Warlord: Dervish

by Tony Monchinski

  Jason locked the knight in the steel sights of his M4. The knight clothes-lined the last surviving child, the blades adorning his gauntlet skewering the boy before his dying body slumped to the street. Jason fired. Sparks jetted from the knight’s helmet. It turned and faced him, unperturbed.

  “Jay!” Bronson called from up the street.

  This fuckers tougher than the gladiator, Jason thought as he sped off after the others. And the gladiator had nearly finished them.

  Deirdre, Areya and Bronson were lost around a corner ahead.

  Jason fired burst after burst at the knight, who patiently waited out the lead hail behind its shield. When the bolt on Jason’s M4 locked open on an empty chamber, the knight looked up from behind its shield. Jason fired the under-barrel grenade launcher, the 40mm projectile bouncing off the knight’s shield and detonating against a house. Jason had already turned and sped off. Lassoing the flail above its head, the knight pursued.

  When he reached the corner where he had last seen Bronson, Deirdre, and Areya, Jason caught sight of them again at the end of the block, about to turn down another street. They made eye contact and Jason signaled for them to continue the way they had chosen, that he would run parallel to them on the street he was already on.

  “Come on!” Jason yelled back at the knight. “Follow me!” He raced ahead, putting some distance between himself and the armored monstrosity. When he dared to look back the knight had disappeared. “Dammit!” The thing must have turned up the block after Bronson, Deirdre and Areya.

  Jason trotted back the way he had come, reloading the M4 from his chest pouch as he did so. This knight was proving to be a real problem. He couldn’t believe its armor was withstanding his 5.56. Though it looked like it had stepped out of the Middle Ages, its armor must be enhanced somehow. Even the heavy 7.62s the kids had put into it at point blank range had only dented its armor. Maybe, Jason thought, if he could get his hands on an RPG…

  He was about to turn the corner to the block where he had seen his friends when some warning in the back of his head sounded its clarion call. Taking the corner low saved Jason’s life. The knight had pressed itself against the edge of the building and waited for him to return, bringing the flail around at chest level. The spiked ball crashed into the side of the house, a shower of concrete chips and dust dislodging themselves.

  Rolling away from the knight, Jason fired the M4 from his back. The knight raised its gauntleted forearm, protecting its eye slit. Sparks glinted off the armor as Jason’s bullets impacted. The knight raised its shield and waited.

  Jason sat up and fired another 40mm round from the M-203. The grenade streaked across the few yards separating them and plunked against the Kite shield before dropping to the street.

  “Son of a…” Jason rolled over and scampered away. He had only gotten a couple of yards when the grenade exploded, the concussion lifting him up and dumping him in the road.

  He wasn’t sure how much time passed. There was a ringing in his head. He was facedown on his chest and knees. He managed to push himself up and coughed out some sand. Turning over on his side, he looked for the knight. It was lying flat on its back, toppled by the blast. Its flail and shield lay scattered in different directions. Jason didn’t have his M4 and had no idea where it’d gone.

  He tried to stand but found he almost couldn’t. His back burned. He felt wet there and wondered how much shrapnel he’d taken. There was no way to tell.

  Behind him, the knight stirred.

  Jason squinted, puzzling over the firmament. The Doppler effect played itself out, the closest stars appearing blue, those farther away burgundy in hue.

  The knight struggled against the weight of its armor, attempting to sit up.

  His left leg would collapse under him. Jason limped forward, slouching to the side. He pulled a glove off, casting it away, feeling the back of his thigh. His hand came away red.

  He looked back and saw the knight seated in the middle of the street. Jason took the last grenade from his webbing, pulled the pin and pitched it overhand. The knight caught the grenade and hurled it right back at him. Jason dodged, the grenade passing him, exploding well beyond his person.

  The knight reached up over its head, grasping the handle jutting above its shoulder.

  Shaking his head, Jason staggered forward. Planting the blade of its greatsword in the road, the knight used the weapon to brace itself as it stood. A spiked pommel gave to a hilt bisected with two cross guards. The heavy blade itself was nearly four feet in length, ending in what resembled a rounded, razor sharp quarter moon.

