Warlord: Dervish (23 page)

“Shit.” Jason cursed when the magazine emptied. “Run.” The knight rose to its full height and gave chase.

They ran, the four of them, pursued by the knight, which moved surprisingly fast given the weight of its armor. Jason reloaded as they turned a corner, telling the others to go on, waiting for the knight to round the corner, opening fire on it when it did. Again, the knight took a knee and waited out the barrage behind its shield.

“Jay!” Bronson had pulled the pin from a grenade and threw it overhand at the knight. His aim was true and the grenade bounced off the shield before landing in the dirt and exploding.

“Nah main…”

The knight rose from behind the shield, unharmed.

They ran, catching up to Deirdre and Areya. Sticking to the middle of the streets, they gambled that nothing would burst from a door or alley. They worried less about insurgents or what might be in any particular house than the nightmare that chased after them, the noise from its armor betraying its proximity.

“
Kef
!
Kef
!”

Turning another corner, they ran head long into a group of African children wielding Kalashnikovs and machetes.

“Don’t shoot us!”

The kids waved their blades and rifles wildly, screaming—

“
Kef
!”

—ordering them to stop.

“Don’t shoot us!” Jason repeated, pointing the barrel of his M4 skyward, holding the weapon out, away from his body.

“
Kef
!” The kids thrust their barrels towards the men, towards the woman and the boy. Bronson had both hands turned palms out, showing he was unarmed while Deirdre shielded Areya. They passed through the gaggle of children, the hotheaded boys miraculously not gunning them down.

“Look out,” Bronson turned and yelled back at them, signaling with one hand. “He’s coming this way!”

The knight barreled around the corner. The kids cried out, immediately opening fire with their AKs.

Jason propelled Deirdre and Areya ahead of him, glancing over his shoulder as they darted off. As AKs barked and 7.62mm rounds glanced off its armor to strike the boys themselves, the knight bludgeoned them with its flail, laying the children to waste. Connecting with their small skulls, the spiked ball killed them instantly. Using his shield as a weapon, the knight knocked the boys off their feet, finishing them with the flail. Their machetes did it no damage.

“Go! Go!” Jason yelled at the woman, the child and Bronson. He raised his M4. One of the kids, hit by an errant bullet and bleeding from his torso, attempted to crawl off on hands and knees. The knight raised an armored leg and brought his sabaton-booted foot down on the boy’s back, snapping the child’s spine.

Jason locked the knight in the steel sights of his M4. The knight clothes-lined the last surviving child, the blades adorning his gauntlet skewering the boy before his dying body slumped to the street. Jason fired. Sparks jetted from the knight’s helmet. It turned and faced him, unperturbed.

“Jay!” Bronson called from up the street.

This fuckers tougher than the gladiator
, Jason thought as he sped off after the others. And the gladiator had nearly finished them.

Deirdre, Areya and Bronson were lost around a corner ahead.

Jason fired burst after burst at the knight, who patiently waited out the lead hail behind its shield. When the bolt on Jason’s M4 locked open on an empty chamber, the knight looked up from behind its shield. Jason fired the under-barrel grenade launcher, the 40mm projectile bouncing off the knight’s shield and detonating against a house. Jason had already turned and sped off. Lassoing the flail above its head, the knight pursued.

When he reached the corner where he had last seen Bronson, Deirdre, and Areya, Jason caught sight of them again at the end of the block, about to turn down another street. They made eye contact and Jason signaled for them to continue the way they had chosen, that he would run parallel to them on the street he was already on.

“Come on!” Jason yelled back at the knight. “Follow me!” He raced ahead, putting some distance between himself and the armored monstrosity. When he dared to look back the knight had disappeared. “Dammit!” The thing must have turned up the block after Bronson, Deirdre and Areya.

Jason trotted back the way he had come, reloading the M4 from his chest pouch as he did so. This knight was proving to be a real problem. He couldn’t believe its armor was withstanding his 5.56. Though it looked like it had stepped out of the Middle Ages, its armor must be enhanced somehow. Even the heavy 7.62s the kids had put into it at point blank range had only dented its armor. Maybe, Jason thought, if he could get his hands on an RPG…

He was about to turn the corner to the block where he had seen his friends when some warning in the back of his head sounded its clarion call. Taking the corner low saved Jason’s life. The knight had pressed itself against the edge of the building and waited for him to return, bringing the flail around at chest level. The spiked ball crashed into the side of the house, a shower of concrete chips and dust dislodging themselves.

Rolling away from the knight, Jason fired the M4 from his back. The knight raised its gauntleted forearm, protecting its eye slit. Sparks glinted off the armor as Jason’s bullets impacted. The knight raised its shield and waited.

Jason sat up and fired another 40mm round from the M-203. The grenade streaked across the few yards separating them and plunked against the Kite shield before dropping to the street.

“Son of a…” Jason rolled over and scampered away. He had only gotten a couple of yards when the grenade exploded, the concussion lifting him up and dumping him in the road.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed. There was a ringing in his head. He was facedown on his chest and knees. He managed to push himself up and coughed out some sand. Turning over on his side, he looked for the knight. It was lying flat on its back, toppled by the blast. Its flail and shield lay scattered in different directions. Jason didn’t have his M4 and had no idea where it’d gone.

He tried to stand but found he almost couldn’t. His back burned. He felt wet there and wondered how much shrapnel he’d taken. There was no way to tell.

Behind him, the knight stirred.

Jason squinted, puzzling over the firmament. The Doppler effect played itself out, the closest stars appearing blue, those farther away burgundy in hue.

The knight struggled against the weight of its armor, attempting to sit up.

