One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  Caroline raised the revolver, straightened her arm, and jerked the trigger. The result was deafening. The big handgun threw her arm up like a pump handle. She felt the shock all the way to her shoulder. Through the smoke, she saw an entire section of banister had been torn away at the top of the stairs.

  The three cigar smokers were descending the stairs three steps at a time, leaving top hats behind in a rush to be out of the line of her fire. She fired two more shots in quick succession to let them know the first was not a fluke. She could hear splintering furniture and the crash of from the floors below, followed by the shouts of men and screams of women.

  Through the clanging din in her ears, the rising sound of a baby’s wail. Her baby.

  She looked down to see Stephen red-faced and howling in terror, with hands held fisted to his face. Caroline cooed words of comfort even though she could not hear them herself. She was probably shouting and adding to the baby’s fear. In a flash, she recalled her predicament and swung the gun down the hallway toward where she fully expected to see Patrice rushing her.

  The big man stood at the far end of the hall, frozen in mid-stride with his back to her and clutching the carpetbag. His shoulders were hunched in anticipation of a fresh fusillade. Smoke was still drifting from the weapon she aimed at him. Caroline used all her strength in her free hand to thumb back the heavy hammer and saw that the revolver cylinder rotated and clicked into place.

  “Move on!” It sounded to her like it was coming from miles away through layers of cotton. She was shrieking though it sounded to her like a whisper. Patrice trotted toward the end of the hall, and she followed with the pistol raised at the back of his skull.

  They descended the tight back staircase and reached the servants’ mudroom and the doorway to the alley that lay at the bottom. She urged Patrice to step outside and set the carpetbag on the cobbles. She ordered him away, out of her sight. A waggle of the weapon sent him running away down the alley toward the rear courtyard as fast as his big feet could carry him.

  Caroline dropped the revolver into a voluminous pocket of her coat and hefted the carpetbag. Struggling with her double burden, she made for the street at the far end of the alley. She prayed that whoever the registrar went to for help capturing the mad German spy was too busy with the war to come back to the hotel with him.

  Her hearing returned in the cold sting of the wind coming down the narrow passage between buildings. Stephen was still wailing in the basket. Beneath the sound of his cries, she could hear the muffled rumble of cannon shells landing somewhere nearby.

  “Goddamn you, Samuel,” she whispered as she stepped out of the alley and onto a sidewalk crowded with foot traffic. They were all of them running in one direction. She turned to look at the way they came to see a dense tower of dirty gray smoke rising over the buildings to join the low shroud of winter clouds.

  Caroline found shelter for herself and the baby in a restaurant set in the middle of a block of apartments. They were out of the wind and the cold and removed from the chaos on the streets. Soldiers were trying to keep order. They blocked entry to certain upscale streets, bayonets gleaming in the cold winter light. The mobs were encouraged to disperse, to go home and huddle in their basements and cellars. Some men, young men mostly, stood to engage the troops in argument or simply hurl abuse. Those were rewarded with rifle butts and boot heels and left to lie where they fell while their comrades fled, calling back dire threats of the people’s vengeance.

  Within the dim confines of the restaurant, the political discussions continued at tables crowded with refugees from the street. They were refugees of a certain class only. Two sturdy waiters stood at the door, judging customers by their dress and deportment. Those who failed to meet the pair’s standards were refused entry. Those who insisted on entry despite their appearance or manner of speech were discouraged with fists.

  She took a booth at the rear and ordered a cup of tea, a glass of wine, and a plate of olives and hard cheese. It was understood that only paying customers would be tolerated. She selected enough from the scant menu to allow her a few moments to order her thoughts and dropped far more coins on the table than necessary to pay for her order. Stephen also needed to be fed, and she nursed him using her shawl to conceal the suckling baby.

  There was little privacy here as the place filled up. Two men slid into the booth across from her, removing their hats and smiling greetings. They eyed the shifting shape beneath the shawl with openly lurid interest. They nudged one another like schoolboys. They made muttered remarks at the sounds Stephen was making on her breast. They giggled like children. Caroline pretended interest in a rather dreary landscape framed on the wall above the booth.

