Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Read online

  The scroll patch on our left shoulder that identifies us as Rangers still means something though, even for a just-a-linguist like a me. As Sergeant Thor put it to me the first day with the detachment, “The Ranger tab is just a leadership school. The scroll is a way of life.”

  He had both a scroll and a tab.

  I had been placed here as augment, really. So even though I had trained enough for this mission that on paper I was to be considered a Ranger, I had too much respect for what they did, what they’d earned, and how they lived it, to just assume I was one of them.

  That’s why they call me Talker—because I do languages—instead of Walker. Which is my real name until I went through RASP.

  I’m also only a PFC, and Kurtz is a real live staff sergeant weapons squad leader. And in the Ranger batt that actually counts for something. Word is, Kurtz was some kind of scout sniper in the marines, except he got thrown out for being too violent and offensive for the marines. Or maybe he didn’t like the taste of crayons. That was another Tanner joke said only when Kurtz was nowhere to be seen.

  I went prone next to Brumm, who yelled “Get some!” while spraying the orcs now surging up the bank onto and all over Third. At the same time Kurtz called for his team to shift fire back out into the river for fear of hitting the Third Squad guys in their now-overrun holes.

  “Engage second wave coming into the water now.”

  Specialist Rico said something about the situation being dumber than a bag of hammers.

  “Steel Eight One, this is One Four. Request fire mission on TRP oh-eight-zero.” Kurtz was both calling in fire support and directing fire where he wants the two-forty to concentrate. “Say again…”

  “Loading!” Brumm said calmly as he knelt and dragged a new drum of ammo for the SAW from over near the pit. Hot brass flew everywhere and I fired into the orcs, never really aiming for anyone. You didn’t have to. They were so thick you couldn’t miss. There was this surreal moment when it felt like I wasn’t actually doing anything to help. Because the orcs weren’t reacting to the 5.56 rounds coming from my rifle. But I still tried to hit them.

  “Brumm, you’re with me,” yelled Kurtz. “We’re going QRF to relieve Third. Talker, you too, you worthless slag. Follow me and don’t shoot anyone dressed like us.”

  I did Basic with a bunch of other support types. Fort Leonard Wood. Cooks. Truckers. Telephone repair specialists. But as the Army says, everyone’s a rifleman. And I was pretty good at it. So much so that I qual’d BRM first time through and ended up doing KP so that those who couldn’t shoot got some extra range time.

  But when Kurtz told me we were forming a quick reaction force to relieve the pit next to ours along the riverbank, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. As the first mortar rounds from the top of the small hill at the northern tip of the island began to fall out there on the far side of the river, near the trees the orcs were swarming from, I at least had the presence of mind to put a new mag in my weapon. I pulled it from my chest carrier, and the look of pure contempt Brumm gave me as he lugged the SAW up to get ready to counterattack—I guess my mag pull wasn’t slick enough for him— was palpable.

  Kurtz was in front of us as we pushed out of our fighting position, hunkering low as if we were flanking jihadis in Honduras. The orcs were frightening, hairy beasts bristling with fangs, claws, leather armor wrapped in dark rags, and literally wicked-looking scimitars they tried to slash us with. But swords as deadly as they appeared, couldn’t shoot back at us. They didn’t have AK-47s or PKMs. So we had that going for our three-man counterattack to relieve Third.

  Then the arrows started to fall and Brumm took one right in the plate carrier. I heard it land with a loud THOCK. Not a Thunk. But a THOCK. I don’t think it penetrated because Brumm started to laugh and just snapped it off. Yeah, we were wearing full battle rattle. Plate carrier. Knee pads. Combat helmet. But there were a lot of places an arrow that big, and it was huge and dark in the half-light provided by the falling explosions out there on the far riverbank, could find a home in a body.

  I wasn’t scared.

