DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3)

by Andrew Seiple

  My polio braces itched again, and I traced my fingers down to the metal band under my sock. A quick twist, and some re-fastening, and it was in its proper place around my wrist. The fourth gadget I'd crafted had been a wrist-radio, one with more utility than the crrent era’s models. I hadn’t shown Bryson that one, and last night I was glad of it. I’d found something interesting. Coded messages, originating from within the church.

  I’d thought they were to the resistance, up until I started noticing the patterns of the code, and how it matched the codes of the German frequencies I’d been listening in on. The resistance would have to be made of idiots to be using Nazi codes. Combined with the ease we’d had leaving the city, my paranoia was on full-swing, and it was all I could do to keep my face placid.

  I didn’t think it was Unstoppable or Dottie or Bryson, but I couldn’t rule them out.

  Dottie didn’t seem like a traitor, but she’d been awfully quick to declare herself my friend. Why? I'd also noticed a certain unease, that the others showed her. They didn't let her go out alone, and watched her like a hawk whenever she had the jumbled crystal thing out. Curious, but I had no answers there.

  Henri was a cypher.

  Father Kovacs or Tadej seemed like the most likely suspects at first glance, but I couldn’t guarantee that one of them was guilty. The Father was in charge of the church safehouse; he could have simply handed us over before now. And Tadej... well, I hoped he was the one. He seemed like a slime-ball.

  So. Here we were in the dark, heading out into the wilds, far away from any witnesses, to an inevitable ambush. At which point, the traitor would probably start shooting people in the head.

  If I were a hero, it’d be quite the dilemma. I’d have to go in, spring the ambush, simultaneously catch the traitor, and win against unknown odds. Didn’t see any way of doing that without losing people. Maybe myself, too, depending on who was waiting for us.

  Fortunately, I was a villain. And now it was dark enough that I could go ahead with my master plan.

  “Stop.” I reached up to Bryson’s hands and seized the reins. The horse stilled, and next to us, Henri brought his own to a halt as well.

  “What?” Bryson whispered.

  “Movement on the horizon.”

  “You can see that far? You didn’t tell me of this.”

  “Minor augments.” I lied. I couldn’t see that far. Didn’t matter for what I had in mind. “Give her five minutes to scout ahead.” Before he could argue, I slipped from the cart and was gone into the shadows.

  “How are you going to sneak with those braces on?” He hissed after me. I didn’t slow down, rattling as I jogged into the treeline. Once out of sight, I tucked the skirt into my belt full of batteries, and tugged the braces off. A few quick clicks, and my sonic blaster was assembled and ready.

  How do you dodge an ambush and an unknown traitor? You fuck up their carefully laid plans. You don’t go along with their script. You force them to improvise, at a time and place of your choosing.

  Now that I didn’t clank with every third step, and that damnable skirt was up above my knees, I was free to ghost into the trees and back. Two minutes of careful, slow stealth brought me to what I deemed a good vantage point.

  I slipped my tinkered monocle out from my pocket. Bryson had fussed when he noticed it had gone missing. He would have fussed even more to see the crude circuitry I’d put in it. It was a clear violation of our gentleperson’s agreement to restrict the technology that could fall into Nazi hands.

  One quick twist, and a snap of the cable into the battery belt, and my crude nightvision lens powered up. A few hundred feet away, my arguing teammates swam into focus. The bulk of the angry whispers came from Bryson and Unstoppable, while behind them Father Kovacs hunkered down with a shotgun out, aimed into the darkness. My kind of priest, really.

  In the other cart, Henri was as still as a deer caught by surprise, a hand tucked in his coat, eyes straining to see. He looked in my direction a few times, but didn’t seem to register my presence. Tadej had a pistol out, and was loading it. Dottie was hunkered down in her seat, barely showing from the angle I had.

  Right now the traitor had to be panicking. This wasn’t right, this was far too early. Had they been lied to? Had the Nazis decided that the traitor was acceptable collateral damage? What should they do?

