London Burns

by Chris Philbrook

  Gunfire popping off in bursts from the palace was sporadic, but steady, and the crowds watching were the same. They had flocked to the sides of the streets and found cover but they still watched and filmed, lured in by the glory of violence and wanting to be near a calamitous event in history. Beck was certain they were idiots.

  “Any luck?” Beck asked Patil.

  “Naught,” Patil said. “I can’t get them at all. Forty Commando is trying to get in touch with the Palace for us but they aren’t responding. They are saying Heathrow is eating up resources left and right. I guess a plane crashed. Ran out of fuel.”

  He could hear the planes circling miles above when the gunfire paused. “What the hell does that have to do with us?” Beck asked. “How did communications get so shit, so fast?”

  “Can you imagine how crushed the phone service is? Look around. There has to be five hundred 999 calls running right now, and then for every phone ring there’s a radio dispatch to an emergency service. Then there’s the pricks on their cell phones calling for mum and dad,” Patil said, giving up trying to contact anyone. “Ten million pricks all screaming at the same time.”

  “That’s a lot of pricks,” Thurgood muttered.

  “Shut up,” Beck said. “Alright, brilliant. If we approach, we stand a good chance at getting shot. If we leave this cover, we stand a good chance at getting shot. If we remain here, we stand a good chance at being bitten or beaten to death. So, let’s let them know we’re here, identify ourselves the old fashioned way, and move to flank. Motterhead, get ready to throw smoke. Everyone else, get ready to move.” Beck got out a smoke grenade.

  The horse-faced giant nodded and yanked a tubular smoke grenade from a pouch on his belt. He moved his rifle to the side and pulled the pin in unison with his sergeant.

  Beck hurled his grenade with all the strength he could muster into the courtyard separating the monument from the gate. The same courtyard that saw tens of thousands of tourists every month, but had now been turned into the scene of a massacre. Motterhead saw where it landed, and threw his short of the spot.

  The two grenades popped loudly and issued out massive streams of dense white smoke. The devices hissed and spat as the thick cloud shot across the ground and into the still June air, forming a wall of smoke.

  “ROYAL MARINES! FORTY COMMANDO APPROACHING! HOLD YOUR FIRE!” Beck screamed. “Follow me. Head to the left gate. Do not return fire if they shoot.” Beck took off trotting in a crouch, using the monument’s circular retaining wall as cover. When he ran out of that real estate, he jogged along the line of the spreading smoke, taking care to give the bodies of the wounded attackers a wide berth. Beck’s men followed him, spacing themselves out to avoid bunching up.

  “TO THE LEFT GATE, MARINES!” a voice yelled out.

  “ROGER THAT!” Beck hollered back to the stranger.

  A gentle breeze picked up, and the wall of smoke slid over the top of the line of runners. In the time it took to take a breath, they had been swallowed up by the viscous cloud. Their visibility had evaporated and Beck slowed to a trot, then a walk. The dense smoke killed the noise of the battlefield, and sent them back two hundred years into the past.

  “Go to night vision?” Private Thurgood asked in the orange-lit cloud of smoke.

  “It won’t help,” Corporal Averill replied. “We need thermal to see through the smoke. Bugger this shit.”

  “Watch out for the fucking bodies. No one trip!” Beck snapped. He knew they were walking through the edge of where the wounded and dead lay. He could hear the moans of the injured and dying in the haze.

  “Soldier, please help. They shot me. Help me please I’m bleeding badly,” a man called out. Beck couldn’t even see where he was, but he was close.

  “Fuck off, prick,” Motterhead said to him. “Got what you had coming to ya, ya did.”

  “Please. I’m begging you,” the voice said again. “Oh thank you, if you could just take my hand—aaahhh!” the man started screaming. The marines backed away from the sound of the voice, trying to put space between the man and whatever was making him scream bloody murder.

  “Move boys. Quick,” Beck said. The injured man screamed again. Someone else in the impenetrable smoke screamed too. Out of fear or pain, they couldn’t tell.

  “What the fuck is happening out there?” Motterhead exclaimed as the unit picked up speed, shuffling their feet in the impenetrable dark.

