Warlord: Dervish (20 page)

“All right.”

Several minutes went by without incident. “Yo, Jay, what was the kid like?”

Jason was puzzled. “Who you talkin’ about?”

“The kid. Rudy.”

“I told you about him?”

“You don’t remember.”

Truth was, Jason didn’t. He’d thought a lot about Rudy during his imprisonment and torture, but he hadn’t been aware he’d spoken aloud of him.

“He was…” Jason wasn’t sure how to put it. What was he going to say? That Rudy was a
good
kid? “…he was a kid, a fucking kid. Eighteen, nineteen,
maybe
nineteen. He never got to experience… nothing. I mean, he never got to experience life, its successes, failures.”

“Least he didn’t get to experience those, right? The failures.”

Jason shook his head. “I’d have wanted him to. Not taste failure—that’s not what I mean. But to have the option, you know what I mean? To have
the chance
.” Jason watched the other roof, waiting for an insurgent to show himself. “That’s what it all boils down to for me. I wished he’d had that. A chance.”

“A chance to what?”

“To
whatever
. I don’t know…get married.”

“Get divorced?”

“Sure, maybe, alright. See, he’s never going to know what it’s like to come home from work to a family…to a little kid who’s waiting for you, to a wife who loves you. He’s not going to know what it’s like to have a job that you love or that you hate, and if you hate it you do it because it let’s you enjoy all that shit you love.”

The gunfire in the distance no longer sounded.

“You jus’ wanted him to have a chance to ride on them twenty-foes if that what he wanted, huh?”

“Twenty-foes?”

“Yeah, twenty-foes.”

“That a rap thing what that is?”

“Sure, could be,” Bronson grinned but the smile was almost immediately replaced by a frown. “Motherfucker talked to me ‘bout music. To
me
!”

“You’re talkin’ ‘bout who I think you’re talkin’ ‘bout?”

“Yeah.
Motherfucker
.”

“He like rap?”

“Fucker talkin’ to me ‘bout vibrating strings and shit. Knew I like music. Fuckin’ with my head what he was doin’.”

“What he like?”

“He wasn’t talkin’ bout any music I eva’ heard of,” Bronson divulged. “Get ready.” The men on the street were crying out to one another, trilling.

First one assault rifle fired on the street, then a second, then a dozen. Bullets creased the air over their heads. The insurgents lined up in the street, firing on the roof, firing into the door and bricked window, their rounds pocking the house.

“Shake and bake?” Jason looked at Bronson.

“Let’s do this.” Bronson tossed Jason a phosphorous grenade. Jason already had his own in hand. Clasping the grenades, he used his index fingers to remove the pins. Bronson readied two high explosive grenades. Bullets abraded the concrete parapet behind them.

“Fire in the hole!” Jason sent the grenades over the roof, one in each direction. Someone below yelled and Bronson followed suit, tossing his. The grenades detonated in rapid succession. Jason and Bronson rose quickly, firing into the street. Half a dozen insurgents were down, dead from the phosphorous and fragmentation. A dozen more scurried off, several wounded. Rapid, clipped bursts felled many of these before Jason and Bronson squatted down.

“
Allahu Akbar
!” An insurgent burst from the stairwell Jason had watched, his arm drawn back. Repeated bursts from Jason and Bronson laid him low before he could pitch his grenade. It exploded on the roof, most of the blast muffled by the dead man’s body. Jason and Bronson reloaded from their chest pouches.

“Knew he was gonna show himself sooner or later.”

“Hey, Jay. Time to get back inside.”

“What? Why?”

“Look.” A wall of sand surged through the city. “Come on,” urged Bronson.

They kept low, entering the stairwell. They secured the door with the metal bars. Jason was about to ask Bronson to go check on those below when Bronson said, “I’m on it”, disappearing down the stairs.

The wind picked up outside and Jason lay his hands on the door, feeling it shift under his palms. The wood began to vibrate as the wind howled beyond the door. He was glad for the metal bars securing it in place. A burst of automatic rifle fire sounded outside, down in the street, followed by panicked cries which cut off as abruptly as they’d begun. The light in the stairwell was on the fritz, blinking on and off.

