The Lost Castle

by Nick Cole

  There were rooms and arches and bridges up there in the citadel of the castle. It seemed as though someone who loved Escher had built their dream castle in some lost century of mad nobles and tireless peasants. It was both beautiful and mysterious.

  “Now it is time for you to meet Andrea.” Jordana stood next to Frank. Her statuesque bearing somehow made her less small beneath all the opulent magnitude swallowing the boat and rising above them in medieval gravity and splendor. There wasn’t just one temple, but many temple-like buildings and small gates and courtyards up there. In each moment Frank found some new and almost unbelievable facet to the architecture and detail of the place. Even from here, it was a maze that could not be casually deciphered.

  If at all, suspected Frank. If at all.

  “Who is Andrea?”

  The trawler was approaching a lone dock near the water’s edge. The dock was connected to a small tower from which an ancient rusty crane loomed over the water. The captain began to adjust the maneuvering throttles as the boat slowed and then crabbed into position for its dockside approach.

  “Andrea is the leader of the order.”

  “What is the order, Jordana? Tell me what I’ve gotten myself into.”

  For a long moment she was silent. Frank remembered the night and when she had come close to him. Melded into him. Held his hand as she seemed to hide in his shoulder all through the night in the galley. During the storm.

  “There is a war, Frank. A war against the Black Queen and her followers... the Black Hand. This is the home of the Order of Iluminación. This is the island of San Giorgio.”

  She paused and Frank felt a small shudder pass through her. On the dock, a man in a white suit and fedora waited. He wore a jacket over his shoulders like it was a cape. Dark sunglasses too. Even from here Frank could see white teeth radiating out from tanned olive skin. He was the typical Italian man of a certain age.

  “This is the Island,” whispered Jordana and straightened up, pulling away from Frank. “And that is Andrea. The keeper of all our secrets.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Big MRAP thundered down the road, pursuing the convoy. Steele’s Humvee led what remained of the convoy out across the fringes of the desert, heading in toward the dense urban zones.

  Nine vehicles out of twenty-four had survived the El Cajon pass and come out on the downhill side. All of Riverside and Eastern Orange County lay ahead. Areas, Braddock remembered from the power point, that had seemed like pustulent red blisters on the projected map during Steel’s briefing back at the base last night.

  “So, ah... eh, Cap-i-Tan... where do you think...” Gautreaux waved his hand out across the desertscape all around, taking in the convoy in front of them. “Where do you think all this leads?” The Frenchman smiled awkwardly at his open-ended question. “Y’know, for us?”

  Braddock knew where it led for him. Steele dead. But the mercenaries... Who knew? Any kind of monetary system was nonexistent now that everything had collapsed. All those U.S. dollars they’d been promised weeks ago were worthless.

  Gold? Maybe.

  Power?

  Survival?

  Who knows what happens next...

  “Like, ah, eh...” continued Gautreaux. “What if we were just to leave and y’know... go it on our own? The way I see it...”

  “Don’t,” ordered Braddock and then paused. “Don’t see it that way.” If he was going to kill Steele, he needed as many men as possible to keep his back clear of whatever the world was turning into until the opportunity to kill Steele presented itself.

  If ever.

  Darling, hasn’t the opportunity presented itself on several occasions? At any moment you could’ve used anything on him. From a knife to an RPG. You haven’t tried... and really you must. You really must. The hour is getting late.

  But there was that feeling. That feeling that none of it would work. The deep down inside gut hunch that everything aimed at Steele would fail.

  And you only get one chance.

  Of that Braddock was sure.

  An hour further down the road, the urban areas were starting to come together from loose unincorporated developments into outlying towns and bedroom cities some developer had tacked together out in the wide wastelands of scrub and rock. The small patches of large outlet malls stuck out like untouched platters of food in the sand and wind of what looked like a buffet that had been done to death days ago. Large, silent factories behind massive chain link fences where no one moved. Blocks of warehouses that seemed to creep away into a silent forever of uniformity. Then vast stretches of nothing but lonely highway and empty high desert. In time they would come to the more populated areas.

