Tom took Mile’s oil cloth and overlapped it with his.
“There,” said Tom. “Now we have a nice roof over out fighting place.”
Miles stepped back on the ramp and looked askance at the little bunker they had made. “I don’t like this,” he said. “If someone attacks us, we’ll be cornered. There’s no escape route.”
“Sure there is,” said Tom. “Straight up the path.”
“That’s too exposed,” said Miles. “They’d cut us down.”
“It’s not us who should worry about the fighting,” said Tom. He grinned and patted the assault rifle leaning against a boulder inside the little bunker. “Have you seen what these can do?”
“Not firsthand,” said Miles. “And I don’t care to.”
“It’s okay,” said Tom. “I have practiced in the mountains. I am very good with this.”
“Where did you get that thing, anyway?” said Miles.
“From the barrows,” said Tom. “Bimji would go there to meet with Nalkies and Sesep’o. There is a tomb with nobody dead inside, and weapons just like this. Mom doesn’t know that Bimji was still involved with such things. He told her he gave it up. Please don’t mention it to her.”
“Who brought these here?” said Miles. “How?”
“I don’t know how, but it was Sesep’o who brought them,” said Tom. “They are people from another country who fight the Venep’o. They come to Gi to help the Nalkies.”
“You ever meet any of these folks?” said Miles.
“No,” said Tom. “But I have seen them.”
The clouds brightened and the grey forest turned green again. A tree wiggled and dumped the reservoir of built-up water its leaves had collected. Miles clutched his crossbow tighter.
“Just the wind,” said Tom. “Don’t worry. We will know when they come. I have made certain of that.”
Miles inhaled deeply, his eyes traveling from tree to tree. When nothing else moved, he settled back and tried to relax, digging a little groove in the floor of the bunker to channel the water away.
“So you’ve lived here all your life?” said Miles.
“Yup,” said Tom, propping his legs on a stone the size of an ottoman.
“What about your mom?”
“She’s not from here,” said Tom. “She’s a peregrin.”
“Has she ever offered to take you back to where she’s from … to meet relatives and such?”
“She’s a peregrin,” said Tom. “Peregrins don’t go back.”
“Well, someone had to go and get that gun of yours,” said Miles. “No? Did it walk here all by itself?”
“Peregrins don’t go back,” said Tom. “That’s all I know.”
“But apparently, the Sesep’o do,” said Miles, softly.
Something tinkled in the forest, a sound like dishes in a scullery.
Tom scrambled for the rifle, unplugging the wad of leaves stuck in the barrel. Miles tensed.
“What was that?”
“Trip wire rigged with crockery,” said Tom. “I set it up as an alarm.” He peered through a gap between the upright slabs protecting them.
“Could it have been an animal?” said Miles.
“Possible,” said Tom.
Miles drew back from the opening. He stood up slowly and peeked over the top of a ledge. He could see the blood-clouded puddles where the two villages had fallen the night before and a wall of green broken only by trails leading back towards the river road.
A sizzle slid past his ear and cracked against the cliffs. He dropped to the floor of the bunker. A flurry of bolts clattered into and against the bunker and sliced through the oil cloth. Tom grunted and fumbled with his rifle. A blizzard of jangling crockery sounded from every trail below.
“Crasacs!” said Tom.
Miles wedged himself low in the backmost corner huffing like a Lamaze instructor. Tom breathed through his teeth. Blood trickled down the side of a slab.
“You alright?” said Miles.
“I’m hit,” said Tom. “My stomach.”
“Shit!” said Miles, scrambling to his feet. “Let’s surrender. I’m surrendering.”
“Stay in the bunker!” said Tom. “They’ll kill us whether we surrender or not.”
“What do we do?” said Miles, panicking.
Helmeted soldiers, with flapping, blue-daubed armor of wood and leather rushed the stone ramp.
Tom slid forward on his knees behind the tilted slab and let loose on full automatic.
Tugga-tugga-tugga-tugga-tugga-tugga-tug!
