The Apocalypse Script

by Samuel Fort

  Chapter 43 - Breach

  When Rudger finally saw the Maqtu he knew that the tables had turned against him. By his estimation the opposing force now numbered almost two hundred. He screamed over his shoulder, “Damn it, get those doors open! We need hostages and we need them now!”

  “They’re reinforced, Colonel,” said the woman at the door over her shoulder, who had been trying to manipulate the lock mechanism, “and the hardware is military grade. We’ll have to set charges. There might be causalities inside if we do.” No one on the breach team was really trained for what they were doing. They were guards, not combat engineers.

  “Do it already!”

  Fiela heard Rudger’s orders through the doors.

  “Princess,” she said, “you must seek safety in the cave. The doors will be blown open.”

  She checked the magazine in one of her two pistols. The Peth had retrieved her combat armor and weapons after the first shots were fired. The uniform was different than standard issue in that it was not black but sable with black tiger stripes - a secret gift from her uncle many years ago. She had put her red hair up in a simple ponytail. A Nocte Sicarius never wore a helmet.

  “They will not harm us,” Lilian said. “I have seen their orders.”

  “How?” asked Fiela holstering the pistol.

  “Lord Disparthian’s spies shared them with me. He is our ally – he, and the Maqtu. I will be no better off in the cave if the forces of the Seven somehow defeat them. It does not matter where I am captured if that is my fate.”

  “Princess,” said Fiela, “a bullet obeys no orders. You could easily be dispatched by an errant shot.”

  The other woman said nothing as she weighed the Peth’s words. The fact was that she had not expected Moros’s troops to enter Steepleguard and had made no provisions for that possibility. She had envisioned the battle differently when discussing it with Disparthian.

  “I do not wish to hide,” she said cautiously.

  “Sister,” said the Peth, “you will not be hiding. You can return swiftly once the battle is over, either to enjoy your triumph or surrender yourself. But you must not die by mistake.”

  Lilian thought for a moment and nodded. “I shall do as you ask.” An awkward second passed. “You must come with me, Fiela. You are serretu and second to the queen’s throne.”

  Fiela shook her head. “Our guests above - who will protect them, if not me? There is no time to usher them into the cave. We have but minutes.”

  Lilian thought to command the Peth to come with her but having already been proven wrong about the impossibility that the doors could be breached, she doubted her own judgment on this matter, also.

  “Very well,” she said. “I am proud of you, Sister. Ben would be, also.”

  Fiela smiled sadly. “Do you think,” she said, wondering if she had asked the question before, “that the Seven will allow him to live if they capture him?”

  Lilian decided she deserved the truth. “No. They have orders to kill him.”

  The Peth did not react and indeed, seemed not to hear the other woman. She rotated a leather belt around her waist to better position four sheathed knives and said, “On the wall next to the stairwell leading down to the cave there is an electrical panel. Will you turn off the lights so that I am in my element?”

  Lilian nodded and disappeared into the corridor. A moment later the hotel and the grounds beyond were plunged into darkness. The cacophony of gunfire beyond the walls was muted for a few seconds as the combatants took in this development, but then the pace picked up again, and the battle raged on.

  Alone, Fiela walked toward the main doors and placed herself only twenty feet from them, deciding that against a large number of opponents she would rather fight in close quarters with her knives. She’d never win a gunfight.

  Not that she expected to win any engagement. Knowing that Lilitu’s allies had arrived and were closing in on the Peth trying to enter Steepleguard, she needed only to delay the attackers once they entered the building to give those allies sufficient time to come to the guests’ rescue. It was a holding action, pure and simple.

  When she found her spot, she turned her back to the door, lay flat on the ground, and closed her eyes. She did not want the inevitable explosion to ruin her night vision.

  Her husband was dead, she decided. He would not have abandoned her, and Lilian, and was not being used as a hostage. Ben was dead, and in the Nisirtu underworld, for that is where all Nisirtu royalty went. He was there, and alone, because he had no Nisirtu family to greet him, which meant he might wander the dark corridors forever.

  She had failed him, as both his protector and wife.

  Lightning from the storm flooded the room with a blue light. She listened to the yells and screams and gunfire outside the building’s walls.

  To clear her mind for the battle ahead, she whispered a poem to herself.

  “For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have rest, though the night was made for loving, and the day returns too soon, yet we’ll go no more a roving-”

  The doors to Steepleguard exploded inward with a roar.

 

  Rudger and three Peth rushed into the Great Hall, rifles and carbines raised, but they slowed when they discovered it was as dark inside as it had been outside. With their numbers dwindling and the enemy at their back, the ingress had been hasty and disorganized and the lack of any indoor lighting was yet another unexpected obstacle. Rudger led the way, determined to find a decent hostage. Preferably Lilitu, though any noble would do.

