We sat in the quiet of early morning as the last of the night shadows faded in the rising of the sun. Dawn was breaking, and there was mist down there on the river flowing around the little island. Ranger Alamo. The light was golden, turning the trees out across the river lighter shades of pastoral greens, evoking spring instead of the dark ominous foreboding late-winter tangles they’d been in our desperate days before.
The topic of what season it actually was, and if seasons meant anything anymore here ten thousand years in the future, had been hotly debated by everyone during brief breaks in the endless tasks to prepare for each night’s onslaught. We’d left Fifty-One in late August. The weather had been sweltering everywhere across the globe, and a lot of the reports of inexplicable random acts of violence and mass hysteria had been chalked up to a crazy heat wave sweeping the world in those end-of-days times. Lighting everything on fire both literally and figuratively. Like the world had a fever. Like it was fighting off something bad. And losing.
It was a lot to take in. And you really had no idea what to believe. There were even reported rumors of sudden outbreaks of mass blindness. Things were crazy, and the world seemed intent on embracing the madness. Anyway, back before we left, it had been a late, hot, sweltering end-of- summer simmer that made you wish for the cool of fall. Maybe even the first blush of winter. Since we’d arrived, the place seemed to be in late winter. Ten thousand years or so in the future, everyone was still complaining about the weather, about the relentless chill in the air. There was no place to get warm. Even the grounded C-17 was constantly cold. It didn’t snow and there was never any frost in the morning, but it was cold with a chill that never departed, and when an early-morning breeze or something in the late afternoon came up, it took the warm right out of you and froze you down to the bone. Like a forgotten porterhouse steak left in
the freezer too long.
But now, here atop Sniper Hill, sitting in the first light of a new morning and surrounded by piles of dead monsters that hadn’t smelled too good when they’d been alive, it felt like some sea change had just taken place. Like the seasons, or even the micro-seasons, had just flipped the next
page on the calendar in the night while we fought to the death. Careless of our struggles. It was shaping up to be one of those beautiful days. You could tell from the very start of it.
Things were different now.
The situation had changed for us.
Or maybe it hadn’t. That was still to be determined. But it felt like it. If only because we could count ourselves among the living few, and not the many dead littering the top of the hill, its sides, and the island and river below. Everywhere you looked.
NCOs were going around getting the ACE reports, and none of them were going to be “blue sky” coded. There were casualties, ammo was down to practically nothing, and lots of equipment was either missing or damaged. So about as far from a blue sky as it gets. Info was being disseminated. Twelve more KIAs. That’s how many we’d lost last night after Phase Line Charlie collapsed.
I tried to remember how many of those I saw first hand. The Ranger bitten in half. The guys who went rolling down with the troll—they had to be gone, right?
The attempt to recall quickly felt heavy. A burden. I let it go by reciting Macbeth’s Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy in one language after another. Out, out brief candle.
Everyone was flat smoked. Even the relentlessly preparing Rangers just sat there for a few minutes as the day turned from pre-dawn to dawn. Still holding their weapons and staring at the dead like they could murder them all over again. Some of the more callow souls dug into their MREs. But no weapon maintenance, clearing of bodies, or improving of positions was conducted for those first few minutes of dawn.
You just looked around to see who was still alive. Glad you saw the faces you did. Sad when you didn’t.
The Rangers had fought for their lives, and now they were done, if only for a moment. Even the NCOs sensed this, moving about their endless business with less general chastisement than usual. Quietly busy and even encouraging at points. The Rangers had earned a few minutes’ peace, and the NCOs made sure they had it. They just needed to ignore the fact that the brief respite took place on the top of a corpse-covered hill.
This was nothing new for some of them. You could see the ones that
didn’t seem to mind it. If anything, it made them happier. And hungry for the tasteless MREs they’d been issued before the battle. Some finished theirs and asked their buddies whether they were going to finish their own. As if to say hunger didn’t care. Hunger was hunger.
And you never knew what was coming next.
Soon word got around that Sergeant Jasper had been the Ranger the troll had bitten in half in the middle of the last fight. Later we’d find out Kang and Soprano were still alive. They were the two who’d jumped the troll with tactical tomahawks and then gone rolling off down the hill with the huge beast. So I’d been wrong about seeing those men die.
Soprano had been knocked out and lay unnoticed in a pile of dead orcs. Kang had E-and-E’d, escape and evasion, downslope and gone on a killing spree behind enemy lines, cutting throats in the dark where he could find them. When they found him, he was covered in blood and eating an MRE he’d found on another dead Ranger. He didn’t talk for a few hours, but came around by nightfall. Not that he was wordy in the first place. None of them are. The Rangers, that is.
