But hey… I was new in town. So I continued to listen. Keep my mouth shut.
If I’d said something like, But Sergeant Major, he didn’t use your rank, Kennedy’d have help digging latrines one minute later.
There was something else. Something I saw and heard in McCluskey’s manner that stuck out as odd. Out of place. Maybe the thing that counterattacked us when we hit the HVT out in the woods had messed with my head, but… for just a second… I was reminded of the thing that looked like Sergeant Thor.
The Doppelgänger.
I looked around to see if anyone noticed anything else odd. Later, I’d realize the captain had. He’d been subtle about it, repeatedly prompting McCluskey by using the man’s rank as if to remind him how things ran ten thousand years ago back when we’d all sworn to support and defend. But Chief Rapp, the command sergeant major, and even the pilot were like Easter Island tourist attractions watching the whole debrief go down. They just sat there listening, giving away nothing.
So I made like a rock and just listened too. Filing my bit away for later in case everyone was so out of ideas they actually came to me for anything.
“So no other detachments have come through since you and your team arrived, Chief McCluskey?” the captain asked.
“Negative. We have not made contact with anyone in the last twenty years, nor have we encountered any evidence that any other friendly task force element has come through the QST.” Then he added sir. For the first time. Like he’d read my mind and everything I’d been thinking in the seconds before. Or like giving an official report and using the word negative had awakened something ancient within him. Something he’d forgotten during twenty years of Robin Hood Outlaw. Some memory of what it was like to still be in. In his defense, I posited how often he’d been called upon to use actual military courtesy in the last twenty years.
Probably not often.
Maybe that was his defense, and it had to be considered. If just to be fair and keep an open mind about things. Perhaps he had gone native despite indicating he hadn’t. Maybe he didn’t even know he had. What do they always say? Crazy people don’t know they’re actually crazy.
It was to be expected. Going native, that is. Hell, he was the one who sat here looking all Game of Thrones. This was the new normal. We were the ones out of place. Out of time. Out of our element. He’d said it himself. You gotta go savage. That, or die.
“Ain’t nothing left, if that’s what you’re asking, sir,” said the new McCluskey, suddenly conscious of rank. “No human civilizations or kingdoms anywhere. Nowhere. Or at least none that we ever found, sir. Just a few villages and enclaves in very, very inaccessible places, and more often than not, there ain’t much human about ’em anyway anymore. Everything you knew… all of you,” he looked around at us as though challenging us, his blue eyes looking into and past us, “it’s flat-out gone now. Long gone, long, long time ago. And this is gonna sound crazy. Even I know it does…”
Like I said, his manner was so friendly and easy, intoxicating in a certain way, you wanted to believe him. Wanted to be his buddy. He was capable. He radiated capability in that way operators do. You wanted him to be on your side. Especially when your back was to the wall. And Ranger Alamo was starting to feel like some kind of wall we had our backs to. If not tonight, then some night.
“This world…” continued McCluskey softly. “It’s filled with nothin’ but big bad real-life monsters now. Nothin’ but evil. Humans are all gone now. You’ll find the occasional, but we have nothing in common with them. They’re used to what we would call the monsters and magic of this place; what’s foreign to them is us with our high tech and weapons and old-fashioned mores and culture. They don’t have rules of engagement here, sir. If you’re an enemy, they try to kill you with everything they got. All of you. Prisoners of war? Conventions? Cease-fires? Nah, they don’t do that here. Best you can hope for is a chance at being a slave until they need the calories one tough winter. And… spoiler alert, as we used to say… all the winters here are tough. Then it’s the pot.”
He paused. “Closest to us, in values and civilization… maybe… and they’re still weird… is the elves. If—and it’s a big if—you can find them. Which you never can when you need to. They’re all underground and hiding out in the woods and caves. There are also dwarves, we call ’em. They’re not like midgets, but more like the ones in the movies with Frodo and Sauron. The dwarves aren’t allies, but they don’t like orcs any more than you do right now. And the orc tribes comin’ at you are going to be only your fourth biggest problem here in the Ruin. That’s what they call the whole world. The Ruin.”
