El Sombra

by Al Ewing

  There was a silence between the two men. Each dearly wanted to attack the other, to take out their fury and frustration on the enemy. To mask their own guilt with righteous anger. Instead, they simply sat there and watched each other. Master Plus had not shaved, and his white suit was grubby and stained, but he seemed to have gained some small measure of strength over the last twenty-four hours. If only the innate strength of one who understand that he has nothing more to lose.

  The masked man exhaled. "Fine. I screwed up. I should have taken her somewhere safe and tended to her myself. And you screwed up by being a mula. There's no point going over it any more, it's done. What's important now is that we fix it and get her back. What's this wedding?"

  Master Plus closed his eyes tight. "The town criers are privates dressed up. God knows why. To catch attention, but I can't imagine any of the workers being that thrilled when they're being forced to pull fourteen hour shifts. But now you know as much as I do. I wasn't informed about any of this, I just heard the announcements. Needless to say, no leaves have been granted to the workers or the lower ranks, so I assume it'll be just officers there. Again, God knows why they're doing it that way. Their original plan was to make a big public spectacle out of it, a little dazzle for the drones." He buried his head in his hands.

  "What was your plan? Beyond marrying your daughter off to a psycopath?"

  Master Plus gave a great, racking sob, the tears pricking at the corners of his eyes before rolling down his great cheeks.

  "I don't know. I remember her seventeenth birthday, looking at her... I thought to myself, I still have time. I still have time to think of something. Anything. And I never did think of anything, I just kept on, and on, doing as I was told, hoping I'd come up with an idea. She'd have been better off with a brand on her forehead and no thoughts in her head. She wouldn't have been noticed. But I had to 'protect' her, turn her into an experiment, put a target on her... oh, Jesus forgive me, forgive me!"

  "Jesus isn't here. He's gone for a walk." El Sombra sighed and pushed his chair back. "Where's this Centre For Something Something?"

  Master Plus wiped his eyes, drawing in a great hitching breath. "It's the church. The Old Church. It can't be a chuh-church any more, but they've always liked the building. They have events there for visiting dignitaries."

  El Sombra nodded. He had never managed to get much information on the old church - Jesus had a superstitious fear of going too near it, thinking he would be recognised if he dared to step through the doors - but this was no surprise. It would be just like the bastards to turn a place where good men worshipped God into a place where bootlickers worshipped the next rung of the ladder.

  Master Plus interrupted his reverie. "What will you do if it's a trap?"

  "What will I do if it isn't?" he shrugged. "I can't sit back and allow it to happen. If the Church has the same layout I remember, there should be a side exit for the vicar. I'll just grab Carina and run."

  "You'll be killed."

  "She's dead if I don't get her out of there. You know that."

  Master Plus had nothing to say. El Sombra sighed and lifted himself from his chair.

  "It's ten to eleven, by your clock. I'm going to see if I can't disrupt this wedding they're having and get your daughter somewhere safe. I'm going to be taking the pistol, so I suggest if you do decide to end it all you use a rope."

  Master Plus stared at the bottle. "Thank you."

  El Sombra nodded. "You're welcome."

  Carina stared at the wall. The only features in the cell were a thick metal door, a wooden shelf that acted as a bed, and a bucket, which was emptied twice a day. The only light came from a small candle placed in one corner. She'd considered starting a fire with it, but all she had to burn was her bed, and that would take too long to catch light. And if it did catch light - what? She'd die of smoke inhalation. A great moral victory, no doubt, but nothing she was interested in doing.

  From what El Sombra had told her, there should have been a yellow mist in the air to drive her out of her mind. She wasn't happy by any means - she hadn't been since she'd awoken from a sound sleep to find herself here - but any anxiety she was feeling wasn't artificially produced.

  She frowned, remembering the stories of Conan Doyle. Eliminate the impossible, and what is left must be the truth. So, she hadn't been harmed, or even questioned, and she wasn't being held in the Palace Of Beautiful Thoughts. Which meant that she wasn't going to be interrogated or questioned, assuming that El Sombra had told her the truth about what her father's friends did to people.

