The Blood Line

by Tom Hunter

  “Leave it to me! I’ve got him!” Caught up in the heat of the fight, Basile chased after his target.

  “Basile! Wait!” cried Shafira, but he either didn’t hear or ignored her cries. She had no time to do anything about it, as Josh reached the first of the guards and threw the first punch. In the ensuing scuffle, Josh managed to swing the man around. With his back to Shafira, he didn’t see her bring the butt of her gun down on his head.

  The guard collapsed to the ground, leaving just one for Josh to deal with.

  The two men squared off, each sizing each other up. Josh jabbed at the guard, who dodged his fist before returning the blow. The guard struck Josh on the side of his shoulder, glancing off without doing any serious damage.

  BANG!

  Josh’s ears rang with the aftereffects of a pistol going off right next to him. He turned to see Shafira holding a smoking gun, her eyes tightly closed.

  “Did I get him?” she babbled, not daring to look. “Did I get him?”

  Josh looked at the body of the guard lying before him, rapidly oozing red liquid.

  “You got him,” he told her, gently gathering her into his arms, while he took the gun out of her hand. Neither of them liked to think about what would have happened if her bullet had hit the wrong target. “Come on. Let’s get into the tower. We’ll be safe there.”

  “We might be safe, but what about Basile?” asked Shafira, her body trembling as the enormity of what she’d just done sank in.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Josh reassured her, pressing the button to call the elevator. “We need to get the military here as soon as possible, though, or things are going to get far, far worse. Let’s send a signal out and we can go look for him later.”

  The doors to the elevator pinged open and Josh guided Shafira inside. The doors slid shut behind them and the elevator began the slow climb to the top of the tower.

  Thirty-Four

  The body of a Knight lay draped over a boulder. His eyes open, he gazed up sightlessly into the sky, as if commending his soul to God for its final journey. Blood smothered his uniform, his bow lying on the ground uselessly next to him.

  Waleed grimaced with distaste as he picked his way around the body. “I’ve been in some bad situations in my life, but this takes the biscuit.”

  Samuel nodded, gesturing to a Bruard agent slumped over the wheel of an abandoned truck, an arrow sticking out from the side of his neck.

  “I know we’re fighting a war and we’re all supposed to be opposed to the Bruard, but there’s a good reason I became an archaeologist,” he remarked. “The only bodies I’ve ever been close to have been thousands of years old. I’ve never seen such carnage, and I never want to see it again. After this is all over, I’m going to retire to an island somewhere far away and make sandcastles.”

  “You and me both,” agreed Akhenaton. “I fear my Order is irreparably damaged. We’ve lost so many of my brethren, our leader is gone. I don’t see how we can ever recover.”

  As they continued to make their way through to the middle of the ancient city, the sounds of battle became increasingly severe.

  “The Bruard have practically overrun the city,” Samuel observed, as they passed an enemy patrol vehicle, one of its wheels blown out. “It appears they’ve pushed their way into the heart of the ancient settlement, and the Knights have been massacred. We’re going to have to hustle if we’re to find the relic first-if the Bruard haven’t already found it. By the looks of things, there won’t be any Knights left to help us before too long.”

  They came to an intersection. Pressing themselves flat against the wall, Samuel peeked around the corner. After spotting a number of Bruard soldiers, he quickly pulled his head back.

  “There’s an armed honor guard of Bruard agents lined up at the end of the alley,” he whispered to the others. “They seem to have been ordered to stand guard over something or someone. I can’t be completely sure, but I’m positive I saw Pin in the distance.”

  “What was he doing?” asked Waleed, as Samuel threw himself to the ground. Worming his way forward, he looked round the corner again.

  “He’s wearing St. Augustine’s hat,” Samuel replied. “He’s got a man pinned up against the wall by the throat. The man’s wearing a tour guide uniform, but whether he’s just a guide or one of the Knights is impossible to tell from this distance. Either way, we can’t take any chances. We can’t risk him telling Pin where the treasure chamber is.”

