by Matt Wallace
Ritter enters the scene just in time for the finals of the tournament that has lasted for two days and drawn competitors from all over the world (and in true “all over the world” fashion, 90 percent of those competitors are Americans, who’ve been joined by a handful of Scandinavians on holiday, a surly German war fetishist, and a Filipino ex-soldier whose entire village took up a collection to send him to the tournament).
The final two competitors stand shirtless in the ring. Cindy wears a basic black sports bra, while her male opponent is allowed to freely flaunt his nonfunctioning nipples. They both have numbers scrawled on their stomachs in thick red marker, and they’re armed with knives fashioned from hard nylon that are typically used in training and demonstrations.
They wear no protective gear.
This isn’t a safety-oriented crowd.
Their ring is composed of four elongated plastic folding tables arranged in a haphazard square, allowing them just enough room to maneuver. Two referees in Hot Zones T-shirts observe the match from different angles.
Cindy’s opponent is a determined-looking Jicarilla Apache who has traveled to the tournament with a small battalion of supporters from the reservation, all of them wearing T-shirts that declare them “Team Perea.”
When one of the refs gives them the command, the two finalists begin slashing at each other, dipping forward and leaping back with frantic speed. There’s some technique to be seen among the spastic feints and strikes, but actual combat is a messy, disjointed affair. Speed and determination often win out over casual martial-arts training.
Cindy is a pit bull, her knife hand obsessively going for her opponent’s throat. Each time the plastic blade connects with flesh the referees separate the two of them and award her a point.
They fight to five points.
Cindy harmlessly slashes Perea’s throat five times without positive contact from his blade even once.
When the final point is awarded no one in the crowd seems particularly happy she’s won.
Unsurprising, considering she’s one of maybe five women in a ballroom of two hundred men.
The top prize is fifteen thousand dollars. Within four hours of accepting her title and check Cindy has gambled half of the money away in the casino. Ritter observes her from a safe distance the whole time. She pounds rum and cokes with alarming rapidity and rarely speaks to anyone around her.
When she anoints herself too buzzed to make rational card-playing decisions, Cindy retreats to a video poker machine far away from the nearest other patron.
That’s where Ritter approaches her, taking a seat in front of the machine one removed from her own.
“You want something?” she asks him after a few awkward minutes.
Ritter nods. “I do. I want to hire you.”
“What I look like to you, dude?”
“A soldier.”
That statement briefly takes Cindy aback, and then she looks down at the exposed ink on her arms. An Explosive Ordinance Disposal “crab” badge is tattooed on her right forearm while a navy anchor whose shaft is a lit stick of dynamite opposes it on her left.
“All right,” she says, more composed. “So what?”
“So I’m going to talk for sixty seconds, and if you want to hear more I’ll be in the McDonald’s in back of this shit-hole waiting with two cups of coffee. Fair enough?”
Cindy shrugs. “Whatever.”
“You’re what, six months out? You’re drifting. You’re drinking too much. You’re gambling too much. You can’t remember the name of anyone you’ve fucked since your discharge because you never really asked their name in the first place.”
Cindy starts at that, angrily, but when she searches his expression for some bullshit gender-based judgment she finds none.
She realizes he sounds like he’s speaking from experience.
She realizes he’s one soldier speaking to another.
“You’re still a soldier,” he continues. “That’s all you want to be. You’re not built for civilian life, but that’s where you are. You need a mission. But with your service record the only mission anyone is going to give you would be wiring the car of a drug lord or sweeping the caravan of some profiteering corporate fuck overseas. And you don’t want that. Because despite why they booted you, you have a conscience.”
“Who the fuck are you?” she asks him, on the verge of tears.
“I can offer you a mission you can be proud of. One that’s about serving people instead of blowing them to hell and gone. It’s straight work. It’s well-paid work. And I’ll never ask you to do anything that will make you hate yourself.”
Ritter stands up. “That was a little more than sixty seconds, but I thought that pitched better. Like I said, I’ll be in the McDonald’s over there.”
Ritter exits the casino. He crosses the hotel lobby to the small food court that operates twenty-four hours. He orders two large coffees from the McDonald’s kiosk and occupies a table in the common area.
He waits.
Cindy joins him before the coffee has cooled.
Now
They drive northwest, to Bontddu, near Barmouth, in Gwynedd.
None of them except Hara have any idea how to pronounce the names, and he doesn’t feel the need to comment.
They pass the more famous Clogau mine, which remains active to this day. A few short decades ago there was still as much as five hundred thousand ounces of gold waiting to be unearthed in its bowels, but since the late nineties it’s been mined completely dry.
They drive off the beaten path to a far less known, smaller mine that has been abandoned for years since its veins ran dry. It’s removed and set against a Tolkien-esque wilderness.
Ritter halts the van and they all get out, Ryland reluctantly and uncoordinatedly. They pull coveralls on over their clothes, fitting the straps of air filtration masks around their necks and attaching devices to their forearms that monitor air-toxicity levels.
