by J. F. Holmes
There was a loud cacophony of shrieks. I pushed with my heels and elbows to create distance between us. Suddenly there were Djinn all around us, and as soon as they appeared, the fiery ghouls were diving and plunging into the Afghan. They tore at his soul, and he burned, unable to scream. The horde began to dissipate into wisps of embers that blew away in the breeze.
They were gone, the Djinn and the Afghan. There was simply the spilled blood turning the dirt to mud, the burnt marks of a struggle, and the necklace with the jewel. Silence filled the air.
I let myself go limp so I could take lungfuls of air. My mind was a storm of emotions, from relief and confusion, to anger and sorrow. The Afghan had tried to kill me, and I’d killed him instead. He’d been devoured, and I was fine. The fighting was over. My Marines were still dead. I didn’t notice Master Sergeant Quince taking a knee beside me until he spoke, “You got him, Corporal. You got him.”
I think I may have had tears on my cheeks. I got up and saw that the other Marines were gathered around us. “Is everyone okay?”
King nodded with a small grin.
“What just happened to that guy?”
King’s voice came, familiar and almost comforting. “That was our sorcerer. It appears he made a deal with the Djinn. His soul for their service.”
“You guys are pretty calm about all this,” I said with a soft chuckle, trying to calm my nerves.
“It gets old,” Carland said as he handed the necklace the Afghan had been wearing to Captain King. I left that question unvoiced. I could only handle so much for right now.
“So now what?” I asked quietly.
“We’ve got a bird coming in,” Quince said, and I could hear the familiar sounds of helicopter blades.
“And I go back to my company?”
Captain King looked at me with piercing green eyes. “Corporal Lake, I’m sorry, but you won’t be returning to your unit. You’ll need to come with us.” I nodded in understanding, and rose, no complaints.
The Osprey landed, and we ran up its lowered ramp. I took a seat closest to the ramp and looked out at the Afghanistan countryside lighting up with the rising sun. The Osprey pitched upward, and there was still smoke pluming from TCP 2. I said my goodbyes and turned back to Captain King and Master Sergeant Quince. “Sir, how do you do your recruiting?” My question caught the officer off guard. “I want in.”
Troll
J.F. Holmes
Chapter One
It seemed to go on forever. The confusion, the gunfire, the up and down of adrenaline rushes. The darkness, punctuated by the strobe light of muzzle flashes and the screams of dying men. Staff Sergeant Richards had hurt his ankle when he came down hard on the paved road, jumping way lower than they were supposed to. Thousands of acres of pastureland, and the wind had carried him right onto a hard surface. Well, that’s the fortunes of war. At least he was alive and had some of his own unit around him as the sun came up, and they knew where they were. Twelve paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne were nothing to mess with. The night’s terrors had passed with the faint glow of dawn on the horizon, as it had for men for thousands of years. He lay quietly on the knoll above the road, the horizon turning lighter as dawn approached.
Major VanKoop lay next to him, trying to match what he saw through his binoculars with the map hidden under a poncho and illuminated with a red light. Richards lay, patiently waiting. Pulling security around them, Sergeant Simmons held the other end of the line. Between the two NCOs lay the nine paratroopers, half sleeping, half on guard. Rest was a weapon, and the hour they got was enough to keep them going for another day. They were young, and after their textbook ambush of a German patrol, invincible. It was dawn, June 6th, 1944, and the rumble of the great guns pounding the coast of Normandy twenty miles away lent urgency to their mission.
“I can see a roadblock; call it four men, one machine gun.” VanKoop paused, turning to the left, looking across the road. “That’s Saint Remy there, I recognize the church steeple.”
“We were supposed to be interdicting the road to Caen, but you make do when the devil dances, Sir. You’re the boss.” They’d been kicked out of the plane miles from their drop zone and objective, but paratroopers were trained to make mayhem wherever they landed. Their officers and most of their platoon were nowhere to be found, but the battalion S-3 had stepped in and taken charge of their little unit.
