by C. P. Odom
“If the Corpsman MOS hadn’t moved over to the Corps, Commander August would be your CO, Dancer.”
“She’s a good egg—just kind of impractical outside of her surgery.”
She turned somber and continued. “She swore to me she’d make sure none of the barbs got their hands on her patients. It was kind of gallant, even if it was rather pathetic. Damn the Iranians! I wish President Davis had hit ’em with nukes when he first became president back in ’30!”
“No nukes.”
“What?” Sandra said in outrage. “Whaddya mean ‘no nukes’?”
“Nuclear weapons don’t last forever,” McDunn said mildly. “Neither do ICBMs. They both need maintenance and regular testing. After a couple of decades of neglect, the cupboard was full of useless missiles and inoperative warheads.”
“I never heard that!”
“It wasn’t advertised, but it was an open secret to us grunts before I got out. Davis tried to build things back up. That’s why I saw so much combat during my enlistment. We were buying time, keeping the terrorists busy while the government tried to get the economy and the military back up to speed. Restoring our nuclear capability was just one of the things on the list. The president ran out of time. We all did.”
There was almost a minute of somber silence; then Sandra shook her shoulders and deliberately tried for a lighter mood to end the conversation.
“So now, I suppose, you’ll be returning to your literary classic.”
“I could use a little escapism right about now. What about you?”
“I need to make the rounds and make sure everyone has their med kits in the correct BDU[1] pocket. Probably everyone’s ship-shape—all the careless ones haven’t made it this far. But it’s something to do.”
[1] Battle Dress Uniform
There was nothing really to say after that, so she rose and left. McDunn watched her go, pushing down the approval he felt at watching her graceful, cat-like prowl or the many other attributes he liked just as much.
Then he sternly made himself shove those thoughts back into the box in his mind he’d labeled “wishful thinking.” When he had his thoughts about as close to composed as he could achieve, he got out his personal tablet again and opened it.
Maybe I can get through the meeting at Pemberley before the bastards show up.
***
Tuesday, October 10, 2045
Cornwall, England, 0955 hours
McDunn didn’t get far in his reading before the barbs made their appearance. He’d known they were getting close from his landline connection to Colonel White, who used his sole remaining RPV drone to scout their advance. But the drone had gone dead a half hour before, even as the lookout posts started filtering back to their lines to report all the barbs in the world were coming at them.
It didn’t even take PFC Smith shouting, “Here they come, Gunny!” to alert everyone. Fifteen seconds later, a weird whistling filled the heavens, accompanied by a few shouts of “Incoming!” to alert everyone. But few of the marines left in the battalion had ever heard the dreaded whistling sound of mortars, McDunn instantly realized. Even the vets. The bad guys they’d faced usually didn’t have anything heavier than rifles and grenades.
“Mortars! Incoming mortars! Get down, Bravo!” he bellowed.
The term wasn’t exactly accurate, since the unit he commanded was the skeletal remains of Second Battalion, but everyone seemed to get the message and hunkered down in their fighting holes.
“Where’d the bastards get mortars, Gunny?” Sandra shouted from the hole next to his. He’d positioned her in the center so she could go either left or right when her services were needed.
“I dunno,” he yelled back, as he heard the dull krruuump of shells exploding far to their rear. “If you hear ’em, it means they’re going over! You likely won’t hear the one that’s gonna land in the hole with you, so stay down!”
As though he was foretelling the future, the next series of whistling sounds included a smattering of nearby rounds going off before the whistling was heard. It also included a high-pitched call for a corpsman.
“Gotta go, Gunny,” Sandra yelled back and immediately was out of her hole and scuttling left. McDunn desperately wanted to tell her to stay under cover until the barrage lifted, but he knew it would be a waste of time. In any case, he had problems of his own since he needed to see where the bad guys were. So he stood up high enough to look over the lip of the barricade in front of his fighting hole, his binoculars to his eyes.
He was thus standing high enough so the next mortar shell, which buried itself in the dirt at the base of the barricade, went off without any whistling sound whatever and blew him backwards through the air. He was unconscious before he hit the ground, grievously wounded but not dead.
Second Battalion had lost its most experienced leader within a minute of the outbreak of battle. Their last battle.
***
Tuesday, October 10, 2045
Cornwall, England, 1140 hours
It was the sound of a man screaming in a frenzy of pain and terror beyond his comprehension that brought McDunn to his senses. He was immediately aware of terrible agony deep in his gut, and he instinctively froze to avoid making his torment worse.
But the scream sounded again, and it wasn’t his own cry, so it had to be one of his men. One of his men was hurt. Terribly hurt. He was needed. Duty was a stern taskmistress, and it was duty that forced his eyelids open to witness the horror.
The ground was carpeted with bodies—two, three, and four deep—draped over the lip of the barricade his marines had thrown up to protect their positions. Bodies covered the ground behind the barricade, some in marine camo but most dressed in the weird assortment of rags the barbs favored.
But the horror came from the vision of three people who weren’t dead. The screaming came from PFC Smith, who was clearly badly wounded but not yet dead. He was being held by one very alive barb, who looked European, while another one dressed like a jihadi had just begun to saw on Smitty’s throat with a long knife. The grievously wounded marine screamed again, trying to jerk his arms free from the barb who held him and laughed at his captive’s terror.