  “Lights!” he screamed.

  A second later the reply: “No joy.”

  Damn it! He raised his carbine’s night-vision scope to his eye and scanned the room. The large hall appeared to be empty. He calculated that his troops could hold the building for five minutes. That was just enough time for those with him to reach the rooms on the second level, where surely some of the nobles were hiding.

  “Follow me,” he said, and took a step toward the nearest staircase, but the moment his trailing foot left the floor he felt his other kicked out from under him. He was still floating in the air when the knife entered his neck.

  The Peth behind him stumbled as he collided with Rudger’s falling body. Before he could right himself something grabbed his helmet and pulled hard, forcing the fall he had been trying to avoid. The man felt something cold at the base of his neck and then felt nothing at all.

  “Commander!” yelled one of the men who had just entered the hall. He went down, too, and was silent.

  Another four of Rudger’s soldiers entered the Great Hall but instead of fanning out they found themselves corralled by the attackers behind them, the nothingness before them, the bodies collecting at their feet, and the enemy that lurked below. Their night-vision scopes were useless in such close quarters.

  “Ahhh!” screamed one of the female attackers as she was dragged to the floor like a swimmer pulled beneath the waves by an invisible shark. A nearby Peth shot at where she had been but the round struck the shinbone of the man who had been behind her. The wounded man screamed bloody murder and fell to the floor of his own accord. There he listened to the fallen woman’s gurgles as she drowned in her own blood.

  “Nocte Sicarius!” yelled a man in the front but then a bullet entered his skull from beneath his chin, shattering a number of teeth before taking the scenic route through his brain and exiting out the back.

  The remaining Peth let their carbines and rifles fall to their sides and pulled out their pistols, aiming at the floor, site lasers glowing red.

  Disparthian cursed the Maqtu even as he gave thanks for their appearance. They had arrived at the last possible moment. Only two men out of his assault platoon still stood at his side. The rest were injured or dead. A dozen could have been saved if Sibelius, the Maqtu leader, had attacked only a thirty seconds earlier.

  Still,
the Maqtu had arrived, and Colonel Rudger’s troops were being pushed away from the hotel, with the exception of the squad that had breached the main doors and entered Steepleguard. Thankfully, someone had shut off the property’s lights and slowed the assaulting force’s advance. Fiela, he assumed.

  The battle could be lost yet if Rudger’s troops were to capture Lilitu or Fiela. As the battle devolved into hand-to-hand combat near the entrance, he summoned his two remaining Peth to his side and made a final push.

  Fiela surveyed the arena as the man with the wounded shin flailed futilely in her chokehold. She was certain that four of the Peth still standing were Rudger’s but the situation was growing increasingly chaotic. She could hear Lord Disparthian’s yells near the doors urging his troops forward and she was not sure if the troops now entering Steepleguard were friend or foe. Even the Peths above her didn’t seem to know.

  She made the decision to go vertical when the pistols came out. She rolled to a position behind the nearest enemy, stood, and plunged a knife between his helmet and body armor, severing his spinal column. She started a leg spin as the man fell and passed a knee a half-inch above his head before slamming a boot into the nose of another Peth who had turned toward her.

  That left two. Both saw her at the same time as a flash of lightning briefly illuminated the room. The first, who was two arm lengths away, brought up her pistol too quickly and rushed her trigger pull, sending a round over Fiela’s shoulder. Fiela closed and felt a second shot tear into her hip. Ignoring the pain she grabbed the other woman’s gun and twisted it violently, breaking the woman’s finger. The movement forced the trigger back, sending the third round into the intruder’s head.

  One left.

  All done, then, she told herself.

  Except the last thing.

  “I will find you,” she said in a hushed tone.

  Time slowed for Fiela as she dropped her hands to her sides and became a spectator to the battle in the doorway. There was Disparthian, whom Lilian had once called ‘Lancelot,’ rushing forward with two other men, and behind him, a horde of Maqtu, Sibelius at the front. The battle was won.

  She lowered her eyes to the man in front of her. Rudger’s last man. Extending her head forward and stretching her arms out behind her, she took a step toward him and screamed.

  The ear-piercing and alien shriek shook the man, and when lightning again illuminated the room, he saw the thing coming at him from the shadows. Whimpering for the first time in his adult life, he raised his pistol and pulled the trigger five times. The thing fell to the floor.

  He knew the use of a flashlight would be death sentence, but he didn’t care. He shakily pulled the device from a strap on his shoulder and flipped it on with his free hand. Looking down, he saw the faint silhouette of a girl’s body. A girl? His hands trembling, he struggled to reconcile what he thought he had shot at and the figure at his feet. The thing he had shot at had not been a girl, had it?

  Gods, no! It was something else. Something abominable. It was-

  A Maqtu bullet ended the Peth’s life before he could finish the thought.