Odyssey

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  “My guess? He’ll be in his throne room.”

  “Yeah.” That’s what Homer had been afraid of. Center of the spider’s web. The lion’s den. The pirate’s cave. Waiting for Homer to come find him – again.

  Well, he thought, trying to find the light side. As Ali would no doubt say: It’s not going to suck itself.

  He moved them out again. But even as he cleared the next corner – there they were. A four-man team, turning onto this stretch of corridor from the end, 50 meters down. Ulfhednar.

  A hunting pack.

  Homer pulled his head back before they could get a shot off – and pulled Kili into a hasty retreat, both taking off at a run, trying to break contact, make the next intersection, find a way around. They turned the next corner fast, slowing just enough to make sure it was clear, then headed that direction. Homer was more cautious at the next cross hallway – lucky thing, as he immediately saw another group approaching from beyond it.

  Crap. Pulling back under cover, he made, basically, a Crap signal to Kili. They were trapped. And now they were going to have to fight again – once again, four on two. Until it was eight on two, when the ones boxing them in caught up. But then, as the two teammates spun to face in opposite directions, weapons trained on the corners at either end of the hall, getting ready for a quick and brutal fight in very close quarters… Homer reviewed the mental photo he had taken of the approaching group.

  And he lowered his rifle, taking his left hand and putting it on Kili’s shoulder. Kili didn’t protest, or ask questions. He just stood beside Homer, watching their six, waiting with him.

  The four men turned the corner ahead. Team guys. Kitted up. Walking toward them. But they also didn’t raise their weapons – and Homer kept his pointed at the floor. As the men approached, they seemed not even to notice the two.

  But Homer noticed them – and that none wore pelts.

  As they split in two, and walked past them in pairs, the last man in the train just nodded to Homer. Then they disappeared again. More sound of doors opening and closing.

  Guys hiding out. Or, rather, waiting it out.

  And Homer thought: Okay – not everyone is loyal to Odin. Or else Kili and Homer would already be dead.

  “Now what?” Kili asked, his breath shallow.

  Homer raised his rifle, nodded forward, and got them moving, away from the Ulfhednar still approaching from behind – and toward Odin’s throne room. “Now…” he said.

  “We go dethrone the king.”

  * * *

  Sarah stood up on top of the Stiletto’s wheelhouse, scanning the blackness behind them, in the direction of shore. But she couldn’t see a damned thing. There would be lights on in the Annex. But of course they’d all be shielded. Whatever was happening back there, she was going to have to use her imagination about it.

  More importantly, and worse, Homer wasn’t reappearing.

  Finally giving up, she climbed back inside, checked on the kids – who she had tucked into an improvised bed on the bench seats – then went forward to the wheelhouse again. She took her radio out of her belt pouch, checked the volume, and placed it on the console before her. She then sat in the pilot’s seat, rifle in her lap.

  And she checked her watch – again.

  There were now 30 minutes left before she was supposed to abandon Homer, and get the kids out of there. She had her doubts she could do it. But, then again, not that many doubts. Sitting here in the dark and silence off the coast, in open water, less than a mile from the world’s undisputed masters of maritime special operations, plus having no idea what the hell was going on… all of it was giving her a case of the howling fantods. So, for purely selfish and personal reasons, she did want to get the hell out of there.

  But of course she wouldn’t leave one second sooner than instructed. And probably later. They’d have to see.

  She eyed the radio in the dark. It sat cold, black, and silent before her. Just like the endless ocean, and endless night, that surrounded them. But then she imagined she saw, or felt, that darkness move, somewhere out in front of her. Whatever the hell it was she thought she saw, it didn’t resolve. Beyond the portholes, sky bled into water, which bled into hull. It was all muted, indistinct, and her eyes hurt just trying to focus on it.

  But, at the same time, her spine tingled. Tiny hairs waving.

  She pulled herself to her feet, trying not to make any noise, hefted her rifle, and padded through the hatch back into the main cabin. Seeing the kids still where she put them, she turned toward the outside hatch on her right – trying to decide if she had the courage to go out there and investigate.

  She never had time to decide.

  Because right outside was a glistening, black-clad body – pulling itself silently out of the water, up onto the hull.

  Fuck!

  Her entire system flooding with adrenaline, she just had time to make out the evil shape of a silenced pistol in his hand. By some complete and utter miracle he was at the pivot point of supporting his weight while hauling himself on board.

  Sarah reached out, slammed the hatch, and dogged it, all in a flash.

  Then she spun around, grabbed both children, and moved aft again, this time taking them through the hatch out the back of the main cabin, and into the wet dock in the rear. Rifle up, she looked out the back – and saw nothing moving, so she spun forward again, and slammed and dogged this hatch.

  The question was: Holy fucking shit, what now?

  They had a couple of locked hatches between them and the invaders, which might hold a little while, but sure wouldn’t hold them long.

  Jesus, Sarah thought, where the hell did they come from?

  The disabled boat? The shore? A whole new boat? Fuck, it didn’t matter. These guys were combat swimmers – Homer had taught her that much. Getting wherever they needed to go in the water was pretty much their whole job.

  And now they had gotten here.