The SEAL seemed to relish the brief dramatic pause, all eyes locked on him. “So let me tell you about problem number three. That’s the Crow’s March. Vampires. Werewolves. Ghosts. I kid you not, sir. And yes, I know it sounds crazy. But it’s like…” He searched the darkness above his head. “Think of it this way. It’s as if the old Soviet Union went all Nazi Germany, but with boogeymen in control. Very, very, dark place. They’re ruled by a character who calls himself, you’ll like this… the Black Prince.”
You’re dressed in black, psycho, I thought, and then watched as McCluskey’s serial-killer blue eyes flicked over toward me for half a second. Like I’d said what I’d thought out loud, instead of thinking it all quiet.
“That’s problem number three for you. The Crow’s March. Problem number two is the Saur. They’re a race of—and believe me, even if I sound real casual about this, or… what’s the word… blasé … it’s only because I’ve lived it, here on the ground, for so long. But the Saur are a race of lizard men. They’ve ruled this whole place starting about a thousand years after we departed the scene and the plague wiped out human civ. Okay? Got it? The Saur keep to the south, like down around Old Eygpt. Let’s just say they’re asleep right now. They’re into some dark stuff and they got designs and prophecies about enslaving the whole Ruin forever and ushering in a whole Dark Millennium. Bad stuff.
“But your Problemo Number One-Oh… is a being. And I use that word specifically because I don’t think he’s from this world if half the stories we’ve heard are true. Think of this being as more of… well, a lot like that Sauron character. I think he’s like an alien from another dimension or something. In the tales and records of the various shamans I’ve encountered, he starts showing up about the same time as the ‘sky fell,’ as they say around here in their oral traditions. That’s when that meteor broke apart and slammed into Western Europe and North Africa. Anyway, this being—problem number one for everyone here, including me—is called the Nether Sorcerer. And these boys, the orcs trying to cut your throats out there in the dark tonight, the ones trying to wipe you out, they basically work for the Nether Sorcerer. Though I’d say most of them don’t exactly understand it that way.”
The captain began to write once again, and we all sat there listening to the scratch of his pencil against the sheet of paper he worked on. The form he was filling out. Preventing time as we know it from suddenly reversing course and flinging us all off the planet.
McCluskey leaned forward, his black leather armor creaking softly in the silence.
“And there’s one other… thing… and I should be honest about this with you, up front and all… but that plague that was changing all of us way back then, ten thousand years ago, that’s what it did. It changed the very fabric of… everything. It still does things to people. But I think… in a way it’s done its work, mostly, or… run out of juice. But you should know something about me if we’re gonna work together from here going forward. I ain’t evil or nothin’. I’m no monster like the things out there trying to kill you. I’m still just Mike McCluskey from Michigan. Joined the Navy and went to Special Warfare School at Coronado, BUDS class 299. Fought in Iran and Iraq. But… well… I’m what you’d call a vampire now.”
Chapter Nine
“What do you mean�
� a vampire?”
It was the pilot who asked the question everyone was thinking about asking. The rest of us were just Easter Island statues. Even me.
Hey, I’m learning to Ranger!
So I just sat there as the command team had throughout the entire insane-sounding debrief. Except it wasn’t really insane given current events. Or… was it what crazy sounded like in a world that had lost its marbles, and humanity, ten thousand years or so ago? Hard to say. And that’s not an understatement. But for everyone else sitting around me it was like they’d heard this sorta thing before. Or shades of it. In all the other dark places they’d been sent off to die in across their careers. They knew crazy because they’d seen it before. And they knew that if crazy was the set of rules you were supposed to play by… then it was best to embrace it sooner rather than later.
