General Hammond picked up the phone head set. "Just hold it a minute there Teal'c," he said. "I just want to find out how the medical team are getting on with the SG-1 team."
He dialled and then waited for a few moments until someone answered the phone at the other end.
"Is Doctor Fraiser there?" he asked.
He waited for a moment, and then for a longer moment. He twiddled thumbs and coiled his fingers in the telephone cord.
"Well if she's expected to be in the OR for a while," he said finally, "then who else can give me the details of how SG-1 are faring?"
He waited.
"This is General Hammond here. You're speaking with him. There is not much point ringing me to get permission to issue the information because I just gave it to you."
"--"
"Yes, well, that can happen."
"--"
"What about that young Doctor who had…" He realised that he had forgotten the boy's name. God, getting old was bad.
The image of a yellow face and spiky tendrils appeared in his mind. Now why would that have thrown up in his mind?
*
Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill stepped further into the room that had been assigned to Daniel Jackson and in which they had all spent the night. There was no sign to indicate where the rest of the SG-1 team might have gone. There was no one in the corridor, and there was no notes left anywhere in the room.
"This is ridiculous," O'Neill summarised. "I'm just assuming that they must have gone through the passages behind the tapestries. I mean what else can I think?"
Carter nodded. She had been very thoughtful throughout the morning so far. That was just another of the imponderables that had come up in the hour since they woke.
O'Neill pushed the tapestry aside and stepped into the passageway. He shone his torch left and then right.
"Which way?" Carter asked.
O'Neill waved his torch in the direction of the right branch of the tunnel. They set forth. They rounded a bend in the passage and… There was something lying on the floor. O'Neill walked over for a closer look. Carter followed and they crouched together, almost shoulder to shoulder.
"Oh yuck," said Carter and restrained the barf that threatened. She hadn't had breakfast yet, and she was very glad. Last night's dinner continued to make threats of a comeback. It promised to be worse than any comeback by an eighty's hair-band. With the obvious exception of Bon Jovi, but they're legendary and besides they were never really into the self-parody bad-boy life-style to the extent that the rest of them were.
O'Neill and Carter stepped carefully over the remains of the vampire that someone had left lying among the cobblestones. She was sprawled mostly in the hallway and a bit beneath one of the draping tapestries. The scene would not have been quite so bad if those two locations were closer together, but unfortunately they were quite a long way apart.
"Oh yuck," said Carter again, just in case O'Neill had missed hearing it the first time. For O'Neill's part, he found no need to comment because, in its way, Carter's commentary was a masterly summation of the scene they confronted.
O'Neill walked over to the tapestry and then bent to examine the head. "One of the Countess's sisters," he concluded. "I guess this situation had to happen some time."
"There's the key stone to the dungeon over that way," Carter mumbled through the hand that she was holding over her mouth to clamp her lips shut. Every meal that she had eaten during the last month had decided that joining the Vampire on the floor would be the first thing it would do if it had the chance. "They might have been taken there."
"I don't think they were taken," said O'Neill slowly. "Some one killed this vampire. It might have been them. She might have been the one who took them captive."
"Then surely they would have come back along the corridor here and we would have met them coming the other way."
"Yeah, that's what I thought."
"Unless there was more than one of them and they only managed to overcome one of them before the other ones subdued them," concluded Carter.
O'Neill nodded. He had been thinking nothing of the sort. His thoughts were more along the line of; "this doesn't make any sense."
"Ah good," breathed O'Neill, he turned to regard Carter with mild interest. O'Neill had as much feeling for the dismembered Vampire as he would if it was a lump of dog droppings. (Smells bad, looks nasty, wouldn't want to step in it). The sight obviously had more impact on her.
"Come on," he said and boosted himself back to his feet. "They have to be ahead of us."
O'Neill led the way. Carter followed with perhaps a touch more haste than was strictly necessary, but she would need to seriously hurry if she were going to keep up with O'Neill who marched purposefully along the corridor.
*
Heidi Pravda led the weirdly attractive man with the eye decorations, and the advance scout for Apophis along the hallway that was built into the castle walls, and therefore deeper into the bowels of the earth.
"This tunnel leads to the outside," she explained. "We will meet up with my father and the rest of the resistance movement once we get there."