  And they were about to get Sarah, plus Ben and Izzy.

  She had to get them the hell out of there. And she could only think of one way that was going to happen. Failing to come up with anything reassuring to say, she just got both kids up and over the tubular side of the CRRC, the combat Zodiac. Then she found and undid two nylon straps – and then put her back into it, pushing from the stern.

  The five-meter boat went into the water of the wet dock.

  She jumped in back and started frantically feeling around in the dark for a pull-starter on the outboard engine, feeling the weight of every second that passed like a death sentence. She couldn’t find anything that felt like a manual starter – but finally laid her hand on a key in a panel, which she turned, and then stabbed an electric starter button beside it. The engine roared to life, deafening in the steel-enclosed space. Reaching to her right, she found the throttle. She twisted it all the way around.

  The deafening noise turned bone-rattling.

  The narrow space of the wet dock filled with water, spraying up and off the bulkheads that surrounded them, soaking Sarah and the kids where they sat.

  The CRRC blasted out the back, bouncing onto open ocean.

  Starlight hit them from above, and stealing a look back, Sarah could see the silhouetted Stiletto recede behind them – with an armed figure standing on top, tracking their escape. She hunched down, tensed her shoulder blades, every nerve firing, waiting for the shots that would end her.

  They never came.

  She was alive. Looking at the kids huddling down in the bilge, she saw they were alive, too, and unhurt, albeit wet and shivering – from cold or fear she didn’t know, but either would be understandable.

  Sarah had somehow gotten them out alive, too.

  But she had also lost the Stiletto. Which meant none of them were ever going to make it back to the carrier. She had lost their transport. Their exit strategy. Their escape plan. Feeling the creeping dread of having fucked up, badly, and not for the first time, she tried to brace herself, telling herself that, sure
ly…

  Homer would have a backup plan.

  Because, in this case, two was apparently none. This glorified dinghy sure wasn’t going to get them back to the JFK.

  She needed to tell Homer what had happened. She reached to her waist for the radio, to break silence and hail him. At which point, she remembered where her radio was – sitting back in the wheelhouse of the motherfucking Stiletto. Looking around, she quickly worked out that there was no radio aboard this thing. And she shook her head in renewed, and inconsolable, despair.

  One was definitely none. One was bullshit.

  It was also just like the overrun cabin again. When the hell would she learn to stop putting radios down, and running off without them?

  Goddammit.

  Hard Entry

  Homer and Kili reached the hallway that terminated in the Black Squadron team room, not encountering anyone else along the way. Homer wasn’t even sure that was a positive sign. Staying out of gunfights in narrow corridors could only be a good thing. But this was feeling more like a trap every second.

  And these could easily be their last seconds.

  He briefed Kili on the entry plan with hand signals. And then they stacked up on either side of the door, which was shut. Homer put his ear to it and took a long, last, careful listen.

  Nothing audible inside.

  He popped the spoons on both his looted grenades, did a two-count, then nodded at Kili – who touched the liberated keycard to the card reader, then turned the latch and kicked the door open.

  Homer leaned in and hurled both cooked-off grenades, one ahead left, one way out right. Neither were flashbangs. This was a hard entry. There were no hostages inside who needed rescuing. There would be no innocent bystanders, no facilitators or farm boys. Just killers. They ducked out of the way as both frags whumped off a second later.

  Then they both blasted inside, leaning forward to dominate their assigned quadrants, getting ready to do CQB the hard way – just the two of them clearing a large complex of rooms, with not only an unknown number and disposition of shooters inside.

  But a bunch of Tier-1 shooters inside.

  * * *

  Finally, trapped together on their tiny backup boat, and having no way to make contact with Homer, Sarah realized she didn’t even know where the hell they should go next. The captured Stiletto was directly behind them. Maybe she could maneuver around and get them safely out past it.

  But the 80-mile range of this little rubber vessel wouldn’t get them anywhere – except far enough out to perish at sea. She was still heading the direction they’d started, from the dock at the stern of the Stiletto, back in toward shore. But she only realized she was taking them toward the mouth of the waterway they’d first come out of—

  When another boat came roaring out of it.

  It was big, sitting high on the water, cutting a deep channel – the other Mk V, she figured. And this one had mounted spotlights sweeping the water. Searching.

  Now they were being hunted.

  Sarah turned the rudder left, away from it. But she kept them angling back toward shore. She needed to get them off the water.

  This was not their happy place.

  * * *

  Homer’s senses and vision slowed to razor-vivid bullet-time, room-clearing mode, and he had just acquired targets in his sector – way at the back of the room, but by no means too far to hit with his Mk18 – when a fraction of his attention got peeled away by something odd. It was a big, square, and very unexpected object in the back of the room, the throne area, dead ahead.

  But he had zero time to react to it.

  And he never got a shot off.

  His skin burned uncomfortably for a fraction of a second – and then, instantly, the pain became excruciating, overwhelming, with seemingly no way to reset or rally or fight through it. He just dropped to the deck, all his muscles and tendons convulsing.

  It was only retrospectively that he heard Kili shout in pain at the same time – whatever had hit Homer got him, too. But Kili had been in the number-two spot, and partially shielded from it by Homer’s body.

