I listened while I waited for my night vision to kick in, struggling to filter out the sound of my heartbeat. Soon, the boys outside would be sending another man to the machine gun. But if they were smart, they'd established a new firing position. We waited until our attackers identified themselves with machine gun fire.
Sure enough, the boys outside began pumping Alvarez's house full of lead again. I kept my rifle steady and scanned the places I'd be if I were setting a machine gun nest. Sure as shit, I saw the faintest tip of a head there. I steadied my rifle, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The firing stopped instantly. Alvarez gave me a thumbs up.
I ducked down and moved to another window. The attackers would be attracted to my muzzle flash. Like clockwork, the next poor sod to take control of the machine gun shot my ol’ fighting position to hell, rendering it a riot of smoke and splinters. But Alvarez just waited calmly and then took a shot. Again, the machine gun fell silent. Then the ol’ man sunk to his belly and crawled to his back door.
You had to admire the bastard. He was gonna take the fight to the enemy. He looked back and gestured for me to follow. I shook my head. ‘We don't know how many of them are out there,’ I whispered.
He hesitated, then said, ‘Doesn't matter. We stay here, they’ll kill us. Plus, I don't want ‘em to wreck my house any more than they already have.’
I smiled and then nodded. I low-crawled to Alvarez and said, ‘Let me go first. I’ll draw their fire.’
He smiled and slapped me on the back. ‘I may forgive you yet, Marine.’
I slowly rose, grabbed the latch on the screen door, and opened it. I sprinted toward a Ford 150 in the driveway, making for its wheel well. To cover Alvarez, I pointed my rifle toward the almond grove where our assailants were hiding, then gave him a thumbs up.
Alvarez ran toward the rusted Ford. The crack of a rifle shot echoed through the valley. Alvarez dropped, clutching his leg. I aimed my rifle in the direction of the muzzle flash, found my target and fired, dropping another attacker. I ran to the ol’ man. I dragged him behind the truck. Tearing off his lower pant leg, I took a look at his wound. ‘You're gonna be just fine,’ I reassured him.
Alvarez smiled and said, ‘You're doing good, son. You're doing good. There might be some hope for you after all, Marine.’
I stood up, pointed my twenty-two at Alvarez's head and blew the ol’ man's brains out.
* * *
‘Good work, gentlemen,’ I said as I stood over Alvarez’s limp body.
‘Damn,’ Skippy said, ‘What the hell took you so long? Kahn, Reed, Lee, and Marlow all got popped.’
‘And your share of the pot went from one hundred and twenty-five grand to a quarter million dollars,’ I said.
Skippy smiled. ‘Good point. How the hell you know he wouldn’t kill you?’
‘He was a Marine. And he thought I was one too.’
‘You’re not?’
‘Hell no. I got the tattoo specifically for this op.’
‘Shit,’ Skippy said. ‘You are one twisted mo-fo.’
I smiled, then opened a box of cigars I’d looted from Alvarez’s home. ‘Let’s celebrate, boys.’
Skippy, Jonesy, and Big Jelly all grinned like the greedy, stupid pigs they were. I handed each of ‘em a cigar. ‘Any of you got a light?’
Jonesy nodded, pulled out his Zippo, and lit everyone’s cigars.
Skippy looked my way. ‘What, you not smoking, boss?’
I grinned. ‘Oh, I’m smoking all right. I’m smoking you.’
I put a bullet right between the eyes of each man before you could whistle ‘Dixie’.
Being a merc these days is tough business. Ain’t no way I was sharing that bounty with anyone.[GdM]
Sean Patrick Hazlett is a technology analyst and Army veteran living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he considers writing fiction as therapy that pays for itself. His short stories have appeared in Plasma Frequency Magazine, Perihelion, Fictionvale Magazine, The Colored Lens, Mad Scientist Journal, Outposts of Beyond, and NewMyths.com, and others are scheduled to appear in future issues of Sci Phi Journal and Stupefying Stories.
