by J. F. Holmes
Gritting his teeth, Dante stared out the window and tried to think of another way out of their predicament. Get your fingers out of your asses, boys. You’ve got survivors in here if you’ll do something about it. Movement at the rear of the formation caught his eye, and he pressed his nose to the glass with a frown. “Ty, look at this.”
An unmarked cargo truck had pulled up behind the ring of armored vehicles and Humvees. Heavily armed men in tactical gear unloaded from the back, formed up, and jogged toward the front. That in and of itself wasn’t so strange. The fact that the camouflage pattern they wore clashed with the ACUs worn by the Army personnel around them was odd, though. “Marpat?” Tyson guessed.
“They’ve got enough Brads to turn this plane into Swiss cheese,” Dante muttered. “Why bring in a squad of Marines?”
“What did you say?” Omar blurted. Dante and Tyson turned to see the businessman scrambling across the aisle toward them.
Ty gave him a look, but Dante just shrugged and jerked a thumb over one shoulder, pointing out the window. “The Marines have landed. See for yourself.”
The Arab shoved his way between them and pressed his face against the window. He considered the unfolding tableau, then cursed in a low, harsh-pitched voice. The words tickled something in Dante’s eardrums, and he found himself twisting his neck in an involuntary cringe.
Tyson wiggled a pinky in one of his ears as though seeking an elusive drop of water. “Dude, what was that? It wasn’t Arabic, was it?”
Omar turned to face them and straightened. “That was a tongue unfit for Western mouths, fool. It is the language of creation, you uncultured monkey!” He waved a hand, and an invisible fist slammed into Dante’s chest, carrying him and Tyson to the opposite side of the plane. An armrest slammed painfully into the small of his back, and he’d have cried out if the punch hadn’t blasted the air from his chest.
“Damnable American cowboys,” Omar spat. He kicked Dante in the stomach. “Talk about crashing my plane, will you? Disrupt my plans?” He braced his hands on his hips and stood over the two men with an imperious air. “The problem, gentlemen, is that while my minions don’t like the sunlight, their fear of it is not what’s kept them back.” He smiled, but the otherwise cheery expression didn’t touch the cool cobalt of his eyes. “I am.”
Dante’s fingers scrabbled across the carpet, seeking out the reassuring weight of Graham’s cane. The hot, salty taste of blood filled his mouth. His body ached from the three rapid-fire blows he’d taken, but he’d be damned if he’d go out lying on his back. He found the cane. “You talk too much,” he rasped, then swung.
There wasn’t much mustard behind the swing, but the handle sank into Omar’s bicep and elicited a yelp at the same moment Tyson slammed a heel into the Arab’s opposite knee. The yelp deepened into a howl of pain, punctuated by the crisp celery crack of ripping cartilage. He ain’t gonna walk that off.
Dante pushed himself to his feet as Omar staggered back. He spat a glob of mucus and blood and brought the cane back around for another swing. “You got at least one thing wrong, dickhead. We’re Rangers, not cowboys.”
“Attend me!” Omar shrieked, and a chorus of growls rose from the rear of the plane. Hassan and Ajay had watched the sudden conflict in stunned silence, but the explosion of activity from coach elicited cries of dismay.
The Brit’s scream was loudest. “They’re coming!”
Tyson’s voice turned uncharacteristically serious. Dante couldn’t help his smirk. When surfer bro turned mean, it was on like Donkey Kong. “Handle it. We’ve got Omar.”
In spite of his pained tone, the Arab didn’t sound all that impressed. “Oh, have you now?”
Dante glanced at his friend and nodded slightly.
As Omar raised his hands to attack, Tyson pulled the pin on his own fire extinguisher, spraying the Arab’s face with a dense blast of white powder. The other man coughed. Rather than swiping at them with another invisible fist, he brought his hands involuntarily to his eyes. Dante rushed forward, holding the cane out with both hands. He clotheslined the Arab in the throat with the shaft, shoving the bigger man up against the bulkhead. In a flash, he realized that he’d carried the fight in front of his own seat. The corner of his abandoned paperback stuck out of the storage pocket, but that wasn’t what drew his attention.
