Brian holstered one of his Desert Eagles and used the free arm to
climb onto the windowsill, holding the other one steady. He looked all
around the room, including the ceiling, and pronounced, "Clear." He dropped
in. Sean followed, Shepherd being on lookout, then Shepherd followed. The
room seemed to be used for recording Hogwarts history, as there were dozens
and dozens of bookshelves in this room with titles plainly outlining
Hogwarts lore.
"Okay," Shepherd whispered, "if the architecture is like it is upstairs, there'll only be one corridor from the door, but it probably isn't because this is the ground floor. Probably there's two or more corridors. Brian, you slice it left, Sean, you slice it right, and I'll cover you from behind the scribe's desk."
Shepherd ducked behind the desk and set the safety-catch on his M16 to single-shot mode (i.e. one round fired per trigger pull), Sean crouched to the left of the door holding one Desert Eagle and Brian crouched to the right of the door with his shotgun in one hand. Shepherd nodded, then Brian nodded. Sean twisted the doorknob, threw the door open and pointed his pistol down the path to the right of the door. Brian caught the door and pointed his shotgun down the path to the left of the door. Shepherd pointed his AR straight out the door. While Brian and Sean were looking down corridors, Shepherd was looking at a great set of double-doors with stained glass. Shepherd broke cover and silently moved towards the door. Sean moved into the doorway, and Brian stood up and moved into the doorway, the result being that neither one was a particularly easy target, between them they could see the entire corridor and neither one was in the other's line of fire.
"Clear." they chorused. Shepherd walked up to the double doors and peered through the stained glass, even though the dirty and primitively created glass made vision hazy. Through the doors was some kind of a great hall, with five tables in it. It was an absolute slaughterhouse, with wizards' bodies piled high. All manner of outlandish creatures patrolled this area, and several wizards in reflective masks. That made it even clearer that something very weird was going on. It made sense that all the mythical creatures he'd seen so far would attack random people, as they were all either carnivores or notoriously bad-tempered, but they were actively not attacking each other or any of these wizards in the silver masks. There was no natural explanation, so this was the work of somebody. Who organised this devious hit on a school? Which led him back to the question; why had the US army been ordered to go into here? And where was here, anyway? He could guess it was in the United Kingdom, because the two conscious civvies he'd come across both spoke in British accents. It would politically take a lot to divert troops en route home to another mission, and it would take even more if this mission was to be carried out on an ally's soil.
Well, he wasn't going to find the answer by standing here, he'd find it when he found a superior God damn officer. If any were left. What Shepherd was hearing was dozens of assault rifles NOT being fired, which in normal circumstances meant one side had been decimated. Judging by the throngs of lethal creatures and evil wizards on the other side of the door, it wasn't his opponent. Shepherd gritted his teeth. "If we don't find a superior officer within the next two hours, we bail." he ordered in a whisper. He motioned left with his M16 and walked left. His two charges walked with him, Sean acting as rear guard while the other two kept their guns trained forwards.
Shepherd and co. then methodically searched the school. They kept well away from all enemies, hiding from patrols and avoiding sentries, while they walked around silently. They searched scores of classrooms before coming to the Gryffindor common-room.
Of course, they didn't know it was the Gryffindor common-room. All they could see through the slashed-to-ribbons Fat Lady's portrait was that it was a place of gathering, with a fireplace (the fire had burned down to embers), a bunch of comfortable chairs and settees, and more portraits on the wall. They entered cautiously, but reasoned that nobody was here unless they were exceptionally quiet.
"Hey, anybody here?" Brian whispered. "You can come out now if you're hiding. We're US marines."
"I'm corporal Shepherd." Shepherd added.
"Shepherd?" a voice whisper-shouted from a very dark corner behind a settee. "Holy shit, is that you, Shepherd?" The speaker stood up. His brown hair had flecks of grey, his combat uniform was badly creased and soaked in sweat, and he carried no weapon except his knife.
"No - colonel Black?"
"It is you! You crazy bastard, you got reassigned to this fubar op too?" colonel Black grinned in delight.
"Unfortunately I did. I notice that you're still getting into situations where I save your ass. Is it becoming a habit? Do you realise I've already saved your life?"