  I gotta make that clear, because I’d been worried for a long time leading up to this that I was going to be afraid when I actually got into combat. When does a linguist ever see combat was a phrase I couldn’t get out of my head. Sure, I knew that someday-probably-never, combat might go down somewhere in my general vicinity on some garbage-littered third world street against jihadis or Chinese irregulars. But orcs? Nah. I hadn’t planned for that. Who would’ve?

  And yet there I was. Supporting Sergeant Kurtz with live rounds. Arrows rained down through the willows and slammed into the muddy bank all around us, but Kurtz kept us moving forward. Then one went right through his forearm and he swore once. Violently.

  Not a blue streak.

  Just once.

  He snapped it off and moved on Bravo’s pit. The orcs were in there and one of the Rangers was fighting hand-to-hand, swinging a rifle like a club. I noticed another one on the bank, hammering a tomahawk straight into the chest of a prone orc he was straddling. His helmet was missing.

  “Push right, Brumm. Clear forward!” shouted Kurtz and then started firing his rifle into the orcs in the pit with blood streaming down his arm and onto the overturned earth we were crossing.

  I raised my rifle and drilled an orc warrior with bright eyes like some twisted devil in the dark. Eyes gleaming cold malice. He wanted me dead. I shot him twice in the chest and he just backed up along the pit, snarling and taking the rounds. Gnashing his broken teeth at me. Not sure what to do or why this was happening, but enraged that it was. Slick as a snake he flung a black dagger that came from out of nowhere right at me. The aim was true, but I twisted out of the way at the last second. When I turned back, Kurtz had blown that one’s head off and was heading down into the pit to retrieve the two-forty.

  The surge from across the river had abated as mortar strikes rained down along the far bank. Tanner was probably adjusting fire from our fighting position.

  “Find out who’s still alive!” shouted Sergeant Kurtz raggedly as he dragged an ammo can up next to the pit’s two-forty and fed a belt into the receiving tray.

  Brumm swore.

  Swore to the effect of What in the hell is that?

  I looked up from the bodies in the pit. Side note. It’s impossible to tell if someone has a pulse when yours is firing like a jackhammer. I had no idea who was dead or alive in there. But there was a lot of blood and there were dead orcs bleeding down there among our guys too. They don’t bleed green or black, if that’s what you’re thinking. In the dark it was red as near as I could tell. And it was all one big bloody mess of limbs and arms. Plus, the orcs stank.

  Here’s what I was doing. And this is my account of the Battle for Ranger Alamo. I was basically asking the bodies of Rangers on the ground, “You okay, buddy?”

  Pathetic.

  But I was doing my best.

  Did I mention I speak eight languages? I can get by in a lot of others, too.

  And when Brumm expressed some sort of dark wonder at what he was seeing off to our right out across the river, punctuated by the fact that the normally trigger-happy SAW gunner, who preferred the music of gunfire to anything else found on his iPhone, had suddenly stopped firing, I involuntarily looked up to see what had captured the Ranger’s attention.

  Even hard-core Sergeant Kurtz paused.

  And this is what we saw.

  Walking through the night mist and clearing smoke of the mortar strike, striding across the field and heading toward the dark river and straight for us… was a real live giant.

  A goliath. Easily twelve feet tall but built like it was hewn from a mountain. Thick and wide. All muscle.

  Later, PFC Kennedy, who plays a lot of D&D, would say that it was maybe a hill giant, and then he added a bunch of other geek stuff no one could stand to listen to.


  At that moment, as it tromped across the river shallows toward us, it didn’t look like one of those friendly giants in Disney cartoons. Or even the sort of misshapen cave trolls from the Jackson films.

  “Talker! Inside the pit! Brumm, find me the Carl Gustaf!” Then Sergeant Kurtz ran a line of bright fire up the torso of the menacing giant in the flowing dirty gray kaftan with an iron cap across its head. The rounds spat out and streaked across the water as Kurtz tried to find his range. The giant wasn’t lumbering, and it carried a massive spiked mace. From its wrists dangled heavy chains. It began to laugh, bellowing angrily as it came on at a smooth, fast stride that would have it all over us in seconds.

