The Ancient Order: A Bud Hutchins Supernatural Thriller (Bud Hutchins Supernatural Thrillers Book 1)

by JB Michaels

  The reanimated Romans stood again. Some of their bodies lacked heads or limbs, yet they moved toward Magnus, the living legion, and the children. Their numbers were plenty enough to attack and severely stress all four sides of the Roman square that protected the children.

  They stopped and stood still. Some groaned. Others gargled whatever blood or liquid was left in their bodies.

  “How many of you still have your pila?” Magnus asked.

  Three soldiers responded, “Yes.”

  “Everyone still have their daggers?”

  All responded, “Yes.”

  “On my mark, throw your daggers and spears at them. We can thin them out before they inevitably charge.”

  “Baal wills his return!” The loud, distorted, deranged, raspy voice poured from the mouths of all the undead surrounding them.

  Then it clicked. Magnus shook his head. “It can’t be.”

  “Did they say Baal?” Romanus asked.

  “They did. They sure did. It’s the Carthaginians.” Magnus gripped his dagger.

  The children began to cry out.

  The great oak behind them cracked loudly as if something wanted to tear the trunk in half from within.

  “Thin them out!” Magnus threw his dagger.

  The rest of the century’s remaining soldiers followed suit. Magnus watched his dagger stick the throat of an undead soldier. It fell to the ground once more. Three spears cut down their targets easily. The rest of the daggers proved effective, but some undead still stood. At least twelve charged three sides of the Roman square.

  “They won’t stop, Magnus,” Brayden said.

  “We won’t either. Let them come. Push them back and take their legs out.” Magnus unsheathed his sword.

  Six Carthaginians smashed into Magnus’s line first. The force was stronger this time. He nearly fell back onto the children. The soldiers next to him helped him into a stronger stance. He recovered his footing.

  “Ah! You bastards.” Magnus reversed the momentum of their charge and pushed back. He let his sword do its efficient, brutal work. He stabbed. He pulled back. He thrust. Pulled back. Each time, he felt the impact of the gladius tear through the thighs of the undead.

  “With me, Romans!” He broke the square, and the four Romans decimated the Carthaginian legs.

  The six enemy soldiers fell to their knees then began to crawl and grab at their ankles. Magnus drove his shield down. The force crushed the undead soldier’s wrist and arm.

  Magnus and his men returned to the square. The other six charging soldiers again fell to ground on the other sides of the square. The legionaries employed the same tactics.

  “Let’s see if they can attack with no legs.” Magnus wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm.

  “I want my mother. I want my mother,” a little boy cried in the center of the square.

  “We will get you to your mother, boy. I promise.” Magnus turned, put his sword down, and patted the boy’s head.

  “Promise?” The boy sniffled.

  “I promise.”

  “Magnus, the ones we felled with our daggers and pila.” Cassius pointed.

  The undead powered by the spirits of Carthaginian soldiers stood again and readied themselves for yet another attack.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Michaela could still hear the stomp of Sean’s large feet. The crunch of the leaves and snap of sticks echoed and bounced off the trees in her vicinity. She had applied the traditional war paint. She needed to get to the sanctuary.

  “Hutch…I hope this works,” she whispered to herself.

  Michaela turned around. She peeked around the trunk of the tree she’d previously took refuge behind and could see the blue glow of ancient soldiers looking high and low for her. Sean was off in the distance in the direction she’d come from. He kept putting his hand and mace up in the air. He seemed to grow impatient.

  Michaela took a deep breath and walked out from behind the tree among the ghost-soldiers who headed towards Sean. She kept a steady pace behind one of them then bravely ran past the soldier. The soldier marched as if he hadn’t noticed her.

  Michaela smiled. She waved her arms in front of the soldier’s sunken-in face. Nothing. He didn’t notice her.

  Hutch’s paint worked. It shielded her from the spirit world. Gave her power of invisibility and worked to her advantage. She ran more swiftly between three more soldiers, then ten more, twenty. All fifty didn’t notice her. The apparent leader spirit that controlled Sean’s body didn’t notice her either.

