Last Call

by Lloyd Behm II

  Speaker bowed low and retreated against the wall.

  “Delver, you speak greater truth than you know,” Call of the Sun said to Fred before turning to Sola. “Where did you get these?”

  Sola took one of the implants from Call of the Sun. “Those were recovered by one of our agents during an intrusion into this world by followers of the god Abzu.”

  Call of the Sun turned to Henry Keith and bowed formally before dropping to one knee. There was a collective gasp from the remaining elves before they, too, kneeled. Speaker knee-walked to Call of the Sun’s side, where there was a brief exchange of elvish in an ancient dialect. Speaker then knee-walked to the door, where he took one of the slender swords of the guards before returning and presenting it blade first to Call of the Sun. Call of the Sun took the blade; to the horror of his followers, he broke the blade across the anvil of his knee.

  Henry rose and walked around the table. The other elves dropped their faces to the floor as he passed. Call of the Sun waited until Henry stood in front of him.

  “My people owe yours a great apology, Undying One.”

  “How so, child of the Fair Folk?”

  “The magic involved in those…things that would enslave others is not Akkadian. It is, at its root, the work of my people.”

  “Surely humans have perverted elvish magic in the past?”

  “I fail to speak clearly,” Call of the Sun said. “The magic overlaying the spells of the Akkadian god? The spell that detonates the implant if the user rebels? I know the creator of the spell. He recommended the unnamed one who was removed from this very room for my entourage.”

  “Shit,” Fred rumbled, pulling a radio out of a pocket. “Alfie, tell QMG to seal the building.”

  “There is no need,” Call of the Sun began.

  The building swayed under the impact of something huge.

  My phone started vibrating in my pocket.

  I pulled it out as the wards on the building went live. Whatever had slammed into an upper floor screamed in rage as the wards kicked it out of the building.

  My phone showed it was Tatsuo calling.

  “Yes?”

  “Foreman, there’s something you should know. The attacker is a dragon. No, I cannot help you in this,” she said in one breath. “Protocols.”

  “Understood, Retainer,” I said, hanging up the phone and turning to Henry. “We’re under attack by a dragon.”

  He shook his head. “It had to be dragons, didn’t it? Call of the Sun, your offer of alliance is accepted. Get off your knees—we’ll have to do the formal song and dance later.”

  Call of the Sun rose gracefully from the floor, his retainers rising to one knee. Something streamed past the building below us—golden red scales flashed in the sunlight.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Fred said. “That’s the Piasa.”

  The building shook in the Piasa’s wake.

  “That explains why Tatsuo can’t get involved,” I said.

  “Yeah, the whole damn continent is that big bastard’s territory, and he’s too damn dumb to understand anything but the first three rules of life,” Fred said. “How do you want to handle this?”

  “That’s up to Henry,” I said. “He’s the senior agent on site.”

  “I’m waiting on the governor to pick up now,” Henry said. “That thing is far too…Hello, David, how are you today?”

  “I hate listening in on one-sided conversations,” Fred said, moving closer to the windows. The Piasa continued to circle the building, screeching in frustration every time it bounced off the wards on the building.

  “Damn, that thing is dumb,” Fred said, watching the Piasa tumble after an unsuccessful attempt to land on the building. It caught itself just before it slammed into Brazos Street, lumbering gracelessly back into the sky.

  “What are the first three rules?” I asked, watching the Piasa struggle to stay in the air. It wasn’t really flying, more like beating the air into submission by force of will.

  “The first three rules?” Fred asked with a grin. “Come on, Diindiisi, I know you’re old for a human, but surely you’ve heard of Fuck it, Fight it, or Feed on it?”

  His beard split in a grin that would have looked fine on the Cheshire Cat.

  “Yes, I have heard of those,” I said, smiling in return.

  “You stupid thing, you should have stayed asleep,” Fred said as Henry hung up the phone.

  “Should be about ten minutes,” he said, walking to where Fred and I were watching the Piasa circle the building cluelessly.