Daniel Jackson nodded thoughtfully.
Behind him Teal'c followed but spent much of his time looking over his shoulder as though expecting someone to come bounding out of the shadows. "I do not like this Daniel Jackson," he said.
"What's the matter Teal'c?" Jackson asked, he stopped to wait for the big Jaffa to catch up.
"We are leaving Major Carter and Colonel O'Neill in this place with these mutated Goa'uld. They have a great power over humans, as you very nearly found out. It is not like the previous times that they have confronted Goa'uld. And they are not able to speak with the Goa'uld, whereas we can, both of us."
"So what are you suggesting, that we go back and try to find them?"
"I believe that we should consider doing that. Certainly one of us should."
Heidi listened to the conversation with half an ear. She couldn't understand a word of it, but the tone was clear. They were having second thoughts about her strategy.
Jackson thought for a moment before answering. "We'll do that as soon as we have a chance to speak with the Resistance. If we go back in force we'll have a great deal more likelihood of success."
Teal'c nodded. "As you say." With an air of visible reluctance he followed along.
Heidi led on again, with the air of one determined to be patient with fools.
*
"Let's get out of here then," Jack O'Neill said, tucking his Smith and Wesson back into it's holster. "We're going to have to look for them. God I hope Teal'c can keep Daniel out of trouble."
Samantha Carter gave a look that left him with no confidence at all.
O'Neill led the way out through the door and marched purposefully into the hallway. He had guns, he had friends (well, one any way), he had grenades, he had knives and he had the knowledge of how to use them. If he were Rambo, he'd be tying a bandanna around his brow about now. All of those words suggest that the mutated Goa'uld that were running the show should watch out.
The coast was clear for now. That is a particularly stupid cliché. On the face of it, the phrase can have nothing what so ever to do with the story. Unfortunately they were a long way from the ocean and the building they were trapped inside was full of mutated Goa'uld and on top of that there was something that they didn't know but it was going to make their lives intensely interesting when they found out. The castle was also full of rampaging and vengeful Villagers (with a capital V and that was also the first letter of violence). The little torch lit meeting of the night had mutated during the early morning and become quite heated. Alcohol had been consumed, lots of it in fact. Sense and alcohol are rarely used in the same sentence (except for that one, but that's just an interesting coincidence).
For the moment we will concentrate on the SG-1 military pair. They knew nothing of the Villagers and their intentions at this moment. For O'Neill and Carter there was only the small problem of the vampiric Goa'uld.
They reached a bend in the corridor and stopped to see what was ahead of them. O'Neill waved Carter back against the wall. His AK-47 had a look around the corner and milliseconds later O'Neill did as well.
There were none of the Goa'uld loitering in the hallway at that moment, and O'Neill was just vaguely disappointed at the lack of opportunities to practice vampire dismemberment. The sight of that corpse in the passageway had done nothing for his diplomatic skills.
He took Carter's hand and led her around the corner and along the corridor.
"Where do you think Daniel and Teal'c are?" Carter hissed.
"Probably in that damned dungeon," O'Neill said with the absent air of a man who was utilising the majority of his on-board processing capacity running threat assessment routines and strategic speculation.
"What are you planning? Get them out and then get the hell out of here?"
"Yeah, pretty much," he said and then stopped at the next bend in the corridor. "Oh and blow up that sarcophagus," he added as an after thought. With the SG-1 team outnumber at least a couple of dozen to four by dangerous monsters, only some one like Jack O'Neill could make a comment like that. Imagination and Jack O'Neill have only a passing acquaintance.
Samantha Carter does not suffer from the same lack of imagination. She has no trouble imagining her self being skewered, dismembered, disembowelled, drained or barbecued. Which one of them is the braver, the one who goes forth because he has to and can't conceive of losing, or the one who goes on even though he carried images like that in his head?
We'll take votes later and see how the consensus comes out.
Of course that might have to wait until after we discuss how the SG-1 team shook off the pursuing horde of desperately drunk villagers, because they were waiting around the next corner in the corridor. We probably should pay them more attention. O'Neill had heard their approach, had planted himself against the wall like he was making an attempt at mimicking the behaviour of the thousand and one tapestries that were hanging everywhere. He leant around the corner and spotted the horde that was coming his way. He pulled his head back hurriedly and cast a glance at Samantha Carter that said it all.
