By the time we got down the hill and onto the other side of the ridge, the Rangers were in full flight but in no way disorganized. Rangers know how to move farther, faster, harder than any other soldier. It’s hard-coded in during the selection process. The vineyards and the shack behind us were on fire and the dying screams of the witch were fading with the last of the night. Orcs had been spotted trying to cut us off from the east. The giant’s feet thundered. NCOs were pushing everyone hard to keep moving as fast as they could.
Even the wounded.
I heard Kurtz barking, “Keep your people tight and line of sight. No one gets left, Brumm!”
Chatter on the comm was coming in from the captain, who was putting a new plan into action. We were stopping beyond the pond where the stream began to turn into a tributary that fed a larger waterway to the north at the entrance to the Charwood. We were going to make bramble rafts to get the wounded downriver faster. The water was pretty swift up here, but it would put some distance between us and the enemy. Mainly the giant.
Some of the heavier supplies were being floated via strapped rucks and watertight bags filled with air. The security team and scouts were being sent forward at the double to stay ahead of the floating main element.
I was busy working to get a bramble raft assembled and help the wounded “onto” it, which just meant they’d be hanging on to it as it floated downstream. Ambulatory wounded who could manage were using their rucks as flotation devices and lashing them together. Like I said, the current was swift and who knew if it got dangerous. But we didn’t have any other choice, and the Rangers were pros at water obstacles and navigation.
Dawn wasn’t far off now and the unseen giant howled relentlessly as it climbed up out of the valley on the other side of the ridge. The scouts had also spotted fast-moving swarms of orcs coming down out of passes nearby. Autumn told me something new had our scent; she could sense their presence coming for us now but whatever these newcomers were called, I didn’t get a sense of what they were. If we didn’t move, we’d be in a fight with whatever they were very soon and there was no reason to think it
would be an easy one.
Autumn stared off upslope as though in a trance. “They’re in the vineyards now.” She told me the smoke had confused them for the moment, but once they got through it and found the river… they’d be on us.
I relayed all that to the sergeant major, and he just told me to take one of the wounded Rangers, Sergeant McGuire, and get into the river. It would be my job to hold on to him. I used some 55O and a carabiner to make sure he stayed really close.
After that I saw Last of Autumn mounting her horse and riding off ahead to assist the scouts who were clearing the sides of the river as the first orcs began to get ahead of us.
It was like a noose was slipping about our neck again.
I went into the cold current, assisting the Ranger named McGuire who’d been hit by a ballista bolt during the final night of the battle on the hill. His plate carrier had absorbed the brunt of the blow, but it had broken every rib in his chest, and he was having trouble just breathing. Somehow, don’t ask me how, he’d kept walking for most of the exfil. But now it was time for him to float, and it was my job to keep him breathing with his head above the surface. Chief Rapp organized the float and paired us up with a team of Rangers. The Special Forces medic told me to watch for bloody sputum as a sign of a possible tension pneumothorax. As in air filling the lungs and pushing on the heart, strangling the patient. So we had that going for us. We got him entangled in the bramble raft and pushed us off into the current with four other Rangers.
Behind us, just over the ridgeline with dawn in the east, the giant howled forlornly.
This was going to be really close.
The water was cold and fast and the looming rocks looked pretty dangerous to me. They were blue and gray and jagged in the first soft light of the new day. The current was dark and cold and there were whirlpools beneath the surface that sucked at your boots, and you knew if your boots got caught on a rock or an underground branch and you got stuck, you’d get pulled out of the raft and left behind. Regardless of what the Rangers thought or said, if you got sucked down you were staying down.
I knew things were getting serious when we hit the first set of rapids and our bramble raft went out of control and slammed into a large rock so
hard it felt like it was going to disintegrate with all of us hanging on. The Rangers held it together, but we were clearly out of control. I held on to the hissing and gasping McGuire, just trying to keep his head above the rushing water.
As we came out of that first set of rapids, arrows began to whistle from the dark woods all around. In the moments of foam and fury along the rapids the sun had risen and while the air was still cold and we were soaked to the bone, the day was promising to be golden.
It would be nice if we lived to see much of it.
One of the Rangers blazed away with his sidearm at a misshapen orc who’d come down to the bank to throw a barbed spear at us.
Then one of the Rangers took an arrow right through his arm and another Ranger pushed himself up on the out-of-control raft and grabbed the wounded man before he slipped away and under the water. There had been no time to make our weapons watertight for river crossing. Someone on another raft opened fire on the shadowy trees the dark-feathered arrows were screaming out of. Whether anything hit or not was hard to say as we were being swiftly carried off down the river and knocked into rocks and drowned all at the same time. I was sure I was losing gear. There were firefights going off in the woods all around us and we had no comm. So who knew what was going on? The scouts were obviously engaging the outliers, who had to be as tired as we were. They’d had to travel a much longer distance to even attempt to cut us off here.
But what about magic? I asked myself. I didn’t know the answer.
In time the river slowed to a crawl and we caught sight of Autumn and the scouts near a bend in the river along a small sandy beach. They were signaling us to disembark there as the rear security teams pulled out of the river course under heavy arrow fire. The Rangers on my raft pulled hard for the beach, and to my credit I’d kept McGuire alive even though he looked half-drowned and like he wanted to die right there. He tried to stand on the sand, but his legs gave out. He stayed conscious. The man was tough. He coughed and then said it felt worse than when, “I got shot over in the Sandbox.” We gave him a moment to catch his breath as he knelt there silently fighting back tears and spitting up blood. Other rafts floated onto the beach.