  “What should be about ten minutes?” Call of the Sun asked.

  “The governor has ordered the National Guard to see if they can drive the Piasa away from downtown.”

  “That might not be the best idea; it’s ancient and can soak up a lot of damage before dying, and then do a lot of damage to downtown Austin when it hits the ground. Might be necessary, but it might piss the governor off.”

  “Drive, not kill,” Henry replied as a pair of helicopters came into view. “Although ‘lure’ might be a better term for what they’re going to do.”

  “Is that a live cow?” Call of the Sun asked.

  Fred slid down a wall, laughing at the sight—one of the helicopters had a clearly panicked cow dangling below it, all four legs trying to make contact while the cow rotated slowly widdershins.

  There was a large speaker hanging out the side of the second helicopter.

  “They’re trying to convince it to follow the cow,” Henry said.

  “You got anyone who speaks Algonquian on that helicopter?” Fred asked.

  “No, why?”

  “When we did some work for the Piasa back in ‘73, that’s the only human language it spoke. It’s so old it doesn’t even speak proper Dragon, just some proto-Dragon language the linguistics expert dubbed ‘Ancient Lithic Wyrm,’ so he could claim credit for ‘discovering’ it,” Fred replied.

  “Well, something seems to have worked,” I said. The Piasa was following the helicopter with the attached cow.

  “Fred? Do you speak Algonquian?”

  “Me? No. Before you ask, that dwarf died of boredom twenty years ago.”

  “This is some dwarf joke, right? Dying of boredom—there was a mining accident, and someone drilled a hole through him?” Goodhart asked.

  “No. Stronghammer was sitting in his office one day when a bored dwarf walked in and hacked him down with an axe.”

  “That’s a fascinating story, and it adds to our depth of understanding of dwarf culture,” Henry said. “However, it doesn’t solve our communications issues with the Piasa. Anyone have a workable suggestion?”

  Father Miller stepped forward. “I had to check some information first. One of the local Jesuits speaks Algonquian. I can contact the Church and have him meet the Piasa wherever.”

  “Give his address information to Goodhart and we’ll have a team pick him up.”

  Miller and Goodhart walked to one side and swapped information. Goodhart made a phone call and then nodded to Henry.

  “I would say that the Piasa attacking this conference is a good indication that someone or something doesn’t want us to go forward,” Henry said, returning to his seat. “The best way to foil that desire, in my opinion, would be to continue with our discussions.”

  Everyone filtered back to his or her seats.

  “With the proviso that you and I complete the formal alliance ritual later, I concur,” Call of the Sun said, returning to his chair. “If Sola Stellus agrees, I will tell the research mages I brought with me to speak to his apprentices.”

  “Grad students,” Sola said.

  Call of the Sun raised an eyebrow at the term. “I…see. Yes, then I will have them contact your senior graduate student. There should be no issues with communications, as all the research mages I brought speak Human.”

  “Ah, yes, well…” Sola started.

  “You see an issue?”

  You could chill drinks with the ice
in Call of the Sun’s tone. He apparently was not accustomed to having his decisions questioned.

  “What Human tongue do they speak?” Sola asked.

  “Whichever one is most useful for the human political entity where their Enclave exists, of course,” Speaker replied.

  The ‘you idiot’ was beautifully implied, not spoken.

  “Yes…well, you’ll be glad to note there should be no communications issues as all of my grad students speak the ancient form of the language of the Fair Folk.”

  All elves spoke the ancient form. There were no local variations, as they were born knowing the tongue—their creator goddess, whose name roughly translates as ‘She who walks through the Mists at the Dawn of Time,’ had endowed the elves with one language. There was some flexibility—the elves could add new terms and terminology, but they had to be uniquely elvish terms, not loan words from human languages.

  “You taught these human ‘grad students’ the Fair Tongue?” Speaker asked, a look of shock and amazement crossing his face.

  He had apparently missed my statements earlier or saw me as a unique item.