It was the laugh—cruel, exultant, and barbarically savage—that cut through McDunn’s concern over his own wounds. He was lying on his side, curled up around his belly wound, but his right arm was free. Without thought, he unfastened his shoulder holster and jerked out the HK-Colt 13 mm pistol his parents had given him during his first enlistment. The safety came off with a click that made the barb with the knife look up. The dirty-looking jihadi had just silenced Smitty by cutting halfway through his throat, and the sound made him look around in time to take the first round between his eyes. McDunn saw the hole open up, and the man’s head snapped back on the initial impact and then forward as the hollow-point round exited the back of his head. He simply dropped to the ground.
McDunn’s front sight blade was already on the second barb, who had dropped Smitty and was trying to get his AK-47 off his shoulder. He jerked as the major’s second round hit him under the throat.
That’s probably a fatal shot, McDunn thought in a weird, preternatural calm, but he took no chances. Three other shots impacted the barb in the torso before he collapsed beside his brother-in-arms and their victim.
McDunn instinctively put on the safety and returned his pistol to its shoulder holster, snapping the strap over it before his calm disappeared. Then there was nothing but the throbbing agony in his gut, and he felt himself spinning downward again.
***
Tuesday, October 10, 2045
Cornwall, England, 1158 hours
McDunn was wrenched out of the comfort of unconsciousness by stabbing bolts of white-hot agony coursing through his midsection and spreading outward through his torso. At first, he cou
ld see nothing other than a darkness shot through with blood-red streaks of lightning, even though he thought his eyes were open. Only gradually did he become aware that he was being moved. It was the bumping about resulting from the movement that was causing him to hurt so badly. There were hands under his armpits, lifting and pulling. Something—or somebody—was moving him bodily and causing his anguish.
A cry was ripped from his lips by an especially hard jolt, and suddenly he was wide-awake and fully conscious of the hideous surge of pain searing through his lower midsection.
A belly wound, he realized, struggling to find his voice. A belly wound, and I didn’t even fire a shot. Some warrior to go down like this! Just like Edranger in the first firefight, my luck finally ran out. Someone’s pulling me…got me under the arms…it can’t be one of the barbs.
“Dancer?” he croaked, hoping it might be his corpsman because the sudden image of the lovely girl being buried under all those bodies he’d seen was excruciating to consider. “Is that you, Dancer?”
“I am not a dancer,” a rumbling voice said in strangely accented English. “But I am a friend, Yank. Oh, yes, very much a friend of anyone who fights these murdering butchers.”
“Hurts—”
“I know, but you must be strong. I must get you into the cave before more of the swine return, drawn by your shots. You and the others killed almost all of them, but there are still a few.”
Despite the pain gripping him, McDunn recognized he was not in a position to reject assistance from someone—anyone—who called himself a friend. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to endure the jolts as his unknown benefactor pulled him over the ground and through the heaps of bodies his foggy vision revealed. He was impressed by the strength of the other man. McDunn wasn’t small, and pulling him had to be difficult.
The light of the sun was suddenly blocked, and he saw rock all around him in the dim light filtering through a thick screen of bushes at the mouth of the rock tunnel. Finally, he found himself dragged into a cave lit by many candles.
“Please, Yank,” the man behind him said. “You must try to stand. I cannot pull you to your feet without your help.”
McDunn opened his eyes fully to see he was sitting on the rock floor of the cave beside a massive rough stone about three feet high and six feet long. With the help of his protector, he managed to struggle to his feet, though he could not stop himself from groaning from the nauseating surge of molten fire flaming through his belly.
“Can you swing your leg over the Siege and sit on it? You have lost much blood, and I may have to send you early, even though you would not go where you are supposed to go.”
The words were discernible despite the man’s accent, but they made no sense whatsoever. But the man had made his order clear, so McDunn, bracing himself on the rock with his hands, managed to swing one leg over it. The effort wrenched another cry through bloody lips as the man helped to ease him into a sitting position, his buttocks fitting into a rounded depression seemingly designed to fit his hips.
“Good, good, Yank. Now, just sit here and try not to faint while—”
“Friend,” McDunn interrupted, “nothing you say makes any sense at all.” His words were slow, and he was hard-pressed to form them into a sentence as the stranger helped him place his hands on the stone to hold himself upright. Again, there was the strange sensation that his hands fit naturally into a pair of hollows in just the right location. He knew vaguely that such coincidences shouldn’t happen, but his mind was too befuddled to worry about trivialities.
“I know,” the man agreed, his voice sympathetic. “The pain must be very bad. Do you have any of those foreign medicines to relieve your distress?”
McDunn pointed to the pouch on the right shin of his BDUs. “In there. In a case. Some morphine syringes.”
“Ah yes! I have heard the word ‘morphine.’ ”
McDunn saw the man for the first time as he dropped to a knee beside him. He was tall and massive, just as large as his voice suggested. He wore some kind of long robes, much like a priest would wear except his were deep blue and covered in strange symbols. The man unzipped the shin pocket and removed the hard-shell case, opening it to reveal four long, thin plastic-wrapped packages.