He had Omar pinned against the emergency exit door.
“Ty!”
Dante kept one hand on the cane, pinning the struggling wizard, or whatever the hell he was, and reached down for the lower release handle. The single word and his action were more than enough to signal his intent, and Ty joined him. The other man pulled the upper handle down, and—
He was falling free on top of Omar, who remained on top of the door. The shift lifted the pressure off the Arab’s neck, and he narrowed bloodshot eyes as he raked his fingers at Dante’s face. They hit the ground before the other man could strike, the impact blasting the air from Dante’s chest as he sandwiched the other man between himself and the chunk of the aircraft.
He rolled to one side, sucking in desperately greedy gulps of air. He’d lost the cane in the fall, and he fumbled for it even as Omar hopped to his feet with a screech. Dante’s hope that the knee injury might slow the maniac down crushed, he frantically slid himself across the tarmac on his back, using his elbows and heels for leverage.
Dante’s adrenaline rush blurred the shout over the loudspeaker into an indecipherable mess. If Omar heard it, he didn’t react—his eyes locked onto Dante, and he staggered toward him, face contorted into a bestial snarl.
The first bullet didn’t stop his course, but it jerked his shoulder to one side. Dante didn’t know if it was the pain or the impact that finally drew the Arab’s attention to the troops surrounding them. His eyes widened in shock, and he raised his hands in a familiar gesture. The air turned suddenly electric, and all the hair on Dante’s body stood on end. Whatever was coming, it felt a hell of a lot worse than the invisible fists the madman had thrown around inside the airplane.
Staccato thumps pounded Dante’s body, and he howled in victory as a burst of tracers transfixed Omar and tore him limb from literal limb. Evil wizard versus one of the long-enduring fruits of John Moses Browning’s genius?
Browning won.
All was silent, and Dante realized that even included the plane. He raised his head. Tyson stood in the exit row opening, eyes wide.
“They stopped,” his friend shouted. “They all just quit fighting and hit the floor. They’re dead, again.”
All was still for a moment, and then Ajay called out, “Can we get off the plane now?”
***
Humorless Marines ushered Dante and Tyson into the small room as soon as they contained the rest of the survivors in an empty hangar. He’d been carrying the responsibility for the civilians for so long that he almost refused to go in until he knew the people would be taken care of, but Dante told himself to relax. The little voice in the back of his head continued to point out that a world of monsters and magicians was something totally new. In spite of that, he felt secure in the knowledge that the troops would take care of the shell-shocked passengers and flight crew.
They shoved Dante and Tyson into a small room, about ten by ten. Four chairs and a rectangular metal table bolted to the concrete floor under a single, flickering light fixture were the extent of the décor.
With a shrug, Tyson pulled a chair out and sat facing the door. A pair of water bottles, dripping condensation, sat neatly in the center of the table. While his friend cracked the bottle and downed half the contents in a single swallow, Dante sagged into his own chair and tried not to wince. He wasn’t thirsty, but he could have done with a couple dozen ibuprofen and maybe a beer. His entire body ached, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so sore. Iraq, probably.
They sat and stared at the walls until, perturbed by the silence, Dante said, “How far did they get into the plane?”
Tyson pushed the cap of
his water bottle around on the table for a moment before answering, “That hole you left made for one hell of a big picture window. The sunlight didn’t burn them up.” His friend sounded almost disappointed. “It slowed them down, though, made them stumble around like they were drunk. All the passengers crushed forward while we held the line. Everyone else made it.”
Dante grunted, then smirked. “I told you they were zombies.”
Metal scraped on metal as a lone figure pushed the heavy door open and strolled into the room. The Marine was a tall, powerfully built black man. The bare skin of his scalp gleamed under the intense glow of the overhead lights, and the creases in his fatigues could double for knife blades. Dante was Airborne to the core, but even he knew what crossed rifles under three rockers meant. The lizard-looking thing with wings on the unit patch was less recognizable, but he went with it. “Gunnery Sergeant,” he said with a nod.
