
"Fire at will."
The rhythmic sound of mortar fire was a welcome aspect of modern warfare we could appreciate: artillery having been the long arm of the Special Task Force for a long time. The bloop, bloop, bloop of it all was calming if a storm was coming.
A fire storm that is. The sound of great concussive bursts, like fireworks, and the slow, sizzling rain that followed had silenced all before Wilkes had confirmed to hit his mark on the other side.
Suffering sounds like a soul wanting to leave a dying body: a sinking ship with which there is no return: sound and fury combined in the horrible wails of a living thing that wishes to die.
We could only oblige. I raised two fingers up toward a point on the wall as I tapped my fist against my helmet two times before making a punching motion. Those who hadn't armed a mortar had abided as the sound of a chicken screaming its lungs out on the other end had resounded: it trashing along whatever walls there were on the other side making thumps as strong as the mortar firing had been.
There was a sense of urgency those that stacked up had done, instead opting for detcord: making the man-sized impression before backing off and hitting the clacker: the smoke from the white phosphorus that was on the other side pushing through. They disappeared into the smoke after flashbangs were thrown in, Masterson as point man, pulling into the flames as we followed close behind, guns up.
We'd used white phosphorus before, during the garden party, just to demonstrate what we could use against them if it had ever come to that. It never stopped burning, creating a black hole on the patch of grass it landed on: a visitation of a whitish hell.
The stone seemed to melt as we all came through, the sounds of a dying beast coming through the faded smoke.
It was if the air itself was ill as impossibly white splotches remained on the environment, sparkles of flame and fire drifting around as if snowflakes. Our gas masks shielded us from burning our lungs, blistering our mouths, as we immersed ourselves within: creating a firing line on the other side as a black form approached us erratically.
The sound of constant sizzling greeted us as we came to this plaza: transformed into a place of destruction: bare once by design, bare now by destruction. There was nothing to destroy but a single beast that inhabited these halls.
One that might've given us trouble if we went gun to beak with.
We were practical people however.
This is what we had to show for it:
Flesh, charred to the blackest, ashiest, color one could image: what were once feathers now seemingly crystallized shards emanating out of a beast.
It looked at us with its beady, clouded over eyes, neck slithering and moving like a snake with its leathery underside, keeping its head low and constantly shifting. The whites of its eyes, by god, the whites of its eyes were the only thing that broke up its melted form as every caw seemed like a corrupted audio file: going against our ears like nails on chalkboard.
"Yeah, you want to kill us, don't you you fucking cock, huh?!"
As the beast hobbled, crawled, died its way toward us, Masterson opened his mouth. There was a rage, a callous insulting pleasure he had let into his voice.
The beast seemed to respond, trying to lunge out, only to trip, burnt flesh skidding on burnt ground as pieces of itself grinded into stone.
"Come on you fuckwad, come closer, I dare you!"
I turned my head over to Cam as he went on, frozen, gun up, but mouth moving behind his own mask. What the fuck was his issue?
The burn it had was almost comical, but absolute: the way pieces of itself fell of like flakes had revealed almost pink skin underneath rubbed raw. It was still on fire, scales crinkling up as it did its best to make its way toward us. And yet it still yelled at us, as if we were playing unfair. As if it was sentient. This wasn't how it was supposed to be, it cried out as pieces of its beak cracked and fell off, leaving only its fleshy tongue to fall out.
It was as big as a bus, and yet it didn't meant a thing to us as we turned out to be a victor of an unfair fight.
Khan, in his protective gear, had barked in return, murderous toward another beast that would've dared try to fight them. It fell on deaf ears however as a stray flame from its back snaked its way into one of its eyes: bursting it as its neck and head shook violently all at once.
It was on fire, and that was all I needed to describe it as Masterson took a step forward.
The nature of mercy killing was something Cam knew well, even toward a beast which was still kicking. The double barrel shotgun was in his hands, stock in his shoulder, as he had basically hunched down and pressed the two black barrels into the beast's black head, it unable to do anything.
With the way he had cut down the barrels of his shotgun the boom which blared out had been a terrible boom: one akin to thunder throughout the maze. The effect of that boom was also not to be understated. Not when some specks of blood had found themselves out from the skull of the beast to my rifle in short order.
The body was still twitching wildly, but with no obvious threat to us Masterson had been just fine standing there, smoking gun and all, and letting the splash of red on his form take hold as he had habitually ejected the two shells, two being slammed back in as he whipped the gun closed.
I didn't expect him to go again, pressing further inward into the crater he made, seeing the insides of a living creature's convulsing skull and brain, pressing up against that flesh as he did the unthinkable and fired again.