His left leg would collapse under him. Jason limped forward, slouching to the side. He pulled a glove off, casting it away, feeling the back of his thigh. His hand came away red.

He looked back and saw the knight seated in the middle of the street. Jason took the last grenade from his webbing, pulled the pin and pitched it overhand. The knight caught the grenade and hurled it right back at him. Jason dodged, the grenade passing him, exploding well beyond his person.

The knight reached up over its head, grasping the handle jutting above its shoulder.

Shaking his head, Jason staggered forward. Planting the blade of its greatsword in the road, the knight used the weapon to brace itself as it stood. A spiked pommel gave to a hilt bisected with two cross guards. The heavy blade itself was nearly four feet in length, ending in what resembled a rounded, razor sharp quarter moon.

With no idea where he was going, Jason struggled to clear his head. The ringing was dissipating. He did not recognize the houses on either side of him as he faltered on. The knight pursued, its greatsword raised in both hands.

As he stumbled head long to the next block, Jason felt the strength returning to his left leg. He couldn’t explain it, and he wasn’t going to argue against it. His gait picked up speed. He turned one corner and then another and when he looked back the knight was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t dare let up and hurried forward, running now.

At he approached the next cross street, a man in a white lab coat hurried by, clutching a sheaf of papers. Something about the man…He looked familiar.

“Hey!” Jason called out. The guy cast a fleeting look in Jason’s direction before disappearing inside a building. One glimpse was enough. Jason knew the man.
Kaku
.

Barring his teeth, Jason ran ahead, quickly reaching the place where he had lost the doctor. The door was locked. He pounded on it.

“Jason!” He turned and spotted Deidre on the roof of the corner house he had just passed. Bronson and Areya stood with her.

“Did you see him?” Jason cried up to them.

“Jay main, get up here!”

“Did you see him?!”

A thundercrack sounded. Jason stood in the middle of the intersection of two streets that formed a
t
. He glanced to his right, where, some distance off, the wall of sand seethed and glittered, thunderous reverberations within its mass. A voice cried out in Latin and Jason turned to his left. At the next intersection, dozens of Roman legionaries filed out into the street. Jason stepped backwards, watching the men mass on the road, the stars overhead reflecting off their shields and spears.

A centurion barked and they moved forward in formation at double march.

“Jay! Get out of there!”

He looked back the way he’d come. The knight stepped around a corner in that direction, bracing its greatsword in front of its body. Jason turned, ready to run, but there was nowhere to run to. The path ahead was blocked, funnel-shaped dervishes oscillating in place, sand and dust misting around each mini-tornado.

He was trapped on four sides.

Having closed the distance between themselves and the lone man in the street, the Roman legionaries were halfway down the block. The shutters on second story windows yawned open as what sounded like dozens of AK-47s opened fire at once. Muzzle flashes blazed—tongues of flame licking from rifle barrels bristling from windows—and Roman soldiers screamed as they died, collapsing under shields offering scant protection. White vapor trails streaked from the buildings as RPGs plunged into the legionaries, sending bodies and their parts skyward. Their corpses fell like dominoues in the street.

Jason hurried to the closest corner, crouching down behind it. The dervishes behind him undulated in place, showing no sign of advancing on him.

An insurgent in a white dishdasha burst from a house and ran towards the nearest Roman soldiers. Jason watched him laughing before he detonated himself, disintegrating along with the legionaries about him.

The knight couldn’t see what Jason or those on the roof saw, yet the cacophony gave it pause. The thing stood its ground, greatsword in both hands. Jason reassured himself that the dervishes were still where they were and turned back to the battle.

The Romans cast their spears ineffectually towards the houses as they attempted to beat a hasty retreat. They were caught in a veritable meat grinder, insurgent alley. And they all would have died there, except the insurgents in the windows unexpectedly stopped firing, pulling the window shutters closed behind them.

Jason was staring at the wounded Romans as they dragged themselves on the ground when a thundercrack brought his attention to the curtain of sand. Preceded by a plangent roar, the unnatural barrier billowed down the street towards him, towards the injured men, tendrils snaking in and out of its grainy mass.

“Jason—
run
!” Alarm in Deirdre’s voice.

He felt no such hysteria. Indeed, he was oddly level headed. Jason’s injuries did not bother him. He considered the knight blocking the path ahead of him and the dervishes behind him. The sandstorm rolled down on him like a wave, blotting out the sky.

As it swept forward, Jason focused on it, gazing deep into the eddying black blizzard, and as he did so he discerned less chaos and more form, an order unto the madness, a structure more
felt
than known, patterns experienced if not cognized. Staring into its depths he recognized things about himself, things known and suspected, things unknown, some purposefully kept hidden, facts and beliefs and emotions long consigned to the scrap heap of memory. Yet here they were, naked to him, swarming, an intertwined jumble defying reality and reason. They were not so much confronting him as revealing themselves for his consideration, presenting their existence for his contemplation.

Ignoring them called for a conscious act of will, a decision to turn his back on them, to avert his eyes from truths pleasant and otherwise, the individual truths that composed any person’s life, composed it in a manner similar to the way in which these tiny granules dancing in the air constituted this malevolent wind bearing down on him.

Having forgotten himself, Jason stared into the void, into its great, infinite depths, vast stretches at once empty and brimming with faces and figures and feelings…

A voice

…and the void stared back at him

Jason

…into him

“Jason”

…
through
him.

“Jay main—snap the fuck out of it!”

And Jason did snap out of it, returning to his senses, turning his head away from the violent, hot, sand-laden wind. He sprinted to the house across from him before he knew what he was doing, aware from his peripheral vision that his friends were vacating their roof for the safety of the house, aware that the knight was coming at him, its greatsword poised above its head.