by James Curcio
Loki abruptly sprung to his feet and ran to the door. Jesus almost choked on her hit and glared at him.
He opened the door, and froze. “YOU FUCKING STUPID BASTARDS!” he screamed.
As though approaching a dangerous animal, Dionysus reached out to touch him on the shoulder.
“We’re dead,” Loki said. “Look. They’re all fucking dead.”
All of them were at the window now. Throughout the nearby canyons, they could see vehicles arriving as the sun set. Tents going up. Rifle racks coming out of SUVs. People doing yoga. The flicker of campfires. Pleasant conversation and laughter.
Somehow their fans had found them, again. Downside of driving a bumble-bee striped monstrosity. Loki found nothing funny about it anymore. His shoulders shook with rage.
“That’s fucking murder. That’s...hundreds. Thousands of people who are going to turn this into some stupid gesture. Man the barricades, hippies! Let’s transcend humanity, man! Let’s all die for liberty! The Grand-Fucking-Gesture. We’re dead. We’re surrounded. We’re buried.”
“Hey,” Dionysus said.
“The one thing a State can kill, the one thing it can handle, is an army. It’s what they do. It’s their damn job. You and your god-damned cult, peasant crusade bullshit...”
“Hey,” Dionysus said, more emphatically. Loki stopped and collected himself.
“Yeah. Sorry. It’s just...I tried.”
“I know.”
“I did my best. I did. I...”
“Rode a tidal wave into an iceberg.”
Loki grinned. “Something like that.” He flicked his cigarette. “See that? They’ll say a falling star marked the hour of your passing. You poor, martyred bastard.”
“A little respect for the dead, if you please.”
“Loki. If we disappear,” Dionysus said. “Then maybe they’ll be left alone.”
“Delaying the inevitable at best.” Loki shook his head. “The Grand Gesture. Fine. This ain’t Megiddo, but it’ll do.”
“Ready to die like a God?” Dionysus asked.
Loki shrugged. “I was born ready. Artemis, get me a topographical map of the surrounding area.”
Silence fell on the cabin for several minutes. Jesus eyed Dionysus. “I heard what you said from your bunk.”
“Yeah?” Dionysus asked.
“Every time,” Jesus said cryptically.
“Huh?”
“It ends in blood. Every god damned time.”
Loki inspected the map. He and Artemis started circling areas. “Ain't ended yet,” he said over his shoulder.
“Nailed up, torn up, hacked up, shot up...” Jesus continued.
“Slow down,” Dionysus said.
“I've been poisoned. Beaten. Do you know how many times Christians have killed their own savior? I've been staked out for lions.”
“Tigers. The stakes were your own spears, which you raised against our father,” Loki muttered, not paying attention to his own words.
“Wait. What did you just say?” Dionysus asked.
“Huh?” Loki asked, genuinely confused. “I didn't say anything.”
Jesus and Dionysus eyed each other. Dionysus put his hand on Jesus' shoulder. “Hey, walk with me.”
The two of them made their way out the door of the Behemoth, eventually sitting on a rock.
“Why do they kill us every time?” Jesus asked. “I know it's crazy, but I'm willing to admit it now. It'd be stranger for us to be simultaneously making this up. You know what I'm talking about. I know you do. And you know how this ends.”
“That's my point,” Dionysus said, “we know how this goes, whether we know it or not.” He glanced back towards the Behemoth, where they could see Loki and Artemis still deep in planning, and a flock of girls gathering around them, taking orders.
“But we know how it goes because we come back. We don't die. Not really, not for long.”
“I die every time,” Jesus said, looking up at fresh moon above.
“And you get up, every time. 'From thence to rule the quick and the dead.' You bear their sins and die in the desert. I synthesize a new order and have to go to the underworld to reclaim what I've lost. Loki invests a net and they bind him with it. Every. Time. And we keep coming back.”
“Cycles. Circles. Over and over and I'm sick to fucking death of it,” Jesus said.