“Yeah, well, this bridge is a D+1 objective for the Brits. If we can blow it early, we need to. The road is one of the main routes for the Panzer Lehr Division to reinforce their 21st Armored.”
“Damn. Well, I don’t want to take on tanks with my piano,” said Richards, referring to the Thompson that lay across his chest.
“Should be simple enough, if we hurry. Let’s take out the guard and blow this thing.”
“Yes, Sir. Thank God we have the bomb and Private Soblowski.”
VanKoop grunted. On the ground behind them lay a battered five-hundred-pound aerial bomb, a dud dropped from a B-24 earlier this week. Like any battlefield, unexploded munitions littered the ground; as a kid Richards had found live Civil War mortar rounds every now and then, heaved up out of the ground at his parents’ farm outside Vicksburg. This one had been sitting almost right where they lay, part of a string of bombs that must have been aimed at the bridge. A series of craters gaped silently on the far hill, attesting to how hard it was to actually hit anything with a bomb.
“Still gives me the willies, even if he did pull the fuse. Not that any of us would know it if it DID go off.” He shook off those thoughts, rubbed at his tired eyes, and said, “Gather the men and let’s review the plan,” and the word went down the line. Soldiers who had been deeply asleep snapped to alertness, and they formed a small circle around their leadership.
“OK,” said the major, “just past the crest is a bridge over the Orne River. We’re going to use that bomb to blow it, since we lost all our demolitions. There’s one roadblock on the south end of the bridge—fortunately for us, on our side. It’s about three hundred yards from here, and I count four men, one motorcycle, and an MG 42 pointed north to cover the bridge.” As he spoke, he drew all this in the dirt, using rocks and twigs to indicate positions.
“Sergeant Simmons,” the officer continued, “you and I will take three men and move to a position within about a hundred yards of the roadblock. There should be enough cover to get that close, then an open field.” The young man nodded; he was a veteran of the Invasion of Sicily, and hard as nails at twenty years old.
Seeing that Simmons understood his part, VanKoop turned to Sergeant Richards. “You’ll take the others and set up the BAR, giving harassing fire. If you can hit them, fine; if not, don’t worry about it. I just want their attention focused on you.”
The NCO looked at Private Orson, their BAR gunner. The kid was a wizard with the .30 caliber automatic rifle; Richards suspected he could take out the entire roadblock from four hundred yards. A plan with redundancies, though, was a good plan.
“Once the firing starts, give them a good minute of random bursts. Do NOT get into a machine gun duel with them; that 42 will eat your ass for lunch.” Orson smiled, a ‘yeah, whatever, Sir!’ smile. It was, VanKoop knew, a smile of confidence, not cockiness. They were Airborne, after all.
“Then Sergeant Simmons’ squad will assault through the objective,” the major continued. “When we give the all clear, Staff Sergeant Richards and his men will carry the demo down to the bridge,” summarized the officer. “Are you sure you can make this thing blow, Soblowski?”
Another confident smile. “Sir,” he said in his heavy Bronx accent, “I was a miner before the war. Isn’t anything I can’t make go bang. Especially with that motorcycle battery.”
“Except your wife,” whispered Orson to him. The Pole ignored him, though the smile disappeared off his face. His Dear John letter in England had been a sore subject for weeks, and though he would give his life for his fellow soldier, it didn’t mean he had to LIKE the kid.
“Any questions?” VanKoop made each of the men repeat back to him their roles in the plan, and when he was sure they hadn’t missed anything, he turned them over to their NCOs to get everything in order.
It was a quiet time. Five minutes to psyche yourself up to do something that might get you killed or seriously wounded, and this far behind enemy lines, both were probably the same thing. Some drank water, others chewed on a chocolate bar, a few said quiet prayers. All checked their weapons and ammunition. Multiple prayers to God might save your ass, maybe, but an M1 Garand only gave you eight chances and a ping, so you had to make sure your equipment worked right.
They moved out slowly; the sun rising in the East had yet to clear the valley. Richards could see the four men hunched over as they moved down an irrigation ditch, but a row of hedges obscured them from the Germans. No traffic moved on the road, but high in the air overhead, contrails danced and engines droned. Always in the background was the thunder of big guns. They hardly noticed it anymore.