  “Run boys!” the same policeman’s voice hollered from somewhere inside the palace’s gate. “They’re starting to get up and head your way!”

  “Shit,” Beck said to himself. He prayed for clear space, and bolted. The sounds of his men’s feet on the courtyard stone told him they did too. His legs pumped up and down, putting one boot in front of the other with a slap as he ran. Each stride his mind braced for a trip, either a piece of curb or a dead body. He prayed for smooth stone, he prayed to stay upright.

  He tripped.

  Something caught his right ankle and he lost his balance. Time dilated as he launched forward into white space, feet above the hard stone above. Beck tried to tuck, to roll onto his back so he’d land on his shoulder on the stone but something had his foot in a grip. It almost felt like he’d been snared by a trap his boot felt so tight. His forward momentum halted, he plummeted to the hard ground below.

  Something cracked in his shoulder, or maybe his chest. Stars flew in front of his eyes and his breath shot out of his mouth in a gust. He gasped and tried to remain as still as he could to halt the pain in his shoulder. He reached down to his hip to grab the pistol there as he felt hungry, clawing hands and a heavy weight move up his leg.

  His hand found an empty holster at the moment he felt a sharp, piercing sensation just above his kneepad.

  “Mother fucker!” he yelled as his men reached and passed him. They stopped when they heard his scream. Beck began punching down at the burning sensation in his leg. His right fist connected with someone’s face, and he followed the blow with another from his left fist. One after another he grunted in exertion and pain as he pummeled the person biting his leg.

  “Hold still,” he heard lance corporal Patil say in a panic. Looming above him he saw the form of the marine lean over, rifle aimed flat to the earth at the body of the person attacking him. Patil fired a single shot into the side of the head of the person biting Beck, and the pain in Beck’s leg ceased. He dug his fingers into the mouth of the asshole who hurt him and dug the jaw open, scraping his finger and a nail on the sharp edge of a broken tooth. The teeth came free with a shock of pain, a run of his own hot blood, and he backed away on the ground. The body of his attacker fell off his lower leg, all dead weight. Two of his men scooped him up and with another grunt of pain, they helped him hobble off through the fog of war.

  The pain in his leg was extraordinary, but he stayed upright with the help of his men.

  As they exited the cloud of smoke they saw one of the black and gold gates crack open ahead. Five heavily armed policemen stood behind the protective steel, their weapons trained on them, and the threat of whatever still stalked in the smoke. The marines slipped through the gap in the gate and over the lifted anti-car blockade. Lifting his leg cost Beck notable pain, but they were safe. He’d delivered his men.

  “Christ you need a medic,” an elderly cop with a MP5 and a mustache almost as dangerous said. “Is that gunshot? Or a bad bite there?”

  “Is there a doctor or medic inside?” Beck asked with a wince.

  “Aye,” he said. “We’re glad to have you. This day has been hell and is heading to worse. We’ll be the richer to have you and your boys here, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you,” Beck said. He turned to Motterhead, Hodges and Averill. “You three cover the gate with these men and women. Patil and Thurgood, would you help a chap to the infirmary? Constable could you spare us a guide. Marines don’t know the way here. We aren’t always invited to Royal affairs.”

  “Of course. We’ll get you patched up right q
uick. Follow me,” the mustache said.

  As they walked away—the two marines helping the third—Beck felt something like relief. Maybe it was shock setting in, but it felt good to him. He’d gotten all of the men who had survived the helicopter crash to the palace, safe and sound. He would forever regret the loss of his medic, Corporal Adamson, but he clung to the idea he’d done right by the rest.

  “Good job, lads. You’re good men.”

  Patil adjusted the weight of his sergeant. “Thank you sir. You’ll be back at it in no time.”

  Patil was right. He’d survive a little bite, and then he’d track down that cabbie and get his pistol back.

  It’d be brilliant.

  —An Elmoryn Short Story—

  Roots Grown Deep

  “Sure is hot this summer,” Lily Thornbrooke muttered. “It’s near high moons above and far from dawn and I’m sweating like a lamb in an oven.”