Excerpt: The Dinosaur Lords
VICTOR MILÁN
Tricornio, Three-horn, Trike—Triceratops horridus. Largest of the widespread hornface (ceratopsian) family of herbivorous, four-legged dinosaurs with horns, bony neck-frills, and toothed beaks; 10 tonnes, 10 meters long, 3 meters at the shoulder. Non-native to Nuevaropa. Feared for the lethality of their long brow-horns as well as their belligerent eagerness to use them.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
THE EMPIRE OF NUEVAROPA, ALEMANIA, COUNTY AUGENFELSEN
They appeared across the river like a range of shadow mountains, resolving to terrible solidity through a gauze of early-morning mist and rain. Great horned heads swung side to side. Strapped to their backs behind shieldlike neck-frills swayed wicker fighting-castles filled with archers.
“That tears it!” Rob Korrigan had to shout to be heard, though his companion stood at arm’s length on high ground behind the Hassling’s south bank. Battle raged east along the river for a full kilometer. “Voyvod Karyl’s brought his pet Triceratops to dance with our master the Count.”
Despite the chill rain that streamed down his face and tickled in his short beard, his heart soared. No dinosaur master could help being stirred by sight of these beasts, unique in the Empire of Nuevaropa: the fifty living fortresses of Karyl Bogomirskiy’s notorious White River Legion.
Even if they fought for the enemy.
“Impressive,” the Princes’ Party axeman who stood beside Rob yelled back. Like Rob he worked for the local Count Augenfelsen—“Eye Cliffs” in a decent tongue—who commanded the army’s right wing. “And so what? Our dinosaur knights will put paid to ’em quick enough.”
“Are you out of your tiny mind?” Rob said.
He knew his Alemán was beastly, worse even than his Spañol, the Empire’s common speech. As if he cared. He’d had this job but a handful of months, and suspected it wouldn’t last much longer.
“The Princes’ Party had the war all its own way until the Emperor hired in these Slavos and their trikes,” he said. “Three times the Princes have fought Karyl. Three times they’ve lost. Nobody’s defeated the White River Legion. Ever.”
The air was as thick with the screams of men and monsters, and a clangor like the biggest smithy on the world called Paradise, as it was with rain and the stench of spilled blood and bowels. Rob’s own guts still roiled and his nape prickled from the side effects of a distant terremoto: the war-hadrosaurs’ terrible, inaudible battle cry, pitched too low for the human ear to hear, but potentially as damaging as a body blow from a battering ram.
An Alemán Elector, one of eleven who voted to confirm each new Emperor on the Fangèd Throne, had inconsiderately died without issue or named heir. Against precedent the current Emperor, Felipe, had named a close relative as new Elector, which gave the Fangèd Throne and the Imperial family, the Delgao, unprecedented power. The Princes’ Party, a stew of Alemán magnates with a few Francés ones thrown in for spice, took up arms in opposition.
The upshot of this little squabble was war, currently raging on both banks and hip-deep in a river turning slowly from runoff-brown to red. As usual, masses of infantry strove and swore in the center, while knights riding dinosaurs and armored horses fought on either side. Missile troops and sundry engines were strung along the front, exchanging distant grief.
Rob Korrigan worked for the Princes’ side. That was as much as he knew about the matter, and more than he cared.
“You forget,” the house-soldier shouted. “We outnumber the Impies.”
“Gone are the days, my friend, when all King Johann could throw at us was a gaggle of bickering grandes and a mob of unhappy serfs,” Rob said. “The Empire’s best have come to the party now, not just Karyl’s money-troopers.”
The axeman sneered through his moustache. “Pike-pushers are pike-pushers, no mat
ter how you tart ’em up in browned-iron hats and shirts. Or are you talking about that pack of spoiled pretty boys across the river from us, and their Captain-General, the Emperor’s pet nephew?”
“The Companions are legend,” Rob said. “All Nuevaropa sings of their exploits. And most of all, of their Count Jaume!”
As I should know, he thought, since I’ve made up as many ballads of the Conde dels Flors’ deeds as Karyl’s.
The Augenfelsener ran a thumb inside the springer-leather strap of his helmet where it chafed his chin. “I hear tell they spend their camp time doing art, music, and each other.”
“True enough,” Rob said. “But immaterial.”
“Anyway, there’s just a dozen or two of them, dinosaur knights or not.”
