by Chuck Dixon
Near the walls, the bodies grew in number and density until they formed a carpet all the way to the base of the breach. It grew impossible to move around the heaps of dead. Eventually, with no ground visible, there was no way forward but to walk upon the corpses of men and horses. The mélange beneath them was an unending mass of pulped flesh and bone after the soles of thousands of boots, hooves and the wheels of heavy guns had marched, stamped and rolled over them. One body was indistinguishable from another—they were all crushed to form a ghastly roadway toward the city walls.
Bat kept her eyes on Lee’s back and sipped shallow breaths, doing her best to ignore the yielding surface under her feet. She swore to herself, as she’d sworn on the operations to Roman Judea and prehistoric Nevada that this would be her last trip in the Wayback Machine. You can have history, fuck the past, she thought.
They fell in behind a column of riflemen marching up the hill of ruins and into the breach in the wall. The way ahead was illuminated by torches. Bat looked back across the field and could see the beetle-backs of more troops gleaming under the firelight as they moved toward a gateway that had been forced open. In the other direction, more soldiers climbed row after row of ladders up onto the walls. The city was being fully invested by the regiments of Sang and the other generals, moving in to make the city theirs.
She imagined that similar incursions were happening all around the circumference of Nanking.
It reminded her of columns of ants moving to and fro from the carcass of roadkill.
They were down the lee of the heap of broken stone and into the city.
Musket fire popped in an unceasing cacophony from the streets beyond. Wood smoke drifted everywhere. The stars above were replaced with a skein of swirling embers against towers of black smoke.
“Which way?” Boats said. Byrus stood by the SEAL looking about anxiously as though he might catch a glimpse of Jimmy Smalls somewhere in the press of humanity.
“The shortest route to the inner city that carries us around any firefights,” Lee said. A series of booms from within the city cut him off. They held position until the barrage passed.
“That will be cannons trained on the sanctuary walls,” Shan said. “The imperial troops will be on the palace grounds before dawn.”
“Stick close. Eyes on me. We fight when we have to. But only when we have to,” Lee said and turned to trot into the widest lane leading off the area back of the breach.
There were more bodies. More and more of them civilians. Women and children, even infants, lay along the curbs and building fronts. Skulls dashed to pulp. Some without heads. Most of the women, young and old, were naked, and their white flesh was black with bruises. Bat looked away, not wanting to see any more. She was grateful they hadn’t come in daylight. Above the crackle of muskets and boom of explosions, she could hear the high peals of women screaming. She wanted to stop her ears with her hands but resisted the urge.
A market square, much like the one they’d hurried through back in Shanghai, was in utter turmoil. Soldiers and peasants were openly looting warehouses and stalls. Some stooped to pick valuables from corpses. The dead lay everywhere. A Tartar, bow and quiver slung over his back, was crouched by a pile of severed heads. He was prying teeth out of the jaws with the edge of a knife and dropping them into his fur-lined cap resting on the ground.
Some soldiers, in the bucklered leather skirts of the emperor, were arguing over a girl who looked to Bat to be no more than twelve. The girl’s eyes were dead with shock. The soldiers were giggling and jeering as they plucked her from each other’s grasp like a toy.
“Not our fight, babe,” Lee said, suddenly at Bat’s side with a hand gripping her arm to keep her in step.
“I know,” she whispered, voice hoarse. This was all in the past. This had already happened, and there was no changing it. Everyone within her sight had been dead for a hundred years before she was born. Still, to her, it was happening now. This was, as crazy as it seemed, her present.
Bathsheba Jaffe was no stranger to the bestial nature of man.
It was a suicide bombing during a visit to Jerusalem that convinced her to move to Israel and enlist in the IDF. A dance club was ripped to pieces by a Hamas ‘martyr.’ She was outside talking to friends when it happened. She still awoke from nightmares imagining that she was once again painted in the sticky wash of blood and ephemera that sprayed her and her friends in the blast. One of the girls Bat was talking to died when a single piece of shrapnel drilled through the girl’s skull. She learned later that it was a common house key probably from the deadly mix of projectiles the bomber packed into pockets on his explosive vest.