  “I test applicants to work in my lab for their ability to learn it,” Sola replied proudly. “There are many magical and mathematical concepts that can only be expressed in the Fair Tongue, so to aid my research, my students must be comfortably conversant in the language they are working in.”

  “It seems we of the elder Enclaves are too set in our ways to see the advantages you have here, Learned One,” Call of the Sun replied, bowing his head to Sola. “Speaker, please notify the mages. Sola, when this is resolved, I would like to speak to you about establishing methods of cross-species cooperation.”

  Sola bowed his head in return.

  “Now, I believe we were discussing destroying a god?” Call of the Sun asked.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 15 – Jesse

  “We’re coming in,” Gunny said, keying the mike on a radio he’d lifted from one of the dead SEALs.

  I’d thoroughly trashed what would have been the reception area if we’d been Stateside. The otherwise neutral beige walls looked like a bad Rorschach test—congealing blood and bits of monster covered the walls and floor for quite a distance from the door.

  “Follow the glow sticks once you get out to the warehouse. The lights should be on, unless the ghouls turned them off.”

  “Roger that,” Gunny replied.

  “The hell are those things, Gunny?” Morrison asked over my shoulder.

  “I’m guessing, based on what Lt. Commander Keith just said, they’re ghouls,” Gunny replied. Fifteen of us had joined him on his fool’s errand.

  Morrison was an out and out pain in the ass—a shitbird and blue falcon of renown throughout the Marine Corps—but he was a good son of a bitch to have on your side in a firefight.

  “Stay frosty,” Gunny said, watching us go by.

  I paused, dropping my rifle to hang by its sling. I pulled the M79 around and loaded it.

  “Figure if I’m going to walk point, I should carry something that’s going to waste a lot of the bastards at once.”

  “Good idea,” Gunny said. “You have an idea where you’re going?”

  “Keith said to head for the warehouse. I’m just following the signs,” I replied, pointing to a sign that read “Warehouse” in English under the Arabic scribble.

  “Try not to walk into anything,” Gunny said.

  “Sure, you betcha.”

  It took about ten minutes to get from the front of the building to the warehouse. We passed laboratories with mad science experiments frozen in time—unidentifiable body parts floating in jars of ochre-colored liquid, long dead, desiccated things strapped to tables, and other less savory things that still lurk in the corners of my mind, waiting to jump on me unexpectedly. We stepped over or around ghoul bodies.

  “They found a few up here,” was all Gunny said.

  The door to the warehouse was wedged open—someone had driven steel spikes under the door to keep it from closing.

  The warehouse was also empty—there were three bright yellow Jungheinrich forklifts parked against one wall, covered in about an inch of dust. Beyond that there was nothing in the warehouse, other than trails in the dust showing that something had passed through. There were bright, shiny dents in the otherwise drab metal doors to the desert outside the facility.

  “That’s not good,” Morrison said. “Looks like a lot of the bastards came through here.”

  “We killed a lot of the bastards,” I said, walking toward a glow stick lying in the middle of the clean path.

  “How many more do you think there are?” Morrison asked.

  “Fuck if I know. Probably a factor of the carrying capacity of the local environment,” I replied.

  I could feel Morrison’s eyes boring a hole into the back of my head. I grinned. It was the only damn thing I remembered from an environmental biology class I took a couple of years ago—well, that and this really hot chick who’d worn shorts all semester, even when the temperatures dropped into the forties in the mornings.

  There’s something to be said for going to school in Texas—shorts and sweatshirt weather being one of them.

  “Hold up when you get to the stairwell,” Gunny said.

  “Roger that.”

  We crunched our way across the floor to the stairwell, our boots not quite slipping on the fine dust that still covered the floor.

  “Swap out your batteries on your NVGs,” Gunny said. “Just in case.”

  Spent batteries went in the bag I dropped empty magazines in. When everyone had changed batteries, we tightened all our gear one last time, and lamented not taking a piss before we came into the building.

  God knows I could have taken a piss before going down those stairs.

  Gunny signaled me forward.