*
The meeting was tense. On one side of the debate were Heidi Pravda, Teal'c and Daniel Jackson. On the other side were her mother and her sister and most of the women of the village. The majority appeared to be intent on waiting for the outcome of the expedition on which their menfolk had foolishly set forth.
We shall listen in and try to catch up on all of the prior knowledge that these people have brought to the discussion.
"We are not about to listen to stories," Heidi's mother dismissed her daughter's augments with a flourish of her arms and sneer of her lips. We can assume from that little exchange that things have not gone well so far. "You're father has raced off and done something foolish on the basis of a rumour that you and the other serving girls brought back from the castle. He has marched off with all of those hot-headed drinking buddies of his and even now are probably in the clutches of those monsters up there." Her tone turned mocking and she put on a fake male voice. "We intend getting rid of everybody in the castle. Throw off the oppressive regime. Ha, he is a fool, your father, and some of that has bred true with you."
She turned and tried to flounce away. She made a fair fist of doing something with such a stupid name and such a poor definition.
"But mother, look at him," Heidi called after her. "You, yourself, told me of his coming. I showed you their clothes. You saw the cloth."
Her mother stopped in mid stomp, and turned back to face her daughter with a look of contempt on her face. "It was a story Heidi. A thing to amuse children when they are frightened, or to console them when bad things happen. It was never real. And now your father and your uncle have stormed off in a drunken rage to do…" She shook her head and made to turn away again.
"Is that what you think?" Heidi demanded, "or is that the way you hide from the truth now that it is in front of you?"
"I don't think this has gone the way she expected," Teal'c turned to Daniel Jackson and managed a mighty piece of understatement. "I think that it is time to 'make a run for it.'"
"I think you might be right. We need to get back and make sure Jack and Sam are OK."
One of the villagers noticed that the SG-1 team loitering by the side of the gathering and left the rest of the mob to investigate. The rest of the women had paid them barely any attention up until this point, but they needed some sort of distraction because there was an uncomfortable aspect of personal history implied by a few of the comments that Heidi and her mother were sharing right at that moment.
The woman peered up into Teal'c face and squinted.
"It's true," she says, looking closely at the mark on Teal'c forehead. She reached up with a tentative hand and fingered the mark on his forehead. "It is the mark of Apophis."
"See, I told you mother."
"Oh this is all I need," muttered Magda Pravda. She shook her head and stalked over to stand beside the woman who was staring at Teal'c. The mark looked very convincing, even she had to admit that. "May I?" she said and pointed to Teal'c staff. It hefted in her hand, feeling much heavier than a stick. It gave the impression of being filled with malevolent intent. She shucked it and the pointy end slid open to arm the weapon.
She handed it back without another word and then turned to face her daughter. "You say there are others like these up there?"
Heidi nodded enthusiastically.
"They know the means to kill these monsters that we face?"
"Yes," Heidi hissed with a heavy dose of tested patience. "It is all as I told you. I did not have to tell these people how this was done. They knew. He has the mark, they have weapons. This is an opportunity like we may never have again."
Magda Pravda turned to Teal'c and Jackson with the air of some one who was about step into the dentist's surgery after an absence of decades. "Tell us what we face," she said. "Tell us of your people and how they will react to us. Will they respond well to us?"
"They may well try kill you on sight," Jackson warned, about the threat that the SG-1 team posed by themselves. "No, no, that was not meant as a threat," he told their aghast new expressions. "It was meant more as a warning about how we should approach them. They are in a dangerous place and are very much aware of the danger that they face. Teal'c and I should go in first and let them know what is happening. We have to overcome the problem caused by you not being able to speak the same language that they do. Teal'c and I will have to do the negotiating with my people."
The women looked at one another and muttered a few choice phrases to each other. A discussion group formed and they began debating about what was going on and whether they should be stupid enough to agree to help.
*
Pursued by a team of angry villagers who appeared to be armed with a motley collection of sharpened timber implements and an alcohol induced bravo attitude, Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill went racing back past the entrance to the dungeon where Teal'c had recently visited with dire results.
