Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller

by Jason Anspach

  Eventually one orc, covering behind a shield up, monkeyed into place with another to lock big iron shields and form a defensive line. The shields were heavy enough to deflect rounds. I would have rolled a grenade at them, and was on the verge of doing so, but the chief just waited for an opening, his focus riveted on the sight picture at the end of the barrel of his rifle as it danced and shifted left to right like he was playing a game with them, getting them to drop their guard, and then he fired. Total focus, never mind the gunfire, rocks, and arrows. Blowing off a head or putting a round into a peeking eye was the entire world for the giant Special Forces operator.

  The shield wall collapsed as the chief showed them how their plan wouldn’t work. But the orcs didn’t care. They just pushed more forward to stab and cut. Rangers were going hand-to-hand now. Slashing tomahawks against vicious little short swords. Sweeping enemy hand weapons aside and going full savage as they planted their axes in skulls and chests. The enemy kept coming. This was their big moment and they were going for it. As though they knew Chief Rapp and the rest of us couldn’t have too much more of our “boom magic” left. Maybe that’s what their own chiefs and shamans were telling them in the dark chants I could sometimes hear between the bouts of our gunfire and the punctuations of explosions as the last of the grenades were used.

  A troll hit the right flank, and I saw someone, a Ranger, lifted up and bitten in half. Then two other Rangers swinging tactical tomahawks leaped onto it and started wailing away like jackhammers, flailing their agile axes down into the thing where they’d grabbed on to it. A second later the troll went over onto its back, and all of them went rolling off down into the darkness at the bottom of the hill, crashing and crushing through the orc horde coming up.

  I saw the sergeant major blazing away near the wounded. Firing his M18 near point-blank into an ogre and three orcs who’d somehow gotten in between the snipers and the right flank. He gave no ground. First round he put through the ogre’s brain, gore and matter exploding out the back of the misshapen lump. Then he continued to put rounds into it as it swung a giant two-handed sword even as it fell and almost hit another Ranger.

  There was a bright flash, a flashbang of some sort, and I couldn’t see anything for a few desperate seconds.

  I shielded my eyes and scanned my sector. A group of orcs were trying to come up the way the frog shaman men had. I checked the sergeant major, but he was gone and the three orcs who’d supported the dead ogre with the big sword who’d come at the wounded were dead now.

  Chief Rapp was next to me and tossing grenades down at the orcs. One two and three. The orcs down at the bottom of the hill near the ruined corpses of the frogmen just stood there as the explosives went off. They were torn to shreds.

  “Stay in this, Talker,” Chief Rapp said calmly. “Almost through it. I can tell.” Then he was back and shooting down more orcs scrambling over the edge of the hill.

  Knives and arrows showered the Rangers and the chief, and some stuck. Whether in the armor or the flesh was unclear. The enemy moved fast, like a cross between a spider and a monkey. And none of that mattered to the SF operator at the front of the line. He continued to shoot until his magazine ran dry, and then he had another one out. His movements seemed so slow, so slow and so calm like he wasn’t bothered in the least. Almost too slow, like they’d get him before he could be ready to fire again. But that was all just an optical illusion. His slowness made him smooth. And the smooth made him a kind of incredible fast.

  Unlike me, who was still having to think every time I needed a new magazine. By the way…

  Last one.

  I knew what to say even though it didn’t matter. It just felt like admitting defeat at that moment.

  But I said it anyway.

  “Mag out!”

  I swapped the empty for the last loaded magazine I had and targeted more orcs with my MK18 rifle. They were coming out of the trench and trying to move behind us. I kept shooting them as fast as they could boil.

  Then something happened. And the something that happened was this… though I didn’t know it at the time. I can only write about it now having digested it. Dissected it. Thought about it in the quiet since. Lived through it to tell no one in this account no one will ever read.

  I was mad as hell because I was down to my last loaded magazine. And proud of that fact at the same time.

  Mag out!

  Black on ammo. I’d used up every round issued to me to kill the enemy. I was down to the last of what I had been entrusted with. And there was something in that… some pride that meant something I couldn’t quite explain, knowing I was down to my last. Knowing I was making my last stand right here with everyone else. That no one had cut and run. That I had not. And the anger was really that I wouldn’t have any more rounds to kill any more enemies with. Which is a good kind of anger. I made every round in that mag count. I made them pay.

  Then I found a small sword. It was a dirty, dented, banged-up thing. Notched and scratched. The hilt oily and smelly. It had to have come from the discount Rent-A-Center clearance aisle of used swords. Remaindered at half price two-for-a-penny just-steal-these we-don’t-care swords that one could find on that hill at somewhere after three o’clock in the morning. Long night. Somewhere between never and dawn.

  It was mine.

  Now that the last of my ammunition was used up, I would use this, and I would go on killing them for the obvious little that remained of me. I would teach them, as I had with all my rounds, the error of ever meeting me out in the dark.

  Be meaner than it, Talker.

  Roger, Sergeant Major.

  I’d never felt anything like that before. I was a long way from the known… and fine with that.

