by R. A. Jones
So focused was he on the fallen enemies at his feet, however, that he failed to see the pair of them crouched on a rocky ledge above and to his rear. Like him, the two soldiers were now disarmed and both bled from at least one wound. But life remained, and with it their intent to carry out their orders.
Both landed on Carter’s back at the same time, driving him to the ground. But, no, it wasn’t the ground but rather a corpse upon which he fell.
A cry, not of pain but of horror, escaped his lips as he found himself staring into the raw and bloody hole that had once been another human being’s face.
Fear and revulsion powered him to push up and away, throwing his attackers off him and to the side. He staggered to his feet, still yet clutching his empty rifle. As his opponents struggled to also rise, he tossed the rifle up, catching it by the barrel with both hands.
Carter swung it like a baseball bat. Its wooden stock shattered from the impact as it slammed into the face of one of his attackers. He almost puked at the sickening sound of breaking bone and cartilage, at the sight of the German’s head snapping back and flopping limply to one side.
The second German lunged forward, wrapping his arms around Carter’s legs. As the American went down, this time actually onto the ground, the soldier began to claw his way up his opponent’s body, hoping to lay hands on his throat.
Carter still held the remnants of the broken rifle in his right hand, and he swung it now like a street thug might wield a lead pipe. The German grunted as the rifle barrel laid open the back of his head, but did not release his grip on the American.
Carter swung again, this time catching the soldier just above his left ear. The skin split and blood spewed, and the soldier relaxed his hold and toppled over to his right side. Carter followed along with him, placing himself now atop the German.
Blood spattered down as he raised the rifle barrel over his head, then brought it crashing down again and yet again. There was no need for him to strike a third time.
Carter cried out and, crab-like, skittered back and away from his freshest kill. He stopped when his back struck solid rock. His senses were still about him enough that he raked his eyes quickly back and forth, up and down, to see if any further danger awaited.
All was quiet.
Every German soldier who had entered the pass now lay dead.
Using the rock wall for support, Carter pushed back up to his feet. Later, it would bother him – a little – that he felt not an ounce of sympathy for the slain. At that moment, only one thought reigned in his fevered brain.
Where was Stella?
Immediately fearing the worst – he had heard no sound of her voice, she had made no effort to help him in his recent struggles – he stumbled and tripped his way across the corpse-littered floor of the pass to the spot where he had left her.
She looked so small lying there, surrounded by the bodies of men. As softly as possible, he slid his hands under her and lifted her in the cradle of his arms. She moaned as he did, and blood as well as breath escaped from her nose and her mouth.
She was alive. But not, he knew, for long.
Her eyes fluttered open weakly, and she attempted a smile.
“We … gave ‘em hell, didn’t we, Clay?”
“We sent them to hell, sweetheart.”
Stella winced as fresh pain wracked her slender body.
“We’re … we’re not going to see Paris, are we?”
“Don’t be silly,” he lied. “We’ll be sipping cognac at a sidewalk café before you know it, old girl.”
“Ah,” she sighed, wishing this was true. “Then give us a kiss, ducky … and let’s be on our way.”
She died while his lips were still pressed to hers.
Carter began to sob like a baby, pressing her body against his and rocking back and forth. The sliver of a crescent moon had taken the sun’s place by the time he cried himself out.
Grief momentarily gave way to guilt. It had been his plan to try to hold the pass with only a small contingent. All three of his compatriots had bravely followed him in his folly, and all had paid the ultimate price.
So why hadn’t he?
“What made you think you could be a soldier?” he said aloud, in self-recrimination. “What made them think you could?”
No answer came to either question, from within or without.
He rose slowly, painfully to his feet, determined to do one last thing for the woman who had loved him to death.
Scouting about, he found a crevice large enough to hold Stella’s body. After gently laying her to rest, he covered the crevice with stones.
Only then did the practical thought of preserving his own life intrude on his mind. Holding down the bile, he crawled amongst the dead, scavenging for anything that might keep him alive. He found a working rifle and an ammunition belt from one slain soldier. Three canteens combined to give him one that was nearly full. That, of course, was the easy part.
Now came the hard part: walking God knows how many miles with an open wound to the French frontier.
Each step brought a shot of pain radiating out from the wound in his side, but it wasn’t too bad. Not at first.
But soon the pain became continuous, whether he was walking or stopped for one of his increasingly frequent rests. A particularly sharp jolt brought his hand to his side, and it came away dripping wet. The walking had opened the wound even further, causing the blood to flow more freely.
Now he began to stumble and fall from time to time. On each occasion, it became harder to rise to his feet and continue on. Walking caused the blood to pump even more furiously from his heart and down the side of his leg. Yet he knew he would just as surely bleed out if he were to stop moving, so he forced himself to keep going onward.
He was finding it harder to think, to concentrate on anything at all. His vision blurred, making it even more difficult to see through the blanket of night all around him. He wasn’t sure if he was even on the trail any longer.
Then the moon began to rise up before him.
