Eden's Children (Earth Exiles Book 2) (15 page)

Mike stopped about fifty feet from the edge of the city.  “What do you think?  Should we go in?” he asked.

They studied the city before them.  Nothing moved.  Whatever happened here happened a long time ago.

“I’m not seeing anything that looks dangerous.  It’s quicker to go through than to go around,” Everett answered.  The others agreed.

Mike walked to one of the streets that led into the city.  Dust from the ground swirled around their feet as they walked, laying low across the ground until the capricious wind caught it and whipped away.  Debris beneath their feet crunched as they walked.

“Mike.”

Mike looked up and over at Mickey, “Yeah, Mickey, what’s up?”

Mickey pointed, “Look over there.”

A yellowed skull lay in the shattered remnants of a doorway.  They crunched over to the skull.  It looked like a human skull, small and fragile.  The skull wasn’t the only bone present.  There were skeletal remains, ribs, part of a vertebrae.  It looked incredibly brittle, probably lying there for years, possibly centuries, at the mercy of the elements.  To Mike’s eyes, they looked very small, maybe a woman or child, but he couldn’t judge, not knowing the species of human.  Mike’s gaze tracked down from the skull to the gravel under his feet, “Oh, good God.”

“What?”

Mike pointed down, “Bones.”

The team looked down at their feet.  Mike was right.  Crushed bone littered the street.  They looked along the street, towards the middle of the town, and multiple remains were suddenly recognizable in the debris.  Mike hoped they weren’t human, but the skull seemed to indicate otherwise.  He felt like an interloper, intervening in the isolation of their ruin.  They started walking.

The town was a necropolis.  Skeletons of the dead lay haphazard in the dirt, debris reclaiming the city.  The team was skittish when they started walking, trying to avoid stepping on the bone.  It was unavoidable, though.  Chips of shattered bone were everywhere.   Crushed bone gave way to intact skeletons.  The skeletons gave mute evidence to the horror that had been visited on these people.  Ghastly injuries attested to violent death.  Shattered skulls, severed long bones, and crushed ribs told a story of terror and futility.  Death had come violently for this town.  It had been a bloody slaughter.

As they followed the street, one thing became evident.  The townspeople had been herded to a central location.  Skeletons and grinning skulls became more prevalent as they walked.  Then, the epicenter of the horror opened up to them, revealing the magnitude of the slaughter.  The road ended in an open area.  It was the center of town.  The buildings here were still mostly intact, partially buffered from the ravages of time and weather by the structures surrounding it.

The team stopped, overcome by the spectacle before them.  Time had done nothing to erase the impact of the scene.

“Oh, Jesus,” Tom exclaimed.  Roberto and Mickey both made the sign of the cross.

Skeletons were piled on top of skeletons.  Nobody had been spared.  Babies, toddlers, children and their parents had been murdered by the hundreds.  This was the place they’d made their last stand, herded here by God knew what.

Mike and the team had seen horrors in war.  Nothing could have prepared them for this.  It wasn’t the fact that human beings had been slaughtered.  No, that was pretty standard for the warzones that Mike had been in.  It was the sheer quantity.  What hit Mike the hardest were the small ones, the delicate skeletons of children that died screaming, the frail bones hacked and shattered.  The humanity of the skeletons seemed violated by the dirt and weeds, punctuating the bleakness of the remains.

Mike choked up.  He looked back at the team, and saw the stricken looks on their faces.  It took a hard man to not be moved by what they saw.  He turned back to look at the sad, scattered detritus of lost lives, “There’s easily a thousand skeletons here.  And that’s only the complete ones.  God alone knows how many others died here.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and heard the hoarseness of Everett’s voice, “We can’t do anything here.  Let’s go.”

Mike nodded.  A bleakness settled into his soul.  He turned, and started walking towards the other side of the city.  The team fell in behind him, turning away from the ancient slaughter.  They worked their way towards the other side of the city, hoping to put this horror behind them.