  Lily’s cousin Raymond Thornbrooke—a willowy tall boy still aching through his last puberty growth spurt—sat beside her on a wooden bench atop one of the two gatehouses that greeted travelers to their small village of Low Marish. The red moon Hestia above was near to full and bright red like a child’s cherry flavored sucker. Following the red moon across the black night was the blue-white orb of Lune, Elmoryn’s other moon.

  “Aye, you’re not wrong. This leather armor has chapped everything on my body it’s touched since I put it on after dinner. I can’t wait for dawn to get it off,” Ray said as he adjusted the rest of his toughened leather breast. He picked up his bow from the wooden crenellations he and Lily guarded their town behind and tried to puff out his chest. The two may be related, but that was no reason to not look manly in her presence.

  “We’ve a couple hours to go,” Lily said, brushing back a sweaty strand of her dark brown hair. She tucked it behind her ear where hopefully it’d stay for ten minutes.

  “Aye. You have any water left?” Ray asked her. “All this staring into the woods, waiting to see one of our dead neighbors walking towards the wall has me thirsty.”

  “Yeah, here,” she said and handed him a clay jug filled with fresh river water. He removed the rubber stopper and took a swig.

  “Still cool. Thank you,” Ray said. “When do you suppose this will all end?”

  “I wish I knew. Father Burke says these people from the woods are not undead. His spells have been almost no use to stop them,” Lily said, leaning over the edge of the raised wall to peer into the depths of the southern forest. A drop of sweat ran off her chin and spattered on a wide leaf far below. She lifted her head and looked up over the forest, over the horizon she couldn’t see towards the nation she’d never visited. Ebonvale was to the south. A land of strange people with a strange language that only they spoke. Brave people, but unwelcoming people. Not too unlike the people of her own nation; The Shires.

  “He’s daft. Gotten into his ceremonial wine one too many times. You saw the man yesterday, didn’t you? He walked like the dead, staggering all about. Distant eyes, saliva everywhere. Going angrily at the first person he saw. A blind man could see he was the undead.”

  “I think Father Burke is right,” Lily said.

  “How?” Ray laughed. “And how would a girl know what was undead and what wasn’t?”

  “How would you? Tell me how many times you’ve laid eyes on the walking dead? How many people on your side of the family didn’t make it to an apostle to be blessed before coming back to kill? Hm?” She already knew the answer. No one in their family had succumbed to the curse of Elmoryn.

  “Well… I… It’s just…”

  She leaned over the thick wooden logs that made up Low Marish’s wall and tried to ignore his rambling attempt at saving face. A crack of a stick breaking alerted her to movement below.

  “Are you listening to me?” Ray asked, frustrated.

  “Quiet,” she whispered, holding a finger to her lips. She then pointed the dirt smudged digit over the top of the wall until it pointed in the general direction of where she heard the noise. Ray pulled a long wooden arrow from a quiver that hung on his belt and notched its feathered shaft on his bow’s string. Lily did the same and the two family members peered again into the black of the woods below.

  Another branch broke.

  Ray looked around and jogged down the wall to a wrought iron sconce. He lifted the torch out of the cone shaped iron placement and came back, holding its light and smoke aloft. He left a trail that looked like a rising steam engine’s stack as he went.

  “Watch out,” he said and threw the torch off the wall.

  The flaming stick tumbled end over end as it fell, casting off a wild spiral of smoke, embers and sparks. The leaves of the tall trees cast insane shadows as the orange and yellow light from the fire spun again and again. The torch bounced off a thick clump of branches and leaves, the hit the damp forest floor with a faint thud. The flame almost died out from the fall and impact, but after a few moments of sizzling away the moisture surrounding it, the torch flared back to life, illuminating the underbrush and forest floor.

  A figure walked past the flame.

  “Sweet shit,” Lily exclaimed, grabbing Ray’s arm tightly.

  “Ow, damn Lily. That hurt,” Ray said, swatting her grip from his bicep. He’d bruise the next day, he was sure of it.

  “Shush, watch it. Pay attention,” she said, already having moved past their earlier argument.

