The bronze doors leading into the inner chambers of the tomb were a tough nut to crack. In the end, after much inspecting, and caution concerning traps, which we were just bluntly calling IEDs now, the decision was made to use one of the three breaching charges we’d brought along for the intrusion. Which had been all the Ranger detachment had left.
Truth was, we either took back the Forge or we were gonna have to learn to go Bronze Age in order to go Roman. And we already had, to some extent. Most of the Rangers were either now carrying found weapons or the tomahawks a few of the truly Rogers’ Rangers types loved to sport. Guys like Kurtz and Thor for sure. I had a flick knife. I’d tossed that smelly old short sword after a while. It couldn’t even take an edge and it was notched to hell. Probably some low totem pole gob like Jabba had carried it until the Rangers shot him to death atop Sniper Hill.
“What’ll we face on the other side of the door once we breach, Kennedy?” hissed Kurtz as we got ready to storm the inner sanctums of the tomb by blasting the bronze double doors. I could feel the pain of him having to ask this of Kennedy.
Kennedy made a face at me that basically said, How am I supposed to know?
But our “wizard” was a lot smarter than that. He knew Kurtz was running on edge here. A ragged, dangerous, edge. Best not to provoke him.
“Well, Sar’nt,” began Kennedy softly, which was his manner of speaking and probably another reason the Rangers had not found him one of their own. “This is what Dungeons & Dragons calls a dungeon, technically. But specifically… it’s actually a type of dungeon, Sar’nt.”
Kennedy, for all his power and obvious intelligence, failed to notice the murder look in Kurtz’s eye.
“And what kind of dungeon is it, Captain Obvious?” asked Kurtz.
Exasperated emphasis on kind.
“It’s a tomb, Sar’nt,” answered PFC Kennedy quickly. Murder look intensifies.
“Yeah. We got that part. What does it mean, PFC, besides dead people buried down here in the dirt for a thousand years?”
“Well, technically, Sar’nt. They’re not buried. They’re… laid to rest, and—”
Kennedy caught the look from Kurtz that time, but he held up his hand, stopping Kurtz from either a hissed tirade or an outright unit decimation by one.
“Why that’s important, Sar’nt,” said Kennedy, trying to get ahead of the storm, “is… ’laid to rest’ means, like these skeletons that came out of the walls, they’re not in the ground. Not buried. They’re in there”—here he pointed at the doors—“most likely waiting for us in some kind of undead half sleep to come in and bother them. Then they’ll attack us in some way.”
Kurtz heard this, nodded in understanding of the intel he was given, and probed with a further tactical question about the disposition of our enemies. “We’ll be facing enemies just like these skeletons? Out in the open and ready to light it up? Or are there other types of… units… we could expect to run into down here?”
“I don’t know, Sar’nt,” replied Kennedy. “This world ain’t exactly my game. I mean… yeah, there are similarities. And undead are surely waiting and ready to go. That’s kinda their thing. The dead-sleep, let’s call it, lets them do that. They’re usually guarding some treasure, and we could loot that and all for useful stuff like potions or magic items. But that comes with other… problems. But yeah, there are different types of undead. Some specific to tombs. That’s what you asked, Sar’nt. There’re different types we could expect to run into. For sure.”
“Such as…?”
Kennedy swallowed and shifted his dragon-headed staff to his other hand as we all stood there, planning our next move.
“Well, there’s skeletons. Obviously. Zombies are technically undead. Wights. They’re like… like undead warriors. Sunlight hurts them and I think I could do something about that with the staff. But they’re not quite ghosts. There could be those too—ghosts. Banshees. Spirit types. I don’t know if our weapons are even going to hurt those. Usually you’ve gotta have magic weapons to deal with that class of monster. Class is a type.”
“Magic weapons?” asked the sergeant after a tense sigh. Did I mention his knuckles were turning white on his handguards? He hadn’t put on his Mechanix gloves yet.
It’s the little details that fascinate me. I know.
