They’re not invulnerable, he thought, looking at the one burning wagon, then shifting to the one that had been turned over. Whispering a quick concealment spell he made his way into the woods and crouched under the trees, watching the intruders work their way through the village.
They’re professionals, he thought, watching dismounted infantry search all of the houses, a man entering while another watched the door, then the watcher following him in. They quickly moved the Kashana’liya in the village toward the open commons, a couple of men armed with whatever strange weapons they used watching the villagers. But where in the Hells are they from. Not of this world, or we would have heard of this magic they use. The Count wondered if there would be reprisals for the men they had lost, and was surprised when the invaders allowed villagers to return to houses to bring out food and drink for the people. Could they be the ones the Emperor had warned us of? The ones the prophecy foretold? They must be, or else another invader has come to our lands. Which would be an unheard of coincidence.
They don’t kill the servants of their enemies, he thought, perplexed, watching as they treated with the Kashana’liya as if they were equals. That was as foreign to his nature as their machines were to this world. He didn’t understand how any military power could show such weakness. And his next thought was how his own people could exploit that weakness.
By that time the first of the vehicles had reached the road up to the castle. The wagons were pulling off the road, avoiding the bodies of his men and the dead horses. As he watched one of the larger vehicles crashed through a thick stone retaining wall as if it were made of paper, scattering blocks around it as the things it rode on tore up the grassy sward. Cattle and sheep ran from it, lowing and bleating in their terror.
Men got out of the lead vehicles and walked among the fallen. Here and there they stopped and squatted near a still living man, putting containers to their lips and bandaging wounds. Another sign of weakness to the Count. He watched for a while longer as the invaders reached the castle, one of the wagons knocking down the thick gate. Then he decided that it was time to leave. To get the information to his duke, that a stronger response to this invader could be made.
* * *
“They’re damned Elves,” said Sergeant First Class Jonathan Jackson, the Platoon Sergeant of first platoon. Men from his first squad’s tracks were guarding the more hale of the hostile survivors, while the platoon’s corpsman was tending to some of the more seriously wounded. One of the hostiles had done something, a spell of some kind, that had knocked out two of the humans. A 5.56 mm round through the head of the hostile had stopped that nonsense, and the rest of the pointy eared prisoners had been cowed.
“They sure look like them,” agreed the Captain as he looked over the prisoners. They stared back at him with ice blue or cat green eyes under slanted brows. All were beautiful, in a masculine sort of way. They wore a fine light chain mail armor. Some of the armor had the feel of power radiating from it.
“I thought Elves were supposed to be good,” said the Platoon Sergeant, gesturing at the prisoners.
“Maybe they are,” said McGurk, not believing it for a minute. “Maybe they felt threatened by us. Or maybe the D & D people were right, and they can be of any alignment.”
“Well, those sure weren’t angels they called up,” said the Platoon Sergeant, who was also an ordained Baptist Minister. “And I felt some of that magic they threw at us that put two of my boys asleep.”
“You didn’t seem to be affected, Sergeant,” said the Captain, looking at the man with a raised eyebrow.
“The Lord is my strength and my shield,” said the Sergeant, looking to the sky. “I felt his power in my heart as well, and the magic they threw slid off of me.”
That’s something that might be interesting to know, thought the Captain, who was not a religious or spiritual man in any sense, despite his upbringing. But if magic did exist in this world, and there was something that would counteract it, it behooved him as a leader to use it to his advantage.
“You know the men in the company that have the most faith, preacher?” said the Captain, using the Sergeant’s nickname. “I don’t mean church goers who do what they want the rest of the week. I mean those who really believe and walk the walk.”
“I know some,” said the Platoon Sergeant. “Maybe a dozen.”
“I want you to get them together and introduce them to me,” said the Captain. “You may just be the Paladins we need in an unholy land.”