Me, even I was a little quiet. My throat was dry, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d drunk any water. I needed coffee. I needed coffee badly.
I mixed cold water and instant coffee in my canteen and sat there drinking what I told myself was a cold-brew. It tasted like chlorine. I told myself that was the roaster’s choice. Mind over matter.
You don’t mind. It don’t matter.
Everyone agreed Sergeant Kang had straight-up Rangered. Hardcore. The sergeant major got Kang sorted and hydrated and then muttered down to the buck sergeant, “Don’t try so hard, Sergeant Kang. You’ll make us all look bad.” And then he was off to another task.
I saw Kang nod to himself as the command sergeant major walked away. Then he smiled a little as he began to eat another MRE, inspecting the various packets within. Seeing and not really seeing. You could tell that. But even then, he was coming back around. All it took was the approval of a senior NCO he wanted to be like more than anything in the world, and he would come back for his brother Rangers and try to forget what he’d seen down there alone in the dark.
I understood leadership a little better then. I watched the whole
interaction while I was helping out with the wounded.
The birds came out just before sunrise, but they were cautious about sending forth their songs for a few minutes. Then the first, tentative trill came, and not long after life was in full force out among the trees.
We sat there, waiting for another attack, and when it didn’t come, they got us up and moving, and that’s when the informal body-tossing contest began. Work would take our minds off the horrors we’d just lived through. Or at least, that’s what I suspected.
The Rangers were tossing dead orcs off the hill, letting them roll downslope toward the river. Points were awarded based on how close the tossed body made it to the river’s edge.
In a matter of minutes there were rules for the game of Toss the Dead Orc, and soon there were two-man teams and—of course—betting. What else were you supposed to do?
I had about two hours with the wounded, helping Chief Rapp and the Baroness and a few of the other Rangers who’d been specially trained to serve as secondary medics. Like I said, this all happened while the hill was being cleared. No one had any idea what we were gonna do next. Even the NCOs expected to get the “hold until relieved” order. It was clear that despite low ammo to no ammo, they were preparing to hold the hill again for another night. Regardless of current events.
Captain Knife Hand led a patrol down to recover the dead, find the missing and wounded, and recon the C-17.
Spoiler. The Forge was gone.
I didn’t need the still-unconscious PFC Kennedy to tell me that that strange purple light show halfway through the battle before the final assault had had something to do with that. Teleportation magic or something else that once was considered ridiculous. Like they, the big whoever behind this attack, used the “magic” this world made real to basically hijack our Forge and get it out of here. Chief McCluskey? King Triton? I remembered that sickening feeling of the near becoming close, and the close telescoping far away as it all went down. The sound of an anchor in the universe dropping and then being reeled back into some unknown space we were never meant to see. Or know of.
Whatever that had been, however my brain had interpreted those
signals, that had to have had something to do with the hijack of the Forge during the battle.
Later, the snipers spotted her first.
Those of us helping the wounded and clearing corpses noticed a commotion. The snipers—not Thor, he was cleaning weapons—spotted a target down there on the river. A rider on a dappled gray horse. Standing at the water’s edge on the far side of the river.
“Hope she don’t step on a mine,” muttered Tanner as he heaved one of those dragon-dog-men off the side of the hill. “’Cause that’d be real bad for her.”
Her. Yeah. Now that I studied the figure it had the shape of a girl. Rangers had good eyes and of course they made the distinction. I had to concentrate to get those details. But they’d spotted her and identified her as a “her.” Then again, the snipers had the best optics in the world. They were probably studying every inch of her up close through their scopes.
I couldn’t get too involved. I was busy holding up an IV for one of the Rangers because that was the help Chief Rapp needed. Professional IV holder-uppers.
But then the call came in to the first sergeant who was running the hilltop to send me down with Tanner. Someone else would have to do my super-important job of IV holding because now… I was gonna do some languages. Stand back everyone. Linguist comin’ through.
More than a few of the Rangers gave me the old stink eye because I was getting to go down and interact with a female. That she might be a dangerous witch-vampire-succubus didn’t seem to bother them. Each and every one of them was convinced he could run some kind of game on her and was probably getting his best lines together. Ten thousand years in the future was beginning to remind some of the Rangers that there were other things to be missed besides unlimited coffee and dip.
Heads up. What if there were just orc women here in the fantastical future?
