by James Cook
“To answer your second question, I call myself the Tribune of Blackmire because I am the protector of these people. You see, in ancient Rome-”
“I went to school, dickhole,” I interrupted. “I know what a tribune is.”
Another blow, this one hard enough to make my ears ring. A dark blob appeared at the top of my vision, growing and expanding until it broke free and trickled down my face. Several more followed it until I had a thin, steady stream of blood obscuring my left eye.
“Then you know why I call myself Tribune,” Tanner said, and sat back in his chair. He knocked back another drink and closed his eyes, savoring it. When he spoke again, his tone took on a businesslike quality.
“You can’t imagine my surprise when I heard you were alive. Your exploits against the Free Legion made quite a stir last year. You’re practically a celebrity, although it’s probably not the kind of attention you would wish for.”
Noting my surprised expression, he chuckled and leaned forward. “Come on now, Gabriel. You didn’t really think all your good deeds would go unnoticed did you? You’re Gabriel Garrett, strong and mighty and feared throughout the land, the high protector of Hollow Rock. Did you know there is a price on your head? The president of the Alliance himself issued the warrant.”
“I’m flattered.”
“You should be. It’s quite a sum. Which brings me to why I’ve gone to so much trouble and expense to bring you here.” He pushed his chair back and kicked his feet up on the desk. “As much fun as I’m going to have repaying you for abandoning me to die, you are not my primary target.”
I shook the blood out of my eye and looked up. “Let me guess. Silva.”
He nodded. “Thus far, he has proven elusive. I know he is alive, and I have a few men pursuing his trail in Nevada, but unfortunately, such endeavors are quite costly. I have the necessary equipment to stay in touch with my men, but providing them with supplies and resources is difficult in the extreme. However, with the reward I’m going to get for turning you over to the Alliance, I’ll have the necessary working capital to mount a larger expedition. If my agents are as good as they claim to be, then Gustavo Silva should be enjoying my hospitality before the end of the year.” He sighed and rubbed his hands together, expression wistful. “That will be a most enjoyable reunion indeed. But in the meantime, you and I have some business to settle. Douglas, if you please?”
One of the men holding me left the room and came back with a large wooden box. He set it on the ground in front of me to make sure I had a good look at its contents. There were chains, iron eye-bolts, and a variety of torture instruments.
No fucking way.
I surged upward, catching my captors by surprise. The one standing closest to me caught the top of my head against the bottom of his chin. I heard a crunch and saw a tooth spin past me. Wasting no time, I heaved to my left and drove the crown of my head into another man’s face, racking up my second broken nose of the day. He went down, giving me the opening I needed to bend down, pop my handcuffs below my butt, and leap into the air. My hands came up in front of me as my feet touched the ground. Turning around, I saw the other men had recovered and were rushing me as one. I sidestepped right and clubbed one of them on the side of the neck, sending him stumbling into the others and causing them to trip over one another.
Your weapons!
I turned and ran for the table as fast as my hobbled legs could take me. Just as I reached a hand down to grab my pistol, I had a flash of thought—one of those realizations that passes through your mind so quickly it is immeasurable as a span of time—and realized that in the last few furious seconds I had been so focused on fighting the guards, I had completely forgotten about Tanner.
The crackle was familiar.
So was the pain, and the fall, and the flash of light.
I caught a dim outline of Tanner standing over me holding a blackjack, and just before the darkness took me under, I felt a pang of concern my skull might be shattered.
Then nothing.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I was back in Fallujah.
The sun beat down hot and angry, determined to kill us all. I was sitting in a chair, rifle propped on a bench-rest improvised from a crib and a sandbag. There was a wall in front of me with a hole large enough to climb through. The building around me had been taller, once, but a few insurgents had decided to use its rooftop as a sniper hide, sealing the structure’s fate. A few rounds from an Abrams reduced the building from five floors to three, and reduced the insurgents from human beings to meaty paste.