Immediately after O'Neill had poked his head around the corner of the hallway, it had begun. They scampered out of the passageway, through the bed room, leapt over the discarded bed clothes and bounced off the walls. They made it into the corridor and then into a bedroom on the other side of the hall. From there they found another secret passageway (that was remarkably easy to find all things considered). It hadn't worked. The horde seemed to know about the passageways. Even in there, the SG-1/2 were still being pursued by a marauding mob that was hell bent on killing anything they found in the castle. They waved stakes and torches as though they were weapons. Up close they certainly could have been. O'Neill had no intention of testing that theory.
So they ran. Their booted feet clattered on the cobbled-stoned floor in a percussive symphony that contrasted markedly with the discordant racket that echoed from the passageway behind them.
O'Neill was reluctant to shoot any of the pursuing villagers, because that tended to make them angrier. And of course they were probably the good guys, if perhaps a trifle confused just at the moment. On top of those philosophical considerations, there was also the fact that they were armed and they were dangerous and there were a lot of them. On top of the obvious amounts of alcohol they had already consumed, putting a few of them down with a dose of lead medicine might not be a wise move.
O'Neill and Carter leapt over the corpse of the former vampire. Carter's boot collected the thing's head and knocked it rolling drunkenly further along the passage until it finally rolled to a halt in the middle of the floor, staring malevolently back at the on-rushing drunken hoard.
Oh, damn (or words to that effect), O'Neill thought to himself, they were running in circles. That had to stop.
O'Neill found a branch in the passage. One way led down, the other led onwards. He chose down. The sounds of a pursuing mob were still filling the corridor somewhat behind them.
The SG-1 team members rounded another corner in the hallways and there they encountered a few members of the Vampire Gang coming from the other direction. In the brief moment when he bothered to look at who they were bearing down on, O'Neill recognised the second of the Countess's sisters and a couple of the guards they had seen loitering around the entry hall when the SG-1 team had first arrived at the Castle. Was that only yesterday? My how time drags when you're being pursued by rabid mosters.
"That's them," intoned the countess's sister. She raised on elegant pale hand and pointed at the SG-1 team. "We must bring them to the Count. He has plans for them."
O'Neill and Carter skidded to a halt, cart-wheeled their arms and legs for a few seconds like the good physical comedians that they were and then ran back the way they had come. Of course we knew what was coming along the hall way behind them.
The guards grinned at O'Neill and Carter. Well actually they grinned at the patch of wall that was between them and the SG-1 team members, but it was close.
O'Neill didn't understand what they said, but the tone was obvious. He also recognised the teeth, they were hard to forget.
They were sandwiched. O'Neill and Carter raced back to the branch of the tunnel without encountering the drunken mob, for which they were eternally grateful, and so they were free to launch themselves down the second branch. They wasted no time, but plenty of effort, and a few square centimetres of skin and cloth on the stonemasonry as they went past.
For their part, the drunken mob had taken the opportunity to examine the body of the dead vampire and between them they had developed a story regarding the bravery of the leader's daughter. Under the circumstances (alcohol and adrenalin fizzing joyfully through their blood stream) it was an impressive piece of cognition. Proud tears were shed.
"Through here," O'Neill called over his shoulder and they rounded the corner represented by the change in direction of the hallways. At full tilt, and facing over his shoulder while he was running so he could be sure that Carter was close behind, he was confronted by an impossibly slippery slope. Funny how these things seems to sit there for years and never get used and now the trap was being used for the second time in half a day. O'Neill was on the fly and he could not have stopped his flight even if he was Jesus; he was already running too fast for braking to form any part of considerations in his short-term decision making process. He struggled for a moment to retain his balance amid the maelstrom, windmilling his arms this way and that way in an attempt to transfer his momentum, but it was all to no avail. No matter how much it's publicity might try to have you believe other wise, gravity sucks. O'Neill went down, sliding on his bruised derriere and screaming his lungs out all the way to the bottom, before landing amid the wreckage of a tangled tapestry with a bone jarring thump.
