You never think about that when you go swimming in the ocean. But that’s where sharks are. That’s where they live. The first time you do think about sharks swimming in the same water you’re swimming in, it’s hard to stop yourself from thinking about it forever after. You find yourself swimming a lot less once that picture gets into your personal hard drive.
McCluskey was a shark. And he was sitting right across the table from me. Swimming.
I guess we, or maybe just me, were hoping he was a friendly predator. Because he was definitely a shark of some kind, and we were in his ocean now. Even with all our Rangers and weapons and gear, this world was his. He’d been swimming in it for twenty years. Hence the dark armor, wicked sword, and vampire-enhanced skills.
What would we all look like in twenty years? If we survived.
“So… how do you… sustain yourself… if you need blood or plasma?” asked the chief, in his seat once more.
McCluskey was back in his seat too. Same easy-going helpless posture of hands between his leather-clad thighs. That was for show. He was trying to teach us. Or convince us. Or lie. To us. That he wasn’t really a shark.
It’s just that he couldn’t help being one.
“Blood of my enemies,” he murmured with a knowing smile. “Topped off on my way in. Now all I need is some sleep until dark. And then I can either stay and help you—if you’ll let me—or I can slip back through the attacking force and link up with the team. Gather some useful allies and start hitting the enemy rear to relieve the pressure on your line. It’s your call, fellas. What’s your situation? Exactly.”
He looked around at everyone and landed on the captain. Then, so fast maybe only I noticed, he flicked his eyes off toward the front of the aircraft where the Forge was busy cranking out more ammo for us to burn through tonight when the orc horde came back to finish the job.
And he’d also caught me noting that I’d caught him noting where the Forge was. His eyes flicked to the staff I’d been carrying since returning from the mission, a quick appraisal and then back to the audience before him.
“So…” began the chief again. “Daylight burns you but… you were out in it this morning when you came inside the wire. And there’s the light still coming in through the rear cargo door and a few of these windows. How isn’t this bothering you right now, Chief McCluskey?”
“Well,” said the SEAL, running his hand through his thick curly hair. “Truth is… it’s killing me. But you’re gonna find out that, even though this world takes away your weapons, well, there’s all kinds of fun prizes it gives you to make up for it. Magic being the number one, Chief. Real live magic. This…”
He pointed to the intertwined serpent hoop in one ear. The piece of jewelry that made him look like a pirate. To me at least.
“This here is a magic charm. It mitigates some of the more serious effects of daylight. My redundant backup protection system is this cloak. The elves of Charwood call it a Cloak of Darkness. Basically, with the hood up, it’s midnight for me. Even in broad daylight. And this…” He tapped the scabbarded blade on the map-covered table. “… this is Coldfire. Took it off the Shadow King down in the Underworld beneath what we used to call the Italian Alps. Blade is the sharpest I’ve ever felt. You get cut with this, it doesn’t heal, and it hurts like you wouldn’t believe for a long time afterward. Like you’re freezing and burning up all at once. It’s a real party. Believe me.”
He smiled, and it was then we could see the pronounced canines. Like he’d learned to hide them and then show them when needed. Now he was showing.
“But even with these tricks, I gotta stay out of the daylight. Sick as a dog when I’m in it. These just help me move around like I’m fighting off the worst flu ever. But come nighttime… hell, I’m ready to party, know what I mean, guys?”
He looked me right in the eye, no doubt wondering what in the hell a PFC was doing here in the CP. Why I was getting to listen in? What was my deal? That seemed to vex him for a moment. A look that said so crossed his face.
The captain declined the subtle invitation to lay out our disposition of forces to the SEAL. So that told me I knew the trust and love wasn’t mutual on both sides so far. That Captain Knife Hand was still a cagey animal. And I sensed that wasn’t lost on the SEAL either.
“Grab some rest, Chief,” said Captain Knife Hand. “Sergeant Major can get you settled somewhere that meets… your needs. We’ll discuss what to do next later and then I’ll let you know what we need from your element. We appreciate the cooperation.”
The meeting broke up, and the sergeant major nodded at me to stick around while he took the SEAL off to a space between some stacked clamshells that would be dark enough, apparently.
I waited around outside the grounded plane for a few minutes and tried to wander away when the Deep State guy came up out of the quiet woods. He looked like he was coming from Sniper Hill. Or he’d been out along the line along the river’s edge. He was looking inside the plane now, but not going in.
“What’s going on in there, Private?” he snapped at me.
I shrugged. It’s a special skill PFCs have. One day I’d join the E-4 mafia and learn all new powers of shamming. But right now I thought it best not to divulge what I’d heard. Best not to have anything to do with this guy. He was stupid. You could tell that from a long way off. He was smart stupid. Someone had made the mistake of treating him like he was special because of his big brain and right schools he’d gone to. And that had promptly gone right to his head. He actually did think he was better than everyone else around him. I’d seen a lot of that in my old life inside academia. Smart stupid people. Combined with a sense of certainty and ego, it made them very dangerous to everyone.
My E-3 shrug didn’t deter him in the slightest. You could tell he didn’t really see people whom he considered lesser than himself. They weren’t there. He only saw the people above him, the ones he could suck up to for goods and prizes. Everyone else was just a thing to be used by him, for him, to advance him.