Kennedy nodded and looked around, almost embarrassed to be speaking aloud on such subjects. Clearly we were getting into uncomfortable territory. Gaming was something he wasn’t proud of, though he obviously loved it. I understood that. In the civilian world, you might tell Kennedy to just let his freak flag fly. My experience in the military had taught me that things were different here. Competitiveness and alpha skills were encouraged. Difference was viewed with suspicion. The week of Kennedy holding forth as some kind of expert, and the authority he’d unofficially gained, seemed to vanish like mist in the presence of Kurtz’s glare. But Kennedy continued because he knew it was important to our mission. And it was. There was every chance, and the chances were pretty high, that we were gonna die trying to pull this off. Remember that bit about no one ever trying the Halls of Sleep and living to tell about it?
So we needed every advantage. And intel about what we might face was all we had.
Our training time on the way down had consisted not only of dry-fire drills with Chief Rapp and glass house walkthroughs, but with monster orientation classes led by PFC Kennedy, who held court every night after the march, supported at times by Last of Autumn and Vandahar. The Ranger sergeants, to their credit, endured this nerdery and assessed the subject tactically, becoming highly inventive about the best ways to kill mythical beasts like Minotaurs and umber hulks. It was a bit harder for Hardt and Kurtz, self-appointed keepers of the flame of Ranger hardcore; during these sessions they seemed more like children stuffed into suits and sent off unwilling to Sunday school on a day perfect for fishing or skullduggery. Yet to their credit also, they too endured.
So Kennedy was going over some material we’d already covered. A refresher for the squad leader and anyone else who may not have been entirely disposed to absorb the information the first time around. Or maybe Kurtz simply wanted a second opportunity to hate both the information and the private providing it.
“A magic weapon is something like…” continued PFC Kennedy, “… like a sword of great power. King Arthur or Thundarr the Barbarian. Or— oh yeah this could be important—it could simply be made out of silver. That’s good against lycanthropes but probably ghosts too. I can’t remember. If we could charge up our smartphones, I have all my books on there. Oh. I
guess… yeah, like my staff.”
I had no idea what a Thundarr was. Conan, yeah. I’d seen the Schwarzenegger movie. It was written by Oliver Stone. I’d once taken a film appreciation class. I didn’t know there were multiple famous barbarians. Like this Thundarr dude. But apparently he had a cool sword. Be on the lookout for cool swords. Good to know.
“What’s a lycan-throat?” asked Thor. There was a gleam in his eye as he listened to the young PFC. Like killing something new was a thing he’d just acquired a taste for. Like collecting Pokémon. Except you killed them all in combat instead of whatever it was you did with Pokémon exactly.
Kennedy pivoted in the dark of the skeleton-bone-littered chamber. We could see each other in the gloom thanks to the Hunters’ Fellowship.
“Lycanthrope, Sergeant. Werewolves, werebears, wererats. Those kinds of things.”
“Werebears?” asked Thor. “I thought it was just wolves. Wolfman, right”
Kennedy nodded. “Werebears are possible.”
The Viking sergeant muttered an almost inaudible, “Cool.” Like he’d just seen the latest high-performance Ducati on the showroom floor and that was exactly where his next enlistment bonus was going.
“What else?” asked Kurtz.
Kennedy looked up at the tomb’s ceiling and sucked in a deep breath. “Uh… ghasts. There could be those. They’re like ghouls that smell like death real bad. Ghouls, of course, are sorta… dead people that were really bad in life. People who got hanged. Cursed, you could say. And they just hang around and feed on corpses.”
“Sounds fun,” noted Tanner. No one laughed.
“Mummies and vampires of course,” continued Kennedy.
I hadn’t told anyone McCluskey had revealed himself to be the latter. The command team felt like they’d lose credibility by disseminating that the SEAL had said he was, and so it had remained knowledge available only to a select few. I could see Captain Knife Hand’s reasoning. Rangers, even though they were Rangers, tough as nails and twice as hard as iron, were already dealing with a lot of freaky stuff. They didn’t need bloodsucking SEALs added to the mix.
I thought that was a bad call. In my opinion from having observed and
lived among them, telling them that they were going to get to waste a SEAL gone vampire would’ve been like handing out free Rip Its and dip.
Their day would have just gotten a lot better.
