by Jeff Long
Too late, he heard the tinkling of jade.
The Chinese had a special word, ling-lung, to describe the musical jingling that jade jewelry made as aristocrats walked by. There was no telling what the hadals might have called it twenty eons earlier. But as the statue next to him came alive, the sound was identical.
The mercenary started to rise. The proto-Aztec war club met him on the downstroke. His head popped clear with surgical neatness. Obsidian really was sharper than modern scalpels. The statue shed its jade armor and became a man. Ike socketed the club back into its terra-cotta hands, and hefted the rifle. Fair exchange, he thought.
The mutineers carried to the sea and loaded them with the expedition supplies. This was done in full view of their commander, whom they had bound into a wire cocoon and hung raving from the wall. “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the vengeance of God,” he shouted at them.
In their side room the prisoners could hear Walker. Love, not vengeance, thought Ali, lying on the floor. The colonel had it wrong. The quotation was Romans, and it had to do with the love of God, not His vengeance. A moot point.
Their guard left to help load the getaway vessels. He knew the civilians weren’t going anywhere.
The time had come. Ike had given her all the advantage he could. She was going to have to improvise from here on.
Ali drew out the knife.
Troy lifted his head. She laid it against her wrist bonds and the blade was sharp. The rope practically disintegrated. She rolled to face Troy.
Spurrier heard them and looked over. “What are you doing?” he hissed. “Are you crazy?”
She flexed her wrists and shoulders and got to her knees to unravel the wire leashing her neck to the wall.
“If you make them mad, they won’t take us with them,” Spurrier said.
She frowned at him. “They’re not taking us with them.”
“Of course they are,” Spurrier said. But she had shattered his hope. “Just wait.”
“They’ll be back,” Ali said. “And we don’t want to be here.”
Troy had the knife, and went over to Chelsea and Pia and Spurrier.
“Get away from me,” Spurrier said.
Pia grabbed Ali’s hands and pulled her close. She stared at Ali, eyes wild. Her breath smelled like something buried. Beside her, Spurrier said, “We shouldn’t make them mad, Pia.”
“Stay, then,” Ali said.
“What about her?” Troy was kneeling by the captive girl. Her eyes were on his, unwavering, watchful.
The girl might bolt for the entrance or start screaming or even turn on her liberators. On the other hand, leaving her was a death sentence. “Bring her,” said Ali. “Leave the tape on her mouth, though. And keep her hands tied. And the wire around her neck, too.”
Troy had the knife blade under her rope, ready to cut. He hesitated. The girl’s eyes flickered to Ali. Tinged with jaundice, her eyes were catlike. “You keep her tied, Troy. That’s all I’ll say.”
Spurrier refused to escape. “Fools,” he hissed.
Pia started out the door, then turned back. “I can’t,” she said to Ali.
“You can’t stay here,” said Ali.
“How can I leave him?”
Ali grasped Pia’s arm to pull her, then let go.
“I’m sorry,” Pia said. “Be careful.” Ali kissed her forehead.
The fugitives stole from the room into the interior fortress. They had no lights, but the walls’ luminescence fostered their progress.
“I know a place,” Ali told them. They followed her without question. She found the stairs Ike had shown her.
Chelsea was limping badly from whatever the mercenaries had done. Ali helped her, and Troy helped the girl. At the top of the stairs, Ali led them through Ike’s secret entrance into the lighthouse room.
It was dark in the room, except for one tiny flame. Someone had pried open the floor vault and emptied it. And left a single clay lamp burning. Ali lowered herself into the vault, and helped Chelsea descend. Troy lowered the captive girl. Ali was surprised at how light she was.
“Ike’s been here,” she said.
“It feels like a tomb,” said Chelsea. She had started shivering. “I don’t want to be here.”
“It was a storage vault with jars,” Ali said. “They were filled with oil. Ike’s taken them somewhere.”
“Where is he now?”