“Hey, PFC,” he said earnestly, as if actually seeing me now, though he clearly didn’t.
This is another skill those types possess. They’re convinced they can relate to “commoners” like he perceived me to be. He turned back from trying to see what was going on inside the aircraft and faced me in the woods, putting on a friendly-buddy face. Maybe Captain Knife Hand had thrown him out before the meeting, citing the debrief as a military matter?
“That’s a nice, uh… walking stick. How are the men?” asked Deep State faux-sincerely. No longer Deep State Volman. More… Comrade Buddy.
But seriously?
How are the men?
Who was he kidding? This lame attempt at concern was laughable. The men. Why not use fellows, or mates, or even chums. Each of those would have been as off-putting and out of place to a real soldier as the word choice he’d just employed. The men. I should know; I’d been masquerading as a soldier ever since I’d raised my right hand during enlistment. Someday, if I didn’t get killed by an orc werewolf or troll dragon, if I kept doing Ranger stuff with the Rangers, I might become a real soldier. Or at least that’s how I felt.
This guy never would.
“No idea, sir,” I told him. “I’m just the linguist, and there’s no one to talk to in any of the languages I speak. So, Auf Wiedersehen.”
That means take a hike in German.
He faked a laugh like he understood what I’d just said.
“That’s the Army for you, huh, PFC?” he said with his mouth and not his eyes, like he was relating to common old me. His new working-class buddy comrade. Not really a statement. Not really a question. Nothing really. That was probably his skill. Managing to never say anything he could end up being hung out to dry for. You could tell he was pure political animal, and that was an alien thing in the military. I’m sure it existed somewhere. Higher up. And there wa
s a kind of politics here for sure. But not this kind. Not so far in my training experience. And definitely not in the Ranger batt.
By his eyes I could tell he was done with me. I hadn’t been recruited to inform and be on his “side.” Plus, I couldn’t do anything for him. I was just some extraneous piece of the Ranger company he had no idea what to do with. Useless to him and the power games he was no doubt up to. What was he gonna do, have the captain impeached? I had no street cred with the men for him to use. I watched the math in his eyes add up as he turned and walked away, barely throwing a goodbye over his shoulder as he went. He definitely looked like he was off to find more busy to body.
Auf Wiedersehen off a short pier, dude.
A few minutes later the sergeant major came off the cargo deck walking right past me and dragging me along in his wake once again as he muttered through gritted teeth, “C’mon, Talker. We got work to do. Now, son.”
Chapter Ten
The sergeant major led me off through the woods to a little place out among the trees he’d set up for himself. Sort of his unofficial command post where the NCOs and none of the junior officers knew to find him. There was a tiny smoking fire and a blue camp percolator of coffee still sitting among the ashy orange coals.
This place was the opposite of the whole island.
“Coffee?” rumbled the senior-most NCO.
I gladly got out my canteen cup in giddy anticipation. You’ll never need to ask me twice regarding the sacred brew. I’m an avowed coffee addict, though I tell people I’m merely just an enthusiast and pretend to accidentally “find” craft coffeehouses doing the latest pour-overs or whatever. That’s all an act. Like an alcoholic who pretends they know something about wine. Truth is, I’ll even hit a government vending machine like break room doughnuts left out three days too long if I’m desperate enough. I don’t judge. Coffee is a dark mistress that must be served, and I’m not too proud about where I have to find it. I’d been ignoring a creeping terror that told me there was no more coffee in this world, and my thirty-six packets of instant and whatever else we’d brought along in the MREs was all that was left. Forever. That’s real terror. Like waking up and realizing you didn’t survive the plane crash and you’re all in hell now.
So what I’m saying is, I’m not particular about where I find it. Especially not now.
We sat down on some rocks around the fire.
I watched as the command sergeant major listened to the sounds across the island. To his Rangers cutting down more trees for defenses. Chainsaws growling and screaming so as much work got done as possible before nightfall. Then silence after the thin leafless giants collapsed with loud rustles and a final whumph into the dead grass.
“They’ll be back tonight,” observed the sergeant major as he blew on his coffee and held the tin cup close to his gray eyes, watching the silent woods and seeing the battle we’d find again there tonight.
He wasn’t inviting my opinion on the matter. He was telling me what was going to happen. To be honest I’m not even sure I was part of the conversation. More than likely he was talking to himself. Steeling himself what was coming next. So I didn’t say anything. Either because I didn’t know whether what he was saying was true, or… and this is what I really suspected… I didn’t want it to be true.
“All right, son,” said the sergeant major, looking at me after scanning the work and positions he could see from his little campsite observation post. “Let’s see the intel you pulled last night.”
