Stream of Madness

by Jim Roberts

  He wanted to scream, but he had no air to make the sound.

  The two combatants exploded out of the alleyway as Joe was carried inexorably along with the unstoppable force. Joe managed to crane his head behind him and saw they were on a headlong trajectory towards the old well.

  If he didn’t do something, the beast would slam him against the pillar and break every bone in his body.

  Feebly, Joe grabbed for the combat knife in his belt and drew it. He was held tight by the blinded and infuriated monster. Somehow, Braddock managed to spot a piece of exposed skin on the creature’s back. He plunged the knife in, feeling it cut deep.

  Brutus howled and Joe felt the beast lose its balance. He pulled the knife free. More blobs of napalm splattered against Joe’s arm. He cried out in agony.

  Joe felt the darkness. He felt the encroaching gloom threatening to overtake him.

  The creature tumbled forwards. Joe was dragged with the beast as it slammed like a battering ram into the cistern. Rock and metal exploded in every direction as the two enemies demolished the top structure. Joe felt himself pulled by the sheer weight of the mechanical creature as it toppled head first into the cistern. Joe was yanked down by the weight of the wounded Brutus. At the last second, he felt the creature’s grip on him lift.

  Joe Braddock plummeted into the pitch black darkness of the well.

  * * *

  SANDOR DELACROIX had mustered half of the surviving Shaitat tribespeople into a small domicile across from the now burning wreckage of the semi. A mortar had struck the remains of the truck and it had caught fire. The home provided almost no protection from the machinegun fire that was now whizzing towards the structure. The Centurion hazarded a look out the small window as Jamal reloaded his AK-47. The two men had been trading fire with the approaching enemy for several minutes. Beyond the village square, Sandor saw their opponents streaming down from the hilltop and into the town below.

  “I recognize these men,” Jamal said as he slapped a clip into his weapon, “They are Saladin’s mercenaries.”

  “Goddamn! As if this day couldn’t get any worse!” The Centurion lowered his PSG-1 to eject the empty magazine. A stray bullet tore through the wall directly above the Olympus soldier, spraying him with a shower of mud and debris. At the back of the room, Ayishah held Abdul, who was sobbing into his mama’s shoulder, terrified out of his mind.

  “We cannot stay here!” Ayishah cried out over the gunfire.

  Sandor knew she was right. But the only direction they could escape to was to the south; directly out the back of the village and there was little to no cover offered by the Syrian steppe for several miles.

  They were effectively boxed in.

  Sandor slapped the ten-round magazine in place and took several quick breaths. As he popped back out through the window to snipe another Saladin mercenary, a singular thought burned in his mind.

  Where the hell are you, Braddock?

  Chapter 15

  Torment

  Dummaya Cistern

  July 17th, 2015

  JOE BRADDOCK opened his eyes into complete darkness and could not even tell what direction was up or down. He felt liquid pouring into his nose. Joe panicked and thrust his hands out, pulling himself feebly through the water. His hand still gripped the combat knife. His eyes could not adjust to the darkness that surrounded him, forcing Joe to move blindly.

  He thought he could see a small dollop of light, showing him the direction of the surface. After several seconds of pushing through the water, his head burst into the stifling darkness of the cistern below the town of Dummaya. Joe coughed and gagged as he tried to get his bearings. The light he’d seen had come from the small blobs of napalm that had fallen onto the water surface, providing just enough illumination to see the outline of the cavern. He squinted and saw the entrance of the well, nearly thirty feet directly above him. Joe could hear the vague sounds of gunfire, muffled by the layers of rock and stone. There was a horrible smell like rotting garbage emanating throughout the cistern.

  From what Joe could tell in the darkness, the reservoir was ancient; designed by Syrian craftsmen hundreds of years ago. Large pillars stretched up from the water surface towards the ceiling, sculpted with great care and attention to detail. It would have been an archeologist’s dream come true.

