Capes

by Drabble, Matt

  He moved along the bench and stared out through the glass, all the while keeping his head low and hopefully without providing an achievable target.

  There were multiple figures outside encircling the building, but as yet, they hadn’t moved in any further. The hooded, white robes were certainly new for SOUL and they were far too impractical to be any kind of special forces sent by either the UK or Swedish governments. Not to mention the fact that they all seemed to be armed with some kind of long, curved, bladed weapons that he’d never seen before.

  Not knowing the facts made him feel helpless. How could he formulate any kind of effective plan without the right amount of data?

  “CJ? You’re leaving me hanging here, buddy,” he said quietly as he crept along the wall, watching out through the window.

  He counted 12 hooded figures that he could see, but the line bent on around the building out of sight so there could be another half dozen at least.

  Suddenly, a large figure started to walk forwards while the others remained in place.

  “Here we go,” Jesus muttered to himself.

  The figure moved within ten feet or so from the building before it yelled over the snowy winds.

  “‘IT OPENED ITS MOUTH TO UTTER BLASPHEMIES AGAINST GOD, BLASPHEMING HIS NAME AND HIS DWELLING!’” The man shouted in English but with a thick Swedish accent.

  “So it is SOUL then.” Jesus nodded to himself. “Just the Swedish branch, I’m guessing from the guy’s accent.”

  “‘How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?’” The man outside quoted a second verse as he walked in closer.

  “CJ?” he called over. “We need you, pal; it’s getting to that time here.”

  The man outside was clearly some kind of leader, but Jesus found it odd that after all this time, Cynthia Arrow had not come to the party in person. It was the sort of thing she surely lived for… their death, that was.

  “YOU'VE GOT TWO MINUTES TO WALK AWAY!” Jesus bellowed out through the glass. “TWO MINUTES BEFORE YOU END UP A BLOODY STAIN IN THE SNOW!”

  He was answered by the crack of another rifle shot which broke the window above his head. That had been two rifle shots that he’d heard, so their attackers had at least one rifle out there.

  “CJ!” he yelled, but the alien merely looked at the floor helplessly. “Brilliant,” Jesus said, shaking his head and raising his eyebrows. “Just brilliant.”

  “Back door is secured for now,” Link said as he rushed back into the room with Jamie-Lyn after they heard the voice shouting outside. “CJ?”

  “Nope,” Jesus replied. “I’m wondering if our friends out there had something to do with that.”

  “I had the same thought,” Link admitted. “Speaking of them, are we thinking SOUL?” he asked, nodding towards the now broken window pane.

  “Certainly sounds like their kind of rhetoric,” Jamie-Lyn added.

  “THIS PLACE IS CONDEMNED,” the voice outside bellowed. “This is an abomination, a perversion of the word of God and a den of sin for the damned.”

  Link was still holding the heavy copper saucepan, and he handed a matching frying pan to Jesus.

  “You want me to make an omelette?” Jesus scoffed as he took the pan.

  “No, I want you to bash the next head that peeks its way in here,” Link answered.

  “We shall not abide with blasphemy; we shall not accept the dark arts of WITCHES!” the man outside yelled.

  “Witches?” Jamie-Lyn asked aloud. “Did he say witches?”

  “That’s a new SOUL direction; maybe something got lost in translation?”

  “I can hear you in there, Erik,” the man outside said as he drew up to the window. “Freja’s time was done. God had called her until you intervened with your black magic!”

  “Who the hell is Erik?” Jesus exclaimed. “Or Freja for that matter?”

  “I think there’s been some kind of mistake,” Jamie-Lyn called out from her crouched position beside Jesus who was ducked down low.

  “I hear you too, Astrid,” the man replied.

  “Astrid?” Jamie-Lyn responded. “I’m not Astrid; there’s no one here with that name, nor an Erik or Freja either.”

  “You do not fool me, child of the dark. Your tricks will not stand in the light of God. Nothing shall dampen his truth!”