The remnant of the third floor’s outer wall rose up in front of me, concealing me from the column of insurgents advancing just over three-hundred yards away. I peered through a scope mounted atop an M-40, mentally cataloguing information to relay back to two companies from the First Marine Expeditionary. In the reticle, I watched angry, bearded young men serpentine from building to building, weighed down by heavy bandoliers of ammunition, AK-47 rifles, RPGs, and RPK light machine guns.
Rocco’s voice sounded beside me. “You want to call it in?”
“Naw,” I replied, accent much thicker than it should have been. Life in the military eroded my Kentucky drawl until it was almost gone, but that happened much later. In my early twenties, I may as well have been fresh off the farm. “You go on ahead. Don’t wanna come off my point o’ aim.”
Rocco’s voice monotonously detailed the enemy troops’ number, armament, disposition, and location. It took him maybe ten seconds, a sterling example of military brevity. The response came a few seconds later.
“Copy Echo Six. Are you in position to engage? Over.”
I could hear the grin in Rocco’s voice. “Like a motherfuckin’ boss. Over.”
“Acknowledged. Echo Two and Echo Four are en route, ETA six minutes. You are weapons free, clear to engage. Happy hunting, gentlemen. Acknowledge.”
“Copy that, Echo One. Engaging now. Just make sure the cavalry knows where we are; I don’t want to catch a TOW to the face. Over.”
“Wilco. Echo One out.”
“Here we go,” I said, letting out half a breath and lining up on the first target. He was very young, maybe eighteen, not even old enough to grow a proper beard. He was short and painfully thin, even under his billowing dishdasha man-dress. The kefiyah on his head was torn and dirty, and his sandals looked like he found them in a roadside ditch. I might have felt sorry for him under other circumstances, but the bandolier of loaded magazines, the rifle in his hands, and the murderous determination in his dark eyes made him an enemy. There was a universally known maxim most of the world understood, but these insurgents had evidently never heard. It was a simple statement, boiling down to nine easy words:
You don’t fuck with the United States Marine Corps.
My finger tightened on the trigger. The reticle rested steadily, aimed center of mass. No headshots today. This was serious business, and American lives were on the line. No room for showing off in that equation.
The shot surprised me, letting me know I was doing it right. I saw the projectile’s faint, shimmering vapor trail as it sped towards its victim, crossing the distance at incredible speed. The young man in my sights jerked from the impact, his mouth forming a little O of surprise as he slumped over.
“Nice one. Got him in the heart. Didn’t know what hit him.”
As Rocco spoke, I was already shifting my aim, working the bolt to chamber another round. The insurgents heard the report, and could see their dead comrade leaking blood onto the dusty street, but they could not pinpoint where the shot came from. At this distance, the noise was low, and with all the identically ruined buildings between us, from their vantage point, Rocco and I were nearly impossible to spot.
The next target was a little older than the first one, full black beard, checkered kefiyah, clutching an RPK, eyes wide with alarm. Another trigger pull, and he joined his comrade on the ground.
That one got them moving. Rather than the orderly advance
I had been watching moments ago, they broke into a panicked scramble to find cover. I caught another one on the run as he tried to slide behind a parked vehicle. The impact caused him to miss a step and pitch forward, landing on the car’s trunk, then slide limply down.
I was just about to carve notch number four when Rocco spoke. “What the fuck?”
My head lifted from the rifle as I looked up, blinking at the sudden change of parallax. “What?”
“Down there, where you shot the first guy.”
I looked through the scope again and swiveled to the body of the dead insurgent. Only instead of lying in the dirt, he was on his feet, eyes locked in my direction. I could swear he was looking straight at me.
“The fuck…”
After adjusting the scope’s magnification, I peered through it again and got a much enlarged view. The insurgent’s mouth hung open, eyes vacant, skin a ghostly shade of gray. He had dropped his rifle, and seemed not to notice the heavy belts of ammo hanging from his gaunt shoulders. Shifting focus to his face, I saw that one of his eyes, the right one, was normal. But his left eye had gone milky white, a deep, livid scar bisecting it from forehead to chin.