  My wrist-radio started chattering. More Nazi codes, and that told me that they had noticed our stop. Which meant that they were within visual or audio range, and asking for instructions. One of the weaknesses of our foes, I’d learned from Unstoppable. Nazis are rigid, inflexible, obsessed with control. Introduce a little chaos into the works and they freeze up, looking up the hierarchy for reassurance and instruction.

  Unstoppable leaped out of the cart, and started jogging in my general direction. What the heck— I glanced down at the wrist radio. Ah, right, sound carried. He was coming to check it out. Worried voices as the others conversed, too far for me to make out words.

  I’d hoped to avoid this next part, but if the Nazis were already as close as the radio traffic indicated, the game was up anyway. Time to lure them into my battlefield.

  “Look out!” I yelled. “They’re in the woods!” Then I flipped on my Tesla Deflector, drew my Colt, and shot Unstoppable.

  It was a good plan. There was nothing wrong with the basics of the plan. What should have happened was that they would take cover, start looking for imaginary snipers, maybe fire a few rounds off at nothing. Then when the Nazis showed up my team would be under cover, ready to fight, and I’d have a perfect bead on the traitor when he finally made his move. I could snipe him before he killed anyone, then help take down the Nazis.

  But I didn’t account for the horses.

  They panicked and reared at the gunshot, freaked out more at the boom of the nervous priest’s shotgun, and took off down the road at high speed. My teammates yelled and hung on for dear life, and I gaped, watching in stupefaction as my clever plan went to shreds in seconds.

  And then Unstoppable tackled me. His gun tore free of his belt and spun off through the trees as it passed through the electromagnetic bubble generated by my deflector, but the rest of him was non-metal material, and I barely had time to break my fall. “Stop! Hey! Quit—” Then there was pain, and exploding light, and my head whipped to the side. He’d punched me, I realized, through a brain gone all wobbly from blunt force trauma. I couldn’t see and for a second I thrashed, panicked and blind before realizing he’d probably just knocked the monocle off.

  “Doc?” he whispered. I cursed and writhed beneath him. “Whoa, shit! Sorry! Stay down. They got a sniper out here!”

  “Get off!” I yelled. “They’re heading straight into the ambush!”

  “What the heck—” And then Dottie screamed, high and thin in the night air. Her panicked wail receded as the horses galloped and the cart rattled down the dirt road.

  He got off me in a hurry. “Where are the Germans? Can you see?”

  “Not yet! We need to get airborne.” I fumbled the monocle back, tucked it on. Still functional, thankfully. But my leg braces were making up the sonic rifle’s stock now, and I didn’t have time to disassemble and replace them. Without them, I couldn’t use the rocket boots. Not if I valued my shinbones.

  “Okay Doc, hold on tight!”

  “How will that help—”

  He grabbed me, threw me into a fireman’s carry, and with no warning or visible means of propulsion we went up.

  He could fly?

  We rebounded from a nearby trunk, crashed through some light branches, bounced with a meaty THWACK off a heavy branch, and wobbled into the air.

  Maybe he couldn’t fly, just fall in directions that weren't up.

  “Are you even in control here?” I shrieked.

  “Give me a break, lady, I’m new at this!”

  This was about the most pure fear I’d ever experienced. Sure, I’d flown before, many times. But always under my own power, while armored in a
shell that could handle a fall. This time I wasn’t in control, and if he lost it in midair, death was a distinct possibility. And wouldn’t that be a shitty way to go out?

  I forced myself to breathe, in and out. I am Dire. I’ve stood toe-to-toe with Crusader. I’d been the doom of Great Clown Pagliacci. I’d brought Icon City to its knees, damn it! I can handle this. Heights are nothing. Nothing!

  Finally the fear eased. It helped that Unstoppable wasn’t very fast, maybe about the speed of a man on a bicycle, and not even one going flat out. I blinked, took stock of the situation while I clenched my eyebrow tight to hold the monocle in place. I had a nice nightvision view of his rump, and while it was a pretty good backside as they went, it wasn’t helping. We were in this dizzying aerial jaunt to find the enemy before they found us, so I started twisting my head as best I could, looking for discrepancies.

