Last chapters were hectic with this battle in Burroughs.
Please, I would really like to know yours thoughts about it or any other part of the story so far, whether they are positive or not.
Thank you again for reading.
"I thought that the I. rex had guzzled you," Brunet said to Dearing and Grady. "You are lucky to be alive."
"It was close," Grady replied.
They were standing on the platform up the stairs, ready to enter in the Discovery Center, but before Dearing and Grady could cross the threshold, Brunet came to stand in front of them and he severely looked at them in the eyes, intimidating the two just with his gaze.
"When we went to the Center, we found Hamada, dead, stabbed in the heart. Who did that?" He asked inquisitively.
They swallowed and as Dearing's chest tightened, Grady began to mumble an explanation.
"Listen Gilbert, what happened…"
"It was me," Dearing said weakly.
"Claire ..." Grady hissed, inviting her to keep quiet.
"Let her talk Owen!" Brunet told him.
Dearing took a step towards the Frenchman, holding in her right hand Hamada's dagger.
"It was an accident. I wanted to put the dagger aside but Katashi begged me to kill him. I couldn't so he grabbed my hand and forced me to stab him. As I realized it, the blade was already in his heart," she told while Brunet was looking at her coldly. "I am truly sorry, if there is anything I can do to repent for this act…"
With the palm open, she handed him the dagger.
She was so ashamed that she didn't dared to look at Brunet in the eyes
He approached slowly and gently took the dagger by the handle.
He stared for a moment at the dried blood on the blade and slowly passed his fingers along the edge of the blade.
"Claire. As you must know, I don't have a high opinion of you," he reminded her. "What happened wasn't an accident but it wasn't a murder either."
Dearing looked up at Brunet.
"You're not a murderer. What you did, even if it was against your will, was ending the suffering of a dying man," he explained before hanging the dagger to his belt.
Then, in a bitter voice, he added:
"Katashi would have surely wished that one of ours allows him to join the afterlife instead of you but it is how it is. Excuse me, I must go take care of my men."
Brunet took leave of them and entered the Center after the other guards. Dearing and Grady crossed the threshold in their turn soon after and headed to the lower levels, in search of Zach and Gray.
While he was checking the condition of each of his men, then scattered in the rotunda and the galleries and halls nearby, Brunet found Velasquez in the toilets.
He was kneeled on the floor and crying loudly, holding Durant's body in his arms. She had succumbed to multiple internal haemorrhages just a few seconds before.
Darbinian was also in the room. She put a hand on Velasquez's shoulder and knelt down to offer him some comforting words.
Two guards came with a stretcher and a body bag.
Velasquez watched them put Durant's body in the bag, then put the latter on the stretcher and leave.
He stood there for a moment, staring sadly at the ground, then he started to wander in the building but as he stepped in the rotunda, he recognized among the crowd there those who had trampled Durant.
The sorrow that had struck him have way to a great rage.
He quickened his pace and rapidly covered two-thirds of the distance that separated him from those responsible of his friend and comrade's death.
"Velasquez!" Brunet shouted in his back.
Seeing that he was still walking in the same direction, Brunet forcefully grabbed his arm, stopping him on the spot and forced him to look at him straight in the eyes.
"I know way too well the hatred that dwell in your heart right now. The people who trampled her are assholes but they are still defenceless civilians! Attack them and believe me, you will step on a path from which one hardly return." He warned. "She wouldn't want that to happen to you…"
Velasquez understood in Brunet's intonation that he had experienced a similar situation in the past.
His eyes stopped on the right shoulder of his superior where, unlike in his own case or that of most guards, there were only the five stars of the Guard and not also the French flag like one would have expected.
Brunet was one of the bannerless, a term that referred to guards that didn't bore the flag of their country of origin, either because they didn't want to for certain reasons such as a lack of attachment for their homeland or a long mercenary career during which they served other entities than the latter, either because they weren't or didn't feel worthy of bearing it.
As Niall Forrester had explained to him the night before, the Guard also welcomed exiles, voluntary as well as involuntary, and individuals looking for redemption. However, being a bannerless wasn't seen as shameful in the Guard and it was very disrespectful to show disdain for them. They were equal to their comrades in every way and could be eligible for the position of marshal.
Velasquez knew that Brunet was a mercenary before he joined the Guard, which perhaps explained his status, and that he had experienced violent conflicts such as the Rwandan Civil War, the First Congo War and the Kosovo War, but did not know in what kind of operations he had been involved and for whom he had worked.
