Shadows

by William A. Webb

  He tried to think of what to do next. Enemies could be hiding through any of the doorways, but so could Kesteluni. He backed into the corner on his left, putting a wall behind him, but also moving away from his escape route back up the stairs. Expecting a sudden attack out of the dark, he heard, or thought he heard, a whimper through the left doorway, only a few feet from where he stood.

  Driven by the thought of his wife suffering at the hands of the J’Stull commander, Tanavuna moved into the passage with the M14 held at his waist, finger beside the trigger but not on it; he would rather die than risk shooting his beloved by accident. Instead of a room, though, he came to a short flight of stairs leading down. Beyond the last riser, a wan light poured from a room. Careful to make no sound, Tanavuna crept to the bottom and gaped at what he saw.

  A vast rectangular chamber stretched away for at least one hundred feet. He estimated the walls to either side were at least thirty feet away. Hewn from the living rock, support columns ran in three parallel rows down the room’s length. The room was lit by tall candles in metal holders, and the area stank of tallow. Beyond the light of the candles, deep shadows obscured details. None of that was what stunned him, however.

  Every inch of wall space was covered with shelves crammed with binders of paper and parchment, scrolls, stone tablets, pots of various sizes, and dried plant stalks. Thousands and thousands of items spilled onto the floor. Picking up a page near his right foot, Tanavuna felt the rough texture of animal skin and frowned at the characters, diagrams, and illustrations that crowded to all four edges of the smooth side.

  Being the hetman’s son, he’d been taught to read, but most of the words were foreign to him. Nevertheless, he could make out enough to know it was about the effects of some medicinal plant. Nearby, stacks of square stone tablets harkened back to an earlier time, with barely legible letters chipped into them, probably by a hammer and chisel.

  A sniffle in the distance made him drop into a crouch, the rifle aimed down the center of the room. He saw a faint light some fifty or sixty feet away. Against its glow, he could make out a partial silhouette. As he crept closer and panned the gun in a semi-circle, Tanavuna watched as the light gave increasing detail to the dark outline, ultimately revealing it to be the face of an old woman, her skin bleached nearly white as only long years out of the sun could do. A bony hand held a writing stick, which she dipped in water and scratched upon an ink block before writing on some parchment. She was shrunken, like he’d seen the sun do to mummified corpses, and she hadn’t noticed him yet.

  She sat at a table inside a cage with heavy iron bars. A hole in a corner of the floor must have been the privy. The only other furniture was a crude wooden bed with a blanket. Ominously, two identical but empty cages were positioned on either side of it, one of which had a blanket on the floor and its table and chair overturned.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  The old woman looked up, squinted, and went back to writing.

  He came closer. “Who are you, grandmother?”

  “What? Who’s there? I don’t recognize the voice.”

  “My name is Tanavuna, what is yours?”

  “My what?”

  “Your name.”

  “Oh…my name. I had a name once, yes, you’re right I did. Let me see…Paaku-something.”

  Tanavuna stood without realizing it, more shocked than he had been at the sight of the room.

  “Paakunami? Is that your name?”

  “Hmmm…yes, yes that was it. Paakunami. Good, that’s good, I’m glad to remember that.”

  “But…you disappeared thirty-five years ago from a village east of the city. We have all heard the story; all of us in the region. You were thought to have been taken by a predator while out gathering medicines.”

  “Was I? Thirty-five years, you say? Well, no matter, I am here now.” Putting her nose an inch from the parchment, she went back to working.

  “Was there a young woman here last night?” he asked, voice rising in urgency, “Tall, with black hair and brown eyes?” Now that the shock of finding the room and the old healer was wearing off, his sense of urgency returned, stronger than ever. Tanavuna thought he could smell his wife’s scent.

  Paakunami peered at him, annoyed. “What woman?”

  “She would have been in there,” he said, pointing to the cage beside her.

  “Oh…her. Woke me up with her screaming when Subitorni came for her.”