Either way, now was the time for full disclosure. Like I said… we needed everything if we were going to get out of this alive. If McCluskey was undead, then most likely he’d have some kind of alliance, affinity, call it whatever you want, with what we might be facing ahead down here. Chances were he could possibly communicate with them in some form. So I told them what I knew about Chief McCluskey, the Man in Black who’d come across the river on day two of the battle back at Ranger Alamo. I told them he had indicated he was some kind of vampire and that this transformation had happened at some point in his twenty years in the Ruin, if his story was to be believed. It was already common knowledge among the Rangers that the stranger, this Man in Black and probable King Triton, was a SEAL from one of the detachments back at Area 51. Only the he’s- also-a-vampire part was news to them.
Minor detail.
“Figures,” said Tanner, and the rest of the Rangers agreed.
“Liches!” exclaimed Kennedy suddenly as he racked his brain for imaginary monsters he’d once killed with his dice. “There could be those. Not likely though. They’re super high level. But basically, they’re wizards who went mad for power and turned themselves into eternal skeletons, in effect, so they could live for a really long time and conduct magical research for more power.”
“You mean like… the Ilner,” I said, interrupting the think-of-all-the- undead-you-can-or-die-fighting-the-one-you-missed lightning round Kennedy was currently being forced to play. “The Ilner who sought things that should not be known, according to Vandahar. The secrets to eternal life. The Not-Men. Could those be liches?”
Kennedy’s delicate mouth formed a small o and I could tell from the faraway look in his eyes that he was adding up the data to see if my hypothesis was indeed correct.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “That sounds like how it would go.” And then he added, “And if that were the case… we’d be in pretty big trouble, Talker. We’d be in way over our heads if there were liches down here. If that was the case.”
***
If that checked anyone, made them stop and think, it didn’t show. Kurtz didn’t care about liches or were-ghouls who needed some kind of Excalibur to kill. Kurtz was gonna kill ’em all and let the rules sort it out.
And who said there were rules?
“If it bleeds, it can be killed,” muttered Brumm. To which Tanner replied, “I don’t think these things have blood anymore, Brumm. Look around. See any? Nope.”
Brumm spat dip juice for a reply. It landed on the bones of another skeleton.
We were gonna make our hit time no matter what, according to Sergeant Kurtz.
“We’re doin’ it,” he said, thumbing shells into his Rampage. The short-barreled shotgun he’d smuggled Oscar Mike. “Clock’s runnin’. Everybody up.”
We explosively breached the bronze doors a few minutes later. Headphones protected our hearing over a certain decibel level. We pulled back to protect from overpressure and gave Jabba and Autumn lots of extra hearing protection, wrapped and balled shemaghs, due to their crazy hearing and twitchy long ears. The four-man team went in first and I got a pretty good view of how it all went down in the seconds after they swarmed the entrance.
Oh, and the brass door rang from the explosion like a gong to signal the end of the world. We hadn’t foreseen that part. Farewell, surprise on other parts of the complex.
It was wights. Or at least that’s what PFC Kennedy the Wizard guessed on the other side of the brief and very violent fight we faced. Sergeant Kurtz had set the charge on the bronze doors. Giant and thick and inlaid with strange scrawling runes like Arabic, two slabs of bronze that barred our way. I cannot read Arabic. I can speak it, but reading it’s a whole other thing. Kurtz had the charge planted at what we thought was a lock that looked like some kind of great seal made of twisting snakes in the form of a Celtic knot. Except it wasn’t Celtic snakes. It was a river and it felt vaguely Egyptian.
“Here,” said Last of Autumn, reading our thoughts through the
Hunters’ Fellowship. Following along with the conversation through our shared images and questions. She pointed to a space in the seams about three quarters of the way up the length of the two doors. “This is the sealing ward. Destroy this, and the door may become useless.”
We walked through how it was going to go down, rehearsing our actions on the objective. Kurtz would blow it in from the number three team leader position. Tanner would sweep in and to the left in the number one slot. Brumm in the number four to the right. Thor to the left as two. Each covering their sector. Both teams were covered by blast blankets.
“Remember: surprise, speed, maximum violence,” hissed Kurtz as we stacked.
No one needed to be told twice. We’d learned that in the shoot house. Except Kurtz had exchanged controlled violence for maximum violence. Because that was Kurtz’s way of course. The assaulters would assert control of the room, killing everything as they did.
