by Stu Jones
“Yeah”—the bandit greedily rubbed his hands—“that sounds alright.”
“Besides,” Shana boasted, getting into the blackened, dust-covered Datsun pickup with her rifle, “I’ve got a job to finish.”
The bandit appeared puzzled. “Which means?”
Shana rolled her eyes and put her feet on the dash. “It means Kane and his people have to die. Is that clear enough? Now get in the truck and step on it.”
7
SCRAMBLING ON ALL fours for the rifle that always lay next to her when she slept, Ari tried to gather herself. The fires throughout the small camp were spreading, and the gunfire and screams that had torn her from the clutches of her slumber were fast approaching. She had to find her brother.
“Aviel!” She hissed his name into the darkness. No reply. Her hands touched the rifle, and she hugged it tightly to her chest. Moving quickly in a low crouch, she crossed the gap and entered under the tarp that her brother had set up as his shelter. In the darkness, she mashed her hands down against the blanket and felt them touch the cold, hard earth.
Where is he?
More sporadic gunfire filled the smoky night air and was followed by a woman shrieking. They were under attack. She peeked around the canvas and saw a group of men stabbing another man to death as they taunted him with hateful slurs. Farther down the way, the shrieking woman was being raped by a group of mostly naked thugs.
“Shit,” Ari said. “Highway bandits.”
She had to do something. If she could just find Aviel, then they could at least provide a unified front of resistance. Generally highway bandits were small, unorganized, untrained groups of idiots. With a solid show of force, they could be defeated or routed fairly quickly. But a sizable show of force was something she didn’t have.
Alone she felt isolated, hobbled, and vulnerable. She had to find a way to turn the tide in her favor. She had to find Aviel. Ari scanned a few nearby bedrolls; the people occupying them wore masks of fear, unable to do anything but wait for the terror to end, one way or another.
“Have you seen Aviel? Have you seen my brother?”
One woman barely managed to shake her head.
“Get your people and go. If you stay here, you will be raped, tortured, and murdered—the children too.”
The woman remained frozen.
“Go! Make your way into the hills and hide. They will not spare any of you if they find you.”
The woman managed a nod before pulling a few adults and children together with hurried whispers and disappearing into the dark beyond.
Ari gave a quick 360-degree scan of her surroundings. How had it come to this? How were they now living in fear and squalor like animals? It hadn’t always been this way. Back before, she had lived her life with nobility and purpose. Never before had she lived in fear, not even when the Palestinian missiles rained down again and again upon her hometown of Sderot when she was just a child. She and her brother and her mother and father would take to the shelter each time, hoping to survive the blasts. Shh…shh…Ariella, her father had soothed her as he stroked her long, dark hair. God will protect us. Her father was right. God had protected them. They survived. They persevered. It was in fact what Jews had done for thousands of years. Surrounded by enemies on all sides, not only had they survived—they’d flourished and, in the process, become a proud nation, a people of indomitable strength.
Of course it had been her privilege to serve her nation for three years in the Israel Defense Forces as a part of the famed Caracal Battalion. And served with distinction she had. Highly decorated and with extensive training in desert warfare, hand-to-hand combat, and special weapons, she had been quite ready and capable of dealing with any terrorist threat. This fact ensured that she saw multiple deployments along Israel’s southern border with Egypt and other dangerous sectors of her home country. It also ensured that she was later noticed and recruited by Mossad, one of the most respected intelligence agencies in the world.
Her father had not been in favor of her service, but that didn’t much concern her. It was all she had ever wanted—to serve her county, to serve her God, to fight against the evil in the world.
Now here she was—half a world away from her family, trapped in the wasteland that used to be America. How was she to know that she would never return from her vacation visiting her brother in the States? Of course the radical actions of the Sword of Destiny, the terrorist group that essentially initiated the end of the world, weren’t surprising to her in the least. She’d heard that Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were two of the first cities hit, and the desire to be back home, to fight once more, burned deeply within her. All she could hope was that her people had survived in some capacity. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if just one Israeli man, woman, or child had survived, that person would be fighting back—fighting to stop the burning of the world.