But this, Nanking, was stupefying in the scale of its brutality. Everywhere she looked, she could see humanity reduced to its animal elements of slaughter and fear. And she knew that, all across this city, the same scenes were repeated with banal constancy. Man unleashed, a synergy of evil feeding upon itself. This was a world without order or boundaries or even the most common kindness. Beyond the market, they reached a wide lane where imperial troops were raking a makeshift barricade with rifle fire. The Taiping defenders had erected a wall of carts, bales, and furniture and were laying down musket fire from behind the fragile defensive position. Lee waved the team into an embrasure in the wall of a building with a marble façade.
“This road makes a beeline to the main gate of the inner city,” he shouted over the rolling explosion of muskets and rifles.
“What is your idea?” Shan called back.
“We follow these guys in once they’ve cleared this mess. Beats getting lost in a tangle of back alleys,” Lee said. The others nodded and dropped back into the shadowed doorway to watch.
The imperial riflemen laid down regular fire from three ranks, but the return fire from the barricade didn’t slow. The firing line of imperials was being reduced, man by man, by shot from hidden guns. An officer waving a length of bamboo rod strode the ranks bullying the men to keep up the fusillade without heed to the balls whistling by his head. He stumbled to the ground, a leg brushed from under him, the bamboo greave on his leg suddenly running with blood through a ragged hole. A soldier supported him and helped him stand. All the while, the officer kept up a stream of commands, even smacking at the helmets of the nearest riflemen with his flail.
Under the withering fire from the Taipings, the soldiers stood as one, dropping the butts of their rifles to the cobbled street with a crash and whipping out needle-shaped bayonets a foot and a half in length. At the wounded officer’s shrieked directions, they snapped the bayonets in place even as men fell from the ranks under the grueling fire.
The imperial troops charged the barricades, bayonets before them. The officer hobbled along with them, hopping on one leg and whipping that bamboo stick around to thrash the men to greater speed.
“I think we picked a winner,” Boats shouted with a broad grin, jacking a round into his rifle. He broke from the shadowed doorway to chase after the charging mass that was closing on the barricade. Gladius drawn, Byrus was right on his heels.
“Fucking Navy,” Lee seethed and ran to the guns, with Shan and Bat close behind.
54
Cul de Sac
The chunk-chunk of axes and hammers continued above. A section of the roof collapsed. Timbers crashed down into the treasure room followed by a shower of broken boards and tiles. Knotted ropes dropped into a blinding shaft of sunlight streaming through the gap. Men moved into beams of light casting shadows. They slid down the ropes, swinging in pendulum arcs as they descended. Sword blades glinted on their backs. They were easy targets for the two Rangers waiting in the cover of the East King’s plunder hoard. The rifles boomed. Men pitched off the ropes to tumble into shelves of pottery and racks of silk kites. More swordsmen followed. A heap of dead men rose on the floor in the brilliant cone of light from above. They were naked but for loincloths. Their skin was rubbed with lampblack to conceal them in the dark. A swordsman swung his rope to bring him to a l
anding atop a roof beam. Jimbo shot him off the perch. The man fell spinning and landed with a crash of breaking porcelain.
Releasing the ropes, other swordsmen chose to leap through the hole in the roof unaided. They landed on their wounded and dead comrades, breaking bones in the thirty-foot fall. Their suffering was brief as they fell under the rifle fire coming out of the dark.
A man hurdled to the pile of the slain and rose to his feet despite a shattered femur, the jagged end of white bone jutting through blackened flesh. He held a sword in his fist and lunged from the circle of light. Jimbo dropped him with a round through the head.
“They’re gooned out!” Jimbo called.
“High as motherfuckers!” Chaz replied.
The assassins were flying on opium. Their fanaticism made them fearless; the bhang made them numb to pain.
