Cale hustled up along the line to PFC Rashad. The young Marine knelt in the lee of a very small hill that looked out over a wide plain. Cale dropped to a knee beside him.
They’d been trudging their way around, far from any roads, over hills and badlands and scrub, for half the day. Heath and Hassel had been given Lady Wíela’s litter and they were pretty fresh. They’d all be faster if she would wake up and walk on her own damn feet. The squad had started to mostly fall silent, except from the usual chatter of youngest Marines.
The sun was getting much lower behind them and Cale wanted to find shelter before full dark came on. He could smell the rain in the air, and hated the idea of being caught in the open.
The wind started to whip up out of the south.
“Whaddaya got, son?” Cale asked, coming up to the point man.
“Ruins, Staff Sergeant.”
Cale had to use the binoculars to make out a crumbling pile of stone, vaguely arrayed in a square shape, with the remains of towers on the corners. It was all tumbledown and hopelessly old, but what had survived this long appeared to be pretty stout.
“Barden?” he asked.
“The lee of the wall would be enough protection against this building storm,” she said, looking up at the distant clouds.
“Yeah,” Cale agreed. “I like our chances better with some stone around us.”
“Agreed.” Barden looked weary, Cale thought, but cautiously optimistic. They were making decisions that could have an impact on whether they made it through all this, and they both had the time to dwell on it. This wasn’t like combat, where you had to make a snap decision and ride it. Doubt had time to creep in.
“Alright, take us in, but tread carefully. No telling who might have had the same idea.” At least it was far from any of the roads on the map.
“Aye aye, Staff Sergeant.”
They started the careful trudge toward the horizon.
The wall and castle looked to be the remnants of some ancient fortress or fortified town, but there was fuck-all to show for it at this point. Whatever had been here, apart from this, had sunken into the grassy turf. Nothing left but an idyllic meadow and some crumbling stone. Heath, now on point because Cale wanted someone with a bit more experience and some fresh eyes, brought them into the shadow of it quickly and carefully, just as the rain started to patter down.
“Barden,” Cale called back along the line. “Recon the structure.”
She grunted an acknowledgment, then trotted forward with her team. They ducked through a gap in the nearest wall. She stepped back out seven tense minutes later and waved him forward.
“Not much shelter up here.” She jerked a thumb at the interior of the castle, calling attention to the lack of roof, and the water gathering and cascading down through the collapsed towers. “But Rashad found a cellar entrance of some kind. Seems dry enough down there.”
“Alright, it’ll do,” Cale said, relieved. “Let’s get some shut-eye in the dry, and move on when the rain eases.”
“Roger that.”
Rashad had marked the entrance to the cellar with a green ChemLight, giving it a bit of an eerie glow as they approached. He guided the squad down, pausing with Doc Dooley to strap Lady Wíela to the litter. The way into the cellar was steep and unforgiving, and the last thing they needed was to drop her on her neck after all their trouble to keep her safe.
“Lomicka, your team has first watch at the stairs,” Cale said as they settled into the dim underground space.
The cellar was wide and dry, with a little pile of debris in one corner. A couple of flashlights came out, as well as two more chemlights. Barden walked over to a dark arch on the far side of the space, waved her flashlight around into the gloom beyond, then retreated.
The rain drummed hard on the stone floor over their heads.
“Not a bad find by the kid,” Barden nodded over at Rashad, who was finding a place to sit down with Orley and Jones.
“He’s doing okay,” Cale allowed.
Everyone settled in on the dry, hard floor and started in on weapon maintenance. Somewhere, water dripped and echoed around the walls, somehow sounding louder than the rain beating down outside.
“He thinks you’re riding him, Staff Sergeant,” Barden said, using her flashlight to look over the parts she’d quickly and smoothly pulled apart and set on cloth in front of her.
“You know as well as anyone I’m not riding him,” Cale said. “You think I’m giving him special treatment?”