  I didn’t need to look far. Machine gun fire echoed through the night air, and muzzle flashes lit up to the... north? Somewhere over his left hip. “Spin left!” I shouted. “No, no, too far, back up— okay, can you bring us that way— too fast! Too fast! Whoa, lift up lift up lift up—” He twisted around, got under me, and we hit the ground at a pretty good clip. I heard bones go, snapping all across his frame before he lost hold of me and threw me into a nearby bush. I tried to roll with it, groaned as a thick branch clocked me across my already-bruised cheek, and bit my tongue before I rolled to a stop.

  Behind me, Unstoppable rose to his feet. I could almost hear his spine popping as it healed back into place. He shook himself like a dog, and started looking around for my landing site.

  A few hundred feet to the north, a horse screamed as it caught a spray of bullets and fell. I got a brief glimpse of my team taking cover behind the other wagon, and Henri cutting the other horse loose before darting back into cover himself. They were holding fire, unwilling to reveal their exact positions.

  And beyond them, the Nazis.

  They’d set up nearly a thousand feet away behind a good rise next to the road. I caught what looked like tarps flapping in the darkness, and at least a dozen men spilling down the grade of the mound, advancing on the wagons and trying to keep my team pinned down. The range was long, too long for them to be very accurate, so at least some good had come of my ill-thought-out attempt to spring the ambush early. The plan wasn’t entirely unsalvageable either, come to think of it. All I had to do was keep an eye on the group and make sure the traitor didn’t kill anyone until the Nazis were dealt with.

  As to dealing with the Nazis, well, I had the perfect resource for that. “Pssst!” I hissed, and Unstoppable jogged over, squatted down next to my position.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes! Can you go kill those soldiers over there?”

  “Sure. Wait—” he patted his side. “Got a gun? I think mine fell out of the holster somewhere back there.”

  “Yes, she does.” I reached for my holster, and grabbed air. Oh. Wait. I’d had it in my hand when he tackled me. Then I’d grabbed the monocle, and he’d grabbed me, and yeah, my pistol was back in that patch of woods a few hundred yards away. Somewhere. “No she doesn’t,” I amended. I had the sonic rifle, but explaining how to use the thing would take all night. Besides, I needed that.

  Unstoppable sighed. “The hard way then. At least until I get one of their guns. Back in ten, keep the oven on.” And he set off at a flat-out run, legs chewing up the distance as he charged.

  I watched blood spray as a stray round hit him. He kept on going. I heard shouts of alarm as they noticed him coming in. He kept on going. They started opening up on him, shifting from the pinning fire to focusing everything they had on him. He fell, rolled to his feet, his incredible regeneration healing his wounds faster than the bullets could hurt him, and kept on going. When they shot the legs out from under him, he crawled until he could regrow his knees and then he jogged until he could run again, and he just kept on going, leaping on the first Nazi he could reach, beating him to the ground and salvaging his weapons, all while under heavy fire.

  It was magnificent, in its own bloody way. There was literally nothing they could do to him that he couldn’t survive and heal instantly, and their worst barely slowed him down. When bullets didn’t work they switched to grenades, sometimes taking out their own troops by design. When the grenades didn’t work, one of them opened up with a flamethrower, but he just kept on fighting while he was burning. At one point I was pretty sure that he was fighting blind, due to his eyes temporarily bubbling out of his skull. But it seemed a minor setback, as eventually the fire went out and he was still going. That was about the point that they started retreating.

  That was also the point that I remembered I was supposed to be watching my teammates.

  I whipped back toward them, and found that they’d scattered. Dottie and Father Kovacs were backing away to the rear, Henri and Tadej were circling around their cover on the dark side of things, creeping up on the Nazis, and Bryson was charging straight at them, now that Unstoppable was tying up their main line. The man probably had his deflector going, so I wasn’t too worried about him. I turned back—

  Just in time to see Father Kovacs turn, and level his shotgun at Dottie.