Jason stared at the door. What was going on out there? It continued to shift ever so slightly beneath his palms, the metal bars keeping it in place.

“Jason.” Ahmed joined him on the stairs. “More sand?”

“Yeah, more sand.”

“There is something not right about this…”

“Something ain’t right, Ahmed. How are things downstairs?”

“I think I killed two of them.”

“Good shooting. You recognize them?”

“They’re speaking Arabic.”

“So we could be…?”

Ahmed shrugged. “We could be anywhere.”

Something began to tap on the other side of the heavy wooden door. Jason pulled his hands away, holding up a finger, enjoining Ahmed to silence. The tapping grew more forceful, moving around the door frame, as if testing something…Jason would be damned if he’d open it up and see who was on the other side.

“The sandmen…” Ahmed whispered, his rifle aimed at the door. Jason remembered what Areya had said, how it hadn’t made any sense. He stared apprehensively at the door, and as he did so the tapping stopped. The howl of the wind ebbed. The door vibrated a few seconds more before it too ceased moving. The light overhead burned steadily once again.

73rd Iteration

“Jay.” Bronson came up the stairs.

“You told them not to open the door, right?”

“They ain’t opening it.”

“Letitia’s gonna sit tight?”

“Letitia’s scared shitless.”

“Maybe she should be.” Jason looked to Ahmed, thinking of the tapping.

“Here, I brought this.” Bronson handed over a bandolier of magazines, which Jason slung over his shoulder, thanking him.

“Want to look?” Bronson motioned.

“Someone was…” Jason hesitated “This is going to sound crazy, all right? Someone was knocking on the door just now.”

“
Knocking
?”

“Yes,” Ahmed confirmed it. “I heard this myself.”

“Knocking how? Like
little pigs-little pigs
, let me in?”

“Not funny. But yeah, maybe. I don’t know.”

“If he’s on the roof,” Bronson raised his M4, “we ready for him.”

“Okay.” Jason found his resolve. “I go left, you go right. Ahmed, you follow.”

Aight
and
yes
the others replied.

The door opened upon an empty roof. Jason, Bronson and Ahmed fanned out, circling the pillbox, looking up with disbelief. Wisps of multicolored, swirling haze filled the sky, eerily aglow, an illumination none had ever witnessed.

“Jay…” Bronson stood at the parapet, looking down where the street had been. Motes of sand wafted lazily about their house on four sides, ebbing and flowing. The cloud of sand extended around them for as far as they could see, blanketing the houses around them. “Fuck is that?”

“Sand,” Ahmed offered helpfully.

“House moved again,” uttered Jason, then, in a normal tone, “We only had the street on this side before. Now we got it on four sides.” He looked down into the shimmering sand. If he reached down he could touch it.

“Don’t touch that shit, Jay.”

“What? I wasn’t gonna—”

“I seen the look on your face. Don’t main.”

“This sky is not correct.” Ahmed squinted in concentration, focusing upon the feint spectral lines etched amongst the haze. “Where is the sun?”

A metallic clank sounded below and the three men pressed close to the wall, squatting on their haunches.

“What…?” Bronson’s question trailed off, each man intuitively realizing silence was their safest bet. The metallic jangle sounded again. Something large and mechanized was moving in the sand.

Ahmed put his arm around Jason’s shoulders and bore him down to a seated position, their backs to the wall. “This is no good.” There was trepidation in the interpreter’s whisper. “No good.”

“
Shit
.” Bronson hunkered low besides them.

“I just want to see my family again, Jason. Yes?”

“Shhhh.” Jason put a finger to his lips. They waited without speaking as the mechanical lumbering increased in volume, accompanied by an intermittent pneumatic hiss. Whatever the thing on the street was, it passed under and then by them. Jason waited until it had receded into the distance before he asked Bronson, “What’d you see?”