Sparks flew. Rocks splintered. Soldiers fell. The others halted, startled by the sound and its consequences. Arrows and bolts rained down from defenders on the cliff top.
Tom crumpled. A black shaft protruded low on his rib cage. He lifted the rifle to Miles.
“Here. You take it,” he said. “I can’t hold it. Hurts too much.”
“But ….” Miles had never handled anything more powerful than a BB gun before. Tom shoved the rifle into his hands as he collapsed
The Crasacs below had collected their senses and made another charge at the ramp. Miles poked the rifle through a slot, closed his eyes and clicked off a quick burst. The barrel jerked and smacked against the stone. He opened his eyes. Another Crasac had fallen, but the rest continued charging up the ramp, with sabers drawn.
A thousand volts girded Miles courage as bolts skidded across slabs past the bunker. He took more careful aim, and kept his eyes open this time.
Tugga-tugga-tugga-tug!
And again, until the cartridge was empty, and not a Crasac soldier remained standing on the ramp.
Defenders splashed down the ramp past Miles who stepped out of the bunker, dazed. Some carried Tom away up to the cliff top. Others pounced on the wounded Crasacs and finished them off with daggers, stripping them of their weapons.
When they were done, they dragged the dead off the ramp and into a rain-flooded ditch. They patted Miles and bumped shoulders with him as they returned to their posts on the cliff top.
Miles wondered why he didn’t follow them. Instead he sat down in the bunker, staring alternately at the bloody pools Tom had left behind, at the dead Crasacs piled in the ditch and at the trees they had emerged from. He found a sack of bullets tucked into a crevice along with a spare cartridge. He fumbled with a latch on the hot rifle and swapped cartridges. He reloaded the empty as if it were second nature, as if he were born with an AK-47 in his hands.
***
After an hour or so, the rain began to slacken. Misty came down to the bunker.
“Liz sent me to fetch you,” she said.
“I … I can’t leave,” said Miles, trembling. “What if they come back?”
“If they come, they’re bringing more than they brought before. Liz says we should lay down arms. Especially … that one.” She nodded towards the rifle.
“She knows about it?” said Miles.
“How could she not? It about thundered off the mountains.”
“I’m not leaving,” said Miles. “Tom said they’d kill us even if we surrender.”
“Liz doesn't seem to think so," said Misty. "She thinks she can talk to them. I trust her judgment. She knows this place well.”
“I’m staying right here,” said Miles.
“Don’t you want to come up and have some food?”
“I got food,” he said patting the crusts of porridge in his pocket.
Misty sighed, and stared down to the cliff bottom to where the dead Crasacs lay.
“Oh Lordy … that’s no way to bury someone.”
“You go dig a hole,” said Miles. “I’m sticking right here.”
“Miles, you’re not thinking straight,” said Misty. “I think you’re traumatized or something.”
“I wanna stay.”
“Gun or no gun, you can’t hold off a whole army.”
“I don’t care.”
“Jeez, Miles, you’ve really gone bonkers.” Misty got up to leave.
r /> “How’s … Tom?” said Miles.
“Not so great,” said Misty, pausing. “He’s not bleeding as much. But he’s messed up inside.” She scuffed the ground with her foot. “Just so you know, Liz is livid about that gun. She gets a hold of it, she’s gonna snap it in two. If Tom wasn’t already dying, she’d kill him.”
“He gonna be okay?”
“You wanna go see him?” said Misty.
“No,” said Miles. “I’m staying right here.”
Chapter 15: The Visitors
Miles kept the barrel of the rifle pointed through a slot between two slabs. He had a few degrees of wiggle room covering two of the paths merging at the base of the cliffs.
His senses ran full-bore, still reeling from the incident that felled Tom. He knew the feeling too well. In high school he had survived a car accident that killed his best friend’s girlfriend as she sat unbuckled in the front seat. Jeremy took a slushy curve too fast driving home from a basketball game and rolled his Nissan into a swamp. Julia, ejected, smacked a red maple with her head and broke her neck. He remembered standing helpless over her, ankle deep in mud and ice, as they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
Hours later, back home and unscathed, he had sat up shaking in his dad’s easy chair, watching the snow slant through the porch light. Tremors like those afflicted him now.