Snapping back to the present, Ari rubbed her face. It was the hand they had all been dealt, and now they would have to play it. Clearing her head, she stayed low, moving to the outside of the camp and up into the hillside beyond. Staying low she navigated the hillside, picking her way around a few large rocks to where she would have the best vantage point.
Crouching down on one knee, Ari unslung her AR-15 and looked through the stubby, four-power tactical scope. She hissed through her teeth. It was a sizable force. No, not sizable—downright large. Maybe several hundred bandits total. Looking up the road, she could see their caravan headed by a large fuel tanker stopped a ways back. That tanker was a grand prize in its own right. They had likely stopped to raid and pillage on their way through to somewhere else. Ari thought it through for a moment. These were no ordinary highway bandits. They seemed more empowered, more driven. This was very bad, and there was no way for her to fight them off, not a group this big.
If she could just spot her brother, reconnect with him, and get the hell out of this place, everything would be fine. Ari scanned the small camp, a group of people she and her brother had allied with out of sheer necessity. That was where the allegiances stopped. The only person she cared about was Aviel.
The bandits were now bringing their spoils out into the open. Torches were lit as the area became covered in the orange glow of firelight. Men, women, and a few children were crying and moaning as they were dragged out into the open and tossed upon the ground like trash. A couple of thugs were fighting over who got to keep a found rifle. She watched this infantile squabbling for a few moments before resuming her visual search for her brother. It was then that she saw him. She gasped as the men dragged him across the light of the fire and threw him to the ground. He had already been badly beaten. Her baby brother. Ari gritted her teeth and aimed through the scope to assess her shots.
They weren’t going to murder her baby brother. They wouldn’t get the chance. That much she was sure of.
God help me. Elohim guide my hand.
She had one full magazine and a partially loaded one in her left cargo pocket. Nowhere near enough rounds to take on a force this size, even from an elevated position of advantage. She bit her lip.
Come on, Ari; you can do this. God will protect us.
The crack of a gun snapped her focus back on her brother, who was now raising himself off the ground. They had shot another man who had been struggling with them. Now the bandits, led by one with blue face paint, began to taunt and murder the captives, stabbing or shooting some and slowly sinking their knives into others as they screamed and wailed against their captors.
Barbarians.
She had witnessed the same barbarism years before. Whether it was Hamas, Hezbollah, or wasteland bandits—the visage of true evil manifesting itself in a person was always the same. She huffed out a breath and brass checked the action of the rifle. There was no good way to do this, and they were quickly working their way down toward her brother. A child squalled and threw itself upon its mother, who now lay facedown on the ground in a puddle of gore. With another cruel swipe of the bandit’s knife
, the child rolled over, unmoving atop its mother.
She couldn’t stand by and watch this madness anymore. She had to do something—even if it meant a death sentence for her. As Ari raised her rifle, she watched in horror as her brother spat upon a nearby thug, damning him in Hebrew. In response, the thug lunged forward and buried his jagged blade in Aviel’s side under his ribs, twisting it as he yanked Aviel’s hair back. Aviel cried something out, and though they were a distance away, she knew with a very distinct dread exactly what he was screaming. Her name.
Ari gasped and took aim on the thug as he pulled his knife and drew it back to stab her brother again.
Her rifle cracked across the open expanse, the sound freezing time in its wake. The bandit’s head popped open, launching a stream of red into the air as he fell, dropping the knife. Shots rang out, maddened screams in the darkness, as rounds began to strike the hillside around her. She was pinned down. Rising just beyond cover, she began firing on each new target, watching them spin and pirouette like the pop-ups at a shooting gallery as they charged the short hill.
They were holding her brother down now.
No! Please, no! God protect us!
