Butcher Rising

by Brandon Zenner

  In a home overlooking the bay, a man named Miles was on guard duty in a turret-shaped room, which soared an extra ten feet over the roof of the dwelling. The circular room contained a bed, a desk, and a panoramic view of Hightown. A low sandbag wall circled the windows, and two machine guns rested idle beside ammunition boxes.

  Miles sat in a chair, his scoped twenty-caliber rifle leaning against the desk and his binoculars tied around his neck. He was reading a worn paperback noir novel, holding the pages open so that the flimsy spine was further and forever creased. The small flickering light from a candle was his only source of illumination, but with the sun now rising, it would soon not be needed. The candle was in direct violation of his orders, since even the smallest light made his eyesight weak against the nighttime world outside, but after a year on nightshift, not once had a ship approached other than the fuel convoys. No one in Hightown had ever seen a rogue vessel, and most everyone was under the impression that they were the sole possessors of ships and the fuel necessary for sailing the seas, for miles around.

  The sun was close to peering out over the distant barrier island, and the sky above was an infusion of brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows. In these early morning hours, it appeared as if the horizon was ablaze, from one corner to the other. Once the sun cracked over the bay, the bright rays shone straight through the glass windows, unhindered in the clear sky, and reflected in colorful sways atop the cresting waves.

  Miles blew out the candle, flinching at the spray of hot wax that stung his fingers. He stood and stretched his back, then moved to sit behind the sandbags, in the only spot in the room offering shade in the early hours.

  As he stood, a black dot caught his attention far off in the water, and his initial thought was that the fuel convoy had arrived.

  Then uncertainty crept into his mind, and he took up his binoculars. He attempted to shield the harsh rays of the sun with his palm, and saw a lone ship entering the channel … wait … was a shipment scheduled this morning? The vessel was following the same path of the convoy … but maybe it wasn’t. Instead of veering to its right, toward the docks, the boat was swinging left, its broad side facing the shore.

  Miles went back to the desk and picked up a clipboard. He ran his finger over dates and times, looking below the ones with lines crossed through them. There was nothing scheduled for today.

  The radio on his belt crackled, and a voice said, “Miles, you there? Over.”

  He grabbed the radio. “This is Miles. Over.”

  “You seeing this?” The voice belonged to Alex, in the lighthouse. “I checked the itinerary; there are no deliveries listed today. Over.”

  Miles placed the clipboard down and looked out over the water. The massive vessel became clear.

  He swallowed, then spoke into the radio. “Call it in. Over.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Miles grabbed his scoped rifle and rested the stock on the sandbag. He scanned the deck of the boat, and then the barrier island behind, where an observation post and long-range artillery were stationed to guard the channel. Was that a wisp of smoke? It looked like steam … a white steam. No more than thirty seconds passed before a loud, wailing alarm caused him to jolt.

  Holy shit.

  If the engineer on duty, John Zur, had sounded the town’s alert system, it would be for good reason. The man didn’t cry wolf.

  Footfalls resounded from beneath the floor as heavy boots came stomping up the stairway, and two men burst into the room. Without missing a beat, they fed the ammunition belts into the heavy gauge machine guns.

  “What’s going on out there?” one of the men asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  The machine guns were put in position, the windows facing the bay flung open, when a thunderous crack made the entire building tremble. The popping noise of small arms followed.

  “Jesus,” Miles said. “What the hell was that?”

  The soldiers peered down the barrels of their weapons, and they all flinched as an even louder explosion thundered from somewhere inside the town, followed by another.

  The radio was abuzz, voices giving commands. He could hear John Zur, his normally subdued demeanor panicked, coughing as if he couldn’t breathe.

  Miles picked up the radio. “Are we ordered to fire?” he called in. “Are we ordered to fire?” The overlapping voices told him to stand by.

  One of the machine gunners said, “Where the hell is our artillery? That ship isn’t ours.”

  The first two motorboats could be seen heading out from the docks toward the ship, and then a dozen more followed, bouncing atop the gentle swells.

  The order came in. “Fire with small arms. Fire!”

  The machine guns opened up from all the various lookouts along the hilltop, and the water circling the ship erupted in jarring sprays of white. Miles scanned the top of the boat through his scope, from left to right and back again, but could see no indication of people.

  Then another terrible noise emitted, and the entire top of the ship erupted in smoke. Fast and terrible streaks shot into the air as missiles were unloaded, and a torrent of high-caliber machine gun fire opened up at the approaching small vessels.

  The whistling sound of the rockets was near deafening, rattling around that small, circular room. Then a rumble struck the house so intensely that windows shattered, and Miles’s book and clipboard flew from the table. A portion of the roof above him cracked and fell in, as a gale of burst shrapnel walloped into the side of the home, and a force struck Mile’s side.

  A missile had struck the next-door residence, and half the structure disintegrated in a massive gust of fire. The other half crackled like a hundred trees falling at once, then toppled over in a terrible clatter.