  As his head hit the deck, he could just see a flash of…

  Kili darting back out the door again.

  * * *

  Sarah strained her eyes to make out the swelling shore.

  She figured she needed to take them outside the walls, off the grounds of the Annex. But she had no idea how big it was, or where the walls intersected the water, or if they even did so along the coastline. Geometrically, they kind of had to.

  But then she suddenly realized what the problem was with that plan. Wherever team guys didn’t hold dominion, any place Odin’s wolf-warriors didn’t hunt…

  The dead still ruled.

  Because now she could just make out a line of thin, dark, palsied bodies trudging along the beach, as well as higher up in the dunes – heading north, toward the waterway. Sarah couldn’t know for sure what was drawing them, but her guess was Homer and Kili. She had heard something vaguely like a couple of explosions, a while back. And now, looking in that direction, she could just make out the glow of flames over the treetops.

  She veered left, cruising the coast, looking for some kind of a dead-free zone to beach them in. Well, she thought, at least we’re clear of the fucking Annex.

  But then she shook her head, as she realized they were going to have to face either the Ulfhednar, or else the armies of the dead – unless she could somehow find a way to navigate through or around these two threats.

  And there are Scylla and Charybdis, she thought, almost laughing. Death on one side, killers on the other. Right back to Homer.

  No, wait, she thought, laughing out loud. That’s VERY confusing. Back to Odysseus, I guess.

  With Dam Neck, she’d thought Homer had been trying to get home.

  But now she knew: this place wasn’t Ithaca.

  It was just another deadly foreign shore.

  * * *

  The pain was still unbearable, as if Homer were being burned alive, and it was getting worse. He was unable to move, or even think. Still, all his training, instincts, and operational experience told him to rally, to fight through – try to get a pistol clear, get back to his feet – or, failing that, to drag himself under hard cover.

  But even as he tried to rise up on all fours…

  He felt a shadow pass over him. He managed to tilt his head up enough to make out who it was.

  Odin. Of course.

  The big man wound up his leg.

  And he kicked Homer with full force in the side of the head.

  Blackness.

  * * *

  And there it was – what Sarah guessed was their best chance. She didn’t know what options the Ulfhednar would have for locating them here on their raft – drones, radar, more boats with searchlights – she only knew that, while this thing was a lot smaller, it wasn’t a super-high-tech stealth boat.

  And she felt desperately exposed on the water.

  So when she spotted what looked like a small boathouse at the end of a short stretch of dock, she angled them in toward it. All along the coast, she continued seeing ambulatory dead on shore, and now considered beaching the boat away from the dock, and leaving the motor running to attract them – to that spot, instead of where they were going.

  If she’d been on her own, that’s what she would have done. But she wasn’t on her own. Once again she had dependents, and small ones this time. But this time, they weren’t a burden she’d been stuck with. They were an obligation she had freely undertaken, a holy charge she was honored with. Homer had given her one job, and for him it was the most important job in the world. Sarah had failed to protect her own family, and that failure would haunt her for life.

  But she wasn’t going to fail this time.

  She wouldn’t let Homer down.

  She got the boat pointed toward the junction of dock and beach, trying to make it out in the darkness – and then killed the engine when they were still 100 me
ters out, hoping to God she’d judged it right. She had. The rubber bottom scraped sand in the shadow of the pier.

  She scanned the darkness ahead, but turned around when Ben asked, “What’s happening?” The boy had the good sense to keep his voice low, which Sarah realized was more than could have been said for her own son, at twice this kid’s age. She moved to the back of the boat and said, “We’re just going to hide here for a while. And wait for your dad to come get us. Okay?”

  Ben nodded, not looking afraid, so Sarah picked up Isabel, who was drowsing, but with her arms still tightly wrapped around her bear. Ben followed them over the gunwale into the lapping surf, and they all climbed up onto the dock, then moved down its length. The door to the wooden boathouse was closed, and Sarah realized she had a whole new problem: she could hear moaning from up in the dunes now, and definitely sensed the dead getting riled up out there.

  She had become attuned to it over two years of ZA.

  And it made her fine hairs levitate every time.

  She put Isabel down at her brother’s feet, drew their father’s SIG, and tried the door to the boathouse. It was locked. More moans floating out of the darkness. She couldn’t tell if they were getting closer – turning toward the water – or just continuing up the beach to the north. And she really didn’t want to stay in the open long enough to find out. She took a step back, leveled the pistol at the lock, and fired once, sparks flashing off steel.

  She tried the door again. Nothing.

  Pivoting, she put two rounds to the side of the lock, into the doorjamb. Now the door swung free. Moving inside, pistol up, she cleared the small shack in five seconds. Nothing but a bunch of fishing tackle, buckets, nets, and boxes of crap. She went back out and brought the kids inside with her. As she pulled the door closed, she stole a look back up at the beach.

  Definitely motion. Not human – but inhuman.

  She pulled her head back in and pushed the door closed. Of course, it didn’t even shut properly now, never mind lock. That wasn’t her biggest worry, though. The real question was: had the dead out there sensed them? Everything hung on that. Because if they had, if they got curious, and followed them…