  Down below the person walked with an uncoordinated limp past the fallen torch. One leg seemed to be lame; causing a limp or stagger that a healthy man would’ve tried harder to hide, or fix. Both arms hung strangely limp at the waist, failing to move with the motion of the legs, sending the walker further off-balance. A protruding root tripped up the stranger’s good foot, causing a forward fall that resulted in the intruder falling straight to the ground against a rock, winding up in a thorny bush. They didn’t cry out in pain, or even gasp. After a few seconds, the now bloody interloper gathered themselves and got to their feet.

  “See? Dead as lamb’s wool,” Ray said.

  “No, he’s not dead at all. He’s bleeding. Dead men don’t bleed,” Lily said.

  Ray turned his attention down to the blood-soaked person pulling themselves up using a tree trunk. Sure enough she was right. The filthy yellow shirt the emaciated man wore had a hundred pinpricks of red welling larger and larger. The thorns had spoiled the undead answer, but raised another.

  What caused the living to act like the dead?

  “What do we do?” Ray asked.

  “Fetch the captain of the guard. He’ll be walking the walls somewhere. I’ll watch this fellow while you’re gone. Be quick about it,” Lily said.

  Ray looked at her, then at the frightening apparition walking less than twenty feet below, then he took off running.

  “Show me,” Acton Cobb said to Lily. The captain of the guard had just arrived at the spot along the wall Lily and Ray had seen the wounded, staggering man wander. Acton had his own bow—one much larger and more powerful than the teen’s—at the ready. A wide-headed arrow sat on the string, ready to cut the strange person down.

  “Here,” Lily said, pointing down at the base of the wall.

  Acton’s height made it easy for him to see downward. He leaned over through one of the archer notches of the wall and peered down. In the shadows he saw movement, but with the moons at his back he couldn’t identify what was happening in the dark. He tugged on his brown beard and thought.

  “Fetch another torch,” he asked as two more village guards arrived, their bows at the ready. Ray scampered away and came back, holding another cloth-wrapped, pitch-soaked torch. The flame burned bright as he handed it to the older, bearded leader of the town’s defenses.

  “Thank you, Acton said as he took it. He leaned back over and dropped it carefully lengthwise a few feet from the shuffling intruder below. It fell straight to the grass below, and cast light on the man scratching his nails off on the log wall below.


  “By my mother’s spirit, that’s Grant Barber,” Acton exclaimed. An expression of sickness washed over the captain’s face as the man now known as Grant looked up at Acton with oddly discolored eyes. Grant didn’t snarl like a hungry wolf, or reach up to attack like a normal undead would. Instead he looked about as if he were in a stupor and trying to figure out how best to reach the familiar face above.

  “Grant Barber? Son of Hadwell and Celine Barber?” Lily asked, shocked. “Don’t they live a few miles south of Low Marish? You think he walked all the way here at night? Like that?”

  Acton leaned back inside the protective barrier of the wall. “He must’ve. Walking toward the torch lights on the wall I surmise. Grant took a wife from Leister a few months ago, at the end of spring. I knew him to be building a new farmhouse for his wife a mile from his parents. Carving it out of the woods. The deeper woods.”

  “That’s never good,” Ray said. “He might’ve… disturbed something in the trees. Something that did whatever to him.”

  “No,” Acton said. “I think he might’ve disturbed the tree.”

  “There’s a… special tree in the woods?” Lily asked, her voice trembling more than a little.

  Acton looked her dead in the eye. “It’s been dormant for longer than I’ve been alive. They thought…”

  “What?” Ray asked.

  “We thought it had died. They thought it did, at least. We have to gather the clan elders. They’ll remember what happened last time. Keep this man from leaving the wall. Throw a fishing net over his head if you have to. I’ll wake the elders. Dawn approaches.”

  The central clan hall of the village of Low Marish warmed up to intolerable levels by the dawn’s break. The heat and humidity in The Shires had reached epic proportions earlier in the summer, making most homes and structures uncomfortable for the entire season. The vaulted-roofed log hall lit by torches and filled with the scared residents of Low Marish boiled up and over far worse and long before the sun’s heat caressed the thatched roof. The meeting couldn’t last, or they’d cook to death.