They were also lucky in another sense. Five days of quiet on this front had caused the soldiers of the valley to become over-confident. They especially didn’t expect an attack in the day and a few of the men on duty were nodding off and more were shooting the shit with their friends in the next foxhole. The ridge was also lightly defended. There were a bare thirty men holding the half mile of ridge up which the Azael were scrambling.
The leading group of Azael got within a hundred yards before a rock was dislodged by one of the men. It went clattering down the hillside, almost hitting a man who made the mistake of cursing loudly.
A rock skittering down the slope was one thing; it happened all the time and made for some very anxiety-ridden nights, but a voice as well? That got the soldiers’ attention and the first Azael was spotted seconds later.
The valley soldiers fired killing three men in as many seconds. The return fire from half of the duke’s men was a storm of lead that withered plants, scorched the air and had the soldiers throwing themselves down into their holes.
Led by Brad Crane, the men of the Azael scrambled up the hill while they could, hoping to get close before the soldiers recovered from their shock. They were within fifty yards when the ridge came alive with gunfire, though it was with nowhere near the same intensity and yet, the fire was effectively aimed and men dropped with every shot and the attack stalled.
“Move!” screamed the duke. “Get your asses up that hill!”
He yelled and kicked at his men and even fired his rifle into the dirt next to one of them and, gradually, he got them moving again. The press of men upwards became too much for the thin line of soldiers and it wasn’t long before their courage broke and they ran, leaving a gap square in the middle in the defenses of the valley.
The Azael rushed up, cheering, excited that they had been able to crack the first line of defense with such ease; barely forty of them had been killed, they had been expecting five times that number. They stood on the ridge as if they had conquered a mountain and their inexperience was never more fully on display. Instead of racing down the far side of the ridge to fully exploit the gap, they rested, leaving both of their flanks unguarded.
The center of the hill was taken but there were still enemies to deal with both north and south. The valley men crept along, gathering under the banner of low-ranked sergeants. In the twenty minutes it took for the duke to climb his way to the top with Jillybean in tow, there was a force of approximately seventy men arrayed on either side of the Azael.
Jillybean, her fly-away hair, no longer flying, but rather plastered to her head from all the sweat, was just gazing down once again at the Estes Valley and was just wondering, with some disappointment, how the fight had been so one-sided, when the soldiers counterattacked.
With the Azael congregating on one of the narrower portions of the ridge, the bullets lancing into them couldn’t fail to find a target. A flash of something zipped right across Jillybean’s nose and blood splashed on her arm. For a moment she thought it was her own blood it was so hot and fresh. She scurried beneath a log and curled up like a fetus, while all around her, men screamed, blood flew, and guns hammered the air.
Then there was silence. It was such an abrupt change that she could hear the drip of blood onto an old dried-up leaf. There was a dead man lying over her log. He had the glassy stare of a gutted fish and a hole in his head above his right ear. Death was so common that she didn’t even blink twice at the man and the most she could think was: Too bad it wasn’t the duke.
In the three seconds before the Azael, almost as one, returned fire. Jillybean took the time to examine herself, finding that she was decidedly fine. She amended this, seconds later as The Duke’s thousand men opened up, spraying every hill and rock, every pine and shrub with upwards of fifty thousand bullets. The men emptied their magazines, reloaded and then emptied them again.
Jillybean couldn’t imagine that anything could have lived through that onslaught. And yet, somehow, the soldiers did, many of them, probably most if not all of them. As the Azael were reloading, the soldiers began a deadly return fire that was based on accuracy as opposed to volume of bullets expended.
The Azael huddled behind anything that seemed to give them cover and still the soldiers found their marks. For ten long minutes the Azael absorbed outrageous casualties with no one finding the courage to stick their heads up and risk being shot. Finally, the duke cried out: “Someone do something, damn it! Brad, where are you?”