  “A lady wishes to sit here,” a man standing at the opening booth said in a deep rumble.

  The two men protested. The man, a big man in a leather-trimmed wool coat, grabbed fistfuls of their clothing and dragged them from the bench. He cast them toward the crowd standing at the bar. He tipped his head at Caroline. He had the face of a boxer with a crushed nose and scarring along his brows. But his eyes were kind.

  “Would you excuse the company of my mistress?” the man said.

  Caroline nodded in gratitude.

  The big man stood aside to make way for an older woman dressed in conservative clothes of magnificent quality. She wore a coat trimmed in ermine or mink over a high-collared dress of black silk embroidered with jade insets. On her hands were dove-colored gloves, with a garnet ring worn on one finger.

  She walked with the aid of a gold-capped walking stick. Despite whatever infirmity she suffered, she carried herself in a regal manner. The woman settled on the bench across from Caroline and removed her gloves, setting the ring on the table. The big man stood at the opening to the booth with his back to the ladies.

  “Claude will make certain we maintain some degree of privacy,” the woman said. “You should not have to suffer unwanted attentions while seeking to see that your child is fed. War has made us all equally miserable but it is no cause to turn us to beasts.”

  “Um...thank you,” Caroline said. “I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.”

  “I am Madame Villeneuve,” the woman said. “I assume from your charming version of French that you are foreign.”

  “Caroline Rivard. I’m Canadian, though my husband is French. I am learning the language from him.”

  “The only place to learn any language is in bed,” Mme. Villeneuve said and smiled when Caroline blushed. “Your husband has left you and your child alone?”

  “We were separated by the fighting. I am trying to find him.” Caroline resisted creating a more elaborate story than that. She opted for some partial truths. “Stephen, my baby, and I were evicted from our hotel. They did not believe I was married.”

  “These filthy Germans have made a tragedy of all our lives. Now they are outside our gates. They will not stop until they have made us all into Germans.”

  “Do you believe they will win? They will take the city?” Caroline wished she already knew the answer to that.

  “I only know what I read in the papers, which means I know nothing.” Mme. Villeneuve sniffed. “It does not take a genius in military affairs to know that if their cannons are close enough to strike the Pantheon and the Sorbonne, then we will soon see Prussians marching on our boulevards.”

  As if in emphasis to her remarks, the restaurant shook with a tremor of enough strength to set the chandeliers swinging. Dust streamed down from the ceiling. The clamor of conversation died across the dining room and bar for a few seconds then resumed as before. “You say you lost your lodgings,” Mme. Villeneuve continued. “Where will you and your child stay?”

  “I will find a place,” Caroline said. Beneath the concealment of the shawl, she opened her dress further and shifted Stephen to her other breast.

  “A woman alone? Don’t be ridiculous. You will only face the same ignorance at any hotel worth staying at. The two of you will find yourself in some h
orrid pensione, where you will be robbed and worse.”

  “It’s that dangerous?”

  “Can you not feel it in the air? Unrest. Disobedience. The uncertainty of these days has given men license to act unlike they would in a time of security. No woman is safe, even in as sophisticated an establishment as this once was. Those two pigs leering at you as they did! All decorum gone. Respect is a forgotten thing. It may become so anarchic that we will eventually welcome the Germans in to restore things to the way they should be.”

  “Then I have no desirable opportunities for shelter then?” Caroline felt as trapped as she had back in her rooms at the Exemplaire.

  “Nonsense,” Mme. Villeneuve said, pursing her lips. “You will come to my home. I will not see a young lady, even a Canadian, cast upon the street with a baby in arms.”

  Caroline’s eyes welled with tears, and the older woman held up a hand to quell any displays of emotion or gratitude.

  “We will wait here until just before curfew. Then Claude will escort us past the army barricades to my home. You will be far more comfortable there, and I will be far more comfortable with myself, knowing I did not leave two innocents to a fate unknown.”