  Lone zombies, or even small groups, weaved directionless from across the landscape. Even out here, in the wastelands between everything, thought Braddock, they are found. And what will it be like in Riverside and Orange County? Already dense urban areas before the collapse.

  They’ll be teeming with the dead, he thought. But that didn’t sound right.

  Swarming.

  Swarming was the word. Because he could see that. In his mind it was all overrun and there was nothing left and nowhere to go. The hour was indeed getting late. Almost too late.

  “Paladin Six, this is Ranger Six.”

  Mercer had worked on the commo SOP for the op. He’d gone with fantasy names. When Braddock had asked him why, the SEAL had merely responded, “We might meet a grue out there in the dark. Thought it might be good if we were in character.”

  “What’s a grue?” Braddock had asked.

  “Monster. In an old pc game, you got eaten by them in the dark. Y’know... you’ve been eaten by a grue.” He’d said this as though Braddock, and everyone, should know what he meant. Even the origin. Its nerd-speak applicability obvious.

  Braddock didn’t.

  But he’d understood all the same.

  “Paladin Six, over,” replied Braddock, keying his mic.

  “Hey brother, we didn’t sign up for all this. We’re about to get ourselves killed with this craziness. We gotta bug out. We ain’t in the service anymore. And Steele ain’t payin’ enough... You with?”

  Braddock sighed. Mercer and the rest were more afraid of Steele and what lay ahead than what lay out there, all around them. Braddock guessed they were figuring they had enough weapons and ammo to make a go of it on their own. Maybe even do pretty well on the backside of all this.

  Braddock waited. Gautreaux and Brees watched him.

  He had to keep everyone together. Had to keep as many of the task force alive and moving forward if just to give him enough time to deal with Steele.

  That Mercer was trying to mutiny on a secure channel did not bode well. How many of the other vehicle commanders had he talked to already?

  “What happened to the rest of Bravo?” asked Braddock. Most of the vehicles in the convoy were Echo.

  “Man,” came the reply over the crackle and hiss of the net. “They got eaten by grues. Know what I mean?”

  Braddock understood. Mary Ann hadn’t been a zeke. She was something else. Some new horror in this constantly evolving equation. A grue waiting in the darkness.

  He wanted to say... alien.

  But that didn’t seem right.

  She seemed like something... something old and evil. But from another world. Like a demon, he thought. Something like that.

  Ahead, the lead Humvee, Steele’s, pulled out of the speeding convoy and dropped back beside a Hummer two in front of the MRAP.

  Braddock watched as the gunner dropped out of sight into the hatch. A moment later, Steele appeared inside the turret. The wind pulled at his hair, lashing a square jaw made iron with determination. The sunglasses hid nothing because Braddock had never seen anything on that face that anyone could mistake for emotion, or feeling. Or anything.

 
The face was just some kind of mask that hid something horrible underneath.

  Braddock knew what was up as soon as the Hummer, Mercer’s, pulled out of formation and tried to speed off away from Steele’s as it pulled alongside.

  A blur of lead erupted from the minigun jutting out in front of Steele, turning the fleeing Humvee into so much burning Swiss cheese seconds later. It wallowed off the road, barely crossed some desert scrub and came to rest, falling away behind the convoy, against a fence. In the rearview mirror, billows of black smoke heaved up from the wreckage.

  Gautreaux muttered something to himself and then said, “I guess that answers that.”

  The only thing Braddock could think of was, Eaten by a grue.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Holiday faced subsequent stages of this weird videogame slaughterhouse. Short and violent, each grew toward some horrific arc, revealing themselves as Holiday shotgunned his way through each violent playlet of this make-believe future war of horrors.