  So she was being kept in storage. It was a similar prison to her rooms in her father's house - only considerably less lavish. What were they keeping her for?

  The wedding.

  They'd invested a lot in her, and they wouldn't see any of it back if the wedding didn't take place in some form. So they'd keep the plates spinning a little longer, have their royal mock-celebration behind closed doors, make proclamations and give out photos and souvenir teacups after the fact... then see how it affected their workforce and tabulate the results. And when they had collected their data, she would, if she was lucky, be shot twice in the back of the head and left in a ditch somewhere.

  Smoke inhalation might be more pleasant.

  She sighed and leant back against the wall. The best thing she could do would be to sit tight and wait for her chance to escape. That chance would most likely not arrive until the wedding, so she would have to stay alert and hope she could seize it when it finally came.

  She had no daylight, and no clock to tell the time, but if she had - and if the dank cell in the basement of the Red Dome had been within earshot of the town criers who had paraded in the streets and lent their voices to the dawn chorus - she would have known that it was three minutes shy of noon.

  Her wedding was about to begin.

  El Sombra made his way through the back alleys towards the church.

  The Old Church had been built in the early eighteenth century; the work of zealous Spanish missionaries who believed that the first thing a tiny colony like Pasito needed was a place of worship. Its construction had been sponsored by a wealthy philanthropist of the time, and thus it was built of stone rather than wood, and sported an impressive circular stained glass window, depicting the Crucifixion around the circumference. The building had been allowed to remain standing at the request of Alexis Eisenberg, who enjoyed the irony of holding formal receptions for the Ultimate Reich in what had once been house of God.

  El Sombra looked up at the old, grey stone, listening to the sound of the organ playing within. It was the Wedding March. Obviously the ceremony was just starting. There were two guards posted outside, one on either side of the double doors that led within, but they seemed shiftless and preoccupied, kicking pebbles to one another and chatting about who knew what. El Sombra watched them carefully from the shadows, then turned away. They looked like bait, and besides, there was no point in coming from the direction the bastards expected. Surprise was the key.

  He scanned the sky quickly for wingmen before leaping at the church wall. As his fingers and toes found holds in the stone, his mind flashed up images of sheer rock faces in the desert sun, cliffs without handholds, overhangs of desert rock that could not be climbed, that he had climbed regardless. In comparison, the wall of the church was child's play, and he scaled it silently and swiftly, reaching the roof in less than a minute. The organ was still playing, a loud cacophony that seemed more sinister than celebratory. He would look forward to shutting it up once and for all.

  The masked man took a deep breath and stilled his mind. Then he began to run towards the far end of the rooftop, past the silent bell tower with the old weathercock slowly creaking and spinning on top of it, sprinting almost to the edge before hurling himself into space. His body twisted in mid-air, hands gripping a stone gargoyle leering over the edge of the roof, using it to swing himself down, bare feet aiming towards the circular stained-glass window.

 
The force of his impact shattered the glass, sending hundreds of razor-sharp fragments pouring into the church, slashing at his legs and back, spotting him with shallow cuts as he descended to land like a cat on the altar, the coloured glass shimmering down around him and tinkling against the cold stone.

  It took him less than a second to see that his plan was doomed from the start. Rescuing Carina from her wedding to Alexis was a noble goal - but there was no wedding taking place in the church.

  Instead, El Sombra had landed in front of a firing squad.

  Ten machine guns opened up as the masked man dived behind the stone altar, the bullets ricocheting off carved saints and crosses. A squad of ten wingmen had been waiting in readiness for at least an hour for him to come crashing through that very window. When their moment had arrived, they had not flinched or hesitated. It was only the lightning reflexes that the masked man had cultivated over nine long years that prevented him from being chopped into mincemeat by the rain of gunfire.

