The enemy’s last push wasn’t so much a push as a final go-for-broke surge. There was only one direction we could go now. Only one direction we could be pushed toward. And that was down the back of the very steep hill and into the deep end of the river.
With wounded and civilians, that wasn’t going to happen.
Things were not looking good. For all the forces of evil we’d waxed, it fell like the only thing that had come of it was giving up ground. That felt like losing. Honestly, at that point I was convinced we’d lost. Past tense. But not the Rangers. To them, it was like they had the enemy right where they wanted them. Everything had been done to lure the enemy into this final, perfect trap where the Rangers could shoot targets in every direction.
It was some time after O3OO. I knew that because O255 was the last read I saw on my watch before it stopped working. That was a while ago. Our smartphones were dying, too. We’d been charging them at the Forge, which contained a small internal powerplant, but they were starting to run dry. Same story with the ammo. We’d been ordered to use semi-auto fire only, due to low ammunition reserves, and we were down to the last redistribution. Some guys had started picking up enemy weapons. Gnarly axes. Jagged spears. Rusty, blood-covered swords. All weapons with some kind of reach. And of course, the tomahawks the Rangers carried were ready as well, as our defense constricted and constricted around the hilltop everyone called Sniper Hill, and I thought of as Ranger Alamo.
I’m an optimist. Really.
The last push came, and it was nothing but a brawl. I went to the top of the hill twice, first dragging the lifeless Kennedy who wasn’t dead but seemed to be for all intents and purposes, then assisting the dazed Specialist Rico. So I was already there at the peak when Kurtz’s section, or what remained of them, came back up for the final defense. The two-forty was tossed aside. It was bone dry and there was no ammo to be had for it. Off to my left I could see the sniper teams, shooter and spotter, continuing to fire down into the surging masses of orcs, trolls, goblins, and other unknowable things making their way up the face of the hill to come and get us. The monsters were getting crafty about staying low, using cover, and even
slithering through the piles of their own dead to get close enough to attack. They had figured out that our “boom sticks,” as they most likely called them, needed to be avoided. And all the while their drums and horns were calling out to one another, indicating they were timing and coordinating their last big assault.
The air was loaded with tension. You could feel it.
And why shouldn’t they come for us now? They’d taken the worst we had to offer and their numbers seemed no less motivated for it.
These were things, monsters, a kind of people in their own way, that had probably lived and breathed desperate survival from moment one of their horrible existences. They weren’t like us. There was no civilization, no hospitals, no police and emergency services to protect them when they were young and not warriors. They were probably more like Spartans who’d been neglected and maltreated from birth in order to select for better warriors.
They knew nothing but survival and conflict.
Which is to say, they were more used to walking the razor’s edge between life and death than we were.
But that didn’t matter to the Rangers. Not in the least. To the Rangers, it didn’t even matter that we were down to our last mags with no support and no wire to fall back behind. No place to hunker down or even retreat to. No air cav to make gun runs. This was it. This was last stand at Ranger Alamo time, and yet the men around me had no doubt that they were going to make ’em pay for it.
Kurtz kept saying that as he organized his defense on our wing of the hill. “Make ’em pay, dammit! Make ’em pay.”
The snipers were the only ones not low on rounds. They kept up fire with methodical intensity. Working the enemy for the targets they’d prioritized for death. The big ones. The “tanks” of the enemy. The trolls and ogres. The war leaders. I saw Sergeant Thor, and his face never came away from the stock of the magnificent Mjölnir. Every time I heard the massive boom of the anti-material rifle, debris suddenly pushed away by the explosive power, he was shifting for his next target. Listening to the spotter working the range finder. Acquire and fire. Barely a few breaths as they killed another. And another. And another…
And for all that killing, it didn’t seem to make a damn bit of difference
in the size of the dark horde coming up the slopes for us.
The sergeant major appeared, checked me over, and moved on without saying a word for a long moment. I figured he had nothing to say and then, “Find a weapon, Talker. One of theirs. Gonna need it, son.”
Then he was moving on down the line, checking his troops. The mortar teams were out of rounds and moving forward to the line, sharing out their mags to guys who were dry.