“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll find him.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Troy, but reluctantly. He didn’t want to leave the girl. He had developed some kind of obsession with her during the past few days. Ali looked at Chelsea: she was in terrible shape. Troy would have to stay with them. Ali tried to think the way Ike would.
“Wait in here,” she said. “Keep low. Don’t make any sounds. We’ll come back for you when it’s safe.”
The tiny flame lit their drawn faces. Ali wanted to remain here with them, safe with the light. But Ike was out there, and he might need her.
“Take the knife,” Troy said.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” Ali said.
She cherished Troy’s and Chelsea’s looks of hope. “See you soon,” she said.
Their rafts rocked on the seiche. You couldn’t feel or hear the tremors, but deeper designs were stirring the sea with swells. The food and gear were lashed with muleskinner knots. They had the chain gun mounted, the spotlights on. It was going to be heavy going for eleven men, but their cornucopia promised months of sustenance and would lighten as they exited.
Half of the soldiers waited on the rafts while half went back to tidy up. They had drawn straws for the wet work. It was disgusting to them that Shoat asked to watch.
You didn’t leave witnesses alive, not even the walking dead. Long before they died of starvation, any one of the survivors might pen some damning deposition. Things like that could haunt you. It might be ten years before any colonist found this fortress, but why risk the testimony of ghosts? That was what had confounded them about the colonel. He’d treated this as a calling, when all along it was just a crime.
They worked from front to back and kept it professional. Each of their wounded comrades got a well-placed mercy shot behind the eyes. Walker they left alive, strung to the wall, babbling scripture. Fuck him. In a million years, he wasn’t going anywhere.
All that remained were the civilians in the side room. Two entered. “What’s this bull?” one shouted.
Spurrier looked up, shielding Pia. “They ran away. We could have gone with them,” he said. “But look, we stayed.”
“Dumb fuck,” the other soldier said.
They rolled two fragmentation grenades into the room and hugged the outer wall, then hosed what was left with a clip each. They returned to the front room. It was quiet, now that the wounded had finished pleading. Only Walker still moaned.
“That sucked,” said one of the mercenaries.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Shoat said. He was just finishing inserting another of his homing capsules into the wall.
“What are you talking about?”
“Visualize whirled peas,” Shoat said.
“Hey, Shoat,” called another. “Why keep stringing those homers? We ain’t ever coming back this way.”
“He who plants a tree, plants posterity,” Shoat pronounced.
“Shut up, mope.”
They watched from just below the water. Others occupied the heights, camouflaged with powdered rock, stone-still. Their composure was reptilian. Or insect. A matter of clans. Isaac had arranged them just so.
Had the mercenaries thought to illuminate the cliffside, they might have detected a faint pulse, the ripple of many lungs respirating. Their lights on the water simply ricocheted off the oscillating surface. The humans thought they were alone.
The party of executioners appeared at th
e fortress gate, in no hurry. They walked with heavy legs, like peasants at the end of the day. Until you’ve done it, you have no idea: Killing is a form of gravity.
“Vengeance will be mine,” Walker’s mad voice bellowed from the fortress.
“Have a nice day,” someone muttered.
The flicker of fire coruscated through the doorway. Someone had started a bonfire with the last of the scientists’ papers.
“We’re going home, boys,” the lieutenant called to his men as he welcomed them.
The lance that impaled him bore a beautiful example of Solutrean Ice Age technology. The flint blade was long and leaf-shaped, with exquisite pressure flaking and a smear of toxic poison milked from abyssal rays.
It was a classic impalement, driving straight up from the water and penetrating the lieutenant’s anus precisely, pithing him the way, long ago, the lieutenant had readied frogs in junior high school science lab.
No one suspected. The lieutenant stayed erect, or nearly so. His head bowed slightly, but otherwise his eyes stayed open, the smile pinned wide.
“Made in the shade, Lewt,” one of the soldiers replied to him.
Down at the far end of the line of boats, a shooter called Grief sat straddling the rubber pontoon. He heard a sound like oil separating and turned and the sea was sliding open. There was just enough time to see a wall-eyed happy face before he was seized and pulled under. The water sealed shut above his heels.
