“That was a tomb of slave kings,” said Autumn as we moved swiftly along the next passage once Kurtz’s team had cleared it of IEDs.
“How do you know?” I asked. We were talking about the room we’d just left. Where the wights had been done to death again. Undead zero, Rangers two.
“There were old… Dragon Elves Mist Markings in the room. You cannot read or… even see those kind of markings.”
She pointed to her eyes. Indicating that somehow they were adapted in ways ours were not, to be able to see these “Mist Markings.”
“What are they?” I asked.
She looked around trying to find the right words in Grau Sprache. Nothing fit, and so we slipped back into Shadow Cant, seeing as none of her people were around.
“The language of ghosts,” she said simply. “It is everywhere… here.”
Ahead, the team was getting ready to breach the next room at the end of the long hall. We were deep in the rock of the crag. It was silent and heavy down here under the earth. And best not to think about how much rock was on top of you.
There were more petroglyphs down here along the hall, but even with the Hunters’ Fellowship in effect, it was way too dark to study them. I was just getting bizarre fragments that made no sense. But they tantalized me all the same. What can I say? I’m an information junkie. Add that to the coffee and the achievement thing I’ve got going and I’m actually a real mess. Thankfully, most of my addictions are positive. I quit smoking. Mostly.
The next door ahead was a simple door. But the hall was too narrow for a four-man breach. Instead Kurtz went in behind Brumm, guns up and following the SAW.
Almost instantly, short controlled bursts, hallmarks of Brumm’s mastery of his weapon, began to bark out aggressively. Kurtz was calling out targets as the rest of the team moved in, and then the shooting started in earnest. Coming online to support Brumm’s attack against the unseen foes.
Writing this all down, I sometimes have a hard time remembering what I was actually there for, and what I experienced via the Hunters’
Fellowship. Like, I was right there when Kurtz and Brumm prepped to strangle an orc and knife him at the same time… except I actually wasn’t. It’s equally hard to recall perfectly what was spoken aloud, and what was communicated via the meld. We could hear each other’s thoughts, see events others saw, but it’s not easy to do much of that while focusing on your own personal tasks. That was going to take practice.
And then there was Kurtz, who was too Ranger to use anything other than tried and trained protocols.
Still, I do know that by the time I got there all the mummies were already dead. Apparently 5.56 works great on mummies. And it was Tanner, who had followed Sergeant Thor, who let me know how it went down in there once they breached.
That I had become the official archivist of the Ranger detachment was clear now. Rangers had been coming up to download on me. Maybe it was just because the sergeant major had basically made me the de facto intel asset. But I think it was much more, or, now that I think about, much simpler, than that. The Rangers wanted a record kept. Their deeds put down. Or maybe it was just something had been hardwired into them living the Scroll Life and going to Ranger School. Something that had been just beaten into them so that they could fight and survive and do it again until everyone who opposed them was good and dead. They wanted a record kept, for the last and final AAR. After-action report. Rangers AAR everything they do, looking for ways to improve. This was no different, but with an added emphasis on recording the “who” part of the 5 W’s—who, what, when, where, and why.
The Who of who they were was important.
The KIAs since we’d first arrived were starting to accumulate. And chances were, if things didn’t radically change in our situation, there were going to be a lot more KIAs sooner rather than later. Getting it down, what happened to them, or what they wanted known if the worst should, had assumed a kind of informal importance on our hump south to hit the fortress. It had become my job, and I was cool with that.
So by now the download of intel, story, and personal account was just standard. They came to me. Told me something interesting and assumed when I was writing it down that night that it was going in the record of us. So there’s a lot here, in this account, you’re not getting. At least not just yet.
It’s all in kind of a shorthand notes section at the back of the journal my mom gave me as her kind of sarcastic indictment of my choice to be all I could be and join the military.
There are lots of stories and they’ll go down in the record when we get someplace safe and I get more paper. Or papyrus. Maybe a clay tablet. Or a cave wall and some charcoal to draw on. Whatever.
Stuff like the story of Sergeant Kang slitting throats down in the dark beneath Sniper Hill. Which doesn’t belong here in the middle of the tomb. But here it is.
He was one of the last to come to me and tell me his story of what happened. He’s silent, even for a Ranger. But about three quarters of the way through the journey south, he came over one night and mumbled, “I want to tell you something.”