Chief McCluskey nodded to himself and launched into the story of how he became a vampireHalf of me felt like an idiot for just sitting there and listening to it, and the other half couldn’t resist hearing it. So much so that at certain points I had to wipe my sleeve across my mouth just to make sure it was closed.
And still… it felt like it was a performance played for the thousandth time one too many. The SEAL turned escaped Ren Faire lunatic knew all the beats of it a little too well. All the jokes too pat. And I couldn’t help myself from thinking, as I listened to him, that it was little more than a bad script read I was sitting through for a bad B movie I’d never admit to watching.
Long story short. He and his team had been crossing into “the Crow’s March.” The place he’d told us was old Germany. More specifically, Bavaria. They, his SEAL platoon, had gone into an alpine human village high in what was now called the Giant’s Teeth. You could say this much for the new world order: the location names were more colorful. Three of their team took injuries during exfil, or getting out of the village of the living undead. Yes. They did indeed suffer bite wounds. Within thirty days of walking away from the place they’d left in flames on a snowy dawn morning, the three with injuries began to show signs of some sort of virulent infection their on-hand meds couldn’t lick. They got weaker and weaker by the day. It became clear in pretty short order that they were dying of some kind of wasting disease.
The team medic diagnosed it as extreme anemia. Massive iron deficiency. And the infected SEALs couldn’t tolerate daylight. They broke out in severe burns, almost third-degree, even when exposed to the wan winter light the team was struggling through. Then came the hunger for what they thought, at first, were just animal proteins. Soon it became apparent that it was blood the dying SEALs wanted. The team figured it out, adapted, and overcame a bad situation.
“But there were some benefits too,” said McCluskey.
“Such as?” asked Chief Rapp from the shadows of the briefing area. Interested. Probably because he was doing a mental health evaluation. That was my guess.
“It’s really, and I mean really, hard to kill me,” McCluskey replied. “Don’t know if a stake to the heart’ll do it. But I’ve been hacked, slashed, and stabbed just about every which way you can cut somebody. I’ve been what the team medic called ‘dead’ a couple of times. I go into a kind of stasis, and if you keep me outta daylight then I come back after a while. Feel like roadkill though… but it’s better than being permanent dead, know what I mean? I can see in the middle of the night, even with no moon, clear as day like it’s straight-up noon. And I’m stronger than I ever was back at Coronado. I don’t know how much I can bench, but one time I picked up a warhorse and threw it over a stone wall because we were being chased by grave trolls down in Skeletos. Greece, I mean. Skeletos is Greece now. Man, haven’t said that word for… a long time. Greece. And I’m fast, too. Faster than I ever was… before. It’s been a long time since I’ve broken down a weapon and put it back together, but back on the teams, with an MK18, thirty-four seconds was my best. In pieces to rock and roll. I haven’t used a firearm in about twenty years, but given time… I bet I could beat my old record now easily. I’m totally sure of that. Here—hand me my sword. I’ll show you a trick if you’re all up for it.”
Chief Rapp looked unsure. But Captain Knife Hand nodded once for approval, his eyes wary and tired at the same time. The command sergeant major just sat in the back, motionless. Seeing, and not seeing, everything. I couldn’t tell if anyone had completely bought McCluskey’s story as of that moment. If these were their poker faces, then I had to wonder what they were doing in the Army. They could’ve cleaned up at tables in casinos around the world.
Then I remembered that the world we’d known was dead now. And that there were no more casinos or endless shrimp buffets. You wanted shrimp, you were going to have to get a rowboat and kill them yourself. Then figure out how to make butter. And there were probably sea orcs and lobster trolls all down in the ocean now. The possibilities of how one could die expanded geometrically each time I stopped to consider the mess we’d ended up in ten thousand years late for our mission to save the world. This… this was losing its luster fast. And there were a whole lot more troubling and unasked questions looming and hiding that would surface once immediate survival wasn’t a factor. What were we fighting for? Were we still under the terms of our enlistment, which should have expired, at the outside, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-six years ago?