  She grew bolder and ran as fast as she could away from the evil ghost army and to the sanctuary to warn Magnus of the impending doom. Up the ravine she went, and she made a sign of the cross as she passed her fallen warriors. Something she’d picked up on when the Roman priest had met with her. She now understood that the spirit world and Yeshua’s world were inexplicably linked. Perhaps a mixture of the old traditions and the new would save her village and the children. She just didn’t know exactly how quite yet. Her run helped clear her mind.

  On her trek back to the sanctuary, she heard the all-too-familiar sounds of battle. The grunts of men, the heavy impacts, the cries of children.

  “Oh dear. Oh dear, no!” Her heart beat faster in anticipation and fear of what she might see.

  She could see the great oak’s branches in the moonlight. The sounds of military engagement, and the louder cries of the children once more. She saw possessed Roman soldiers and ghosts combined swarm the center of the sanctuary.

  Without hesitation, she grasped the crossbow, aimed, and shot into the fray. She missed the first shot at the undead horde. She kept moving. Loaded another bolt. She shot again. This time she didn’t miss. The bolt tore through two undead Roman heads. She noticed that the Romans attacked the legs of the charging undead.

  A good tactic to ensure they couldn’t charge again with full strength. No legs. No charge.

  More enemy soldiers fell to the ground, and the Roman position was almost successfully defended.

  She fired yet another bolt. Another undead soldier fell to the ground in front of a familiar and very much living Roman soldier.

  “Magnus!” She jumped over and tiptoed between the twitching and crawling undead.

  “Michaela!” Magnus opened the square to her.

  “More ghost soldiers come. At least fifty, and my strongest warrior is possessed by them. They are coming this way.” Michaela breathed heavily.

  “No matter how many times we repel their attacks, they keep coming back. There has to be another way we can defeat them,” Magnus said.

  “Thank you for protecting these children.”

  “They brought ten to the sanctuary, and all ten are alive, but I don’t know for how much longer. I see you have your war paint on. It’s a good look,” Magnus said.

  “This war paint helped me slip past them. They almost caught me.”

  “We can carve the husks that they possess, but the spirits do not die. These spirits are relentless. They said ‘Baal wills his return,’ which makes me think they are Carthaginian. Baal is a god in their religion,” Magnus said.

  “They come seeking vengeance for the Punic Wars.” A familiar older man’s voice sounded from next to the oak tree.

  “Hutch!” Michaela was happy to see a familiar face of her own people. “How did the children get here, Magnus? Did you or your men find them?”

  “They were brought here by the ghostly Carthaginians—” Magnus started.

  “They want to sacrifice the children to unleash him,” Hutch said.

  The tree cracked again. Power pulsed through the roots and rattled in the trunk.

  Hutch bowed his head. “Samhain has begun. The spirits beckon and call to be unleashed. I am afraid Magnus is right. It is not possible to defeat such evil with the current means at your disposal.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Michaela rubbed her forehead. “Who unleashed these spirits in the first place? They wouldn’t just spe
w from the tree when the Romans and priest set foot on our soil.”

  “That is very likely the case. Someone had to have performed a ritual to alert these ancient spirits,” Hutch said.

  “We haven’t time to ruminate or solve a mystery. I sent Romanus to get more help from the Iceni guarding the village. He should be back soon, and that should buy us more time to figure out how to combat this evil,” Magnus said.

  “The only suggestion I have is the power of Yeshua. Invoke him and perhaps that could be used as a defense and means to defeat Baal’s army.” Upon Hutch’s suggestion, another vibrating pulse shot out from the roots and shook the ground they grew under.

  Magnus lifted his sword. “I will take my chances with my sword over a poor dead carpenter.”

  Something rolled towards Magnus’s feet. He readied his sword, assuming it was an undead crawler, when to his horror it was not an undead Carthaginian warrior but Romanus’s head. Still bleeding and squirting blood from the mangled sinew of his shortened neck.