“You’re focused on him enough that Lomicka and Diaz are starting to pick up on it.” Barden blew out some dirt. “I told them you’re an equal-opportunity asshole of a Staff Sergeant, and they believe me. For now. But . . . what’s going on, sir? He’s on my team. I’ve been putting this off as long as I can, but we’re out in the shit and it’s starting to bug me.”
Cale realized she’d see through any denial. He paused.
“The ’Stan,” he finally said. “There was a kid. A whole family. Back when they were shifting to more community-oriented policing. Get to know the locals, help them out. Wrong people found out how friendly we were.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
Cale resumed cleaning and ignored that. “Rashad looked like this kid’s brother. Not just because he was another brown kid, but, in the way that you run into someone and the way they hold themselves, talk, just remind you of someone? It fucked me up a little.”
“You talk to anyone?” Barden asked, sounding way too casual. Cale could tell there was concern behind it, though.
“I don’t want anyone here getting hurt, Barden,” Cale said wearily. “But, if I don’t make sure Rashad’s up to speed and something happens to him, it’ll stick to me. That’s all it is.”
“But have you talked to someone, sir?” Barden finished reassembling and sat with her rifle on her lap, looking directly at him.
“I’m talking to you,” Cale said. “And if this is jamming him up, I’ll back off. It’ll be on you.”
Barden’s lips tightened. “He’s one of my team. It’s always been on me.”
Cale saw right then that part of this was some pride. He was stepping all over her and micromanaging things, wasn’t he?
“Okay, Corporal,” he said. “It’s on you.”
He felt a little odd sharing it, and even stranger handing it over to Barden. But, even stranger, he felt like he’d shucked a vest.
Cale hugged his M27 against his chest, and leaned back against the wall. Lady Wíela lay on her litter beside him, with Doc hunched against the wall on the opposite side. Some Marines grabbed a little snack, others started going through their patrol packs for the first time since leaving the FOB hours before.
He should order them to sleep. They’d covered twenty-five or so kilometers of nasty terrain, but some of the younger Marines were all keyed up, whispering to each other as they re-sorted and re-packed everything. The last forty-eight hours had been intense.
But that was the job. Days and days of utter boredom followed by moments of sheer terror, and often a lot of sweaty hiking while keeping an eye out for someone who might, but not necessarily, want to kill you.
Cale started to doze, nodding a bit, when a prickling cold sensation made him shiver. It felt like ice water had run down his back, but when he shifted, he realized he was dry.
A green flicker near the arch on the other side of the cellar caught his eye. At first Cale dismissed it as someone cracking a new chemlight. Then he opened his eyes all the way as a whisper of voices broke out into shouts.
Cale clutched at his M27 as the green glow oozed out of the void toward them with what he instinctively felt had to be menacing intent.
“Everybody up!” He twisted around onto one knee, and brought his weapon up to his shoulder.
Lady Wíela surprised them all by sitting up, looking at the green light, and shouting in an alien tongue. The terror in it made Cale’s stomach shrivel. She’d been calm when staring down the prospect of getting smashed into toothpaste by trolls, but whatever that green light was freaked her the hell out.
Shots popped off into the green-tinted darkness.
“What the fuck is it?” Heath shouted across the cellar.
“Wights!” Orley replied from closer to the arch. “More coming down the stairs.”
An animated skeleton shambled into Cale’s line of sight, looking both more fake and more horribly real than any Harryhausen flick. Shots peppered it and he saw the thing’s femur shatter, but it kept moving, undeterred. The pieces of a broken arm swung a rusted sword, the green, glowing power that held the undead remains together utterly unfazed by the squad’s bullets.
“Out, out, everyone out!” Cale shouted. “Lomicka, secure topside!”
“Why did you bring me here?” Wíela shouted.
“Doc! Get her out of here!” Cale got to his feet and moved two steps forward, closing toward two new shambling wights that had now gotten within ten meters of the nearest Marine.
“Keep back!” Orley shouted. “Don’t let them touch you!”
“Why not?” Jones shouted back.