  “What the hell is this?” Link asked. “Look, fella,” he said, raising his voice to the man outside, “whatever you think this is, whoever you think we are, you’re wrong, pal, dead wrong.”

  “We shall not be diverted from our path to glory.” The man laughed.

  There was a moment of eerie pregnant silence before a voice screamed, “GE SIG PÅ!”

  “What does that mean?” Link asked, puzzled.

  “HERE THEY COME!” CJ yelled in answer as he yanked Link out of the way. A bullet flew through the window and would have hit him in the head if he’d still been standing there.

  After a volley of gunfire to pin the inhabitants down, the horde of hooded figures all ran at the building with their long-bladed weapons held aloft like Viking warriors stepping out of the pages of history.

  They struck the building at multiple points, shattering glass as they hacked and swung their way into the faded brittle wood.

  “IT WON’T HOLD!” Jesus shouted unnecessarily as faces were already starting to force their way in.

  Link rushed forwards just as a man started to push his way through a window without the glass being broken all the way. The jagged edges cut through his robe and into his skin, and soon, the pristine white outfit was being stained red, but like his companion at the back door, he never uttered a sound of pain.

  Link swung the pan hard at the man’s head, knowing that there was no time for mercy here.

  The copper saucepan struck the man’s head with a dull clang and the man slumped forwards over the window. His waist landed on glass shards that embedded themselves into his stomach and pierced it open.

  Jamie-Lyn let out a primal scream as she charged forwards with the kitchen knife, slashing out at a man trying to push his way in. The blade caught him several times in long slashes, but he ignored the wounds.

  Jamie-Lyn steeled herself, and instead of slashing sideways, she stabbed forwards and had to swallow bile as the knife drove into the man’s chest up to the hilt, driving him back out. He tumbled backwards when the tip of the knife pierced his heart, falling like a wardrobe being tipped over.

  The man’s axe-cum-sword weapon was still tipping through the window, and with her knife buried in the undoubtedly dead man’s chest, she snatched the new weapon up gratefully.

  Jesus was struggling with a woman who had reached through a now smashed window. Her bony fingers were clamped onto his collar and her nails were digging into his neck drawing blood. His own hands were trying to wrench hers free of him, but her strength was incredible for her slender frame.

  He’d dropped the frying pan when she’d taken him by surprise, and with no little reluctance, he made the decision to take a hand away from her iron grip in order to reach down to the bench at waist height to find his meagre weapon.

  The moment he took one hand away, hers found a firmer grip around his throat and she started to squeeze the life out of him.

  His hand floundered for several agonising moments before he snagged the handle and without thinking swung the heavy pan upwards.

  He had intended to strike the woman on the side of the head, but she felt the movement coming and turned into the swing. As a result, the copper pan caught her square in the mouth and shattered multiple teeth, showering Jesus in blood and bone fragments as she fell backwards back out of the window, leaving him gasping and gagging.

  There were now numerous figures all trying to force their way into the building. The long-bladed weapons that they all carried were being used to hack and slash thro
ugh the building’s aged timber frame, which was offering little in the way of protection.

  Jesus, Jamie-Lyn and Link ran up and down the front line, hitting, clanging and slashing out at groping hands and pushing bodies that were trying to force their way in. Each time that they drove a hooded robed figure back, another one took their place in the never-ending surge.

  Link knew that the undefended rear of the building must be under a similar attack, but he couldn’t turn away now, otherwise he was certain that they would be overrun from the front.

  The battle raged on in an eerie, almost silence, the attackers only letting out the occasional grunt to show that they weren’t entirely mute while the defenders had little energy to spare, so cries of primal rage were simply a waste of limited physical exertion.

  While Link was correct about the rear assault, he was incorrect about the lack of defence.

  Crimson moved swiftly through the heavy snow, his senses razor-sharp now in the heat of the battle as muscle memory and instinct ruled over cognitive thought processes. It was here that he was truly alive; it was for situations like this that he had been created.

