The captain was leading a withdrawal across the prairie, a withdrawal that was turning into a running firefight through tall grass and across smaller muddy tributaries that cut through the wetlands in that area. Depressions in the landscape and other obstacles allowed the Rangers to stay low and keep moving as the orc horde tried to pin us down and cut teams of Rangers off.
There is no lying about this part. The going got extremely tough. Moving with the beat-up Sergeant McGuire, Specialist Brumm and I were the slowest. Teams that could outright carry the unconscious half-dead were faster than us, but due to the nature of Sergeant McGuire’s crushed chest, we had to be very careful with him. It was best to just let him move under his own power with our assistance as I checked to make sure he wasn’t strangling on his own blood.
We passed clusters of Rangers burning ammo on the orcs swarming to get close. Arrows rained down into the mud and tall grass as outgoing rounds zipped off into the brush in adamant reply. Neither side could mind the incoming boulder artillery delivered via the giant Cloodmoor now coming down the face of the far ridge we’d surmounted last night. Howling in rage at us and no doubt promising to stomp us flat. Uroo Uroo horns blared out the coming kill.
We passed Captain Knife Hand’s team and were down to our last hundred yards to reach the river Ashwyne when a boulder round came in danger close, hit nearby, and literally threw us into stagnant water as the earth buckled and shifted in the aftershock.
Someone in another team got crushed. The boulder the giant had thrown rolled off and away and dirt and mud came flying down all over us.
“C’mon,” gasped Sergeant McGuire as we tried to get him onto his feet. “We… can… do…”
He hacked once, violently, and groaned as he made it to his boots. “…
it.”
Then I got eyes on the new threat Last of Autumn had warned was
coming. The biggest wolf I’d ever seen in my life, and two of his friends, came bounding in from another direction, across the boulder-crushed grass and churned mud. Coming from a direction not guarded by the captain’s fire
team we’d just passed.
“Head’s up, Talker!” shouted Specialist Brumm as he shifted his 249 up and away from his body with one arm to engage the wolves with a spray of fire while still holding on to McGuire with the other. The slavering wolves with burning red eyes came in hard and fast, and gunfire in adult- sized doses ruined one, but the other two leapt onto us, snarling and biting. It was like getting hit by a flying chainsaw. I had no idea what happened in the second after that as I tried to hold on to the wounded man and protect myself at the same time. And even that was too much to keep track of.
The one that hit me must have been moving at something approximating runaway freight train speed. It knocked me and the wounded sergeant back into the grass and mud, pinning me and snarling and yeah, there was literally feral wolf drool dripping down in long ropy strings across my face. The thing snapped and went for my throat immediately, and I was reduced to trying to squirm away from it, pushing with both arms as it latched on to my plate carrier with its jaws and dragged me powerfully from side to side. My body felt like it was in the grip of a powerful fang tornado. Like the wolf knew it had to peel away the protective outer layers of my armor to get to what it wanted to get to real bad and was intent on having.
My blood. My throat.
I smashed it in the snout with my FAST helmet and my eyes closed at the same time.
And then I had… a completely rational thought.
My hands were free if I let go of this snapping terror.
My rifle was slung across my torso on which the snarling, snapping wolf was currently pinning me with all its weight. So there was no way I was getting it up and into play.
I had about ten seconds before it released my carrier and just went for my now very exposed throat.
But my hands were free. If I wanted them to be.
I grabbed the sergeant major’s sidearm, glad I’d kept a round in the chamber, shucked it from its holster, and thrust it forward into the wolf’s black hair along its taut underbelly. I squeezed the magazine dry over the next few seconds, sending hot rounds tearing through the creature’s abdomen and intestines. Bullets came out around its spine, messy bloody sprays of bone and matter erupting in the morning mist.
It howled mournfully like something that had been horribly and badly wounded, which it had, and yet it refused to stop pinning me as I fired dry, the slide locking to the rear. I could feel its warm blood pumping out all over my gear as it looked up into the sky, snarled once more at the rising sun, almost angrily like it was a promise or a curse, and then died panting out its last.