Miles wrapped his arms around the stock and closed his eyes, ears attuned to any jingle of crockery on Tom’s trip wire. For an hour, at least, nothing stirred in the forest, not a bird, not a rodent, only the rain, weakened to intermittent spits and spurts, slapping against the crowns of the trees.
A whistle from the cliff top made him jump. The rifle would have perforated some trees if his finger hadn’t slipped off the trigger guard. Ellie came skipping down the ramp with a gourd enmeshed in braided twine. A crossbow dangled from her shoulder.
“I’ve brought you some lunch,” said Ellie. She didn’t look at him, her eyes passing from the bloodstains on the boulders to the ditch full of dead Crasacs. Her brow was furled. Her eyes looked red.
“Thanks,” said Miles. “But I’m not that hungry.”
“Take it,” she said. “There’re so many people at the farm. Some of us might be skipping dinner.”
“How’s Tom doing?” said Miles.
Ellie kept her eyes fixed on the trees below. “Mom’s with him. A healer from Xama made him a poultice, but the damage is inside. He doesn’t look so bad right now, but they say these kinds of wounds get worse before they get better.”
“Sorry to hear,” said Miles.
“You don’t have to stay down here, you know,” said Ellie. “We have lookouts on the cliff.”
Miles ignored her. Something had snapped in Miles during the attack. He felt rooted in place, compelled to remain in the bunker. He couldn’t bear the thought of being bottled up on the farm, not knowing if or when any soldiers swarmed up the ramp. Here, he could see them coming, and do something about it.
“Mom’s telling the refugees they should go into the hills, but many people are afraid to go.”
“Why, what’s up there?” said Miles.
“Meadows and mountains,” said Ellie. “But our uplands are full of barrows. It’s not a place where the living can be comfortable.”
Ellie shuffled impatiently, her eyes still scanning the forest.
“You coming then?”
“No,” said Miles.
“Then, I’ll be going,” said Ellie. “Mom says we can’t take on any more refugees. There’s just no place to put the ones that’re there already, never mind feed them. I’ve already told the folks on the cliff. They’ll do the talking if anyone else shows.”
Ellie trotted back up the ramp, Miles looked down at the gourd she had left and let go of the rifle he had gripped so tight, he had cramped the muscles in his fingers. He popped the lid off to find bits of cracker and cheese along with some indeterminate pickled vegetables that he found in the bottom of the gourd. He nibbled at chunk of gamey, salty cheese.
Lunch and a brightening sky helped restore some of Miles’ calm. He no longer expected to be assaulted from every tree. He found it hard to believe that he had killed several men and was quite ready to kill some more. In Greymore he had been barely brave enough to front a band. He was the type who ran from bar fights. Now here he was, Miles Pawluk, the champion of Lizbet’s farm.
Some champion. He was already toying with the idea of slipping away with the gun and making his way back to the car. The isolation of the moors had become a plus, offering respite from the chaos and violence that had overtaken the farm. There, he could sit in his own car, listen to his radio. Maybe his phone would work and he could speak to someone from his own world, someone who care about him and could help him find a way out of this hell hole.
Miles shut his eyes and listened for the tinkle of crockery.
***
No clanking forewarned the arrival of the voices this time. Miles wasn’t sure at first that they were real. Voices in his head were nothing new. He had seen a doctor once about it, concerned it might be the beginnings of schizophrenia or after-effects of drug abuse.
But the voices he heard now were nothing he could conjure. They varied in amplitude and tone. They had direction. No doubt, they were external.
They spoke loudly, showing no desire for stealth, no fear of being discovered. Miles couldn’t distinguish any words yet, but the rhythms and inflections of the speech sounded an awful lot like English.
He spotted their source before they spotted him, standing over the gully where the bodies of the slain soldiers had been deposited. They had come down a path along the cliff base that Tom had neglected to booby-trap.
