Warlord: Dervish (24 page)

Jason hit the door, never sparing a thought as to what he would do if it was locked, and it gave under him. He immediately pushed it closed, spying the knight lumbering through the intersection, swept within the gale. Feeling in the dark beside the door, Jason found the metal bars that each house seemed to be equipped with and fit them in place.

1,621st Iteration

He ran his hands over the wall until he found the switch. When he turned the lights on, Jason wished he hadn’t. The room was a slaughterhouse, its walls streaked with blood and vomit. Slashed mattresses were strewn about the floor, begrimed by feces and gore. Barely recognizable human beings lay in greater or lesser stages of mutilation. Each was scalped.

Above the stink of blood and excrement, the fetor of death visited mercilessly, hovered an oily mint stench.

One of the bodies moved. A man pushed himself across the floor with a bare foot, his other leg shredded from stab wounds. His mouth opened, emitting a tortured, lowing moan. The blood streaming from his glistening, exposed skull had blinded him. As he reached up with red-slicked hands, fingers twitching, he wouldn’t touch his face.

“Amina.” He keened the name. “…Amina…Amina…”

The man cowered as Jason knelt beside him amid the blood and carnage. “Easy, it’s okay, it’s okay, take it easy,” Jason whispered, knowing there was no way to sooth him. These people around them were the man’s family. One, he had no doubt, was Amina.

“It’s okay…your eyes are okay…” After reaching into his pack, Jason poured Betadine over the man’s scalp. “It’s okay, just keep your eyes closed, okay?” He tore open a package of gauze bandage and began packing the wound around the man’s head.

“…Amina…”

“Hey—hey—you’re gonna live, okay?” Jason slipped out of his Camelback and unscrewed the bladder. “Keep your eyes closed, right? Okay?” He washed the other’s face with water from the bladder and the man’s face screwed up. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Jason shielded the man’s nose with his free hand to keep the water and blood from washing up his nostrils. “You’re good, you’re going to be good…”

He thought about Ahmed as he worked. Ahmed, who had just wanted to get home to his wife and kids. Seven kids. Ahmed, whom he hadn’t known that long or that well, but known well enough to know he was a decent man. Ahmed, who’d come to Jason’s aide, tousling with that thing in an attempt to save him, getting himself cut to pieces in the process. Tearing open another roll of Kerlix, Jason used it to sop up the blood and water about the man’s eyes.

“Look at me…” Jason dabbed at the caked blood “…can you see me?”

The man blinked his eyes several times until they focused on Jason. Ahmed had kids at home,
seven
kids waiting for their daddy, and their daddy was never going to come.

“
Shukran-jazilan
,” the man thanked Jason. Jason’s country had made war on this man’s country—whatever country this was—and Ahmed’s country, and, always,
always
, they were saying
thank you
, grateful for the littlest kindness, the slightest bit of humanity, thankful to have the work, to serve as go-betweens for the war mongers.

“You’re welcome. Now stay still.”

“Amina.”

The man started to sit up and Jason pushed him back down by his shoulders, shushing him with his lips pursed. “Stay down. I need you to stay down.”

“Amina.”

“We’ll find Amina, okay? We’ll find Amina.”

Amina’s name seemed to calm the man somewhat.

“I’m going to give you this…” Jason pulled the plastic hood off a morphine syrette “…and then we’ll see what we can do about Amina, alright?” He yanked the guard off by its wire loop. “This will make you feel better, okay?” Jason stuck the syrette in the man’s shoulder at the neck—he flinched at the bite and Jason whispered Amina’s name to him several times—flattening the tube between his thumb and forefinger. “How’s that feel? You feel that?”

“…Amina…” the man sounded far away.

Jason considered pinning the used tube to the man’s shirt but instead threw it away. He was the only triage this man had. His was the only medical care the guy was going to get. He had to cover that scalp up. Jason removed the sopping bandages from the man’s skull. He was tearing more Kerlix open when the man gripped his arm, raising his head and shoulders off the ground. He thanked Jason once more, laid back down, and died.

Jason considered the body before him, ignoring the mayhem, the reek of death that hung about the room. The guy’s eyes were open. His fucking eyes. Jason had spent how long clearing the guy’s eyes so he could see? And now he was dead and his eyes were open. He passed his palm over the man’s face, thumbing the eyelids shut. He tossed the unused Kerlix away and cupped his forehead.

Something stunk in this room. It wasn’t the blood, wasn’t the shit. A soapy, diesel smell.

A thud sounded against the wooden door. The sandmen.

“What…” Jason got up, his legs sodden with fresh blood, confronting the door. “
What
?”

A heavy thump battered the door.

“The fuck do you want?” he roared.

When the quarter-moon blade of the greatsword broke through the wood, Jason knew how wrong he was. Not the sandmen.
Holy shit
! Scanning the room for a weapon, there was nothing he could use. The greatsword hacked at the door, its wood splintering, wisps of sand clouding the interior of the room.

Jason retreated, stepping backwards from the room, eyeing the door as it shook and cracked. He backed through a hallway and was passing an open doorway when he looked in to find Aguilera. The Marine sat in what had been a bedroom, on what had been a mattress. He was smoking hash, drawing his K-Bar back and forth over its whetstone.

“Aguilera!”

The Marine looked up at Jason but didn’t acknowledge him.

“Aguilera—what the fuck did you do?” Scalps were stacked one atop the other beside him.

The greatsword continued to cleave the front door.

Aguilera’s rifle and grenade launcher were propped against the wall. The feint scrape of the K-Bar against its stone ended. Aguilera was watching him as Jason looked at the M4.