  The long, wooden-handled battle blades of the enemy were viciously sharp and deadly. Their fatal swinging arcs could decapitate a man with a single blow, but they were also cumbersome and difficult to reload into position.

  As a result, with his mind fully attuned, he was slipping and sliding his way through multiple attempts to separate his head from his body. Great heaving swings came at him from many angles, but that gave him the advantage after the initial dodge.

  A large man turned from his attempts to batter through a bedroom window as he heard Crimson’s approach, the snow making it impossible to be completely silent all the way to his prey.

  The man swung the weapon, slicing through the air and cleaving several snowflakes. Crimson slid onto his knees at the last second and came in under the mighty swing, driving his own small blade upwards and into the man’s chest, ripping the knife sideways before twisting it out in a bloody spurt.

  A woman rushed him from the side with her weapon held out in front of her like a charging lance, and he spun in perfect unison making her miss. As he spun around, he buried a backhanded knife in the base of her skull, driving it in deep and forcing her forwards with more momentum so that she slammed into the side of the building face first, dropping like a stone.

  The rifle that he had taken from the first man he’d encountered was still slung over his head and shoulder, but it hung unwanted; that wasn’t how Crimson liked to fight.

  He quickly counted four more figures and isolated a slender man or woman; it was hard to tell with their backs to him and hoods raised, but the gender mattered little to him. They were all the enemy and they were all dead.

  The slender figure, due to their narrow shoulders, had almost crawled all the way through a small smashed window, and he knew that if the rear line was broken, then those inside would be taken on two sides and would quickly fall to a rear attack.

  He rushed forwards with a dipping shoulder and ploughed into the nearest figure’s back, driving them forwards. The figure bounced back off the wall and Crimson, grabbing their hood from behind, drove their face into and through a glass window.

  The glass shattered and Crimson then lifted the figure’s head before pushing it down onto broken shards, impaling the figure throat first, serving a double purpose: both tearing open its throat and blocking the potential entry point.

  He quickly changed direction and darted towards the slender figure trying to wriggle through another broken window. He quickly reached out and grabbed its ankle before starting to pull backwards.

  The others two figures saw this and quit their own actions and turned towards him.

  He now had hold of the intruder’s ankle and was fighting to keep them from getting all the way inside, but that meant he only had one hand left to fight with.

  The arm holding the figure was worryingly starting to ache after only a few moments of struggling. That wasn’t a good sign.

  In his heyday, he didn’t ever remember getting fatigued, no matter how hard he’d run or fought. Back then, he could have run a marathon a day without ever getting tired, but his heyday now seemed like a hell of a long time ago.

  A figure rushed towards him with their long-bladed weapon held aloft. The hood bounced up enough for Crimson to see a blonde-haired woman with delicate features and a stunningly beautiful face beneath, but her exquisite features were contorted and transformed into a mask of pure hatred.

  He kept hold of the slender ankle and let out a deep cleansing breath as he took complete control over his body and senses.

  The throwing dagger slipped into his hand like magic once more with little more effort than a twitch. The woman charged at him with wild, piercing blue Nordic eyes, and he threw the blade right between them, dropping her like a stone.

  He took a deep cleansing breath but then could not take a second as huge powerful arms suddenly took him from behind and lifted him up off the ground in a mighty bear-crushing hug.

  His arms were clamped down at his sides and his fingertips only just managed to hang onto the slender ankle as the other figure still fought like a cat caught by its tail trying to get free.

  The literal life was being squeezed out of him now, but still he kept hold of the ankle. He was sure that he could hear his own bones cracking under the pressure as the blood rushed to his head and threatened to come spilling out of his ears.

  The foot that he had a tenuous hold of was beginning to slip out of his grasp, and the world was starting to blacken around him as his vision became little more than a pinpoint of light.