  “Holy fuck!” Miles shouted. He looked at the machine gunner beside him, who lay slumped over the sandbags, blood pooling beneath his face. He moved to roll the man over, and became aware of a tugging sensation on his midsection. When he looked down, he recoiled to see a shaft of wood, maybe a foot long, implanted in his side.

  “Where the fuck is our artillery?”

  The second machine gunner was unloading his rounds, when he paused. “Miles—Miles!”

  Miles stopped pulling at the shrapnel implanted in his side, and looked forward. “Oh … Christ …”

  A swarm of black dots like an infestation of locust issued out from behind the warship in a great horde, a shadow of death extending its ghostly fingers.

  Adrenaline kept his mind away from the pain in his side, and he attempted to focus on his breathing. His scope followed the fast-moving tops of helmeted heads jettisoning in their direction, aboard inflatable Zodiac boats, and an assortment of medium-sized attack ships and military landing vessels.

  Miles breathed in, then out. Focused. Pulled the trigger. He breathed in, then out. Focused—

  The top of the warship erupted again in a cloud of smoke, and a wall of fire shot into the air as the missile systems unloaded.

  He did not see the explosion that took his life, or even have time to flinch from the gale of fire. One moment he was there, and in another, he vanished.

  ***

  A voice came in from over the radio.

  “We have an unidentified ship. Over.”

  Iain Marcus stopped in his tracks and put the crate of carrots he was taking to the kitchen down on the ground. He pulled his radio free and listened to the men debate what they were seeing. The lead engineer, John Zur, sounded panicked, which was unusual.

  Without hesitation, Iain left the crate on the dusty path and ran across Hightown. When he arrived at an overlook, panting, sweat rolling down his face, his eyes went large.

  This is it …

  The ship was moving in direct line to the shore, and he looked up at the magnificent homes not far to his side and the lighthouse a few properties over. This area was the last place where he’d be safe.

  He had his orders, but for a fraction of a second, he was powerless to remember what
they were. This was plan B, which he went over with General Metzger all those months ago. The war in Alice had failed, and by God … if the warships were here, the General must still be alive …

  In a flash, he turned and ran toward the center of town. His feet seemed to be moving slower than he wanted, his body aching, his breath coming out in labored huffs, and he cursed the debilitating effects of age on his body. Ten years ago, he thought, hell, five years ago, I could’ve run a marathon without breaking a sweat.

  He’d made it back to his living quarters when a person on the radio said, “Get to the ships. Send out a squadron.” In an eyeglass container, hidden at the bottom of his footlocker, was a tiny amount of C4 explosives. He grabbed the case and swerved around a fellow soldier in the barracks who said, “What’s going on out there?”

  Iain shrugged and ran past the man.

  The air horn blared out from the docks, alarming him, but he didn’t miss a step until he was at the edge of a clearing, surrounded by personnel and with a mobile command center to the side. In the center of the clearing were over a dozen long-range missile and artillery systems, with men shouting out commands, and loading the breaches. Shells were being stacked under portable tents, with more locked away in storage sheds to the rear of the clearing.

  He could see John Zur inside the mobile command center, hunched over an array of screens and monitors, issuing orders to men nearby.

  A soldier appeared before Iain, his face red, with deep furrowed lines cutting across his forehead. “What the fuck’s the matter with you!” the officer shouted.

  Iain became aware of his sweaty, disheveled demeanor. “Sir, where can I help?”

  “Get moving!” The officer pointed to where soldiers were unloading crates of ordnance from the shed to the grass beside the weapons systems.

  Before Iain could respond, the officer turned his attention to another soldier, shouting, “Ready artillery!”

  Iain hurried to the storage shed, where inside lay stacks of crated artillery munitions. As he neared a crate, he pulled out the glasses case, opened the cover, and flipped a small metal switch implanted in the side, connected to a battery. A red LED light flickered on, and as Iain bent over to pick up a crate, he dropped the case between a stack of boxes. Three other men were grabbing munitions, and one said, “Marcus—hurry it up!”

  Iain grabbed a crate, followed the men, and placed the box down beside a lightweight field howitzer. Then he turned and ran, ignoring the sweat stinging his eyes, and the officer shouting, “Fire on my command!”

  Someone was calling to him, “Marcus, where’re you going? Marcus!”

  He was nearing the side of a dilapidated and unused storage structure when the detonator went off, and the succession of explosions were so overwhelming that they all seemed to belong to one giant explosion and not the dozens of crates erupting at once.

  Even from his distance, a force of heat pushed him off his feet, and he flew onto his stomach, scraping his chin as he bounced over the ground. He kept his arms over his head as the explosions rippled over the artillery field, with shrapnel soaring in every direction. A blanket of dirt overwhelmed him, shooting into his nostrils and mouth, and he pressed his arms even tighter over the top of his head.

  I’m too old for this, he thought, his muscles sore and bruised. The fragility of his body pinged in his mind, sending waves of fear and uncertainty to his thoughts. If I break something, I’m done for.

  When the waves of heat lessened, he got up and brushed the dirt from his face and eyes, seeing the flaming pit that had once housed the town’s artillery. The command center had been ripped in half, and he waited momentarily to make sure the eyes and ears of Hightown, John Zur, had been killed. But then a number of men spared from the explosion, maybe a dozen, were fast approaching, and one was pointing at him.