It was almost as if a drill had gone askew in the Cockatrice's head, everything at that forty five degree angle Cam fired at blown away as the spent shells flew over his shoulders again and, mercifully, he holstered his shotgun.
Something ticked in me as I held my breath and kept silent, the officer in me bucking up before tightening my fist up and sweeping across the entire room with an open hand, my Rangers fanning out with their rifles up, ignoring Masterson and the beast as they walked throughout the room with such rigid precision.
I pointed to two of them, they halting before I pointed then to Masterson and the beast, they understanding as they rushed up to the body, Wilkes getting his bayonet out and attaching it to his rifle, pig sticking the creature through its throat as Omar took a knee by Masterson, back to him.
Masterson was just standing there, open mouth, breathing, specks of blood dripping off of him with sweat.
I got my canteen ready to splash his gas mask clean, but he had raised a hand at me lightly as that hand returned to his face and wiped down: the mask itself coming off in one go as he smelled the toxic air, the toxic blood, and all he had done.
The color…
The liquid ran over his Mechanix gloves as pale as the blood of the zombies did.
"Eugh, you are what you eat." He ground before putting his mask back on.
"You alright Cam?" He nodded calmly before letting a splash of water from me going over his face. "Also what the fuck was that?"
Khan had returned to the battle, even if the beast was dead: going to the corpse's neck and sinking his teeth in.
"Attaboy." Cam ignored my question, not wanting to answer as he slid his hand over his face, holding it.
I grabbed his arm, and we both froze. There was disappointment written in his laugh lines, pettiness within himself as he breathed out hard.
"Cam." My turn.
He looked at me, same height that we were, and saw his concern turned onto him. For a second, behind his clear mask, his eye had twitched as he was hit inside by some painful emotion, but he had let it run through him before discarding it.
"Sorry. Just got caught up in shit, is all. Fucking hate feral animals."
Bullshit.
Not that I had time to call him out on it as Omar, again, even as he shook his head from the gunfire echoing in his head, heard what we could barely.
"You hear that?"
The groans of women looking for men had been, for once, not appreciated as they filled the air of the labyrinth.
No rest for us weary.
"Aw fuck that shit." Wilkes had spoken for us all as we realized what we heard.
It made us irritable, but being angry tended to work in combat.
This little arena for the overgrown cock had been hell of an echo chamber, one which reverberated the great bursts of mortars throughout. All the explosives, all the tribulations of an animal being put down had been broadcasted and put down to that one point: there.
In my time here, from Pina's guest bedroom, to Arnus, to the arenas, there was a certain suspension of belief I had to show for the sake of staying sane. That the tropes of a fantasy world were not tropes to them, but rather common facts and states of being. I still held that suspension of belief, but when the zombie horde came running, I remembered who I was.
I was an American boy, grown up on the idea that killing zombies was an okay thing to do. Two shots with the starting pistol and then a knife to finish them off to maximize point gain in videogames. These zombies had fumbled about like the walkers that a Kentucky cop had stabbed in the head over and over and over again in a TV series I hadn't the money to afford its channel.
These zombies operated on those rules in the lightest sense.
A single figure had come hobbling out from around the corner of an entrance to our right: I raised my rifle up as I squeezed off one unceremonious shot, the form dropped to the ground. A harbinger of what was to come.
"Alright!" I screamed out, taking my knife out, checking its sheen once before putting it back in. "If these motherfuckers bite you, there ain't any risk of disease or shit like that! It's just gonna hurt like a bitch!"
"Khan! Stay!" Peters had yelled, the dog staying between his legs as the sound of the groaning multiplied. But Khan was beyond subservience, even when he did so, only to bear his teeth and growl, howling into the air in response.
My Rangers had shown that same eagerness that the dog did.
But Cam told me once, probably quoted from some anime I hadn't watched, that we were not wolves in sheep's clothing. We were wolves outright.
"Aw shit, we're actually doing this, aren't we?" Masterson had gotten his Peacemakers out, spinning the cylinders and checking their loads before holstering. I had nodded fiercely at him. I couldn't help but see the hint of roll in his eyes. As far as he was concerned, I hope, we were doing these bodies a favor at the end of it. "Drop your rucks!"
The quick release systems on our bags had dropped the gear on our backs, liberating us to our free movement, most of the bags kicked over to the cover of the dead chicken carcass, ammo quickly unpacked from all of them.
I had racked back my M16 once, clearing and then rechambering my rifle once as I let it fall limp against my chest, the M45 coming out as I did a brass check. It was these weapon checks that had helped give me that mood I needed to perpetuate, Masterson going to his own rifle and doing the same, blowing the top of his mag before reloading it.