The entrance to the abandoned mine isn’t simply boarded up, it has been blasted shut. Behind the dusty, rotted wood planks is a wall of tightly packed-in boulders of varying shape and size.
Hara helps Cindy unload a portable drill press attached to an eight-foot-high jack from the back of the Transit. The drill’s bit is diamond a half-inch thick. As they wheel it up to the entrance Ritter and Moon use crowbars to pry away the boards zigzagging the collapsed rock face.
“If I can be of any service at this point in the proceedings you’ll inform me immediately, yeah?” Ryland calls from where he’s reclining against the open back of the van.
“I really dislike him,” Cindy casually informs Ritter.
“He dislikes himself more, I promise you.”
Cindy cranks the press several feet up the jack and begins drilling a hole through one of the boulders packed in the entranceway. She repositions the press seven more times and drills seven more holes at various points and heights in the obstruction.
Once that’s done, she removes and uncaps several airtight containers from one of the main rucksacks in the van. She pulls out thin lines of high-tensile cord, the ends of which are weighted with thin cylinders. Attached to the lines at three-foot intervals are what look like compressed wads of tissue paper drenched in bright pink liquid.
Cindy carefully and meticulously begins feeding each line through a hole she’s drilled in the rock.
“Is the van out of your blast path?” Ritter asks her.
She never takes her eyes off her work or halts her hands. “Yeah, we’re good. It shouldn’t push the debris past a twenty-foot diameter. It should mostly just collapse.”
“I’m hearing should a lot,” Moon comments from the sidelines.
No one says anything, but Hara stares down at him with a rare showing of emotion, that emotion being highly annoyed.
Moon shuts up.
“All right, we’re ready to go hot,” Cindy announces. “Everybody behind the van.”
They all obey, joining Ryland who already
has two cigarette butts crushed into the ground at his feet.
Cindy reaches inside her coveralls and removes an iPhone.
“Moon, if you ask me if I have an app for this I’ll perforate your chest cavity with my middle and forefinger,” she warns him in a neutral tone.
“You’re still pissed about the black-Irish thing, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” Cindy says, and taps the iPhone’s screen.
The blast itself isn’t loud, but the sound of the rocks breaking apart is particularly grating on their ears. Debris no bigger than pebbles sprawls down the hill, none of it touching the van.
What’s left is a pile of rubble that rises to about half the height of the entranceway.
The darkness beyond is now visible.
“Artful as always, Cin,” Ritter tells her.
For the first time since arriving in Wales, she smiles.
Hara is able to clear away most of the rubble with a shovel before the rest of them have even retrieved theirs. Instead, Ritter passes out the rest of the gear and large digital torches to each of them.
“It smells like a Welshman’s arse,” Ryland complains.
“I look forward to that chapter in your memoirs,” Cindy says.
“Let’s go, Ryland,” Ritter bids him. “You’re on.”
Removing the current lit cigarette from his mouth and flicking it away with a sigh, Ryland enters the mine ahead of them.
“Why gold?” he demands as they trek through the main shaft. “Why must they eat gold?”
“Matters of goblin digestion don’t concern me,” Ritter says. “This is the job.”
“Why Welsh gold, then?”
“Because it’s the rarest in the world and it’s a royal goblin wedding. They want the best.”
“Overcompensating gombeens,” Ryland mutters.
He reaches inside his coveralls and removes a large gemstone.
Even in the almost total darkness it gleams bloodred.
Ryland begins holding it up against the walls of the shaft as they tread along.
“So you’re really going to grow new gold here?” Moon asks him.
“Theoretically.”
“Even though there’s none left in this pit?”
“Traces enough remain.”
“And it’ll be real? The gold?”
“As real as the odor now assaulting us.”
“I don’t get it. If you can literally fucking grow gold, why the hell are you working at Sin du Jour?”
“Alchemic karma,” Ryland says as if that’s all the explanation required.
“What the hell is that?”
“If I attempted to profit personally the gold would turn to shite. Literally.”
“That sounds made-up.”
“If it wasn’t a very real thing do you imagine I’d currently be dwelling in a disused recreational vehicle behind a catering firm in Long Island City?”
Moon thinks about that.
“Yeah. Fair enough.”
Someone snickers in the dark.
It might even be Hara.
The gem in Ryland’s hand begins pulsing.
“What the devil—”
He pauses.
“What’s up?” Ritter asks. “You find a vein?”
“No, that’s not what this means.”
“Then what does it mean?” Cindy asks with alarm.
Ryland turns to the anterior wall, squinting into the darkness.
There isn’t a single break in the rock, yet somehow a golf ball–sized sphere of rusted metal emerges from the wall of the chamber, flies across the space, and cracks him in the left temple.
He falls.
Hard.
Dozens upon dozens of spheres begin firing through the wall, brutally pelting them. Ritter, Moon, and Cindy break for the side walls, trying to clear the strike path.
In the next moment Hara is there over Ryland, his back to the sphere-spewing rock, scooping up the drunken alchemist as easily as a father picking up his toddler.
