Siege Line

by Myke Cole

  “I’ve got him, Master Corporal,” Fitzgerald said, tugging on Desmarais’ elbow and motioning him toward Mankiller’s office.

  Desmarais looked at Ghaznavi, back up at Nalren. “Stand down. We’re going to need every hand in the fight.”

  “Sir, that’s not—” Nalren began.

  “Up for discussion,” Desmarais finished for her.

  Nalren gritted her teeth. “Montclair, take the opposite flank. Don’t let them get around us.”

  Montclair nodded and leapt out through the mangled window, cutting across the front of the building and heading out in the opposite direction of Reeves and Sharon. She looked a bit steadier on her feet, but not by much.

  Mankiller knelt at Nalren’s side. “I got bear traps between those two trailers there.” She pointed. “I had some over there”—she pointed again—“but they got sprung the last time they came for us.” She gestured toward the track. The snow there was churned, stained black and red. Close to the station, the barricade of trucks was badly holed, the vehicles turned on their sides, burned out and scattered. “We’re open here, you can see.”

  “That barricade wouldn’t stop them for long,” Nalren said, “even if it was brand-new.”

  “Well, it ain’t gonna stop ’em at all right now.” Mankiller sounded irritated. “I need you to cover me while I get a scrape set up there.”

  “Wilma Plante!” A voice echoed through the freezing air. Not the tinny buzz of electronic amplification but the natural yell of a creature with superhuman lungs. Schweitzer could see the skin on Calmut’s arms prickle into gooseflesh.

  “It doesn’t need to be this way!” the Director boomed. “There’s been too much bloodshed already and there’ll be more. We don’t want to hurt you. We just want to speak with your grandfather, then we’ll be on our way. No one else has to die! Just come out, alone and unarmed. Don’t be selfish! Do it for your people.”

  Calmut’s thin hand clamped on Mankiller’s forearm, so quick that she flinched, whipping her head toward him. “You ain’t goin’ out there, Sheriff. No way.”

  “He’s right,” Schweitzer answered. “It’ll end worse for everyone. I promise.”

  He could see the conflict behind Mankiller’s eyes, the love for her people as she looked at them shaking their heads. “Listen to Ollie,” one of them said.

  “You stay right here, boss,” said another.

  “Yeah.” Mankiller finally choked out the words, clearly overcome. “Guess I’ll stick.”

  “We can put Schweitzer there.” Nalren pointed to the gap in the barricade, her voice trembling only slightly now. “He’s the closest thing we’ve got to armor out here.”

  “Nope,” Schweitzer said, making his way to the door. “You’re just going to have to cover her.”

  “Where are you going?” Ghaznavi asked.

  “High ground,” Schweitzer said. “I need to see the battlefield.”

  “This is the highest ground there is,” Mankiller said. “You don’t need to see the battlefield. You’re in it.” She pointed out the shattered window. “The enemy is right there.”

  “The living enemy, sure,” Schweitzer said. “The Golds won’t be mixed up with them. They usually just go for whatever beating heart is closest, so the Cell will want to make sure it’s yours. If the living are coming from there, then I bet the dead are coming from somewhere else.”

  “Where?” Mankiller asked.

  “I’ll let you know when I find out,” Schweitzer said. “Good luck.”

  He turned and went out the door, ignoring Ghaznavi’s calls for him to wait. Whatever she thought she knew about the Golds, she wasn’t prepared to make the deck plate–level decisions on deploying troops. She would find out what she was up against soon enough.

  “At least take a gun!” Ghaznavi shouted after him.

  “Got one,” Schweitzer said without turning, holding up Nalren’s .45.

  “That’s mine!” Nalren shouted after him.

  “Sue me!” Schweitzer shouted back as he edged through the line of trucks.