“OK, they’re set. Don’t worry about what the major said, Orson, give it to ‘em good. No chances of return fire.”
“You got it, Sarge,” said the teenager, and he lined up the sight—already elevated for the estimated three hundred yards—on the two men sitting on ammunition crates next to the machine gun. He exhaled, muttered, “Jesus forgive me,” and pulled the trigger.
****
Deep beneath the surface of the river, in a cave that arched up over the water level to provide a dark, gloomy cavern, the valley’s oldest inhabitant felt the gunfire through the ground. He was a creature of nature, attuned to the earth around him, and the bombs earlier in the week had greatly disturbed him. He knew of the modern world, had watched it develop over the last five hundred years, and didn’t like it. The bridge, his bridge, the one he was inexplicably linked too, had felt the effects of war before, and the creature had raged and killed, devastating the countryside. The land had been quiet for more than a century, and he only took the occasional toll of a random life. The creature felt OLD, and this was too much to be borne. With a heave, he lifted his enormous bulk from the floor where he had been resting and slipped into the water.
****
The dead smelled, but you got used to it. Bodies ripped by bullets spilled guts, and blood had a coppery tang. The ragdolls of the dead Germans were sprawled in that boneless way only the dead can be. Three lay around the roadblock, another hadn’t made it to the motorcycle, and an unseen fifth had been dropped as he ran across the field. In any other time, him trying to run with his pants around his ankles would have been funny to the young men, but each knew it could have been them in a different reality. Orson had killed four without changing the twenty-round magazine, and Private Compton had drilled the runner through the back from his position with Sergeant Simmons. The man who’d killed him draped a poncho over the half-naked body of the teenager, and no one said anything.
When Richards’ squad came up, they were sweating from the exertion of hauling five hundred pounds of dead weight between them, along with their equipment. They collapsed on the ground, exhausted. There wasn’t much time to rest, though. They’d barely sat down and started swigging water when Sergeant Simmons had them dragging it toward the bridge.
“Well, that worked,” said Staff Sergeant Richards to Major VanKoop, examining the bodies. The officer just shook his head, thinking about where to place the bomb. Together they walked onto the span, toward the middle. Soblowski was already at work on the motorcycle, stripping out the electrical components.
“Set up a defense for both approaches while we get this thing in place,” said VanKoop to the NCO. “Put the MG-42 here, and the BAR at the far end of the bridge. SOBLOWSKI!” he yelled, “HOW LONG?”
“FIFTEEN MINUTES, MAJOR!” he yelled back.
****
The creature felt the first footsteps on the bridge, felt them in his mind. It was his bridge, and no one crossed it without permission. For five hundred years he had exacted his toll whenever someone moved, and the French peasants had learned the price of his peace. He had slept for the last century, only waking briefly while the world moved on. Half aware the whole time, the creature was now awake, and enraged. The battle raging around the French coast had stirred up energies he hadn’t felt in almost two decades, and for the past day he’d been slowly stirring. In his mind he could feel the intent of the humans above to destroy his bridge. Not even during the Revolution had there been such a threat. Reaching the low piers, the troll grasped the stonework and hauled himself upward.
****
Major VanKoop had just turned back to the south when a large, gleaming, wet form climbed over the stonework. What he saw would have been called a “Troll” by the Norse who settled Brittany, but had become known in French in later years as an “Ogre”. The thing reached its full height, maybe twenty feet tall, and roared in an incomprehensible language.
“What the…” began the startled major, reaching to unsling his rifle, and the Ogre’s open hand struck his head, ripping it completely off his shoulder. Staff Sergeant Richards turned to see the major’s body dance for a few seconds, blood spurting from the stump of the neck, and then collapse.