  “When?” In the urgency of the moment, he raised the M14 as a threat, but the hag showed no fear. He doubted she could see it.

  “I don’t know; was I supposed to remember that?”

  Realizing he’d gotten all he could from the woman, Tanavuna whirled and ran back up the stairs in time to hear a woman’s voice faintly echo down the hallway beyond the staircase leading to the upper chamber.

  “Help me!”

  It was Kesteluni.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 16

  Yukannak’s footsteps rang through the empty tunnel. At Unaa’s prodding, he tried to force himself to run, but a lifetime of relative ease had not prepared him for so much physical exertion. Nevertheless, the determination that had kept him alive when so many others died served him well now. Unaa had a mad look in his eyes, and Yukannak didn’t doubt the young tribesman would welcome having a reason to kill him. So even when the pain burned in his side like hot metal, he kept moving toward the main tunnel. Once there, they turned south toward the Inner City.

  He stumbled as they approached the cross-tunnel leading to the cache set aside for the Harvesters. The aftermath of battle littered the passage. Two men lay dead in each other’s grip, having been shot mid-grapple. Unaa’s face tightened when he recognized a man from his village. He had his thumbs in the eyes of a militiaman wearing yellow and green paint. That man’s corpse still gripped the knife buried in his enemy’s stomach. Bloody drag marks led to bodies piled against the wall where they had been moved out of the way. Men who’d been living minutes earlier were now nothing more than meat.

  But the fighting wasn’t over. Yukannak dropped to the floor as bullets whined off the wall near his head. Was somebody targeting him?

  No, not at him, at men crouching in the shadows ahead. Yukannak glimpsed the situation in the light of muzzle flashes. Deployed on either side of the tunnel, maybe a dozen men armed with the same kind of rifle that Unaa carried were firing toward the Inner City. They were either Offworlders or allied with them. Near the tunnel mouth, a clutch of the satrap’s militia fired back. Unaa stood and called out to the nearest group, waving his rifle overhead…and then toppled backward under a hail of rifle fire. The impetuous youth never took another breath.

  Unaa’s death cry alerted his apparent comrades to their presence, but when they turned around, all they saw was Yukannak lying on his belly beside one of their own lying dead in a pool of blood. The safest reaction in such a combat situation was to shoot first and ask questions later, which they did. Bullets sparked off the stone floor and whined as they shot at him. He hid behind Unaa’s body—if the young man hadn’t already been dead he surely was now—as round after round struck his corpse.

  “Stop! I’m a friend!”

  More shots.

  “I have a message from—”

  A ripple of gunfire drowned out his words. The invaders weren’t in a mood to listen, and Yukannak had to do something fast or die. There was nothing he wanted to do less than what he planned to do next.

  He leapt to his feet and yelled, “Don’t shoot, I’m your friend.”

  He ran toward the militiamen at the mouth of the tunnel, waving his arms, with both sides shooting at him and each other.

  Yukannak screamed, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! I’m the silci!”

  * * *

  Cutter’s shoulder ached from hanging inside the well longer than expected. He couldn’t help be proud as he’d watched his men deploy according to his orders. He’d trained them well, yet he had no illusions about ho
lding their position against a determined assault. Imsurmik was jammed with amateur militias who’d spent their lives only fighting each other, unless they’d tangled with the J’Stull, and since the satrap ruled the region, that wouldn’t have gone well for the tribesmen. Cutter’s Cutters were better than the J’Stull, because the man who’d trained them had faced some of the toughest, meanest, least scrupulous soldiers in Earth’s history. But this time, he feared the militia would press home their numerical advantage, which would likely be considerable because they feared their own leader more than Cutter’s Cutters.