I knew things were bad when Chief Rapp showed up, jocked up and ready to go with all his high-speed SF gear and weapons. He’d definitely switched over from Life-Saver to Death-Dealer.
We were on the left flank, or eastern edge of the hill. The heavy weapons section was taking the access trench that gave out onto the forward slope. And Chief Rapp just walked up to us, casual like he’s just stopping in to say hello, big white teeth smiling in contrast to his Mississippi-mud dark skin. Like everything was gonna be great soon as we got this done.
“Guess I’ll fight with you boys,” the special operator said to Sergeant Kurtz.
Kurtz nodded and asked the chief what his team could do to improve the defense.
The chief lowered his rifle, letting it hang by the sling with the butt resting on his chest, and suggested positions we should take up to mutually support each other in what looked like a last-stand situation. He had us roughly in a circle at that side of the hill. We dragged containers and clamshells into heaps for some cover.
“This our circle, boys. Circle of trust,” said the chief, his basso profundo voice rich and sonorous in the middle of the night cold. “Rule number one… no one violates the circle of trust.”
I could see what he was doing. As long as we held this circle along our flank, the enemy couldn’t flank the snipers or reach the wounded at the center of the defenses. If the circle broke, then the enemy could sweep the hilltop, rolling up each section one by one.
Captain Knife Hand and the XO came along shortly. The enemy was busy firing flaming bolts from the ballistae they couldn’t get up the hill. The massive flaming spears streaked through the air but overshot the hill. It was impressive, but of no tactical value.
The captain saw Chief Rapp’s layout, nodded, and moved off quickly
to check the rest of the sections. He trusted the SF advisor with a Ranger captain’s most valuable asset: his troops. Nothing else needed to be said. Nothing else could be improved on in the highly trained SF tactical advisor’s plan to hold the line here along the eastern edge of the defenses.
Twenty minutes later, and the night was only promising to get darker. The moon was gone, and it was nothing but pitch black when the horde of monsters came screaming up the last of the hill and made their final push. This was a charge. Pure and simple. No flaming arrows. No war drums or Uroo Uroo horns. They came up silent and determined, holding in the roars until the last as they scrambled over the dead, going for broke one last time. They’d pushed us this far; just a little bit more and there’d be nothing left to push. You could see that was their plan.
Plan, meet Rangers.
I was covering behind a stack of clamshells that seemed flimsy at best. To the inner rear of the circle of trust. Meaning I was close to the wounded. I had no idea what to expect, which was probably for the best. I just kept watching my sector.
Others along the line were already shooting when I saw the humanoid frog creatures coming up the slope from behind us. I called out targets and started to engage at the one-hundred-meter mark, semi-auto and putting rounds into the bullfrog shamans with spears. I’d decided they were shamans, dark holy priests, because there was something in them that evoked the German word for shaman. Schmane. They wore ragged loincloths and necklaces made of teeth—a popular fashion statement out here—and they wobbled as they flopped up through the weeds down there at the base of the hill.
I spent a mag killing them until they weren’t coming up anymore. As I scanned the darkness down below, I heard overwhelming fire start up behind me. The orcs were coming out of the trenches below the base of the hill, boiling out like a chemical reaction from some bizarre science experiment. Don’t try this at home, kids. You’ll never get rid of the stains and you won’t like what the orcs do to the carpets.
Brumm had someone else’s MK18, probably off one of the more badly wounded. He was busy engaging the orcs, squeezing hard and fast to keep them from getting out of the trench. Pointing the weapon and selecting new targets like he was going for expert on a range full of pop-ups. Never mind
these pop-ups were going to flay you alive if they got close enough.
It was incredible: as fast as you put one down, two more crawled forward, and if you targeted those two, seven more were squeezing out to lob hand axes and spears. I felt one barely miss my bucket and cleared an angle to fire and shoot at an orc getting ready to throw another. A fast- moving goblin that managed to do what six of its comrades hadn’t been able to do—get close—leapt out of the line of fire Kurtz was pouring into his sector, curved dagger out, and flung itself at the Ranger sergeant. It jabbed him with the dagger, but it was hard to tell if it stuck deep.
Bad mistake for the goblin.