“I don’t know,” Bronson appeared bewildered. “I couldn’t tell. Shadow. A big fucking shadow.”

“Was it some kind of tank?”

“No.” Having removed his helmet, Bronson poured water from his canteen over his head.

Seeing his friend do so reminded Jason how thirsty he was. “Stay low.” He sipped from his Camelback.

“This is bad…” Ahmed was distressed. “This is very, very bad.”

“Ahmed, I need you to take it easy, okay?”

“I just want to see my family. I just want to see my family again.”

“You want to see your family again, you’ve gotta stay cool, understand?”

Ahmed nodded.

“Tell us about them.” Water dripped from Bronson’s brow.

“
Shoo
?”

“Your family.” Bronson removed a glove and wiped the water off his face. “What they like?”

A genuine smile displaced Ahmed’s worried look. “Fatima—my wife—she is a beautiful woman. When she smiles…”

“Takes your breath away?”

“Yes, Jason, exactly. My Fatima has given me seven children, each as beautiful as their mother.”

“
Seven
?” Bronson was taken aback.

“And when I get back,” Ahmed answered proudly, “we will have more.”

The three men shared a smile. Something small and delicate alighted on Bronson’s forehead. As he wiped it away, he looked at the smear remaining on his hand. Replacing his helmet, Bronson peered over the wall, rising to his full height. “Hey…”

Jason and Ahmed stood with him, surveying the scene.

The clouds of sand around the house had receded, revealing a street of raw, concrete block houses about them. The streets and buildings were marred with the remnants of a battle. Smoke rose from burning houses into the magenta sky. Drag marks and blood trails crossed the cratered street beneath them. The facades of the buildings across from them were bullet riddled. A bloodied, disheveled turban had been abandoned in the road. Grey-white matter floated out of the sky around them, like burnt newspaper.

“All this happened while we were inside?” Bronson didn’t sound like he believed it.

“No,” realized Jason. “We moved again.”

The war ravaged city stretched off into the distance around them. The terraced fields now faced them from the east. The lone obelisk had also assumed a different position, further from their house.

“What is this?” The ash alighted on Ahmed’s outstretched palm. “Snow?”

“No.” Bronson wiped his hand on his fatigues and pulled his glove back on. “There’s a big-ass fire somewhere.” He studied the cityscape. “Over there.”

Several blocks away, tendrils of flame flickered towards the sky. Whatever burned was lost from their view behind the houses and shops separating them from the conflagration.

“What you make of that, Jay main?”

At the end of their own street, a wall of sand stood like a barrier. It enveloped whatever parts of the city were behind it but showed no sign of spreading.

“Pretty unnatural for sand to do that, ain’t it, Jay?”

“This whole thing is unnatural.”

“
Neik
.”

A gigantic scorpion stepped from the wall of sand and trundled down the block. Twenty feet from carapace to the lower part of its abdomen, its segmented tail and oversized pincers doubled its size. Its eight legs propelled the beast forward, its tail bent over its body, a stinger the size of a traffic cone. The ash snowed down on it.

Ahmed was sighting down the barrel of his M4 when Jason signaled him not to engage.

The creature seemed unaware of their presence. It passed the house on which they stood and continued along the street, its pedipalps bobbing in the air before it. As they watched in disbelief, the beast turned into an alleyway and was lost from their view.

“That shit ain’t right…”

“Holy shit,” Jason breathed. “Holy shit.”

The sky had assumed a lavender hue with bluish-red and blue-violet streaks.

“
Bos
!” gasped Ahmed.

A man stepped from the rippling wall of sand and dust. A visored helmet protected his face and head. He wore rudimentary armor, metal shoulder pieces affixed to his deltoids, leather elbow and wrist bands. A loin cloth covered his groin. He clutched a short sword in one hand and what looked like a human head in his other.

“Fucking gladiator,” declared Jason. He, Ahmed and Bronson stayed low behind the wall, watching the man.

The gladiator strode forward, eyeing either side of the street. Behind him, two similarly armored men emerged from the sand. One wore a plumed helmet and wielded a harpoon. The other, bald, clutched a spear and a round sword.