He had just heard from one of the officers that Marshal Störmer didn't trust Brunet and that without Hamada speaking up for him to Lord Pennant many years before, he would be rotting in prison.
Who was Gilbert Brunet the mercenary?
"Lieutenant Brunet!" Hailed a husky voice behind them.
They turned to the vestibule and saw the swordsman who had beheaded one of the Quetzalcoatlus in front of the group trapped outside. He was moving in their direction, followed by some of his companions.
They had all removed their helmets, holding them under their arms, and some of their protective gear, leaving their arms bare.
The swordsman was their leader. He was a man of great stature, barely forty years old, with an athletic body, a close-shaven chiselled face and long brown hairs that fell down to his shoulders.
His right-hand person was a slender woman slightly older than him and whose red hairs were cut short.
She had the peculiarity of having tattooed arms and her main weapon, the double-bladed glaive they had seen earlier, was strapped to her back.
Brunet made some steps towards the arrivals, stopped and greeted the swordsman coldly:
"Sherman."
"My men have cleaned the city from all rampaging creatures," the latter said. "I…"
"Yeah, well you took your time!" One of the guards launched in a reproachful tone.
"A thank you would be appreciated, right?" Snapped one of Sherman's companions, a man of Asian descent with a shaven head. "It's not like we just saved your asses!"
The guard grunted, and like most of his comrades gathered there, he had a hand kept near the handle of his sabre, then sheathed in its scabbard, and was giving a black look at the arriving soldiers.
The visitors and employees in the rotunda had become silent when they heard the altercation and the tension between the two armed groups made them feel uncomfortable.
Sherman glanced at the guards and spoke to them:
"I am aware that you are still angry at us since that incident in Caer Draig years ago. But right now, around twenty thousand people are counting on us to act against the threats of this godforsaken island."
He approached Brunet and said to him:
"Hoskins is currently talking with Marshal Störmer in order to define a common strategy on which we must agree. It is in the interest of all that we must collaborate," he added, glancing at the visitors.
As Brunet and Sherman discussed, Drekanson moved closer to Velasquez, who was standing away, and he revealed to him the soldiers' nature:
"The Slayers. The very elite of InGen's troops. Seasoned dinosaurs' hunters and enforcers."
Lambert Ross, who had up to then been sitting against a wall nearby, joined them and added:
"To fight monsters, Hoskins created monsters. These guys are for the most part veterans of the Saurian Wars. Most of them were good people whom I once called friends but the primitive war that we lived didn't leave them all unscathed and at the end of the latter, the boundary that separated them from the wild beasts they had fought had become thin for some."
Looking at Sherman, his right-hand woman and the other Slayers, he noticed that they all bore the same tattoo on the right forearm, the one of Saint George on his steed thrusting his spear into the Dragon
"You weren't some mere InGen soldier, you were one of them," Velasquez realized, making the connection between Ross' tattoo and the one of the other Slayers. "That's why Bellamy didn't looked happy last night when I mentioned that my cousin also had the tattoo of Saint George and the Dragon. He is also one of them…."
"I trained most of those who stand there. I was their leader for a time," the innkeeper stated. "To say that Sherman was even younger than you when Hoskins brought him from Afghanistan. If the frightened young military chaplain I took under my wing was looking at today's swordsman, he wouldn't recognize himself."
One of the Slayers, a fortyish Costa Rican Amerindian with long and straight black hairs, had glimpsed Velasquez out of the corner of his eye.
He stepped aside from the group formed by his companions to better stare at Velasquez, like if he was familiar.
"Julio?" He asked.
Velasquez wondered how the soldier knew his name and then, by staring back at him, he recognized the man he hadn't seen in years.
"Paco?"
The two men separated from their respective groups and came to hug each other in the middle of the rotunda.
"I would have liked to see you again in other circumstances, cousin," Velasquez declared to his cousin in the language of the Tun-Si.
"Likewise. You have all my condolences for your fallen brothers and sisters in arms," Paco Cortès told him in the same language.
Guards and Slayers alike looked at them with surprise.
Sherman was a bit amused by the scene:
"I didn't knew that Paco had a cousin among your ranks," he admitted to Brunet. "Perhaps their relationship is a first step towards the return of an understanding between us."
"There are wounds that require more than just hugs to heal, Gregor."
A/N:
Hypothetical Casting:
Zach McGowan as Gregor Sherman
Terry Chen as Kevin, one of the Slayers.
Gerardo Taracena as Paco Cortès