Only this wasn’t the thin sliver of the moon at all. Carter squinted, trying to make out details of the glowing orb that was now hovering several feet off the ground just ahead of him.
He began to laugh lightly, hysterically. The blood draining from his head had made him delusional, he thought.
For the shining orb resembled nothing so much as a human eye.
This eye, however, was the size of a football.
And there was no face attached to it.
CHAPTER X
A soft humming sound arose from the floating eye as it slowly dipped down to the level of the American’s own eyes. Unable to break its glare, Carter felt compelled to gaze directly into the orb’s opalescent pupil. No voice emitted from it, but he felt certain it was sending him a message.
Follow me.
It then slowly drifted away, heading off at a right angle to the direction in which the man had been traveling. Now convinced that he had at most minutes left to live anyway, Carter staggered after it.
If there had ever been a trail where the orb led him, it had long since been obliterated by falling rock and twisted vegetation. Carter was reduced to crawling on his hands and knees to make his way along. Just as well, perhaps, for he wasn’t sure he could continue upright much longer in any event.
His passage was suddenly blocked by a thick tangle of hedges. His shoulders slumped and he shook his head slowly from side to side. The illusion he was following had led him to a dead end.
Yet somehow it seemed still to beckon him impossibly forward.
He raised his eyes to glare at the orb, which simply renewed its movement away from him, seeming to pass right through the intertwining branches of the hedges.
As if pulled by a halter, Carter lunged ahead straight into the dark weave of vegetation. It gave way grudgingly, impeding his progress by snagging his clothing and nicking his exposed skin with scores of stinging cuts.
But the faint light of the or
b continued to beckon before him, and he thrashed his way past branches and thistles. After all, what were a few small drops of blood compared to the stream that still poured from his side and darkened the ground behind him?
Bunching his legs beneath him like a toad, he sprang forward, a sob of pain spewing from his lips as he found himself propelled free of the encircling vegetation.
He grunted as he fell face down on rocky soil. His nose was mashed painfully against it, but he kissed the ground lightly, so glad was he to be free of the serpentine branches. He turned his head to the side but stayed prone, too weak and tired to do ought else.
But lying still would get him nowhere, so at last he got his hands under him and pushed himself up to his hands and knees. Raising his head, he saw the glowing eye still hovering patiently in the air before him.
He raised his eyes up and beyond the orb and for an instant thought he was inside a cave of some sort, for the sky above had seemingly disappeared.
But then he made out a ribbon of faintly lighter darkness, detected a few pinpoints of starlight.
He was on a narrow pathway through the mountainside, so narrow in fact that he could easily stretch his arms out to either side and touch its rock walls. He kept his hands there, first to help himself rise to his feet, then to remain on them and finally to hold himself up as he painstakingly began to place one foot in front of the other in pursuit of the mystical eye as it traversed the winding pathway before him.
By this time he was lightheaded to the point of giddiness. Smaller specks of light appeared to dance and dart around the larger light that was the floating eye.
He stumbled as the narrow passageway suddenly widened, so his hands no longer had its walls to cling to for support.
At the same moment, the disembodied eye vanished.
Carter shook his head, and the cobwebs in his mind temporarily vanished as well. What he saw before him made him forget his weakness; he no longer felt the warm blood still seeping through his clothing.
The hidden passageway he had traversed had widened out into a small box canyon. And a building sat square in the middle of it.
Or what was left of a building. As Carter stiffly walked toward it, its features became more clear even in the thick darkness. It was a round, stone structure. A small portico had once stood before its entrance, but the columns that had supported its top had toppled long ago and were now littered about the canyon floor.
Though he was no historian, Carter felt it likely that, based on the architectural style of the building and its columns, and its apparent antiquity, the deserted building had most likely been erected by the ancient Romans.
Indeed, though he could not know this, those conquerors of eons past had raised the walls at this secret Iberian site even before the Christ had walked the Earth.
Even in decay, it spoke to him of a power and grandeur the likes of which the western world had never seen again.
“Come ahead, boy.”
Carter flinched back. Had this abandoned temple, for such he now took it to be, literally spoken to him?
“Come ahead … or leave this place. The choice is yours, but make it now.”
Carter cautiously inched his way forward. Earlier, the mystic eye had only seemed to be communicating with him. But this was a real voice, speaking in a tone that registered on both his ears and his brain.
He stumbled and fell when his toes hit the bottom of a series of steps leading up to the temple’s gaping front entrance. He lay where he fell, gasping for air, exhaling wreaths of smoke that circled his head.
Then he shoved himself back up. If he had ever intended to simply lie down and die he would have done so back at the pass, with Stella in his arms.
He’d come this far, what were a few more steps?
He limped forward, until he was swallowed by the darkness that waited beyond the temple doorway.
As his eyes adjusted to that blackness, he saw he was in a narrow corridor. At its far end, he saw a light beckoning to him. Thinking it might be cast by that same incorporeal eye that had led him this far, he again followed it.