"Do we have to do the routine every time we meet? Fine." He began speaking in a self-important way. "I could've easily survived those two rag- heads. I had an M60, they had AKs, at medium-long range."
"But your gun was facing completely the wrong way when they opened up." Shepherd replied with great satisfaction. The manner in which he spoke suggested that he'd spoken these words many times before. "By the time you brought it around, they'd have perforated you like a spaghetti-strainer."
"Not with Soviet-surplus AK-47s. You know how shit they are."
"They were putting so much metal your way it would have been impossible for both of them to miss with their entire clips. If I hadn't been standing in that bell tower with an LSW, you'd be six feet under."
"Keep dreaming, Shepherd." Black replied airily, then dropped the façade. "How ya doing, ya old bastard?"
"Looks like I'm doing a lot better than you are. How did you get here? Where are your weapons?"
"No time for niceties? Well, I used up every last round I had fighting a group of centaurs, then the last couple of guys near me got hit, so I dropped everything on me as I ducked in through the school gates so I could run away faster. I didn't look where I was going, I just climbed stairs because the centaurs had trouble with stairs. Then I saw some trolls and ran even further, eventually ending up here. Private, give me that shotgun." Brian obliged. Shepherd gave Sean a quick look, which he understood; he gave Brian one of his pistols.
"Sir, we were told before we left that if we were separated from leadership before we received our orders we should search for higher- ranking people to give us our orders. That's what's happened here, none of us have a clue what our orders are. Please tell me that you were high- ranking enough to be told in Iraq, or we're gonna have to search for people even longer."
"I'm not, actually, but I was told my orders when I landed. The orders from on high are thus; we are to get into the castle, kill everyone, and get out."
There was a pause.
"What?" queried Sean.
"What?" defended Black.
"We were specifically ordered by the US government to kill British citizens?" Shepherd snarled. "No, that's not something the US does."
"That's exactly what the commander said our orders were." Black confirmed. "Just kill everybody here."
"That's an act of war on a long-standing ally." Shepherd stated. "That's not something Rumsfeld would order. These are perverted orders and a perverted mission. We have unwittingly become part of a splinter militia."
The colonel frowned, somewhat alarmed. "That's enough, corporal." Black ordered. "Think nothing of the sort. Come on, we need to get out of here. We can pretty well assume the wandering creatures will finish off anybody left alive, so mission accomplished. We need to get to the evac point."
"Sir, there's no guarantee that the choppers will still be there, they were probably forced to take off long ago. And it's not just creatures wandering. There are some people in black robes and silver masks."
"There are? Shit, we're gonna have to kill them too." Black announced.
"Are you nuts?" exploded Sean. "If we fire one shot they'll find us and kill us. The one consideration we should have, now we know what our loony orders were, is how to get out alive!"
Black stepped around the settee and marched up to Sean, eye to eye. Sean quailed slightly. "Soldier, you are out of line. Fall in. Move out." he said softly.
"Sir yes sir." he said humbly.
The group of soldiers then stealthily snuck out. They hid from the increasingly frequent creature patrols, continuously being cut off from their chosen path by something-or-other. Shepherd was very glad that they didn't see any more of the silver-masked wizards, or else Black would've probably shot at them and given away his position, quickly resulting in painful death and being eaten.
They moved behind the path of a manticore and down a long hallway with few doors. They were most of the way along the hallway when they saw lengthened shadows of trogs with spears on the wall at the far end of the corridor. Shepherd immediately thought, "We need to hide." and turned on his heel. Then he saw the shadows of trolls at the other end and thought, "Trogs are blind, if we go this way we'll have a better chance of hiding in some room." and turned around again. Then he saw the shadows of the trogs divert down some other corridor, and their place taken by the shadows of five giant spiders. Shepherd thought, "Trolls are stupid, if we go back the other way they might not notice us hide in a room." and turned around again. Suddenly he noticed a door just to his left. He couldn't believe he didn't see it before. He muttered, "In here." for Black's benefit, who looked ready to open fire, and opened the door silently. Black and his men bundled into the room quickly, and Sean took great care to shut the door with not even the faintest of rushes of wind. Then Shepherd looked around the room. It was a comfortable place exactly like the room they found Black in (the Gryffindor common-room) right down to the shape of the mantelpiece. On four of the chairs sat four young schoolwizards and schoolwitches in robes.
