And to our rear was the impossible sight that suddenly demanded everyone’s attention. The giant.
By morning’s light the massive Cloodmoor had surmounted the ridge. Cloodmoor the Terrible, she’d called him. Autumn. Last of Autumn. The elf girl who’d gotten us out of a jam and managed to get us this far. Everyone, mouths open, watched for a full thirty seconds as the impossible Cloodmoor scanned the morning landscape and spotted us far below. Then with a howl he picked up a huge boulder and just flung it at us. The thing must’ve weighed tons and all we could do was watch as the rock-turned-meteor headed straight at us, arcing through the new morning mist and sky.
So. Cloodmoor had no problem with hurling multi-ton rocks.
Luckily the giant’s game was weak. He shot an airball. The boulder went over the river and off into the grassy prairie beyond. To our north. We turned to watch it fly overhead and off into the waving grass, amazed it hadn’t crushed us.
It was in that direction that we were given our first glimpse of the Philosopher’s Palace. Where the main river passed near the beginning of what had to be Charwood Forest as described by Last of Autumn. Beyond the river over there rose the fantastic white marble ruins of an ancient fortress whose walls had long ago been smashed down and wrecked. Huge blocks of white stone lay in the river and the long grass and in the trees. More of that same cathedral architecture I’d witnessed on my adventure with Autumn inside the temple was in evidence where the main body of the ruins waited. High broken towers, fractured fantastic columns, and the skeletons of grand cathedrals or perhaps even observatories where shattered crystalline shards of glass still twinkled high up in the first morning light.
“Hurry…” said Last of Autumn next to me and in my ear. “Tell your king… you must make it there. Soon. You will be… safe. Your scouts… they know now. You will be safe… once on the other side of the river Ashwyne.”
Cloodmoor was moving fast along the ridge, pulling up and tossing badly hurled stones as he came at us. Sending rockets through the air between us. The distance to the far ruins was well over a mile. Maybe two. We’d never—
A rock the size of a car came down in the stream near the beach and sent up a plume of spray like a building imploding. One of the last Ranger rafts coming in barely escaped getting hit.
NCOs already had the scouts’ orders and knew the destination of our next phase line. The ruins. We’d run for it. If we weren’t safe there, we could at least use the river crossing to make our last stand. There would be no fighting along the way. No counterattacks. Just defending ourselves in order to keep moving as fast as we could to reach the next river.
It was a race now. An all-out race for our lives.
“C’mon,” said Sergeant Kurtz bitterly as he pulled his section away from the water’s edge. Running wasn’t his thing and it showed. He was looking right at me and he didn’t stop after he’d ordered me to move. He knew I’d follow. There was no other way to get out of this. But you could tell he didn’t like it one bit. Not at all. You could tell Sergeant Kurtz would rather have stayed and fought Cloodmoor the Whatever with the last of any ammo anyone would give him. Kurtz was a fight to the death no matter what kind of guy.
As though he knew the world, whatever world he found himself in, hated him. And he hated it right back in its face without blinking. But orders were orders and it was time to run.
I watched the tired and soaking-wet Rangers hunch under their burdens of weapons and supplies and overloaded rucks—Jabba too, looking like he could just die from exhaustion—as they started off across the tall soft grass beyond our beach. Other Ranger teams were already moving out as best they could. The captain and the rear security team were waiting until everyone that was coming out of the river had done so.
“Ain’t nothin’ but the Mog Mile, Talker.” It was Brumm. Still humping the 249. I was holding up McGuire who looked like he could barely stand, much less run a mile.
The Mogadishu Mile.
The legendary story of a group of Rangers who ran through hell, small-arms fire and RPGs and overwhelming hostiles, to escape an operation gone extremely bad. They do it every year back at Fort Benning. To commemorate the heroism displayed that day. The Rangering done. Except without the gunfire and death.
The Mog Mile. After this it would be the Cloodmoor Mile. But that wasn’t a sure thing at this point.