  He heard, “You there!” and he turned and ran.

  A shot rang out, and then more followed, with voices shouting, “Stop—Stop!”

  Someone must have seen him drop the case, or made some sort of connection when he began to run. But none of that mattered now, because as he ducked behind the crumbling building, he heard the monstrous ignition of the warship’s batteries, and within moments, explosions echoed from all over Hightown’s line.

  ***

  Karl followed the first wave to shore, ducking low in his Zodiac raft as it bounded over swells. The water was peppered with machine-gun fire, but by all accounts, no artillery was raining down, which meant Iain had done his job. Plan B: Take out enemy defense capabilities at the onset of a naval attack. Plan A would have been the same, only they would have been arriving on land first, after the fall of Alice.

  As Karl’s boat rebounded over the top of the water, the massive homes on the far hill were burning and exploding. The tall lighthouse that once jutted far over the tallest tree was gone, replaced by a thick trail of dark smoke. But still, the water all around him was being plunked with machine-gun fire, and men were falling overboard. Several boats had erupted into flames or exploded, sending dramatic concentric rings of disturbances in their wake.

  The shoreline was filled with vacated rafts as his men flooded the land. When Karl’s boat came to a stop, he jumped into the waist-deep water, and trudged with the hundreds of men to the walled bank.

  Soldiers were already scaling the steep hill, woven into the eight-feet-tall reeds like lice on a dog. Karl stopped to observe, watching his men near a chain-link fence about halfway up, with rings of barbed wire atop. There were random explosions as mines went off, and grenades were lobbed down from the line of Hightown’s soldiers that were amassing at the hilltop.

  Karl turned to Bishop, who’d been in the raft with him, and shouted a command. Bishop kneeled, covering one ear while yelling into a microphone. Within moments, the large caliber machine guns on the warship began to rattle, focusing on the hilltop and the section of land just above the fence.

  His men crouched low as bullets came perilously close, with many struck down from friendly fire.

  Bishop shouted another command, and the bullet fire ceased. A line of snipers on the ship were still taking aim at Hightown’s men at the top, and every few seconds, dead bodies came tumbling over the rim.

  “Move!” Karl ordered. “Move out!”

  He took to the embankment himself, and joined his monstrous swarm up the sheer side, grabbing at thickets of reeds and the occasional large rock to pull himself along. When he reached the top, the men ahead of him had eliminated most of the waiting army. They were quick to further their advance, yelling, shrieking, their minds ablaze and chemically altered by a cocktail of amphetamines the medical staff had prescribed.

  Artillery fire from the ship slowed to precise detonations, with areas being called in one at a time. Most of the helicopter pads had been targeted with the first wave, to suppress Hightown’s air support. The location of the pads was supplied by Karl’s prisoner, who endured hours of torture until every drop of information had been wrung from him. Copies of his map had been made, and the papers were distributed to each man. Squadrons were ordered to advance to individual targets and strategic locations.

  Largely to their advantage was that a quarter of Hightown’s army—including a considerable section of its armored wing—was still down south in Alice, helping repair their line. The Red Hands would have to endure a counterattack once the town was theirs, but if everything went as planned, the majority of Hightown’s fortified walls and defenses would still be in place for his army to maintain.

  Karl advanced into Hightown, exchanging gunfire with pockets of resistance as his army continued to scale the hill and amass at the top.

  As they made headway, Karl and a squad of ten men broke off from the rest of the force, and followed a course previously outlined. Among them was Jacob, his eyes twinkling with narcotics, and smiling like a madman at seeing Hightown’s soldiers being blown to pieces. The squad had gone over the layout of the town so many times that they didn’t need to use
the map to navigate.

  The men came around the bend of a building, and stopped short as enemy bullets peppered the corner of the wall.

  “Grenades on three!” Karl said over the roar of gunfire. “One … two … three!”

  The men pulled the pins on their grenades and lobbed the barrage over the roof of the low building. Following the ripple of explosions, Karl darted forward, his men at his heels, eliminating a scattering of enemy soldiers who were injured or hurt from the explosions.

  “That’s it,” Karl said, pointing to a building ahead. “Move!”

  The squad ran to the side of the building and followed the wall until they came around the bend, and to the front of Hightown’s Police Department.

  The door swung open, and a flash of movement was seen behind the thick plate-glass security window as whoever was guarding the building ran from the front office.

  A soldier was quick to plant explosives at the handle of the bulletproof door, and the men swung around a corner. The soldier came running to meet them, holding a small mechanical device. On Karl’s instruction he pulled the trigger.

  A rush of smoke and debris shot down the hall with the roar of the explosion, and the air became hot and thick.

  The squad moved out, and one was shot and fell only a step around the bend. Gunfire was exchanged from both sides, but the sheer pressure of Karl’s men to advance caught the enemy off guard, and soon the top floor of the station was clear. A handful of dead enemies lay scattered throughout, and Bishop and the soldiers scoured their pockets, finding several matching sets of keys.