"Evening." one of them, a fifteen-year-old kid with stuck-up jet-black hair, black glasses and almond-shaped green eyes, said mildly.
"Okay," Shepherd whispered, "if the architecture is like it is upstairs, there'll only be one corridor from the door, but it probably isn't because this is the ground floor. Probably there's two or more corridors. Brian, you slice it left, Sean, you slice it right, and I'll cover you from behind the scribe's desk."
Shepherd ducked behind the desk and set the safety-catch on his M16 to single-shot mode (i.e. one round fired per trigger pull), Sean crouched to the left of the door holding one Desert Eagle and Brian crouched to the right of the door with his shotgun in one hand. Shepherd nodded, then Brian nodded. Sean twisted the doorknob, threw the door open and pointed his pistol down the path to the right of the door. Brian caught the door and pointed his shotgun down the path to the left of the door. Shepherd pointed his AR straight out the door. While Brian and Sean were looking down corridors, Shepherd was looking at a great set of double-doors with stained glass. Shepherd broke cover and silently moved towards the door. Sean moved into the doorway, and Brian stood up and moved into the doorway, the result being that neither one was a particularly easy target, between them they could see the entire corridor and neither one was in the other's line of fire.
"Clear." they chorused. Shepherd walked up to the double doors and peered through the stained glass, even though the dirty and primitively created glass made vision hazy. Through the doors was some kind of a great hall, with five tables in it. It was an absolute slaughterhouse, with wizards' bodies piled high. All manner of outlandish creatures patrolled this area, and several wizards in reflective masks. That made it even clearer that something very weird was going on. It made sense that all the mythical creatures he'd seen so far would attack random people, as they were all either carnivores or notoriously bad-tempered, but they were actively not attacking each other or any of these wizards in the silver masks. There was no natural explanation, so this was the work of somebody. Who organised this devious hit on a school? Which led him back to the question; why had the US army been ordered to go into here? And where was here, anyway? He could guess it was in the United Kingdom, because the two conscious civvies he'd come across both spoke in British accents. It would politically take a lot to divert troops en route home to another mission, and it would take even more if this mission was to be carried out on an ally's soil.
Well, he wasn't going to find the answer by standing here, he'd find it when he found a superior God damn officer. If any were left. What Shepherd was hearing was dozens of assault rifles NOT being fired, which in normal circumstances meant one side had been decimated. Judging by the throngs of lethal creatures and evil wizards on the other side of the door, it wasn't his opponent. Shepherd gritted his teeth. "If we don't find a superior officer within the next two hours, we bail." he ordered in a whisper. He motioned left with his M16 and walked left. His two charges walked with him, Sean acting as rear guard while the other two kept their guns trained forwards.
Shepherd and co. then methodically searched the school. They kept well away from all enemies, hiding from patrols and avoiding sentries, while they walked around silently. They searched scores of classrooms before coming to the Gryffindor common-room.
Of course, they didn't know it was the Gryffindor common-room. All they could see through the slashed-to-ribbons Fat Lady's portrait was that it was a place of gathering, with a fireplace (the fire had burned down to embers), a bunch of comfortable chairs and settees, and more portraits on the wall. They entered cautiously, but reasoned that nobody was here unless they were exceptionally quiet.
"Hey, anybody here?" Brian whispered. "You can come out now if you're hiding. We're US marines."
"I'm corporal Shepherd." Shepherd added.
"Shepherd?" a voice whisper-shouted from a very dark corner behind a settee. "Holy shit, is that you, Shepherd?" The speaker stood up. His brown hair had flecks of grey, his combat uniform was badly creased and soaked in sweat, and he carried no weapon except his knife.
"No - colonel Black?"
"It is you! You crazy bastard, you got reassigned to this fubar op too?" colonel Black grinned in delight.
"Unfortunately I did. I notice that you're still getting into situations where I save your ass. Is it becoming a habit? Do you realise I've already saved your life?"
"Do we have to do the routine every time we meet? Fine." He began speaking in a self-important way. "I could've easily survived those two rag- heads. I had an M60, they had AKs, at medium-long range."