“Go!” Ritter orders him. “Get him out!”
Hara hesitates for less time than can be practically measured, then charges back down the entrance shaft.
“What the fuck—” Moon yells before catching a sphere in the face and dropping to a fetal ball at Ritter’s feet.
Ritter looks down, shining his light on a half-dozen of the assaulting objects as they roll to a halt and unfurl themselves.
They’re not spheres.
They’re tiny bipedal beings.
Each one is the height of an index finger, bearded and with flesh that looks as hard as the rock from which they emerged. Their entire bodies and all their appendages are adorned with curved pieces of armor obviously designed to become near-solid spheres when tucked together.
As he looks on, the armored creatures begin dog-piling one another, more spheres rolling to join what at first looks like a chaotic mass of metal but soon begins to take a definite shape. The sound of tumblers falling in a lock echoes throughout the chamber as the small armored figures interlock with one another, their mass building in height and defining in shape until it begins to resemble a full-sized human form.
Ritter’s seen enough. He turns to grab Cindy, but sudden streaks of color crackling with repellent energy knock him back, separating them.
It looks like a wall of rainbow-colored caution tape has been unfurled in front of him.
Ritter turns from it to find himself face-to-face with a gargantuan automaton fashioned from hundreds of armored bodies; they’ve even arranged themselves to give it a vague double-wide face with hollow eyes and curving lips.
“All right, that’s a new one on me,” Ritter says, and it sounds like a disturbingly casual admission under the circumstances.
The construct doesn’t banter with him.
In the next moment Ritter’s casual demeanor has turned dire as he ducks and rolls from the path of a sweeping metallic limb intent on decapitating him. Ritter bounces to his feet, now behind the automaton, curling his right arm and driving the thick ulna bone of his forearm into the thing’s many-eyed “back.”
It’s a blow that would painfully readjust the spine of a human opponent.
This opponent, however, has no spine and a backside made of modular refined ore from the bowels of the Earth.
As such, the impact bruises Ritter’s forearm down to the bone, which also splinters and sends chemical signals of agony to his brain.
Ritter steps back, half a dozen curse words blending into one unintelligible oath that only ends when he has to duck to avoid the automaton’s next swing as it turns around.
The construct advances on him, Ritter backpedaling and scantly avoiding several more blows. He feints and ducks the metal limbs, the facilities of his mind generally tasked with such things collectively shrugging at him as he requests a plan of action.
“Oh, fuck it!” he yells out loud.
Ritter ducks under the next swing and dips briefly against the construct’s body, reaching out with both hands and gripping one of the interconnected armored creatures balled up there. With a berserker’s cry and every ounce of strength he can muster, he rips the sphere free of the rest of its fellow and leaps back.
The act causes the briefest moment of confusion among the rest of the things composing the creature’s body.
More important, it causes the briefest moment of hesitation.
Ritter jumps back in, still holding the armored ball, and smashes its surface against the “face” of the construct, detaching several other spheres from their host and sending them flying.
He immediately reverses the position of the armored ball in his hand and backhands the other side of the construct’s “face,” depleting it further. Ritter continues bashing it with a piece of itself until finally he drops down and smashes the best approximation of a knee joint he can locate on one of the thing’s “legs.”
The construct is forced to one knee.
A grating chatter, like a thousand
squeaking voices, rises from its every nonexistent pore.
It’s a confused sound.
It’s vulnerable sound.
It’s stopped lashing out.
Ritter rears back for a coup de grâce, but halts as his entire body abruptly seizes, pain shooting up through his arm. He turns to look at his hand and can’t help freezing further to marvel at the sight of a much tinier hand protruding out from the armored sphere.
That tiny hand is holding an even tinier dagger.
That tinier dagger is buried in the meat of Ritter’s palm.
As he squints in puzzlement at the sight, the tiny hand twists the tinier dagger.
Ritter curses and drops the sphere altogether. He hears it skitter over the dank, rocky terra and in his anger and pain scans the ground in the dark, hoping to crush the thing underfoot.
An eternity might as well have passed by the time he remembers his main opposition isn’t the thing that stabbed him.
It’s behind him.
And the confused chatter has ceased.
Ritter already knows he won’t have time to turn around, but he tries anyway.
The gargantuan construct raises a four-fingered hand and swings it into the side of Ritter’s head, breaking itself apart and sending a dozen bearded warriors flying upon contact.
Their elated hollers are the last thing Ritter hears before the darkness takes him.
2009—Algeria
The average Westerner finds little reason to travel to the Saharan interior of North Africa, much less the middle of the desert, life-threatening miles from anything resembling civilization.
Ritter has never been average in any respect.
As such he currently finds himself staring at a horizon made of fire in the hottest season of the year, when there’s not a cloud to be seen in the sky and the air is so dry it sucks at every pore like a thousand microscopic vampires.
His guide is an ancient, withered Igbo man draped in a woefully oversized Isiagu who sits in the back of their jeep obsessively playing Angry Birds on his smartphone.