  I imagine that’s what warriors, real warriors, Rangers, carry with them every day. That’s what makes them Rangers. I felt it for a moment as we were being surrounded, shot down by clusters of arrows, and overrun on that hilltop.

  The arrow fire had not stopped. Several Rangers had black arrows sticking out over their carriers, thighs, rucks, themselves.

  I had killed this far. I could kill a little more.

  I was heaving with rage when the dark rider came up the hill, his horse rearing and fear-struck as it rode down the orcs in the trench just to get at Chief Rapp. The grave-shroud cloak and rags that had covered it were thrown aside. Black armor, well-made and dusty, lay underneath. It was a skeleton. Skeletal. It wasn’t human. It had a death’s head, a skull for a head. It came out of the trench, the horse crying madly, hood thrown back and swinging a great silver sword at us. And there were more, more of the dark riders riding straight up the hill and vaulting the lip as the Rangers mowed down the last of the orcs, the last push with the ammo they still possessed.

  The riders screamed, and the scream was an ethereal howl and a hiss all at once. One rider swept his sword at a Ranger and practically cut him in half.

  Slick as a snake, Sergeant Thor turned with Mjölnir and rapid-fired the .50 caliber Barrett anti-materiel right into the rider bearing down on another Ranger engaging a swarm of orcs with the last of his ammo. Every shot from Mjölnir hit, leaving giant smoking holes and tearing off armor fragments and finally knocking the skeleton in armor off the horse. The horse was hit and died screaming.

  Thor advanced, drawing a bead on the skeletal warrior who was not dead, or at least was no deader than it had been to begin with. The thing swept aside its tattered cloak and flung its tremendous silver blade out in a wide arc, cutting wide to keep any harassment away as it gained its black boots and got ready to fight.

  Thor fired one shot at the skeleton’s skull, and it exploded in a dusty puff. The thing was down.

  I had my cheap sword in my hand. Behind me, Kurtz had a tomahawk and his M18 out. Brumm was behind him, and they were rushing the trench, shooting the orcs and slashing at them.

  The enemy turned, and finally
, finally began to flee.

  It was over.

  We’d driven them off the hill.

  To the east the sky was getting light, and I could hear great beasts trampling off through the night, smashing trees and tearing them down as they fled for the river and the dark shadows of the wilderness beyond. Seeking caves and dark places they thought we would not go down into.

  We’d won.

  For now.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We sat in the quiet of early morning as the last of the night shadows faded in the rising of the sun. Dawn was breaking, and there was mist down there on the river flowing around the little island. Ranger Alamo. The light was golden, turning the trees out across the river lighter shades of pastoral greens, evoking spring instead of the dark ominous foreboding late-winter tangles they’d been in our desperate days before.

  The topic of what season it actually was, and if seasons meant anything anymore here ten thousand years in the future, had been hotly debated by everyone during brief breaks in the endless tasks to prepare for each night’s onslaught. We’d left Fifty-One in late August. The weather had been sweltering everywhere across the globe, and a lot of the reports of inexplicable random acts of violence and mass hysteria had been chalked up to a crazy heat wave sweeping the world in those end-of-days times. Lighting everything on fire both literally and figuratively. Like the world had a fever. Like it was fighting off something bad. And losing.

  It was a lot to take in. And you really had no idea what to believe. There were even reported rumors of sudden outbreaks of mass blindness. Things were crazy, and the world seemed intent on embracing the madness.

  Anyway, back before we left, it had been a late, hot, sweltering end-of-summer simmer that made you wish for the cool of fall. Maybe even the first blush of winter. Since we’d arrived, the place seemed to be in late winter. Ten thousand years or so in the future, everyone was still complaining about the weather, about the relentless chill in the air. There was no place to get warm. Even the grounded C-17 was constantly cold. It didn’t snow and there was never any frost in the morning, but it was cold with a chill that never departed, and when an early-morning breeze or something in the late afternoon came up, it took the warm right out of you and froze you down to the bone. Like a forgotten porterhouse steak left in the freezer too long.

  But now, here atop Sniper Hill, sitting in the first light of a new morning and surrounded by piles of dead monsters that hadn’t smelled too good when they’d been alive, it felt like some sea change had just taken place. Like the seasons, or even the micro-seasons, had just flipped the next page on the calendar in the night while we fought to the death. Careless of our struggles. It was shaping up to be one of those beautiful days. You could tell from the very start of it.

  Things were different now.

  The situation had changed for us.

  Or maybe it hadn’t. That was still to be determined. But it felt like it. If only because we could count ourselves among the living few, and not the many dead littering the top of the hill, its sides, and the island and river below. Everywhere you looked.

  NCOs were going around getting the ACE reports, and none of them were going to be “blue sky” coded. There were casualties, ammo was down to practically nothing, and lots of equipment was either missing or damaged. So about as far from a blue sky as it gets. Info was being disseminated. Twelve more KIAs. That’s how many we’d lost last night after Phase Line Charlie collapsed.

  I tried to remember how many of those I saw first hand. The Ranger bitten in half. The guys who went rolling down with the troll—they had to be gone, right?