  He took out his gun and aimed at Pin, but before he could pull the trigger, a bullet hit the ground inches in front of his face. He scrambled back behind cover.

  “I don’t know whether that was a ricochet or a sniper, but it’s going to be hard to get anywhere near Pin,” he told the others. “We’re so close to the final artifact. I can sense it. I can’t see how we can reach his position though.”

  Heart pounding, he risked another glimpse around the corner. His blood ran cold at what he saw.

  Pin beckoned to two of the guards to follow him, as he ran in the direction of a tall, imposing building. Four pillars supported an archway that stood in front of the entrance, a smaller arch allowing access to the building itself.

  “They’re heading towards the Capitol building,” Samuel announced to his friends, pulling back again. “The good news is that it looks like Pin knows where St. Augustine’s secret is hidden. The bad news is that it’s just beyond the battlefield right in front of us and the only way there is through it.”

  “So if we can get there before him, we have this all sorted and be home by bedtime,” joked Waleed.

  “If only,” sighed Akhenaton. “How exactly are we going to get through that minefield to catch up with Pin?” He looked up at the sky. “Lord, if there was ever a time for you to intervene, now would be it.”

  Samuel tutted as he pondered his options. “Oh, what the heck,” he exclaimed. “We’ll just have to try something a little crazy.”

  “So what’s new?” remarked Akhenaton. “Clearly you’ve spent too much time with Waleed, and his own peculiar brand of craziness has rubbed off on you.”

  “Hey!” protested Waleed, slugging him in the shoulder slightly harder than necessary.

  “Duke it out later, you two,” ordered Samuel. “Follow me.”

  Thirty-Five

  “You’ll never get away from me!” yelled Basile, leaping over a broken column in hot pursuit of the guard he’d shot. “A Frenchman always gets his man! We invented the musketeers you know!”

  Risking a quick glance backwards, the guard redoubled his pace when he saw Basile gaining on him, clutching his shoulder to hold back the bleeding. He raced up some crumbling stairs, taking them two at time. He didn’t slow down for a second, not even when he encountered the bodies of two young civilians lying in his path. They were still holding hands from when they’d tried to get away together, united in death as in life. Basile crossed himself as he approached them, sending up a little prayer for their souls. He tried not to think about the shiny wedding rings on their hands or the thought that this might have been their honeymoon, their married lives cut tragically short.

  The guard ducked through an archway and Basile saw his opportunity. Cutting to the left, he leapfrogged over a wall, timing it perfectly so that he landed on the guard’s back just as he was running past.

  The two of them landed awkwardly on the ground, rolling apart. Despite his injuries, the guard’s military training kicked in and he was first to his feet, pulling out a razor sharp hunting knife. He slashed out at Basile, catching him across the shoulder in a mirror image of his own gunshot wound.

  “Mon dieu!” Basile scooted back, narrowly missing being cut a second time. “Non, my friend. You may cut me once but that’s the only taste of my blood you’re getting.”

  Driven mad by pain and enraged by the taste of battle, Basile threw himself at the man, gripping the knife by the blade. Ignoring the cuts to his fingers, he scooted around, still lying on the ground, and kicke
d the guard heavily in the stomach. The soldier was winded and curled up in agony, loosening his grip on the knife. Basile yanked it away, tossing it over his shoulder. He heard it clatter to the ground somewhere.

  Basile pushed himself to his knees, and grabbed the soldier by the throat in a death grip. “No more! You have killed too many people today! It ends now!”

  The guard hit out at him, but Basile wasn’t going to let go. He was like a man possessed, as the guard thrashed beneath him. Nothing was going to deter him.

  “Never again will you hurt anyone,” Basile swore, but he spoke too soon. The guard suddenly thrust his hands between Basile’s, slamming his fist into the Frenchman’s nose to break his grip. It was Basile’s turn to fall back as the guard pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the agonizing pain in his midsection, an evil grin on his face.