“He make it?” asked Specialist Brumm of McGuire. Then he bent down in the dying sergeant’s face. “You make it, Sar’nt? Almost there.”
All McGuire could do was look up, gasp, and then… nod that he could make it.
“We’ll make it, Sar’nt,” said Brumm. “Take his other arm, Talker. I’ll take this side. We’ll help him along.”
We were off, doing as best we could to make it while boulders rained down from the sky like incoming artillery strikes and orc pursuers racing out of the ether green of tall grass, the Rangers shooting the vicious killers down before they could pick off our wounded.
Chapter Forty-Three
The captain was leading a withdrawal across the prairie, a withdrawal that was turning into a running firefight through tall grass and across smaller muddy tributaries that cut through the wetlands in that area. Depressions in the landscape and other obstacles allowed the Rangers to stay low and keep moving as the orc horde tried to pin us down and cut teams of Rangers off.
There is no lying about this part. The going got extremely tough. Moving with the beat-up Sergeant McGuire, Specialist Brumm and I were the slowest. Teams that could outright carry the unconscious half-dead were faster than us, but due to the nature of Sergeant McGuire’s crushed chest, we had to be very careful with him. It was best to just let him move under his own power with our assistance as I checked to make sure he wasn’t strangling on his own blood.
We passed clusters of Rangers burning ammo on the orcs swarming to get close. Arrows rained down into the mud and tall grass as outgoing rounds zipped off into the brush in adamant reply. Neither side could mind the incoming boulder artillery delivered via the giant Cloodmoor now coming down the face of the far ridge we’d surmounted last night. Howling in rage at us and no doubt promising to stomp us flat. Uroo Uroo horns blared out the coming kill.
We passed Captain Knife Hand’s team and were down to our last hundred yards to reach the river Ashwyne when a boulder round came in danger close, hit nearby, and literally threw us into stagnant water as the earth buckled and shifted in the aftershock.
Someone in another team got crushed. The boulder the giant had thrown rolled off and away and dirt and mud came flying down all over us.
“C’mon,” gasped Sergeant McGuire as we tried to get him onto his feet. “We… can… do…”
He hacked once, violently, and groaned as he made it to his boots. “… it.”
Then I got eyes on the new threat Last of Autumn had warned was coming. The biggest wolf I’d ever seen in my life, and two of his friends, came bounding in from another direction, across the boulder-crushed grass and churned mud. Coming from a direction not guarded by the captain’s fire team we’d just passed.
“Head’s up, Talker!” shouted Specialist Brumm as he shifted his 249 up and away from his body with one arm to engage the wolves with a spray of fire while still holding on to McGuire with the other. The slavering wolves with burning red eyes came in hard and fast, and gunfire in adult-sized doses ruined one, but the other two leapt onto us, snarling and biting. It was like getting hit by a flying chainsaw. I had no idea what happened in the second after that as I tried to hold on to the wounded man and protect myself at the same time. And even that was too much to keep track of.
The one that hit me must have been moving at something approximating runaway freight train speed. It knocked me and the wounded sergeant back into the grass and mud, pinning me and snarling and yeah, there was literally feral wolf drool dripping down in long ropy strings across my face. T
he thing snapped and went for my throat immediately, and I was reduced to trying to squirm away from it, pushing with both arms as it latched on to my plate carrier with its jaws and dragged me powerfully from side to side. My body felt like it was in the grip of a powerful fang tornado. Like the wolf knew it had to peel away the protective outer layers of my armor to get to what it wanted to get to real bad and was intent on having.
My blood. My throat.
I smashed it in the snout with my FAST helmet and my eyes closed at the same time.
And then I had… a completely rational thought.
My hands were free if I let go of this snapping terror.
My rifle was slung across my torso on which the snarling, snapping wolf was currently pinning me with all its weight. So there was no way I was getting it up and into play.
I had about ten seconds before it released my carrier and just went for my now very exposed throat.
But my hands were free. If I wanted them to be.
