Lycan Fallout (Book 2): Fall of Man (33 page)

“Lana, I’ve met your father. He may be a bit on the hardheaded side, but he had to know that throwing in his lot with the Cajunites was not going to end well. As soon as Jangrut got what he wanted, he would most certainly attempt to expand his lands and become a modern day Genghis Khan.”

“Michael, they do not know what you refer to,” Azile said.

“Warlord, conqueror, despot, dictator, merciless ruler. Take your pick. I’m sure he will fit into the role nicely. So there you have it, Merrings. If anything, I should be paraded around the town as a hero for not giving arms to our enemies. Damn shame the same cannot be said about you. My vote for firing squad still stands.”

“I will not hear any more of it,” Gount said. “Merrings is a councilman and citizen in good standing.”

“Who also was willing to put every inhabitant of said township at risk. Although, I guess that does make him the perfect government employee. You need to send a message.”

“Perhaps if you are in such a rush to send this message, you should do it,” Gount said, I guess attempting to call my bluff. The problem with calling a bluff was that the person had to be bluffing.

I stood up. “Let’s go.” I walked over and yanked Merrings up by the shoulder. That was when all hell broke loose in that meeting. Merrings started bawling. Gount and Azile came up to stop me. Bailey wavered between whom to support.

“Michael, I do not believe this is the way this should be handled.” Azile had placed her hand on my arm. When she looked up to my face, she realized just how tightly my cordage was bound. My arms felt like steel bands ready to lash out. That all changed the moment one of Bailey’s guards burst through the door.

“Men in the tunnels!”

“That worked out well,” I told Merrings, slamming him back into his seat so hard he chipped more than one tooth from the impact.

“They’re…they’re supposed to wait for me to come back.”

“Funny thing about combatants, they very rarely do what you expect them to. Lead the way,” I told the guard. “Although I should put Merrings out in front and see how that goes.”

He shied away.

“Fucking politicians; always willing to stir up the shit as long as they don’t have to touch the stick.”

Bailey motioned for one of her men guarding the proceedings to keep watch on Merrings and then we headed out. We raced back to the entrance by the vault and headed down the stairs. I guess I’d been too enamored with all the rifles to notice the utilitarian door off to the side of the small opening. To be fair, I figured it was to a janitor’s closet or utility room at best, not a damned cool-ass tunnel.

There was a guard by the door and, as we approached, he whispered, “They’re about midway. I can see their torches.”

“Close that door,” I told Bailey just as she was about to descend down to the landing. I didn’t want the invaders to see any of the ambient lighting. We were plunged into darkness as the door clicked shut. “Do they know we know they’re coming?”

“I don’t think so or they don’t care,” the guard told me.

“Bailey?” This was still her town to defend. The call was hers.

She brushed past me and opened the tunnel door. “HALT!” she shouted as I held open the door. I couldn’t make out anything much more than a bright circle of light from the torch and maybe two or three faces, because they were still fairly distant. They were taking their time, being cautious; and why not? As of yet, they had no reason to think they’d been discovered. That changed with Bailey’s announcement.

The tunnel, for lack of a better term, was not much more than an underground corridor. Wider than a standard hallway by about double, so six maybe seven feet across, apparently enough to move whatever used to be shuttled back and forth.  It couldn’t have been too big, because it still had to make it through the doorway. With Bailey and me standing side by side, we took up a fair amount of the real estate. We were lucky when the bullet crashed into the steel doorway behind us. Bailey and I both retreated as more shots were fired. We quickly shut the door, two more rounds impacting it with a heavy thud.

“I guess they weren’t fond of your command.”

Bailey was breathing heavy. “I do not like being shot at.”

“No one does. Give me your weapon,” I told the guard. He looked to Bailey before she nodded her assent.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Payback. Step aside,” I told them all as I got ready to open the door. As soon as it was ajar enough, I placed the side of my rifle up against the doorjamb and started unloading my magazine. It felt more like bowling with bullets as I just sent lead down the alley, hoping to hit as many “pins” as possible. Blindly shooting rounds was not my favorite way to deal with the enemy, but in this case, it was effective. The ones who had not been hit and screaming for help were now in full-on retreat.

“That’ll give them something to think about,” I said as I handed the guard back his rifle, one magazine full of spent rounds lighter.

“They will not try that again,” the guard said.

“Oh, I doubt that. They’ll at least get some steel to deflect bullets and whatever else they can think of, to make it a living hell down there. Bailey, you’re going to want to heavily defend this doorway. They’ve found a way in and won’t soon forget it.”

“We’re already stretched thin.”

“I know that, and you know that. Let’s hope they don’t know that.”

“Damn you, Merrings.” She started to make her plans while I went to find Azile. She was still in the council room along with Lana and Gount. They were alone and suspiciously stopped talking when I entered.

“It’s shit like that that will make a man paranoid.”

“We were discussing what we would be willing to do should the need to surrender be forced upon us,” Gount said. He looked like he’d aged twenty years in the last few days.

“Have you guys not been listening to what I’ve been saying? We cannot surrender. Jangrut, at the very least, will not allow it. There will be nothing left of Talboton or its inhabitants. It will be wiped clean from the landscape much like Atlantis to become more myth than any actual reality, although there was that one time with Trip and Jack. Forget I said anything.”