“Here,” Brad called from somewhere up ahead. “The duke is right! We can’t just sit here. On the count of three, half of us fire and the other half advance. One, two, three!”
No one advanced. All of the Azael shot their weapons, most without bothering to aim. Under the cover of all that wasted shooting, the valley soldiers continued to fire and continued to kill. “What the fuck?” Brad cried. “If we stay here, we’ll all die.” No one even lifted their heads.
They weren’t trained like the soldiers had been. Their fear outweighed all other considerations, including actually winning the fight. And they surely didn’t trust their leaders who, apart from Brad, were cowering just as much as anyone. They were saved, for the moment, by the appearance of Duke Paulus’ regiment which came hurrying down from the opposite ridgeline in four foolishly compact waves.
At first they jogged through the flat area between the two lines of hills unopposed, but halfway across, fire from the north flank caused them to throw themselves under cover. Jillybean couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Almost a thousand men had been stopped by a handful of soldiers.
Still it took the focus off the northern flank and Brad started squirming forward, hissing: “Come on! Now. Everyone move.” This got a hundred men moving but they weren’t moving at the same time that cover fire was being laid down, resulting in twenty of the men being shot before they had progressed thirty yards.
Brad saw the problem and implored people to shoot while others moved. He was the lone voice of reason and authority and somehow managed to corral a company of men to act in some sort of harmony—but too late.
Jillybean saw that the soldiers who had run off in the first heat of the battle were being led back up the ridge. Half moved straight east, obviously moving to shore up the defenses against Paulus’ men and the other half were coming at a diagonal heading to fight Menis’ regiment. What was worse, for the Azael, was that dozens of engines could be heard echoing along the mountain sides.
That meant reinforcements were coming. Jillybean almost cheered. She bit it back by the barest margins though she couldn’t help smiling, not that anyone noticed what the little girl in the yellow dress was doing. They had heard the engines as well. Some were foolish enough to raise their heads.
When two men had their brains spattered onto the rocks, the rest hid themselves. The log Jillybean was under sat partially on two rocks giving her a six inch port to see through and she thought it no wonder that the Azael were afraid to move. The valley soldiers they were fighting were almost magically invisible.
They blended so well with their surroundings that all she saw of them were little twinkles of light.
The duke couldn’t see anything. He was cowered behind a rock and as extra protection he had dragged a corpse onto his back. The only view he had was of Paulus’ men crawling under fire. “Are we attacking?” he cried out. “Why aren’t we attacking? Jay! Frank! Brad! Get your men up right now or I’ll cut off your worthless balls myself and stuff them down your throats.”
“Let’s go, Azael!” Brad bellowed. “Start shooting. Start moving.” He inspired a surge and fifty men started running in short bursts toward the northern flank. The men on the southern flank, who were without any leadership, refused to budge.
Jillybean didn’t think things looked good for the soldiers. Yes, they had men racing to the rescue but there weren’t that many of them, while the Azael were like ants, seemingly everywhere. And now that Azael were beginning to fight back, the twinkling ligh
ts from the soldiers were dampened which only emboldened the Azael more.
Now, groups of four or five would leap up and rush forward and sure, one would invariably go down screaming but the rest crept closer and closer to the soldiers.
But the soldiers of the valley weren’t out of it yet. They had tricks up their sleeves and more gadgets than the Azael. First grenades came flying out of the forest sending shrapnel pinging off rocks and biting into flesh. Everyone went down as smoke filled the air, and not just the black smoke one would expect, there was also blue smoke that didn’t make any sense to Jillybean.
She wasn’t the only one who was confused. Many of the Azael were staring at the smoke in stark puzzlement. Someone even yelled out: “It’s poison!” This caused the attack to stall a second time.
The smoke wasn’t poison, of course, it was a marker. Moments later there came a whistling noise followed by an explosion so loud and so violent that Jillybean thought the entire hill had been thrown into the air. She was too stunned for thought and could only grab her head in her hands and try to weasel deeper into the earth.