I grabbed the sergeant major’s sidearm, glad I’d kept a round in the chamber, shucked it from its holster, and thrust it forward into the wolf’s black hair along its taut underbelly. I squeezed the magazine dry over the next few seconds, sending hot rounds tearing through the creature’s abdomen and intestines. Bullets came out around its spine, messy bloody sprays of bone and matter erupting in the morning mist.
It howled mournfully like something that had been horribly and badly wounded, which it had, and yet it refused to stop pinning me as I fired dry, the slide locking to the rear. I could feel its warm blood pumping out all over my gear as it looked up into the sky, snarled once more at the rising sun, almost angrily like it was a promise or a curse, and then died panting out its last.
I pushed the heavy carcass off me and scrambled for Sergeant McGuire, checking to see that Brumm had ruined the other wolf with his 249, which he had, though not before the big wolf had done some vicious work with its claws across Brumm’s face and eyes. The Ranger was so bloody I couldn’t tell if he’d lost an eye or had merely had the flesh torn from his face.
He grabbed the 249 which had somehow been dropped in the struggle, sling and all, and had it back around his torso a second later.
“C’mon!” he shouted in Kurtz’s NCO bark regardless of the horror show that was his face now. “Time to move, Talker!”
McGuire had either died or passed out from both of us getting rocked by the incoming wolf. He was no longer capable of self-movement. I bent down to check his pulse, my ears buzzing and the heat of the morning making me swoon for a second. The heartbeat was there, but it was distant.
Another boulder round rocketed across the hazy morning sky above and slammed into the river we needed to cross.
“We gotta move now, Talker!” shouted Brumm. “Captain’s pulling back to the river.”
Before I joined, I’d gotten in shape. I knew the Army, and the Rangers, everything I was asking for, was going to be physically challenging. Especially to someone who had spent most of his life in academia. But people kept telling me Nah, you’ll just be a linguist. Nothing to worry about. You’ll sit in a little box listening in on transmissions and translating in an office somewhere. Nothing physical required. And then there was the dream of picking locks for John and the Company. Remember all that. But I knew what I wanted, and just like languages, I’d found it was best to be prepared for the worst. Like when you spoke to a native and they came at you rapid-fire with all kinds of slang and colloquialisms that weren’t covered in the lesson books about Doña Hernandez going to la biblioteca on her bicicleta.
So I’d trained. That last year as I finished up my doctorate, I got into triathlons. Amateur ones, of course. But I did ’em and I felt like dying and I did ’em anyway. The good news was once I showed up for enlistment I had no problems in Basic, Airborne, or RASP. That’s not to say it wasn’t hard. The drill sergeants and instructors, when they really wanted to… they could smoke you. They could find your wall. Indeed, they really could. I cannot emphasize that point enough. It was like they could smell your weakness and the one place you didn’t want to go. And that’s where they went. You could only White Line Drill for so long. Or sit against a wall in an imaginary chair for hours on end as your thighs and quads turned to living fire. Or run past the battalion headquarters around the airfield once more for the second time in a row.
In other words… they could find your wall, and throw you straight into it. All you did was bounce off and pray the torture would end sooner rather than later.
I grabbed the lifeless Sergeant McGuire just like I’d been taught in the first aid lifesaving course back in Basic Training. I hauled him up, bent low, and had him over my shoulder. Then air squat up and hope you don’t slip a disc. Oh please, I thought as I grunted and strained to get my feet under me with the full bulk of Sergeant McGuire resting atop my shoulder, please don’t let me slip a disc now. There’s probably not been a chiropractor around for ten thousand years.
Believe me, I was as surprised as Brumm was when I had the Ranger Sergeant up and over my shoulder. Guy was six-two and probably two-twenty of solid muscle. Add his gear and I didn’t even want to think about the weight.
But truth be told… I felt like a stud at having got this far. So maybe I could do this.
“Let’s move,” grunted Specialist Brumm, and he took off through the tall grass leaving the bloodstains and dead wolves behind.
I took one step and knew instantly I was never gonna make it twenty feet much less another hundred yards.