The new arrival smiled. “I hate to break it to you, but they weren’t zombies, either, Sergeant Accardi. Based on the lore, the most fitting term is barrow-wight. A particularly nasty form of undead raised and controlled by a necromancer.” The Marine slid a printed copy of what looked to be a painting across the table. The paper might have been new, but something about the clothing the figure represented in the art wore told Dante it was old. Artistic license aside, it was quite evident that Omar was the subject of the painting. “Nazr bin Omari, on the occasion of his visit to the Tang Dynasty of China, circa 645 AD. This guy’s your basic mystical cockroach—he’s got more lives than Toonces the Driving Cat. One-time acolyte of Abdul Alhazred, until he went his own way because his mentor was too kind-hearted for his taste.” The gunny’s voice turned thoughtful. “On the bright side, barrow-wights are only contagious as long as their creator’s still around. Otherwise, the entire plane would still be in quarantine.”
Dante thought back to the mess on the tarmac. “You’re shitting us, right?” He was about to say the entire premise was impossible, then remembered the red-eyed creatures and Omar’s invisible fists.
“You guys turned the asshole into Hamburger Helper,” Tyson pointed out.
“Off the top of my head, that’s at least the fourth time on this continent in the last century,” the gunnery sergeant said with a shrug. “Dude’s been around since before Mohammed, and he’s got a real mad on for the world. Letting a horde of undead loose in a major metropolitan city is right up his alley.”
Dante blinked a couple of times before he found his voice. “You’re serious.”
The Marine laughed. “Son, you’ve never met anyone more serious. Gunnery Sergeant Aloysius Blakely, Joint Task Force 13, USMC.”
“What’s that, some kind of specialized recon unit? We’ve rolled with those boys before,” Tyson said. He took another drink of water, but Dante could tell that his friend was rattled.
“I saw that,” Blakely said. “Recon’s tough, don’t get me wrong, but they’ve got it easy. The things they fight are usually human.” He slid a phone out of a pocket and flipped through it. “I’ve got to say, you two have pretty impressive records. Contractors, though? Don’t you think that’s kind of beneath you?”
Dante sensed the test and pushed down his initial instinct to react defensively. “The money’s great. Chow’s good. The commute’s a bear, don’t get me wrong. But the 95 through Boston ain’t much of a peach, either.”
Blakely’s eyes bored into his own. To his credit, Dante had just spent the last twelve hours staring at red-eyed monsters and fighting, if the gunny wasn’t full of shit, an immortal wizard with nothing more than a freaking stick. He kept eye contact and didn’t blink.
He didn’t know if the gunnery sergeant had gotten what he was looking for, but the other man’s expression softened. One corner of his mouth drew up in an amused smirk. “Not going to lie to you guys. The pay’s okay, but you aren’t going to get rich on it. Chow and the commute depend on the day. But…” He let the word hang, and when Tyson leaned in with his elbows on the table, Dante knew that his friend felt the same way he did. “We hold the line.”
“Which line?” Dante murmured.
“The only one that matters. Inter Caelum et Infernum. The line between Heaven and Hell.”
He caught Tyson’s look out of the corner of his eye, but Dante didn’t turn away from the gunnery sergeant. In the end, what else could he say? He’d seen the line up there on the plane, keeping ordinary men, women, and children safe from things of darkness. To step away now was unfathomable. “We’re in.”
Daniel Humphreys is the author of the Z-Day series of post-apocalyptic sci-fi thrillers and the Paxton Locke urban fantasy series. His first novel, "A Place Outside the Wild", was a 2017 Dragon Award finalist for Best Apocalyptic novel. He is a frequent contributor to Cannon Publishing, and his work can be found here on Amazon.
Revolution
Lucas Marcum
The following events were compiled from the personal letters and diaries of Major Sean Tillerson, commander of the 4th Pennsylvania Rifles, from his time on campaign with the Continental Army during the American War of Independence. The papers were discovered amongst a trunk of his personal effects some two hundred years after his death. The following was composed by his great-great granddaughter, Major Sally Tillerson-Hensly, United States Marine Corps, and published in 2017 by the Joint Staff Support Directorate, Joint Task Force 13, United States Marine Corps.