Thanks to the glow it cast, he could make out the details of faded mosaics that lined each side of the corridor. Each image was martial in tone, depicting ancient warriors in battle. One image was of an entire city being consumed by flames, an allusion perhaps to fabled Troy.
Carter left the confines of the hallway, finding himself in the temple’s circular central chamber. It was here that priestly rituals would have been performed, where animals would have been sacrificed in an effort to mollify their temperamental gods. At the chamber’s very center stood the stone altar upon which those sacrifices would have been made. Its gray surface was laced with darker streaks of spilled blood.
And a man was standing atop the altar stone.
At least it was something roughly in the form of a man. But it was more than human, for the eerie light that had beckoned Carter emanated from this being.
The creature bathed in light was dressed in the style of the warriors whose images defined this temple. A metal helmet with a plume of stiff horsehair running from front to back covered the top and sides of his head. A nose guard hanging down the front partially obscured the features of his face.
His torso was enclosed and defined by a sculpted metal breastplate, while shining greaves covered his legs from ankle to knee. A short sword was scabbarded on his left hip.
On his left arm he carried a glowing bronze shield, emblazoned with the head of a lion. In his right hand he easily held a spear that stood nearly eight feet tall.
“Kneel, child,” the spectral warrior said, in a voice that carried both weight and authority.
“I’d rather stand,” Carter replied.
“I’m sorry, manling,” the spectre said. “Did you think that was a request?”
He raised his spear and banged the butt of its shaft down against the top of the altar.
“Kneel!”
The sound of his voice merged with that made by his spear, and the two raced outward to wash over the American like the pounding tide of a hurricane, turning his bones to jelly and causing him to collapse.
“That’s better,” the warrior said calmly.
It was with great effort that Carter pushed himself up and onto his knees. Wincing in pain, he glared up at the warrior, who now stepped off the altar and slowly floated down until he stood on the ground before the human. Gritting his teeth, Carter stood to face him.
“I didn’t give you permission to rise,” the warrior said.
“I didn’t ask for your permission.”
Carter stared at the spectre with a defiance he knew his flesh would be unable to support. The harsh silver glow made it difficult to look directly at this frightful being, but Carter forced himself to do so.
He could now make out most of the features of the face looking back at him. Thick, bushy eyebrows scowled above cold eyes. An aquiline nose rested above a cruel and smirking mouth that sat in the middle of a closely cropped moustache and beard.
“I could kill you with little more than a thought,” the spectre declared. Carter sensed this was probably true.
“Do whatever you like,” he spat. “At least I’ll die on my feet and not on my knees.”
A palpable silence then fell around the two. The spectre drew itself up to even greater height, and Carter steeled himself for what was to come.
But what came was not what he expected.
To his astonishment and perplexity, the spectre threw his head back and began to laugh!
Even when the laughter died away, a toothy smile remained on the ghostly warrior’s face as he leaned in closer to the man who swayed unsteadily before him.
“You’re a true man of war,” he said admiringly. “And I should know.”
Carter’s rubbery legs gave out under him and he began to collapse, but the spectre caught him under both arms and pulled him back upright.
“Don’t die on me now, son. Not before I’ve be
stowed my gift upon you.”
“What in holy hell are you talking about?” Carter mumbled drunkenly. “Who are you?”
“Don’t you know?” The spectre put an arm around the American and began to walk him toward the stone altar.
“I’m Mars … the god of war!”
Now it was Carter who began to laugh softly.
“What do you find so funny?” the spectre demanded.
“All this,” Carter replied. “First it was a giant eye. Now I’m seeing ‘god.’ One of the guys I beat in Berlin told the press he thought I had delusions of grandeur.” Carter chuckled again.
“I guess he was right.”
“You think this is an illusion?”
“I think I’m dying,” Carter declared grimly. “So let’s get on with it.”
All strength now left the man’s legs and he would have fallen if the spectral figure had not scooped him up in twin arms of corded muscle. The vision that called itself Mars carried the delirious American the rest of the way up to the stone altar and gently placed him atop it.
“Look up,” the ghost said. “Look to the sky.”
Carter forced his weary eyes to open. High above him, he saw for the first time the circular opening that was cut from the temple’s domed ceiling.
That part of the sky above that he could see appeared black, cold and empty. The same words could be used to describe the sensations swelling in his body as his life force prepared to leave.
Then, a point of light appeared on the right edge of his field of vision. Then another. And another.
Within moments, eight such glowing bodies could be seen within the oval of the night sky. Strangely, they then seemingly began to converge on one another.
“Those are the other eight planets of our heavens,” the spectral Mars whispered to him.
“What are they doing?”
“They are converging in perfect alignment with the Earth,” Mars explained, “in a fashion that only occurs once in a million million years.”
“But … what does it mean?”
“That, you’re about to learn.”
At that very instant, the eight planets seemed to merge into a single, pulsating orb. To Carter’s dumfounded amazement, a single, intense beam of multi-colored light appeared to radiate forth from the aligned worlds.