  The attempt to recall quickly felt heavy. A burden. I let it go by reciting Macbeth’s Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy in one language after another. Out, out brief candle.

  Everyone was flat smoked. Even the relentlessly preparing Rangers just sat there for a few minutes as the day turned from pre-dawn to dawn. Still holding their weapons and staring at the dead like they could murder them all over again. Some of the more callow souls dug into their MREs. But no weapon maintenance, clearing of bodies, or improving of positions was conducted for those first few minutes of dawn.

  You just looked around to see who was still alive. Glad you saw the faces you did. Sad when you didn’t.

  The Rangers had fought for their lives, and now they were done, if only for a moment. Even the NCOs sensed this, moving about their endless business with less general chastisement than usual. Quietly busy and even encouraging at points. The Rangers had earned a few minutes’ peace, and the NCOs made sure they had it. They just needed to ignore the fact that the brief respite took place on the top of a corpse-covered hill.

  This was nothing new for some of them. You could see the ones that didn’t seem to mind it. If anything, it made them happier. And hungry for the tasteless MREs they’d been issued before the battle. Some finished theirs and asked their buddies whether they were going to finish their own. As if to say hunger didn’t care. Hunger was hunger.

  And you never knew what was coming next.

  Soon word got around that Sergeant Jasper had been the Ranger the troll had bitten in half in the middle of the last fight. Later we’d find out Kang and Soprano were still alive. They were the two who’d jumped the troll with tactical tomahawks and then gone rolling off down the hill with the huge beast. So I’d been wrong about seeing those men die.

  Soprano had been knocked out and lay unnoticed in a pile of dead orcs. Kang had E-and-E’d, escape and evasion, downslope and gone on a killing spree behind enemy lines, cutting throats in the dark where he could find them. When they found him, he was covered in blood and eating an MRE he’d found on another dead Ranger. He didn’t talk for a few hours, but came around by nightfall. Not that he was wordy in the first place. None of them are. The Rangers, that is.

  Me, even I was a little quiet. My throat was dry, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d drunk any water. I needed coffee. I needed coffee badly.

  I mixed cold water and instant coffee in my canteen and sat there drinking what I told myself was a cold-brew. It tasted like chlorine. I told myself that was the roaster’s choice. Mind over matter.

  You don’t mind. It don’t matter.

  Everyone agreed Sergeant Kang had straight-up Rangered. Hardcore. The sergeant major got Kang sorted and hydrated and then muttered down to the buck sergeant, “Don’t try so hard, Sergeant Kang. You’ll make us all look bad.” And then he was off to another task.

  I saw Kang nod to himself as the command sergeant major walked away. Then he smiled a little as he began to eat another MRE, inspecting the various packets within. Seeing and not really seeing. You could tell that. But even then, he was coming back around. All it took was the approval of a senior NCO he wanted to be like more than anything in the world, and he would come back for his brother Rangers and try to forget what he’d seen down there alone in the dark.

  I understood leadership a little better then. I watched the whole interaction while I was helping out with the wounded.

  The birds came out just before sunrise, but they were cautious about sending forth their songs for a few minutes. Then the first, tentative trill came, and not long after life was in full force out among the trees.

  We sat there, waiting for another attack, and when it didn’t come, they got us up and moving, and that’s when the informal body-tossing contest began. Work would take our minds off the horrors we’d just lived through. Or at least, that’s what I suspected.

  The Rangers were tossing dead orcs off the hill, letting them roll downslope toward the river. Points were awarded based on how close the tossed body made it to the river’s edge.

  In a matter of minutes there were rules for the game of Toss the Dead Orc, and soon there were two-man teams and—of course—betting. What else were you supposed to do?

  I had about two hours with th
e wounded, helping Chief Rapp and the Baroness and a few of the other Rangers who’d been specially trained to serve as secondary medics. Like I said, this all happened while the hill was being cleared. No one had any idea what we were gonna do next. Even the NCOs expected to get the “hold until relieved” order. It was clear that despite low ammo to no ammo, they were preparing to hold the hill again for another night. Regardless of current events.

  Captain Knife Hand led a patrol down to recover the dead, find the missing and wounded, and recon the C-17.

  Spoiler. The Forge was gone.

  I didn’t need the still-unconscious PFC Kennedy to tell me that that strange purple light show halfway through the battle before the final assault had had something to do with that. Teleportation magic or something else that once was considered ridiculous. Like they, the big whoever behind this attack, used the “magic” this world made real to basically hijack our Forge and get it out of here. Chief McCluskey? King Triton? I remembered that sickening feeling of the near becoming close, and the close telescoping far away as it all went down. The sound of an anchor in the universe dropping and then being reeled back into some unknown space we were never meant to see. Or know of.

  Whatever that had been, however my brain had interpreted those signals, that had to have had something to do with the hijack of the Forge during the battle.

  Later, the snipers spotted her first.

  Those of us helping the wounded and clearing corpses noticed a commotion. The snipers—not Thor, he was cleaning weapons—spotted a target down there on the river. A rider on a dappled gray horse. Standing at the water’s edge on the far side of the river.