Ken Richards had grown up on a farm, and had seen blood in plenty. He’d hunted the woods of the Roanoke Valley, and knew the darkness that sometimes dwelt in the land and lived in the deep hollows of the mountains. His introduction to combat in Italy had inured him to the paralyzing effects of surprise, and even as his thinking brain stuttered, his animal brain reacted. The Thompson came up, the thing was in his sights, he aimed low, and the bolt slid forward, chambering and firing the first fat .45 caliber round. He held the trigger down as the full metal jacket rounds blazed from the barrel, letting it climb across the thing’s body. The soldier let off the trigger after ten rounds, let the barrel drop, and fired again, emptying the magazine.
The creature staggered as if being pelted with rocks, shook himself, and roared as the bolt locked back, empty. From twenty feet away, Richards methodically dropped the empty, then reloaded. He stepped forward to lean into the rise and pulled the trigger again, this time not stopping. The majority of rounds hit, but the thing ignored the impacts and walked forward, an evil grin on its face. The paratrooper turned to run and slipped on the blood spilled on the bridge. With a laugh, the creature grabbed his ankle and dragged Richards toward its mouth. He twisted and drew his combat knife, stabbing downward. It was like hitting a piece of iron, and the monster laughed again.
With the characteristic buzzsaw sound of the German MG-42, his squad let off a massive fusillade. They probably figured Richards was already dead, and were as scared and surprised as he had been. The tracers skipped past him, hammering the thing’s back, then stopped. That much firepower should have riddled whatever it was like swiss cheese, but it just stood and shrugged. Looking down at Richards, it grinned cruelly, lifted him by his ankle, and threw him off the bridge in the direction of the northern shore.
As he pulled himself from the water two minutes later, after struggling out of his gear and almost drowning, the 82nd Airborne NCO could hear shots and screams echoing across the river, accompanied by the monster’s roars. Reaching the road again, he looked across the span as the thing picked up the discarded bomb in one massive hand and threw it a hundred yards. Around the end of the bridge lay the bodies of the rest of the American soldiers. One man, he couldn’t see who it was, tried to crawl away, but the creature grabbed him and casually bit his head off, chewing vigorously. It waved to Richards and slipped over the embankment, dragging the body down with it, and disappeared beneath the water. Struggling not to slip into madness, the sergeant turned and started jogging toward the thunder of the guns far to the north.
Chapter Two
There were still shells dropping on the blood-soaked sand of Omaha Beach at 03:00 hours, but the men standing in the deep hole ignored it. It was no different than a thousand other holes on Omaha Beach, except that thi
s was the command post for Task Force 13, and a radio operator fielded half a dozen high priority calls at once.
At first glance, all was chaos, but then a pool of calm settled off to one side. A man with hard features and grey in his close-cropped hair sat up against the wall of the crater, ignoring the commotion. Colonel Archer sat in the sand because the creature in front of him was a little over two feet tall, in the shape of a man, wearing a red cap. Between the two stood a slightly taller, but far more beautiful, golden haired woman, all of four foot tall.
“Tylwyth,” said Archer, “it is very important that you translate directly. I need your word that you will.”
The Welsh fae looked at him and rolled her eyes. In a high, musical voice, she answered, “You insult me. We have the treaty between yourself as the leader of your band, and my queen, Mab. And I am OF the Tylwyth, but that is not my name.”
The human ran his fingers through his dirty hair. “Sorry, it’s been a long day. I’m grateful for your people’s help. What’s your name?”
“Like I would tell you and let you have power over me. You may call me Angharad ferch Afrelia,” she answered, and turned back to the smaller French sprite, blistering him up and down in a language full of consonants but few vowels. The Korrigan bowed deeply, grinned at Archer, and shot back something equally nasty. Then he actually vanished.
“Gods be damned rude French bastards,” said Angharad.
Archer actually smiled. It was at times entertaining to see the—well, whatever they were—creatures, dealing with each other. “Do we have our treaty, or not? And I thought he was a Briton, like your people in Wales.”
“Maybe a thousand years ago, mortal, when I was young. Now they are all stinking garlic eaters. You have your treaty. In return for one thousand ounces of gold and five hundred gemstones, the Korrigan people will, how do you say in America, ‘gremlin’ the Saxon machines where they can.”