The whistling came again and was followed by another mind-numbing blast. Jillybean heard someone screaming, a shrill sound of horror and it too was so loud that she thought that maybe it was more than just one person, maybe it was a dozen men. Before her ears could sort out what was what, there was another explosion followed by another and another and another.
Jillybean had never been so frightened. Her fear was beyond her control and was so total that even Eve could not take over the reins of her mind. She felt like a rabbit caught out in the open by a pack of ravenous wolves. Her instincts told her to stay hidden under the log where she was protected from the blasts, but then she saw the first of the men jump up and run. He was followed by a hundred others and before she knew it, Jillybean was running as well.
All around her were men racing straight down the hill. In their panic they trampled everyone and everything smaller than themselves and that included Jillybean, who was shoved hard in the back. Her feet lost the little control they had and then she was tumbling in a blur of sky and mountain.
It seemed she spun a thousand times, going faster and faster until she fetched up against a worm-ridden log with a thud that rattled her brains something good. The log was very old and so decayed that it was practically mulch, which explained why she wasn’t killed when she crashed into it.
Still she had been jarred into a semi-state of consciousness so that she could see the waves of men rushing down the mountain at her, but she couldn’t understand why they were running or even who they were.
Brad suddenly appeared, standing very tall above her, his long blond hair flying. He didn’t speak, he only scooped her up and went on running. Somewhere between the flat, open area and the start of the next ridge, her concussion caught up with her and she passed out. It was a long spell and the sun was well and truly down by the time Jillybean started blinking her eyes.
She found herself just on the edge of the heat border of a raging bonfire. Her right side, the side closest to the fire was warm while her other side was chilled and damp. Groaning, she sat up and wished, partly, to get closer to the fire; she didn’t feel good. Her head spun and her body ached as if she was sick with the flu. The greater part of her wanted to crawl away into the dark.
It was the king’s bonfire and he raged with greater strength and anger than even the ten foot high flames. He laid blame everywhere and on everyone though mostly it fell on his brother. “Three hundred men dead! Three hundred! And for what? For a girl? Menis, this is your fault. You brought this embarrassing defeat on us with your stupid, childish lusts and your pathetic leadership. What do you have to say to yourself?”
Menis stood with his head hung, refusing to look up into the face of his outraged brother. “There were more of them than we anticipated and they had artillery and they...”
“Those were mortars,” Brad said, “Big ones and expertly fired. Our men haven’t been trained to withstand that sort of...”
“No one asked you!” the king thundered. He turned to Menis and glared. “You need to fix this. I don’t care how, just do it or I’ll be forced to take away your title and your lands.” The king turned from his cowering brother and stomped off. The gathered court left as well but not before looking down their noses at Menis.
Soon it was only the duke, Brad, Jillybean and Kay who stood just at the edge of the firelight, keeping perfectly still, perhaps wishing she were invisible. With Jillybean around it was a possibility. The second the duke saw the little girl sitting up, he pointed a finger at her and hissed: “Kill her! Right now! She’s a goddamned jinx. From the moment I laid eyes on her I’ve had nothing but bad luck.”
Brad didn’t make a move for his weapon. He appraised Jillybean with the firelight dancing in his sharp blue eyes. “I wouldn’t kill her if I were you. She’s not a jinx, she’s a tool...no, better yet, she’s a doubled edged sword, and a very dangerous one at that.”
“I don’t care, kill her.”
Very calmly, Brad said: “No. I have a better idea. Listen.” He cocked an ear and everyone followed suit, holding their heads perfectly still as they heard the far away sounds of gunfire. “That’s our enemies fighting for their lives. They haven’t used that many guns since the first day. That tells us that they’re getting desperate, that maybe they are having their problems just like us.”
“Yeah, so?” the duke asked.
“So they are likely on the edge of breaking up. Maybe one man is holding them together, keeping them going. Maybe if we kill that one man their will to fight will drain right out of them.”