I pushed the heavy carcass off me and scrambled for Sergeant McGuire, checking to see that Brumm had ruined the other wolf with his 249, which he had, though not before the big wolf had done some vicious work with its claws across Brumm’s face and eyes. The Ranger was so bloody I couldn’t tell if he’d lost an eye or had merely had the flesh torn from his face.
He grabbed the 249 which had somehow been dropped in the struggle, sling and all, and had it back around his torso a second later.
“C’mon!” he shouted in Kurtz’s NCO bark regardless of the horror show that was his face now. “Time to move, Talker!”
McGuire had either died or passed out from both of us getting rocked by the incoming wolf. He was no longer capable of self-movement. I bent down to check his pulse, my ears buzzing and the heat of the morning making me swoon for a second. The heartbeat was there, but it was distant.
Another boulder round rocketed across the hazy morning sky above and slammed into the river we needed to cross.
“We gotta move now, Talker!” shouted Brumm. “Captain’s pulling back to the river.”
Before I joined, I’d gotten in shape. I knew the Army, and the Rangers, everything I was asking for, was going to be physically challenging. Especially to someone who had spent most of his life in academia. But people kept telling me Nah, you’ll just be a linguist. Nothing to worry about. You’ll sit in a little box listening in on transmissions and translating in an office somewhere. Nothing physical required. And then there was the dream of picking locks for John and the Company. Remember all that. But I knew what I wanted, and just like languages, I’d found it was best to be prepared for the worst. Like when you spoke to a native and they came at you rapid-fire with all kinds of slang and colloquialisms that weren’t covered in the lesson books about Doña Hernandez going to la biblioteca on her bicicleta.
So I’d trained. That last year as I finished up my doctorate, I got into triathlons. Amateur ones, of course. But I did ’em and I felt like dying and I did ’em anyway. The good news was once I showed up for enlistment I had no problems in Basic, Airborne, or RASP. That’s not to say it wasn’t hard. The drill sergeants and instructors, when they really wanted to… they could smoke you. They could find your wall. Indeed, they really could. I cannot emphasize that point enough. It was like they could smell your weakness and the one place you didn’t want to go. And that’s where they went. You could only White Line Drill for so long. Or sit against a wall in an imaginary chair for hours on end as your thighs and quads turned to living fire. Or run past the battalion headquarters around the airfield once more for the second time in a row.
In other words… they could find your wall, and throw you straight into it. All you did was bounce off and pray the torture would end sooner rather than later.
I grabbed the lifeless Sergeant McGuire just like I’d been taught in the first aid lifesaving course back in Basic Training. I hauled him up, bent low, and had him over my shoulder. Then air squat up and hope you don’t slip a disc. Oh please, I thought as I grunted and strained to get my feet under me with the full bulk of Sergeant McGuire resting atop my shoulder, please don’t let me slip a disc now. There’s probably not been a chiropractor around for ten thousand years.
Believe me, I was as surprised as Brumm was when I had the Ranger Sergeant up and over my shoulder. Guy was six-two and probably two- twenty of solid muscle. Add his gear and I didn’t even want to think about the weight.
But truth be told… I felt like a stud at having got this far. So maybe I could do this.
“Let’s move,” grunted Specialist Brumm, and he took off through the tall grass leaving the bloodstains and dead wolves behind.
I took one step and knew instantly I was never gonna make it twenty feet much less another hundred yards.
Then I took another step and maybe I wasn’t not gonna make it.
Whatever that means.
I envisioned one football field. That was as far as I needed to go. That’s all. Just do that.
Three steps and I was just falling forward to keep moving, balancing the massive Ranger on my shoulder as I stomped through the mud and tall grass following after the specialist. Ahead, Brumm was firing into the brush at our left at targets I couldn’t see and didn’t have the reserve energy to look at. Screaming at me to move as he covered us. Hot brass caught my arms as I passed him working the 249. Cutting down grass and dark misshapen figures that had tried to murder us with spears from which claws and oily crow feathers dangled.