“This a fuckin’ joke?”

The three came down the street in a wedge.

“This no joke.” Bronson answered his own question.

“I think maybe we should shoot them,” opined Ahmed.

“Wait,” Jason cautioned.

“That’s a head he got, right Jay?”

As the trio neared it became evident that the head was a woman’s.

“Who’s head is that?”

The eyes were gouged out.

“Is that…it
is
.”

It was Hahn’s.

“We shoot them, Jason, yes?”

“Yes.”

Ahmed fired the first burst, catching the lead gladiator in the stomach. The man grimaced, stopping where he was, dropping his sword and Hahn’s head. As he sunk to his knees, an arm crossing his ravaged midsection, Bronson and Jason fired on the other two.

The gladiator with the plumed helmet was drawing his arm back to launch his harpoon when a round pierced his headpiece, knocking him from his feet. The third gladiator instinctively raised his shield, the wood splintering as 5.56mm rounds impacted it. He released his spear—which fell well short of the three on the roof—and raced to the building nearest him, barreling shoulder first through the doorway, into a house.

Ahmed put a second burst through the gladiator kneeling in the street. The man slumped over in the sand, unmoving.

“Damn. One got away.”

“He’s wounded, dough Jay. Who’d a thought gladiators’d be so frail?”

“Yeah, that was too easy. Didn’t feel right.”

“Should we go after him?” Ahmed asked.

“Fuck no,” asserted Jason. “You see what I was saying about the high ground now, right?”

“Yeah.” Bronson stared at the gladiators, dead in the street.

“What’s going on up there?” Deirdre called up.

“How do we…?” Jason looked at Bronson and Ahmed. “Ahmed, can you go downstairs, make sure they’re all cool?”

“Cool. Yes.”

“Thanks.”

“Yo, Ahmed.”

“Yes, Bronson?”

“You keep cool. We get you back to Fatima, aight?”

“Yes.”

When Ahmed left the roof, Jason said to Bronson, “So they got Hahn. Wonder what they did to Aguilera.”

“We seen the gladiators, Jay. So where’s the Roman legions?”

…shump…shump…shump…

“What that?”

Movement in the sand.

Shump—Shump—Shump

“I jinxed it,” claimed Bronson, “didn’t I?”

SHUMP-SHUMP-SHUMP

The first line of the Roman legionaries stepped from the sand, marching in formation, side by side and shield to shield. Their numbers stretched across the width of the street. Armored from head to ankle, their spears bristled from the front wall of the formation. They wore battle cloaks and sandals, plated armor and cassis. Their curved shields were forty inches tall and thirty inches wide. The logo printed on each shield was unmistakable.

“Diogenes…” Jason whispered.

There seemed no end to their number until there was, the last row stepping from the sand. The men were obscured behind their shields, but Jason counted the pairs of sandaled feet in the front row, multiplying that by the number of men he thought stretched back in one column. A hundred and twenty, give or take.

Tires squealed on the opposite end of the street, men barking out in Arabic, piling out of a pick up truck. They immediately started firing on the legionaries. Sparks flew as bullets struck armor and several shields tottered, dipping to the ground as the men behind them died. A rocket propelled grenade streaked by on the street, tearing the Roman’s front lines asunder, toppling soldiers like bowling pins.

Jason and Bronson watched the battle unfold, dumbstruck.

AKs chattered and legionaries fell, some bullets sparking off Lorica segmentata armor, most penetrating iron and man. Spears were fired and one insurgent went down shrieking, pierced through his midsection. The legionnaires had reformed their ranks and marched ahead, their Centurions’ voices booming in Latin, an impenetrable wall of shields and spears.

The truck screeched away as the man with the RPG knelt in the middle of the street, reloading, spears javelining around him. Before he could launch a second grenade, a well-aimed projectile impaled him. Another insurgent broke from cover, draining his AK as he dashed to his fallen comrade, taking up the RPG.