by Nancy Osa
She pointed to a full stack, casting him a searching glance.
The colonel grew more urgent. “Quartermaster! How much gold?” They had mined quite a bit back at the old abandoned dig and had both blocks and ingots in their inventories. “Quickly! A crafting table,” the old ghost demanded. He whispered something to Jools, who dipped into his brewing inventory while the colonel crafted away.
Kim watched, hope slowly replacing the horror in her eyes.
At last Colonel M said, “Let’s give it a go.” He nodded for Kim, Jools, and Rob to follow him inside. No one wanted to be that close to the flesh-eating monsters, but they knew they had to rise to the task.
“Quartermaster! You first!”
Jools pelted the distressed beasts with splash potions of weakness.
“Now the apples!”
The colonel had used the mined blocks and refined ingots to craft golden apples, some of them enchanted. “This worked on villagers once,” he explained. “Let’s hope it does the job now!”
They tossed the golden apples through the iron bars, and the trapped zombie horses wolfed them down. As the group watched, their groaning turned to hissing, their writhing turned to shuddering. Little by little, their coat colors faded and rejuvenated. Their passionless eyes reanimated. In a few minutes, each of the stabled animals had turned back into a true equus ferus caballus—a real, live horse.
Rob had never seen Kim so ecstatic. The color had come back into her pink cheeks and the spring had returned to her step. “Starla! Josie! Mister Wiggles!” They whinnied back at her. She unlatched one of the stall doors and entered, cooing, “Josie, Josie . . . I missed you so much.”
Now Turner and Stormie crept through the barn door to witness the happy scene. Kim’s joy spread to the rest of the group, and Stormie found herself hugging Turner. Rob, Jools, and Frida crowded around the colonel to rave about what his idea had accomplished.
“Who knew?” Frida said. “Colonel, you had just the right prescription for those sick horses.”
Kim led Josie out of the barn. “I’ve used golden apples to encourage breeding, but I’m not much of a brewer. I had no idea that you could combine a weakness potion and a golden apple to cure a zombie horse. That’s a valuable fact for my files.”
Colonel M smiled at her. “A good horse master never stops learning.” He turned to Rob. “Captain, don’t let this one get away.”
Rob promised he wouldn’t, and Stormie glared at Kim jealously. She had nothing to worry about, though. Kim had been a good friend from day one, and she was a fellow horse lover, but she would always put her animals first. Once a horse geek, always a horse geek, Rob thought.
*
In the days that followed, horses and men stayed foremost in the cavalry commander’s mind. Trusting to Colonel M’s counsel, Rob realized that arms and ammunition could be considered secondary weapons. He needed to figure out the best way to use his officers to rally the new recruits and set a strategy for winning back the extreme hills boundaries.
One by one, Rob called his battalion members aside to chat.
“Frida, thanks for coming.” He pointed her to a seat in his makeshift office that he’d converted from a horse stall.
The olive-hued survivalist sat on the edge of the wood block. “What’s up, Newbie?”
“I want your take on how best to scout out the battle lines and site our attack.”
This new Rob was still a surprise to Frida. He had moved from the blank slate she had encountered back on the beach to a real commander-in-the-making. Their meeting had been fortunate. She only wished she could help him more in his quest to get home . . . but that seemed beyond her power.
“I’m glad you asked,” she said, returning to the topic at hand. “Getting a bead on Dirt’s coordinates in the extreme hills will be tricky. As Colonel M said, there are lots of opportunities for ambush, and that doesn’t bode well for spying. I’m thinking the only way to do it is to go undercover.”
“You mean . . . infiltrate them?”
She nodded.
What a gutsy girl, Rob thought. Luckily, her confidence came from skill, not bravado.
“I know I can count on you, Vanguard. It’s a perilous mission. I’ll give you whatever help you need. Check in with me in a day or two.”
She nodded again.
“And Frida . . . I appreciate . . . everything.”
He asked her to call Turner in from where he was drilling troops.
Rob’s conversation with his sergeant major showed less sentiment. Turner was riding high on a wave of self-importance.