  “Now it’s my turn,” he smirked, pulling out a garrote that had been sewn into his uniform’s collar.

  Suddenly, the guard’s head caved in as a bullet hit him square in the face. Basile gasped from the unexpected spatter of blood raining down on him. He looked around to find out who fired the shot, just in time to see a woman’s boot. It collided with his face. That was the last thing Basile saw.

  Thirty-Six

  The Bruard mercenaries regrouped, providing cover for Pin and Pae as they went to retrieve the final artifact from its hiding place. They fired indiscriminately out into the ruins, trying to pick off the remaining few Knights creeping up on them. Although their aim with a bow was deadly, the Knights were no match for motivated mercenaries due a bonus for every man they killed.

  “We can’t let them win!” One of the Knights called out to his fellows in a desperate bid to rally his troops. “We’re the final line of defense. Hold true in the name of the Lord!”

  “There are too many of them!” cried out another. “We have to fall back!”

  “No!” The first Knight barked an order. “Hold true, I tell you! We have to do this. Aim for the neck. Their armor doesn’t cover it. It’s their one weak spot.”

  The Knights let loose with a volley of arrows, and a number of Bruard men fell. However, there were just too many. For every fallen man, two stepped forward to take their place.

  “Fall back! Fall back!” Reluctantly, the order was issued to retreat in a last ditch attempt to find in another way to stop the Bruard. However, as they started to move-

  “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!”

  Samuel leaned out of the window of a purloined Bruard patrol vehicle, waving at the Knights to get out of the path of the speeding car. Waleed, behind the steering wheel, blasted the horn to emphasize his point.

  Akhenaton stood on the back seat, standing up through the sunroof. He stood, arms outstretched in a mimicry of Jesus on the cross, shirt open to reveal a pendant with the flower and cloud symbol of the Knights of the Spring Dream. Closing his eyes, he threw back his head to the sky and sang in a surprisingly powerful tenor.

  “When I am afraid, I will trust in you. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?”

  Recognizing Psalms 56, the Knights immediately scattered, clearing the way for Waleed to put his foot down.

  “Yee-haw!” he hollered. “Josh isn’t the only one who knows how to drive a car!”

  He pumped the gas and the vehicle surged forward, plowing through the Bruard forces in a direct line towards the Capitol building. Men scattered in all directions like bowling pins.

  “I can take us all the way up the steps and through the front wall of the Capitol building,” Waleed offered. “Pin will never see us coming. It would be the ultimate surprise.”

  “No!” yelped Samuel, unable to stop his natural archaeologist’s reaction. “No,” he went on in a calmer tone. “The city’s been damaged enough already. Take us to the foot of the stairs. That’s close enough. We’ll follow Pin from there.”

  “You got it, boss,” shrugged Waleed, yanking on the parking brake to put the car into a skid, coming to a stop in the perfect position before the building.

  “You certainly know how to handle a car,” remarked Samuel, as the three of them tumbled out to chase their quarry inside the temple.

  “What can I say?” shrugged Waleed. “I’m full of hidden talents.”

  “If you’d spoken up sooner, maybe Samuel wouldn’t have fallen asleep at the wheel and we’d have got here in time to stop all this,” muttered Akhenaton. “So many of my comrades have fallen and for what?”

  “Now’s not the time for recriminations,” Samuel reminded him before a full blown fist fight could develop. “We can sort all that out later. For now, we need to focus on stopping Pin and Pae, if we’re not already too late.”

  “Speaking of which, isn’t that them over there?” Akhenaton pointed to the side of the building, where Pin and Pae were hitting something on the wall. Suddenly, a secret door slid open, and the two men hurried inside, the door closing behind them.

  “Let’s go.” Samuel made to follow after them, but a bullet hitting the ground just in front of him stopped him in his tracks.

  “Snipers!” yelled Waleed, as another bullet hit the steps, chipping the stone. Waleed, Samuel, and Akhenaton raced up the stairs, taking cover behind the pillars in front of the entrance.