  With no idea where he was going, Jason struggled to clear his head. The ringing was dissipating. He did not recognize the houses on either side of him as he faltered on. The knight pursued, its greatsword raised in both hands.

  As he stumbled head long to the next block, Jason felt the strength returning to his left leg. He couldn’t explain it, and he wasn’t going to argue against it. His gait picked up speed. He turned one corner and then another and when he looked back the knight was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t dare let up and hurried forward, running now.

  At he approached the next cross street, a man in a white lab coat hurried by, clutching a sheaf of papers. Something about the man…He looked familiar.

  “Hey!” Jason called out. The guy cast a fleeting look in Jason’s direction before disappearing inside a building. One glimpse was enough. Jason knew the man. Kaku.

  Barring his teeth, Jason ran ahead, quickly reaching the place where he had lost the doctor. The door was locked. He pounded on it.

  “Jason!” He turned and spotted Deidre on the roof of the corner house he had just passed. Bronson and Areya stood with her.

  “Did you see him?” Jason cried up to them.

  “Jay main, get up here!”

  “Did you see him?!”

  A thundercrack sounded. Jason stood in the middle of the intersection of two streets that formed a t. He glanced to his right, where, some distance off, the wall of sand seethed and glittered, thunderous reverberations within its mass. A voice cried out in Latin and Jason turned to his left. At the next intersection, dozens of Roman legionaries filed out into the street. Jason stepped backwards, watching the men mass on the road, the stars overhead reflecting off their shields and spears.

  A centurion barked and they moved forward in formation at double march.

  “Jay! Get out of there!”

  He looked back the way he’d come. The knight stepped around a corner in that direction, bracing its greatsword in front of its body. Jason turned, ready to run, but there was nowhere to run to. The path ahead was blocked, funnel-shaped dervishes oscillating in place, sand and dust misting around each mini-tornado.

  He was trapped on four sides.

  Having closed the distance between themselves and the lone man in the street, the Roman legionaries were halfway down the block. The shutters on second story windows yawned open as what sounded like dozens of AK-47s opened fire at once. Muzzle flashes blazed—tongues of flame licking from rifle barrels bristling from windows—and Roman soldiers screamed as they died, collapsing under shields offering scant protection. White vapor trails streaked from the buildings as RPGs plunged into the legionaries, sending bodies and their parts skyward. Their corpses fell like dominoues in the street.

  Jason hurried to the closest corner, crouching down behind it. The dervishes behind him undulated in place, showing no sign of advancing on him.

  An insurgent in a white dishdasha burst from a house and ran towards the nearest Roman soldiers. Jason watched him laughing before he detonated himself, disintegrating along with the legionaries about him.

  The knight couldn’t see what Jason or those on the roof saw, yet the cacophony gave it pause. The thing stood its ground, greatsword in both hands. Jason reassured himself that the dervishes were still where they were and turned back to the battle.

  The Romans cast their spears ineffectually towards the houses as they attempt
ed to beat a hasty retreat. They were caught in a veritable meat grinder, insurgent alley. And they all would have died there, except the insurgents in the windows unexpectedly stopped firing, pulling the window shutters closed behind them.

  Jason was staring at the wounded Romans as they dragged themselves on the ground when a thundercrack brought his attention to the curtain of sand. Preceded by a plangent roar, the unnatural barrier billowed down the street towards him, towards the injured men, tendrils snaking in and out of its grainy mass.

  “Jason—run!” Alarm in Deirdre’s voice.

  He felt no such hysteria. Indeed, he was oddly level headed. Jason’s injuries did not bother him. He considered the knight blocking the path ahead of him and the dervishes behind him. The sandstorm rolled down on him like a wave, blotting out the sky.