  Yet, in his experience, the best attacks were made right away, before the enemy had a chance to prepare their defenses. Maybe the apparent reluctance of the militia to launch an assault meant that First Squad might not have to defend the plaza after all. Then the situation developed exactly as he’d thought it would. Simultaneous rushes from the south and west followed brief covering fire. Cutter hung from the iron rungs within the well, a dangerous ruse de guerre, since one brief glance downward by a passing enemy would discover him in his hidey-hole. If they didn’t see him, though, he could hit them when they didn’t expect it and disrupt their whole attack. It was a high-risk, high-reward ploy that captains were supposed to assign to others, but he couldn’t do that, not this time around. If he died, well, he’d already done that once, so what the hell?

  By sheer bad luck, the angle of the sun was now hitting the side of the well where he was clinging to the ladder. When he’d first climbed inside, the heated iron blistered his palms, which made holding onto the ladder even more problematic. Eventually the metal under his hands cooled, but he couldn’t move them because the iron around his hands remained scorching hot. And even though the backs of his hands burned like somebody had focused a magnifying glass on them, all he could do was endure and hang on.

  The well distorted the sounds of battle above. From the proximity of shots and screams, it sounded like his men took quite a toll on the attackers and held the line for several minutes. Then he heard Sergeant Riidono yelling for retreat and, as First Squad withdrew from the plaza, calling out, “We are pulling back, Captain, I’ll shout ‘now’ when the enemy is in position.”

  Good man, Cutter thought; he’s company sergeant material.

  Gunfire swept over the plaza. Voices came from around the well. Hanging by one hand, Cutter braced the Thompson’s stock in the crook of his arm and pointed the barrel skyward. If somebody discovered and started firing down at him, well, he wasn’t going to die alone. Now that he thought about it, his ruse no longer seemed like such a great plan.

  Nobody peeked over the side, though, and he heard no voices nearby.

  But he did hear Riidono shout, “Now!”

  Trusting the sergeant with his life, Cutter stepped up one rung, balanced, leveled the Thompson, and opened fire at the backs of a score of local militia.

  Everything about the Thompson, from its weight to the hammering recoil into his shoulder, was like play-wrestling with an old and trusted friend. At a range of thirty feet, the .45 caliber rounds ripped into the backs of the tightly packed enemy. Panicking, those who weren’t hit fled in all directions. Right on cue, just as the gun clicked on an empty chamber, his own troops counterattacked and poured back into the plaza, providing him with the cover he needed to climb out of the well.

  Heaps of new bodies clogged the area, some still twitching. A quick head count showed only twelve of his men firing at the red militiamen, including Riidono. There was no time to think about that as he regained his footing on the stones. Swapping the empty magazine for a full one, he scanned in all directions and understood the danger of their position. They’d hurt the enemy badly, but the enemy would soon regroup—faster than he’d imagined, as it turned out.

  “They are attacking!” someone cried. A quick glance showed enemy troops coming down all three streets at once.

  “Pull ’em back, Sergeant,” he ordered, pointing to the eastern alley. “Get ’em back to the main road.”

  Riidono barked orders as Cutter pulled back, climbing over corpses to find a good firing position. He crouched behind a smashed wagon and steadied the Thompson on its railing. He remembered doing the same at a farmhouse near Mortain, chickens squawking as German rounds ate into their coop, holding off a whole platoon long enough for four of his men to run to the safety of the farmhouse. Now he’d do it again.

  Once the last of his men ran past, he waited three seconds for the enemy to enter the plaza. They all wore the dull mustard paint of Imsurmik’s poorer classes, except with the red stripe from the bridge of the nose down to its tip. Instead of spraying bullets like he’d done the first time, Cutter fired three-round-bursts to pin them down. He changed magazines again, and glanced behind him. He saw two of his men thirty feet down the street, kneeling with rifles up to cover his retreat, with two more thirty feet behind them. In full combat mode, thought became action, and he ran from behind the wagon, slowing to step over the dead body of an old man clutching a small animal under one arm, also dead.