Hauvsbaum had thumbed in rounds to her sniper rifle as she had flipped on the cover, transitioning to her off center backup sight, the sound of reloading and mechanical fumbling heard as the groans came closer and closer, the patter of rushing also heard.
"Shit, should I be scared?" Omar had muttered fast, he ejecting the mag in his M45 only to replace it. "You know, zombie horde and all."
There was no fear in his voice. There was no fear in any of our actions, in our words as we all had gotten ready for contact.
Men in our rank, in our roles, had died before for more, for less; certainly for less. They died in the dirt of a glassed Middle East as children danced over their bodies. They died for the failure of the local militias, unable to work hand in hand with them. They died for a people that never wanted them there.
If we were to die here it was to insult who we were.
Zombies were only zombies, and we were who we were. We were not left for dead survivors doomed to an existence safe house to safe house, no citizens of a biohazard ridden city where the resident evil had been mutated monsters, or even the walking dead: the living that have yet to be become undead.
We were United States Army fucking Rangers. Almost a dozen of us.
"Just like a videogame?!" Tony had tried to speak to himself, he loading his own rifle again quick, dropping the empty aluminum containers to the ground in a clatter. "I don't know if I got enough ammo!"
I looked to the swords astrewn by other adventurers done in by the cockatrice. We had weapons to draw from. Perhaps it was just the fact I was in a circular hellhole again, but this felt natural. My people couldn't disagree however, not when they had seen how easy they were to take down, how threatless they were.
It was a familiar feeling, and it was a grossly unkind thought that the Imperial Legions had offered the same kind of resistance zombies did.
The tip of my knife was against the back of my hand, having drifted there without me knowing; that urge to give my blood to a god I did not know sweeping through my mind as I pulled away.
"Watch your muzzles! Minimize your fire! We can do this!" Good thing was that there had been only two entrances into this little atrium in the maze, and the other seemed no-factor at the moment.
Masterson had spun his revolvers once, just for habit, as he rubbed shoulders with me, getting his pump action out only to pump it once to load it, tossing it over to Peters for him to use, Peters tossing his combat rifle over to Hauvsbaum.
Wiles had gone to their stomach in prone as they got their machine gun ready, my Rangers spreading themselves out across a firing line as they all either took a knee or laid prone themselves.
I would've liked to have said that the anticipation was the worst: but this was only the fifteen time or so we had faced a human wave. But we knew what was coming. We knew how to deal with it. We knew how to shoot into that crowd and do the most damage out of it.
I didn't like to think about that too much in all honesty: that we did know what to do.
Like the waves on a beach, they came in one organic swoosh: the firing beginning in one line as those bodies on the forefront tripped over each other, pieces of themselves lost to the mass of flesh behind them.
To us, it was a familiar sight regrettably.
We knew what to do now: gunfire kept to their heads as best we could, steady bursts, bodies and bodies tripping over each other in rags and in ribbons.
Naturally as they overflowed there would be runners to the side, but we knew how to cap them off: Masterson had taken one side as Omar went over to the other: a spray of fire almost corralling (if not killing) those that tried to pour over to the side, two riflemen splitting off to assist them as we controlled a conical area of fire.
It was their natural habit to somewhat move forward, so we all did as gunfire was put down range, into the mass of bodies of dozens of women, all clambering and falling on top of each other. The gun smoke rising, the smell of it bathing us all as my trigger finger became its own form of automatic: acting on its own with an enemy in my sights.
Why we hadn't put on our suppressors again I hadn't known, but each kick, each flash before my sight had been liable to give me lapses in my vision: frames of my life gone after each of my shots, each of my takedowns unseen.
It was a roar I had heard in my life too many times, but the roar of automatic gunfire was unmatched, and it went on into the seemingly infinite through our ear protection.
Trouble always came when one needed to reload however.
"Reloading!" Our autogunner had yelled out as he tossed his ballsack of an ammo bag off his LMG, getting another one from his belt, having destroyed and cut apart many frail legs.
The grip of my left hand shifted down to my underslung's trigger.
I always saw the merit of Willie Pete condensed into 40mm form. "Willie Pete! Reload!"
I called out from the center of fire, the bloop that came after both explosive and fiery when it went off.
No shrapnel for this explosive: only the burning white of a substance that couldn't be extinguished, that was all encompassing and forever spreading.
The sound of the Mk46's bolt being racked back had been followed by more heads rolling, the crackling sound of fire and skulls bursting spreading for as long as the trigger was held.
Their skeletons came at us like fiery ghosts, but our rounds had caught them as I reloaded myself. When the M25 was drawn from one of my Rangers, the electronic clicking of its airburst capabilities coming alive, we had all gotten down on the floor or into a crouch.