  He paused, surveying the ground. The station was perched on a slight rise, but the town itself was situated in a small bowl, the frozen ground surrounded by gently sloping hills thickly clustered with scrub pine. The lakeshore was to their rear. The low buildings sprawled, creating a series of broad lanes choked with piled snow and abandoned vehicles. It was a shooting gallery, the worst ground Schweitzer had seen in a long time. If there were time, he would move the people to a more defensible position, but there wasn’t. He could see the heat signatures of the Cell’s forces spreading out along the town’s perimeter, beginning to move into the lanes leading toward the municipal center. Schweitzer didn’t have time to get a count, but there were a lot of them.

  The Golds. He scanned the second stories of the structures, looking for a hide-site where he could get a view from above. The buildings were disappointingly low. The best candidate was what looked like the town’s main government building, which was only barely taller than the town’s lone tavern. If only there were a . . .

  There was. To his right, Schweitzer could see a blue-trimmed chapel, the steeple shorn of its cross by the winter wind a long time before. Like everything else in Fort Resolution, it was a small affair, but it was taller than the surrounding trees at least, and that was something.

  Schweitzer leapt easily up onto the station’s roof, ignoring the shouts from the defenders at the sound of his boots striking the shingles. He pushed off, leaping the distance to the second story of the tavern, and then again to a house nearby. Two more jumps got him onto the chapel’s steeply sloping roof, so slick with frost that he scrambled for a moment before finally pushing off again and grabbing hold of the gutter below the spire. He let his momentum carry him through the wooden slats that covered the window. The resulting crash was louder than he liked, but there was nothing for it. Hopefully, the human operators were too far and too focused to pay much attention, but it might alert any Golds nearby.

  He saw them as soon as he righted himself and turned to look out the hole he had made.

  There were five, spread out in a delta like a flock of migrating geese. They loped along the gentle slope that made its way up to the lakeshore, a stumbling half run that was doubtless faster than it looked. They were uniformly naked, as all Golds were, the only interruption in the bleached color of their skin made by the purple of stitched scars and the flashes of metal where their reinforcing cables breached the skin. Schweitzer almost let his eyes pass over them, trying to pick out the path they would take through the buildings to reach the station. It amazed him to think that the sight of magically animated corpses could have become mundane, but . . .

  Something different.

  At the delta’s apex, the leading Gold was black. Schweitzer tightened his hands on the shattered remnants of the sill, leaned forward, focused.

  Not black. The figure was clothed. A cheap black suit. Its head was partially covered in a filthy white hood ripped across the face.

  As Schweitzer watched, the leader’s leg twitched and it stumbled. Something was wrong with its hip. That wasn’t remarkable for a Gold that had seen some service. Schweitzer himself had put more than a few dings in them himself. But what was remarkable was that the rest of the creatures stopped with it, slowed their pace to keep formation to its rear.

  Golds, subordinating themselves to something other than bloodlust. They were still functioning like animals, but now they appeared to be pack animals. That Gold out front must be impressive, indeed. This had to be the famous Director. The one Eldredge had warned him of, the one Mankiller had spoken to. The undead thing that seemed to have conquered its animal lusts every bit as much as Schweitzer had.

  Later. Focus. It was a simple-enough plan of attack: occupy the defenders with the living troops making their frontal assault, and run the real threat right up
their backside. If they were going to hold out for even a short time, Schweitzer would have to stop the Gold force here.

  Fortunately, the Director’s ostentation had given him a target. If the Golds were playing follow-the-leader, then he would simply have to stop that leader.

  Schweitzer sighted in the .45, bracing it in the crook of his elbow. He targeted the Director’s flexing knee, rising and falling as he ran.

  The Director was inhumanly fast, and his lurching gait made it difficult to lead the shot, predict where the round would fall once Schweitzer pulled the trigger. The Director turned and the delta turned with him, making their way up a narrowing track between a pair of winterized trailers. The Director slowed as he drew close to the junction, no doubt careful of whatever traps Mankiller and her people might have laid for him.

  The leg rose and fell more slowly now. It wasn’t going to get any better than this.