Kurtz dropped his rifle—it was single-point slung so it just dangled— and throttled the thing with one hand. Then he jammed the tanto knife he kept on his plate carrier right into its brain. It went limp like a puppet, and Kurtz tossed it aside like it was nothing and he had no more time for it as he brought his rifle back into play and shot three more in rapid succession. The rounds left smoke trails that ended in goblin and orc chests.
Chief Rapp had a whole front to himself. Basically, the section of the hill that linked up with Kurtz’s sector and then attached to the snipers who now looked to be shooting at targets close at hand. Just beneath the lip of the hill where it was steepest, and the horde couldn’t assault directly.
The chief worked his rifle easily for such a big man. His marksmanship was incredible. Things he shot stayed dead. The orcs had pushed over the lip of the hill, coming up an almost vertical section of the slope, and thrust heavy iron shields out in front of them to protect their foothold against our line. The first few to do this died as the chief nailed them in the head at ten meters. But, as was the enemy’s way, they had numbers, so if they lost a few dozen just to take a few more meters, no problem for them. Or so it seemed. Foothold was everything to them. They had bodies to burn.
Eventually one orc, covering behind a shield up, monkeyed into place with another to lock big iron shields and form a defensive line. The shields were heavy enough to deflect rounds. I would have rolled a grenade at them, and was on the verge of doing so, but the chief just waited for an opening, his focus riveted on the sight picture at the end of the barrel of his rifle as it danced and shifted left to right like he was playing a game with them, getting them to drop their guard, and then he fired. Total focus, never mind the gunfire, rocks, and arrows. Blowing off a head or putting a round
into a peeking eye was the entire world for the giant Special Forces operator.
The shield wall collapsed as the chief showed them how their plan wouldn’t work. But the orcs didn’t care. They just pushed more forward to stab and cut. Rangers were going hand-to-hand now. Slashing tomahawks against vicious little short swords. Sweeping enemy hand weapons aside and going full savage as they planted their axes in skulls and chests. The enemy kept coming. This was their big moment and they were going for it. As though they knew Chief Rapp and the rest of us couldn’t have too much more of our “boom magic” left. Maybe that’s what their own chiefs and shamans were telling them in the dark chants I could sometimes hear between the bouts of our gunfire and the punctuations of explosions as the last of the grenades were used.
A troll hit the right flank, and I saw someone, a Ranger, lifted up and bitten in half. Then two other Rangers swinging tactical tomahawks leaped onto it and started wailing away like jackhammers, flailing their agile axes down into the thing where they’d grabbed on to it. A second later the troll went over onto its back, and all of them went rolling off down into the darkness at the bottom of the hill, crashing and crushing through the orc horde coming up.
I saw the sergeant major blazing away near the wounded. Firing his M18 near point-blank into an ogre and three orcs who’d somehow gotten in between the snipers and the right flank. He gave no ground. First round he put through the ogre’s brain, gore and matter exploding out the back of the misshapen lump. Then he continued to put rounds into it as it swung a giant two-handed sword even as it fell and almost hit another Ranger.
There was a bright flash, a flashbang of some sort, and I couldn’t see anything for a few desperate seconds.
I shielded my eyes and scanned my sector. A group of orcs were trying to come up the way the frog shaman men had. I checked the sergeant major, but he was gone and the three orcs who’d supported the dead ogre with the big sword who’d come at the wounded were dead now.
Chief Rapp was next to me and tossing grenades down at the orcs. One two and three. The orcs down at the bottom of the hill near the ruined corpses of the frogmen just stood there as the explosives went off. They were torn to shreds.
“Stay in this, Talker,” Chief Rapp said calmly. “Almost through it. I can tell.” Then he was back and shooting down more orcs scrambling over the edge of the hill.
Knives and arrows showered the Rangers and the chief, and some stuck. Whether in the armor or the flesh was unclear. The enemy moved fast, like a cross between a spider and a monkey. And none of that mattered to the SF operator at the front of the line. He continued to shoot until his magazine ran dry, and then he had another one out. His movements seemed so slow, so slow and so calm like he wasn’t bothered in the least. Almost too slow, like they’d get him before he could be ready to fire again. But that was all just an optical illusion. His slowness made him smooth. And the smooth made him a kind of incredible fast.