The attack from above slowed, allowing Chaz and Jimbo to train rifle fire on the hole in the ceiling. Footfalls fell on the roof as the suppression fire caused the assassins to retreat. Chaz’ face creased in a bitter smile at the sound of bodies tumbling and voices screaming. Attackers fell from the high pitched roof.
The pounding at the double doors, the rhythmic work of the rams, continued. Though the doors remained in place, the masonry around the frame was showing cracks. If the attackers couldn’t bring down the door, they’d bring down the walls.
“We are seriously fucked here,” Chaz said, panting.
“There’s got to be a back door. A secret passage or some shit,” Jimbo said, feeding rounds into his rifle’s magazine tubes.
“If there were, these assholes would be using it. This is a vault, son. One door.”
“How are you for ammo?”
“All I have is already in my rifle and sidearm,” Chaz said, patting his empty bandolier.
“I have maybe forty rounds total,” Jimbo said, eyes turned upward. There were men moving on the roof again.
Wei rushed to them from out of the shadows. He had the inventory book in his arms and was babbling in rapid-fire Mandarin. He pulled Jimbo to him, holding up the open book and stabbing a finger at an entry. The columns of neatly drawn characters were broken by an intricate brush drawing of a horse.
“We don’t have time for this, bro,” Chaz said, eyeing the circle of sunlight above them.
“This is what we came for, Chaz. This is the operation objective,” Jimbo said.
“And what good is it when these fuckers get in here?”
“Hold the fort.” Jimbo set his rifle and bandolier down by Chaz to chase after Wei. Their babbling chaperone was wending his way through the labyrinth of treasures.
“An Apache telling me to hold the fort. Shit,” Chaz said to himself, jacking a fresh round as the patter of feet above converged on the hole in the ceiling.
Jimbo caught up with Wei who was pointing at a magnificent statue of a trotting warhorse. The statue was life-sized and cast in highly polished brass. The teeth in its snarling mouth were faced with mother-of-pearl. Its eyes were opals. A leather saddle with a high crown rested on the horse’s back. The leather of the saddle was trimmed in gold. The bridle was worked with buckles of gold and studded with gems. Straps of leather armor draped the hindquarters and chest with silver bucklers worked along their length. The saddle and tack were old but well cared for. The leather was a rich deep umber with years of oil rubbed into it.
The whole statue had to weigh a ton or more. It stood bolted onto a marble plinth that was two tons or more on its own. The base under the horse’s hooves was carved to imitate trampled grass. Wei dropped to hands and knees and felt along the base of the plinth. He barked at Jimbo, jerking his head at the base as he worked his way around. At first, Jimbo thought the man was trying to shift the weight aside on his own. Then he realized that Wei was looking for something—a concealed latch or spring.
Jimbo got to his knees and felt along the base with his fingertips. There was a recess an inch deep above the floor that ran all around the inside of the base of the plinth. He worked one way while Wei worked the other.
From the dark behind them, Chaz’ rifle boomed. The radiance from the beam of sunlight was interrupted by bodies dropping through the break in the ceiling.
The Pima’s fingers, greasy with sweat, found a small plate set in a place where the recess deepened. It was set level with the underside of the base with a nearly imperceptible gap around it. He called a “yo” to Wei and pressed upward.
The plate gave way, sliding into place within an indentation with a tolerance of a mere fraction of an inch around the plate. The grinding of gears and clink of chains came from within the torso of the gleaming warhorse. A counterweight clunked to a stop somewhere under the floor beneath their feet. An exhalation of air was released from the bottom of the base. Dust swirled over the tiles. The expelled air had the scent of lavender. Jimbo and Wei stepped back and looked at one another.
Jimbo reached out a hand to shove against the haunch of the statue. The entire structure, horse and plinth, skated away from his hand as easily as though on oiled bearings. He and Wei pushed together, and the statue moved aside to reveal an open hatch in the floor with stone steps leading down into a well of darkness. The smell of lavender grew stronger.
“Chaz! This way!” Jimbo called.
Wei descended into the dark, the book under one arm and an oil lamp held up in his fist.