Chapter Five
Beate Terbourg looked nervously at the driver as they headed past the Soegel church. The box with momma and the kittens was in her lap. Gerhardt had tried to talk her into putting them on the back seat of the Mercedes, but she wouldn’t have it. They were her charges, her responsibility, and she would keep them where she could watch them closely. She hoped one day to marry the man, but she would never follow his orders.
“I think the Autobahn is our best choice,” he was saying, waiting a moment while a military convoy went by on the street ahead. “We will get there faster, even if we risk some congestion.”
Beate nodded as she watched the tanks and armored personnel carriers clank by on the road ahead. They had symbols of the United Kingdom on their hulls and turrets, come here to defend the Fatherland. From what she had heard there was nothing that could defend them from the Hell weapons that had already been sown across German soil. Berlin, Frankfort, Munich, Hamburg. All gone, millions dead, and the fools thought that there would be something left for the land battle to save.
“You still think the mountains are our best hope?” she asked, looking over at Gerhardt when the last APC has passed.
“Yes I do,” said the young geologist in training. “We get to one of the valleys, hopefully an area that has been prepared for refugees, and we are protected from the fallout or any effects of nearby blasts.”
“And if they drop one into the valley that we happen to be in?”
“Then we are well and truly fucked,” said Gerhardt, following that last APC, looking in the rearview mirror at the cars behind him. “We just have to pray that it doesn’t go down that way.”
Gerhardt pushed a button on the dash and the CD player started pounding out the heavy metal sounds of Die Fledermaus, one of Germany’s most popular groups. It gave them some semblance that they were still living in a civilized world, one in which music could be enjoyed.
Gerhardt started to push on the horn, but must have thought better of it. Beate thought that a good idea. No use pissing off the guys with guns, especially in the middle of a shooting war.
“I wish they would get out of the way,” she said, looking worriedly around the almost deserted streets of the small town.
“I’m afraid it will be like this all the way to Austria,” said Gerhardt, shaking his head.
“Then we should have left sooner,” said the young woman, regretting her tone as soon as she said it. Gerhardt had tried to get her to leave sooner, but she hadn’t wanted to abandon her family. He had finally convinced her that they couldn’t make her mom and dad go, and wouldn’t do them any good by staying to die by their sides, and so she had left.
“We will get there,” said Gerhardt, flashing her a bright smile. “And I guarantee that we will live through this, and that you will have my children in a world of survivors.”
“Liar,” she said with a laugh.
“Cross my heart,” said Gerhardt, putting his hand to his chest.
She started to laugh again, but stopped as something bright as a sun flashed behind them. She screamed as she turned around. The light spilled around the church, and she realized that the weapon must have gone off kilometers away. Whether that would be enough to save them she wouldn’t be able to tell until she got through it.
The walls of the church, not a half kilometer behind them, rippled, smoked, and then blew apart. She knew she had seconds to live, if that long. And then another flash, much closer than the first, flared to their fr
ont. She screamed again, covered the eyes she knew had to be blinded with one hand, and put her other hand on Gertrude. The cat was yowling in terror while trying to cover her kittens with her body. And Beate could feel her skin burning, feel the car slammed by the blast from behind.
And then it was all gone. I’m dead, she thought, afraid to open her eyes to see what kind of afterlife she might be in. Gerhardt was coughing next to her, so she knew he had come into the afterlife with her. And then momma cat moved under her hand, and she knew that wherever they were must be a good place, otherwise the innocent animal wouldn’t be there with them.
“Where the fuck are we?” asked Gerhardt.
She opened her eyes, surprised that they still functioned, and looked over at her lover. Beyond him the light of a sunny day shone into the car. She looked around and out of all the windows of the car, seeing what looked like virgin forest. There was another car about twenty meters behind them, and a British APC to the front. Then she saw that Gerhardt was bleeding from his forehead.
“It will be OK, baby,” she said to her lover, twisting to put the box with Gertrude and the mewling kittens on the back seat, then getting the first aid kit out of the glove box.