The M25 had been a pretty piece of hardware afforded to us as Rangers: a pretty piece in that as the rapid bloops from it rang out I realized that the Ranger firing it hadn't bothered aiming above the fiery masses: the 40mm grenades tunneling through the broken bodies before bubbles of explosive flechette rang out and slashed through deep within the zombie mass.
What White Phosphorus does to living flesh is something that normal fire cannot attain or achieve. It is what mankind has made out to be Hell's own flame. The flesh that it burns burns until it is the color of a mirror reflection the darkest night, charred so that the very impression of a human being melts off leaving only the underbelly of faces and bone to bare.
It burns without regard; at a temperature half as hot as the sun itself.
Two Rangers stepped forward with their own grenade launchers, sending more Willie Pete to the sides of the mass, keeping them down one corridor as they continued to tumble out of where we came.
The only reason why I knew White Phosphorus as I did was because of my teacher.
He taught me how to use it, why to use it, and why I shouldn't use it.
But in the end, as the locks of hairs on these women's went alight like hay and straw, hardly looking like the undead, I could take sanctuary in the fact that they were dead women walking already as they burned.
The throaty groans of their blaze joined our gunfire as they made no progress on us, the bodies climbing and climbing and fueling that fire.
The gear we wore, those that had been to war before us, the lessons of the type of tactics we used was learned in what we donned today, now.
"We're pushing through them!"
Orders were orders. In the middle of combat I knew my men had processed orders like machines: indiscriminate in their listening and execution.
That sweeping motion they all adopted had been horrifying: the way they had shifted their rifles from side to side very gradually as they fought these zombies with a grace honed by the Romans that came before.
To fire out of cover, all at once, as they did: we were spoiled.
The way we were trained gave us the idea of a line of fire: that we were a wall that pushed forward regardless of all. We trained not until we got it right, but until we got it wrong.
And in one fell swoop we took our first steps forward, moving like the treads of a tank in unison, fire being spit as we became a human mulching machine.
When one would fall to be replaced, we would not stop.
I did not stop.
We were like a tank somewhat, moving as one unit, almost shoulder to shoulder as we took in our breaths and moved against the mass of flesh, firing outwards as fast as we could as we became a hot iron ball through an ice block.
Women were cut in half in front of us in gory displays, but we felt nothing for them.
Neither physical nor emotional.
They were the walking dead, abominations that needed to be cut down like we did so many Imperials before. And here we saw the purist display of what we had been doing for months here in a way that we could only measure: face to face with the dead already.
Hauvsbaum and Peters had shared a look as the walkers were bare feet away from us, and yet posed no actual threat. An eyebrow raised from her and a shake of his head had substantiated Peters getting his knife out and twisted through a woman's skull.
The amount of dead weight that came from that body was instant, crumpling to the floor as Peters looked on horrified, but knowing of what was the correct course of action as Hauvsbaum had gotten her hatchet out.
Our ammo hadn't run out, we weren't backed up against the wall, but we did what we wanted to do.
Those whose shins had been broken apart by our autogunner's fire had been crawling in typical fashion, but our boots came down and the splatter came up.
A systematic extermination of this infection was without remorse.
Masterson pumped his shotgun once, almost threateningly, as he had reloaded it after spilling more buckshot forward. "What the fuck even is this?!"
The loss of an arm, fingers, piece and chunks of flesh and heads was not enough to fully kill them. That much I observed as a burst of mine took the stomach out of a woman.
What that meant was that we had to be absolute.
Some of my Rangers got the message as their breaching hammers and crowbars came out. Those that hadn't opted for the tactile weapons had simply been making a coordinated mess with automatic fire as we beat back an inhuman wave.
Beating them back was not the correct term in reality: we were hunting them down.
How far we immersed ourselves into it, we didn't know. Not when we were simply surrounded by flesh. So much flesh that I could reach out and feel, and hold it, and grab, and crush her neck by grip alone as I singled this particular body out from it all.
Her dead eyes, her spongy skin, the flies had been doing their job with her.
Now was my turn as I felt loose skin give beneath my fingers.
The Winchester had slid out from its scabbard as I held the feral woman by her neck, the twirl I did ending up with the rifle in her stomach. The boom and crunch, the give and take, was the last thing I felt from this woman as her body crumpled to the ground and I was met with my team having already pushed forward, cutting down into the flesh one gunshot, one slash, at a time.
Maybe it was some cardinal instinct, or some habit learned from the videogames I used to play, that as I was freed I raised my boot above her head and came down.
Maybe I didn't care what I just did, not when the horror before me reminded me so much of a throne room so far away.
Maybe I thought we were doing the world a favor.
Whatever I felt, whatever I did, it was in the name of staying alive at the very least as I flip cocked the Winchester again and did Rory's job.