  Joe’s heart nearly seized as he remembered Brutus. Joe remembered seeing the monster falling in immediately ahead of him, but after that, nothing. The napalm fires soon faded and the room gradually returned to darkness. Joe reached into his pants pocket and pulled out one of the glow sticks given to him by Sandor. Clicking it on, he raised it above the water. The phosphorescent green light bathed the cistern in an eerie ambience.

  Joe took stock of his current situation. He had his knife and Browning 9mm. Seeing how useless his rifle had been against the Olympus soldier, Joe knew the handgun would be of little help. He still had his grenade belt with four M69 frags as well as the last napalm cocktail. Needing one hand free to swim, he sheathed the knife in his belt.

  Joe noticed a deep cut on his left hand. The pain had been muted by the myriad other injuries he’d received in the past day, but now it hurt like a sonovabitch.

  Braddock scowled. One more scar to add to the list.

  It took a few seconds of wading through the water before he felt the bottom of the cistern with his feet.

  Where the hell is Brutus?

  As Joe’s mind clung to the question, something bumped into him from behind. Joe flinched in surprise, turning himself around to see what had touched him.

  A body.

  Floating in the well water was a revolting, maggot eaten corpse of what appeared to be an Arab man. His face was gone, leaving a death mask of rotting flesh and a ghoulish smile of white teeth.

  Joe’s eyes went wide at the sight. Abruptly, another body sprung up from the depths of the well, bobbing up and down like a cork. Joe franticly tried to swim away from the corpses.

  Another cadaver burst from the depths directly in front of Joe. Headless and stiffened with rigor, it stunk of moldy decay.

  As Joe swam to escape the bodies, he quickly realized the cistern was full of them. Everywhere he tried to move, more corpses, in gruesome states of death were piled against each other. Decapitated, charred and dismembered, they floated around Joe like ghastly driftwood. The putrid stench of death and decomposition filled his nose to the point of making him gag.

  The horror Joe was witnessing was beyond anything he had ever experienced.

  No matter where he turned his head, there was another corpse, even more horribly disfigured then the last. Men and women, butchered like cattle and dumped into the well.

  Joe was wading through a fountain of the dead.

  Aimlessly, Joe moved through the macabre scene, trying to avert his gaze from the surrounding horror, but found his eyes inevitably drawn back.

  He saw a woman, her torso slit open from neck to belly, her innards having spilled into the water.

  He saw a man, eyes gouged from his head, the dead pits looking into Joe’s soul.

  Madness…

  Terror broke through Joe’s soldier exterior. Terror unlike anything he could describe.

  He clenched his eyes shut, hoping this was all a nightmare. Please let this be a nightmare.

  …But when he opened his eyes, the corpses were still there, as real as ever.

  The faces of the dead moved in towards Joe. Eyes unseeing, they floated towards him as if to bring him down to the depths of the cistern with them.

  Joe Braddock had discovered the fate of the Syrian rebels. Murdered by ISIL, their bodies had been thrown down the well like so much refuse.

  For what felt like an eternity, Joe waded through the lake of the damned, pushing the endless piles of bodies away from him. A rat that had been gnawing on the floating corpse of a teen boy leapt at the stranger in the water. Joe felt the beast land on his face, clawing at the intruder to his domain.

  Joe couldn’t c
ontain himself any longer.

  He screamed.

  Joe’s voice echoed through the chamber like the wail of a dying child.

  He brought his free hand up and grasped at the creature. The rat scratched his face before Joe managed to tear the rodent free, throwing it into the darkness of the well.

  By now, he’d lost count of how many corpses there were – easily a hundred.

  Finally, Joe felt the bottom of the well begin to rise against his feet. The vague direction he was heading seemed to be leading towards a narrowing subsection of the cistern. Logic told him that there would have to be some sort of raised area for workers to walk upon during times of maintenance. If he could only find it, he could climb out–

  Water exploded around Braddock as something burst up from the depths below. Joe was propelled backwards into the brackish water. He felt the glow light slip from his fingers.