“Controlled pairs unless it doesn’t have a heart. And if that doesn’t work, shoot them until they change shape or catch fire,” said Kurtz as we stacked. The rest of us would follow in once we got the clear, or come in to support if things got hairy. “If it’s like the skeletons, no pairs to the chest. Work the skull.”
The breaching charge, an eighteen-inch strip of 24OO-grain explosive cutting tape, designed specifically to cut through metals extremely efficiently, went off… and destroyed the locking ward that was the seal of twisting snakes stamped into the ancient bronze of the door. But the two huge slabs that formed the rest of the portal didn’t budge but an inch or so. A second later a sudden magical flash discharged like a thunderclap being played in reverse. Or at least that’s what it felt like to me. All you could smell was something similar to burnt ozone.
Kurtz stepped up and tried to kick one of the doors open. It moved. A little.
“Talker, Soprano, on me!” he shouted.
We’d discussed this. In the event the doors didn’t move well as we tried to breach, Soprano and I would rush forward from the stack and try to get them open physically so the assaulters could move in and clear the room.
In that second he called our names, I totally now understood “the fatal
funnel” the vets had talked about regarding a breaching op. I’d done it as practice during RASP. Felt some kind of distant thrill that was tempered by the fact it was just training.
Now it was real.
Now…
… it was very real.
We heard the call of the sergeant and rushed forward. Not thinking. Heart not just beating, but hammering. It was thundering in my chest so hard I could feel blood rushing in my ears. If I’d had something to say, I doubted I could’ve spoken a word.
“Throw your back into it!” shouted Kurtz as we approached. He pointed with his assault gloves clearly where he wanted us. Then ordered, “Stay low!”
The guys with weapons and live rounds were going in over the top of us. Best not to be in the way.
We hit the two doors with our whole body weight. Tiny Soprano and a linguist who doesn’t weigh much more. Time was of the essence and I felt myself literally perform a flying block on the door to try and thrust it forward. If there was an enemy in there, we only had a few seconds to get the Rangers in and kill them all before they, the enemy, figured out something was up. The question was… what was the enemy? What new horror was waiting for us that we hadn’t planned for? You could only plan for so much. The unknown, that was the scariest part, was exactly that. Unknown. And that’s what made it dangerous. And what made this the funnel on crack. Sorry, no pop-ups or even real live jihadis today. Today we were gonna find something no one else had ever seen before. Or at least… no one left alive.
No one from our world.
The doors were heavy. Incredibly heavy. Soprano and I leaned in and pushed and they slowly swung open on a low groaning moment that took forever.
Maybe two horrifying long seconds in which we felt completely exposed.
“Get down!” shouted Kurtz as the assaulters swept over and started firing into the room. I hit the floor and smelled nothing but ancient dust in my face and nostrils. Similar to the smell of old books in the stacks back at
any ivory tower university’s most venerable library. A smell I was very familiar with. But this had a rotten, foul… almost corruption to it as I lay there on the ground getting hit by hot expended brass. I sneezed as the suppressed gunfire started in pairs.
It had an almost rhythmic cadence. Here’s two. Here’s two more for you in the face.
There was surprise for sure. I just wasn’t sure on whose side it fell. There was speed. Surprised or not, the Rangers opened up on what
Kennedy the Wizard would later tell us had to be tomb wights.
And maximum violence. Of course there was that. That’s what Rangers did best.
As Kurtz and Brumm went right to our side of the room, maintaining their primary sectors of fire to cover the antechamber we were storming, weapons engaging from our side to the far wall, the crypt creatures did indeed look like rotting knights from some lost and elder bygone age. Horned helmets and desiccated armor. Toothless smiles in decomposing skulls with ragged pieces of leather flesh still clinging in places. Heavy, dark broadswords.
The explosive detonation of the breaching charge had woken them from their long slumber. That much was clear. They’d been lying inside what looked to be solid gold ancient sarcophagi arranged in two rows along the sunken floor of the crypt. Long stone rectangles with more of that strange twirling Arabic writing chiseled into the gold and then inlaid with turquoise and aquamarine stones. Heavy golden lids that had long ago been pushed aside and smashed to pieces on the surrounding floor.
