Kurtz and his section had pulled back to the next defensive position. The last one we were to hold before falling back to the final positions atop the hill. The two-forty was silent when we got there with the resupply. The team was engaging the orcs in the ascending trench with secondaries. On the slope outside the trench, Brumm was holding them back with the chattering squad automatic weapon, but he was dangerously low on ammo and made sure his squad leader knew all about it. For the stoic gunner this was a downright Shakespearean monologue straight out of Henry V.
“Gonna be down to cussin’ and bad intentions in about thirty rounds or so, Sar’nt.”
Then the specialist unloaded with a fury, draining the SAW and making good on his prophecy as he swore violently. We, PFC Kennedy and I, were setting down the ammo cans for the two-forty when it happened. Obviously the SAW gunner was trying to hit something important, as he’d burned the last of his ammo to do so.
Brumm shrugged off the SAW sling and jumped back into the trench as a fusillade of crow-feathered arrows slammed into the hill all around in reply. Kurtz and Tanner were busy holding the trench from small alcoves they’d carved into the sides. Taking turns popping invaders as the raging orcs tried to take the next ten meters of the trench we were barely holding on to.
Another sudden rain of arrows whistled in and slammed into the dirt along the side of the hill above our heads. Their archers were getting closer and improving their aim.
And then the head of a giant appeared above the lip of the trench. It was huge and bald with one leering eye that burned pure hate, boosting on malice like some junkie looking for a fix. There were small, bloody wounds in its forehead and cheeks. Or rather the savage impact wounds from Brumm’s two-four-nine seemed small across the cratered moon of its massive ugly giant face. A huge hand the size of a dumpster came up into view, clawing at the side of the trench the Rangers were fighting from. The giant was pulling himself up the hill, using our trench as a handhold, or trying to; mostly he ended up just pulling a huge section of scarred earth
away, tearing a massive gap in the slit the Rangers had dug out.
Brumm pulled a grenade and tossed it into the gap, while at the same time reaching for his M18 and trying to cover along the side of what was left of the trench leading to the top.
“Frag out!” he shouted as Kennedy and I threw ourselves down over the drums of ammunition. Maybe because we knew they needed to be protected from blast damage. Or maybe just because they were there. Rico, who’d regained consciousness, flopped over and covered with his arms.
The grenade detonated right under the crawling, climbing giant. The thing bellowed like a howling demon in the night, its roar echoing off into the forest and distant hills. Brumm’s M67 pill was the apparent cure for a giant when prescribed from only a few meters. If definitely didn’t make its night any better.
“Were you gonna tell us about the giant?” Sergeant Kurtz shouted at the gunner.
Brumm just looked murderous as he prepared to pop out and empty his mag point-blank on the giant’s ugly face.
White star-shells arced out across the hilltop, throwing the looming gargantuan into shadow as it arched its back from the explosion that had just showered its neck and chest with hot explosive fragments. Then the giant was fully revealed as the illumination shells shifted out over the wild battle along the lower slopes. It towered above us like some colossus from a lost age. Roaring anger in the falling starlight.
Beyond the MK18s and a few grenades, there wasn’t much left to fight it with.
And it was pissed.
“Talker… we’re gonna need a bigger frag.”
Kennedy was right next to me. We were on our knees, and Kurtz was swearing and dragging a can of 7.62 ammo toward the two-forty. Hoping to get it loaded and up before the giant smashed both of its meat locker fists down on the cluster of us.
“Talker,” said Kennedy in the half light of the falling white star-shell. The giant was standing up now, rising like some massive edifice suddenly being erected before our eyes. It was almost impossible to comprehend the sight of it in that moment.
How many times had death been close tonight? I’d lost count. Prior to
this mission I’d calculated there would be two, maybe three times at best when the highly valuable linguist I intended to serve as would be in actual real might-get-killed danger. That kind of duty was for studs like the Rangers. My job was to say “We come in peace” in three different Arabic dialects. But now I’d used up my entire allotment of might-get-killeds all in one night and then some, and even those near-death experiences paled in comparison to the moment facing me now, as the giant who’d survived Brumm’s competent attention with the SAW, and then a direct up-close- and-personal grenade det, rose above us, raising its titanic fists even higher into a night colored by red war, to pulp the tiny little Rangers it found trying to hold it off in that torn-apart section of the trench we’d been fighting from.
We were stupid and insignificant compared to this gargantuan nightmare.
And I kept thinking… We’re gonna die now.
And then there was PFC Kennedy. Who was thinking something else. “Talker… can I see that staff on your ruck?”
The giant bellowed like some war elephant from an elder age.
The staff was still attached to my ruck. The HVT sorcerer’s staff with the carved head of a malevolent dragon. The one we’d taken off the high- value target.
The giant prepared to crush us all.
I nodded dumbly at Kennedy, who already had a flick knife out. he cut the paracord and took hold of the sorcerer’s staff in one motion. Some flare must’ve gone off out over the battle, or another explosion, because down there in the dark of the trench I could see PFC Kennedy staring at the staff through his coke-bottle RPGs. That’s what we call Army-issue eyewear. Rape protection glasses—RPGs. Or birth control glasses. BCGs. Because no girl’s ever gonna find those things attractive enough to attack you when you’re running your game at the off-post EM club.