  A monster rose from the water. To Joe’s feverish mind, it was something out of his worst nightmares.

  Brutus.

  The creature reared back and roared, arms outstretched. The creature must have continued to swim beneath the waters, searching for its prey.

  And now here it was, ready to rend limb-from-limb the man that had caused it to feel such pain.

  Joe had no time to act. He was still up to his torso in water and could barely move at a decent pace. Brutus pushed through the water, his massive suit sparking from the napalm damage. Braddock had barely enough time to find the bottom of the cistern with his feet when Brutus lunged at him, barreling through the water like some frantic wildebeest. With no options left, Joe reached to his side and clasped the body of one of the dead Syrians. He pulled it across the water in front of him, with a vague notion of using it as some sort of shield. Brutus tackled the dead corpse, grappling it with his arms.

  For a brief second, Joe thought his feint had worked. But then the Olympus tracker heaved the body of the Syrian over his head and wrenched with all its might. The corpse came apart in Brutus’s grasp; torn neatly in two. Entrails and organs spilled out in a waterfall of gore. Joe felt sour bile in his throat, but managed to hold it down. Throwing the remains into the water, Brutus once again focused on his living prey.

  With a speed surprising in something so large, Brutus sprang towards Joe, grasping him with his gauntleted hands. With a brutal grunt, the beast tossed Joe across the cistern like a lawn dart. The Peacemaker landed hard against one of the rock columns, wrenching his back violently before tumbling down into the water. Joe sputtered as liquid filled his nostrils and mouth yet again.

  This thing will kill you, Braddock. Get up now!

  The creature was drawing out the inevitable; making it hurt.

  Joe found the bottom of the well with his feet. Ignoring the screaming pain in his back and ankle, he found his balance and stood back up, bracing for the next attack that was assuredly coming. He watched as the hulking killer stomped through the water, its metallic parts grinding as it moved. In the bleak light of the cistern, Brutus resembled some sort of ancient Grecian horror; a terror removed from antiquity that only the most superstitious minds could conjure up.

  Joe took in his surroundings as quickly as possible. The creature had thrown him against one of the pillars further up the shallow end of the cistern. The water here was only waist deep. There were several bodies of Syrian rebels that had piled up around the base of the column. To his immediate right, he could see the water become shallower, where at the end of the cistern a small cavern led to an unknown destination.

  There…wherever that leads, that’s my last chance.

  Brutus was enraged now. The beast flung its muscular arm against one of the tall columns, smashing it utterly. The cavern seemed to groan from the missing support. Joe could tell the cistern was so old, that any more damage to the interior structure could bring down the entire thing.

  Brutus sprinted through the water towards Joe, howling as he ran – ready to gore the soldier with his wolf-shaped helmet. Corpses were thrown aside like so much discarded waste in the monster’s path.

  The napalm! Use the goddamn napalm!

  A voice from inside his mind broke through the fear, urging him to act. Focusing, he unhooked the last napalm cocktail from his belt and popped the flare. Brutus lurched momentarily in his approach, recognizing the weapon from earlier. Too late, the beast tried to adjust its trajectory.

  Joe flung the weapon at the Olympus tracker.

  The bomb connected full-on with Brutus, splashing the monster’s entire body with slippery incendiary flame. Brutus reared backwards, trying to beat out the fire, to no avail.

  The super-soldier had become a walking inferno.

  The more Brutus tried to stem the flames, the more they spread. Globs of napalm splattered throughout the well. The beast let out a howl that shook the interior of the cistern to its very foundations.

  Joe made his move, wading through the water as Brutus swung wildly, smashing into another pillar and causing it to collapse in a shower of debris. The water eventually became shallow enough to run. Joe’s ankle and back were in such pain, he thought he would collapse right there.

  Almost…keep going…

  He saw the exit from the cistern was a mere three feet in diameter – a small crawlspace. It would be a squeeze, but he could make it. But he couldn’t leave the beast free.