“Spirals. Not circles.”
“Same difference, from the cross.”
“No,” Dionysus said. “We're born into the world we made, don't you see? We can’t help changing the world, we can’t not leave it redeemed, redirected, empowered. No matter how many ways they dream up to slaughter us, no matter how addled and useless we feel... It’s like how a forest fire renews the Earth.”
“The moral arc of the universe...”
“Is way, way bigger than any of us.”
Jesus lit a smoke, and lay on her back. “I think this time I want to explode, to burn, burn, burn like a fabulous yellow roman candle exploding like a spider across the stars...”
“Huh?” Dionysus asked.
“You'll see,” Jesus said, puffing away placidly.
From inside an armored SUV, Trevino scanned the horizon with binoculars. He muttered a stream of orders into his headset.
“...Got it. Draw fire to their southeast, we’re go for insertion. Maneuver and counter-fire only. Remanding the principals alive is top priority.” Trevino swiveled the mic away from his face, which he wiped with a sweaty hand.
“You’re kidding yourself,” Lilith said. “They’re here for blood.” She sat beside him, her hands still cuffed.
“Those kids are armed. Can’t just expect us to take fire and not–”
“–kill every hippie terrorist you set eyes on?”
Trevino sighed. “We want the same thing, here.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“You’re right. I could give a shit what you want, past those three in custody. Show trials, martyrdom, I really, honestly, don't give a rat's bleeding asshole. Bring them to me and this–” he waved at the desert out there, and the idiots who were about to die “–ends.”
“Well, I’ll lead you to them. That, we agree on.” She lifted her handcuffs, which Trevino unlocked.
“We’re tracking you,” he said.
“I’m leading you,” she said. Trevino was left to ponder that as she disappeared into the rocks.
“Fire teams, report.”
“Beta, in position.”
“Gamma, in position.”
“Delta, in position.”
“Awaiting authorization.”
“God help you all,” Trevino said. “On my order.”
A girl blinked up at the sun. Purples and yellows blended into a surreal orange as the early light of the day passed through layers of dust.
“Follow me,” her friend said, waiting for her to emulate his motions. “This is Monkey Steals Apple. It’s a Bagua form that comes from the Earth element in the five element cycle–”
The girl struck the same pose as her friend and held it, smiling beatifically. Her head exploded with a wet pop. A far away gunshot sounded, a moment later.
In the seconds that followed, there was a great deal of screaming and scrambling, people grabbing weapons and aiming them at random. From the tent behind her, Cody emerged, blinking. Gas grenades landed all around him, adding dense, colored smoke to the maelstrom of chaos.
There was more gunfire in the distance. With each sound, a head or chest exploded. Soldiers walked through the clouds, easily picking off anyone that moved. Cody dropped to the ground, curled into a ball, and closed his eyes. When they had passed, he began crawling away.
Lilith serenely walked down a steep-walled canyon. Bullets pinged off the rocks around her, explosions sounded in the distance. She continued as though in meditation.
She thought fondly of training the girls over the past year, firelight conversations, half-remembered nights spent drinking salty kisses. The memories didn’t haunt her. Alone
, her mind was clear, like a mirror without an expectant gaze. Her success demanded a blood sacrifice.
She paused near a pile of bodies to grab a blade, and moved on.
Jesus filled the tank of a dune buggy with gasoline from a portable container. She topped it off, and then splashed the remainder all over the vehicle, madly duct taped a bunch of prepared dynamite to the chassis, and prepared herself for an adequately flamboyant martyrdom. A radio at her belt squawked. It was Loki’s voice.
“They’re in the canyons, we’ve got 'em. Fall back to rendezvous point A. They’re–”
Jesus shut the radio off and dropped it. She strapped herself in and started it up. Taking a deep breath, she gunned the engine.
