The Sentinel (26 page)

Two rumbles fill the ruins at once. The first is the Zodiac engine as it roars to life. The spinning propeller is a wonderful thing to see. The second rumble is the top half of the wall behind Jakob crumbling down.

Jakob hobbles away from the falling wall, but a few of the stones catch his foot. His injured foot. He shouts in pain, but manages to stay on his feet. Willem catches his father and helps him stay up.

The wall behind them crumbles under a fresh blow from Torstein’s giant, double bladed axe. He’s exposed from the waist up. This close up I can see his braided blond beard and hair. His eyes are large and white, twitching with movement. The parasites are watching us. The Viking giant still retains a lot of his muscle, which makes him stronger than the others.

Is that why the wall is crumbling beneath his blows and not the others
? I wonder.
Or do they want our attention on him
?

Before I can voice my concern, Willem snatches the boat engine from his father, hoists the spinning propeller up in front of him, twists the throttle and charges Torstein. The big Draugr swings his axe at Willem, but the blow is blocked by the wall, which crumbles some more.

Willem climbs up the spilled stones and shoves the propeller at Torstein’s chest. The blades bite flesh with a wet grinding sound. Bits and pieces of partially decayed skin and bone spray out like Fourth of July fireworks.

But Torstein is undaunted by the attack. He raises the axe over his head. If he brings it down, he might well split Willem in half.

Willem shoves hard, burying the propeller blade deep into Torstein’s chest.
Is he trying to reach Torstein’s spine
? I think. If he is, the attempt fails when the blade catches on something it can’t chew through. And when the blade stops spinning, the engine starts spinning. The sudden twist of the engine throws Willem to the floor just as Torstein brings the blade down. Luck saves Willem twice in the span of a few seconds.

As the engine spins, its weight and momentum throws Torstein off balance and the giant stumbles back for a moment, taking the engine with him.

We’d do a lot better if we didn’t keep handing them our weapons
!

“We need to get out of here,” I shout.

“We’re still surrounded,” Chase replies.

“Which way is north?” I ask. I’m so turned around I can’t tell.

I scan the walls. Torstein battles to remove the engine on one end. A moving shadow to my left reveals the boy is recovering. The wall to my right shakes from repeated strikes where the blacksmith attempts to break through. And the wall behind me—

Chase points to the wall, eyes wide with fright. “That way,” he says. “North is that way.”

The dog-master pulls himself nearly to the top of the wall behind me. Torstein
was
distracting us.

“Willem!” I shout. “The sword!”

Willem pulls the sword out from his belt and moves to strike the dog master.

“No!” I shout. “There’s a better way!” I reach out for the sword. Willem looks doubtful for a moment, but then hands the weapon over. I move to the fire at the center of the ruins. The flames have dulled, though the stench has not. An occasional pop and sizzle marks the death of another parasite. But I’m not interested in any of that.

I shove the tip of the blade into the still burning dog’s eye socket. I lift the head up, take aim and fling the thing. It sails through the air like Greek fire from a catapult and strikes the dog-master’s shoulder. It’s a glancing blow, but it’s enough. The copious amount of furs the dog master wears burst into flames. The heat forces us all back a few steps, but then the undead bonfire falls back off the wall and the heat is hidden behind the stones.

Given the intensity of the flames, I’m sure the dog-master is done for. The path north is clear.

“Time to go,” I say.

“Willem,” Jakob says, limping towards his son. “Leave me here.”

“What?” Willem looks horrified. “Never.”

“I can barely walk,” Jakob says. “You won’t make it with me.”

For a moment, Willem looks like he might actually be considering it. I sense there’s some kind of macho Viking, “
let me die in battle
,” bullshit happening here and put a stop to it before it can go any further.

“The hell is wrong with you two?” I say. “Willem, pick your fucking father up and carry him.” I turn to Chase. “Think you can set the explosives?”

“No problem,” he says.

“Just wait to set the timer,” I say.

Chase salutes.

“I’ll cover our rear,” I say.

Willem looks about ready to argue, but I cut him off. “You have your father. Chase has the explosives.” I brandish the sword and gun. “And I’ve got the weapons. Now help me push.”