Her weapon ran dry as she fumbled with the magazine in her cargo pocket and instinctively tried to insert it behind the trigger guard as she would have with her IDF-issued Tavor rifle. Adjusting quickly she inserted the new magazine and slapped the bolt catch. She didn’t have enough rounds to stop them. She didn’t have enough. Tears dumped from her eyes as the thug with the blue face began to saw at her brother’s neck with his rusty knife. Her baby brother was still screaming her name when the man cut his throat with a wet gurgle.
“Hear, O Israel, God is our Lord,” Ari bawled, centering her crosshairs on her brother’s forehead, tears dripping from her chin as she chanted the words with true conviction.
She would not have him suffer. Not like this.
The world burned, as it always did, the screams of the lost echoing into the darkness, the moon boiling and turning to blood. This part of the vision was always the same. Tynuk watched helplessly as the stars in the sky died, one by one, their eternal lights winking out against the backdrop of an everlasting darkness. Below, the fires raged; the world was consumed, the people in it gone mad without the light of the Great Spirit to guide them. On the horizon, the dark ones waited, patiently, for their moment to finish the war that had been started so long ago. It was a place without hope, the blood of the innocent crying out to the sky that now held nothing but endless, inky black. Like a cancer, it would devour every last spark of light until there was nothing but the pitiful failure of those who’d served the Great Spirit. Then, like an alarm in his skull, Kane’s voice shouted to him in desperation.
Tynuk! Help us! This is how it ends when you allow the light to die!
Tynuk awoke with a start, his face pressed firmly into the dry sand of the canyon bed, his head swimming with the toxin that still circulated through his system. Was he dead? Had he transitioned into the spirit realm? His head felt strange, hovering, uncomfortably separated from the crushing weight of his body. He couldn’t be alive. It wasn’t possible. Not after a fall like that.
The warrior boy groaned and rolled to his side, his dilated pupils scanning the strange, drug-induced blurring of earth and sky. His heart hammered in his chest, and as he brought his hands up, he felt them slide over the coarse strands of black hair that clung to his body. Black hair, like the hair of a beast. Tynuk swallowed the dryness in his mouth and rolled to his stomach, pushing himself to all fours as his world reeled around him. He struggled to maintain his balance even on all fours, his limbs trembling faintly under the strain.
“I…I can’t…move,” Tynuk mumbled to himself. He breathed deeply the air in his lungs, pulling with it the earthen scent of decay in the shadow of the canyon floor. How had he gotten here? He had leaped from the cliff. He shouldn’t have survived that. Tynuk looked down at his chest again, the thick, black animal hair sticking to the naked sweat of his body.
Azolja.
Tynuk scanned the rocky outcroppings that surrounded him and quickly located the darkened form of his companion nearby, peering at him from a ledge above him. The lights from the sky swirled with the rock, the clouds, and the sand as the colors forced their way through his eyes, causing him to feel overwhelmed at the sensory overload. Tynuk fluctuated between lightness and heaviness, a strange undulation between sinking and floating.
“Az!” Tynuk called to the black beast that stood majestically above him like something out of a fairy tale. “Az…”
The beast flicked his head, a gesture the boy understood as acknowledgment. His vision distorted sharply, the skin of the world pulling back to reveal the underside, the things unseen. Here he was able to peer into the spirit realm. Tynuk flinched and gasped as eyes, yellow and seeing, penetrated the darkness beyond, watching him, waiting for him to expire or continue—they did not seem to have a preference. He was the source of some hidden entertainment in this place, the whispers of the eyes scratching at the back of his consciousness. He looked up toward the beast but instead saw something else entirely: a two-legged creature, not unlike a man, but different—and much, much larger. The creature stood before him, its posture straight and noble. The worn and tattered black-and-purple robe fashioned tightly around it scarcely concealed the massive musculature beneath.
“Who are you?” Tynuk managed. “What did you do with Az?”
The figure did not reply and simply outstretched its hand, motioning for the boy to come forward.
“You want me to follow you?”