  “Dammit!” Samuel cursed, as he tried to take a look around the pillar, only to be forced back by another shot. “We have to get to that door.”

  “No, we don’t.” Akhenaton shook his head. “You do. Waleed, you and I need to distract the Bruard snipers so Samuel can go after the relic.”

  “Fine.” Waleed nodded curtly.

  “You’re so not doing this.” Samuel laughed bitterly. “We’re in this together. We’ll figure out a way through. If you think I’m going to leave the two of you with nothing but a pistol and handful of arrows to defend yourselves, you’re very much mistaken. Those guys have got assault rifles. You won’t stand a chance against them.”

  “Thanks for vocalizing the one thing I was pretending wasn’t real.” Waleed rolled his eyes.

  “You need to go after Pin,” Akhenaton insisted. “I swore an oath to protect the artifacts at all costs. I’ve already lost one of them. It would be more than I could bear to lose a second. I don’t want to live in a world where I’m personally responsible for the Bruard coming to power. You have to let me do this for you. The more time you waste arguing with us here, the more likely it is that Pin will get to the final relic.”

  “You know, Samuel.” Waleed gazed out across the battlefield, an unreadable expression on his face. “I might not be into all these oaths, or looking to my imaginary friend in the sky to protect me, but I do know I want to do something good for the only real friends I’ve got, so get your butt out of here.”

  Without warning, he jumped out from behind his pillar, firing shots in the direction of the snipers to settle the argument once and for all. “I’m over here, you mothers! Shoot me if you dare!”

  Akhenaton fired out arrow after arrow without pause, covering Waleed to give him some chance of surviving his mad dash into certain death.

  “What are you waiting for?” he yelled at Samuel. “Get out of here!”

  Seeing that Waleed and Akhenaton had successfully diverted the attention of the snipers, Samuel didn’t waste any more time. Trusting that they would find a way to follow him later, he hurried off down the side of the capitol towards the site of the secret tunnel.

  Thirty-Seven

  Shafira paced anxiously around the room at the top of the comms tower, nervously worrying at her nails. With everything they’d been through, she had hardly any fingernails left, but that didn’t stop her gnawing away to try and deal with her stress.

  Every now and then an explosion came from outside, which made her wince, but these were becoming fewer in frequency as the Bruard steadily wiped out every last one of the Knights. Dougga had all but fallen.

  Josh was crouched next to the control panel that P
in had been working on earlier. Carefully, he rifled through the wires, trying to get a sense of the different circuits and what they all did.

  “Assuming that Pin and his goons hacked into the system before they made their move, I’d expect to see signs of their handiwork right… around… here!”

  He grinned, pulling out the wire with the tiny little chip attached.

  “Nice try, my friends, but not good enough to escape my attention. I bet you thought you were so clever, too,” he crowed, taking out the set of tiny screwdrivers he carried with him at all times. “Shafira, make sure no one’s coming. This next step is incredibly delicate. One slip up and I’ll fry the entire circuit and then nobody will be coming to help us any time soon.”

  Shafira glanced out of the window, but the clearing surrounding them remained empty of life. “There’s no sign of anyone,” she told Josh. “And that scares me. Basile should have come back by now.”

  “You can’t think like that.” Josh stopped what he was doing for a moment to look directly at Shafira. “I’m not going to lie and promise you everything will be okay. Nobody can. We all knew there was a possibility that not all of us would make it through this adventure when we signed up. But as a pilot, I’m used to feeling as though my life is in the hands of the Universe every time I take a flight. If the Universe has got its act together, all our friends are safe and we’ll be together very soon to celebrate kicking some major Bruard butt.”

  “I certainly hope so,” smiled Shafira, mollified a little by his words.

  She knelt down next to Josh, looking over his shoulder at the jumble of wires. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she offered.

  “I don’t think so.” He turned back to his work. “I’ve got it pretty much covered… Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh?” echoed Shafira. “What uh-oh? Is that a good uh-oh? Tell me it’s a good uh-oh!”