One of the Rangers got down to examine Sergeant McGuire and asked, “You got the tat, Sar’nt?”
“What tat?” I asked, completely in the dark. The Ranger worked fast but decided against the next step. We were losing time. We needed to move. “Some guys get a tat between the fourth and fifth rib that says Puncture Here,” said the Ranger as he got up and got ready to move. “If it gets bad
he’ll start to strangle, and you’ll need to do a needle D. Ever do one?” Needle decompression.
I had not.
The Rangers had established a perimeter and were holding the orcs off with ranged fire. Some arrows managed to get close and land in the dirt and the sand along the shore with sudden soft hisses. Occasionally one hit driftwood with a loud thunk.
I took a moment to scan our immediate surroundings as the Rangers and their NCOs organized for the next phase of the move. The small stream was a bad hold and we were about to be encircled. It was time to get out of the noose before it closed around our necks. We were between the ridge and the forest in open field. The river curved off toward the east and the rising sun, a tributary that fed the main body of the waterway that ran through that area off to the north. Above the river course was a large prairie of grass and wildflowers of every color.
And to our rear was the impossible sight that suddenly demanded everyone’s attention. The giant.
By morning’s light the massive Cloodmoor had surmounted the ridge. Cloodmoor the Terrible, she’d called him. Autumn. Last of Autumn. The elf girl who’d gotten us out of a jam and managed to get us this far. Everyone, mouths open, watched for a full thirty seconds as the impossible Cloodmoor scanned the morning landscape and spotted us far below. Then with a howl he picked up a huge boulder and just flung it at us. The thing must’ve weighed tons and all we could do was watch as the rock-turned- meteor headed straight at us, arcing through the new morning mist and sky.
So. Cloodmoor had no problem with hurling multi-ton rocks.
Luckily the giant’s game was weak. He shot an airball. The boulder went over the river and off into the grassy prairie beyond. To our north. We turned to watch it fly overhead and off into the waving grass, amazed it hadn’t crushed us.
It was in that direction that we were given our first glimpse of the Philosopher’s Palace. Where the main river passed near the beginning of what had to be Charwood Forest as described by Last of Autumn. Beyond the river over there rose the fantastic white marble ruins of an ancient fortress whose walls had long ago been smashed down and wrecked. Huge blocks of white stone lay in the river and the long grass and in the trees. More of that same cathedral architecture I’d witnessed on my adventure with Autumn inside the temple was in evidence where the main body of the ruins waited. High broken towers, fractured fantastic columns, and the skeletons of grand cathedrals or perhaps even observatories where shattered crystalline shards of glass still twinkled high up in the first morning light.
“Hurry…” said Last of Autumn next to me and in my ear. “Tell your king… you must make it there. Soon. You will be… safe. Your scouts… they know now. You will be safe… once on the other side of the river Ashwyne.”
Cloodmoor was moving fast along the ridge, pulling up and tossing badly hurled stones as he came at us. Sending rockets through the air between us. The distance to the far ruins was well over a mile. Maybe two. We’d never—
A rock the size of a car came down in the stream near the beach and sent up a plume of spray like a building imploding. One of the last Ranger rafts coming in barely escaped getting hit.
NCOs already had the scouts’ orders and knew the destination of our next phase line. The ruins. We’d run for it. If we weren’t safe there, we could at least use the river crossing to make our last stand. There would be no fighting along the way. No counterattacks. Just defending ourselves in order to keep moving as fast as we could to reach the next river.
It was a race now. An all-out race for our lives.
“C’mon,” said Sergeant Kurtz bitterly as he pulled his section away from the water’s edge. Running wasn’t his thing and it showed. He was looking right at me and he didn’t stop after he’d ordered me to move. He knew I’d follow. There was no other way to get out of this. But you could tell he didn’t like it one bit. Not at all. You could tell Sergeant Kurtz would rather have stayed and fought Cloodmoor the Whatever with the last of any ammo anyone would give him. Kurtz was a fight to the death no matter what kind of guy.
As though he knew the world, whatever world he found himself in, hated him. And he hated it right back in its face without blinking. But orders were orders and it was time to run.
I watched the tired and soaking-wet Rangers hunch under their burdens of weapons and supplies and overloaded rucks—Jabba too, looking like he could just die from exhaustion—as they started off across the tall soft grass beyond our beach. Other Ranger teams were already moving out as best they could. The captain and the rear security team were waiting until everyone that was coming out of the river had done so.
“Ain’t nothin’ but the Mog Mile, Talker.” It was Brumm. Still humping the 249. I was holding up McGuire who looked like he could barely stand, much less run a mile.
The Mogadishu Mile.
The legendary story of a group of Rangers who ran through hell, small- arms fire and RPGs and overwhelming hostiles, to escape an operation gone extremely bad. They do it every year back at Fort Benning. To commemorate the heroism displayed that day. The Rangering done. Except without the gunfire and death.
The Mog Mile. After this it would be the Cloodmoor Mile. But that wasn’t a sure thing at this point.
“He make it?” asked Specialist Brumm of McGuire. Then he bent down in the dying sergeant’s face. “You make it, Sar’nt? Almost there.”
All McGuire could do was look up, gasp, and then… nod that he could make it.
“We’ll make it, Sar’nt,” said Brumm. “Take his other arm, Talker. I’ll take this side. We’ll help him along.”
We were off, doing as best we could to make it while boulders rained down from the sky like incoming artillery strikes and orc pursuers racing out of the ether green of tall grass, the Rangers shooting the vicious killers down before they could pick off our wounded.