Chapter One
“A Summons”
November 20th, 1777
My dearest Abigail,
I should have written you before now, but with the Army on the march and our expectations of wintering in New Jersey, I have not had time to put pen to paper. Our fortunes have soured of late, and we find ourselves encamped some twenty miles north of Philadelphia, near the Schuylkill River in a small hamlet known as Valley Forge. We have settled into winter quarters to await the remainder of the Army.
The men, while brave beyond compare, are in a dreadful state. It would rend your tender heart to see them so. Poorly clothed, afflicted by all manner of ills and pestilences, and sorely in need of shoes, this Army somehow holds on. I fear that it may not last, should the enlistments expire before some measure of victory in our great struggle is attained, even though the dreary news is as unceasing as a funeral drumbeat. It is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that despite a valiant defense, Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer have fallen, leaving the mighty Delaware undefended and the riverway open for the British to reinforce the garrison in Philadelphia.
This is grave news, and the men’s morale has suffered most terribly at this grim happenstance. Indeed, it is almost Christmas, and their state and prospect of facing the bitter winds of winter and defeat near the holidays may be too much for many to bear. Indeed, even my previously stout spirit has felt the toll of the defeats, and I long to see you and our boys and to…
Pausing, I stopped to listen to the wind howling outside my meager shelter. The banging of loose sideboards made for a constant racket, and the cold that penetrated through the cracks in the small shack was a shock every time I reached outside my blankets. Reaching for my quill once more, I heard the banging again, and realized it was someone knocking on the door. Wrapping my blanket tight, I stood and moved to the door, and opened it, pushing against the wind.
In the dim firelight I could see the burly figures of two men, hats and scarves low, obscuring their faces. Both wore swords indicating that they were officers, and they were shivering in the bitter cold.
“Gentlemen. Army business, I presume. Please, step inside.” I stepped back to make way for the bundled men. They stepped inside and crowded near the small fire pit, seeming to hunger for its warmth.
The bigger of the two men pulled his scarf down and removed his hat. “Captain Tillerson, sir.”
Recognizing the man as one of the general’s aides, I replied, “Colonel Fitzgerald. To what do I owe the honor? I can hardly presume this is a social call.” I gestured toward the door. “Not on such
a night.”
Colonel Fitzgerald shook his head grimly. “No, sir, I fear not. I bring both news and orders.” He traded a look with the man next to him, and then continued, “May I introduce Lieutenant Jonathan Turley of the Continental Marine Infantry. Lieutenant Turley, this is Captain Sean Tillerson of the Fourth Pennsylvania Rifles.”
Having uncovered a youthful face ruddy from the cold, the man offered a hand, which I accepted. He spoke in a pleasant baritone, “Your reputation precedes you, Captain. It is a pleasure.”
“The pleasure is mine, Lieutenant.” With a wry grin, I added, “You’ll not find much shipboard action here, sir.”
The young man grinned back. “Shipboard or not, as long as we get our hands on those bloody redcoats, my men and I are happy.” His smile faltered. “I fear that the British are the least of our worries for the time being. Sir?” He looked at Colonel Fitzgerald, and respectfully lapsed into silence.
Colonel Fitzgerald nodded, and said, “Indeed. Captain, your men can track, can they not? We already know they are fearsome shots, with those peculiar muskets of yours.” He gestured to the long rifle hung carefully on the wall, its finely engraved walnut stock shining faintly in the flickering firelight.
With a nod, I replied, “Aye. They can. Most of them are frontiersmen from Pennsylvania and skilled in woodcraft.” With a slight shrug, I added, “Those that are left, anyhap.”
“Aye. Your men suffered fearsomely at Germantown.” He eyed me steadily, and continued, “Suffered more than most, but you held the line. May have bought the entire Army time to retreat.”
“So they say, Colonel. It does the dead no good.”
There was a moment of silence broken only by the wind howling outside before the other officer replied, somberly, “Indeed.” The burly colonel turned back to the fire for a moment, then he spoke without turning, “Sean. The general needs you and your men for a special task.” He turned back around and regarded me for a moment, then continued, “There’s something out there.” He gestured at the flimsy wall of the hut. “Something dangerous.”