It wouldn’t have stopped them. Fact.
Still, I drew the long straw. So, lucky me. A few witty interactions with the cute co-pilot had me feeling pretty confident about my future if I survived getting hacked to pieces. As long as Sergeant Thor stayed glued to his scope I was probably going to win any competitions to see who was
going to recolonize this world.
We grabbed our gear, me and Tanner, him along for the ride because I was now considered valuable and in need of protection. It wouldn’t do to have one of the dead orcs out there playing possum on the field suddenly come to life and stab the only guy who knew how to speak a bunch of different languages.
As we left the hill I spotted Volman doing nothing but sitting there helpless among the wounded. Deep State wasn’t hurt. He was wrapped in a poncho someone had given him and just sat there staring off into space like some earthquake survivor. Content to let the work of his survival be handled by others.
I was reminded that the sergeant major expected me to do something about him. And not just something. Y’know… actually kill him. I had hoped the sun would rise on an orc sword stuck into his carcass and that little problem having been solved for me. No such luck, as the sun instead rose on his pathetic form wrapped in a poncho liner within the casualty collection point.
I may seem to be understating the gravity of this. But I’d been through some training that made me understand why the action expected of me was a necessary one with respect to the ongoing mission. I’m not saying I was hip about it. I’m just saying I understood the rationale. Still, I hadn’t done it yet. So there was that to consider. That moment of truth.
Not far down from the top of the hill I could see the rider and her horse. They’d crossed through the shallows of the river and managed not to get blown up by any left-over mines or high ex that hadn’t been detonated during the three nights of battle. The girl was now along the shore near Kurtz’s weapons section’s original defensive positions. Talking with Captain Knife Hand, the sergeant major, and the pilot. A Ranger security team had set up a perimeter around the meeting.
But before we get to that I need to take a moment to describe the battlefield as it looked that morning after three nights of fighting. Coming down the hill and crossing the island.
I don’t know—as in… I don’t know why I’m doing this. This account. Who is this really for? What? Am I gonna sell my war memoirs on the other side of this? To whom? There are, as far as we know, no publishing houses left ten thousand years in the future. And even if, let’s just say, we go back
in time to the present we left. Disregard that apparently the world was doomed at that moment and what we’re seeing now is the bitter harvest of that long-ago plague that ruined the whole mess. Disregard all that and say the world got another twenty to a hundred years for me to live out the remainder of my life in relative non-monster normalcy. Who in the world would believe the things I’ve written down are actual memories, and not just the insane ravings of some dork science fiction writer?
Going back in time isn’t even remotely possible. That QST gate thingy… that ain’t here. And during the brief in the big hangar at Fifty-One they specifically made it clear that time travel was a one-way deal. You can only skip forward. Not back. Apparently, Bob Dylan was right about something.
So what? I take a cart and mule from distant human settlement to distant human settlement, loaded down with codexes of my writing painfully copied by hand to see who might be interested?
“Do any of you fine people know how to read? No? Ah! Well, these also make excellent fire-starters.”
For real. Who’d ever buy it? Who’d ever even read it? The answer is: uh… no one.
And no one is going to believe this.
So… why am I doing this? Why am I writing all this down?
The only answer I can come up with is that someone has to do it. Someone needs to put it all down in an account. A record. The facts. Warts and all. And so… I nominate me and the Mont Blanc pen my mother gave me as a sarcastic, and yet very expensive, gift saying that I was wasting my life joining the Army.
Well—who’s laughing now, Mom? I’m still alive ten thousand years later, and I’m probably the world’s greatest writer by default, seeing as I am probably the world’s only writer.
Game, set, and match, Mom.
Even that’s not the real reason for writing it all down. That’s just me trying to get it all out. Everything I was feeling after three days of life-and- death struggling.
No, the real reason is that if Chief Petty Officer McCluskey was to be believed about anything he told us, then everything going on needs to be written down.
I’m betting that… yes, he told us a lot of lies. But in order to make them believable, he told us some truths to wash it all down with. Pro liars will tell you that’s the best way to do it. To lie. A little truth helps the lie go down.
So, parsing everything SEAL McCluskey tried to download on us… I’d say the part about technology breaking down was probably pretty accurate. Why? Because he didn’t have any. No firearms. No smartphone. No watch.
