Deep State Volman thought about this for a moment. Then barked, “Ask her if there is someplace nearby, a city, a, uh, a refugee camp, or some ‘civilized’ place where we can get behind some walls and find safety until I can open formal negotiations. Tell her the Rangers are out of ammunition and no longer combat-effective. We have wounded and we need food and safety immediately. Tell her our situation is extremely dire.”
Then he grabbed my shoulder, and his hand was like an iron claw.
“You’d better be telling her this verbatim, Private, because I’ll find out.”
Excuse me. I’m a PFC. A private first class, buddy. See that rocker? They don’t just give those away to anybody.
“Got it,” I replied. “A-firmative.”
A-firmative is the unofficial, and still official, way to indicate how much you really don’t like someone of a higher rank right to their face. Either over comms or in person. That’s because you can’t get in trouble for saying it, but everyone knows exactly what it means by the way it’s said.
He shot me a look of that pure contempt he constantly distilled. If I had been a cockroach, he wouldn’t have hesitated to stomp me flat and brush me off with the side of his adventure-guy Timberlands.
I turned back to Autumn. Last of Autumn.
“He’s having one of his bad days. He claims the goat he is seeking grants magic wishes and that when he finds it, he will wish for all the cheese there ever was… and also, to fly like a bird so he can touch the moon. He was dropped on his head as a small child.”
I smiled, hoping Deep State Volman didn’t see the slight jerk of my head and bare widening of my eyes to indicate that everything coming out of his mouth was silly nonsense and needed to be treated as such by her.
Did facial expressions in non-humans such as elves approximate our own? I had no idea. But she seemed to go along with it for the moment.
“We…” I pointed at everyone else except Volman, and he didn’t catch that. “We’re wondering what… you’re doing here. We are very pleased to meet you.” I continued acting as though I were communicating what I’d been instructed to say by the Deep State guy. “As you can see, we have fought a great battle here. We have no idea why these…” I pointed at the maimed corpses of the orcs floating in the river and shot to pieces along the banks, “have attacked us.”
I nodded to Volman to indicate I’d finished a faithful and verbatim translation of his words. Which I hadn’t in the least.
Autumn, Last of Autumn, looked around and began to speak.
“My people are in hiding from… same foes who have… come against you. I do not know who you are. You are strange… and not from any of the lands… known to us. That is… plain to see. But… we are… foes of the Black Prince… any that are foemen to him may… possibly… becoming allies to us? I have to ascertain your… intentions.”
She didn’t say “ascertain.” Or “foemen.” Not those particular words anyway. Remember, she was speaking not-Korean. Pidgin Shadow Cant. And translation isn’t just a matter of swapping out words. You have to capture nuance, connotation. Even style. It’s as much art as it is science. Not to oversell it.
But this is the gist of what she said, as best I can represent it.
I turned back to Volman.
“She says we’re in trouble, sir. She and her people are enemies of the… orcs.”
Volman made a face.
“First of all… Private. ‘Orc’ isn’t an official term. I’ve designated it a racial slur and I’d prefer to refer to them as ‘insurgents’ until we properly identify their culture. Slang and slurs start us off on the wrong foot with a people who may one day be our ally despite your captain’s best efforts to make them our present enemies.”
“Her words.”
Volman looked directly at Autumn and started talking loudly like she was both deaf and stupid. I used this opportunity to wink at the sergeant major and the captain. Letting them know I wasn’t translating for Volman. Or at least that’s what I wanted them to understand via a single quick wink. I was pretty sure the captain had never been winked at by a PFC and that if he ever had been, that PFC was now buried in a shallow grave out in the woods.
Even now, as I write this, I feel ashamed of the wink. However, there is no hand and arm signal in the Ranger handbook that conveys “Don’t worry, I’m not actually translating this lunatic.”
Maybe in the updated version there will be.
“I need to meet with your ‘head person’ immediately,” said Volman as loudly and as stridently as possible. Like he was now ordering her around too. “Can you take me to her or him—I’m deeply sorry if I don’t understand your pronouns—so I can request assistance for my people.”
He was making hand signs. Two fingers “walking” back and forth to indicate movement. His fingers up around his head like a crown to indicate someone in charge, including himself. When he said “my people,” he swept one arm out to indicate both the corpses and soldiers under “his command.” He did this with all the warmth of a used car salesman at one of those shady lots just off base of every military installation. The places we’re forbidden to go and where everyone spends their re-enlistment bonus on a new (used) Camaro for four more years of going to exciting places and killing interesting people with your best friends.
I “translated” this again.
“What’s our situation?” I asked her, and didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m pretty sure my leaders would like to work with your people. But… I don’t know if we can survive another attack.”