“That’s leaving aside the small matter of five hundred heavy-horse gen- darmes who back them up.” The house-shield waved that away with a scarred and crack-nailed hand.
Standing in formation across the river, the three-horns sent up a peevish, nervous squalling. A rain squall opened to reveal what now stalked out in front of their ranks: terror, long and lean, body held level, whiplike tail swaying to the strides of powerful hind legs. In Rob’s home isles of Anglaterra they called the monster “slayer”; in Spañol, “matador,” which meant the same. In The Book of True Names, they were Allosaurus fragilis. By whatever name, they were terrifying meat-eaters, and delighted in preying on men.
A man rode a saddle strapped to the predator’s shoulders, two and a half meters up. He looked barely larger than a child, and not just in contrast to his mount’s sinuous dark brown and yellow-striped length. For armor he wore only an open-faced morion helmet, a dinosaur-leather jerkin, and thigh-high boots.
Thrusting its head forward, his matador—matadora—roared a challenge at the dinosaur knights and men-at-arms waiting on the southern bank: “Shiraa!”
The axeman cringed and made a sign holy to the Queen Creator. “Mother Maia preserve us!”
Rob mirrored the other’s gesture. Maia wasn’t his patroness. But a man could never be too sure.
“Never doubt the true threat’s not the monster, but the man,” he said. He scratched the back of his own head, where drizzle had inevitably fil- tered beneath the brim of his slouch hat and begun to trickle down his neck. “Though Shiraa’s no trifle either.”
“Shiraa?”
“The Allosaurus. His mount. It’s her name. Karyl gave it to her when she hatched and saw him first of living creatures in the world, and him a beardless stripling not even twenty and lying broken against the tree where her mother’s tail had knocked him in her dying agony. It’s the only thing she says, still.”
No potential prey could remain indifferent to the nearness of such a monster. That was why even the mighty three-horns muttered nervously, and they were used to her. But the house-shield did rally enough to turn Rob a look of disbelief.
“You know that abomination’s name?” he demanded. “How do you know these things?”
“I’m a dinosaur master,” Rob said smugly. Part of that was false front, to cover instinctive dread of a creature that could bite even his beer-keg body in half with a snap, and part excitement at seeing the fabled creature in the flesh. And not just because meat-eating dinosaurs used as war-mounts were as rare as honest priests. “It’s my business to know. Don’t you? Don’t you ever go to taverns, man? ‘The Ballad of Karyl and Shiraa’ is beloved the length and breadth of Nuevaropa. Not to mention that I wrote it.”
The axeman tossed Shiraa a nervous glance, then glared back at Rob. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“Why, money’s,” answered Rob. “The same as you. And Count Eye Cliffs, who pays the both of us.”
The axeman grabbed the short sleeve of the linen blouse Rob wore beneath his jerkin of nosehorn-back hide. Rob scowled at the familiarity and made ready to bat the offending hand away. Then he saw the soldier was goggling and pointing across the river.
“They’re coming!”
Shiraa’s eponymous scream had signaled the advance. The trikes waded into the river like a slow-motion avalanche with horns. Before them sloshed the matadora and Karyl.
From the river’s edge to Rob’s right came a multiple twang and thump. A company of Brabantés crossbowmen, the brave orange and blue of their brigandine armor turned sad and drab by rain, had loosed a volley of quarrels.
Rob shook his head and clucked as the bolts kicked up small spouts a hundred meters short of the White River dinosaurs.
“It’s going to be a long day,” he said. “The kind of day that Mother warned me I’d see Maris’s own plenty of.”
The axeman shook himself. Water flew from his steel cap and leather aventail.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, all bravado. “Even riding those horned freaks, those Slavo peasant scum can’t withstand real knights. Young Duke Falk’s already chased the Impy knights back up the north bank on our left flank. Soon enough our rabble will overrun their pikes. And there’s our victory, clean across.”
Glaring outrage that the man should forget that both of them were peasant scum, Rob said, “You think shit-foot serf conscripts can defeat the Brown Nodosaurs? Even at a three to one advantage? Man, you’re crazier than if you imagine our fat Count’s duckbills can beat Karyl’s trikes.”