I produced the wizard’s messenger bag. The spell book. The gruesome “ingredients,” for lack of better words. The documents, and by documents I mean sheets of brittle parchment covered in strange scrawlings. The staff I’d been carrying around with me ever since we’d crossed through the forest and back over to our side of the river. Through the entire debrief with the SEAL McCluskey. I’d held on to it like I’d been ordered. When I told the sergeant major it was heavy, heavier than my rifle, he said I should put it down, but he didn’t make any move to touch it himself. Instead he got out a Benchmade folding knife and began to probe the spell book. Opening the cover carefully with the blade. I laid the documents out too. We sat there for a long moment just looking at everything. Or rather, the command sergeant major looking at everything. Me just sitting there and trying to think up something meaningful to contribute. It was all pretty… crazy. Truth was, none of anything made sense. The writing inside the spell book wasn’t recognizable. It looked to me more like a code based on strange symbols and what had to be numbers, though they defied my ability to give them values. Occasionally characters in Chinese would pop up, and these I knew. Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire. And then a fifth one that I didn’t know, but which seemed to stand as a unifier, a combination of all of these essence characters. A quintessence, if you will.
None of this was of use, militarily, regarding our current situation. Situation Ranger Alamo as I’d taken to calling it in my head when I allowed myself a moment to think about just how deep we were into this. Given time—and a nice warm room with a fire like the library at any ivory tower university would have on a winter’s day of research—I could probably unlock this stuff and translate. No. Not probably. I could. Definitely. I was just being modest. But I didn’t have those things right now. No fire. No unlimited coffee. No ivory tower. No time.
We had something trying to kill us all from every quarter, and the ticking clock of nightfall hanging over us. That’s all any of us had.
There were no plans, orders, command, and signal… nothing. Even the wizard’s map was just a rough sketch, geographically speaking, of what the enemy had been sent to attack.
One of the loose pieces of parchment might have been a letter to someone. Just a guess. But there was definitely an official-looking seal at the bottom of that one. Black wax. A pitchfork and the letter T. Not like official as in government, but clearly someone with some kind of authority in this crazy messed-up world. But the body of the enigmatic letter was in code and there was no easy way to crack the text with daylight burning and another battle coming with the night.
Eventually, after a long quiet pause, the sergeant major told me to bag it all up and hold on to it.
“Oh,” I said, remembering one last thing I’d forgotten to show him. “Guy had this ring… on… his finger…”
I dug around in my cargo pockets for it.
Then I found it.
And without thinking I slipped it on as I pulled it out, past some Carmex I carried in that pocket that had made everything waxy and slick.
“Uh… Talker,” drawled the sergeant major slowly. In Texan. He stood. “Where’d you just go, son?”
“Uh… right here, Sergeant Major,” I answered brightly. Y’know, like the guy trying to have a positive attitude before the doctor tells him the very bad test results he knows are coming.
I took the ring off my finger and held it out to the sergeant major for inspection.
The command sergeant major jumped back and swore.
“What the hell’d you just do, son?”
“I’m… not sure what you mean, Sergeant Major. I didn’t do anything.” I looked around. Everything seemed normal. The thin sunlight was getting down in the trees. The Rangers had started on another clump of spindly spruces over by the water with their chainsaw. It ripped and roared and began to cut down another tree.
“You just disappeared and reappeared, Talker. Either that or it’s my old head injury from Kandahar.”
“What?” I shrieked, my heart suddenly jumping off a cliff. I’m not sure if I actually did shriek like a frightened child. But I probably did. This was exactly the thing I was afraid of happening here. Disappearing. I hadn’t visualized that particular fate, but I’d been sure something completely unexpected, and having to do with the unexplainable, supernatural stuff, bad, terrible, would happen to me despite my best efforts at self-preservation.
; Then I remembered I hadn’t addressed the senior NCO by his rank. “I mean… uh… Sergeant Major. I… what happened? Sergeant Major.”
I stammered for a while until he stopped me.
“Talker. When you went fishing for that ring you just held out… you disappeared. I could hear you, and if I tried real hard, I could see you move a little. Or maybe it was just the light shifting. But it wasn’t you. It was like that Schwarzenegger movie about the team down in South America. Predator. The alien that hunts ’em.”
I hadn’t seen that particular masterpiece. But I wasn’t stupid. A cold sweat had broken out across my body despite the chill in the afternoon air. And… I knew what I had to do next. I took the ring in one hand and slipped it back on the finger I had unconsciously slipped it onto while trying to get it out of my cargo pocket in the first place.
The sergeant major gave a low whistle.
“You just did it again, Talker. You just disappeared, son. Well… I’ll be a…”
“I’m still here, Sergeant Major.” Then, oh crud… What if this was like the ring in the Frodo movies? I looked around. I didn’t see a netherworld of spirits and wraith riders coming for me. Or a burning giant eye in the sky. Everything looked exactly the same as when I hadn’t had the ring on.
I took it off and realized I’d been holding my breath. And that my heart was racing like a freight train.
The sergeant major held out his hand. I handed the ring over and he looked at the metal circle. Turning it over and over again as he studied it.
“So…” he began slowly. “This thing kinda acts like a cloaking device. But on a personal level.” He spoke almost to himself like he was thinking about something. “I don’t suppose it matters much now, but we had something similar to this in Delta. Not this simple. Not that good. But… given time… DARPA mighta cooked something like this up. I could see that.”
He was still staring at it when he asked me, “Did you feel okay, using it, Talker?”
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 10