Lana and Gount might not know what exactly Atlantis was, but you didn’t really need to know to get the gist of my words. If Gount, the town leader, was already feeling like throwing in the towel, what would the rest of the community feel like? I couldn’t necessarily fault these people; they weren’t used to this kind of sustained stress. Defending the town previously, had probably mostly consisted of aggressive coyotes trying to get to livestock or maybe the occasional pushy traveling salesman. War was a whole other thing altogether. Watching a friend get killed could sap the will from a seasoned veteran and these people were about as green as Kermit the Frog.

“I suggest you all get to safer places. They’ll attack soon.”

“My father wouldn’t dare,” Lana interjected.

“Well, we’ll know soon enough who’s in charge I suppose.” I walked Azile outside. She was leaning on me heavily. I’d like to think part of it was her showing affection, but it was more of me propping her up rather than anything else.

“Can you please help me get to the parapet?”

“Why don’t you go lie down instead? You feel light as a feather. What the hell did you do in your room?” I asked, referring to her black candle spell making session.

“I’ll be fine.”

I stayed up with her on that wall, not because I didn’t have a hundred other things I figured needed doing, but I was afraid that, if a stiff breeze came along, she might need someone to anchor her down and keep her from flight.

“I can sense the tension within you. You should go.” She had pulled her cloak tight around her throat as if she were trying to keep an ill wind away.

“I’ll leave when you do.”

“What is happening in the tunnel?”

“For now, they have discovered they very much don’t like being shot. Jangrut will figure that problem out soon enough and then I guess we’ll have enemies at both gates.”

“I, like you, mistakenly thought Talboton could not be beaten.”

“Why is everyone already giving up? Maybe you should just start blasting people with fireballs from your hands.”

“You mean like Mario?” She smiled.

She was talking about one of my favorite video games of all time, Super Mario, and a fireball power-up he could attain if he ate a fire plant. My son and I would play it for hours. I got that heavy feeling in my chest as the past gripped my heart and gave it a cold twist of fate. I pushed the melancholy as far back as I could.

“Yeah, like Mario,” I answered sadly.

“If only I could. My powers are based much more in the realm of protection and healing.”

“The Red Witch is a doctor and social worker. Who would have thought that?”

“Killing is easy, you should know that.”

I think I may have recoiled.

“I’m…I’m sorry. I did not mean it like that. You should go. I promise I’m going back in soon. I just want to get some fresh air, and you should be there when they make another assault on the tunnel. Just don’t go getting in the middle of it.”

“Alright, I promise I won’t do anything untold if you promise you’re going in soon.”

She looked straight into my eyes and lied just like I had done to her. In fairness, neither of us had known at that exact moment we were being anything but up front. Rapidly unfolding events, as always, would dictate necessary actions to deal with them. I kissed her tenderly on the lips, realizing that, for once, she felt colder than me. Who would have thought when dealing with the Lord of Lies and Keeper of the Flame of Hatred that one could have heat taken from them? Makes sense, though, nothing much more desolate than a wintry soul.

I was down and halfway to my destination when I turned around to look. I could barely make out Azile’s form, her back was to me and her head was tilted up. Perhaps she was hoping to feel the warming rays of a sun that was no longer shining. I needed to be more careful. It was my actions that had brought her to that place within herself. The events of the night would prove my mother right when she used to say, “In one ear and out the other, as if there is no brain inside that thick head of yours to interpret the message.” This was usually punctuated with her tapping the side of my head after I’d done something else that defied logical explanation.

Hey, I’m sorry, but if a supermarket forgets to lock its doors after hours, then the contents within are fair game. The assistant manager decided to not press charges, considering it was he who forgot to lock the door. He was just happy that he had received the call and not his boss. At first, they were going to make me pay the twenty-eight dollars and fifty-seven cents for the boxes of Devil Dogs I’d motored through, but when I turned my pockets inside out to reveal I had a whopping five bucks on me, the assistant manager let it completely go. He, however, did not let me take the four other boxes I had in my hands. What can I say? I had the munchies. The cops had driven me home to make sure I didn’t get in any more trouble.

“Thanks, Pete,” I had told the cop as he opened the door. I knew most of the town cops on a first name basis, something I shouldn’t have been too proud of.

“Gonna have to let your mother know about this one, Mike.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve already let you off a half dozen times…plus, she’s looking through the window. She’s never going to believe you if you tell her that I just gave you a lift.”

“Not cool, Pete.”

“Wipe the damn filling from your face. You look like you shoved your face in a cake.”

My mother was furious, and that was when she gave me the good old smacking upside the head. I had deserved it. I was fifteen, stoned out of my gourd, and had been happily eating snack cakes on the floor of the local supermarket when the cops had found me. In hindsight, I should have maybe just grabbed a dozen boxes and left, but the odds were good that I would have left a trail of wrappers all the way to my house. I missed Devil Dogs, I missed Pete, hell, I missed my mother, and we really hadn’t even gotten along all that well. By the time my nostalgic thoughts were over, I found myself back at the door to the tunnel.

“Anything new?”

“We’ve heard noise, but Bailey told us not to open the door until either you or she returned.”

“What’s your name?”

“Moland.”

“Like Poland with an M?”

He just looked at me.

“You in charge of these men?”

He nodded. There were an even dozen—about all Bailey could afford to spare with the conflict about to begin anew.

“Alright, Moland, have one of your men take this torch out of here. I need to see what our party crashers are up to. Make sure he shuts the door up top as well. There may not be much light, but any down here will stick out.”

He did as I asked. I waited a couple of seconds, part of that spent thinking on how quickly I had gone back on the words I’d just told Azile. I rationalized by saying it was something that needed to be done, and that I would not jeopardize another’s life when I could just as easily do it myself. I could only hope she put more stock in her words than I had mine.