He had almost managed to untangle himself from the mess when Carter thundered into the room in much the same noisy fashion and neatly cut his feet out from beneath him. O'Neill tried hard, but to no avail and after he fell back down, he landed on top of her and the impact of his chest on her hip knocked what little air he still had in his lungs out through his gaping mouth. He sort of bounced and finished up sprawled full length along her.
They lay entangled for a moment while they got their collective breath back.
"I don't think that worked terribly well, Colonel," Carter wheezed.
O'Neill managed to find enough breath to hiss out, "Well at least we got ahead of them." It came out very weakly.
Carter's problem with shortness of the breath was caused by the weight of O'Neill sprawled across her chest. She managed to push him off and stumbled to her feet with an extraordinary effort considering the spaghetti like strength that she had in her arms and legs. She grabbed O'Neill by the arm and dragged him to his feet.
Still joined at the palm, they clattered clumsily into the middle of the room. Carter regathered her torch from the floor and looked around. O'Neill was still nursing a few new bruises and the reluctance of his diaphragm to operate his lungs. Communications between the parties were continuing but the planned industrial action had only been postponed pending the outcome of mediation. As soon as he tried to walk, he found that he had caused himself another and potentially straw-camel-back-breaking final catastrophe. His feet were completely engulfed inside a tapestry upon which a seamstress had laboured for hours in the depiction a ferocious battle. He stumbling over his own feet and he found himself almost falling on top of the hapless Carter in her attempts to pull him clear of his self inflicted millinery misery.
They then set to competing with each other in the task of tangling his feet more completely and were on the point of exchanging angry words on the subject when another light drifted into the room. A Vampire burst through the shattered doorway, following immediately behind the light. It's badly booted feet stepping in from the hallway through the remains of the door that Teal'c had had a dispute with during the night. It waved a staff at the arguing pair.
"Stop right there," the vampiric guard intoned.
O'Neill shrugged Samantha Carter's hands from his knee while he reached slowly under him self. His fingers encountered the familiar plastic with wood grained finish. He managed not to grin. He wrapped his fingers around the butt, pulled it through and brought it to bear. A hail of led pellets reduced vampire's head to a bloody stump.
The blast from his AK-47 was deafening in the stone lined confines of the dungeon.
The vampire collapsed to the floor with a meaty thump. A few stray bullets ricocheted into the darkness with an intimidating whine. Once again Carter and O'Neill were lucky and managed to avoid being hit by their own friendly fire, mostly through dumb luck.
Carter dived for the floor in an understandably self-preserving move. The muzzle flash lit up the room like a spotlight. Much of that action on her part was too late, because those things come out of the muzzle travelling really fast.
The last whine faded to become a memory.
O'Neill grabbed Carter's hand and pulled her over the steaming corpse of the former Guard. O'Neill will not lean until later that the thing was only incapacitated.
*
Trailing along behind the SG-1 team came the same 25cm tall fluffy pink bunny. It was frantically beating a snare drum that it had suspended around it's neck while it rocked from side to side in a feeble imitation of a man marching.
The bunny looked slightly second hand. The Emergency Toy Medical team had given it first aid, and that had consisted of placing a bandaid spread across it's forehead and filling the crack in it's head with beaded superglue. Beneath the pad of the bandaid was the hole left by a 0.38 calibre lead pellet that had once rested in the magazine of a gun owned by on Jack O'Neill of the SGC.
The crack in it's head had been made by a fire axe. O'Neill again.
The pellet had passed through the bunny's head at great velocity some months earlier, as had the axe.
In them selves neither had been a fatal blow. The bunny had only stopped it's frantic drumming when the recoil from either of those impacts had knocked it off it's feet, and dislodged one of it's life-giving energiser D-cells.
Rectification of that problem had been the final stage of it's laborious recovery. A gleaming almost-new pair of Energiser D-cell batteries nestled snugly in its back, placed their lovingly by the surgeons who had rescued it from sure Death.
There's no doubt about it's courage, it's brains are another matter.
It paused in it's frantic drumming long enough to inspect the body of the newly disfigured vampire guard. The bullet holes were healing remarkably quickly. Even a battery operated child's toy understands that those sorts of things shouldn't happen. It began beating frantically on it's drum while marching frantically away.
