Natural Consequences (9 page)

Alex stumbled through the crowd—rudely, but if the fools didn’t know by now to keep their heads down, it was their own stupid fault. Served them right if a sniper took them out. Several protested, a couple even shoved back at him, but he had to get out.

His body shook with fear. He had to get out.

“Stay here, ye daft bastard!”

“Sergeant, it’s a mess out there,” Alex grunted.

“Man, get the fuck off me!”

“Help me! Someone help me!”

“Ow! Watch it, asshole!”

“My leg… I need help…”

“I can’t move. Don’t leave me here!”

“Don’t even think about it, Shanahan!”

Alex broke free into the aisle, stumbling to his hands and knees in the darkness. Everything was wet from the rain, but at least he could move. He hustled to his feet and ran.

Sergeant Tinney called after him, telling him to get back under cover, but he’d never liked Tinney, anyway. He stayed low as he rushed out of the auditorium. He didn’t ask where the door came from. He just pushed his way through it.

Neither the bright lights nor open, welcoming space of the lobby registered in his mind. He saw only darkness and mud, felt only the rain on his skin and the weary ache of his muscles, and heard the silence shattered by an artillery shell as the door behind him slammed shut again.

He flung himself to the ground and covered up. It was just a single shell. He waited, heard nothing more, and rose into a crouching position to continue toward the voices.

Everything was mud and darkness and more mud. There was precious little light to see by, as the flares never stayed in the air long. Back in ’14, all this artillery would have left more than a few things burning. Three years later, there was nothing left to burn.

Aidan crept and crawled along, heading out to the closest cry for help. At the bottom of a watery crater he found a fellow trooper lying in the mud. The man must’ve been wounded, though in this light Aidan couldn’t see how. The water was already up to his shoulders
. It seemed all the man could do to sit mostly upright. “Can you move?” hissed Aidan.

“I’ve one leg
shot, but the other’s fine… just stuck in the mud to the knee,” the man said. “Trapped.” His words came out haltingly as he fought through pain. “I can move if I get unstuck.”

A
flare went into the sky, offering Aidan a clearer look at the crater. He thought better of rolling in. A man could easily sink both legs into that sort of bog. Jumping straight in would only leave two men trapped in the mud. “Half a moment,” Aidan warned, and crept away looking for wiser of options.

Soon
, he found a couple planks of wood amid the remains of a wagon. Aidan crawled back over with them, wishing there was more in the way of cover or shadow out here as he waited out the flickering light of another flare.

The fellow in the crater stared
down at something white and grey in his hands. “Hey, I’m back,” Aidan hissed. “Hey! Chum!” Aidan wondered how rattled the man was. He seemed absorbed with his little photograph. “Look here! I’m going to get you out!”

The man looked up. Aidan saw another flare go overhead, cursed at their frequency, and hugged the ground. That was when he recognized his company commander. “Captain Westerbrook?”

The captain just shrugged and looked down at his photo. “Captain,” Aidan whispered urgently, “snap out of it, sir! I’ve got these boards. Put them by your leg so I’ll have something to stand on. We’ll dig you out.”

No response. Aidan fumed, then tossed the boards down into the crate
r and slipped inside after them. Several times the mud threatened to envelop his foot or his hand, but Aidan trudged through it.

“Captain?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t have come,” the other man mumbled.

“Aye, you and me both, sir,” Aidan agreed, his cheerful Irish accent contrasting with the captain’s morose tones.

“I was married before I left,” Westerbrook continued. “Should’ve stayed.”

“That her?” Aidan asked, not bothering to look as he fished out the boards and set them around Westerbrook’s trapped leg.

The captain sniffed. He nodded, though Aidan didn’t see. “Chelsea.”

“Huh. That’s funny. I’ve a girl named Chelsea, too,” Aidan grinned, probing for the captain’s leg with his shovel. “
Londoner like yourself, actually. Met before the war. Alright, sir, I’m gonna give this a shove and try to get your foot some slack, y’see?” He heard the hiss of a flare above them.

