“So you wanna play with the big boys now!” he screamed at me.
He turned to smoke and rushed for my weapon. Still smoke. Still McCluskey.
I felt his cold hands around my throat and I was bent over the balcony. I’d jerked the sidearm back to keep it away from him and he’d gone for my throat instead. Which meant…
He could see me.
Maybe some side effect of the grenade blast had disabled the ring. Temporarily? Or permanently.
“How do ya like me now, soldier boy?” said the ghoul luridly leering in my face. Fangs out and wide hungry smile to boot. He was choking the life out of me with claws that were as cold as ice.
I jammed the M18 into his midsection and squeezed. Three shots and he turned to smoke and streaked away from me. I sucked in a gasping breath of air as a trap door opened in the ceiling. He howled like a wounded animal as bright daylight shot down into the darkness.
The thing I saw moving up the ladder, screaming and smoking in pain, was like a cross between a demon and McCluskey. Leering, obscene. And utterly tormented by the sun.
I gasped for more air that wouldn’t easily come and launched myself at the ladder. I wasn’t going to let him get away. I was going to finish this now.
That was when I heard the titanic cry of something from the age of dinosaurs shriek and roar beyond the thick walls of Barad Nulla. Something so unnatural and bone-chilling, my legs literally stopped and said climbing up into the light to follow McCluskey wasn’t a great idea.
A huge shadow blocked out the sunlight on the ladder, and McCluskey disappeared up into the darkness there as some great storm passed close to the tower and its very walls shuddered all around me.
But he had to die. Had to, if just to save Autumn. He’d betrayed us all. Not just the Shadow Elves long before we ever showed up. The Rangers too. And the dead require an answer for such abuses. The dead Rangers I’d written the names of in the journal that had followed me from all the known to this unknown. To the Ruin of everything that once was.
To the Ruin of now.
I looked up and saw the huge tail of a lizard cross the open sky above the trap door. Just one brief flash of the completely impossible. I’m smart. I could put two and two together pretty fast.
“Come on up and meet my friend S’sruth, soldier boy,” laughed McCluskey wildly up there and out of sight.
No thanks, my mind said as my arms and legs began to climb once again. Gripping the M18 and trying to remember how many rounds I’d fired. Reminding myself I’d gassed up with a fresh mag.
McCluskey, when I found him at the top of the Barad Nulla, was half done for. He was leaning against the parapet. His sword, Coldfire, was out, but it hung limply from his pale and trembling claw, and he didn’t look in any kind of shape to use it against anyone any time soon.
I would have raised my weapon and emptied it into McCluskey, but of course there was the giant dragon, green and gold, undulating across the sky all around us. It was completely unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Its triangular horned head was pure malevolent evil, its eyes like bright burning emeralds that glared with some kind of blazing bonfire at the center. Its belly was shimmering gold and shining and immense, the scales along its back and sides like massive plates of green armor that glittered in the morning sun. Two huge leathery wings spanned away from it, catching the air and keeping the massive lizard aloft.
It howled in triumph, and I felt everything I thought of as strength go right out of me. I was surprised I was even standing. I looked down at the sergeant major’s M18. It felt small and useless at that moment.
McCluskey laughed like a madman being strangled and enjoying it nonetheless.
The dragon was coming straight for us, roaring tyrannically like some elder beast from the ages of darkness before man had ever walked the earth. Insulted at our presence.
I was cooked.
I felt the edge of the parapet opposite the laughing maniacal SEAL at the top of the strange tower. The edge was against my back. I wondered at that moment if I should just keep backing up and fall to my death before I died by dragon.
“Back blast area clear!” someone shouted, a voice from below and behind me in the courtyard where the battle still raged. I turned to see the sergeant major, way down there and just inside the body-littered courtyard of stone, surrounded by his team. They were engaging fleeing orcs in every direction.