“I’ve gotta say, Captain, I never thought you’d amount to much. And here you are holding your own alongside the guy who’s commanding all the village troops! I’ve got those privates eating out of my hand.” Turner plopped down on the wooden block uninvited.
“Have a seat, Sergeant Major,” Rob said dryly. “I’ll need both a weapons report and a division report. Have you managed to separate the company into three squadrons?”
“Done and done, sir,” Turner replied, uncharacteristically focused on his task.
Rob marveled that the more you asked of some people, the more they could do. “Good. Then let’s start arming the villagers to provide our cavalry front line with various degrees of protection. Take those with the best aim and give them bows. The biggest and strongest get swords. And the rest will use axes.”
“Dirt won’t know what hit him,” Turner assured Rob. “We’re two-thirds of the way through crafting two weapons apiece. Ammo, not so much. We’re working on stockpiling land mines, though, besides as many arrows as we can make.” Turner frowned. “I keep having to throw them out and start over.”
“It’s hard to meet your standards, I’m sure. But we don’t have the luxury of perfection this time. Step up production, Sergeant Major,” Rob ordered.
“Affirmative,” Turner replied.
As long as he included the mercenary in the dialogue, Rob noted, he quit dragging his heels. Thank you, Colonel M, he said silently.
Knowing that Jools would have the skinny on their potion inventory, he dismissed Turner and asked him to summon the quartermaster to the stable.
*
While Jools hung at the door, waiting to be ushered in, Rob recalled their first confrontation. Jools was thinking about the same thing.
“Sorry about that pufferfish,” Jools said with a wry grin, accepting the seat when Rob offered it.
“I thought I was dying,” Rob admitted. Jools’s great talent was to think outside the box at just the right moment, a valuable skill. “What were the odds of someone catching a poisonous fish in their mouth?”
“But it worked,” Jools said, and the two reminisced briefly about that fishing trip. “I’d like to do some more fishing before we leave the plains,” Jools said. “You never know what kind of loot I might dredge up. Isn’t that how you found Turner?”
Rob laughed. “Nah, the cat dragged him in. But seriously, Jools. We’re going to need you to run some computer simulations for different battle scenarios, starting with one of us infiltrating the enemy encampment. By the time Frida turns on the real griefers, it will be too late for them to retaliate. Or, at least, it had better be.”
Even Jools was impressed with Frida’s bold proposal. “She’s a woman after my own heart,” he said. “That’s the kind of girl I could really hide behind.”
Rob recalled the quartermaster’s previous attempts to remain in the background. “Those days are gone, buddy,” he said. “We need all the manpower we can get, and you’re a good rider. Can you see your way clear to taking up arms?”
Jools hesitated, and embarrassment colored his pale face. “It’s against my typical policy,” he said, “but I’ll make an exception this time for the good of the battalion.”
Rob looked skeptical.
“You have my word,” Jools added, to the captain’s satisfaction.
They agreed that potions would be less effective in this battle, where
the hazardous terrain would give Dr. Dirt the advantage. But boosting everyone’s eyesight with night vision potion would be worthwhile.
“I’ll get right on it, Rob. Sir.” Jools wasn’t used to meeting anyone whose powers of insight and deduction complemented his own. “And might I say that you’re doing a bang-up job?”
“Right back at you,” Rob said, shaking Jools’s hand.
The remaining troopers also pledged their support. Stormie agreed to rig the mine carts they’d brought from the mesa with TNT. They could send them along Dirt’s own tracks to detonate his supply stores. She offered to lead out and act as vanguard when they reached the extreme hills, where her map would not be sufficient to gauge the terrain. Kim came charging into his office in a pink rage and volunteered to strike the first blow when the battle began.
“I can never forgive those griefers for what they did to my herd,” she said, more fired up than Rob had ever seen her. “I want to make them pay.”
Now she was sounding more like Turner than the bronc whisperer who had shown Rob up in the corral that first day. “Active duty doesn’t relieve you of your horse master obligation,” he reminded her.