  El Sombra considered his odds. Since this was a trap the Reich would have sent their most efficient killers, men who worked well with each other. If they'd been prepared for him to enter through the large stained glass window, then that meant they were skilled tactical planners with an understanding of his psychology. Some had duelling scars, which indicated a mastery of aerial sword fighting. Not that they'd need that with the machine-guns they were carrying, but it meant that even if they were disarmed, they would still be more than capable of ending his life.

  Ten highly-trained assassins, six of whom were even now moving around the sides of the altar to box him in. And as a final touch, they'd brought along an organist to serenade them. El Sombra grimaced as the music soared to a new and screeching crescendo, and wondered what kind of mind would think to provide such a distraction. The man at the organ was hunched over, wearing a black, hooded robe, his fingers whirling over the keys as he played a series of savage, half-human melodies that seemed to resonate with murder, malice and death. He looked more like a worker than a soldier. Doubtless some poor fool who had been tortured beyond the limits of his endurance until the pillars upon which his sanity had rested snapped like dry twigs. And now, on the whim of one of the bastards, he was set at the organ like a monkey in a travelling sideshow. It was doubtless meant as a distraction. It was a good one. El Sombra saw the men taking their positions to catch him in their crossfire, as if in slow motion, and the constant screeching and wailing of the thing in the corner meant he could barely think at all, much less come up with an escape.

  Think, damn it. Think! He was hiding, behind an altar, from ten men armed with wing-packs and machine guns. Four were moving around each side of the altar, two by two, to pin him in a crossfire, and two more were rising into the air to take the advantage of height. The great vaulted ceiling of the Church was perfect for such a manoeuvre. The remaining four - including the commanding officer, he assumed - hung back, taking up the rear. He needn't worry about them just yet, but that still left him facing odds of six to one.

  El Sombra had a sword and a pistol in his belt, but nothing that could take care of six armed men, all firing from different angles. And there was no way he could leap out of the way of this. If he couldn't think of a way to murder six armed men in less than a second, he was going to die.

  He was in serious trouble, and the worst of it was, no matter how he looked at the situation, there was no way that it wasn't his fault.

  Hauptmann Aldous von Abendroth commanded Eagle Staffel.

  He was forty-one years of age, he stood at six feet and four inches, and he had less than three per cent body fat. Each day with his breakfast, he drank a glass of tiger's milk and royal jelly, which he had imported from his castle in the Bavarian Alps. After breakfast, he would do one hour of T'ai Chi - a system which he had developed a grudging respect for, despite its origination among the mud men of the East - and then challenged whichever of his men had distinguished himself the day before to a wrestling match. It was considered a great honour among the men of Eagle Staffel to be allowed the chance to wrestle with Aldous von Abendroth.

  After the wrestling, he spent another half-hour in fortifying his mind by reading Goethe, or Schiller, or one of the court epics of Heinrich von Veldeke. By that time, the other soldiers, who rose with the dawn like the sluggards they were, were stumbling to the mess hall, perhaps casting a glance at Eagle Staffel as they engaged in some rousing callisthenics, followed by a shared snack consisting of nature's miracle, the grape, with a little goats cheese that he had flown from Tuscany.

  And then Eagle Staffel dressed.

  Hauptmann Aldous von Abendroth had been awarded the Knight's Cross with Golden Oakleaves, Swords and Diamonds. He was a celebrity in Germany, with a range of chapbooks based on his many exploits in the service of the Fatherland and at least one film, but he was mainly known for his range of health magazines, in which he endorsed a rigorous regimen of callisthenics, T'ai Chi (which he renamed The Abendroth Discipline out of respect to his audience's sensibilities) and of course, nature's miracle, the grape.

  Despite these eccentricities, he was a very dangerous man. He was an expert in both armed and unarmed combat as well as a master of planning and strategy. When backed up by his Eagle Staffel he was unstoppable.

