Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller

by Jason Anspach

  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’.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  As we proceeded farther into the underground tomb, we passed rooms that seemed pregnant with purposes we couldn’t discern. Long gloomy halls that were like ossuaries. Vaults full of statues of strange mythical beasts and grim warriors presiding over the resting places of the dead. At points it was hard to tell if we were climbing up through the solid rock of the crag beneath the fortress, or heading deeper down into the fissures that had to lay farther below.

  “Old Mother… told of a central well… into the upper levels,” said Autumn as we took a break near midnight. “She said… she once went in and saw… a fantastic dome.”

  We knew that already of course. And she knew we knew. We’d thoroughly squeezed every last drop of intel about Tumna Haudh from the Old Mother and Last of Autumn and Vandahar. We even got what we could from Jabba, though the little gob knew nothing whatsoever. Vandahar and Autumn knew little more. But enough. It was the knowledge of that central well that had made us think this might work in the first place. A Back Door. If we could reach that central well, and use it… well, an express elevator to the penthouse suite that was a mad firefight behind enemy lines at the base of the Dark Spire sounded pretty good compared to what we were facing down here.

  We’d had one other fight by then. Giant pulpy black spiders that looked oily in our Moon Vision. The massive arachnids had crawled into a ruined throne room right where we needed to pass. Some long-ago earthquake had opened a fissure within the room, and they had set up residence there, filling the place with their ghostly webbing, the ropy strands standing out in almost iridescent contrast to the darkness we found ourselves in.

  Tanner, on point, creeping ahead silently, about twenty meters ahead of Kurtz, spotted the first strands of webs barring the way into the room. We probed but didn’t get too close. That was when one of the big brutes, a shining-black-carapaced spider the size of a water buffalo, filled the entrance of the dusty and forgotten room and howled in anger at us.

  Or in warning to its brood mates.

  Tanner backed up fast, swearing, and alerted Kurtz to what we’d almost stumbled into. Though the giant black thing seemed to want to rush out from its webby holdfast, it stayed there in the webs and darkness, just waiting for us to be stupid enough to come in after it. Like it could think. Like it knew we had to go this way or risk a serious detour. There were other spiders back in the shadows behind it. Chattering and howling at one another. Strange, almost dog-like baying came from them, and then whispering chitters that bothered you on levels somewhere deep inside your brain.

  Imagine, the darker parts of my mind mused. Imagine getting trapped by them with no place to run. That, as far as I was concerned, was a terrible way to go.

  “They’re smart. Could be pinning us down here if they’re hunters,” suggested Sergeant Thor as Kurtz assessed the situation tactically and tried to figure our next move, checking his cheap watch in the gloom. There was no clear way around them. The other passages we’d gone by all seemed to lead down into the depths. Which was definitely not the right way to go for what needed to be done in a few short hours.

  It was close to midnight now. We had less than six hours to be in place before the attack at dawn began. Kurtz was right. The clock wasn’t just burning. It was on
fire.

  “No idea how much ammo we’d burn just to get through,” muttered Kurtz to himself. “And we can’t afford nothin’.”

  Tanner kept his rifle trained on the big waiting spider inside the webs, challenging us, while Brumm watched our six with the two-four-nine. If fighting through was a no-go, it was looking like we’d have to backtrack to the last intersection, take a passage down into the darker lower levels we’d only glimpsed and not liked the sight of, and then see if somehow we could find some set of stairs going up and getting us where we needed to be.

  PFC Kennedy inched along the narrow passage to come up with Kurtz. Pushing past the snipers and Autumn. Past Rico and Soprano with the two-forty. Kennedy held his gnarled old dragon-headed staff just like Vandahar had held his. Not just something to walk with. But some kind of arcane badge of office for wizards.

  “Sar’nt…” whispered Kennedy. “Feel that breeze?”

  Kurtz pulled off a tactical glove and held up one bare hand. He turned to look at Kennedy.

  “Yeah?”

  “If there’s access to more air down here… then maybe I can burn ’em out of there and not suffocate us?”

  It was phrased as a question. PFC Kennedy wasn’t one to tell Kurtz what we were gonna do, or what a better plan might be. Best to let Kurtz make the call. Kennedy was getting wiser. I had a feeling some of his early troubles in the batt had been due to him assuming he was smarter than everyone else. Or it coming off that way.

  Kurtz looked back toward the spider hold, thinking over PFC Kennedy’s intentions. The giant thing lurking within eyed us like a hungry killer with all the time in the world to sit there and wait for its next meal. Time was a luxury we didn’t have. And of course Kurtz was no doubt thinking about what Thor had just suggested—that we were being pinned down. Surrounded. Chances were the spiders had other ways of getting out of the room they owned and nested in. Even now they could be coming up from behind us, or out of some crack in the dark of the ceiling we’d missed. This was their world, and we were just guests.