“Hand me one,” McDunn said with some effort, and the man extended one of the packages before replacing the case and re-zipping the pocket. McDunn’s fingers trembled, but he forced himself to move deliberately as he tore the plastic covering open and took out the disposable syringe. He took the protective caps off and didn’t even bother to try to swab a place on his forearm. Considering how badly his belly hurt, an infection was the least of his worries. He jabbed the point through the skin and into the muscle before pushing the injector home.
Relief, while not instantaneous, was quick, and a few minutes later McDunn sighed as the searing pain started to fade. He knew he was mortally wounded, but he needed his wits less muddled if he was going to make any sense of what this stranger was saying.
At last, his eyes opened, and the world, while still suffused with a lower level of misery, was clear enough to think. “Thank you, friend,” he managed, turning his head toward the stranger who stood silently beside him. “But I have to ask…who are you?”
“As I said, I am a friend,” replied the man who towered over him. “I was aware of your coming, and then of the arrival of the satanic barbarians. I hoped you might defeat them utterly and wipe them from the face of the earth.”
“Too many and too few of us. Were there…any other survivors? My corpsman… She’s—”
“Ah! One of your female warriors! But I saw only three, and I looked at them closely. Sadly, they were dead. She is—was she—important to you?”
“Yes…yes,” McDunn said, the pain in his belly matched by a different kind of pain, one that seemed to clutch his heart at the confirmation of Dancer’s death. “She and I…well, we—”
But there was nothing he could say at this final touch of grief, so he buried his chin in his chest and tried not to think of what might have been.
“I am very sorry, Yank,” the stranger said, his rumbling voice soft and tinged with clear regret. “I searched when the sound of your guns grew quiet, but all I could find had perished, save only one or two of the savages very far off. They were looking through the dead, so I had to be careful as I searched. But I examined as many as I could before I found you. None of your fellow soldiers were alive.”
“Marines. We were marines, not soldiers,” McDunn corrected automatically, thinking of the men—and the few women—who died in the firefight while he was unconscious. His men. His friends. Dancer. It was the doom all of them had expected for months, but still it hurt to think on it. It hurt so much.
Everyone in my world is dead. Mostly vaporized. Mom and Dad and my sisters in the Parris Island nuke attack. Virtually all of the Corps in Lejeune with so many pulled from Pendleton to beef up the numbers for the Brigade. Everyone from high school since most stayed close to Beaufort. My whole world gone!
“I would have thought you dead if I was not looking for you,” the man said, “since I sensed your presence from inside my cave.”
“Sensed me?” McDunn asked. “What does ‘sensed’ mean?”
“I felt you here,” the man said, tapping his head. “I can always sense those who are meant for the Siege. So I knew you were alive, especially after I heard the shots break the silence.”
McDunn shook his head, wishing the man wouldn’t keep talking nonsense. “Thanks. I didn’t want to die at the hands of those murderous devils. But…but who are you anyway? My name is McDunn by the way.”
“I know,” the man said, pointing to the nametag on McDunn’s chest. “My people named me Kaswallon in the ancient tongue though it is not the name I used in the outside world. But that world is gone now, and I will be Kaswallon for as
long as I remain in this world, which shall not be long. I am descended from a line of priests who marched with Arthur’s army almost two millennia ago, and these robes are those of my profession. I have the gift of sensing those of Cornish descent. That is how I knew you were still living.”
“All of my family considered ourselves Americans no matter where we might have come from. I suppose I’m part Cornish since my grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side immigrated to America from Cornwall. But I didn’t pay it much attention, and neither of them talked about it very often. But who is this Arthur you keep mentioning?”
“I knew you were of Cornish descent when I first sensed you. And Arthur is King Arthur Pendragon, ancient and rightful ruler of these lands. Cornwall is his true home though other districts have laid claim to the title.”
“But Arthur is just legend. There never was a Camelot. Or a Round Table, much less a Lancelot or Guinevere. It’s just a tale to amuse the kids.”
“Ah, there you are wrong, brave McDunn, for you sit on a remnant from Arthur’s court—the Siege Perilous, the vacant seat at the Round Table. It was found by Merlin, who proclaimed only the knight who was successful in his quest for the Holy Grail could sit in it without dying. Six of Arthur’s knights tried to and died, or so the legend says. But the legend is wrong, as was Merlin, for the knights who disappeared did not die. They were sent elsewhere to the world meant for them. Only Sir Percival and Sir Galahad, who together achieved the Grail quest, were able to sit in the Siege without disappearing. Or so said Merlin, wrong as always, because the real reason they remained was they belonged to this world, not elsewhere.”
“Wait, wait,” McDunn protested again. “King Arthur—the legend is just a fairy tale.”
“No, it is real. Rather, parts of it are real though you are correct about many of the embellishments. They were invented by the storytellers to make their tale more entertaining. My family knows the true story, for the tale of what happened has been passed down from father to son—as you will learn once it is full dark and the moon rises. Tell me, are you familiar with Stonehenge?”