  A distant part of his mind, analyzing this in a way he’d always done and never realized he was doing, found that the shotgun, as a weapon, worked extremely well for him. It didn’t require precision like the assault and sniper rifles he’d tried to fire. He’d done badly with those. He’d accidentally hit the quiet kid. Skully. Shot him while trying to rescue the others. Guns were not his strong point.

  And as he blasted his way through waves of charging holographic Russian soldiers the size of gorillas, all of it made him think of Ash and the slap she’d given him. Made him think of it in a distant part of his mind that was still working on all the problems that needed to be solved despite the action at hand.

  Cybernetic hounds with glowing eyes came out of the smoky darkness he advanced through during the next wave. Each one came from a different direction all around him, circling just beyond what Holiday felt was an effective range to use the killer automatic shotgun.

  Suddenly one charged, dodging swiftly on its metal claws and lunging at him silently.

  Holiday fired and pivoted out of instinct, hearing some distant voice warn him to watch his flank. Sure enough, another robot hound charged at him from out of the darkness.

  He fired, still thinking about Ash. In the last few days, since the arrival of Cory, she hadn’t been as cold as she’d been following the gate incident. Like maybe there was a thaw. A chance even, that they might restart what had been smoldering to life that night in the pool when it had been just the two of them.

  The three remaining hounds came in as one, and Holiday pulled the trigger and left it there, sweeping the shotgun across their gleaming metal snouts behind sets of red glowing eyes.

  5

  Silence.

  Holiday scanned the swirling mist and darkness all about. He felt he could almost see the edges of the room he was in. But he’d been walking for so long.

  How big was this place, he wondered.

  “Congratulations!” erupted the disembodied Drill Sergeant. “You’ve completed Basic, grunt! You’re ready for the front. Survive the trenches at Verdun and you get yourself a real AA-12 shotgun as a take-home prize. Guns up, grunt. This is the war!”

  Holiday turned the compact shotgun over and pressed the reload button.

  “Seems like a good idea,” he whispered.

  That same ghostly script appeared once more, the line of text flickering and then disappearing.

  Loading... Verdun Combat Zone, 2002. Mission: Shotgun Hero. Trench Clearing Operations

  2002, thought Holiday. What war is this supposed to be? Like almost everyone, he had played videogames, from Call of Duty to the popular Battlefield series which focused on either real-world conflicts, or fictional settings with eerily similar features.

  How many times had Islamistan been invaded by virtual U.S. Marines?

  But Verdun was a town in France.

  How do you know that, he asked himself?

  He had no answer. No idea how he’d known that bit of information.

  Distantly he heard the sound of falling rain. It was soft at first, as though slowly coming into some sort of audio focus, then growing into a steady drone of wet slaps all about him. Lightning split a distant horizon. Holiday could see a low ridge of hills beneath swollen, lead-colored clouds.

  The sudden flash of light washed out his vision, and for a moment he was blind. The vision of those negative-image distant hills was burned onto his retinas. Now he stared ahead into nothingness, trying to open his eyes wider as though that might make them see better. But there was nothing. Then he could see clouds in the night sky. A moment later there was the sound of thunder in a long, slow, uneven rumble.

  Someone muttered, close at hand.

  Holiday jumped. To his left and right, shadowy figures were hunched along a wall that Holiday could now tell was the thing preventing him from seeing forward. A wall of sandbags. Farther down the line of shadows, a cigarette flared and disappeared. Another brief flash of lightning this time, and Holiday could see the shadows were all wearing the same Boba Fett modern armor the hero hologram at the entrance had worn. Except in this shadowy darkness the armor looked dark green and gray. Peering into that nepenthe, he could see most of the soldiers had their helmets off.

  Someone coughed.

  Someone moaned softly.

  Someone comforted.

  Someone issued a low guttural order.

  This is like... thought Holiday, briefly searching for the right word and knowing he’d find only the wrong ones. This is like... my team.