As they walked, they scanned the area.  The death was ancient, but they were alert for hostiles.  They left the city center, and the pattern of slaughter reversed as they walked away.  The frequency of skeletons decreased.  That was the main reason that Tom noticed the pile of ancient bones on a side street.

Tom pointed, “Hey guys, I see something.”

Tom took the lead down the street.  This was different, a jumble of old skeletons more concentrated than the surrounding area.  Mike noticed something else.  Red streaks marked the slow oxidation of iron, rusted flakes indicating the age of the ancient conflict, wooden handles left lying haphazardly.

“This was where they fought,” Mike said, pointing at the tools.  His voice sounded odd in the silence.

Everett nodded.  It was possible.

Something drew Mike’s eye.  It was dark cloth, waving randomly as the breeze picked at it.  It was the only thing moving.  The fact that cloth remained was unusual.  They hadn’t seen any cloth on the remains.  It was definitely from the time of the slaughter, though.  Skeletal remains lay over the black cloth.

Mike pointed it out.  Tom walked over to it, and gently placed the bones to the side.  Mike could only wonder at the bravery of men that saw their destruction and chose to confront it despite the futility. Tom tugged on the cloth, and dirt fell away.  He recoiled from what he saw.

“What the hell is that?”

Mike looked at Tom, then suddenly noticed that everybody else was focused on him as well.

“Okay guys, we need security.  Eyes out.”

Discipline reasserted itself, the team realizing their error.  They faced out, looking up and down the street as Tom and Mike investigated.  Mike looked down to see what Tom had found.

It was definitely unusual.  It was mechanized, the metal pitted, but not rusted, covered by a dark, black cloth.  Mike didn’t know what kind of metal it was, but it hadn’t oxidized the way the iron tools had.  That in itself was unusual, considering the condition of the tools the townspeople had fought with.

Mike squatted down next to it, and started pushing aside the dirt to get a better look.  Metal was deformed, straight lines bent, servos and gears shattered.  The metal construct had taken a tremendous beating.  Mike became concerned as his tugging revealed more.  He was looking at a construct that was built to kill.  Serrated teeth on a metal jaw that was designed to rip and tear.  Four legs, the ‘paws’ of the creature had long, pointed claws.  It had clusters of sensors on the left and right sides of the head.

Mike looked down the street to a dead end, then back the way that they came from, “Looks like they had this one trapped.”

Tom tilted his head toward the skeletons, “That might be why they ganged up on it.  It couldn’t get away.”

Mike stepped back, “It doesn’t look like it did them any good.”

“Well, maybe not, but they took one to hell with them.”

Everett spoke, “This place keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

“As if it couldn’t get weird enough with the damn dragons,” Rob added.

Mickey the brawler, the man who started bar fights, settled them, then used his combat medic skills to stitch up his adversaries, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back again, agitated.  “This place gives me the creeps,” his voice rumbled.

“Yeah, me too.  Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mike pointed toward the larger street behind them.  They walked back to the street and turned back in the direction that would take them out of the town.

They walked toward the edge of town.  As they walked, the wind picked up.  A sudden, cold wind whistled through the street, making Mike shiver.

“Damn, that wind’s cold!” Rob exclaimed.

The sun was getting low in the sky.  Mike was uneasy about the town, but anything that happened here, happened long ago.  The thought of sleeping out in the open tonight, in the cold, made Mike think that staying in town might not be a bad idea.  He turned to Everett, “What do you think about staying in one of the buildings tonight?”

Everett had to think about, but then he acquiesced, “I don’t have a problem with it.”

Mike turned to the team, “What about you guys?  You have a problem staying in town tonight?”

“I think that’s a good idea, Mike,” Tom answered.  Mickey and Rob agreed.  Matki looked around at the town, then shrugged his shoulders.  It looked like they were going to stay in town.