  Joe had to bring it down for good.

  He removed the grenade belt and yanked the pins on two of the four frags. He turned back to the Olympus tracker, still writhing in pain from the spreading napalm.

  “Eat this!”

  Joe threw the grenade belt as hard as he could at the Olympus super soldier. Without a second’s delay, he jogged towards the outlet and dove through. In his head, he counted–

  1…2…3!

  At the final number, a heart stopping surge of explosive energy burst from the cistern. The underground sewer shook violently. From where he lay, looking back through the narrow crawlspace, Joe saw rubble collapse from the ceiling, burying the room of corpses and the Olympus beast under tons of debris. The corridor Joe was in shook as well, with bits of rock breaking away and falling around him.

  After a moment, the quaking ceased and the corridor was plunged into an aching silence.

  Joe managed to get to his feet and walk a few meters before his legs gave out and he fell face first into the wet floor. His eyes closed as exhaustion overcame his body.

  * * *

  “Goddamn! Jamal, Ayishah, take a look at that!”

  Sandor Delacroix shouted from across the small domicile to Jamal. The young man was helping one of the wives, Maisha, with a bullet wound in her arm. Ayishah was busy trying to calm her son and the little girl, Safa. Both kids were terrified out of their minds from the loud explosions.

  Sandor had felt a tremor in the ground and a moment later, the entire town square broke apart and collapsed in on itself, disappearing from sight. The Centurion’s first thought was earthquake, but soon realized it must have been something detonated beneath the ground.

  Joe, was that you? He didn’t have time to wonder. Past the square, Sandor saw the approaching horde of Saladin’s soldiers. They had paused their fire for a moment as they too observed the town square disappear into the earth. A crater forty feet wide was all that remained of the central area of the town.

  Sandor raised the PSG-1, taking advantage of the lull in action. He trained the sights on one of the mercenaries, who had hunkered down just in front of a small shed. Squeezing the trigger, he felt the gun bark loud in his hands. The Centurion watched in satisfaction as the bullet tore through the man’s face and exploded out the back of his head, spraying blood and brain matter across the shed behind him.

  The death of the merc shocked the others back into the action. Sandor pulled back from the window, dodging the multitude of gunfire that came blazing his way.

  That’s probably the end of my good fortune today, he thought to himself.

  Jamal finished tying a
bandage ripped from his t-shirt around Maisha’s arm. The girl sucked in her breath as tears of pain poured down her face. The girl was tough. She’d be fine – if they weren’t all killed in the next few minutes. He joined Sandor at the window, grasping his AK.

  Jamal looked at Sandor and said, “We can no longer stay here. We must move now!”

  The Centurion gave the domicile a once over. Of the ten Shaitat tribespeople, only four were uninjured. They had tricked fate so far and avoided death, but their luck was growing tenuous. They were low on ammo and Sandor reckoned that any moment, the mercenaries would flank their position; killing or capturing them like sheep.

  If they left now, they could fall back towards the settlements to the southwest, perhaps make it to the lowlands beyond.

  No.

  They would made their stand here and now. There was no going back; nowhere to retreat to.

  “There’s nowhere left for us, Jamal,” Sandor said, holding the PSG-1 at the ready, “We hold on, that’s all we can do!”

  Jamal opened his mouth as if to argue, but knew in his heart it was futile. This was indeed the last stand. He helped Maisha over to where the other injured Shaitat people were huddled behind some loose furniture and rushed back to Sandor’s side. He picked up his dropped AK and checked the breech, “Alright, Mister Delacroix. We fight.”

  Sandor nodded. The two men looked each other in the eye, waiting for the precise time to return fire. When it was right, they lunged up to the window–

  –and were nearly bowled over by a stream of relentless mortar fire that pelted down upon the streets.

  The two men fell away from the window, trying to shake the dust and debris from their faces.

  “They are mortaring again!” Jamal shouted from where he lay.