  As it swept forward, Jason focused on it, gazing deep into the eddying black blizzard, and as he did so he discerned less chaos and more form, an order unto the madness, a structure more felt than known, patterns experienced if not cognized. Staring into its depths he recognized things about himself, things known and suspected, things unknown, some purposefully kept hidden, facts and beliefs and emotions long consigned to the scrap heap of memory. Yet here they were, naked to him, swarming, an intertwined jumble defying reality and reason. They were not so much confronting him as revealing themselves for his consideration, presenting their existence for his contemplation.

  Ignoring them called for a conscious act of will, a decision to turn his back on them, to avert his eyes from truths pleasant and otherwise, the individual truths that composed any person’s life, composed it in a manner similar to the way in which these tiny granules dancing in the air constituted this malevolent wind bearing down on him.

  Having forgotten himself, Jason stared into the void, into its great, infinite depths, vast stretches at once empty and brimming with faces and figures and feelings…

  A voice

  …and the void stared back at him

  Jason

  …into him

  “Jason”

  …through him.

  “Jay main—snap the fuck out of it!”

  And Jason did snap out of it, returning to his senses, turning his head away from the violent, hot, sand-laden wind. He sprinted to the house across from him before he knew what he was doing, aware from his peripheral vision that his friends were vacating their roof for the safety of the house, aware that the knight was coming at him, its greatsword poised above its head.

  Jason hit the door, never sparing a thought as to what he would do if it was locked, and it gave under him. He immediately pushed it closed, spying the knight lumbering through the intersection, swept within the gale. Feeling in the dark beside the door, Jason found the metal bars that each house seemed to be equipped with and fit them in place.

  1,621st Iteration

  He ran his hands over the wall until he found the switch. When he turned the lights on, Jason wished he hadn’t. The room was a slaughterhouse, its walls streaked with blood and vomit. Slashed mattresses were strewn about the floor, begrimed by feces and gore. Barely recognizable human beings lay in greater or lesser stages of mutilation. Each was scalped.

  Above the stink of blood and excrement, the fetor of death visited mercilessly, hovered an oily mint stench.

  One of the bodies moved. A man pushed himself across the floor with a bare foot, his other leg shredded from stab wounds. His mouth opened, emitting a tortured, lowing moan. The blood streaming from his glistening, exposed skull had blinded him. As he reached up with red-slicked hands, fingers twitching, he wouldn’t touch his face.

  “Amina.” He keened the name. “…Amina…Amina…”

  The man cowered as Jason knelt beside him amid the blood and carnage. “Easy, it’s okay, it’s okay, take it easy,” Jason whispered, knowing there was no way to sooth him. These people around them were the man’s family. One, he had no doubt, was Amina.

  “It’s okay…your eyes are okay…” After reaching into his pack, Jason poured Betadine over the man’s scalp. “It’s okay, just keep your eyes closed, okay?” He tore open a package of gauze bandage and began packing the wound around the man’s head.

  “…Amina…”

  “Hey—hey—you’re gonna live, okay?” Jason slipped out of his Camelback and unscrewed the bladder. “Keep your eyes closed, right? Okay?” He washed the other’s face with water from the bladder and the man’s face screwed up. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Jason shielded the man’s nose with his free hand to keep the water and blood from washing up his nostrils. “You’re good, you’re going to be good…”

  He thought about Ahmed as he worked. Ahmed, who had just wanted to get home to his wife and kids. Seven kids. Ahmed, whom he hadn’t known that long or that well, but known well enough to know he was a decent man. Ahmed, who’d come to Jason’s aide, tousling with that thing in an attempt to save him, getting himself cut to pieces in the process. Tearing open another roll of Kerlix, Jason used it to sop up the blood and water about the man’s eyes.

  “Look at me…” Jason dabbed at the caked blood “…can you see me?”

  The man blinked his eyes several times until they focused on Jason. Ahmed had kids at home, seven kids waiting for their daddy, and their daddy was never going to come.

  “Shukran-jazilan,” the man thanked Jason. Jason’s country had made war on this man’s country—whatever country this was—and Ahmed’s country, and, always, always, they were saying thank you, grateful for the littlest kindness, the slightest bit of humanity, thankful to have the work, to serve as go-betweens for the war mongers.