The sergeant major had the Carl G on his shoulder and was stoically aiming it upward in our direction. Solid. Just like the little drawing in the manual on how to properly aim and fire the weapon no matter what’s going on around you. I threw myself to the deck of the tower, and a second later the HE round from the Carl Gustaf streaked overhead, shrieking and smoking as it went, and exploded near the incoming dragon.
The dragon screeched in rage as its armor and flesh was ruined by the anti-personnel round. Eardrums, hearing protection or not, cried bloody murder at the dragon’s howl of wounded rage.
The giant thing was hurt, its body riddled, wings torn and shredded, by tons of small balls meant to ruin human combatants.
It hovered in closer, glaring at me with its purely alien eyes as it snatched McCluskey off the roof in one grab, turned with a flap of its giant leathery wings, and pulled its glittering green-and-gold bulk away and off into the morning sky. Bellowing in rage at the hundreds of wounds it had just received. Flying nonetheless.
I lay there, watching the dragon go.
Knowing I should be dead.
But I wasn’t.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Me helping Autumn as much as she was helping me, the both of us limped from the tower of Barad Nulla. The orcs were dead. Or leaping to their death from the open edges of the crag that supported the Dark Spire. The Rangers were giving no quarter. No mercy. And the orcs, warriors in their own way, chose no mercy.
It was like something out of the Bronze Age.
The Lost Boys were there, taking Autumn away from me, glaring at me as they pulled her away. And just before she was gone, she gave me a look.
It was that look in the vision of the sailboat. I don’t know what to call it. But it’s the look that says there is more than duty, service, and this life we are prisoners of. Something that’s just us. One time, before I’d read the books written by Stephen King, a fellow scholar had been bemoaning the institution we were both at. He was leaving to go do charity work in the third world. Giving up everything for a river upcountry in the Stone Age and some people to lose himself in. I suspected there was more to it. When I asked him why he was going, he simply replied, There are other worlds than these.
He told me to read the Dark Tower series. Then I would understand. I didn’t. But I read the books anyway and I knew the phrase. And now, watching her being led away by the Lost Boys, I knew what she was telling me. If we were other people, it could be different. She wouldn’t be their queen, destined to face the dragon that had almost just killed me. Alone. Instead we’d be those people in the boat. Sailing to the Cities of Men. It was the opposite of the David Bowie song “Heroes.”
We could just be us, if just for one day on a boat.
And maybe that last look said, All things are possible, Talker. Things dreamt, and things never dreamed of.
***
It was Tanner who found me as I crossed toward the ruined tower of the Lost Library. He was pretty rough to look at and broken up. Tears ran away from his angry eyes. And there was all the pain the world can ever know in there. No one needed to tell me it was bad. I knew.
“He’s dead, Talk,” he shouted at me, sobbing and bellowing. “And I don’t want any of this anymore!”
I didn’t need to ask who. I knew. But I did anyway.
“Brumm,” wailed Tanner, wiping the dirty sleeve of his fatigues across his red-rimmed eyes. Unashamed. Tanner, the least of all the Rangers. The one who
’d been there and done that. The three-DUI, two-stripper-marriage, lifetime PFC. The one who thought you didn’t have to be hard to be a Ranger. You just had to Ranger, and you could be funny too. And you could cry when your buddy didn’t make it.
“They got him down there,” sobbed Tanner as he came close.
“No,” I think I mumbled as I pushed past Tanner, making for the tower and the crowd of tired Rangers gathering there. I felt like the world was going to fling me off it once more. Because a lot of people, me most of all, should have died before Brumm. Brumm who killed the giant and said Carl G don’t care like it wasn’t anything special. Brumm who wasn’t afraid when the rest of us were.
“Yeah,” said Tanner, and swore at something, someone. Everything. “He killed most of ’em but he was out of ammo. Just whatever he could get his hands on at the end. They cut him up. Bad, Talk.”
“No.”
No.