  “Thank you, Madame. Thank you for my baby more than for myself,” Caroline said and dabbed at her eyes with a cloth.

  “Now, let us see if they have any brandy of quality here. Would you care for a glass, my dear?” Mme. Villeneuve tapped a finger on Claude’s broad back. The big man waved for a waiter.

  “More than anything in the world, Madame,” Caroline sighed.

  The street before the Hotel Exemplaire was filled with a choking mix of wood smoke and brick dust. A twelve-inch Krupp shell had dropped through the roof of a theater a block away. It buried itself deep in the orchestra pit before detonating. The resulting blast caused the ceiling to collapse, leaving the one thousand seat emporium a flaming ruin and covering the surrounding streets with a thick fog driving pedestrians before it.

  A man stood on the sidewalk across from the Exemplaire. The crowd moved past him in a rush. The man remained unmoving beneath the awning of a jeweler’s as ash fell on them like snow. He watched as the hotelier returned with a gaggle of blue-jacketed soldiers and all rushed inside.

  The watcher removed his Homburg hat, exposing a head of close-cropped white hair. With his elbow, the dark man brushed ash from his hat before replacing it atop his head. He then turned up his collar and crossed the now-empty street to enter the hotel.

  32

  A Wolf in the Fold

  The Rangers atop the escarpment heard the sounds of battle from somewhere below. The multiple shotgun blasts reverberated to them through the still night air. They moved to the end of the headland at the top of the slope above the Roman fort. Bat and Jimbo watched the wooded hummock of land through their scopes but could see nothing, not even a muzzle flash, through the dense skein of trees.

  Lee watched the fort beneath them. No alarm was raised. The sentries had to have heard the booms reaching them from the forest but paid them no mind. They hadn’t yet had the experience of facing firearms, so the blasts meant nothing to them but a curious noise of unknown origin.

  An extended firefight meant that they probably lost the horses. There were too many shots fired. It wasn’t a quick exchange with a small force. It was bandits perhaps but more probably the auxiliary archers showing up ahead of schedule. None of them were concerned about Boats. He knew to abandon the mounts and get the hell out.

  The unmistakable sound of a Claymore erupting changed that assessment. That was a last-ditch, broken arrow move. The SEAL was in deep shit if he was playing his lethal trump card this early.

  Down in the camp, the Romans were rousing. They all heard it. It was loud enough and close enough to bring some of them out of their tents. The mine going off raised a visible cloud that rose above the treetops. They didn’t make a move to mobilize, but an officer was storming around in his undies, waving a staff and ordering men up onto the ramparts. That confirmed that they were warned to expect something even if they didn’t know what form it would take.

  “What about Boats?” Chaz asked.

  “Boats is fucked,” Lee said. “That’s the way it is.”

  “So, we leave him hanging?” Jimbo said.

  “What would he want us to do? We don’t know that he’s been captured and if he’s been killed then heading back over there is a pure bonehead play. Either way, we lost the horses.”

  “And the gear,” Bat said. “We’ll need to do something about that.”

  “Can’t leave that shit back here when we leave,” Chaz said.

  “Yeah. Catastrophic anachronisms. Heard the lecture, bought the t-shirt,” Lee snarled. “We have a new Priority Two. We stick here and watch the fort. If it is the Assyrians over there, then they’ll bring the horses and the gear to the fort. Once we confirm that we build a plan from there.”

  It was an unforgiving set of options, but everyone on the team knew to move on. Mission creep is inevitable, and shit happens. All the bitching in the world won’t unscrew the pooch. They settled into positions to keep watch on the Roman fort and camp.

  The sun rose behind them and the shadow of the headland receded, revealing more and more of the land between the fort and the line of trees. As Lee predicted, men emerged from the forest leading a line of horses, their horses, with all the gear they left in camp back in place atop the packies.

  As the column of men moved closer, they could make out more details and saw something that Lee had not foreseen. Atop one of the horses rode a man. He was stripped naked. The man’s hands were bound before him. A loop of rope ran under the girth of the horse attached to either ankle. A prisoner.