“He never faced us before.”
“You really think that matters, then?”
“Five pesos say I do.”
I thought you’d never say that, Rob thought, smirking into his beard. Downriver to their right, trumpets squealed, summoning the Count’s dinosaur knights to mount. Which meant they summoned Rob.
He held faint hope his scheme, which to himself he admitted was daft enough on the face of it, would win his employer’s last-minute approval. But of faint hopes was such a life as Rob Korrigan’s made.
A cloud of arrows rose from the three-horns’ fighting-castles, moaning like souls trapped by wiles of the Fae. Voyvod Karyl, that many-faceted madman, had famously commissioned artisans in his Misty March to dis- cover treatments to keep bowstrings taut in rain such as this, and to pre- vent the wicked-powerful hornbows from the arid Ovdan uplands from splitting and becoming useless.
“Shit!” Rob yelled. He was almost out of time.
A-boil with conflicting emotions, he turned and ran as best a run as his bandy legs could muster. He clung to the haft of Wanda, the bearded axe slung across his back, to keep her from banging into his kidneys.
“You’re on!” he shouted back at the house-shield. “And make it ten, by Maris!”
* * *
Arrows stormed down on the mercenary crossbowmen on the Hassling’s southern bank. Men shrieked as steel chisel points pinned soft iron caps to their heads and pierced their coats of cloth and metal plates. Rob saw the sad little splashes the return volley made, still fifty meters shy of the trikes. Recurved White River bows sorely outranged the Princes’ arbalests.
The three-horns’ inexorable approach had unnerved the Brabanters. Shiraa’s roar knotted their nutsacks, if the state of Rob’s own was any guide. Getting shot to shit now, with no chance on Paradise of hitting back, was simply more than flesh could stand.
Throwing away their slow-to-reload weapons, the front ranks whipped ’round and bolted—right into the faces of their comrades behind. Who pushed back.
The four stingers the Count had emplaced in pairs to the mercenaries’ either side might have helped them. The light, wheeled ballistas outranged even barbarian hornbows. Their iron bolts could drop even a ten-tonne Triceratops.
But the engines lay broken and impotent in the shallows with their horsehair cords cut. An Eye Cliffs under-groom who’d watched it all had told Rob how a palmful of Companions had emerged from the river Maia-naked in the gloom before dawn. As he yelled his lungs out to raise the alarm in camp, the knight-monks daggered the engineers and the sentries guarding the stingers as they tried to struggle out of sleep. Then with the axes strapped to their bare backs, they’d had their wa
y with the stingers and dragged the wrecks out into the Hassling with the artillery- men’s own nosehorn teams. Before the dozing Augenfelseners could respond, they dove back in the water, laughing like schoolboys, and swam home, having lost not a man.
The under-groom, who for reward had gotten a clout across the chops for not raising the alarm earlier and louder, had seemed equal parts disgusted and amused by the whole fiasco. To Rob, it was a classic piece of Companion derring-do. In the back of his mind he was already composing a song.
But now he was in among the war-mounts—Rob’s own charges—and needed all his wits about him. He dodged sideways to avoid the sweep of a tall green and white tail, vaulted a still-steaming turd the size of his head, sprinted briefly with a little pirouette at the end to avoid being knocked sprawling by the breastbone of a yellow-streaked purple duckbill that lurched forward as it thrust itself up off its belly.
The last he suspected was no accident. Invaluable as their skilled services were, dinosaur masters were commoners. Nobles who employed them, as the Count did Rob, generally suffered them as necessary evils. Their knights didn’t always appreciate them as more than uppity serfs who wanted knocking down.
Or squashing beneath the feet of a three-tonne monster.
But Rob was born sly. His mother had sold him as a mere tad of fifteen to a one-legged Scocés dinosaur master. If he hadn’t made that up; at this remove he had trouble remembering. He’d been forced to come up wise in the ways of war-duckbills. And their owners.
Men shouted. Hadrosaurs belled or piped, each at ear-crushing volume. Down by the river, the Princes’ luckless arbalesters screamed as White River arrows butchered them.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #5 mobi Page 5