Then he said nothing for a few minutes as we sat there. I could feel him working it out. Getting the story he had to tell just right. The story of what had happened to him, and what he’d done.
I waited. Because that’s what you do.
And finally he began. It was a crazy story. He ran into some creatures we had no idea of during the battle. A thing that looked like a brain with tentacles. He could hear it screaming in his mind when he started jackhammering his tanto in where he thought its kidneys should be after he’d crept up on it. Yeah… it was a man with a brain for a head and tentacles coming out its mouth. It wore long wizardly robes. Kang said they were pretty fancy.
When it died it gave Sergeant Kang a vision. That’s what he called it. A vision. A vision of a fiery plain where there was no love or kindness anymore and probably never had been. Kang said it was a burning, violent, lonely place and he could just feel it in his bones as he observed it in the sudden manifestation he’d been attacked with. He saw all this for just a moment with the thing’s blood all over his gloves.
Again, Sergeant Kang’s words: he knew it wasn’t part of this world. And he said that there, in that vision place, across a dead sea that had become a volcanic plain where the bleaching skulls of prehistoric giants our world had never known lay baking under a red and dying sun, he said, “It was probably Hell… if there is such a place.”
I listened. And then later, made notes. Promising I’d get it all down for
him. He also told me he had a little sister who had become an actress in Hollywood. “She’s a waitress and all. Hasn’t got her big break yet but she’s gonna. She’s good. She’s pretty too. Not like me.”
Sergeant Kang is built like the Tasmanian Devil. The Looney Tunes character, not the animal. A squat inverted triangle of muscle and gear you don’t want to meet if you’re OpFor. He will flat out ruin you regardless of his looks. Yeah, he ain’t pretty, but I saw him carry a wounded man through a battle while fighting off nightmare wraith riders on our six.
He didn’t flinch. Just kept working the problem of desperate survival. “If anyone ever gets back…” he continued. Whispering this part. “Just
tell her… I’m sorry. Okay, Talker? The two of us just had each other. And I didn’t mean to… leave her alone. I’m sorry about that.”
He gave me her name. Jade Kang.
So that’s going in the journal everyone calls The Log now. That, and what’s turning out to be a lot of other stories, last words, and things to be done upon demise.
Like the Ranger over in the rifle teams who tossed a fragmentation grenade, danger close, right into an ogre’s gullet just as they were getting overrun on Phase Line Charlie that second night of the battle. He’d emptied his primary on the swollen raging creature in the night battle and there was no time to get a new mag in. It was either the grenade or his secondary as the thing closed to rip him to shreds. And if the MK18 he was working, as he told it, “wasn’t doing it, then how was my sidearm gonna do a damn bit of good?”
So he pulled a frag, popped the spoon, and fast-balled it right into the thing’s open mouth. The ogre was just getting ready to swing its huge, refrigerator-sized double-bladed battle axe dripping with blood and adorned with the skulls of goblins like voodoo charms. The Ranger got a strike, and the giant ogre gagged on the grenade. Then it just swallowed it and smiled.
Which apparently is not a pretty sight to behold in the dark during the middle of a fight for your life.
For half a second the war ogre looked just as surprised as the rifle team Ranger was. Then the awful smile, and it resumed its attack.
And then the grenade detonated down in its gullet, energetically separating its torso from its legs. Blowing the monster’s swollen belly in
every direction.
And that was that.
Those stories. The ones that separated the living from the dead. Which, in this kind of situation, and let’s just call it war, is the only thing that matters, right?
And finally, for now, the one Tanner told me about the firefight inside the mummy chamber when Brumm and Sergeant Kurtz breached. This one is going in this portion of the record because it’s part of Team Rogue’s story beneath the fortress.
Later on, Last of Autumn put together the final piece of the puzzle to the room we were breaching. She told me that in Mist Writing it was called “the Chamber of the Chief Concubine” of someone she pronounced as Raze. But that could have been Reyes. And that could have easily been the name of some Special Forces operator eighteen series. But I didn’t have enough info to confirm that bit of intel.
Just collecting.
For who knows when. Or who.
Best not to ask those questions. Just keep picking ’em up and putting ’em down, as Drill Sergeant Ward would’ve said a long, long time ago.