  Boats.

  Mettius Trivian Bachus ordered the barbarian brought to his tent. The man appeared to be a Celt. The flaming red hair and beard were common among those people, but the man was exceptionally tall for that breed. Though his skin was marked with ink in patterns such as Bachus had seen before in Hispania. Some of the ink was artful but strange, including a quite realistic female figure wearing nothing but some strips of cloth marked with a pattern of stars and red bands. Another showed an eagle tearing at a snake and was very striking. If the man lived, Bachus would ask him about these grotesqueries.

  Two soldiers threw the man roughly to the carpet. His body was covered with bruises received at the hands of the Assyrians. There was also the point of an arrow sticking obscenely from his leg.

  “He’s bleeding on my carpet,” Bachus growled. The Celt was lifted and tossed to a section of bare earth.

  Also in attendance were Bachus’s prime optio and the headman of the archer auxiliary, an oily brigand named Raman. The centurion also asked for Brulo, a brawny Sabine from his century.

  Brulo was a dull-witted brute with a flair for creative cruelty. Titus, the prefect’s lictor, was also with them in the tent. The man said little, but Bachus had caught him time and again scratching with a stylus at a wax tablet. Scribbling notes for Valerius Gratus, no doubt.

  Soldiers brought in some of the strange objects found amongst the prisoner’s belongings. These were tossed in a pile before Bachus’s camp chair where he sat warming his hands over a brazier to take the morning stiffness from them. He leaned forward to retrieve an object; a bottle of translucent blue glass made with impressive craftsmanship.

  Bachus fiddled with the top of the bottle and found the metal seal atop it turned in his hand until it came free. It was secured in place by a series of grooves worked into the thin metal in a manner most shrewd. He sniffed the contents and recoiled at the pungent chemical smell. Some sort of medicine, he imagined, and set the bottle aside.

  “He killed my men with this,” Raman said in his atrocious Latin and held forth a long object of dull steel worked into some sort of wooden device.

  Bachus took it in his hands but could make no sense of it. It was a machine of many moving parts but had no visible blade or manner of projecting missiles. He l
ifted it to his nose and found an oily smell along with the scent of sulfur. There were blood and hair matted on the broad wooden end of the weapon. Was it some sort of Celtic ceremonial club he was unfamiliar with? He tossed it aside. There were other objects in the growing heap, but none of them meant anything to him.

  The centurion stood and strode to where the naked man lay glowering up at him.

  “Do you speak Latin?” Bacchus said in vain hope. The man spat a string of words that meant nothing to anyone in the tent. His optio had spent much time in Gaul and could make no sense of it. It was certainly a language, but not one known to anyone in attendance. Titus set aside his wax tablet. There was nothing in the prisoner’s gibberish worth recording.

  Raman, the archer headman, stamped on the man’s wounded leg. The Celt bit off a cry of pain then spoke under his breath to the Assyrian who raised his eyebrows.

  “What did he say to you? In what language?” Bachus demanded.

  “It was Persian, sir. A most vulgar Persian, spoken as a dog might utter it.”

  “And what did he say, Raman?”

  The archer hesitated. “He told me to have sexual congress with my mother,” Raman said.

  Brulo brayed with laughter at that and clapped a hand to his mouth at a flash from the centurion’s eyes.

  “You will ask him only the questions I say to you,” Bachus said, and the Assyrian nodded.

  Raman relayed question after question. How many are with you? Who has sent you? What is your interest in the slaves? Are you allied with the Jewish rebels? The Sanhedrin? How did you create the killing thunder?

  The Celt gave no answer but to further insult the Assyrian. Bachus insisted that Raman repeat each outrage to him in full detail.

  The prisoner had, in his responses to the questions, suggested that Raman touched himself in inappropriate ways, had carnal knowledge of a goat, was the issue of a camel and a backward monkey, consumed his own feces, and bathed in his own urine.