“Give me your rife!” He stepped into the room to take it. Aguilera raised the knife defensively and Jason halted. When Jason called him a piece of shit, Aguilera growled back, like some kind of animal.

“Forget this.” Jason left the room, leaving Aguilera with his scalps. An armored limb reached through a jagged hole in the front door, working at one of the metal braces barring it.

The sandstorm didn’t seem to be affecting the knight. The thing was going to get into the house and kill Aguilera.
Kill me too
Jason knew. He had no doubts about this. Jason darted through the remainder of the house, searching for something he could use as a weapon, for stairs, for another way out, for
something
.

No lights burned in the inner recesses of the home. Jason wished he had his NVGs but he’d lost them. He nearly tripped over a table he ran into and had to splay his hands against the tabletop to keep himself righted.

Doing so, his hands closed over something metallic. Jason touched at it gingerly until he was convinced he knew what it was. A Kalashnikov. The things were all over this goddamn city. And now he had his hands on one. He picked it up by the barrel and stock and felt along its length. Everything seemed to be in place. He ran his hand over the banana magazine, dropping it from the well, his thumb stroking the topmost bullet. Satisfied, he replaced the magazine and chambered a round. It wouldn’t do much against the knight, but it was better than nothing.

He reached about the table, searching for more magazines, in the process sending what he assumed were several clattering noisily to the floor. The sound of a struggle reverberated from somewhere in the house, back from where he’d fled, and Jason decided against searching the floor in the dark for the extra ammo.

His outstretched hands felt along a wall for an opening and he found one, stepping into a hallway, following the paling light into another room where a door stood ajar. Muted light flooded into the room from the doorway. He approached the door cautiously, listening. Reboations from automatic weapons and grenades met his ears.

Jason knew the knight was in the house behind him. He could try to hide from it in the dark, in some blackened recess. It would search him out and find him. The only way to escape the knight was to keep running, to press on and continue in the only direction open to him. What would he be stepping into once he left this house? The hell was going on with all that racket outside?

He was nearly to the door when a white-jacketed figure dodged past. Whatever light bathed the scene cast a reddish pall over the man, yet Jason recognized Kaku again.
Son of a
… He stepped towards the door, intent on getting his hands on the good doctor. A blur outside the door and Jason stepped aside as a burst of fire was loosed into the house. The bullets snapped the air around him, barely missing Jason, and he clung to the wall for several long seconds, waiting, the AK trained on the door, ready to take out anyone that tried to come in.

He wondered if the gunman was waiting outside, against the opposite side of the wall, similar to the move the knight had pulled. He didn’t know…he hadn’t been able to make out the gunman’s details, not with the reddish glare, not with the man’s speed. The man had been
fast
, really fast. He’d been hot on the heels of Kaku, and something told Jason the guy wasn’t one of the doctor’s friends.

Betting his life on it, Jason stepped into the street. The sky was red. To his right, dervishes were spinning wildly in the street, bouncing against one another, springing off the walls of buildings. Automatic fire echoed through the streets to his left, but the scene there was hidden from him around a corner.

He trotted across the street in that direction, following after Kaku and whoever had fired into the house, sidling against the houses. Jason edged his way to the corner and chanced a look.

The scene was chaotic.

Muzzles flashed as rocket trails smoked by. Bullets pockmarked the street, peppering the inert corpses scattered all about. A little black boy dragged himself through body parts. An RPG round skidded and sizzled in the dirt, never detonating. A tongue of flame spit from the barrel of a SAW, the man firing it going cyclic. An immense, shadowy form moved herky-jerky in the dust, half a dozen smaller forms attacking it with machetes. Above it all, the sky appeared to bleed.

Ducking back around the corner, Jason felt overwhelmed, overpowered by an arpeggio of machine-gun fire and detonations. At least, his one consolation, no one was firing on him.

—white lab coat—

He
hadn’t
seen a white lab coat. He dared another look. The street ahead opened into a circle, a circle Jason recognized because he had been in it before. Where an obelisk once towered, now all that remained was a three foot stump of base. Several large blocks of engraved stone had broken apart when the structure toppled, cast haphazardly about the circle. Men and boys wielding AK-47s had taken cover behind these downed segments, standing quickly to loose bursts of automatic fire at the insurgents firing back at them from the next block.

—a boy soldier stood, AK spitting in his hands, defiance writ large on his face until incoming rounds demolished his chest and he fell, a spray of blood filling the air—

Dust and smoke swirled about the scene, fires burning. A group of shirtless kids were hacking away at a spider the size of a car. One of the boys was caught screaming in the beasts’ chelicerae, the arachnid jerking him back and forth. Other kids clung to the spider’s back, slashing and stabbing it with their machetes and a plundered spear.

—a grenade exploded, an insurgent cart wheeling, his body in one direction, his rifle in another—

One of the white men stood up as Jason watched and fired towards the insurgents, a stream of shell casings ejecting from his rifle. The man was a bloody mess. His shirt was missing and his upper body was swathed in filthy, blood-stained bandages. “We are leaving!” He screamed through his U-shaped mustache.

The man took cover and the black kid next to him popped up, firing his AK before a bullet sent a pink mist of head spray into the air, his tiny, lifeless form draping across a chunk of obelisk.

—the spider snapped a boy in its jaws in two—

A high-pitched whine sounded up the block and the air was rent, a cascading wave visibly distorting the atmosphere. The blast of energy demolished the side of a house, turning insurgents inside out. The thing responsible for the blast clanked forward on two oversized feet, a metallic vehicle, its moves accompanied with a hydraulic cadency.