I was still moving to the Lost Library when Kurtz came out. Holding Brumm in both arms. Brumm stared skyward seeing nothing. He was indeed cut up bad. He was dead.
No.
Because… you don’t want it to be like this.
Kurtz was shaking. But he wasn’t crying. He looked like a man who was trying to hold on while the world spun him off in every direction it could. He looked like he was being carried away by a flood.
“They were brothers, Talk,” shouted Tanner as I stumbled toward the scene, Tanner unable to control his crying as he swore at himself.
Kurtz began to walk away from the tower, carrying his dead soldier like a good NCO. Like a Ranger. And I knew he’d keep walking until he hit the front gate and he’d go out and maybe never come back to the Rangers.
“Same dad,” wailed Tanner. “Just different moms.”
I turned toward Tanner. I’d had no idea. No idea Kurtz and Brumm were actual blood brothers. That Brumm wasn’t a mini Sergeant Kurtz trying to Ranger hard. But that he was his little brother. Trying to…
“They joined the Rangers to be together. Lived in separate states when they were kids. Only got to get together once a year during the summer when they was growing up. That…” And Tanner started crying so hard I could barely understand what he was saying as he followed me and I followed Kurtz. But what Tanner said was something to the effect that they kept in touch with each other. Every day. By ham radios. “Switching to on” had been some kind of code for that between them. Between brothers.
Some kind of message that no matter what—having different moms who change your last name out of spite, alimony and divorce, just terrible parents, poverty, life, and other states—they were still brothers no matter what.
Switching to on.
Every family has those. Words and phrases I’ll never understand no matter how much I try. Words that mean nothing. Words that mean everything.
I felt useless.
And then I was crying too. And I couldn’t look anymore because it was too much. Because we were supposed to have won.
And it felt like we’d lost.
Other Rangers, now that the fighting was over, were coming to watch Kurtz carry Brumm out for the last time. Silence as they watched the best of them carrying his dead brother away to bury him alone.
And then… Chief Rapp happened.
He came into the courtyard, his sleeves and carrier covered in blood. Ranger blood. I heard his big resonant voice bellow. Whether it was grief or something I don’t know. It was just a cry that said, “Oh no!” He let his high-speed SF weapon go, dangling from his sling, and he moved swiftly toward Kurtz, holding out his massive arms and hands, saying “Oh no!” over and over again.
“Lemme see him, Sergeant,” bellowed the giant SF operator. But Kurtz, who was much smaller, was just shaking his head and the tears were starting to come but his mouth was shut tight. Sealed. It would stay shut forever. His lips pressed tight. Pure rage and anger and endless grief. Forever.
Someone told the chief that Brumm was dead.
“Maybe!” shouted the chief. “Maybe,” he said again, his rich voice echoing out over the courtyard. Somewhere there was shooting as some last holdout of orcs was done in by Rangers still securing the fortress. “Or maybe,” said the chief, now speaking to all of us, “maybe this place here is different than where we come from. Maybe there is some kinda magic here. And maybe something more.”
He tried to take Brumm’s lifeless corpse away from Kurtz, but Kurtz jerked his dead kid brother from another mother away and held him like he was a treasure he’d never part with. Roaring something unintelligible in his strangled rage.
“Nooooooooooarrrggggh!”
“I know,” soothed Chief Rapp in his Mississippi mud accent, towering over Sergeant Kurtz, the chief’s bulk and muscle double the size of the tough-as-nails Rangers weapons team sergeant.
“Set ’im down and lemme try one mo’ time, son.”
He took hold of the body and eased it down onto the stones of the courtyard. Kurtz was still enraged and yet hoping the universe had got this one wrong. Just this once. Maybe he had a little faith left.
Oh please, I thought. Just this one time. Let me be… wrong.
So it can be right.
The chief studied the body of Brumm for a long moment as he knelt down next to it on the bloody stones of the courtyard. Then he pulled off his helmet and rifle, undoing his carrier as he raised his hands to the sky and started to speak. Speaking like a black preacher on the last Sunday of all Sundays. Powerful. Rich. Awesome.