  That was the scary part. How fast it moved.

  The 7.62 from the M240 just made it angry. I knew that because it began to charge across the river, raising a massive mace over its head with both of its fat swollen fists, river water gushing to get out of its way. I was in no doubt that the mace would crush us in a single blow within the next few seconds.

  I may have said, “I think you made it mad!” while Specialist Brumm called out at the same time, “Loading HE!”

  Sergeant Kurtz ignored me and silently burned through an entire belt of ammo, teeth gritted, as he tried to kill a thing that would not die. On the other hand, if looks could’ve killed, Kurtz’s glare would have done the job easily. That man is pure hate.

  You always know where you stand with him.

  He just hates you.

  I find that refreshing. It’s one of the reasons I walked away from my old life and chose the military. I like people who don’t play games. And yeah, I asked for a chance to become a Ranger, but all they would guarantee me when I signed up was linguist and Airborne. Also, my recruiter said there was no way in hell he was letting me join the infantry with an ASVAB score like mine. And wasn’t I “good at languages or something” the big E-6 Samoan had asked intently on the day I walked back into the recruiter’s office. Now that I think about it, there must’ve been some kind of bonus in it for him if I was.

  Yeah. Eight languages plus some usable pick-up lines in a dozen more, buddy. Maxed the DLAB. And that’s just a made-up language.

  So anyway, I’d just said “I think you made it mad” to Brumm. Which I hope I really said, because from a screenwriting point of view that’s perfect for what happened next. I want to be a writer someday on the other side of this.

  I think you made it angry.

  That’s what I said.

  And then without missing a beat or even looking over at me, Brumm shouted “Firing HE!” and fired a round out of the Carl Gustaf launcher. A recoilless, direct-fire, 84mm weapon that is for all intents and purposes a miniature shoulder-fired artillery piece. It took off like an invisible hornet that was late for a drive-by.

  It wasn’t an explosion. There was no kick that I saw. Just Brumm rocking back a bit as the round disappeared from the Gustaf. My ears were already ringing from the gunfire, but somehow the low whooomp of the weapon rose above the blare of gunfire and the battle cries of the orcs swarming in the river.

  The round went straight through the looming giant and out its back, tearing away guts and bone in the half-light of the battle. I would find out later that the round was anti-personnel and that after ripping a hole in the giant it shotgunned eight hundred tungsten pellets through the giant’s back, effectively shredding the behemoth’s insides. It was like making a shotgun explode inside him.

  The giant twisted, groaning titanically, and fell back toward the far shore, hitting the water with a terrific splash and crushing a bunch of his buddies.

  In the darkness and sudden quiet Brumm muttered, “Carl Gustaf don’t care.”

  Chapter Two

  In the aftermath of the night slaughter along the riverbank, the orcs faded into what remained of the cold and mist out there on the other side of the dark, murmuring river. We weren’t the only ones to face down that horror. Other defensive positions along the Ranger line had been probed at various points across the island we’d found ourselves on. As PFC Tanner remarked right about the time Command Sergeant Major Stone and Chief Rapp showed up to assess the situation at our CP, “If that was a probe, I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna know what it feels like when they commit to a serious relationship.”

  Nearby, while the wounded were attended to, Brumm, with a mouthful of dip and standing watch with the strapped 249, spit off into the damp woods. “More than enough Carl Gustaf to go around for anyone else who wanted to try.”

  Brumm was like a Kurtz-in-training. He’d dare the suck to come at him just to see if it would blink. And then be happy when it did, because that meant something in Ranger Brain. I don’t know. Maybe they just train ’em that way.

  Or find them under rocks.

  Chief Rapp, a Special Forces medic assigned to assist the unit in getting patched up and the detachment commander regarding Special Operations docrine, went through the wounded who’d been pulled out of the pit. There was one with a serious slash to a forearm where the Ranger had managed to get his arm up to defend himself against a sword. Better than the way it could have gone. He took the cut there as opposed to getting hacked in the neck.