*
The military half of SG-1 clattered to a noisy and thoroughly disorganised halt just before a bend in the corridor. O'Neill and Carter slumped against the wall, just a metre or so short of turning the corner.
"Shoosh," hissed O'Neill. He waved downward at the rest of the team.
"Why Colonel?" whispered Carter.
"Just be quiet."
"But I just wanted to know why?"
"Shut the…Argh," O'Neill hissed and turned away.
He had heard something in the corridor, something familiar and uncomfortable. O'Neill was sure that he had heard some one counting furiously just around the bend in the corridor. Who ever it was, they had stopped now. He waited for a moment, his heart hammering in his chest. and then announced in a loud voice, heavy with eastern European pronunciation; "Two hundred and sixty seven carved stones in the shape of a house."
"It's a Count," said Carter. Her voice showed she was appalled.
"It's not possible," said O'Neill. "We shut down that Sesame Street production line. And besides, these guys have been out of touch with the Goa'uld for centuries."
"I'd know that voice anywhere," Carter insisted.
"It isn't. It can't be. Now, be quiet."
"I tell you…"
She finished her objections by mumbling suddenly into O'Neill's fingers that were suddenly clamped against her mouth. She tried killing him by glaring daggers at him over his hand, but it didn't work.
They had one of those brief battles with their eyes and eyebrows.
Eventually O'Neill released Carter's mouth with understandable reluctance; her desire to keep talking was transmitted through her body language and they had only reached a draw when they engaged in a brief contest of wills. Several seconds elapsed before her eyes finally agreed that she would be a good girl and cease speaking.
"Yes it's a Count," O'Neill agreed. "And we need to plan the next few…"
He turned back to the source of their dispute and crept along the corridor. Who ever it was they were getting closer. He listened to the sound that was coming from ahead of them and decided that it was now only just around the next bend. He risked one quick look and then pulled back hurriedly. She was at least partially right. The voice sure had the same intonation and phasing as the Sesame Street Count that they had encountered on a mission a few months back. What she hadn't noticed was that it was speaking the same ancient Germanic language that the real Count and his wife's family had spoken. There was one thing that bothered O'Neill in this instance. They guy that was strolling along the corridor even looked a bit like the Count from Sesame Street, the same round face and the same wide smile. He even had the slicked back hair.
It was just too much of a coincidence to be believed.
Maybe on of the things had gotten away, he speculated. Or maybe when they were created, their image had been based on something else, something real.
Now that was a scary thought.
The last time they had been camped in a position like this, O'Neill had watched Daniel Jackson absently while he made busy with his hands and it took O'Neill a moment to realise that Jackson had a grenade in his hand. Camped in a corridor while they were being stalked by the Sesame Street Gang seemed a strange time to be playing with a grenade, but O'Neill had seen people play with all sorts of things when combat nervousness became intense enough to require physical movement. It took O'Neill a moment to work out what Jackson was doing. The Egyptologist bit the pin and pulled the grenade. He spat the pin onto the floor and lobbed the grenade around the corner. The pin landed on the floor and made a feeble little clatter at their feet. Shortly thereafter, the corridor ahead of them was momentarily full of light and noise and then it began raining broken body parts. Smoke and smell replaced the noise and light, but when it comes to changing your lawyers you can never go by their names.
OK, it worked once before. O'Neill reached around to his webbing and tried to free a grenade. These walls would stand up to a good blast, he thought, so there would be no danger to either Carter or himself from the explosion.
He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade around the corner.
Carter nodded to him. They covered their ears.
"Vun small metallic pineapple," Counted the voice around the corner.
The blast was very impressive in the limited and acoustically closed confines of the secret stone corridor.
"Well that was discreet," O'Neill judged.
"Effective," Carter suggested.
O'Neill and Carter climbed to their feet and stepped gingerly around the corner. It was a scene to remember, albeit not terribly happily, in fact it would normally come to you just before you woke up screaming. All around them, the walls were coated in gore. It was everywhere, like someone had chosen a scarlet paint scheme and then gone wild with the textured finishes.
"Where do I drive the stake?" Carter asked. It was reference to the baffled confusion that had assailed Jackson after doing something similar to a count once before.
They exchanged a bemused look and then smiled simultaneously.