  He stood on his tiptoes. Now he could see the dim silhouette of the hills in the distance and nothing else over the wall. It was still raining, or at least it sounded like it, but he could feel nothing.

  “Get down,” someone whispered from nearby. “Snipers’ll take your ‘ead off, lad.”

  “B-1s inbound,” whispered a voice across the ether. “Two minutes to attack. Get ready, lads.”

  All around Holiday, the shadowy armored figures began to stand and adjust their gear, finally donning their sci-fi-looking helmets.

  A low rising scream came from off and above.

  “Here dey come!” someone said too loudly.

  A moment later, three dart-shaped aircraft streaked over the battlefield. A second after that, there was a high-pitched series of whistles as though something was falling out and in front of them across the low hills in the distance.

  The lightning struck again. A moment later, the area in front of the hills directly in front of Holiday and his shadowy team erupted in a flurry of huge explosions that seemed to outdo each other with successive blooms of fire and destruction rising into the night sky.

  “That’ll teach ‘em,” someone said.

  “You tink so,” some other shadow replied. “Den you must be new ‘round here, lad.”

  Move Forward, appeared in that ghost script. All around Holiday, the shadow team were hoisting themselves to the top of the trench and heaving themselves and their weapons up over the side.

  Holiday was surrounded by a ghostly chorus whispering, “Go, go, go.”

  He took a cautious step forward and was suddenly elevated to the top of the trench. As though the simulation glitched for a moment in transitioning him from one plane to the next. Ahead of him, all was darkness and shadowy figures hunched forward and moving toward the hills. He could hear the almost plastic scratch of body armor connecting with other armor above the steady hiss of the rain, as weapons were checked and magazines tapped, then slapped back into place with final-sounding Ka-Chucks.

  For thirty seconds everything was a tense, quiet hustle of men and gear moving forward as though expecting the arrival of something terrible, imminently. The dart-shaped planes were gone now and the explosions ahead seemed to have done nothing. Disappeared even. As though they never were.

  In front of them, along the ridgeline, d
istant artillery began to open up in successive Cracka-whumps. In the darkness above, Holiday could see the long slow rising trajectory of some of the rounds arcing out to meet them.

  This is wrong, thought Holiday.

  Why, maggot? he heard some voice ask deep within himself. The place of that harsh voice. The one that called him a “maggot” and had used the word...

  Promachœ.

  Why is it wrong, maggot? the voice roared at him.

  Holiday’s mind scrambled for the space to think, knowing this was just some kind of game. And yet... it seemed very real.

  Because...

  Why is it wrong, my little maggot? Special boy thinks he knows everything. Well... the question is: Does he know anything?

  Because... and then Holiday had it... because it’s a frontal attack on a fortress. A charge against a fortified position. It’s a meat grinder!

  And that too felt wrong to Holiday. Everything was wrong about this. This was a horrible attack. Deep down inside, where that angry roar lived, the voice hectored him to come at something from where they least expected you. Fast and hard. Break their lines and rip them to shreds. Then attack from the front when the enemy had nowhere left to run.

  Overhead, five tiny hot white suns burst to life and floated down through the night sky. Swollen gray clouds glowered above the “stars” creating a weird ceiling. Like the bottom of a land of mythic cloud giants who lived in the unseen above.

  “This is not...”

  Tiny hot pulses of red light zipped out from the hills above. Tracer fire. Holiday had seen the effect in big budget Hollywood war flicks. Some tracers struck the ground like angry fireflies intent on sudden murder. Others hit the ground and zipped skyward into the corpulent gray clouds above. And still others tore through the shadowy men all around him.

  “... real,” finished Holiday, and heard the chatter of too many heavy machineguns to count roaring away at him and all the others, chewing men and gear to shreds in long seconds of Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa... Intermittent between the searing firefly tracers were unseen hordes of angry bee-bullets filling the air along with a thousand other buzzing insects as the machineguns spat lead at every moving shadow.