Futher, the monsters who’d attacked us for three days now had attacked in some sort of orderly fashion indicating civilization and culture. Tribal. Kingdoms. Warlords. They were organized. But they had nothing more than rude Iron Age technology. The most sophisticated crafted technology we saw employed against us was a ballista. A giant crossbow invented by the Romans, I think, used for siege operations. Or some other Hellenic civilization thought it up and the Romans took it. That was how they did things. If I could Google stuff I’d find out. But Google’s about ten thousand years out of date now.
So that’s another reason for this account… to preserve the knowledge acquired. I don’t know what I’ll do when I run out of room in this fancy journal I brought in my pack when all the other Rangers were smuggling favorite weapons and backup ammo in theirs. I’ll scavenge. Make paper, or maybe the Forge could have made paper, I’m sure that it could’ve. But of course, it’s gone now in a big giant mind-bending purple flash off to who knows wherever.
So… yeah.
Finally, I’m writing this all down to mark the dead. I’ve written their names down in the front of this journal. That’s important. If anything, I’m doing it for the Rangers. I’ll tell what they did, what the ancient Greeks called Deeds, and I’ll remember them after death. That’s the least I can do. If it weren’t for the dead I wouldn’t be here. None of us would.
That’s why I’m doing it. This. This accounting of the facts. Warts and all. This is why I’m here.
And so… the battlefield. On the morning after, as I climbed down the hill to meet with our mysterious guest.
Here’s what I saw.
Descending the hill, we had to leave the trench on the western face of
the slope. It was so clogged with dead and rotting orcs, along with other strange creatures, torn to pieces by our savage machine-gun fire, that it wasn’t even passable. The stench, even in the breeze, was overwhelming. We pulled our shemaghs up and continued carefully downslope.
Below, I could see the mostly burned carcass of the one-eyed giant that PFC Kennedy, as Merlin the Magnificent or whatever he’d called himself, had blown off the hill with the dead sorcerer’s dragon-head staff. Most of the rib cage and guts had burned up. The head was thrown back and leering skyward with its milky eye rolled up in its head. The fact that the skull hadn’t burned and that it was still a human in face, in the loosest sense of the word, made the horror show somehow much worse.
I muttered to myself as we passed various tableaus of butchery such as the half-burned giant that this was the worst thing I’d ever seen.
And then about ten steps later I’d see something much worse and say the same thing.
We made the bottom of the hill and stayed out of the gully. There were lots of bodies, or parts of bodies, down there, and again we weren’t completely convinced everyone was good and dead. Plus the flies seemed thicker down in the dry streambed. Maybe because the air was cold and moldy in there. We followed a sandy trail passing crater shells where mortars had rained down steel death on the attacking orcs, goblins, and other misshapen monsters that tried to stage their assault on the hill.
Several had been blown into the trees and gored by bare limbs up there. That was pretty disgusting. Like the wide-eyed and ravaged corpses were just bad art-school installation pieces done by psychotic art majors who’d lost their post-postmodern minds. Trees that had been struck by mortar fire had fallen on other orcs and crushed them. Mostly. We passed a large log one of the Ranger teams had fought from when falling back. There was expended brass all over the sand there. Orcs as close as five meters had gunshot wounds. Farther on we passed a troll that had been holed and gutted with a Carl Gustaf. 84mm round right to the stomach.
That smell was a special kind of rotten.
“Brumm got this one too,” muttered Tanner. He spit a stream of dip juice all over the black and hairy misshapen body of the ruined troll. It was huge. As wide as three men, shoulder-to-shoulder, almost. And it stank to high heaven. It was wearing colossal boots that were covered in muck and
slime. A massive club made from the twisted trunk of some dark-wooded tree lay a short way off. Its features were almost comical if you didn’t look at the death rictus snarl and its yellowing and broken teeth gritted in pain as it had died badly out here among the trees in the night. It had wart-ridden flesh folds over its eyes, making them deep-set. The nose was long and shaped like a potato gone bad. Its skin was black like the skin of a gorilla. And it was covered in boils that oozed even after death.
“That’s sick,” said Tanner as one of the boils popped softly in the morning silence and then oozed out its greenish-yellow load into the sand to mix with the congealed blood and dried gore.
The flies loved this.
I was just glad the horrible thing was dead. I was glad Brumm had such an affinity with the Carl Gustaf. I’d hate to meet one of these things out here in the dark, alone.