  I followed the glow sticks down into the darkness.

  Two flights of stairs down, the glow sticks changed to IR chemlites. By that point we’d all gone to NVGs, just to keep from falling over each other.

  “I didn’t know the Iraqis had moles living here,” Morrison muttered.

  “Probably built by the same Germans who sold them the forklifts up top,” Ocasic said from higher in the stack. “Bring in a couple of dwarfs, dig a hole, and make some bucks.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said, going down the third flight of stairs.

  I don’t know how I missed it. For that matter, I don’t know why it waited until I’d passed by and grabbed Morrison. But it did—Morrison’s screams echoed up and down the stairwell as the ghoul pulled his face off and ate it.

  Someone behind Morrison puked. I don’t think I did, not just then. I was fascinated and horrified, watching the ghoul feed. It had pinned Morrison to the wall with one clawed hand and was stripping the skin off his face with the other.

  “Killit!Killit!KILLIT!” someone was screaming.

  There were strings of blood linking the skin in the hand of the ghoul to Morrison’s face. I puked when I realized Morrison was still alive—his eyes rolled toward me in the darkness.

  The ghoul was still feeding when I stood back up. Either Morrison was dead, or he’d passed out. The M79 was the wrong gun for the job at hand, so I dropped it, my hand finding the pistol grip of my M16. I flipped the safety to “burst” as I brought the barrel up, and when the sight picture steadied, I pulled the trigger.

  The ghoul spasmed and screamed, dropping Morrison.

  Bare feet rutched on the stairs below me. I turned, emptying the magazine blindly down the stairs.

  In the silence as I changed magazines, I heard the ping of a spoon on a grenade releasing.

  “Fire in the hole!” Ocasic shouted, dropping the grenade down the stairs.

  It bounced once on the stairs below me, hit the outer wall, and then fell down the next flight, exploding with a soggy THUMP.

  “Cease fire!”

  “Jesse, man, you ok?” Ocasic asked, shaking me.

  “Y
eah, Rick, I’m good. Sorry, man, froze there for a minute,” I said, picking up the M79.

  “It’s good, man. I’d have horked if I had to watch that thing eatin’ Morrison.”

  “You good, Salazar?” Gunny asked.

  “Affirmative, Gunny. What do you want to do with Morrison?”

  “Hate to do it,” Gunny said, taking Morrison’s dog tags, “but we’re going to have to leave him here for now.”

  “One of those things could come behind us and eat him,” Plant said. “We could booby trap his body.”

  “Yeah, and then blow one of us to hell on the way out if we’ve got to grab him in a hurry. Not the best plan, Plant,” Gunny said.

  “Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that,” Plant replied.

  “Better grab his ammo and weapon, though. We might need it,” I said.

  “Good idea. Dolenz, get his ammo and grenades and distribute them. Give Salazar two magazines.”

  I took the mags from Dolenz, tapping them on my helmet to seat the cartridges, before dropping them into the empty magazine pouch on my armor.

  “Lay on, Macduff,” Gunny said.

  We went down.

  Two more flights of stairs—no hidden ghouls—and we walked into another foyer. There were racks along the wall holding wire mesh suits of some sort. Two of the suits were piled neatly on a bench, waiting for someone who’d never come back to put them on. There was a door on the far side of the foyer, and the dust from the door to the stairs had been disturbed.

  “Wonder what the suits are for?”

  “No clue,” Gunny said. “Shut your pie holes for a minute and act like Marines, not a girl’s school field trip.”

  We shut up, everyone facing either the door or the stairs just in case. Gunny pulled out the SEAL radio.

  “We’re at the bottom of the stairs. Where are you?”

  “Stick your head out, I’ll signal you.”

  Gunny crept to the door, looking around the frame.

  “Looks like you’re about a hundred and fifty yards in and thirty yards up?”

  “Roger. There’s an observation post here for the breeding program. Once you get into the cave, you should be able to follow the path. Most of the ghouls left about an hour ago.”