The mercenaries spread out across the sand, angling for different boats beached along the shore. Two carried their rifles by the handle-sight. One draped his, cruciform, across his shoulders.
“Let’s go, pendejos,” called one of the boat men. “I can feel their ghosts.”
It was said that Roman slingers could hit a man-sized target at 185 meters. For the record, the stone that cored Boom-Boom Jefferson was slung from 235 meters. His neighbor heard the watermelon-like thump through Boom-Boom’s chest wall, and looked to see the once-notorious center for the Utah Jazz stiffen and drop like a huge tree deciding it was time.
Ten seconds had passed.
“Haddie!” cried the neighbor.
They’d been through this before, so the surprise was not surprising. They knew to react with no thought, to simply pull the trigger and make noise and light. They had no targets yet, but you didn’t wait for targets, not with the hadals. In the first few moments, firepower was your one chance at jumbling their puzzle pieces and turning the picture around.
And so they fired at the cliff walls. They fired at the sand. They fired at the water. They fired at the sky. They tried not to fire on one another, but that was the collateral risk.
Their special loads gave spectacular results. The Lucifer rounds struck rock and shattered into splinters of brilliant light, July Fourth with intent to kill. They plowed the sand, blew up the water in arcing gouts. High overhead, the ceiling sparkled with lethal constellations, and bits of stone rained down.
It worked.
Haddie quit.
For a minute.
“Hold fire,” yelled a man. “Count out. I’m one.”
“Two,” yelled another.
“Three.”
There were only seven left.
The mercenaries closest to the boats raced downshore. Three forged back toward the fortress through molasses-thick sand.
“I’m hit.”
“The lieutenant’s dead.”
“Grief?”
“Gone.”
“Boom-Boom?”
“Is it over? Did Haddie leave?” This had been the pattern for weeks, hit and run. The hadals owned the night in a place where night was forever.
“Fucking Haddie. How’d they find us?”
Huddled just inside the fortress gate, Shoat took in the scene and converted the odds. He had not quite left when the attack began, and saw no reason to announce his good health. He touched the pouch containing his homing device. It was like a talisman to him, a source of comfort and great power. A way to make this dangerous world vanish.
With a few simple taps on the keypad, he could eliminate the threat altogether. The hadals would turn into illusions. But so would the mercenaries, and they were still useful to him. Among other things, Shoat didn’t enjoy paddling. He held his apocalypse pouch and considered: Use you now or use you later? Later, he decided. No harm in waiting a few minutes more to see how the dust settled out there. It seemed the hadals might have driven home their point, so to speak, and boogied back into the darkness.
“What should we do?” shouted a soldier.
“Leave. We got to leave,” yelled another. “Everybody get onto the boats. We’re safe on the water.”
Several of the rafts were drifting unmanned. The chain gunner was paddling his own boat back to shore. “Let’s go, let’s go!” he shouted to three comrades crouched against the fortress wall.
Uncertain, the three landbound men stood and peered around for any more ambushers. Seeing no one, they snapped fresh clips into their rifles and tried to prepare themselves for the sprint. The soldiers in the boats kept waving at them to come along.
“A hundred meters,” one of the trapped mercenaries estimated. “I did that in nine-point-nine once.”
“Not in sand you didn’t.”
“Watch me.”
They offloaded their packs and shed every extra ounce, their grenades and knives and lights and inflatable vests.
“Ready?”
“Nine-point-nine? You’re really that slow?”
They were ready.
“Set.”
A woman’s cry fell upon them from the highest reaches of the fortress. Everyone heard it. Even Ali, winding her way down through the fortress, stopped to listen, and knew that Troy had disobeyed her.
The mercenaries looked up. It was the feral girl, leaning from the window of the tower overlooking the sea. With the tape pulled from her mouth, she unleashed a second call from deep in her throat. Her ululation echoed upon them. It felt like their own hearts lifting across the waters.