“There’s magic!” he shouted. At all of us. “Always was! Now I believe in it more than ever.”
He lowered his hands and stared at Brumm’s lifeless body. We were all silent. Unsure what was going to happen next.
“He got this!” shouted the chief, and slammed his hands down onto Brumm. Slammed them down like he was forcing something that wouldn’t fit… back into a place it had to go.
Had to.
And then he resurrected Brumm from the dead.
Brumm came back to life like he’d been hit by the shock paddles. Gasping and staring around wild-eyed at every Ranger standing around him in stunned silence.
The chief backed away, raising his hands and praying. Or praising. Thanking Jesus. The Rangers began to shout and cheer.
Kurtz held his brother, whispering something.
Switch to on, little brother.
Switch to on.
We’d won. The fortress was ours. The Forge was back in our hands.
And death had been cheated. If just for today. If just for one man.
Epilogue
Some of the Rangers started to eat their MREs right there in the body-littered courtyard where orc blood collected among the stones. Vandahar was there and the old wizard swept off his crazy wizard’s hat and laughed good-naturedly at what had been done. The orcs driven out. The dragon driven off. Brumm coming back. The old man’s laugh was good and genuine. And made you want more of it in this world.
Word was Captain Knife Hand had disappeared. But the wounded were being attended to. And the dead. There were dead beyond the power of Chief Rapp. Who insisted it wasn’t him who had the power.
Maybe Brumm was a miracle.
Maybe it was magic.
Maybe it was a one-time shot. A gift from the universe. Or… whomever.
Whatever. We’d take what we were given where we found it. But I couldn’t say we wouldn’t ask questions.
I had a ton.
But now wasn’t the time.
It was the sergeant major who found me.
“C’mon, Talker. Time to debrief. And I got something to show you.”
He led me away. Me following that long-legged road march stride. I had seen many weird things. A dragon. A resurrection. Ghosts and death. Tombs filled with treasure. A vampire. A beautiful elf girl who gave me a look that said… all things
are possible.
And that was just today. And it was only a bit after 0700 in the morning.
We held the fortress. It was ours now. The Lost Boys and their queen, Last of Autumn, were setting up camp near the Lost Library. Claiming it as their own.
The sergeant major led me to a small tower that hung over the ledge of the crag. It was near the inner defenses and not defensive in nature. We walked into it, and I realized it was a kitchen. A normal medieval kitchen with a cooking hearth, pots and pans of beaten copper, an old rough table, and a few odd chairs. A giant open window looked out over the beautiful valley below the crag. The day was turning green and golden, and I could see the hawks out there catching the first thermals of the day. Crying out to one another that today would be a good day.
I tried to forget the image of the dragon looming above me at the top of the tower. And how close I’d been to death at that moment.
The sergeant major rummaged around in his ruck, and instantly I recognized his camp percolator.
He had coffee?
He’d been holding out on me?
“Look at this…” he said, opening a small wooden door at the back of the kitchen. Rough steps led down into a small cellar. There were hams hanging, breads in baskets. Things in jars. Food, I hoped. But no, better than food.
There was coffee.
Sacks of it.
I couldn’t see it yet, but I could smell it. ’Cause I’m an addict.
Turned out there were five sacks. Five large sacks. All stamped crudely with something that basically equated to Product of Portugon in Portuguese. I could translate that. That’s also one of my languages.
I hauled the sack up while the sergeant major found some eggs and cut some ham off the hanging shanks. Thick slices.
For a while we worked at getting the kitchen up. Firewood. Water from a nearby well. I made the coffee using a strange little grinder I found in the kitchen. The sergeant major cooked eggs and bacon in a copper skillet. Finally we moved the chairs and sat down around the rough table right there in the tiny medieval kitchen. Next to the open window.
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 51