Except he meant boots during Basic during a long hot summer in July. He meant someday Basic would be done and we’d be off to fall and AIT and things would be different, if not better. That drill sergeant had trained enough young soldiers to know they needed the reassurance that “this too shall pass” during their season in the only hell they’d ever known.
He’d say that to you when some other wicked drill sergeant with a penchant for particularly torturous corrective punishment put you against a wall and went off to find someone else to torment. Left you sitting in an invisible chair for forty-five minutes as your legs and thighs burned and cried for mercy. Drill Sergeant Ward would ease on by, on his way to keep an eye on someone else, and just whisper in his thick Mississippi mud accent, “Dis too shall pass.”
And then, somehow, you found a tiny bit more in you to just keep enduring a little longer. If just for the hope it would be over someday. Even if today was not that day.
So… this is what happened in the chamber of the chief concubine for
Raze who may or may not have once been a special operator named Reyes.
Probably an E-7 until he did a deal with the Lizard Devil and became an
Ilner. A Not-Man. Who knows?
But now I am very curious to find out and I bet the story is on some wall down here within this massive subterranean complex beneath the fortress atop the crag above, where we are soon expected.
Brumm is following the front sight of his two-four-nine, according to Tanner, and he just starts ventilating mummies in short bursts. Mummies that are coming out of stone sarcophagi, the plural of the singular sarcophagus, a stone coffin, typically adorned with a sculpture or inscription and associated with the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Except these final not-so-resting places are upright and set into the walls around the underground columned room. And though they are human-shaped, the mummies, they’re large, but not ogre large. The occupants must’ve been maybe seven feet tall in life. And still so in death. They have lizard heads and claws. Like crosses between alligators and dinosaurs. Very reptilian. Wrapped in ancient and dirty bandages. Hiss- moaning slurs as they come forth to revenge themselves on those who have dared disturb their long, eons-long, sleep.
So, way ahead of you. These must be the Saur. Or at least, what they once were in life. Except wrapped in dingy bandages covered in scrawled Arabic. Wearing heavy gold bracelets and Egyptian-looking torqs about their thick reptilian necks.
Eight of them. Eight massive stone sarcophagi covered in arcane and magical symbols and strange curling writing that hurt the eyes to look at too long. They must have been waiting for the intrusion into the sanctum, because they come at Brumm from every corner of the room as soon as they’re through the door. Specialist Brumm starts engaging as Kurtz peels off and starts to pick up the next sector, his rifle scanning.
Thor comes in, selects a target in his sector, and fires, practically disintegrating the first mummy he hits with his rifle. Brumm’s brass is dribbling on the stone floor in intervals as the mummies take incoming and close regardless of effect of said incoming.
The only way to destroy them is to reduce them to nothing but grave whispers and rags. That quickly becomes apparent. Mummies are shot to pieces at close range. It’s the only way to be sure.
Tanner, as the last man inside, picks up his sector of the room and starts
engaging the mummified dead. Kurtz is yelling, “Keep firing until they’re down!” Because controlled pairs ain’t doin’ it on lizard mummies.
There’s a brazier, big and made of brass, gleaming in the firelight coming from its embrace. Yeah, there’s a fire burning down here, and we smelled nothing. Where are they getting the fuel? How long has this thing been going? But compared to the dark horror of the rest of the room, it’s almost a place you’d want to run to for safety. The rosy light coming from that fire, throwing itself out into the darkness and the fat hieroglyphed columns the lizard mummies are stumbling through to get at the Rangers, is almost like an oasis of safety.
“That’s what it felt like when I first went in, Talk,” said Tanner as he recounted the tale. “Like that was the safest place in the room and I wanted to just go there as those things came rushing out of the darkness. Then I started hearing them in my mind. And that woman who was crying.”
That’s correct. The Rangers are basically shooting these things to shreds before their outstretched claws can reach in and take a mummy- swipe. And just to make things more interesting, the mummies are attacking the Rangers’ minds.
The mummies are roaring.
“But it ain’t a roar you can hear, Talk. You know, it’s just like a whisper… but how you can hear that with your hearing protection on and Kurtz shouting to put them down before you move to the next target, I don’t know. But in your head, it’s a roar. Like the ocean, or all the oceans in the world, all at once. Hitting the rocks below a cliff you know you shouldn’t jump off… but… kinda want to. Or like a bottomless well that ain’t got no end. It just fills up your mind with… y’know… despair. Like you got no reason to live anymore.”