A huge rock whistled in and hit the tall grass off to our right. The earth shook. Uroo Uroo horns rang out so close I swore there had to be tribes of vicious killer orcs everywhere in the grass all around us. We had to be surrounded. But I just kept moving forward. Putting one leg in front of the other in order to keep moving for that end zone beyond the river.
My legs were burning and I felt like I didn’t have much left in me. In fact, honestly, I was sure I didn’t. There was a wall coming and I wasn’t getting over this one. No way, no how. Three nights of fighting. A night and a day on the run. The thing in the fissure. No real coffee. Maybe one MRE. I was done when we reached the river, I promised myself. Just done when and if we got there. Just staggering along with most likely a dead man on my back was all that was left of me. Then I remembered Kang carrying Mercer through the gully during an entire firefight just to reach the line of safety. Ruck and rifle to boot. Fighting and leading all the way.
I felt guilty that I’d declared how far I was willing to go, and go no further. That wasn’t Kang. And it wasn’t Ranger. But I was outta gas.
“Better man…” I gasped to the prosecuting attorney inside my head. And didn’t have the strength to finish saying that Sergeant Kang was a better man than I’d ever thought I might be back when I was doing all those trainings and triathlons, trying to beat all my own best times like it meant something. Everything I’d done, all of it, to be ready for this day when I wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t proud of admitting I wasn’t enough and was just realizing that now. I’d had it. I was just done when we reached the river.
Rangers were streaming across it as we emerged from the tules along the bank. Some turning to fire at orcs, huge ones, that came racing into the water, savage battle axes upraised and ready to crash down on anyone’s skull. Outgoing rounds ripped into these beasts and they died thrashing and
face-down in the water as another boulder artillery round streaked in and sent up a giant water plume.
“C’mon, Talk!” shouted Brumm at me, still burning the last of his ammo in short bursts as we cleared the muddy bank. He was right next to me and I knew he wasn’t giving up. He’d go as long as he could, as long as needed, or he’d die killing something to get there.
If I thought the grass and wet mud of the wetlands was tough to slog through, then I had another thing coming from the river we needed to cross with the dead weight of Sergeant McGuire on my back. It was like wading through glue. I barely got my feet under me and almost lost McGuire as I went under the dark water. But Brumm had me, steadied me, and dumped the last of his ammo on a cluster of orcs with scimitars and oily rags over their fangs. Brumm pulled me forward across the muddy water and I just tried to keep my legs under me and my boots out of the sucking mud and Sergeant McGuire on my back. Keep carrying the sergeant, I told myself. Just do that and then you can quit.
Then I just decided I wasn’t going to give up. No big revelation. No idea that I could even keep going much further. But I just wasn’t gonna. Not today.
Maybe tomorrow I’d quit. But not today.
Today I was just gonna do my job until everything went black.
The far bank was just ahead and it felt like we’d never make it. But I knew I would and there would probably be some new thing after that to deal with. I looked up, sweat or blood streaming down into my eyes and stinging them. There was an old man, tall and bent, or kind of crooked- looking at the same time, robes and a tall gnarled staff, striding down toward the bank from the ruins of the Philosopher’s Palace. Last of Autumn was dismounted and firing arrows back across the river as she moved ahead of this tall, striking figure. If I had to guess someone was a wizard straight out a cheesy movie, or something like in the games PFC Kennedy plays, then I would have said this guy was it. He had Central Casting Wizard down pat.
I felt one boot catch in the mud under the water and I yanked my body forward, twisting around to get more leverage as I looked back and caught sight of the bank we’d just left.
The orcs owned it. Arrows flew. Axes were hurled. Wolves bounded out into the water. The Rangers were about to get overrun right there.
We were never gonna make it.
I saw Captain Knife Hand slash a vicious brute of an orc with a combat knife, cutting the thing across the throat as it tried to drive its own dagger right into the captain’s chest. The thing died and twisted away from our commander. Then Knife Hand had his MK18 carbine up in an efficient, almost machine-like manner as he engaged two more orcs coming after him with spears. He was all business despite current events as he sent smoking rounds at ten meters into both of his attackers. It was clear he wouldn’t surrender the river until everyone was out.
And neither would I.
I was sure that was true of all of us.