Then I took another step and maybe I wasn’t not gonna make it. Whatever that means.
I envisioned one football field. That was as far as I needed to go. That’s all. Just do that.
Three steps and I was just falling forward to keep moving, balancing the massive Ranger on my shoulder as I stomped through the mud and tall grass following after the specialist. Ahead, Brumm was firing into the brush at our left at targets I couldn’t see and didn’t have the reserve energy to look at. Screaming at me to move as he covered us. Hot brass caught my arms as I passed him working the 249. Cutting down grass and dark misshapen figures that had tried to murder us with spears from which claws and oily crow feathers dangled.
A huge rock whistled in and hit the tall grass off to our right. The earth shook. Uroo Uroo horns rang out so close I swore there had to be tribes of vicious killer orcs everywhere in the grass all around us. We had to be surrounded. But I just kept moving forward. Putting one leg in front of the other in order to keep moving for that end zone beyond the river.
My legs were burning and I felt like I didn’t have much left in me. In fact, honestly, I was sure I didn’t. There was a wall coming and I wasn’t getting over this one. No way, no how. Three nights of fighting. A night and a day on the run. The thing in the fissure. No real coffee. Maybe one MRE. I was done when we reached the river, I promised myself. Just done when and if we got there. Just staggering along with most likely a dead man on my back was all that was left of me. Then I remembered Kang carrying Mercer through the gully during an entire firefight just to reach the line of safety. Ruck and rifle to boot. Fighting and leading all the way.
I felt guilty that I’d declared how far I was willing to go, and go no further. That wasn’t Kang. And it wasn’t Ranger. But I was outta gas.
“Better man…” I gasped to the prosecuting attorney inside my head. And didn’t have the strength to finish saying that Sergeant Kang was a better man than I’d ever thought I might be back when I was doing all those trainings and triathlons, trying to beat all my own best times like it meant something. Everything I’d done, all of it, to be ready for this day when I wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t proud of admitting I wasn’t enough and was just realizing that now. I’d had it. I was just done when we reached the river.
Rangers were streaming across it as we emerged from the tules along the bank. Some t
urning to fire at orcs, huge ones, that came racing into the water, savage battle axes upraised and ready to crash down on anyone’s skull. Outgoing rounds ripped into these beasts and they died thrashing and face-down in the water as another boulder artillery round streaked in and sent up a giant water plume.
“C’mon, Talk!” shouted Brumm at me, still burning the last of his ammo in short bursts as we cleared the muddy bank. He was right next to me and I knew he wasn’t giving up. He’d go as long as he could, as long as needed, or he’d die killing something to get there.
If I thought the grass and wet mud of the wetlands was tough to slog through, then I had another thing coming from the river we needed to cross with the dead weight of Sergeant McGuire on my back. It was like wading through glue. I barely got my feet under me and almost lost McGuire as I went under the dark water. But Brumm had me, steadied me, and dumped the last of his ammo on a cluster of orcs with scimitars and oily rags over their fangs. Brumm pulled me forward across the muddy water and I just tried to keep my legs under me and my boots out of the sucking mud and Sergeant McGuire on my back. Keep carrying the sergeant, I told myself. Just do that and then you can quit.
Then I just decided I wasn’t going to give up. No big revelation. No idea that I could even keep going much further. But I just wasn’t gonna. Not today.
Maybe tomorrow I’d quit.
But not today.
Today I was just gonna do my job until everything went black.
The far bank was just ahead and it felt like we’d never make it. But I knew I would and there would probably be some new thing after that to deal with. I looked up, sweat or blood streaming down into my eyes and stinging them. There was an old man, tall and bent, or kind of crooked-looking at the same time, robes and a tall gnarled staff, striding down toward the bank from the ruins of the Philosopher’s Palace. Last of Autumn was dismounted and firing arrows back across the river as she moved ahead of this tall, striking figure. If I had to guess someone was a wizard straight out a cheesy movie, or something like in the games PFC Kennedy plays, then I would have said this guy was it. He had Central Casting Wizard down pat.
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 35