“Shit,” Rocco said. “There’s another one.”
On instinct, I moved to the body of my second victim. He too had risen, same pale skin, same slack jaw, same dead eye, same scar. I checked the third insurgent. Same result. Then the rifle’s magnification shifted, and in my peripheral vision, I saw Rocco’s hand making an adjustment on the knob.
“Gabe, look at them. What are they doing?”
Through the wider field of view, I could now see that all the insurgents had stopped and stood still, eyes locked in my direction, weapons held loosely. As if on command, they canted their rifles into their chests, directly over the heart, and in unison, pulled the trigger. More than a hundred plumes of red splattered against walls, vehicles, doors, and other insurgents. They collapsed like marionettes with the strings cut.
I tried to move but couldn’t. I was frozen, limbs locked into place, utterly immobile. I watched as, a few seconds later, the insurgents rose and began shambling toward me, all of them bearing the same scar and clouded eye. Hours passed. They filled the streets, flowing like water through alleys and around houses, their moans filling the air like the winds of a storm. Finally, I heard them coming up the stairs, feet dragging and kicking aside broken bricks and other detritus. In the distance, I heard the distinctive whine and boom of a mortar shell detonating.
“We deserve this you know,” Rocco said.
I found I could talk. “What? Deserve what?”
Whiiiiinnne boom. Closer this time.
Against my will, my head rose, the rifle fell from my hands, and I turned to look at Rocco. His spotting scope stood forgotten in front of him as he sat with his head down, boonie hat obscuring his face, thumbs spinning around each other. There was something wrong with his skin tone. As I watched, it shifted from dark olive to pale pink, and finally to the dull gray hue of the grave.
Whiiiiinnne BOOM. Less than a hundred yards away.
“That.” The skin of his hand peeled apart as he gestured toward the door, reminding me of a hardpan desert drying after a rain. “It’s what waits for all of us you know. We think we’ve stabilized, that we’re holding the line, but it’s not true. We’re in decline. All of us. It might be slow, but a slow decline is still a decline. A hundred years from now, there will be nothing left. Just crumbling skyscrapers, and nuclear hotspots from long-dead reactors, and all the garbage we left behind.”
WHIIIIIINNNE BOOM! The floor beneath me shook, dust cascaded from the ceiling. The impact was right outside the building.
Rocco looked up at me and I felt my heart go still in my chest. His face was the same mottled color as his hands, and his left eye stared blindly ahead, scar standing out purple against the dead flesh around it. When he smiled, I counted five missing teeth.
“But for us? After all the harm we’ve done, and all the blood on our hands,” he raised his palms, and there was crimson liquid smeared from the tips of his fingers all the way down to his elbows. “Retribution comes much sooner.”
My head moved again of its own volition. My hands came into view, covered in the same gore as Rocco’s. Behind me, I heard the door smash inward and the amplified cries of the undead. Unable to control my actions, I looked back at Rocco just in time to see him lunge for me, mouth open wide. Suddenly, the spell was broken and I was in command of myself again. I reached out and grabbed him by the throat as he slammed into me, bearing us both to the ground. His fingers dug into my shoulders like iron hooks, ripping a cry of pain and fear from my throat. I struggled to hold him back, but he was too strong. His mouth grew slowly, inexorably closer. I gibbered incoherently, begging him to stop, screaming for help, but the only response I got was another long whine, and then, as if right on top of me, the world exploded in a blinding flash of orange and white.
I felt cold, then hot, and then-
*****
I woke up.
The invisible man with the hammer was back, working as diligently as ever. I tried to sit up, but my hands were cuffed behind my back. Scuttling around on the floor, I exhaled strongly, tightened my abs hard enough to make them cramp, and with a grunt of effort, slipped my wrists down to my thighs. That done, I pivoted until my back was against the door and passed the chain beneath my ankles.