"But your gun was facing completely the wrong way when they opened up." Shepherd replied with great satisfaction. The manner in which he spoke suggested that he'd spoken these words many times before. "By the time you brought it around, they'd have perforated you like a spaghetti-strainer."
"Not with Soviet-surplus AK-47s. You know how shit they are."
"They were putting so much metal your way it would have been impossible for both of them to miss with their entire clips. If I hadn't been standing in that bell tower with an LSW, you'd be six feet under."
"Keep dreaming, Shepherd." Black replied airily, then dropped the façade. "How ya doing, ya old bastard?"
"Looks like I'm doing a lot better than you are. How did you get here? Where are your weapons?"
"No time for niceties? Well, I used up every last round I had fighting a group of centaurs, then the last couple of guys near me got hit, so I dropped everything on me as I ducked in through the school gates so I could run away faster. I didn't look where I was going, I just climbed stairs because the centaurs had trouble with stairs. Then I saw some trolls and ran even further, eventually ending up here. Private, give me that shotgun." Brian obliged. Shepherd gave Sean a quick look, which he understood; he gave Brian one of his pistols.
"Sir, we were told before we left that if we were separated from leadership before we received our orders we should search for higher- ranking people to give us our orders. That's what's happened here, none of us have a clue what our orders are. Please tell me that you were high- ranking enough to be told in Iraq, or we're gonna have to search for people even longer."
"I'm not, actually, but I was told my orders when I landed. The orders from on high are thus; we are to get into the castle, kill everyone, and get out."
There was a pause.
"What?" queried Sean.
"What?" defended Black.
"We were specifically ordered by the US government to kill British citizens?" Shepherd snarled. "No, that's not something the US does."
"That's exactly what the commander said our orders were." Black confirmed. "Just kill everybody here."
"That's an act of war on a long-standing ally." Shepherd stated. "That's not something Rumsfeld would order. These are perverted orders and a perverted mission. We have unwittingly become part of a splinter militia."
The colonel frowned, somewhat alarmed. "That's enough, corporal." Black ordered. "Think nothing of the sort. Come on, we need to get out of here. We can pretty well assume the wandering creatures will finish off anybody left alive, so mission accomplished. We need to get to the evac point."
"Sir, there's no guarantee that the choppers will still be there, they were probably forced to take off long ago. And it's not just creatures wandering. There are some people in black robes and silver masks."
"There are? Shit, we're gonna have to kill them too." Black announced.
"Are you nuts?" exploded Sean. "If we fire one shot they'll find us and kill us. The one consideration we should have, now we know what our loony orders were, is how to get out alive!"
Black stepped around the settee and marched up to Sean, eye to eye. Sean quailed slightly. "Soldier, you are out of line. Fall in. Move out." he said softly.
"Sir yes sir." he said humbly.
The group of soldiers then stealthily snuck out. They hid from the increasingly frequent creature patrols, continuously being cut off from their chosen path by something-or-other. Shepherd was very glad that they didn't see any more of the silver-masked wizards, or else Black would've probably shot at them and given away his position, quickly resulting in painful death and being eaten.
They moved behind the path of a manticore and down a long hallway with few doors. They were most of the way along the hallway when they saw lengthened shadows of trogs with spears on the wall at the far end of the corridor. Shepherd immediately thought, "We need to hide." and turned on his heel. Then he saw the shadows of trolls at the other end and thought, "Trogs are blind, if we go this way we'll have a better chance of hiding in some room." and turned around again. Then he saw the shadows of the trogs divert down some other corridor, and their place taken by the shadows of five giant spiders. Shepherd thought, "Trolls are stupid, if we go back the other way they might not notice us hide in a room." and turned around again. Suddenly he noticed a door just to his left. He couldn't believe he didn't see it before. He muttered, "In here." for Black's benefit, who looked ready to open fire, and opened the door silently. Black and his men bundled into the room quickly, and Sean took great care to shut the door with not even the faintest of rushes of wind. Then Shepherd looked around the room. It was a comfortable place exactly like the room they found Black in (the Gryffindor common-room) right down to the shape of the mantelpiece. On four of the chairs sat four young schoolwizards and schoolwitches in robes.
"Evening." one of them, a fifteen-year-old kid with stuck-up jet-black hair, black glasses and almond-shaped green eyes, said mildly.