I turn to the north facing wall and push against it. It shifts a little, but not enough. Chase throws himself against the wall. Then Willem. Even Jakob, standing on one leg, puts his weight into it. The wall tilts away from us and then spills over, covering the smoldering dog-master with a thousand pounds of stone.

The other walls are weakened by the sudden crumbling and begin to fall inward. Before being crushed, Chase leads the charge out over the dog-master’s corpse. Willem throws his father over his shoulder and follows. I leave the ruins just as the walls collapse and three sets of white eyes turn toward me. Seeing the three of them, out in the open like this, is terrifying. But perhaps even more frightening is the fact that the raven is nowhere to be seen.

A problem for another time, I think, and then leap off the crumbled wall and hit the ground running.

38

Half way to the gorge, I glance over my shoulder and see brown teeth stretching out toward me. The apprentice is quick! But there’s something different about him, something that keeps me from panicking at his proximity. He’s smaller than the others, but that’s not it. Nor is it the fact that he’s not brandishing a weapon of some sort.

Then I see it. It’s his mouth. His stretched back skin and open maw give me a view of his mouth that only a dentist could love. And what I see is a normal looking tongue. Well, as normal as it could after being preserved by clear slime for six hundred years. Unlike the others, the apprentice’s tongue has no white dots. The parasites controlling him aren’t trying to infect me.

They’re trying to eat me.

And while that
should
disturb me, being eaten alive would be a far better fate than becoming a Draugr. Not only would I be under the control of parasites and potentially attack and kill people, but I’d also have to spend the rest of my eternal life with this rank-ass Viking zombie horde.

The apprentice’s teeth clack together as he takes a bite and finds only empty space. I take a wild swing with the sword and have the same crappy luck as the Draugr. Running and fighting at the same time is hard and for fifty feet we repeat the dance of missed bites and sword swings.

As my shoulder starts to burn from the previous day’s furious rowing and today’s repetitious swinging, and I start to feel rather stupid, I change things up. Instead of swinging after he bites, I let him take three bites in a row. Each is closer then the last, but I want him in close, and I want to find his rhythm. By the fifth bite, I’ve got the timing down—he takes a chomp every three steps.

On his sixth attempt, I swing with the sword and make contact. The impact shudders up my arm and I nearly lose my grip on the sword. When I can’t pull the blade back, I realize it’s snagged on something. I look back and see it wedged in the apprentice’s face. With a twist, I yank the blade free and get a good look at the damage. I’ve severed his lower jaw, and tongue, clean off. If my strike had been harder, I might have taken off his head. On the plus side, he won’t be eating anyone soon.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t still take me down and hold me until pappy blacksmith arrives. The big Draugr’s jangling tool belt is loud as he charges toward me, just twenty feet back. Torstein brings up the rear. He’s moving fast, but not nearly fast enough. That sounds wrong, but I want these three together in the gorge.

Of course, I don’t want them this close to me either, or I get buried along with them. I need to do something to slow them down.

I still have just one round left in the gun, but I’m holding the gun in my left hand and I’m running. So odds are I’ll miss. I could probably hack the legs off the apprentice, but then he wouldn’t get buried. Inspiration comes from Chase’s story of how he tripped the blacksmith.

With the apprentice still hot on my heels, and making the occasional lunge forward like he’s still got a lower jaw, I veer to the side and slow myself just enough so that he pulls up beside me. He bites at open air again—I swear he’s the dumbest of the Draugar, which might actually be because he was a boy rather than an experienced hunter, when they took his mind. When he realizes I’m next to him instead of in front of him, he begins to close the gap.

When I strike, I’m sure there are a thousand little parasite minds in his body all thinking, “What the fuck just happened!?” I take the sword and poke it between his legs. When he takes his next step, both legs strike the flat side of the hard metal and the undead kid launches forward. One more clumsy fall for the zombie Youtube sensation.
If only I had Peach’s camera
.