Then I saw the orc coming for us. Moving fast. Almost unseen by everyone. Including Brumm, who was crawling up the bank, pulling me and McGuire out of the water. He didn’t see the fast-moving predator coming straight for us.
The orc would get us. Sure as the sun would shine tomorrow, whether we were there to see it or not.
“Stop!” shouted the old man on the bank above, raising his old gnarled staff into the air. Though I knew he said it in another language not English. Some dialect that was a cross between Scandinavian and Germanic. His voice was like a thunderclap and it made a shock wave race out across the water of the river, knocking orcs down and back into the tall grass. They gnashed their fangs and shook their dirty claws at the old man as they were thrown off the far bank.
Rangers were on me, taking McGuire off my back as I crawled through the mud, Specialist Brumm helping me to my feet. Others were shooting at the orcs as they began to retreat back into the prairie and the river tributaries. I stood, my legs shaking, breathing heavily as I fumbled in my ruck, hands shaking for, you guessed it, one of my instant coffee packets. I had time. I had a break. Who knew what was coming next? Something horrible probably. This place, the Ruin they called it, this was a truly terrible place. One star. Would not recommend.
What we’d have to run for our lives from next was anyone’s guess. And there were no coffee shops and I was tired.
Yeah, I knew there was a giant still crossing through the fleeing army of orcs streaming back across the tall grass and muddy little rivers out there along the prairie we’d just escaped with our lives from. No doubt stomping many of his own side flat. The giant even held one massive rock up and back over his shoulder like he was going to drill it right down on us in the next few seconds. It looked big enough to crush every Ranger there beside the river.
“Stop!” shouted the old, bent, and crooked man in robes as he raised his gnarled staff into the air high over his floppy conical wizard’s hat. This word boomed across the terrain, growing with a ferocity an incoming storm. “You know the agreements of old, Cloodmoor Kinslayer! You know that to cross this sacred river is to invite the wakenings of the Eld. To make null the agreements that prevent the final End War.”
All of this in Germanic. I only distantly realized I was hearing it in this language. I was so intent on mixing the grounds in the last of my warm canteen water I couldn’t care less. I got it mixed, hands shaking violently. I downed it, feeling it spill sloppily to the sides of my mouth, closing my eyes to block out the sight of the towering giant who was no doubt not going to listen to this wizard from Central Casting. I turned, eyes still closed to face the morning sun. Coffee and morning sunshine. Is there anything better? Anything more human? I think not. So I just enjoyed it like a normal civilized person not covered in blood and wolf guts. Like someone who’d just gotten out of bed after a good night’s rest and needed to start the day doing meaningful and creative work. Learning languages. Not someone standing under the shadow of a looming giant who was going to hurl the boulder it was holding like this year’s favorite to win the Cy Young award on opening day. Right down on everyone. Showing smoke to start the season off right.
Opening day ten thousand years ago and a good cup of coffee. That’s where I was. Not bad. I pretended I had all of that, and more. So much more. So much that was gone now and maybe missing forever. But right now, in my mind… I had it all. And it was still mine.
There would be no chin music when that giant threw his shot. We were gonna get beaned, and good. And that would be the end of us. All of us. We’d fought all that fight, come all this way, only to get beaned and stomped by the inevitable giant.
So why not.
I closed my eyes and drank warm canteen instant coffee and listened to the old man prattle on with his archaic and dire wizardly warnings in a dead language in the face of our looming destruction. Nah, it wasn’t a cold brew or a pour-over. Or even a nice plain cup of coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts. But it was mine. And it was morning. And the sun was on my face.
It was the opposite of the last week. I felt a shadow cross the sun.
And then… the giant’s steps fading away. Turning back to the ridge. The old man in robes telling the giant Cloodmoor something or other to the effect of “Go back to whence ye came.” All in a dead Scandinavian dialect.
The Rangers didn’t cheer. They were too grim for that. But they did tell the giant what he could do with himself. The rest sat down in the mud along the riverbank. And some pulled out the MREs. Chief Rapp was working on Sergeant McGuire. McGuire would make it.
We’d made it. Apparently, we were safe.