  “Michaela. Hutch. You need to leave the sanctuary now. Give it up. Your efforts are fruitless.” A voice emanated from the trees in the direction of the village.

  “Conor?!” Michaela yelled.

  “Who is Conor?” Magnus asked

  The warrior queen answered, “I sent him to sue for peace with the Iceni after their men were killed in our village.”

  Conor walked into the sanctuary and wiped blood from a curved blade on his robes. “You mean to replace our tradition with these vile Roman intruders’ religion. They will not rest until our culture is destroyed, Michaela. Hutch, you know I speak the truth.”

  “Yeshua brings a message of peace and selflessness, Conor. You would kill our own villagers in tribute to your gods,” Michaela said.

  “You are so quick to turn your back on what even you have known and practiced most of your life.” Conor’s brow furrowed. He lifted his arms up and spoke in a strange tongue.

  The earth shook. It knocked the Romans, Michaela, Hutch, and the children to the ground.

  Magnus looked up from his prone position. He looked to the trees surrounding the sanctuary. The spaces between the trees filled in with more reanimated dead. Now there was a mixture of Pict villagers, warriors, and his own men. He recognized some of their faces. Especially one, Tiberius. Conor had corrupted his dear friend’s body.

  The earth ceased to shake.

  Magnus was the first to his feet. “To the center! All of us. Form a phalanx! Now!”

  “Oh, you fools. Your tactics won’t work. Which is fine. Baal and Danu won’t mind more blood along with the children’s,” Conor warned.

  Michaela and Hutch rolled into the center with the children.

  Magnus lifted his shield and helped Brayden to his feet. “You will have to push in as far as you can to the center, Michaela. Hold the children if you have to.”

  The Romans formed a tighter, smaller square, except this time, the shields covered not only the ground attack but the air attack. The Romans in the interior of the square behind their fellow soldiers on the perimeter lifted their shields high over their heads. They formed a shell in the center of the sanctuary.

  “Michaela, it is time to pray,” Hutch suggested.

  Michaela held the four-year-old girl who, at this point, had run out tears and nearly fell asleep on her shoulder. They were packed tight in the phalanx. The rest of the children hugged the backs and legs of the legionaries.

  “Why don’t they attack?” Cassius asked.

  “They have us surrounded. They will. Be ready,” Brayden said.

  The ground rumbled again, this time in a rhythmic pattern. Like a drumbeat. Magnus, on the perimeter, peeked through a small crack in between his shield and Brayden’s.

  The rhythmic thumping grew in strength.

  “Hutch, if I kill this bastard Conor, will it stop all this?”

  “Don’t break our phalanx, Magnus,” Brayden warned.

  “It may weaken their power, yes,” Hutch answered.

  The drumming grew louder and louder. Magnus looked through the phalanx once again. He saw the source of the earthquake, the cause of the village’s destruction, the murderer who had stomped his men deep into the ground: one of Hannibal of Carthage’s massive war elephants. It glowed blue like the other spirits, its tusks stretching at least six feet from each side of the long trunk. In but a few seconds, it would trample all of them.

  Conor still stood in its path with his arms open.

  “Michaela, it’s time to pray. All of you, pray!” Magnus handed Michaela Tiberius’s crucifix. Then he threw his shield down and charged Conor.

  “Yeshua, defend us in battle,” Michaela said. “Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of Baal. May Iehova rebuke him, we humbly pray…”

  The war elephant breached the perimeter of the sanctuary.

  Conor began to move from its path.

  Magnus chased Conor, a mere meter between him and his enemy.

  “And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell, Baal…”

  The war elephant stomped three meters from the phalanx.

  Magnus tackled Conor. They were somehow underneath the massive war elephant, having dodged its front feet.

  “…and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.” Michaela began to cry.

  The children screamed.

  The elephant let out a tremendous, high-pitched, bloodthirsty roar.

  Magnus drove his sword through the rib cage of Conor. The centurion didn’t stop there. He angled the sword and drove it farther into his torso, thus piercing his heart.