Miles released the safety on his weapon and chambered a round, just in case. He watched as they crossed a log bridge over the rain-swollen gully, the taller, heavier man nearly slipping into the drink. They were coming this way.
One man spoke with an unmistakably East Coast American accent—a diluted and transmuted Bostonian. Between his grammar and inflections, the other man was obviously not a native speaker.
Miles swiveled around to get a better view out a different slot in the wall of the bunker. His finger slipped off the trigger guard.
Tugga-tugga-tug!
“Shit!”
He looked down. The tree tops dumped their water on the men. Bits of leaf spun down. One of the men—the American—lay in the undergrowth. Had Miles killed him? A bell clanged somewhere above the cliffs. Excited voices called to each other.
The shorter man, eyes fixed on the cliff face, stood his ground. He strode forward, unperturbed, and waved his arms.
“Hello!” he shouted. “We are friend. Friend!”
“Don’t move!” said Miles, voice cracking.
The American rose up on his knees. He looked unharmed. His companion kept coming at Miles.
“Damn it! I said, don’t move!”
Miles pulled the trigger intentionally this time, aiming low.
“Tugga tug!”
The bullets kicked up gravel in the short man’s path.
The cliff top swarmed with movement. Pebbles clattered down the face. The short man stopped and looked up at Miles, smiling weirdly, waggling his palms. Miles really didn’t want to shoot them. He just wanted them to go away. Ellie had told him explicitly that the farm couldn’t handle any more refugees.
But the shorter man kept moving forward, as if he knew Miles wouldn’t dare fire.
***
The shorter man was right. He came up the ramp and wangled Miles out of his bunker with sheer chutzpah and charm. The man, Tezhay, made it clear to Miles that he and his friend were no threat. Hearing them speak English to each other helped grease the skids, not to mention the fact that they mentioned Liz by name.
Miles led them up the switchback to the cliff top. He worried that Liz would be upset that he defied her orders and let two more refugees onto the farm. But these two didn’t seem like refugees. The
y acted like they had come here on business.
Miles endured a moment of awkwardness with the ruddy-faced American—Frank—who apparently mistook Miles for his own son. The implication made Miles’ stomach churn. When Frank went on to ask if Liz might be his mother, Miles didn’t find that idea nearly as disturbing.
Frank looked out of sorts. He had trouble breathing and he swayed as if he were about to topple over. He struggled to haul himself up the ramp.
Villagers looked on warily, long bows and crossbows at the ready, as they topped the cliffs. Ellie and Misty approached from the far end of the defenses, where the waterfall plunged and a heap of slabs and boulders created an alternative access into the vale.
The two visitors paused and stared up the lane as Liz came out of a barn and limped down to sort things out.
Miles grew fidgety away from the bunker. He returned to it in a rush, drawn by a force that was eldritch in its tenacity. His eyes focused back on the path to the river road.
Chapter 16: The Morgue
Tezhay recognized the tidy little vale tucked above the cliffs. He was certain that he had looked down on it from foothills now buried under mist and cloud.
A blunt but precipitous pinnacle—the core of a dead volcano—guarded its entrance. He remembered those twisted basaltic columns, striations like claw marks, as if a giant bear had mauled it.
More than a year had passed since he had last visited these uplands. Somewhere, up there among the hundreds of barrows pocking the face of the mountainside, a cache lay buried.
Tezhay wondered if anything remained of the materiel they had smuggled. The corroded rifle in the hands of that Urep’o boy did not bode well for the cache’s disposition.
“North of fourth,” said Tezhay, whispering the mnemonic a fellow conspirator had once shared with him.
Doctor Frank had stopped to catch his breath. He wobbled like a tree about to fall. Tezhay reached out a hand to steady him.
People gathered to gawk. So many! They couldn’t all live and work here. They were probably refugees from one of the smoldering villages along the river road.
Those defending the cliff were too poorly armed to be Nalkies. Some carried serviceable bows, but the rest wielded a hodgepodge of pitiful implements: hoes, hammers, pruning saws. They could have never withstood a Crasac assault without the aid of that assault rifle.