  When he was only halfway to the first of his men, they opened fire, but he didn’t look back. He put his head down and ran. He felt the ache of pounding on the unforgiving stone in his knees and feet, although that beat a bullet in the back. Only when he was past the second two-man team did he duck around a corner, sucking in the hot air and gagging on the fetid reek of an open sewer across the road. Half a minute later, Sergeant Riidono and two men ran back from the east in the direction where Moorefield’s men held the main road.

  “We cannot get through that way, Captain. The enemy is forcing women and children to hold hands and block the road while they stand behind and shoot at us. We cannot fire back without hitting the innocents.”

  “Human shields,” Cutter said. A genuine hate began to build in his gut, as it had in France. “Damn…” First Squad had already killed a lot of men, but there could be hundreds more, and while the enemy tactics were crude, they didn’t seem to shy away from dying for whatever cause they were fighting for.

  He surveyed his surroundings again, looking for an option he’d overlooked. Even if he had been ruthless enough to gun down the human shields, it would slow them down enough for the red militiamen coming from the west to take them in the rear. The narrow southern street was impassable because part of a house blocked it like a landslide. That only left the north, and Cutter’s intuition told him that way had been left clear for an ambush, as he’d suspected earlier. Nor could he expect help from Moorefield’s thinly stretched men at the road; they were under strict orders not to leave their posts, no matter what they heard in the tightly packed warren of Outer City.

  “We’re trapped, aren’t we, sir?” Riidono asked.

  Cutter was about to answer “yes,” when he saw the answer. “No, Sergeant, we’re not trapped. But they might be.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 17

  The street leading north had tightly packed buildings on the western side, opposite a large open sewer pit. A long, wide oval, its surface was not recognizable as water, or anything else liquid. Discarded debris clogged the pit, and opportunistic vegetation grew among the clumps of garbage that, over the years, had solidified and composted into something fertile enough to allow plants to flourish.

  Crouched low in the muck, Cutter counted the heads of the twelve surviving members of First Squad protruding from the foul muck, like so much flotsam, their weapons resting on the small islands of decayed garbage. The light color of their robes had stood out like a beacon against the mostly dark brown of the sewer, so the first thing he and his men had done upon wading into the thick slime was to dunk their heads. As nauseating as the experience was, it rendered them invisible to those on the street a mere forty feet away.

  They’d heard the red militiamen coming and taken cover under the raw sewage. The people of Imsurmik, having been near it most of their lives, had gotten used to the sight, smell, vermin, and insects it attracted. The militiamen who weren’t fr
om Imsurmik, and those with enough wealth or influence to live away from the sewers, considered being near them a disgusting circumstance, to be avoided as they would persons of the very lowest class. Nobody, however—not even the people forced to live beside them—would dream that someone would voluntarily immerse themselves in the horrific sludge, which is why Cutter did it. They’d trained for it, yes, but he’d never expected to actually do it in combat.

  Red militiamen filtered into the area, wondering where their quarry could have gone. There weren’t as many as Cutter feared, maybe three dozen. After banging on a few nearby doors or rough analogs of them, and listening as the people cowering inside denied harboring outsiders, the man with the red face ordered several of the homes searched. Cutter watched as it happened.

  Now, breathing through his nose and fighting the urge to vomit as sewage dripped into his eyes, he waited for the right moment to spring his ambush.

  Slowly, so as not to attract attention with fast movements, Cutter rose. First Squad followed, hunched behind what cover they had, and picked up their weapons, careful not to get them dirtier than they already were. The enemy didn’t notice. Cutter’s robe hung like lead weights on his shoulders, having soaked up the rancid liquid until saturated, but its brown color was the perfect camouflage. When the militia leader only had five men around him, Cutter aimed the Thompson at the one furthest to the left and fired.

  Being trapped and outnumbered outweighed the risk of accidentally hitting the militia commander, but Cutter had trained his platoon well. All five targets twitched and fell under a fusillade of bullets, while their leader covered his head and crouched against the wall. Slipping out of his robe so it didn’t slow him down, Cutter splashed forward in his underwear, the wet sewage blocking the burning UV rays like body paint.