Unlike me, who was still having to think every time I needed a new magazine. By the way…
Last one.
I knew what to say even though it didn’t matter. It just felt like admitting defeat at that moment.
But I said it anyway. “Mag out!”
I swapped the empty for the last loaded magazine I had and targeted more orcs with my MK18 rifle. They were coming out of the trench and trying to move behind us. I kept shooting them as fast as they could boil.
Then something happened. And the something that happened was this… though I didn’t know it at the time. I can only write about it now having digested it. Dissected it. Thought about it in the quiet since. Lived through it to tell no one in this account no one will ever read.
I was mad as hell because I was down to my last loaded magazine. And proud of that fact at the same time.
Mag out!
Black on ammo. I’d used up every round issued to me to kill the enemy. I was down to the last of what I had been entrusted with. And there was something in that… some pride that meant something I couldn’t quite explain, knowing I was down to my last. Knowing I was making my last stand right here with everyone else. That no one had cut and run. That I had not. And the anger was really that I wouldn’t have any more rounds to kill any more enemies with. Which is a good kind of anger. I made every round
in that mag count. I made them pay.
Then I found a small sword. It was a dirty, dented, banged-up thing. Notched and scratched. The hilt oily and smelly. It had to have come from the discount Rent-A-Center clearance aisle of used swords. Remaindered at half price two-for-a-penny just-steal-these we-don’t-care swords that one could find on that hill at somewhere after three o’clock in the morning. Long night. Somewhere between never and dawn.
It was mine.
Now that the last of my ammunition was used up, I would use this, and I would go on killing them for the obvious little that remained of me. I would teach them, as I had with all my rounds, the error of ever meeting me out in the dark.
Be meaner than it, Talker.
Roger, Sergeant Major.
I’d never felt anything like that before. I was a long way from the known… and fine with that.
I imagine that’s what warriors, real warriors, Rangers, carry with them every day. That’s what makes them Rangers. I felt it for a moment as we were being surrounded, shot down by clusters of arrows, and overrun on that hilltop.
The arrow fire had not stopped. Several Rangers had black arrows sticking out over their carriers, thighs, rucks, themselves.
I had killed this far. I could kill a little more.
I was heaving with rage when the dark rider came up the hill, his horse rearing and fear-struck as it rode down the orcs in the trench just to get at Chief Rapp. The grave-shroud cloak and rags that had covered it were thrown aside. Black armor, well-made and dusty, lay underneath. It was a skeleton. Skeletal. It wasn’t human. It had a death’s head, a skull for a head. It came out of the trench, the horse crying madly, hood thrown back and swinging a great silver sword at us. And there were more, more of the dark riders riding straight up the hill and vaulting the lip as the Rangers mowed down the last of the orcs, the last push with the ammo they still possessed.
The riders screamed, and the scream was an ethereal howl and a hiss all at once. One rider swept his sword at a Ranger and practically cut him in half.
Slick as a snake, Sergeant Thor turned with Mjölnir and rapid-fired the
.5O caliber Barrett anti-materiel right into the rider bearing down on another Ranger engaging a swarm of orcs with the last of his ammo. Every shot from Mjölnir hit, leaving giant smoking holes and tearing off armor fragments and finally knocking the skeleton in armor off the horse. The horse was hit and died screaming.
Thor advanced, drawing a bead on the skeletal warrior who was not dead, or at least was no deader than it had been to begin with. The thing swept aside its tattered cloak and flung its tremendous silver blade out in a wide arc, cutting wide to keep any harassment away as it gained its black boots and got ready to fight.
Thor fired one shot at the skeleton’s skull, and it exploded in a dusty
puff. The thing was down.
I had my cheap sword in my hand. Behind me, Kurtz had a tomahawk and his M18 out. Brumm was behind him, and they were rushing the trench, shooting the orcs and slashing at them.
The enemy turned, and finally, finally began to flee. It was over.
We’d driven them off the hill.
To the east the sky was getting light, and I could hear great beasts trampling off through the night, smashing trees and tearing them down as they fled for the river and the dark shadows of the wilderness beyond. Seeking caves and dark places they thought we would not go down into.
We’d won. For now.