We passed more lines and waves of dead orcs that had been shot down as they advanced on the Ranger defenses. The thing I noticed about these was that they fell into types. As though they’d been organized into fighting units. Seeing them come for you at the end of your sights, looking for all intents and purposes like the pure nightmare monsters they were, green skin, claws, fangs, and roaring some ancient tribal battle cry, it was easy to just classify them all as monsters. But here in the morning light, you could see how the Rangers, as they fell back toward the hill, had killed groups of them with either sudden overwhelming firepower or from ambush. Or landed targeted mortar strikes amid their bubbling massings. And they’d gotten groups. Groups of roughly similar types working together.
We passed skirmishers with short bows. Caught advancing through a small clearing by an ambush of Ranger automatic fire. We came upon the expended brass first, out in the woods and high grass. Dribbled everywhere. Tanner noting it and play-by-playing the whole fight as he saw it all go down.
“These guys engaged from here. So… over there should be more brass if they ran the ambush right.”
Tanner probably could have been an NCO, and tabbed, if he didn’t have two ex-wives and three DUIs. He made that clear whenever possible.
We checked Tanner’s hypothesis. They did run the ambush right. There was more brass over there. And the dead orcs lay there stinking in the
morning heat to prove it.
Then we checked the skirmishers. Shot down in the clearing. Bloating bellies, shattered bone. Pools of congealed blood and brain matter in the sands. Blood spray painting the high grass that barely moved down here in the still stench of the corpse-filled island morning.
The flies were really going to work.
Later we found infantry. Or what we decided to call orc heavy infantry. These were large orcs with armor kits that consisted of iron skullcaps and scaled chest armor that looked poorly put together. Big heavy shields. Forged axes, instead of bone or rock wrapped around clubs, and spears. Swords they hadn’t drawn.
Grenades had ruined these. And then more gunfire.
Finally, when we came out along the river’s edge, I saw the security perimeter of Rangers being run by a fire team sergeant. The rest on one knee and facing outward. And at the center, Captain Knife Hand, the command sergeant major, and the pilot.
The sergeant major saw us and waved us over. Then I remembered again I was supposed to have retired Volman. The guy currently sitting like dead weight among the wounded and planning some new way to make life more difficult than it already was for everybody.
“She don’t speak English, Talker,” said the command sergeant major once Captain Knife Hand, the pilot, and him had me in their midst to explain the situation. “We need you to go talk to her and find out what she wants. Captain here is going to listen along, and if you can translate, he’ll instruct you how to respond. Copy, PFC?”
“Copy, Sergeant Major.” But there was a problem. “I don’t even know if I understand what she speaks, Sergeant Major. So…”
“Just do your best,” said the captain, who looked like he had a minor case of indigestion rather than the full-blown nausea the rest of us had. The smell down here, by the river, where the enemy corpses, including the giant Brumm had killed on the first night, had been soaking and rotting in the water… it was like a bag of diarrhea down here. Not to put too fine a point on it. But like I said, this is an account of what actually happened, and that means warts and all.
It smelled really bad and the flies were so thick I was dreading having to lower my shemagh so she could see me speak. That was standard
translator protocol. Make sure they can see your lips moving. Better for communication with people who already had a language barrier between you and them. In combat, language barriers led to misunderstandings. And misunderstandings led to people getting killed.
So cut down on the misunderstandings and make communication as clear as possible.
I’d have to speak while not ingesting flies, and did I mention the entire river smelled like a bag of diarrhea after a Taco Tuesday in which the consumers had voted Taco Bell the best Mexican food in the entire world?
I did mention that. I know. It bears repeating.
I really need to make that point and I think I have. Even now… I can honestly still smell it as of this writing and we’re nowhere near that river now. It was bad. Real bad.
I walked out to the edge of the river with Captain Knife Hand to talk to the first person who hadn’t tried to murder us or stab us in the back since getting here. I wasn’t saying she wouldn’t later.I’ll confess, it was nice having the captain with me. I was pretty sure he could kill her even if she was a were-vampire-succubus.
Later, when PFC Kennedy came around, he explained that that was a thing. A possibility. Were-vampire-succubus. Who knew?
Her dappled gray horse was off grazing on some non-bloody grass nearby. A rarity given the state of the field. She stood with her hands down and clasped in front of her. A completely non-threatening posture. She was cloaked, and as we got close I could see that the cloak, which was green like the forest around us, covered armor I nearly overlooked. It was a dull, almost translucent silver, made of some kind of fine chain mesh. She wore high leather boots that appeared well-made and supple. For a moment I hoped—just… hoped—that everything McCluskey told us was a lie, and that there were indeed human civilizations here in the fantastical and barbaric future… and that there would be coffee.
I’m selfish that way.
Then she reached up and pulled back her hood, and we met our first elf.