“I guess nursing school might come in handy after all,” said Gerhardt with a weak smile while Beate cleaned the superficial wound on his scalp. “But what the hell happened? I thought we were dead.”
Beate smiled at him again, glanced back into the box in the rear seat to see the kittens calmly suckling on mamma cat and let out a soft laugh. “A miracle happened,” she finally said, putting the gauze pad on his scalp, noticing the people gathering and speaking all around them. “A miracle happened.”
* * *
“There are so many of them,” said the Conyastaya hunter, looking out onto the road that was now clogged with big belching machines. “They make more noise than a thousand times their number should, and the stench.”
“We were told there would be many,” replied Hunt Leader Lasasadar Klinisura, feeling the same emotions the other was talking about. His people were a quiet folk. Even in everyday things they adopted a serene lifestyle that blended them into their beloved forest. And these stinking noisy things seemed more symbols of evil than salvation. “My sister said that they would seem strange to us. Stranger than anything we could imagine.”
What looked to him like a large self-propelled wagon passed by, scores of humans in strange clothing looking out on the world they had come to. It was followed by a thing that looked like a box with a long tube mounted on a larger box. He didn’t know what to call what it moved on, something that was tearing up the ground beneath it as it rumbled along with a sound like rusty metal hinges, but a hundred times louder. The thing gave a feeling of massive weight, like that of an elder dragon, though in a much more compact form. He was not sure what it did, but it looked very deadly to his eye.
“So what do we do?” asked the other Elf.
“We hunt and gather food,” said the hunt leader. Looking at the other two score Conyastaya who stood under the trees with him. “We leave it where they can find it. And we scout for them. Just as we agreed upon earlier.”
“But,” said another of the hunters, his eyes wide. “These cannot be all of them. We will hunt out the forest to feed that mass.”
“Then we hunt out the forest,” growled Lasasadar, glaring at the man. “The game of the forest will come back. The Goddess will see to that. But we may never again have a chance to throw off the chains of our oppressors. So let us be about our business.”
The other Elves gave gestures of assent and faded into the woods so quietly that even the hunt leader, the best among them, couldn’t hear their passage. He looked out on the road one more time, hoping to catch a glimpse of the one that was said to lead these people, the immortal. He wasn’t sure if that was true, but rumor or Goddess sent a gift, and it was a good strategy to say that the man was immortal. His people lived a double millennia and a half, while the Ellala lived even longer. Most of the Eldritch peoples had little respect for humans, feeling that such short lived creatures could not develop the wisdom to be true leaders. But an immortal would get even their attention, if an immortal human was possible.
The hunt leader watched the people pass for another hour, some in the strange wagons, others on foot, all looking bewildered or scared. He didn’t think he would be fortunate enough to actually see the chosen one on this stretch of road, not with people appearing over so a large of an area of the Empire. He could only hope, but after a while he gave it up. It could be any of those people out there, or none of them, and he would never know. With that thought he turned and strode into the deeps of the forest, pulling his bow from its sheath and stringing it on the walk. It was time to do what he could for these people, so that they would be able to reciprocate when they were able.
* * *
“So where in the hell are we?” asked Karl Wilhelm Hartmann, taking a puff on a bowl of hashish.
“It might be better to stay straight,” said Dirk Winslow, looking over at the lead singer of his group. “At least until we know where we are at.” He checked the chamber of his .357 revolver one more time. It was an illegal weapon for a German citizen. He had still smuggled it into the country when he moved back. His dad’s Texas upbringing had instilled in him a love of firearms, and he felt naked without at least one in reach.
“Do you have to play with that thing?” asked Wolfgang Schrenker in a whining voice. “A polizei may come along, and then we’re in a world of shit.”
“I don’t think we’re going to see the police out here in the middle of nowhere, dumbass,” said his brother, Reinhold, twirling a drumstick in one hand. “Wherever here is.”
“I say the Black Forest,” said Karl Wilhelm after letting out a puff of sweet smelling smoke. “Nowhere else in Central Europe with this many Goddamned trees.”