  Most recently, the Staffel had been called away from rest and recreation in the cafes of Rome to a small Mexican outpost of the Fatherland, in the hope that they would assist in solving the thorny problem of insurgency in that colony. A vast amount of damage had been done by a single man. A specialist in bladed and unarmed combat who was making it his business to disrupt and destroy as much of the good work being done by the Ultimate Reich as he could. Hauptmann von Abendroth had dealt with nihilists of this stripe before. They set themselves against the Fatherland's doctrines of ordnung because they were too weak to survive under the Führer's gaze. Well, Aldous von Abendroth knew something about strength, and he intended to teach that something to the anarchist who cowered before him now.

  This 'El Sombra' would find that the lessons of Eagle Staffel were short, and sharp, and very final indeed.

  El Sombra narrowed his eyes, looking at the sharp pieces of stained glass that littered the altar and the ground around his feet.

  This was going to be tricky.

  He moved like a streak of lightning. His hands flashed out to the top of the altar, reaching out to take a large sliver of stained glass in the space between each of his fingers - then he leapt into the air, spinning around once, both arms extended, and let them fly. The razor sharp chunks of coloured glass sped through the air like shurikens.

  The effect was impressive, to say the least.

  The Church echoed with the wet sounds of glass meeting and piercing flesh. A long chunk of brilliant emerald glass, like the feather of some magnificent bird of paradise, jutted from the eye of a man on his left. On his right, there was a soldier with a long gash running along the side of his neck, the jugular already pumping out a cascading waterfall of rich, red blood as clutching fingers desperately attempted to stem the tide. El Sombra held his stance, muscles tensed, eyes flickering around the circle of men that surrounded him. Everywhere he looked, he saw a fatal wound, a pair of eyes glazing over. He allowed himself to exhale. None of the six shards had missed its target.

  Aldous von Abendroth listened, speechless, as the heavy organic thud of four slumping corpses echoed in the confines of the Church - followed by the crash of metal and flesh and hissing steam as two wingmen fell out of the air to crash onto stone.

  And then the sound of the organist spurring his instrument on, as though relishing the scent of death.

  "Spread out! Random directions, random courses! If you get a shot - take it!" Aldous von Abendroth barked the orders quickly to the three men who remained, not allowing himself to think about the six lying dead on the ground - men who had been his responsibility, who had followed his orders and died because of them. He had trained them, taken care of them, taught them e
verything he knew, and because he had underestimated the animal squatting in front of him, they had died.

  He would not make the same mistake twice.

  El Sombra didn't allow himself time for such reflection. He had cut the odds against him by more than half, but that was only because he'd been allowed one free shot. Now he had three people ready to kill him and one more in command, and he should really deal with the damned organist as well. The echoing, screeching music was buzz-sawing through his brain, making it difficult to concentrate. He vaulted the altar and dodged left - and then his eyes lit up.

  On a small plinth next to the pulpit, there was a two-foot wide iron collection plate, decorated around the edges with a chorus of trumpeting angels.

  Perfect.

  He somersaulted forwards, a stream of bullets crossing through the space he had vacated, and snatched up the iron plate, lifting it in time to block another burst of fire from above. He sprinted forward, running between the pews as the bullets chewed up the stone in front and behind. Spinning the plate in his fingers, he gripped it like a discus, aiming upwards, targeting Lieutenant Johannes Trommler, a smart young man of twenty-five who had risen in the ranks quickly, impressing the Hauptmann with his quick reactions. On this occasion, those reactions would not be quick enough. Even as Johannes aimed his rifle to fire a killing shot, El Sombra was already flicking his wrist, sending the iron plate spinning upwards, speeding towards its target. Johannes Trommler made a hideous gurgling sound as the iron plate buried in the front of his throat, penetrating deep enough to lodge between two of his vertebrae.

  Hauptmann von Abendroth shouted more orders as another of his charges crashed to the ground, choking and coughing blood. "You two - stay low, for God's sake! Get in close, don't give him room to dodge!"

  The masked man's lips twitched, but he did not allow himself the smile. It would not do for the Hauptmann to realise he had taken the bait. If he'd kept his soldiers in the air, with their height advantage, they would most likely have picked him off before he'd managed to target another of them. Now their noble commander had ordered them to clip their own wings.