  He kicked back hard… once, twice, then a third time when he scraped his heel down his assailant’s shin, but the grip remained like a vice crushing the life from him. He thought about releasing the foot, but it seemed like a coward’s choice and while there might have been many accurate accusations that could be levelled against him, coward was not one of them.

  He flung his head back as hard as he could and felt it hit hard bone as the huge man behind him flinched, but the arms remained locked.

  Crimson felt the foot now slip from his grasp, and he could only watch as the lean figure wormed its way in through the window and into the building.

  Fuelled by a last-ditch roar of anger and frustration, he threw his head back again with every ounce of dying strength that he had left. This time he felt the man’s nose break upon impact and the arms loosened enough for him to wriggle free and slip down to the ground.

  His chest felt severely bruised by the giant’s embrace and there were most definitely a couple of ribs broken. His breath returned in painful hitches and wheezes.

  The giant was hunched over as blood flowed freely from his shattered nose and Crimson took a grunt of delight in the man’s pain, but any triumph was short-lived as the giant was already starting to rise despite the fact that his face was a bloody mask.

  Once again, the throwing dagger slipped into Crimson’s hand as it had done a thousand times before, but the only difference this time was that when he threw it, he missed.

  The broken ribs and internal injuries threw off his action, and as a result, his aim was compromised. The jolt of pain that he felt at the end of his throwing motion caused his aim to be off, and instead of the tip of his blade finding its mark, it whistled past the giant’s head and merely caused a deep, but ultimately less than fatal, wound along the side of the man’s forehead.

  The act of missing almost cost him his life as that momentary stunned inaction caught him off-guard, and the giant threw his own weapon.

  The long-handled blade might have been large and cumbersome, but given its sheer size, it had a greater mass area with which to find its mark.

  Crimson saw the incoming missile and dropped low to avoid the blade, but the thick wooden handle smacked against the side of his temple scrambling his senses and rocking his equilibrium.

  The giant rushed
in impressively quick for a man of his size, and once more, Crimson found himself on the end of an attack that should have been laughably easy to avoid, but now he caught a ham-sized fist to the side of the head, doubling down on the handle blow.

  He rolled to the side out of instinct rather than judgement, and for once, luck was with him as he avoided the huge boot that came stomping down on the patch of snow where he’d been crouched only milliseconds before.

  The giant swung out again but his own senses were affected by the amount of blood thankfully dripping into his eyes.

  They circled each other, two wounded animals seeking a weakness but respecting the other’s strengths.

  Crimson shook his head trying to clear the fog; he needed to focus what he had left on the giant before him.

  The man’s head had fallen back exposing a Viking of biblical proportions… massively wide shoulders and a barrel chest like a weightlifter’s. His face was half covered in a huge busy blonde beard, and his eyes sparkled with an insanity that Crimson recognised and respected. This opponent was too far gone to feel anything less than crippling pain; thankfully, there was no better surgeon when it came to the dark arts.

  The man stepped in, closing the distance, not necessarily with his speed, but the simple fact that one tree trunk leg swing closed the distance in an instant.

  He swung a huge paw but now Crimson was functioning better with all of his internal systems rerouted to the fight.

  He saw the blow coming and ducked under it. The giant threw another haymaker, and while this one came closer, Crimson was still able to avoid it and shift his weight to one side.

  He threw a dagger, then a second and a third. All of them struck their intended target, but Crimson was having to adjust his aim to a larger and subsequently less fatal area. As a result, the giant merely now had three daggers embedded in his chest but none had penetrated deeply enough to wound him significantly.

  Crimson checked his sleeves and found only a single blade left in there, and he didn’t have enough confidence to throw it away.

  The giant flicked out a couple of jabs, but Crimson kept on circling him, hoping to draw enough fire to drain the monster in front of him and give himself the advantage. The trouble was that his own chest ached monstrously; his broken ribs were rubbing together, making it difficult to catch his breath, and he knew that he was going to be the one to run out of fuel a long time before his adversary would.