O'Neill looked around the devastation that she had wrought, wearing a thoroughly and understandably perplexed expression.
He picked up a gory remnant and inspected it closely. It was a human foot, there was no muppetry involved in this one. It even had little hairs growing from the tops of it's toes, and it needed a good pedicure.
Of course you can't let off a grenade inside the confines of a narrow stone corridor, inside the badly insulated confines of a medieval castle and hope to keep it a secret.
"Just drop it and run!" Carter shouted and pulled him by the crock of the elbow.
The sound of footfalls had sounded from along the corridor behind them, probably attracted by the noise of the grenade exploding. Hey, it hadn't been subtle. We could even hear it from here.
Over his shoulder, O'Neill saw a team of Peasants striding purposefully along the corridor. Each of them dragged an oversized club in one hand and a pointy piece of wood in the other. You didn't have to be a vampire for that lot to be effective.
"There's a monster at the end of the corridor!" O'Neill shouted back at them. It hadn't worked with the muppets, what he thought it would do to a bunch of drunken peasants who didn't even speak English, we will never know.
He turned and ran some more, encountering the immobile form of Samantha Carter only a few paces along the hall. She had been staring after him and wondering what the hell had gotten into him.
O'Neill pushed onward and Carter was already well away down the hallway.
A severed Romanian foot fell from where it had been stuck to the ceiling. It landed on O'Neill's head. It had certainly travelled a long way in the blast he thought. He turned around to try and shoot something and left a whole bunch of little holes in the wall.
O'Neill continued running, moving almost backwards while he waved his gun around threateningly. He almost overshot the next corner, only noticing the bend when the Peasants took aim and loosed off a lump of granite that bounced off the walls chaotically. O'Neill ducked for cover only to find that he was stumbling down a new corridor rather than flattened against the wall like he expected he would. He picked himself off the floor and ran for all he was worth. A large chunk of the ceiling fell in behind him leaving a cloud of dust and the smell of burnt wall coverings. OK so the corridor had not stood up to the grenade like he thought it would. It was just another chaotic piece of entropy in the life of Jack O'Neill.
The Peasants stepped around the pile of rubble that had just landed on the floor. They rounded the corner and strode onward, intent on throwing of the yokes of the oppressive regime that had controlled their lives for too long.
O'Neill stopped in the hall and let forth a blast with the AK-47, aiming for the ceiling and bringing a few more ancient and weathered rock shards down. A few Peasants went down, hiding their heads from the avalanche of rock and lead. The others spun on their heel and took cover behind the corner in the hall. Some of them were starting to sober up, and realise where they were and what sort of risks they were taking. It seemed like a good idea to find a place by the bar where they could stare blank faced at the imposing authority figures and say some thing like; "It wasn't me officer, I've been here all night."
O'Neill spun and faced toward the direction he had been running and intensified his efforts to catch Samantha Carter. She had a good turn of speed and was well on the way.
*
A two metre tall skeleton dressed in a flowing black robe fashioned from midnight, (not that cheap midnight coloured cloth stuff, it was fashioned from just plain old midnight) stalked the corridor and regarded the body of the newly deceased counting Vampire. The shade making all the noise was not people shaped at all, it looked remarkably like a Goa'uld. Hey, it's a self-image thing. The one thing that the soul of a Goa'uld didn't think of itself was in the image of it's host. There was another, human shaped shade lurking in the hallway. It's expression was slightly put out, as though it was confused by the change in circumstances. They were free! They were free! But free to do what?
We heard the swish made by the passage of a scythe that was sharp enough to cut air (slicing N2 and O2 neatly IN2 and that's probably the worst pun in this whole story).
Death was having a busy day. It's only a metaphor when you are a human; to an anthropomorphic personification of impersonal reality that has been cloaked in an image to die for by the machinations of an antiquated belief system, then metaphors have an unnatural life of their own.
The soul of the Goa'uld exchanged some abusive banter with Death and then faded into wherever it's belief system suggested awaiting it post mortem.
"THOSE THINGS ALWAYS DO THAT. WHAT WAS THEIR CHILDHOOD TRAUMA?" muttered Death and stalked off to find his next appointment. It was only just up the hallway.