“Fuck if I know, it just seems like a bad idea.” Orley lit off a quick three-round burst, then scampered up the stairs. Just as his feet disappeared from view: “Damnit! I dropped my pack!”
Sure enough, two or three patrol packs were on the ground, now close to the feet of the advancing wights.
“No time. Move.” Cale fired another three rounds at the wights, then just snarled and hurried toward the stairs.
He and Jones were left at the bottom as the wights advanced. Jones scampered up, pausing halfway to fire a burst from her automatic rifle. Cale followed as she did, then they both ran up into the pouring rain.
As they cleared the steps, the heavy wooden door slammed down on the opening and the green glow oozed out around the edges of the planks. Cale stared for a second, then looked over at Heath, who had clearly just dropped it back in place.
They all backed away, weapons aimed at it.
“Staff Sergeant!”
Cale whipped his head and weapon around as one, looking for the threat, but instead all he saw was Lady Wíela stalking off into the rainy darkness. Doc paced along beside her, trying to get the woman to stop moving, but not having much luck.
“Oh, now she fucking walks,” Jones muttered.
Diaz, who had called him, was trying to form some kind of perimeter around Wíela with his team.
“Barden, take rearguard, make sure that shit doesn’t follow us.” Cale snapped the order off, then trotted after Wíela. “And don’t stop moving!”
Her acknowledgment was lost in the thrum of the rain, but he saw her moving her team. He hurried up and caught the robed figure of Lady Wíela—elf, orc, whatever—just as she crossed the crumbled boundary of the broken keep. He put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off with a strength that didn’t seem possible to Cale.
“Are you trying to rend my soul from my body?” she hissed. “Can’t you tell this place is cursed just by its very nature?”
She didn’t look back at him, just spat as she stalked through the rain. The hood of her robe was in tatters from the various ordeals of the past few days, and did nothing to ward off the wet. He was pleased to see she was getting just as drenched as he was.
“It seemed like a cozy place to hole up for the night.”
“Your ignorance is deadly. It was a mistake to seek you people out. I should have just delivered myself to the Corrupted One’s forces and been done with it.”
“Now hold up,” Cale shouted at her. “We’re not just blundering about in the dark because we like it. If you would share some of your knowledge with us, we might have a fighting chance here.”
“You have no chance. You are too far out of your depth.”
“You came to us.”
“You don’t even know what I am facing. How will you even know to help? You’re a peon, muscle, no more.”
“Then tell us how to help.” Cale wanted to shout at her, to dig deep into that drill-instructor voice he was all too good at dragging from his chest. But this wasn’t some private first class that needed the stupid scoured out of them with some good yelling and the judicious assignment of shitty working parties. So, he kept his voice calm, cool, and professional. Cale the fucking diplomat.
“There is no point. You are too in love with your ignorance. You’ll all die out here from general stupidity.”
This was going nowhere. Cale stopped walking for a beat or two and let her carry on. Doc stopped with him.
“What do you want to do?” Dooley asked as they started walking again, a few paces behind her. Diaz had assembled some rough formation in front of Wíela, but for the moment, all he was doing was keeping pace.
“Keep walking,” Cale said, and turned to step backward a few paces. Two, four, six, eight. All accounted for, though Orley was dragging ass enough to be mistaken for a shambling wight in MARPAT camouflage. “She’s at least headed in the right fucking direction, as of now. We’ll see if we can nudge her onto the correct path, assuming we can find it ourselves. Maybe she’ll even help us when she cools down.”
“And if she doesn’t cool down?”
“We’ll blow up that culvert when we come to it,” Cale muttered.
But he couldn’t deny that she had spooked him a bit. She was local. She knew the ground. She had to know why enough trolls had shown up to send a whole FOB scurrying back through a portal.
It dawned on Cale that the entire attack on their base had been for her, and that they were now de facto bodyguards for a player important enough to prompt that level of response.
If so, he didn’t want to imagine what else might track his squad down.
Cale suspected it might end up being a hell of a lot scarier than just some shambling skeletons surrounded by green light.