Gunshots echoed through the rocky faces of the plateaus. They lured the mercs back into dead ends, coming at them from craggy overhangs and then slipping away. They baited and teased them, using the landscape to hold off an immediate slaughter. It was an old approach, old as Thermopylae, but in this terrain the mercs had little choice but to either give up pursuit or take the punishment as they struggled for an advantageous position.
Loki perched silently on the side of a plateau, surveying the pass below with binoculars.
He spotted a group of mercs. Apparently his mines had taught a harsh lesson. Caltrops, in clusters every three or so feet. Bury the mines in the ground in-between. This merc company was down to a handful of men. Artemis flashed him a sign to wait until they were in the middle of the clearing.
He made a couple quick hand gestures to the group positioning themselves on the opposite bluff. Artemis caught his signal and made signs to the rest of her group. They moved into position.
Loki grimaced at his radio.
“I think they got Jesus,” he whispered to Artemis. She shook her head sadly before turning her attention back to the group of mercs moving in on them.
An engine roared from overhead. Dionysus gawked as Jesus sailed through the air in a dune buggy, arcing down towards the merc squad. They aimed and fired as she descended in an explosive fireball that rocked the canyon.
Chunks of metal and blood fell around them like rain. A whirling, flaming cross – the dune buggy’s roll bar – nearly speared Dionysus as he rolled to his feet. It stuck upright in the ground.
Loki and Dionysus looked at each other in shock.
A hawk circled above, keening bitterly. Loki fired a single shot, drawing a merc’s attention. He slipped from sight.
Artemis’ group, who were positioned on the other side of the ravine, rained rocks on them, the rest unleashing a silent volley of razor sharp crossbow bolts. There was sporadic return fire. She dropped to one knee and took aim.
Warm blood drenched all over her before she could fire. She dropped immediately, instinctively. Beside her was Amber's corpse, still spurting blood but the personality had already left her eyes. .50 bullets blast through a body, shred and explode soft tissue. Half of Artemis' friend was quite simply gone.
No time to mourn, no time to vomit on herself. Anything but machine-like detachment would just slow her down.
Everyone else fell behind cover. A sniper, and one merc approaching with a sub-machine gun.
She gestured over her shoulder and then counted. Closed her eyes and visualized the merc walking towards them. Kept the image playing in her head. One...two...THREE. Popped up a split-second to fire where the imagined merc was. It lined up, and he went down with a gurgling howl.
A chunk of rock exploded behind her, sending a shower of pebbles into the air. The damn sniper. They didn’t have anything that could take him out at that range. “Fall back,” she said.
The group seemed to melt into the rock itself.
As they wound their way further into the cliffs and plateaus, Artemis held up a hand. The narrowing crevasse split in two directions.
She glanced at Loki and he nodded his head. They should break up. She pointed to herself, Mary and three of the other girls who had worked security, and motioned towards the left passage.
The rest clustered around him. “We’ll regroup at the cave,” he said to Artemis, quietly. And they were off.
Artemis’ group moved through a winding path of loose rocks and shrubs. Ahead, Artemis knew, there was a glen of squat trees with broad branches that created a mostly sheltered canopy. Despite the far off sound of gunfire, birds continued to chirp here. In the shadows of the cool rock faces, many small plants and animals could find a daytime shelter from the unrelenting sun. The space had the feel of sanctuary to it.
“Position over there,” she whispered. She could sense the troops following them, but they were a little ways off. “Supporting fire.”
“Where will you be?” Mary asked.
Artemis pointed to a ledge, maybe seven feet up the side of the wall, which was angled away from the path they had just emerged from.
Mary gave her a concerned look, but she waved it off.
“I trained you, girl. Remember, they can only shoot what they can see.” She smiled. “Just watch my back, okay? Move.”
The footsteps of approaching mercenaries could be heard. Along with providing the tactical advantage of location, the glen seemed to act as an amplifier for sound within the stone passageways between the plateaus. Eight of them entered the clearing.
Artemis took a deep, slow breath. Time itself seemed to slow. Taking aim with her repeating crossbow, the one in the rear went down with barely a whimper.