The duke’s eyes grew large. “You want to kill General Johnston.”
“No, I want Jillybean to kill him.”
Chapter 27
Captain Grey
He was the most accommodating of patients…on the first day and that was mostly because he spent nearly the entire time sleeping. Although he did pretty much the same thing on the second day, he was quickly irritable. He had never been one for reclining for very long time. Even back “before” he could barely watch a full length movie without either nodding off or getting up in order to do something.
By the third day of his recuperation, he had to send Deanna off to help Neil, afraid that in his state of irritation he would be a jerk to her accidentally. The C.N.A. who was as nice as a girl could be, wasn’t so lucky and felt the bite of his tongue more than once, the last being when she offered him the bedpan before what she called “bed time.” So far it had been “bedtime” from the moment he’d been carted into the clinic and he was heartily sick of it.
Day four felt exactly like day three except it seemed to have gained extra hours and each of those hours had packed on more minutes than normal and those minutes consisted of long-lasting elongated seconds. All day long he felt like he was on the verge of a full-on toddler-sized meltdown that was just looking for a trigger to set it off.
Once the official bedtime for day four occurred and the clinic grew quiet, Grey broke rule after rule and didn’t care one whit about the consequences.
Slowly, he swung his legs out of bed and stood on his own two feet. It hurt. Even with the drugs they had pumping through his veins, he hurt in all sorts of places. During the first three days, the pain had been greatest in his burned lower right calf. That had been agony every time the sheets had whispered over his bandage. Slowly, that pain had faded into the background as his arm took center stage.
His shredded bicep throbbed with each beat of his heart and at night it got so bad that he started hating his own pulse. It was just like the clock, counting the seconds one after another, only the thrumming clock in his arm came with an ache that couldn’t be totally drugged away.
But standing helped. Though his head spun and all of his aches became extra achy, it was progress. After a spell, he moved his way, as a decrepit old man might with little, frightened shuffling steps, all the way to the bathroom, where h
e took a leak like a proper man should: standing, with his head back and his eyes squarely on the “pee spot” four feet above the rim of the toilet. A groan of pleasure escaped him.
He then made his way back to his bed and collapsed in it to sleep like the dead for the next four hours, whereupon he was afflicted, as he had been for the last two nights, by a terrible case of insomnia. He’d never had insomnia before and he thought it worse than his wounds. Normally, he was asleep within thirty seconds of his head hitting the pillow.
He chalked the insomnia up to the fact that he hadn’t been doing anything but laying around and sleeping for so long that it was causing his body to rebel.
“Well screw this,” Grey said, slinging the blanket back with his good right arm. Doing nothing, even when it entailed trying to force himself back to sleep was against his nature. He stood for the second time in four days and couldn’t resist the urge to stretch. It felt so good to hear his spine crack that another groan of pleasure escaped him.
All in all he felt good, or as good as he could with the pain and the constant threat of death hanging over him. Margaret Yuan warned him twice every day that if he moved his arm he would die. Deanna mentioned it six times a day, and even the C.N.A got into the act, morbidly explaining what would happen if he wasn’t careful—she at least, Grey could tell to shut up.
He was under the strictest orders to keep his left arm completely still. It sat hobbled in a cocoon of bandages with a sling over it which was pinned to his hospital gown. The arm longed to stretch with the rest of his body. In fact, the unnatural confinement the arm endured was half the pain he was feeling and, although he was sure that it was mostly mental, he wanted more than anything to set his arm free.
But he did not. He knew that the warnings were well founded.
Moving the rest of his body was another story. That night he walked the length of his room, all thirteen feet of it, twenty times before he was once again overwhelmed by exhaustion. Sleep came easy after that and the fifth day dawned with him smiling as he almost always did when he woke. A quick prayer passed his lips—again, as usual—and then he was ready to get up again.
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