  A blinding light burst from the tree. Magnus rolled away and covered his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Magnus opened his eyes. Either Hutch’s drink had worn off or Michaela’s prayer had worked. The surrounding blue ghosts disappeared. The rampaging beast, gone. No corrupted dead bodies reanimated with the intent to kill. The feeling at present, miraculously, was peaceful.

  A warm yellow glow emanated from the tree. Fireflies dotted the sanctuary. Magnus recalled the Picts referring to them as faeries.

  The Romans threw off their shields, exhausted from their night of battle.

  The children attached themselves to an adult or each other.

  Michaela held the girl, who played with Tiberius’s cross.

  Hutch stood, walked over to Magnus, and hugged him.

  “Druid, please. Let go of me. I am not certain it is I you should be embracing.” Magnus nodded toward Michaela.

  Magnus stood in front of Michaela at the entrance to the village. “I shall return with auxiliaries and more men to help rebuild and provide relief.”

  “We can handle the rebuild,” Michaela insisted.

  “I have no doubt you and your people are up to the task. I think Yeshua would approve of my offer to help.” Magnus nodded.

  “He would.” Michaela smiled.

  “We will be back. I have to return for Tiberius and the others.” Magnus turned to his remaining nineteen men out of one hundred.

  “It could have been a whole lot worse. The remaining children have been found in the caves in the valley. What will you tell your governor?” Michaela asked.

  Magnus turned around. “Veritas.”

  “What will you have me report to the emperor?” Governor Gricola asked.

  Magnus stood with his helmet under his arm. “I suggest we form an Order to protect against these types of threats moving forward, especially if we intend to spread Yeshua’s message even farther.”

  “You would have this woman lead this Order?”

  “Her faith is unmatched, her leadership ever selfless, her demeanor ever humble. I think the emperor would approve of these traits as they echo that of Yeshua himself. I assure you, Yeshua favors this undertaking,” Magnus said.

  The governor took another swig of his wine. The story he was just told, frankly, frightened him. Made him ne
rvous. Dreadfully uncomfortable. More horror stories from beyond the wall. One would think he would be used to them by now.

  “Very well. This Order you speak of shall be proposed immediately.”

  Afterword

  ON “THE ANCIENT ORDER”

  I hope you enjoyed the thrills and chills of “The Ancient Order!” This book was inspired by my fascination with history. I love learning of a bygone era to better make sense of the life I am living now. I was able to combine my passions for history, supernatural, and of course, thrillers to make something unique and that I feel further explores one of the more intriguing elements of the larger series: The Order of St. Michael’s history.

  The whole concept of a new religion subsuming old religions and customs is just eminently interesting to me. In the context of “The Ancient Order”, Christianity has been adopted by the Roman Emperor and his sons thus, the evangelical spread of Christianity gives way to a more militant one. How do people respond to this new religion? Do some people willingly accept these new beliefs? Do some people stubbornly resist? How does the concept of religion play a role in the shaping of culture and identity?

  I tried to properly communicate that the transition from widespread and deeply entrenched pagan worship to Christianity was not exactly a smooth one and not without its protagonists, antagonists, and static characters that straddled that line of acting Christian but knowingly, in their heart are not willing to change that which they have known for the whole of their lives, which is giving tribute to the gods.

  History is not to be oversimplified and given to gross generalizations as we tend to do in our modern era. History is messy and I very much wanted to show that chaos in “The Ancient Order.” Of course, I do not portend that this book is exceedingly historically accurate. It is a fiction, yet one has to think that pagans struggled with the concept of monotheism and the God concept just as much as some of us do today.

  In conclusion, I did more research for this short book than any other book I have written ever! I did take some inspiration from swords-and-sandals epics. I confess I do have familial origins in Roman Britain, Scotland, and Ireland so the ways of the Celtic people has been a lifelong personal journey of discovery. Again, I hope you enjoyed this book and will also delight in the continuing adventures of The Order of St. Michael.