“They will come… tonight again,” she said, looking seriously around at the dead orcs. Then: “I offer you… the fellowship of my people and a place around our… cookfires. Our hidden home is… day’s march… if we move through the night. Yes. Your… situation… here is most… dire. They will be back tonight with even more warriors. The tribes of the Nether Sorcerer, who is… ally to the Black Prince… are many and… unending. They will never stop. My people have greatly… suffered. In the deserts of the east they say they,” she pointed at the orcs once again, “are as numerous as the sands of the sea. They will lay you waste… in time… if you do not… escape this place. Now.”
I turned back to Volman.
“She says we must leave soon to reach her people and that they will give us friendship and protection. She says the or—” I caught myself, but not quickly enough. “The insurgents will be back again to hit us even harder. Tonight, most likely.”
“Good,” said Volman, slapping both hands together like he’d just closed a deal on someone’s soul. Or a new (used) Camaro. “Tell her I’ll be ready to leave within the hour. I just need to get my stuff from the top of the hill.”
Then he turned to the captain.
“I order you to wait here and hold this position until I can negotiate with these people and arrange for our further relations. Then I’ll return.”
Back to me.
“You’re with me, Private.”
Without waiting for an answer from the Ranger captain, he was off and stomping through the woods again, pushing past the Ranger security cordon who got the wave from the command sergeant major to just let the man go. Un-throat-punched.
I turned to the elf named Last of Autumn.
“He says he’s seen that magic goat just now and that he will go and capture it for you. He thanks you for helping him on his quest and considers you a princess. If you will excuse me, for a moment, I need to take him somewhere before he soils himself. I’ll be back in a few minutes. You’ll be safe with my friends here. I think we will very much want your assistance. And friendship, Autumn.”
She made a face I read easily. A blush. The color in her cheeks was amazing to see. It made her come alive, more alive than she had been before. She was embarrassed. Like I’d used the familiar instead of the proper version of her name. Autumn instead of Last
of Autumn. That was an easy linguist spot.
“I mean… Last of Autumn.”
She nodded formally and then bowed her head.
I was following Volman back off to the hill. Tanner made to go with me, but I waved him off, shrugging my shoulders like I had no idea what was up. But I knew what was up. I knew more than anybody what was about to be up. Except maybe the command sergeant major.
Tanner stayed and watched me go.
“It’s time, son,” muttered the command sergeant major as I passed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It wasn’t like I had the clearest set of instructions. And I could see how it could all go real wrong if I’d read the room incorrectly. I told myself this as I followed after Volman, who was moving fast now, tramping through the underbrush and stumbling over ruined corpses all while breathing heavily. Talking a mile a minute about what we were going to do next. What we were going to accomplish now that things were going his way finally. We were going to go off with a stranger on nothing more than the hope they were a friend, so Volman could “take control of the situation,” as he saw it. He had big plans about an embassy. He was already babbling on and on about it.
He was mad, of course.
He was delusional.
He’d snapped. That much was also clear.
And that made him dangerous to us. To the mission. To our survival. More dangerous than he’d been when the sergeant major had first told me to retire him. It was one thing to try and mingle among the Rangers and foment dissent. He had some points. Everyone’s re-enlistment was up. Technically, by about ten thousand years. Given enough time he would have found the troublemakers and made things difficult for everyone. Especially considering it looked like hanging together was the only way we were going to get through this alive.
Whatever this was.
As we walked back toward the hill, Volman was telling me I was no longer in the Army and that I was being deputized as an official State Department employee and that I was now to report to him and him only. I was a GS-4 now. He gave me a promotion and told me I owed him. Big-time. He sounded half mad. If not full mad.
He pushed past the brush and into the trees, never minding the ruined corpses of the orcs, trolls, giants, and other misshapen beasts I’d yet to encounter. It was like walking through a morgue that decided to turn into a funhouse run by cheap carnies with a very sick sense of humor.
It was a whole new kind of morning after.
He was about fifteen feet in front of me. I’d slung my rifle, quietly drawn the sergeant major’s pistol, and was screwing in the silencer when he suddenly turned around, wild-eyed, and flopped down on a ruined log that had mostly splintered. It had taken a direct hit from a mortar round sometime the night before. We’d come to a small clearing that had been shelled when things were looking desperate.
Things were still desperate.
There was a severed arm lying in the sand, but he didn’t seem to notice it. It wasn’t human. Huge, brawny, green. Spiked leather gauntlet that looked pristine apart from the blood and gore.
And I’m standing there with a silenced pistol, staring at Volman. My intentions were obvious.
Or at least I mean… they would be to me if I suddenly turned around, paranoid and stressed out, and saw a guy with a silenced sidearm following me. I would have realized I was about to get hit. Assassinated. Killed. Retired. Cleaned. Pretty obvious. But of course… that’s the kind of hit man I am. I make sure to play all my cards before pulling the trigger. Like standing there right in front of your target with a loaded silenced weapon and pretty clear intentions about what’s going to happen next. Like the pros don’t.
So there I am, red-handed.
And he chooses not to see the reality of his situation.
He just sat down on the log and had his iPhone out in an instant. Lost in its world of endless screens. He was typing into it furiously, both index fingers working as he stabbed angrily at the keys.