  “The human body do love to defend itself no matter what else you try to make it do,” chuckled the good-natured Rapp. “Ain’t that the way Mike?”

  Rapp called everyone by their first name or tag. Even the Command Sergeant Major. No one corrected him because he was a warrant, and chiefs held no allegiance to anyone but their own. And because he was also Special Forces, that made him an even higher order of the mystery operator voodoo.

  But maybe that was just surface reasoning. Maybe the real reason no one ever corrected him was because he was six foot six, and built like a pro wrestler. If you’re asking me to pin it down I’d say it was because he was nice and Rangers don’t understand that strange and foreign emotion. I’d like to think that I do. I’ve found that Green Berets tended to be positive and upbeat while Rangers preferred a sort of enthusiastic fatalism that required tall odds and small hopes. So they either memory-holed his friendly behavior or evaded it with their version of HardMan/Asperger’s.

  Corporal Brocker was also injured. No slashes to the arm, but he had been knocked clean out. A big old crack ran right down the center of his combat helmet where one of the orcs had tried to split it with an axe.

  “He is concussed, as they say,” mused Chief Rapp in the pre-dawn darkness. He had the man led back to the rear for rest and observation.

  As sunrise drew nearer, we started to get a better picture of all that had happened. Apparently Third’s two-forty had run dry after the eight hundred rounds of belted ammo was used up at an almost cyclic rate of fire as they tried to weather the oncoming orc wave rushing directly across the river and straight at them. No barrel change either—there’d been no time before the orcs were all over them. It was that close. And then the orcs were hacking and stabbing and the assistant gunner was trying to connect another linked belt to the two-forty as the rest of the team switched over to secondaries to engage at the last second.

  Looking back, the attack had happened faster than I remembered it. Faster than I thought possible. In several places all at once along our island. But no one got hit as hard as Third Squad’s sector. Later I’d learn it didn’t just get close… it got downright weird, at several points. Strange things had happened. And that made everyone, even the Rangers, a little nervous.

  But no less resolved.

  It was dawn by the time Chief Rapp finished up with the injured. By that time, I’d been ordered by Sergeant Kurtz into the pit to take watch with him while the rest of the team either got patched up by Chief Rapp or ran back to the C-17 for more ammo. Kurtz got a full round of antibiotics and his arm wrapped. The arrow had taken a chunk of flesh, but the muscle and bone were intact. If it hurt, Kurtz didn’t bother to say.

  I bet i
t hurt. It looked like it hurt.

  Just before dawn, it was dark out there on the river. You could hardly see anything because the moon had gone down by then. Sergeant Kurtz just sat there in the quiet with his NVGs on, scanning the other side of the river for any sign of the enemy. Like he still owed them something. As though he wasn’t just expecting them to come back; he, in fact, wanted them to come back. He had something for them.

  I could feel it in the cold air between us.

  The hostility that radiated from him felt dangerous, so I said nothing because he’d probably figure out a way to smoke me while we waited for the next attack. And that’s saying something for me, because I’ll usually try to make conversation with anyone. They call me Talker for more than one reason. But the Do Not Disturb sign was permanently hung out on the heavy weapons squad leader.

  Kurtz was that way.

  Fine. That was probably for the best. I’m sure everyone was pretty wired by the fight and not getting hacked to death and all by things that until now had only been in games and old novels written by Oxford linguistics scholars. Monsters. Orcs. Axes and swords.

  But part of me wondered…

  What would have happened if they’d gotten through? What would they have done to the prisoners? Cannibalism, I’m betting. They’d eat us. But it wouldn’t be cannibalism because they’re not human. They’re orcs.

  Does that make it any better?

  These are the things I thought about in the dark waiting to get my throat cut by some misty night goblin or any of the other ridiculous imaginings PFC Kennedy had been freaking everyone out with. What might be here. Where we may have possibly ended up.

  None of it made sense. And yet there we were. Watching our sectors and waiting for the next attack.