She could have been calling to the earth or the sea. Or invoking God.
As if summoned, the sand came to life.
Ali reached a window in time to see.
Midway between the fortress and the water, a patch of beach bulged and grew into a small mountain. The hump rose up and took on the dimensions of an animal. The sand guttered from its shoulders and he became a man. The mercenaries were too astounded to lay waste to him.
He was not muscular the way an athlete or bodybuilder is. But the flesh on him stretched in ropy plates. It seemed to have grown on his bones out of need, and then grown some more, with little symmetry. Ali stared down at him.
His bulk and height and the silver bands on his arms evinced pedigree of some sort. He was imposing, as tall as most of the mercenaries, even majestic. For an instant she wondered if this barbaric deformity might not be the Satan she was seeking.
The mercenaries’ spotlights fixed his details for all to see. Ali was close enough to recognize him as a warrior simply from the distribution of his scars. It was a forensic fact that primitive fighters classically presented their left side in battle. From foot to shoulder this barbarian’s left hemisphere showed twice the old injuries as his right. His left forearm had been sliced and broken from parrying blows. The calcific growth sprouting from his head had a fluted texture, and the tip of one horn had been snapped in battle.
In his right hand he carried a samurai sword stolen in the sixteenth century. With his ferocious eyes and earth-painted skin, he could have been one of the terra-cotta statues inside the fortress keep. A demon guarding the sanctum. Then he spoke, and it was London-accented. “Will you beg, lad?” he said to his first kill. She had heard this voice over the radio. She had seen Ike’s eyes grow wide at the remembrance of him.
Isaac shook the sand from his body and faced the fortress, oblivious to his enemies. He searched the heights, dragging masses of air in through his nostrils to catch a scent. He smelled
something. Then he called back to the girl, and there was no question what was happening.
They had stolen the beast’s daughter. Now hell wanted her back.
Before the soldiers could pull their triggers, the trap closed. Isaac leaped on the first soldier and snapped his neck.
The main raft pitched upward and dawdled on edge, its occupants windmilling into the black water.
More lances harpooned up through the raft floors, and a desperate man machine-gunned his own feet.
Spotlights slewed.
Strobes auto-activated.
Obsidian hailed down on hadals and humans alike. The last of Walker’s outfit faced their own weapons here and there, taken from their dead comrades over the past months. Those who could figure out the safety mechanisms and triggers wreaked as much havoc on their own kind as on the soldiers. Many simply used the rifles as clubs.
The three soldiers trapped near the fortress tried for the doorway, but hadals pounced from the walls and blocked their way. Backed against the wall, one bellowed “Remember the Alamo!” and his partner, a macho from Miami, said, “Fuck the Alamo, viva la Raza,” and nailed him through his brainpan. The third soldier shot the gang-banger on principle, then sucked the barrel and triggered his last round. The hadals were properly impressed by the suicides.
Out on the water, the chain gun hosed arcs of light into the black horizon. When the belt feed finally jammed, the lone last gunner grabbed a paddle and set out across the sea. In the silence that followed, you could hear his dogged flight, stroke by stroke, like the beating of wings.
Inside the fortress, Colonel Walker was feasted upon alive. They didn’t bother cutting him down from the wall, but simply carved pieces off while he raved scripture.
High in the honeycombed fortress, Ike raced in search of Ali. The minute he’d heard the wild girl cry out, he’d started his race. Still dripping water from his hiding place at the edge of the sea, he sprinted up stairs and down corridors.
He might have known Ali would use his knife to free the others. Of course a nun wouldn’t know when to let well enough alone. If only she had done as he’d meant and left the others hog-tied to their fates, her disappearance would have been immaculate. This storm of hadals would have swept through like a summer shower. They would have had their washing of spears, then gone on and left Ike hidden with Ali, none the wiser. Instead the People were now combing this cliff structure, hunting for their property, that feral girl. They would not stop until they got what they wanted, he knew, and that would include Ali now. One way or another, that girl would betray her, no matter what kindness Ali had shown her.