We were about a quarter mile away from everyone. From the team down near the river. From everyone on the hill. The flies were thick and swarming and the new heat in this day, a thing that hadn’t been there since we’d arrived, was hot and getting hotter. Volman wiped sweat from his brow while making, if his muttering was any indication, a checklist for diplomatic relations with Autumn’s people.
“Did she say what her name was?” he asked sharply, not waiting for the answer before he asked another question, still not looking up from his screen. “Did she say what her people were called? We need to start co-opting them to our agenda if we’re going to get embedded here. That’s a big priority!”
I shot him.
He’d seen me with the pistol, so when he looked up at me again, I expected that his mind would put two and two together. As in, Hey, that guy with the silenced pistol just shot me. I didn’t think he’d do that. But, well, he did.
But that wasn’t the look.
The look was pure surprise. This hadn’t been part of any plan his fevered mind had conceived. This wasn’t an option as far as he was concerned.
Well, it was.
I hadn’t shot him in the head. Didn’t want to take the chance of missing even at close range. My hand, the one holding the sergeant major’s sidearm, had been shaking the whole time. I didn’t trust me. And if I sound calm now in this warts-and-all account, a cool assassin, I wasn’t at the time. Trust me. My mouth was dry and I felt halfway between passing out and throwing up… just before I shot him.
If there was any coolness, chalk it up to fatigue. I was just empty enough to do this right now.
So I pointed the weapon at his chest, center mass, and fired as he planned to conquer the world at everyone else’s expense.
At first I thought I missed, because the round didn’t knock him over or back, like in the movies. Or like the pop-ups at the range. He just sat there. And then I could see blood spreading across his L.L.Bean adventure shirt and I watched as he looked up at me, mouth working like he wanted to scream, and didn’t. Couldn’t.
The iPhone dropped onto the sand.
And I knew this was the right thing. To do. I decided right there that I wasn’t going to do any of this I-feel-bad-about-the-bad-things-I’ve-done bull.
I filed this under necessary right now maybe not feel bad ever.
And I reminded myself how close things had gotten last night. And that I could be one of the dead. And that a bunch of Rangers had fought together and were alive this morning and playing body toss with their enemies and that had to count for something in the big scheme of things.
Volman was on his knees, mouth still opening and closing silently, when I fired twice more. My hand was steadier now. First shot was left-of-center upper chest. Where the heart and the major arteries are.
John had called that the Pump and Pipes.
It was always the best choice.
I think Volman was dead when I fired the next shot a few seconds later. He was on the ground. Face thankfully pushed into the sand. I put the last shot in the back of his skull and called it done.
Then I turned and went back to the river’s edge where the sergeant major and the captain were waiting. Where Autumn was.
But that wasn’t her name. I’d just started calling her that in my head. And that had caused her to react in a…
Last of Autumn.
That was what she’d said she was called by her people. Like they were… I don’t know… like they were Indians who’d once roamed the American plains. Noble and savage at the same time.
Stands with a Buffalo and Raging Bull. Like they were something special, and nomads, all at once. People we should have tried to better understand. And maybe they should have done the same with us. That would have gone a long way with both sides.
I didn’t look back at Volman. But I knew. He was the opposite of her. And what I’d done was necessar
y.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I told you. Warts and all.
Chapter Thirty
On my way back to the river’s edge, I took the gully back near Sergeant Kurtz’s old position, if only just to avoid the circuses of flies that were hot and close in the day’s rising heat up where most of the dead bodies were clustered. That’s when I came upon the forgotten and forlorn Jabba. Our prisoner. The one I’d interrogated for the sergeant major.
The little goblin was just sitting there in the gully, dejected. All by himself. He hadn’t managed to get free from the zip ties and chains he’d been left in, and none of his comrades had bothered to help during the assault last night when they’d owned most of the island. Or maybe they never even saw him here in the dark. Our prisoner.
He saw me coming along the gully and watched me warily, cowering against the massive piece of deadwood in the bare rock-covered dry streambed. I could see he’d tried every which way to get himself loose. But all to no avail.
I approached cautiously.
“How come your tribe never came to get you?”
I said this first in Arabic and tried it again in Turkic. I think he understood it both ways by the twitch of his floppy ears, one of which had been nicked in some long-ago battle. The look in his beady eyes was one of mistrust. They were big and brown, and the former malevolence was all gone now. They were almost melancholy in a way. Reflective. Resigned. As though awaiting some fate and merely supposing I was here to pronounce it. Like a dog three days too long at the pound.
The grim realization of all our fates setting in. That was it. There was something almost human about seeing that in the little monster’s face.
“No fit’tah fight-fight anymore. Slave now. Sugburahshazz say… say Jabba slave now to Sugburahshazz and Howling Rock Clan. Sug say… he come back after killah-all and mark me with hot dagger. Then Jabba no more war. Jabba serve Sugburahshazz. Jabba live until big pot boiling needs eats. Then…”
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 24