In the light coming off the battle, I watched him study the gnarled staff. Maybe my fear of imminent death by crushing made everything startlingly clear, but it wasn’t until that moment that I noticed that PFC Kennedy was half-Asian. Later I’d find out his mom was Korean. His dad some American guy who’d become a judge. He was the very image of geek. Bony and tallish. Angular face. Dreamy eyes made freakishly large by the RPGs. Pale
Asian skin and light freckles the gringo half of his parentage had contributed to the union. And he played games about imaginary worlds with strange-shaped little dice, assuming characters that were every bit as real to the players as real people were real, in real life.
Role-playing games. Another kind of RPG.
He stood suddenly with the twisted dragon-headed staff in both hands. On the floor of the pit, shooting from a crouch, Brumm blazed away with the M18 and a mouthful of dip, determined to, if nothing else, annoy the giant as much as possible before it killed him. He was the opposite of the overwhelming fear I was currently experiencing. I’ll admit that. My network was down. I was “in the black.” But Brumm and Kurtz were pure hate, hating the giant right into its big ugly face even if we were all about to get smashed.
Kennedy’s voice rang out, cracking because he wasn’t the type to use it much at that volume. You could tell he was quiet and nerdy. Probably opinionated enough to have learned it was best to keep his mouth shut. One had to wonder how he’d ended up in the Rangers. But now, like some Shakespearean actor playing a role in a bad B-movie about a wizard and a bunch of kids trying to kill a dragon menacing the local town, he shouted right up into the face of the giant towering above us all.
“I am Malendron! Emerald Mage of Xathia!”
That was where his voice cracked, and some dark part of me found that funny enough to take note of, despite the fact that the giant’s lone eye was glaring down at us with every intention of crushing us to death in the next instant. I could see the monster had been wounded in a dozen places, yet it didn’t seem to mind. It was bleeding out rivers of blood from all those wounds, and its insanely malevolent mind couldn’t have cared less.
If I had to guess what it was thinking at that moment, I’d translate it as something along the lines of, “Hulk Smash!”
Then I saw the living fire, just like little fireflies at first, crawling up from the bottom of the sorcerer’s staff that Kennedy the Magnificent, or whatever he’d just called himself, was holding up in the face of our immense destructor. In the blink of an eye the fireflies coalesced into a rope of living flame, and then all at once the rope became a huge whip that lashed out at the giant.
It wasn’t fire now. It was white-hot plasma. And as it hit the giant it exploded, blowing him clear off the side of the hill and out into the darkness of the night like he was a gnat that had just been swatted. Not just knocking him back, but literally flinging him away like in those action movies when the villain gets blown off the skyscraper and flies outward, hands flailing in slow motion as death becomes both imperative and imminent in descent. All so we can get to the hero’s tagline.
Talk about a big fall.
But something wittier than that. Something that a team of overpaid Hollywood screenwriters might come up with between martini lunches and doe-eyed starlets.
I knew the giant fell, because after about three long seconds of hang time something huge struck the earth below the hill and went off like a MOAB. A big one. A Mother of All Bombs.
At the same moment a wave of orcs—these were carrying small skirmisher bows—raced forward to exploit the breach, firing their arrows and drawing their next one as they moved surefootedly through the darkness all around us. Even while the ground was still shaking.
Kurtz was just getting the two-forty up and ready to go. Brumm was putting a mag into his empty M18. Tanner was holding the trench because they were still pushing from there, and me… well, I just sat there with my mouth open because that giant being blown off the hill by PFC Kennedy’s trick was pretty amazing. Way better than anything I’d seen in every year’s must-see CGI abomination.
I mean… c’mon. A giant just got roasted and then blown off the side of a hill in the middle of a firefight.
That was pretty cool.
Then the orc skirmishers were at the lip of the ruined trench and shooting, moving forward, and just as the arrows started to fall into the exposed section of the trench, PFC Kennedy pulled his next trick.
Exactly how did he know how to do any of this? I had no idea. But he pointed the dragon’s head right into the swarm of oncoming savage orcs, and it literally became a flamethrower worthy of any military technology. Black and white footage of Marines clearing caves on some island in the Pacific during World War II flashed in my brain as a burning jet of flame splashed out over the cruel orc faces. They were hunched over their bows
and moving forward as a cohesive unit, and in the next second they were all on fire and done for. Roasted right down to their bones. Their flesh just… melted.
It was one of the most horrible things I’d ever seen.
Some orcs at the back tried to run. A couple fired their arrows but the crawling flames cooked those too. Anyone closer than that never stood a chance.
Even Sergeant Kurtz stood there in amazement watching PFC Kennedy
—the Ranger batt’s dogsbody and perpetually-under-threat-of-Article-15 or RFS, Released For Standards, low man on the totem pole—wipe out no less than thirty orcs and a giant in mere seconds.
PFC Kennedy. He was cackling with delight as he unleashed the power of the ancient staff. You know, just like power-mad villains do in movies when they finally get the MacGuffin and decided to use it for evil, not good.
Totally consumed with their own awesomeness.
In the next instant he shot about five massive fireballs down into the attacking forces along the hill. Bigger than anything that had been used on us. We couldn’t see what happened, but the explosions were terrific. Then, all of a sudden, he just turned around with a strange look on his face like he was gonna say something interesting and collapsed. Fell over without even trying to protect himself from hitting the packed dirt floor of the trench. The way guys fainted in formation during change-of-command ceremonies that seemed like they’d never end. The dragon staff went one way, and Kennedy the other.
I caught the staff.
There were more orcs and goblins coming for the ruined section of the trench now. Rocks and arrows rained down on us and Brumm was up with his M18, covering at the side and firing.
It was clear we could no longer hold this part of the defense. Kennedy had only bought us some time.
“Fall back!” shouted Sergeant Kurtz. We were about to be overrun.