I looked up to see the Rangers ballistically ventilating these monsters with solid hits. Ragged, papery bits of ancient mummified flesh flew away. Armor disintegrated from moldy corpses. Yet still the wights pulled themselves up from their golden coffins and stumble-rushed, red eyes glowing, toward the firing Rangers deep inside the musty old tomb.
Yeah. You heard that right. Their eyes glowed like hellish red embers. And for bonus points they hissed raspy, papery whisper-roars that sounded like the voices of drowning ghosts trying to pull you down into a moonlight whirlpool.
Outgoing rounds from the Rangers smashed into the wights, but they didn’t seem to mind. Or at least three of them didn’t. Brumm unloaded a
full burst from the SAW and just disintegrated one, reducing it to scraps as it tried to reach for him.
Sergeant Thor dropped his primary as the one closing on him reached the five-meter mark. Letting his medium-engagement sniper rifle dangle, he whipped one tomahawk out and slashed it once, twice, three times in whirling back and forth cuts across the sleeping undead warrior that had made the mistake of getting close to him.
The cuts did little to the undead thing other than staggering its forward progress for a second. In no way, shape, or form did they prevent it from raising up the old chunk of steel I’d decided was some kind of ancient broadsword. The thing breathed out a breathy gasp of flies, or something, and then swung its heavy sword down at the Ranger sniper still raking it with the razor-sharp tomahawk.
But Sergeant Thor wasn’t there. He was hacking and coughing as he dodged to the side, and the wight’s crusty sword came down on the floor of the ancient crypt, striking old stone and causing sparks to fly.
Thor exploited the missed attack by hacking at one of the thing’s arms, just jackhammering the tomahawk into the undead thing. Three quick chops and he was through the leathery mummified flesh and into the brittle bone beneath. One more and he was through that too, and the long-dead limb flopped to the floor of the burial tomb.
Off-balance, the wight tried to raise the heavy chunk of steel that was its sword off the floor and went stumbling away, gasping curses and promises I could barely translate from what to my ears was a hybridized Arabic as the blur of sudden gunfire echoed all around me.
“Thief!” “Interloper!”
“You will find only death here!”
I was getting off the floor and Kurtz was in front of me, hacking at the wight as it went down, its remaining bony limbs impossibly flailing. Sergeant Thor wasn’t seeing that more of the things were coming from out of the paintings of antique scenes along the wall. Secret doors were opening up all around us.
I had my rifle up and shouted “Engaging!” to clear one coming in at Sergeant Thor’s blind side.
Best shooting I ever did.
Hunters’ Fellowship?
Chief Rapp School of Good Marksmanship and Trick SF shooting?
Don’t know. But I drilled that thing quick, aiming and sending fire right through the skull. I watched as one of my five-five-six rounds exploded out through the old war helm and brittle dry bone at the back of the wight’s skull.
To my right I heard the deafening roar of Sergeant Kurtz slam-firing his Rampage, clearing off the newcomers, shredding ancient bone and armor with the concussive buckshot spray of the mini twelve-gauge. Later, after the battle, the wights on that side were plain ruined. He’d burned an entire mag putting down three and then gone to work with the Rampage when things started to get out of hand.
I don’t know. Maybe… fifteen seconds. Probably thirty from when we fired the door with the breaching charge.
Ten ruined corpses around us. Ten at least.
The fight was over and the ruined messes of wights’ corpses lay scattered across the ornate antechamber.
The funnel.
And then the other side of it…
The Hunters’ Fellowship revealed everything within the room, even in the low light.
From inside the beautiful golden sarcophagi came the gleam of twinkling gems. Some of the weapons on the floor shimmered with an almost blue moonlight.
I heard Autumn’s voice telling us in our heads, “There are mighty weapons of renown here.” And we could tell from the Fellowship that she was indicating the softly glowing weapons on the floor.
But it was the scenes painted along the wall in dried paints mixed long ago that fascinated me. Like hieroglyphs and cave paintings. Telling me a story about the Ruin.
Telling us a story of what had happened to an SF detachment that had shown up way too early.
And became warlords in the long ago of the Ruin.