  “Hey!” I yelled, and ran toward the pair of them. I switched to Croatian. “Hey, you Judas priest!” Of all the times to be without my Colt! The sonic rifle had too wide a spread, I couldn’t use it without catching Dottie, and that was unacceptable.

  I saw the priest’s glasses flash in the distant light, as he glanced between the two of us, then he turned toward me, bringing the shotgun up, and I clenched my teeth as the double-barreled gun roared—

  But my Tesla Deflector did its job, humming and grinding as a flicker of light leaped up around me. The priest gaped, brought the last barrel of the gun back towards me again, and Dottie, sweet Dottie, kind Dottie pulled out a tiny little pistol and shot him in the face.

  I slowed, blinked at her in shock. She stared back at me, eyes wide, breathing heavily before she burst into tears and fell to her knees.

  “Dottie? Hey, Dottie?” I killed the Tesla deflector, knelt down and put my hand on her shoulder. She flinched back, voice muffled behind her hands.

  “Don’t slap me! Please!”

  “Why in the world would she slap you?” I asked.

  Cautious eyes peered out, puffy even in the warped view of my nightvision, and her voice was all over the place as she responded. “I’m not... it’s... I don’t... I’m not good at this, and every time I panic someone slaps me to bring me out of it—”

  “What.”

  “It’s, it’s supposed to cure hysteria, and—”

  “Okay, she’s pretty sure that’s bullshit.” Dottie gasped in shock at the vulgar word, then giggled. I turned my back, rummaged through the dying man’s pockets, and pulled out a handful of shotgun shells. “Know how to use one of these?”

  “Yes. My, my father taught me to—”

  “Good.” I dumped the shotgun next to her, along with the shells, and kept rummaging. Father Kovacs had a duffel bag with him, and it was about the right size for a hidden radio, I thought. Parts is parts, and besides, maybe I could use it to mess with the Nazi communications. My own was ironically too good to impersonate their comms. But my questing hands found nothing in there but clothes, sundries, and other mundane items. He did have a bundle of papers that I handed off to Dottie for future review. “Strange.” I mused. “This is not what she was expecting.”

  “What’s strange?” She was standing now, and her voice barely wavered.

  “The traitor was communicating with the Nazis over a radio. Really thought there would be one in here, but there’s not.”

  “A radio? No, Tadej had the radio.”

  My eyes widened, and I rose, turned—

  Too late. I watched in horror as about four-hundred feet distant, Tadej took aim and fired at point-blank range into Henri’s back. The Frenchman crumpled, and Tadej took off running towards the treeline. />
  I had never considered the possibility that there might have been two traitors, and Henri had paid the price.

  I spared a glance at the battle ahead of me. Burning trees, and retreating Nazis. In the flickering light, and with my nightvision boost, I could just make out a farmhouse in the distance. Muzzle flashes from that direction seemed to indicate a greater force. Bryson was just visible at the edge of the treeline, hunting among the downed Nazi bodies. The blood dripping from his cane looked black in my nightvision.

  Yeah, they didn’t need me. Which meant I had a bit of time.

  I brought up the sonic rifle as Tadej ran, and sighted it in carefully. Flipping the toggle switches on one by one, bulbs sparked to life and flickered as the charge gathered.

  “Oh hey, cover your ears,” I advised Dottie.

  “What?”

  “Too late.”

  BOOM!

  I was sheltered from the worst of it, with my position behind the muzzle. To me it was an annoyingly loud noise, that was all. Dottie, to the side of it, stumbled backwards grimacing in pain. Her lips moved as she dropped the shotgun and clamped her hands to her ears. Too late, they’d be ringing for a little while. But since she was to the side, she was protected from the sheer destructive force of the cone of lethal noise.

  Tadej was not safe. Tadej was in front of the muzzle. Tadej flew forward like a giant had drop-kicked him, hit a tree with bonecracking force, and fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Tree branches caught in the cone snapped and blew backwards, and one small tree fell over entirely.

  A strange silence replaced the echoes of the sonic boom I’d just unleashed, and for a minute I worried that I’d deafened myself. But no, I could still hear the snap-popping of trees burning in the distant fire a few hundred feet away.