“I can do both, sir!”
He gratefully accepted her among the cavalry guard and promoted her to corporal. She would act as liaison between Turner’s infantry and the mounted officers. “Let’s go tell him the good news,” Rob said.
They approached Turner’s squadrons, drilling on one of the side pastures under the watchful eye of Colonel M The villagers, who were used to roaming at will, when and where they wanted to go, were having a difficult time marching in unison. Turner screamed at them to act as a unit.
“Don’t ya get it? Working together makes a team—and that there’s stronger than any one guy,” Rob heard him say. “That’s how come a line of cavalry soldiers charges abreast, not single file.” Turner noticed the captain’s approach and ducked his head. “Now carry on,” he blustered. “One, two, one, two . . .”
*
In a few days the preparations neared completion. Frida donned an old skin that Kim had up in her attic that they hoped would fool the griefer contingent. She set out on her lonely and dangerous operation. They would hear no more from her until she signaled them as they planned from lower coordinates on the extreme hills. Rob couldn’t help wondering if he would see her green face again.
Before suiting up and moving toward the rendezvous point, Rob had to consult one more of his key players. After dinner, he strolled out to the pasture where Saber, Beckett, and Duff were dozing. Rob slipped through the gate and walked up to the black horse that had carried him so far.
“If this was a perfect world,” the captain said to Saber, “I wouldn’t rightly ask another thing of you.” He scratched the horse’s shoulder and received a low nicker in reply. “But, for now, I need you to give me just one more battle.”
The man and mount stood together in companionable silence late into the night. Rob wished it would never end. Finally, he returned to the barn and the bedroll Kim had given him to replace the one he’d lost in the Nether. He wouldn’t ever take sleeping in a bed for granted again.
He woke at first light to Colonel M’s gentle nudge.
“Is it time to go?” he asked fuzzily.
“It is for me,” the wise man’s head uttered. “I must retire to my summer home while you go take care of business.”
Rob sat up, wide awake now. Apprehension knifed through him. Why would the colonel leave just when they needed him most?
“I can be of no use to you in a physical battle,” his mentor explained. “I have already transmitted my small bit of knowledge, which you have interpreted well. Now it is time for you to put it into practice.”
“But . . . how will we contact you to let you know the outcome?”
The bemused head drifted toward the stable door. “I have my ways of knowing,” Colonel M said. “We shall meet again.”
“I’ll never forget you,” Rob promised. He wanted to tell the colonel that he had been nothing before they’d met—that he was a fence-riding cowboy, not a leader. He wanted to list his shortcomings and insist that he wasn’t fit to start a revolution. But he knew that the colonel would want him to turn all those negatives into positives and to hurl them at the enemy with all his might.
As Rob wrestled with these thoughts, he watched his mentor’s head grow fainter and more transparent, until all he could see was the half-empty hay net on the opposite stable wall.
*
“Move out!” Rob called a few hours later to Battalion Zero and its infantry reinforcements. Stormie took the lead on Armor, as usual, ponying Ocelot behind them. It felt strange not to see Frida riding ahead of Jools and Beckett, and odder still not to hear Turner’s banter. Rob had relegated the sergeant major and his corporal to the rear of the foot soldier ranks. He felt better about trusting Turner to hold steady in the rearguard with Kim there to watch over him.
He cast a final glance behind him and was pleased to see the rows of villagers marching smartly along. There was, of course, no way to hide the fact that they meant to strike at Dr. Dirt’s forces. Rob hoped that having Frida embedded in their unit would pay off with crucial intelligence and well-placed booby traps.
“So, Captain Rob,” Jools said as they rode beside each other, “which battle option have you selected?” The strategist had run probability figures for the three most likely scenarios.
“We’ll stick with Dirt’s own battle plan and turn it against him,” Rob replied. “The man has used the same configuration every time. All we have to do is anticipate it.”
Jools nodded. “Pick off the skelemobs, skirmish with the zombies, and blast ’em with TNT whenever possible.”