Should have killed me when you had the chance, Tanner.
Behind me, I heard raised voices. I pressed my ear against the door and listened. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but they sounded agitated—frightened even. Then there was a tremendous WHOMP, followed by a shockwave that knocked me away from the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth. As I scrambled to my feet, I realized the mortar rounds I heard in my dream were not figments of my imagination.
Blackmire was under attack.
There was little chance Tanner’s men would take the time to let me out, so I crouched in the center of the room, fingertips in my ears, mouth open so another shockwave wouldn’t knock my teeth together and break them. I didn’t have to wait long until the next blast. It came from the other side of the building, powerful enough to rock the floor and send me stumbling.
Recovering my balance, I stepped back to the center of the cell and waited. A full minute or so ticked by, but there were no further blasts. I decided it was worth the risk and went back to the door, listening. I strained my ears and closed my eyes, concentrating hard. There was nothing. The voices were gone.
Then, echoing through the wall on my left, I heard the unmistakable sound of a light machine gun. In half a second I was flat on the floor, trying to make myself as small as possible. When bullets start flying, you never know where they are going to hit. People don’t always aim so well when they are enthusiastically trying to kill one another. If you’re a non-combatant, the best thing to do is take cover, keep your head down, and stay the hell out of the way.
I listened to the sounds of combat grow and become more heated. A volley of bullets thunked into the wall behind me, high over my head. The lack of shrapnel peppering my back told me they didn’t get through, which made me feel just a tiny bit less exposed and vulnerable. Several minutes passed as I lay there, hoping against hope no bullets found me and no one blew up the building I was in.
And then I heard a fist pounding against the door.
“Gabe? Gabe, you in there?”
For a second, I was too surprised to move. Then I was on my feet and shouting. “I’m here! I’m in here!”
“Hang on, step back, the door’s locked. Gotta set a breaching charge. Get to the back of the room and stay low.”
I did as ordered and lay flat, eyes squeezed shut and facing away from the door, arms covering my head. A few seconds later, there was a deafening POP, and the door to my cell shivered open.
“Gabe? You all right?”
I stood up and walked to the doorway. The figure standing in it was framed by the
firelight of the Red Rooster across the street as it burned to the ground. Through the broken shutters over the windows, I could see several other buildings nearby were on fire. I stepped closer to the man, peering at his face.
“Hicks? That you?”
A set of white teeth appeared in the darkness. “Never thought you’d be so happy to see me, did you?”
If not for the cuffs, I would have hugged him. “What are you doing here?”
“Long story. I’ll tell you later. For right now, we need to get you out of here.” He clicked on a red-lens flashlight and looked me over.
“Damn,” he said, wrinkling his nose at the smell, taking in my battered face and general deplorable condition. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing good. Don’t suppose you have any water, do you?”
He responded by dropping his pack and taking out a clear plastic bottle. “Here you go. I knew they were holding you prisoner. Figured you might need it.”
I took a few sips, careful not to drink too much and make myself sick. As dehydrated as I was, too much water could be just as painful as not enough. The effect was immediate, like pouring water on a sponge. I’ve had sex that didn’t feel as good.
“Can you do something about these?” I said, holding up my cuffs.
“One sec.” He rooted in his pack again and produced a set of picks. “Let me see your hands.”
He worked swiftly, turning the picks with deft, practiced fingers. The cuffs snapped off my wrists, then my ankles. Total time: maybe ten seconds.
“You are full of surprises, Caleb Theophilus Hicks.”
He smiled again. “You have no idea. Come on, let’s find you some clothes. Can’t have you runnin’ around here in your birthday suit.”
Remembering my gear in Tanner’s office, I said, “Follow me.”
As I turned down the hallway, Hicks stopped me by grabbing my shoulder. “Hold up, take this.”