“Got to stay
quiet, sir,” Aidan warned, glancing up at the flare as it soared overhead, then down at the captain, and the captain’s wedding picture.

It was dark and wet
. Shadows and light danced across the photograph as the flare carried on into the night, but Aidan would have known that smile anywhere.

“Son of a bitch,” Aidan murmured
. He stared down into the blackness that followed when the light disappeared from the crater. The captain sniffled.

You can’t leave him here,
said a voice in his head.
He’s too important. More important than you.

Aidan fumed and fought with himself, but he didn’t lash out
. He didn’t strike the other man in the head with his shovel, or unsling his rifle and shoot him, or accuse him of stealing Aidan’s girl while he was off to war and Westerbrook was still in school. He thought about doing all those things, of course, but the voice in his head was half right. Westerbrook wasn’t more important than Aidan; he was just another stupid officer. But Aidan couldn’t leave him here. Despite his sins against Aidan—and hell, knowing Chelsea, Westerbrook probably hadn’t a clue—the man didn’t deserve to die out here like this. No one deserved to die alone in a muddy pit.

He
leaned in on his shovel, dug into the ground along the side of Westerbrook’s calf and ankle, and fought to give him some space to pry out his foot.

The rain kept falling. Another flare went up. “Move, damn you, sir,” Aidan grunted and shoved
. He put his shoulder into the other man’s ribs just to snap him out of it. “Move, for Christ’s sake! You want to see her again or drown out here?”

Westerbrook regained his wits. He put his free foot on Aidan’s other board, leaned over Aidan’s shoulders and
struggled to pull his leg out of the mud. Together, they felt him come loose.

“Alright, I’ll give you a boost up and out,” Aidan huffed. He staggered over to the edge of the crater with Westerbrook, wondering absently where he’d find the strength to do this for the next man in the next crater. He put his hands together
to give the captain’s mud-soaked good foot a boost and heaved upward. Westerbrook pulled himself up and over, flopping down onto the ground outside.

The rain had picked up. Even standing at the edge, it was almost waist high. Aidan dug his hands in
to the mud, working to climb his way out as another flare passed overhead.

Aidan
didn’t hear the sniper shot that struck him in the small of the back. The pain overrode his other senses. It was more as if he’d remembered hearing the rifle shot rather than actually registering it as it happened. His eyes, squeezing shut in the instant of impact, opened to see Westerbrook shuffling away into the night, looking back once but not stopping to help.

Aidan sank down along the crater wall. He hurt too much to move his legs at first, but as he breathed and focused and tried to overcome
the pain, he realized there was more to his inability to move than just the shock. That bullet had hit him quite near the center of his back, and exited out, he now realized, through his gut.

The rain kept falling.

He gasped, struggling to breathe, looking up at the darkness above. Another flare went out. He glanced around the crater, wondering if there was something, anything he could hold to pull himself out.

Chelsea’s wedding picture floated by his eyes more than once as the water rose
.

He flailed, shaking uncontrollably and gasping for air on a hard, cold tile floor under bright lights. The incongruity between the surface under him and the water and mud became too much for his confused mind to ignore. Alex found his fight for air get easier to win with every breath, yet he still fought. The jumble of sensory information left him trying to synthesize perception and memory.

He was at once in dire danger and basically safe, falling apart for no reason in the empty lobby of an auditorium that kept returning to a battlefield. Alex knew he couldn’t explain this to anyone who might see. No one would understand. He crawled and then staggered toward the bathroom nearby and shut himself inside. He reached for the lock without thinking about it and then curled up on the floor.

The silence helped, as did the lights and the reassurance of a solid floor. He stared at the pattern in the tile. Workmen had laid this out years ago. Hell, maybe it had been a woman who did it. Maybe he’d been black, or Asian, or Latino. He wasn’t in Europe, and it wasn’t 1917. He felt himself calming down again.