Despair?
Interesting word for Tanner, a usually lighthearted and easygoing Ranger, to use. Always quick with a joke if he can get away with it. Now he’s talking about bad choices like they’re as real as it ever gets.
“Like when Friday formation never ends because the safety briefing is inspired by whatever shenanigans happened last weekend. And you know the NCOs are gonna be all over the barracks all weekend long. That kind of… y’know, talk… hopelessness. The feeling there’s never gonna be fun again.”
Yeah. That kind of weekend for Rangers could be real hard on them. Due to deployments and training, they rarely got weekends. So when they did… they were important.
But the Rangers are on target in the mummy room and shooting like pros. No bag of bandages is going to stand up for long against excessively violent outgoing fire distributed generously.
Brumm doesn’t relent. Hosing them just like he did that weird doppelgänger that attacked us back when we hit the HVT on the other side of the river. Which right now, seems like a million years ago.
The mummies went down even though the Rangers were under that psychic attack that felt like staring into a well of darkness and, as Sergeant Thor put it, injecting himself into Tanner’s tale, “wanting to jump just to find out what was down there in the dark of a bottomless well.”
Kurtz gave Sergeant Thor a look of bewildered disbelief when he said that, but nothing further passed between them.
And that was when the real trap inside the room got sprung. As the sound of gunfire in a tight confined space, the dribbling tinkle of brass on stone, the cavitating echo of thunder, faded, it was Brumm who heard her first.
“Got a live one, Sar’nt!” he shouted. His two-four-nine was back up and covering the figure he’d spotted in the shadows opposite the brightly burning brazier. Even I was hearing it and I was outside the door. Incredibly, it was the sound of a woman softly crying. Gently sobbing. Mourning.
Autumn heard it too.
“Tell them to wait!” she said urgently. And I told them, and she shouted her warning over the mind meld as well. But the Rangers were new to this. New to her. New to this strange and bizarre dark underworld we were completely marveling at. It was like walking through a haunted house. But a real one. One that would kill you.
And my warning and hers, they weren’t fast enough.
One of the snipers had already gone in. They were on the objective. Securing the room. And that sniper, a guy named Marcos, went to cover the area around the brazier. Advancing right into its circle of light, and then… falling straight through the floor like it wasn’t there. He screamed as he fell. “I turned to look,” said Tanner, recounting it all to me later. Smoking
one of his last precious few cigarettes he’d brought along. The occasion warranted one. We shared it. He looked tired and dirty in the low light we found ourselves in as Kurtz tried to figure out if Marcos was gone forever. “I turned to look…” repeated Tanner distantly, seeing it all again, “and saw that the big old bonfire in that copper bowl…” He was describing the brazier. “… was just gone. It was a pit. There hadn’t never been a light there. You knew it. It was all a trick. Right out of a horror movie where the main character realizes it was all just a lie. The things they saw weren’t real.”
An illusion.
After that—after Marcos—as we listened to the woman, a dark shadowy figure wrapped in a shroud, weeping in a shadowy corner, Autumn warned us again not to go near “her.”
“Do not… bother… this thing,” Last of Autumn cautioned. “She is… weeping dead. A spirit. A very angry spirit.”
As the Rangers looked on in amazement at the otherworldly figure weeping in the dark corner and the pit on the other side of the chamber, I saw what would happen. What would happen if they tried to help her or comfort her. Autumn was showing me.
“Yes,” said Last of Autumn within my mind. Seeing and commenting on what I was just working out. “She would drive you into the pit with fear… if you disturb her grief.”
That was the trap the Ilner had left here, who knew how long ago. Violate our tomb and our ghost concubine will scare you right into that pit, if the undead mummies don’t make you want to jump in first.
We left that horrible room.
Autumn had used the Fellowship’s Mind Meld to assure Kurtz that the sniper Marcos was no longer among the living.
The pit was not bottomless, but it was a long fall. A very long fall. “Well, that’s just about the worst IED ever,” said Tanner as we
followed the path beyond, deeper into the tomb below the fortress. “C’mon,” said Kurtz bitterly. “Clock’s burnin’.