One.
As she predicted, the group whipped around and fired a burst at her hiding spot, but she had already dropped, falling into a roll, both to lessen impact and make up some of the distance between them. A cluster of birds took flight from the trees.
She came out of her roll, firing another shot as she went. One more free tracheotomy. Spraying crimson from the neck, he fired wildly as he fell.
Two.
She was in their midst. Several sub-machine guns were swinging in her direction. Moving on instinct, she dropped like a bag of rocks, wrapped her legs around one of the soldiers and rolled, using her momentum to uproot him. His head connected with a nearby stone with a dull smack.
Three.
She was on the ground, and exposed. She made a mad leap to get behind cover.
The force of impact twisted her around and nearly knocked her down. Shoulder. Keep moving. Bolts whistled in from the trees, hamstringing one soldier and harpooning another through both arms. About fucking time.
She let out a howl and lunged behind one of the wounded mercs, wrapping her arm around his neck as she slid past. One of his trigger happy comrades stupidly slammed several bullets into his chest, blowing his organs all over her already blood-soaked shirt. She shoved him into the soldier who had fired, and shot him in the chest before he had a chance to recover.
Four. Five.
The merc in front of him grinned, thinking she had missed, only to see his comrades fall face first beside him with bolts in both arms, and one in the chest.
He looked back up in time to see Artemis’ face rushing towards his, shrieking like a Valkyrie as she came. At the last moment she lowered her head, head-butting him and knocking him back several steps.
Sensing danger from behind, she dropped and rolled behind a boulder. A hail of bullets perforated the chest of the stunned soldier instead of her. She twisted around and put another bolt into the neck of her would-be assailant.
Six. Seven.
There was just one left, and he had his gun trained directly on her. However, he didn’t fire, as her semi-automatic crossbow was also trained on her favorite target, the jugular vein. “How many shots you have in those things?” he asked.
“Eight. I guess there’s no chance you could just leave?” she asked.
“No way, bitch,” he said. When another series of twangs came from the direction of the trees, she rolled to the side like a barrel down a hill. The bolts found their mark. Sure enough, on his way down, he fired off a burst where she had been, the bullets shattering rock and ski
ttering harmlessly around the glen.
Eight.
She groaned. Her arm was stiffening. She gingerly peeled back the torn cloth around the wound and was pleased to see that the bullet, though it had torn some muscle, struck at an odd angle and didn’t embed or hit anything vital. The proximity of so much gunfire had quite literally deafened her, at least temporarily. The adrenaline was wearing off.
“Fuck. Guys–” she said, wearily.
The ground trembled.
“Take cover!” she screamed, rolling into a defensive crouch.
Trevino’s SUV rolled through the carnage of the main camp, towards the canyons.
“Lost contact with Gamma and Delta squads,” a merc reported over the radio. “Beta reports zero casualties in main camp.”
“Hundreds. Hundreds in the main camp, you...” Profanity failed him. He punched the steering wheel. “Beta, condition?” Trevino asked.
“Insurgent elements contained in canyons, mesa secured. We have heavy weapons solution, repeat, have solution.”
“Go,” Trevino said hollowly.
“Beginning bracketing bombardment,” the merc repeated.
In the cave, Loki was crouched over a series of rocket tubes, fussing with fuses and checking caps. He looked up as Dionysus entered, then returned to work.
Loki nodded to the others, passing them rocket tubes as they swarmed out of the caves.
“The camp’s a pile of dead kids. We’re down to two teams in the core...” Loki said.
“Artemis thinks we can win this. She–” The ground shook with a distant explosion. Dionysus' eyes widened.
“Artemis is a believer.”
There was a second, closer explosion.
“That’s artillery–” Loki started.
A series of rhythmic explosions continued. Loki stopped, troubled by something in the timing, but Dionysus got there first.
He grabbed Loki and leaped for the cave mouth as there was a final blast and much of the room collapsed in dust and screams.