Did coffee still exist?
Granted, that last question was personal more than big-picture stuff. But no less dire, in my opinion. I was currently sitting on thirty-six packets of instant. In the land of no coffee I was the king of the blind, or something. All I knew was, I had that much, and it wasn’t enough as far as a real coffee junkie was concerned. I needed all the coffee. Only then could I relax and try not to get killed by the sea orcs, or something equally bizarre.
Chief Rapp half stood and handed McCluskey’s sword, hilt first and scabbarded, to the self-professed vampire in our midst. The SEAL was just sitting back in his chair with his hands between his spread knees like the most unconcerned and relaxed Ren Faire tragedian dude in the world.
What happened next was fast. Lightning-fast. Faster than anything I’d ever seen happen up close and personal.
Chief Rapp, being a big man, and tired, had barely stood to hand the sword over and across the table to Chief Petty Officer McCluskey. The giant Special Forces medic had clearly had the intent of just sitting back down in his chair and watching whatever happened next. The trick McCluskey was promising to show us. You could tell from his posture that that was Chief Rapp’s next move. He was tired from two nights of combat and a lot of meatball surgery. That was to be expected.
But in the next second McCluskey had somehow shot out of his chair like a blur, drawn the sword from its scabbard so fast it didn’t make even the slightest sound, and thrust the blade forward again like a streak of lightning, landing its razor-keen edge right against the chief’s neck with incautious precision.
Or at least that’s what had to have happened by looking at the final result and using inductive reasoning to figure out how we’d arrived at a conclusion wherein with the slightest flick of his wrist, McCluskey could open a vein in Chief Rapp’s neck.
No one said a word. The silence was stunning. And McCluskey just stood there, blade resting against the chief warrant officer’s neck. A hungry smile on the SEAL’s face, his eyes casting about for approval because he knew the trick he’d just pulled was pretty slick and neat to boot. And it was clear he liked the adoration of being the best at something. This was his big move.
Then, in the stunned silence, Chief Rapp began to laugh. Because what else could he do? He really was a good-natured man even though there was a dark black sword with a pretty sharp edge held right to his thick neck. He rumbled with laughter and sat back down.
Oh yeah. It was a black sword. Black armor. Black horse. Black sword. McCluskey definitely had a thing for black. Add to all this that apparently he was a vampire, and we had our
selves a real live character.
This is the truest thing I can tell you about Rangers. They. Do. Not. Like. Characters.
It makes them uncomfortable. And things that make Rangers uncomfortable have a tendency to end up dead. A sergeant in RASP, a sergeant who made sure I got through, explained that to me. He saw my effusive and outgoing personality and the problems it might present in a Ranger batt, and he took me aside and told me what was what. I heeded and knew wisdom.
McCluskey, on the other hand…
It was like he wanted to play the villain even if he was on the wrong team to be cast as such. He was gonna do villain anyway.
“So,” said the SEAL easing back down into his chair. “I’m quite fast.” He casually re-sheathed the sword, leaving it on the table between everyone where he could pick it up quite easily again and kill us all real fast if he wanted to. It wasn’t like we could stop him. He was really that fast. Message received. Because that’s what it felt like. A message. Even more so later.
I’d felt a lot more confidence in Captain Knife Hand before this meeting. I’d seen him as a competent soldier and a no-holds-barred killer who would get us through this by any means possible. Whatever it took, he’d do it. I also had no doubt the command sergeant major had gone exciting places and killed interesting people in horrific ways more than anyone else in the detachment. But now… I wasn’t sure about what I knew. Not about them. Not totally. Not like they were false idols and my phony personal security religion based on them had been exposed for the fake that it was. More… I was unsure about the thing in the briefing with us. McCluskey. Like there was a shark swimming nearby in the dark waters you found yourself in. You really didn’t know where it was, but it was there all the same. Have fun.
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 9