Then the door slammed outside, still too loud to ignore. Alex jerked into a fetal position, covering his head and neck with his hands. The door slammed again and again as people emptied out of the auditorium. To Alex, it was too much like an artillery barrage. The footsteps echoed in his mind like charging boots.

He lay shaking on the floor all alone until he heard only silence again. In his brief flashes of lucidity, he wondered when his past would leave him alone.

* * *

In life, Don Geraldo Rafael de Leon had been a servant of the crown, a hero to his people and a slayer of pirates. He had sailed repeatedly between Spain and the New World, braving storms and hostile natives and all the spawn of the Devil that lurked beneath the sea.

He died in the deep end of an empty swimming pool in Malibu.

Witnesses crowded all around the pool’s edges. Some cheered for the Spaniard and his band, others for his opponents. Were it not for the floodlights hung from the palm trees just for the party, Don Geraldo would have seen more witnesses on the balcony of the extravagant mansion that rose above the shallow end. He knew they were there, though. Were it not for their presence, he never would have agreed to this fight.

Don Geraldo and his five companions dressed for the formal occasion that the invitation had described. They wore silk breeches and hose, fine jewelry and shirts with delicate lace. Naturally, they each carried their ornate rapiers, as befit their stations. That did not mean the Don and his men came looking for a fight, as they were happy to tell anyone… but they also carried their pride, and would not lay that down for any challenger.

To their surprise, a challenge came over a dispute spanning the nights of two centuries. Don Geraldo could not evade the confrontation through diplomacy. His host knew all along that this would come. Indeed, it was likely the reason that the challengers received invitations.

Don Geraldo’s men willingly put themselves between their liege and danger as their opponents—both of them—charged in with a bloodthirsty howl. Some in the crowd mimicked and echoed that howl; others gave voice to cries of their own.

Spanish rapiers turned out to be poor weapons against vampires. Stabbing blades did little against men and women whose vital organs no longer served much purpose. Yet to their credit, the line of Spanish vampires held their ground with blades drawn and gave battle, slashing and stabbing with fierce elegance. Their rapiers cut through leather and flesh. For a brief moment, Don Geraldo entertained a brief glimmer of hope.

Then he saw the heavy blade of an axe cleave through Rodrigo’s neck in a single blow. Enraged eyes hidden behind an iron helm and an inelegant, savage red beard glared at him as Rodrigo’s headless body fell, soon to crumble to ash. The enemy dressed in a mismatch of modern clothing and armor made in old styles but with modern technique. Don Geraldo saw black leather and black denim, but also bracers and a mail shirt. None of that mattered to him as much as the bloodthirst in the Viking’s eyes. Don Geraldo’s men closed ranks before the muscular Viking could advance.

Fighting continued. So did the cheers. Bass-heavy dance music boomed over speakers set throughout the wide pool patio, but the melody could hardly keep up with the pace of a battle between vampires. Don Geraldo watched his men give battle, come up short, and quickly fall.

The last of his men, Esteban, was not even given the dignity of death by the blade. He was seized at each shoulder by the other Viking, whose blond hair hung to his chest, and hoisted off his feet. The Viking bit savagely into Esteban’s neck. Blood sprayed everywhere as the larger man gnawed at the flesh of his screaming victim.

The
bearded one stalked forward, leaving his brother to feast. “You have had a long time to pay this off, Geraldo,” he seethed.

Proud to the end, Geraldo refused to show fear to a barbarian like this. “I have always paid my debts, Unferth,” he said with a defiant twitch of his chin. “If you had a legitimate claim, yours would have been paid honorably.”

His hand reached into the folds of his black silk cape. He had one chance at this. It would not likely kill Unferth outright, but a proper blow would at least stun him for several minutes. Geraldo would then have to take on Bjorn, but he could at least evade the other Viking’s sword long enough to stab out his opponent’s eyes. Then he would have the rest of the night to deal with them both. As long as this worked…