The figure nodded.
“Are you one of my ancestors?”
The figure simply motioned again for him to follow.
Tynuk raised himself up; unsteady like a newly birthed foal, he wobbled and fell against the cliff to support himself. The many probing eyes continued to watch from the darkness as Tynuk looked again at the figure. There was something about this creature. Tynuk could feel it. Something noble and full of righteous purpose, and though he had no real reason to do so, he felt that he could trust it. Ignoring the many whispered laughs of the eyes that bore into him from all directions, Tynuk fought to keep his focus directed upward toward the figure, as he took each shaking step farther into the shadowy nothingness that loomed on before him.
8
THE CRACK OF her AR-15 burned in her ears, signaling the final death of everyone she had ever loved. Ari gasped and put her hand to her mouth, quickly choking out a few muffled sobs. Somewhere, a small light of hope deep inside her heart went dark. All the pain, all the loss, all the days before, as they’d struggled to survive, came flooding back. She moaned a sad sound and clutched at her face. Ari and Aviel had always been close, but in the last few years, they had forged an unbreakable bond of love. They were all each other had left in this dying world. And now it was all gone. God had been silent.
Ari could hear the ugly marauders swearing and scrambling up the hillside as they came for her.
Come on, Ariella; get your head right. They just murdered Aviel. Stand up and fight. Make them remember you.
With renewed purpose, Ari wiped her face, her countenance darkening as she prepared herself for what was to come. Stepping back into the shadow of a nearby tree, the moonless night wrapped her in a murky cloak of disguise. Ari checked the chamber of her AR-15 and the round count in the inserted magazine—two rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber, and no secondary weapon. She waited, poised, every inch of her athletic frame staged for action, as her lips moved silently—the Hebrew words of an ancient psalm.
“Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.”
She took a deep breath to steady her heart and hands as the grungy highwaymen approached.
“Hey, there! Don’t be afraid; we’ll treat you real nice.” Several shadows laughed into the darkness as two figures came into view. Ari knew without question there would be more. These wou
ld try to draw her out, and the others would make their move. She was trapped, but she still had the element of surprise.
“Yeah, just come on out, an’ we’ll take real good care of you!” one of the bandits crooned.
Stepping from the dark of the shadow, Ari raised her rifle and fired two rounds in quick succession—the muzzle flashes blinding her enemy and illuminating the look of shock and dismay on his dirty face as he crumpled and rolled down the hillside. Not missing a beat, she pivoted and dropped to a knee as the second thug fired over her head. A single round through the teeth froze him in midstep as chunked fragments of his brain littered the hillside behind him.
The screams were those of sheer madness as the rest of them came for her, more than she could count. The bolt on her rifle was locked to the rear. No more ammo. Groaning and huffing, the first bandit came in and received a savage stroke across his jaw with the butt of her rifle. Ari spun to her left and muzzle punched another in the throat, crushing the wild man’s trachea with a gurgling wheeze. Light blazed across her eyes as something hard struck her across the back of the head. She faltered, took one stumbling step, and swung the rifle in an upward arc to the rear, landing a solid strike to the ribs of the man behind her. She spun and brought the rifle across the thug’s face, sending him sprawling down the hillside. A handgun was raised in her face as Ari sidestepped and parried the weapon away with the barrel of her rifle and delivered a crushing head butt to the chin of the gunman. The handgun cracked as it fell, and another bandit behind her went down, grabbing in shock at the open wound in his chest.
Ari growled a ferocious, unwomanly sound as the warrior in her came into its full form. Stomping forward she crushed the gunman’s tibia at the ankle with a splintering sound as she lunged and delivered a brutal thrust of the weapon’s magazine into his face.
But there were far too many. Ari gave a savage groan as the many hands and arms pulled her to the ground. Struggling fruitlessly, she gnashed her teeth, frothing like a wild animal.
“Saxon!” one of the bandits called over his shoulder. “Saxon, we got her! We got her alive!”