  Schweitzer drilled his focus down, shutting out all else, the wind and the cold and the shadowed closeness of the steeple’s interior, until the world was reduced to the pinpoint of the pistol’s front sight post, hovering over the distant blurred dot that Schweitzer hoped was the Director’s knee.

  The Director stepped forward, and Schweitzer pulled the trigger.

  Bang.

  Schweitzer knew the shot was perfect before the round even left the barrel. It was a feat of marksmanship he would never have achieved in life and would likely never equal even in death. He had accounted for everything, the tremor of the muzzle, the strength of the wind, the arcing velocity attenuating as the round sped toward the target. By all rights, it should have drilled a half-inch hole through the Director’s knee, hopefully crippling him, at least until he could get to a technician for repairs.

  But it didn’t.

  As soon as the shot broke, the Director leapt, a long, lunging step that brought the target up and out of the way at the perfect instant. His half-hooded head snapped in the direction of the steeple, and Schweitzer saw the ragged mouth spread in a grimace. The cheek had been flayed open, showing mandible and rows of yellow teeth.

  “Jim!” The Director shouted, turned, leapt.

  It was a jump of astonishing power, even for a Gold. The Director cleared the trailer and the building beyond it, pausing only to push off the roof hard enough to carry him in a soaring arc up and over the road toward the chapel where Schweitzer crouched.

  The rest of the Golds, released from their master’s thrall, held position, confused by the sudden absence of their leader. The Director had clearly been trying to impress some semblance of organization on them, and if he was willing to let it lapse, it could only be because he didn’t expect to be gone for long.

  Schweitzer would have to prove him wrong.

  He sighted in and fired again, this time aiming for the center of the shredded hood. Again, the Director dodged the shot, ducking his head, sending his body spinning. He fell earthward, and for a moment, Schweitzer thought he would miss the chapel entirely, faceplant in the snow covered parking lanes beneath it.

  But the Director had planned his trajectory perfectly and, at the last moment, snaked out a long-fingered hand to grasp the gutter at the edge of the chapel roof. The force of his descent ripped it away from the building, sent it sliding down to the ground, but not before it gave the Director the leverage he needed to throw himself upward. He landed below the steeple, his feet touching down on the frozen, steeply angled shingles. His body shuddered as it found its center of gravity.

  At last, he slowly straightened. “Hello, Jim.”

  The voice was crooning, the hiss-whisper that Schweitzer had come to associate with the dead’s attempts at speech. But it was hauntingly familiar all the same.

  “Get off my roof,” Schweitzer said. “This is a church, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re the one who broke the window. Jim, this is going to end very, very badly for you. For Patrick, too. I hate to sound like the villain in a science-fiction film, but you’re far better off working with me than against me.”

  “No, thanks. You’re fucking ugly.”

  “So are you. We’re precisely the same brand of ugly, in fact. Why the hell would you help these people?” He waved an arm in the direction of the station. “That’s over for you, Jim. Surely you know that.”

  “Call me an idealist.”

  “You know what your problem is? You haven’t been dead long enough. You’re still clinging to the trappings of life. I was the same way at first. You let it go after a while.”

  “Then why are you trying so hard to get in a living body? You must miss it something fierce.”

  “Not even a little bit. Dying is the best thing that ever happened to me. You, too.”

  “You’re not going to think it’s so great after I rip your fucking arms off.”

  “Last chance, Jim. My eyes are as silver as yours. We’re not like the Golds. Magic made them to hunger and kill. It made us to rule.”

  “Jesus. Can you be a little more dramatic? Why don’t you just clench a fist and say, ‘Jim, I am your father’?”

  “I’ll do even better.” The Director reached up, tugged the filthy, shredded remnants of his hood away. “Jim, I am your brother.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  ALL IN THE FAMILY

  The world vanished. Schweitzer’s vision shrank to a tunnel every bit as tight as when he’d finally reached the end of the rose-petal road, found his wife alive and well and awaiting him.

  Except now it wasn’t his wife, it was his brother, and he wasn’t alive.