“We were a hundred kilometers from the forest,” said Dirk, giving his lead singer a disgusted look. He liked to partake at times as well. But this didn’t seem to be the time. Not when they didn’t know where they were or what might be coming their way.
“And what about that damned nuclear bomb blast,” said Reinhold, looking at the lead singer like he was an idiot. “I never heard they had the power to transport people a hundred kilometers. Unless it was as ash. Ah,” said the drummer, turning around to look at the fifth member of the band walking forward, “maybe Peter found something out.”
“What did they say, Peter?” asked Dirk of his other guitarist.
“Not a damned thing,” said Peter, running a hand through his long blond hair. “It was some dumb shit lawyer and his girlfriend. He wants to keep trying his cell phone, hoping to get through to the authorities. She was yelling at him and calling him an idiot. She doesn’t think we’re on Earth.”
“I think she might be correct,” said Wolfgang, looking up at the Sun. “That thing in the sky doesn’t look like the Sun I’m used to.”
Dirk nodded his head, deferring to the bass player’s knowledge. He knew that Wolfgang had studied astronomy at University. If anyone in the band would know what the Sun was supposed to look like it would be him. And to Dirk’s perception he felt lighter on his feet here, as if the gravity were lighter. Otherwise everything looked pretty damned normal. Then he looked up.
“Damn,” he said as he watched what looked like a golden dragon flap across the sky. “I don’t think we had them in Germany. And I damn sure know we didn’t have in Texas.”
Everyone looked into the sky and gawked at the apparition. It moved across the blue dome until it disappeared over the horizon.
Dirk walked to the back of the BMW and opened the trunk, his mind already made up on what needed doing. The big van with their basic equipment was twenty meters back on the grassy glade. He didn’t think they would be seeing the truck with all of their sound and light equipment again. But he looked down on what he thought was needed at the moment and lifted the shotgun out of the trunk.
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“At least some good came out of joining that damned hunt club,” he said, tossing the gun over to Wolfgang, who had Army experience and had joined Dirk on some hunts. “Load it up and make sure you never let it out of arms reach.” Dirk tossed him a box of double ought buckshot and reached back into the trunk to pull the other weapon from it. He looked with delight on the thirty caliber deer rifle with scope that was just a bit illegal in Germany. He didn’t think it would be considered such here.
“What about the rest of us?” whined Karl Wilhelm.
“The rest of you would only shoot yourselves, or each other,” he said. “Just stay within sight of me and Wolfgang and you’ll be alright.”
“And what in the hell is that?” asked Peter, pointing toward the lawyer’s car.
A body of men had come from the woods and were surrounding the car. Two of them were tall and slender, the other eight were squat and bowed over, with massive arms showing through the sleeves of whatever is was they wore. The girlfriend screamed, and the lawyer got out of the car holding his hands in the open.
Dirk positioned the rifle on the roof of the BMW and looked through the scope. The first of the taller ones came into view. They looked like what he imagined movie stars to look like, with fine features. He swore as he saw the open faced helmets and the gleam of metal on breastplates, and the shimmer of chain mail on their arms. What the fuck, he thought looking at the ancient armor. Did we land in the middle of a movie set? Or an insane asylum? Then he swung the scope to look at one of the stooped creatures and another curse left his lips.
“What do you see?” asked Karl Wilhelm in a shaky voice.
Dirk couldn’t have said what he saw. But the tusks jutting from the face of the creature, along with its yellowish skin and pig like eyes, looked like something out of the fantasy he loved to read. Or the horror movies he avoided. He pulled his face away from the rifle and looked at the entire scene. One of the taller men pointed at the lawyer and one of the squat creatures stepped forward and raised a sword. Dirk looked into the rifle just in time to see the sword come across and the lawyer’s head leap from his body. The girlfriend screamed and turned their way to take off in a run.
Refuge: The Arrival: Book 1 Page 7