  “You’re welcome. Now stay still.”

  “Amina.”

  The man started to sit up and Jason pushed him back down by his shoulders, shushing him with his lips pursed. “Stay down. I need you to stay down.”

  “Amina.”

  “We’ll find Amina, okay? We’ll find Amina.”

  Amina’s name seemed to calm the man somewhat.

  “I’m going to give you this…” Jason pulled the plastic hood off a morphine syrette “…and then we’ll see what we can do about Amina, alright?” He yanked the guard off by its wire loop. “This will make you feel better, okay?” Jason stuck the syrette in the man’s shoulder at the neck—he flinched at the bite and Jason whispered Amina’s name to him several times—flattening the tube between his thumb and forefinger. “How’s that feel? You feel that?”

  “…Amina…” the man sounded far away.

  Jason considered pinning the used tube to the man’s shirt but instead threw it away. He was the only triage this man had. His was the only medical care the guy was going to get. He had to cover that scalp up. Jason removed the sopping bandages from the man’s skull. He was tearing more Kerlix open when the man gripped his arm, raising his head and shoulders off the ground. He thanked Jason once more, laid back down, and died.

  Jason considered the body before him, ignoring the mayhem, the reek of death that hung about the room. The guy’s eyes were open. His fucking eyes. Jason had spent how long clearing the guy’s eyes so he could see? And now he was dead and his eyes were open. He passed his palm over the man’s face, thumbing the eyelids shut. He tossed the unused Kerlix away and cupped his forehead.

  Something stunk in this room. It wasn’t the blood, wasn’t the shit. A soapy, diesel smell.

  A thud sounded against the wooden door. The sandmen.

  “What…” Jason got up, his legs sodden with fresh blood, confronting the door. “What?”

  A heavy thump battered the door.

  “The fuck do you want?” he roared.

  When the quarter-moon blade of the greatsword broke through the wood, Jason knew how wrong he was. Not the sandmen. Holy shit! Scanning the room for a weapon, there was nothing he could use. The greatsword hacked at the door, its wood splintering, wisps of sand clouding the interior of the room.

  Jason retreated, stepping backwards from the room, eyeing the door as
it shook and cracked. He backed through a hallway and was passing an open doorway when he looked in to find Aguilera. The Marine sat in what had been a bedroom, on what had been a mattress. He was smoking hash, drawing his K-Bar back and forth over its whetstone.

  “Aguilera!”

  The Marine looked up at Jason but didn’t acknowledge him.

  “Aguilera—what the fuck did you do?” Scalps were stacked one atop the other beside him.

  The greatsword continued to cleave the front door.

  Aguilera’s rifle and grenade launcher were propped against the wall. The feint scrape of the K-Bar against its stone ended. Aguilera was watching him as Jason looked at the M4.

  “Give me your rife!” He stepped into the room to take it. Aguilera raised the knife defensively and Jason halted. When Jason called him a piece of shit, Aguilera growled back, like some kind of animal.

  “Forget this.” Jason left the room, leaving Aguilera with his scalps. An armored limb reached through a jagged hole in the front door, working at one of the metal braces barring it.

  The sandstorm didn’t seem to be affecting the knight. The thing was going to get into the house and kill Aguilera. Kill me too Jason knew. He had no doubts about this. Jason darted through the remainder of the house, searching for something he could use as a weapon, for stairs, for another way out, for something.

  No lights burned in the inner recesses of the home. Jason wished he had his NVGs but he’d lost them. He nearly tripped over a table he ran into and had to splay his hands against the tabletop to keep himself righted.

  Doing so, his hands closed over something metallic. Jason touched at it gingerly until he was convinced he knew what it was. A Kalashnikov. The things were all over this goddamn city. And now he had his hands on one. He picked it up by the barrel and stock and felt along its length. Everything seemed to be in place. He ran his hand over the banana magazine, dropping it from the well, his thumb stroking the topmost bullet. Satisfied, he replaced the magazine and chambered a round. It wouldn’t do much against the knight, but it was better than nothing.