Chaz was working the lever of Jimbo’s rifle. His own weapon lay on the floor empty. The pile of dead in the ring of smoky sunlight was becoming a mountain as swordsmen dropped howling from above. He turned, eyes red with fury, to see Jimbo yanking on his elbow. The Pima was shouting at him, pulling him away. Chaz has nearly deaf, his ears ringing with the sound of gunfire, shrieking men and the drumbeat of rams.
Together, the two Rangers backed into the shadows, firing pistols as they moved. More men leapt down through the ceiling break to land on the hill of the dead. They tumbled away to run blindly into the surrounding dark. Others swung to the rafters where they leapt from one beam to another, searching the gloom below for their prey.
At the far end of the chamber, the bronze doors crashed inward along with a broad section of wall either side. The floor shuddered with the impact. That end of the room lit up with the glow of torches from the opening bashed in the wall. The treasure vault was awash in dust-streaked light. The shadows came alive with soldiers erupting from the open doorway, boots drumming on the massive doors. They charged inward in a flood to join the swordsmen descending in greater numbers from the ceiling.
Jimbo and Chaz ran full out, the Pima leading his friend to the open hatch that was concealed by the plinth. They dropped inside, sliding down the stone steps toward the glow of an oil lantern. Wei stood at the base of the steps, his hand on an iron lever. As they cleared the gap above, Wei shoved the lever forward. Gears moved. A counterweight rose on chains and, above their heads, the three tons of brass and marble trundled back into place, shutting out the murderous cries of the men above.
“We needed a back door. I found us a back door,” Jimbo said, grinning.
“Or a grave,” Chaz said with a deep frown, looking about the narrow confines of a silent corridor of fitted stone walls.
55
Carrion
On the twenty-eighth day of his hike to the north, Dwayne came across his first sign of humanity.
Ahead of him along the wet sand, a column of sea birds rose swirling in the brilliant blue sky. As he neared them, he saw they were gathered in two areas on the sand, squawking, nipping then flapping clear to land somewhere else in the mob.
The birds were gathered to feed on crabs that were, in turn, feeding on the flesh of two corpses lying partially buried in the sand at the water’s edge. Dwayne shooed the birds away. They rose into the sky laughing and cawing to settle in a broad ring around him. He kicked at crabs to scatter them off one of the bodies.
It was a man, or what the water and feasting crustaceans had left of a man. He lay face up and eyeless. Mu
ch of the tissue on his face had been pulled away, leaving a grinning skull staring from a torn mask of skin. His fingers were stripped to white bone as were his feet. Strands of black hair clung to his waterlogged scalp. The figure was no taller than five feet and naked. Despite the swell of corruption, the man showed signs of starvation. His skeletal structure was visible through the skin.
Dwayne placed the toe of a sneaker under the man and flipped him over. The corpse’s back was crisscrossed with raised bands of scar tissue. He’d been beaten, flogged. And from the look and pattern, it had happened many times. The man’s wrists were covered in gray callus as were his ankles. He’d been shackled, possibly for years. Dwayne knew the signs well after his time as a galley slave aboard a Phoenician pirate ship two years or two thousand years ago depending on how he read the calendar.
Dwayne made his way to the second body. The birds and crabs returned to the first corpse. This man was much like the first except that he lay face down. The same build, same signs of malnutrition, and same telltale stripes across his back. When turned over, his facial features were bloated but intact. The man was dark, not from the sun but from birth. His features weren’t African or aborigine. He looked more like an Asian Indian. Dwayne noticed that both men were free of body hair except at the groin.
He shaded his eyes to search the horizon for sails or masts and saw nothing. These two either escaped from or were tossed overboard from, a boat of some kind. The vessel could be miles at sea in any direction. The dead men could have drifted hundreds of miles south with the current. But the evidence told him otherwise. If they’d been in the water more than a few days, then more of their skin would have been consumed by fish. Dwayne could assume that, wherever these men came from, there were other men within a day’s travel.