On the far edge, they found a two story building.  There was no problem getting in, the the warped door knocked from the frame, lying inside the room.  The first floor was trashed, with broken tables, chairs, and other debris on the floor.  There were stairs in the corner made from stone.  Mike walked to them to scope out the upper floor.  The railing had collapsed and was strewn across the stairs.  Mike kicked it out of the way and walked up, his rifle pointed up, leading the way.  The second floor was better, much less debris, though the remnants of a bed had collapsed in the middle of the room.  The bedding and mattress were junk, well on their way to becoming dust.  The rafters were still in place, but the roof was mostly gone.  Shuttered windows were placed across the walls.

Mike walked back down the stairs and hooked a thumb up towards the second floor, “I think this will be the best place.”

The team followed him up, and everybody staked their claim to a portion of the floor for the night.  Mickey and Rob pitched what was left of the bedding out the window, the dust making everybody sneeze.  The bed frame was too big to bother with, and could be used for a fire, so they stacked it up in the corner.  Tom rounded up kindling from downstairs and started a fire for dinner.  He stacked the wood, and then, when it was lit, he used a stick to move the wood around to get the blaze going.  Matki started making tea for everyone.

Tom poked the fire with a stick, “You guys ever been to Bamiyan?”

“You mean in Afghanistan?” Rob asked.

Tom nodded, “yeah, where the Taliban blew up the faces off of the Buddha’s.”

Rob shook his head, “No, I never got up there.”

“Genghis Khan’s grandson was killed there.  The hill where the locals fought the Mongols is called the hill of one thousand screams.  Genghis Khan killed every last person, even the women and children.”

Rob picked up a cup of tea from the fire, “I guess this is the city of a thousand screams.”

Tom kept poking the fire.  People retired to their sleeping bags, and the night grew quiet.

----------------------------------------------------

He felt the hand go over his mouth, and he reached for his knife.  The other hand clamped down on his wrist so that the knife couldn’t leave the scabbard.  He opened his eyes.  Everett looked down at him.  When Everett was certain that Mike wouldn’t pull the knife, he slowly let go, then placed one finger across his lips.  He pointed downstairs, and put his hand to his ear to mimic listening.

Mike listened, and he heard what Everett was concerned about.  Something was moving through the debris on the bottom floor.  Mike nodded his understanding.  Everett slowly moved around the room, waking each person, making sure they were fully awake before he moved onto the next one.  Mike slowly pulled on his boots, and laced them up.  He looked over and saw Tom’s silhouette, his rifle pointing at the top of the stairs.  Mike could see a faint glow of green cast from Tom’s starlight monocular around the left eye.  Mike knew there was an infrared laser tracking Tom’s aiming position.

It was impossible to shoot at a target at night and have any great expectation of hitting anything with any accuracy.  Because of this, Special Operations had developed a technique back in the nineteen-nineties, when Starlight NVGs were first used.  The primary weapon, in this case, Tom’s rifle, had an IR laser attached to it.  The laser was usually zeroed to hit about a hundred, hundred and fifty yards out, the expectation being that the bullet would still hit anything even though the curvature of the ballistics could send it two to three inches higher or lower from the aim point, depending on how close the enemy was.  Tom knew this, and aimed accordingly.

Mike wasn’t able to see what was happening without a monocular.  He didn’t see the IR laser, and he wasn’t able to see what Tom shot when he pulled the trigger.  The rifle thundered, the muzzle flash momentarily illuminating the room.

“Got it!” Tom exclaimed.

Everett flicked on his flashlight.  The light played over the destroyed remains.  The .338 Lapua had done major damage.  The head was destroyed, the shock from the round causing the head to explode.  Fluids leaked out.  Even from where he was, sitting on the ground, Mike could see the construct.  The team got up and walked over to the robot.  It wasn’t exactly like the one they found previously, but Mike could tell that the same engineer had designed it.  This one didn’t have jaws and claws.  Instead, it had extra sensors clustered around the head.  The same black cloth hid the mechanism within.  They made sure it was really dead, then Rob kicked it down the stairs.