“The griefers don’t have Kim’s zombie horses anymore,” Rob pointed out, “so we’ll have the upper hand.”
“Sounds like a shoo-in,” Jools said.
Turner relayed the orders to his infantry. “Squadron One will return skeleton arrow fire. Squadron Two will move in with their blades, followed by Squadron Three to clean up any baby zombies, chicken jockeys, or retreating griefers. Case closed.”
Rob had dropped back to make sure the entire band understood the battle plan. “In the event of unforeseen . . . events,” he announced, “we’ll sound the retreat. Remember, this is our fight, not one you picked. If it all goes south . . . you people get out of there and don’t look back.”
Turner eyed him incredulously. “Turn and run?” he stage-whispered at Rob. “That’s your fallback? That ain’t the way I’d do it.”
“Think about it, Sergeant Major,” the captain said. “That leaves them alive for another attempt.”
Turner knew that Dr. Dirt wouldn’t give up until he was no more, but the mercenary did not wish to endorse any strategy that didn’t end with more loot in the bank. “Well, what do I know?” he muttered when Rob didn’t change his mind. “I’m just meat.”
CHAPTER 17
THE BATTALION RODE DUE SOUTH AND PICKED up Dr. Dirt’s mine cart tracks as they skirted the village. It made for easy navigation to the battlefront. Once again, Battalion Zero’s officers were on edge.
“Hills, ho, Captain!” called Stormie from her lead post on Armor.
Before them spread a biome like none Rob had seen. The ground cover seemed to have been brushed with turquoise, and the rocky hills rose toward the clouds in dizzying terraces. Every angle offered variety. As they rounded a bend, they saw a sheer cliff face smiling into a deep-blue pool, and around the next, a grove of oak trees rising from a prominent ridge. The sight line at the top would be unobstructed for a thousand kilometers, Rob realized with a thrill.
He could scarcely believe he was laying eyes on the fabled land—the extreme hills. His longing for home hit him like a hurricane. From what he’d learned about this world, if he could locate his original spawn point, he might be able to respawn on command into his previous realm. He could practically hear the cattle lowing and taste that rare
steak cooked over an open fire.
The mine cart tracks began to climb once they crossed over from the plains to the foothills. Saber grunted a bit as he worked harder on the incline but did not slacken his pace. When they arrived at the spot Stormie had marked on the map, they halted. There they would wait until late afternoon, when Frida would use a glass reflector and the sun’s rays to signal them in code.
Rob sent for his sergeant major at arms and corporal. “Turner, designate an alternate second-in-command to direct your troops. We’ll need all riders at the front.”
“Let me at them!” Kim cried.
“Easy, Corporal,” Rob said. “Let’s not get overexcited.”
“That’s my job,” Turner added.
All of the advance guard donned armor, and Kim outfitted the horses, who pawed at the ground, sensing her urgency. Jools and Stormie scoured the hillside for unnatural flashes of light.
Suddenly Stormie spotted something blinking. She pointed toward a shaded area. “Look!”
Jools brought out his computer to translate the code. He sighed loudly. “She’s in. She’s safe!” He paused, watching the reflected pulses of sunlight. “She’s placed trip wires to the west, at our direct approach. Dirt will see us coming and his legions will walk right into them!” He paused again. “Take down these rendezvous coordinates, Stormie.”
She recorded them on her map and prepared to lead the cavalry to them. “Won’t Frida be glad to see Ocelot again?” she remarked.
Turner offered to lead the horse through the steep terrain so Stormie could focus on their course. As the sun began to drop behind the surrounding foothills, Jools made the rounds with night vision potion.
“No crowding, now. Some for everyone,” he said, doling out the potent drink among the cavalry and infantry, and pouring good measures down the horses’ throats.
Every hair on Saber’s coat seemed to stand on end, Rob noticed, as the black horse danced in place. “Mount up!” he cried, to prevent himself from second-guessing the whole plan. He wasn’t sure what the order was for setting foot soldiers in motion, so he drew on his old roundup vocabulary. “Head ’em up . . . move ’em out!”