The trouble is, when the apprentice’s legs lock onto the sword, it’s yanked from my hands and sent spinning back toward the blacksmith. No time to go back for it. But the same motion that took my sword also frees the hammer embedded in the apprentice’s chest. I stop for the briefest of moments, snag the hammer and start my sprint again.

To my delight, the blacksmith stumbles over his apprentice and slows. I can picture the scene, had the man still been living. He’d curse the boy loudly, maybe even strike him, and no doubt work him hard for weeks. But now he just stumbles and moves forward without so much as a stern look. My imagining reminds me that these were once people. And maybe their consciousnesses are still alive in there somewhere. These men once fought hard to wipe this plague from the face of the Earth. They sacrificed so much, killing friends and family, and chasing the raven to this Godforsaken place only to become the thing they hated most.

I’ll do my best to kill you all
, I think. Then I’m at the gorge. Willem is far ahead. He disappears around a bend. Chase is nowhere in sight.

A quick look back reveals the blacksmith closing in. The apprentice is right behind him. Torstein has closed the gap a bit, but he’s still not part of the group.

Another quick sprint brings me to a bend where I’ll lose sight of the Draugar. The blacksmith and apprentice enter the gorge, undeterred. But Torstein stops at the entrance. I can feel him looking at me, his perpetual grin mocking me like he’s got everything all figured out.

“C’mon,” I yell at him, feeling a little like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator. “Come get me!”

But the giant won’t budge and his friends close the distance. I round the corner, see Chase in the distance and start counting how long it takes me to bridge the gap.

Twenty-seven seconds as I reach his side. Willem and Jakob wait for us further down the path. Jakob stands on one foot. Willem stretches his back.

“Twenty seven seconds!” I say quickly, out of breath.

“What?” Chase says.

“The times! Set them for twenty-seven—”

“Oh!” he says. “Good thinking.”

“Start them when they come around the corn—”

Here they come. They’re screwing up the timing. “Go!” I shout.

“I’m trying! Go ahead!” Chase is working the small timer quickly. This is the first time he’s looked at it and it takes him a few seconds to figure out. When it looks like he’s got it, I take his advice and run for it. It feels strange leaving Chase behind. I’m used to it being the other way around.

“All set!” he shouts from behind me, but the C4 is going to explode about ten seconds too late. Maybe some shrapnel will get them.

Up ahead, Willem and Jakob take cover behind a five foot thick outcrop of stone. It should protect us from the blast, assuming we don’t collapse the entire gorge.

As I slide to a stop next to Willem, Chase is still fifty feet back, and he’s not running very fast. Then I see why. He’s setting a second timer. Holy shit. And a third!

“Chase,” I say, my voice full of concern.

The Draugar pass the first explosive. Ten seconds remain on the timer.

Chase lobs one brick of C4 and then the other.

Then he runs like the roadrunner on speed. He’s nearly reached our hiding spot when the first explosion tears through the gorge.

And then through Chase’s body.

39

Chase’s scream lasts just a fraction of a second before he’s past us and either dead or unconscious. That I actually heard him over the explosion is a testament to the power of his lungs. I don’t know if he survived the blast, but I do know that he won’t survive the next two. A cloud of gray dust billows past, fouling the air and concealing Chase’s body. I cover my mouth with my arm, and search for Chase. He lays in a heap, just ten feet away, but fully exposed.

Without looking to see if the first explosion did its job, I lunge for Chase’s limp body.

“Jane!” Willem shouts. “Don’t!”

But I can’t just leave Chase there, not when he finally switched his wiring over from flight to fight. I grab the first part of his body I reach—his left foot—and drag him toward shelter. Half way there, Willem takes his other leg and together we heave him behind the outcrop just as the chasm turns to hell.

The first explosion was bad enough. It felt like a punch to the gut, made my ears ring and chocked the air with dust. The second, and then third, are much closer. The sound, contained and amplified within the gorge drops me to my knees. The impact, even hidden behind the thick wall of stone, is like a sledgehammer to the back of my head, knocking me flat on my back. And the air, hot, fast and full of tiny stone particles, does nothing to replenish the oxygen sucked from my lungs. All this happens in a single second.