  Whatever had killed Peter had mangled his face badly. The gray skin had been sewn back together, a jigsaw puzzle of thin black stitching that couldn’t quite reconstruct his old features. The stretched skin helped the scars a bit but not enough to hide the fact that Peter had been badly burned as well. Oh, God, Pete. You must have died horribly.

  But it was his brother. There could be no mistake. Peter’s misaligned eyes burned solid silver.

  Schweitzer’s training screamed at him to stop talking, stop posturing, to get into the fight and get it over. His enemy was downhill from him, balanced precariously on an icy roof ledge. He wouldn’t get better ground than this.

  But Schweitzer the SEAL was bludgeoned into silence by Schweitzer the kid brother, looking at Peter for the first time since he’d seen the scrolling banner across his television screen: FOUR SEALS CAUGHT IN FIREFIGHT. SURROUNDED BY INSURGENTS.

  Schweitzer could imagine the Cell’s finders combing through the battlefield, carting off the bodies or maybe spiriting them out of the morgue. More grist for the magical mill. They worked exclusively with dead special operators, so of course they would have wanted Peter.

  “Sorry you had to find out this way, little brother,” Peter said. “There was a while there where I thought about coming to find you. But I quickly learned that was useless. Because I was in the next phase already. I was beyond the SEALs, and I figured if you had what it took to join me here, then it would happen in its own time.”

  Attack, Schweitzer’s mind screamed. Enough talking. Get on him.

  But his mouth moved of its own accord. “Your eyes are silver. You’re supposed to be good.”

  Peter laughed, a short, barking sound. “I am good. I’m the best there is. Haven’t you figured it out yet? It just means that you won, that your soul was stronger than the one they paired you with. That kind of strength is almost singular. I thought it was unique to me before you came along. I guess it runs in the family, eh?”

  “Why . . . why didn’t you come to me . . . Even when I was in the Cell . . .”

  “Oh, I watched you, little brother. Believe me, I watched you. There were more than a few times that I almost considered reaching out to you, but I needed to be sure that you had the stuff to hang in there. I didn’t want to invest the time and energy in another Gold.”

&nbs
p; The thought kindled anger and grief in equal measure. His brother, the man whose example had pulled him into the SEALs. Peter had always believed in him. That Peter would think he would become a Gold . . . but he nearly had become a Gold. He remembered his own body shrinking in his vision as Ninip’s corrupting influence struck down a child and simultaneously pushed Schweitzer out to tumble through the void.

  But he had clawed his way back. Tooth and nail, inch by inch, until he had won. For Sarah. For Patrick.

  “By the time you did win out, you were already on the run,” Peter said. “I was glad, of course, but you know that line from the movies. ‘There can be only one.’ I’m not going to compete with you to run my organization.”

  “Jesus, Pete. I wouldn’t have competed with you.”

  “No, I suppose not, but neither would you have allowed me to expand it to the extent I must. The age of the living is over, Jim. Welcome to the dawn of the dead. There’s a place in it for you if you want it.”

  “Why?” Schweitzer asked. “Christ, Pete. There’s nothing for us. We can’t eat; we can’t love. All we can do is protect the things that used to matter to us.”

  Peter shook his head. “You never got it, little brother, not like you needed to. It was never about the pin. It was never about the brotherhood. It was about being the best. It was about fulfilling our warrior legacy, Jim. That’s the thing you never understood. You bought the package they sold you in basic. God, country, family. Very pretty stuff, the same brand of BS they’ve carted out since the beginning of history to entice men to go to war.”

  “It meant something to me, Pete. I thought it meant something to you, too.”

  “Oh, cut the crap, Jim. If that’s why you did it, then why be a SEAL? You could have been a corpsman or a boatswain’s mate or an aircraft mechanic and still got your fill of God, country, and family. God doesn’t exist, Jim. Maybe dying and coming back to life underscored that for you? The SEALs are the elite. You don’t suck sand and bleed salt for as long as we did for ideals, Jim. You do it because it is the pinnacle.