Edward Crichton - The Last Roman

I lowered Helena gently onto the soft fabric, afraid almost the slightest impact might break her in half. She looked peaceful in her drugged state, but I knew she had to be suffering. I stayed only long enough to check her pulse and brush some stray locks of hair away from her face. Giving her shoulder a quick squeeze, I stood to survey my surroundings.

There wasn’t much to see, only a mostly empty basement, but Santino seem perplexed at what he was seeing.

“What the fuck?” I heard him yell from the rear wall. “Jacob, get over here.”

My eyebrows creased in suspicion, but I did as I was told. I passed by Wang along the way who was still working on McDougal. He had a scalpel out and looked ready to perform an incision. Vincent was there to assist in any way he could. Not knowing much about medicine, and always rather squeamish during medical TV shows, I averted my attention. Bordeaux, meanwhile, was charged with the duel task of watching Abdullah and the door.

I found Santino rummaging through one of the containers, already having opened three others.

“What’s up? Did they forget your blankie?”

He glared. He must be getting used to it these days.

“Funny. Look at this,” he said, opening another one. “These are filled with enough supplies to last us years. That first one has nothing but MREs, enough to last a year. There’s explosives, replacement parts, ammunition out the wazoo, extra magazines, and even a few rifles, not to mention clothing, cooking equipment, bottled water, filters, toiletries, survival gear, and I’ve only opened half of them. Why would they give us enough supplies to set us up as an independent mercenary force for half a decade?”

I had no idea.

“Have you tried your radio yet?” I asked, hoping for some good news.

“Yeah, but all I get is static. These fucking Ragheads are probably jamming the signal.”

Cultural expert indeed.

I gave him a doubtful look. “That doesn’t seem very likely considering what we’ve seen from these guys so far.”

He shrugged. “We know the Russians have been supplying terrorist cells with some of their fancy new equipment. It wouldn’t surprise me if they could block our satellite uplinks.”

I didn’t have much time to think on it when the door leading upstairs began to shake.

So much for our “safe” house. I glanced at Santino. He rolled his eyes, retrieved his HK416, and began piling the containers to use as barricades. I helped him stack them, three high and two wide, enough for about ten feet in length and five feet high of coverage. We piled them around McDougal’s inert form, and dragged Helena next to him. Those of us who could, took up positions behind the containers, and trained our guns on the narrow door.

And we waited.

I had to give these terrorist bastards some credit, because they were patient and had themselves some style. Instead of merely beating down the door, they used a directional explosive to direct the force of the blast towards us, but we were ready for them. We had decent cover and the additional protection of our electronic ear buds. The little devices allowed ambient noise to flow through the eardrum, but as soon as they detected any sudden deafening noise, would activate to block it from entering the ear. The end result was a few seconds of slight deafness until the filters allowed sound to flow through again, but alleviated any symptoms of distortion that would occur from an explosion.

When the bad guys set of their charge, we shrugged them off as though nothing happened. Then they started to pour through. One after the other, they came through the door only to get mowed down by precision shooting, and hails of gunfire from Bordeaux’s big ass gun. Ammo wasn’t an issue anymore. Theoretically, we had enough to kill a million of them if we wanted to.

Hopefully, we wouldn’t have to.

There were lulls in the battle when either Bordeaux or Vincent would chuck a grenade through the door and force the bad guys to either run or be killed. We timed it so that we had fresh magazines in place before they came back for more. Occasionally, the enemy would lob their own grenades, but the containers used by the military were bullet proof and could easily handle shrapnel from second hand grenades. Especially ones that probably began their lives in some shady Russian manufacturing plant. I’m surprised none of them went off in their hands, but so many had been exchanged at this point, maybe I missed one that had.

We were lucky none of them actually looked before they threw their grenades. Most landed in front of the containers and the rest fell harmlessly enough that we just kicked them away. I still managed to get nicked in the leg with a glancing piece of shrapnel when I covered Helena from a grenade that went off on top of our barricade. Most of the team took a piece of something here and there. But we were holding. Hopefully for not much longer, because we had to counterattack and get the hell out of here fast.

Twenty minutes into the firefight, it got to the point where their dead provided extra coverage in front of our barricade. Their bodies also littered the stairs, and blocked the doorway. We were about to try the radio again, when our prisoner decided to wake up. It must have taken him awhile to fully regain consciousness, but all of us were too distracted to notice. Still tied, he got up and made his way to the bag Santino had put his glowing ball in. It wasn’t until he took the ball out, and the blue light illuminated the room that I noticed him.

Ball in hands, he lifted it high over his head, staring right at me.

“With this device, the servants of Allah will finally…”

A stray bullet from the enemy upstairs nailed him between the eyes. He fell to his knees, eyes rolling into the back of his head, dead before he hit the floor.

I caught Santino’s eye and he smiled at me.

As Abdullah’s body crumpled to the floor, the sphere fell from his hands and rolled in my direction. I was immediately enticed by its glow as I watched it roll closer. Its allure grew as it thudded against my boot. Starring down at it, I saw clouds swirl from within like the epicenter of a hurricane, revealing a cavern filled with men dressed in white robes kneeling reverently. An additional lone figure stood in the background, clearly not a part of the group.

Unable to contain my desire to reach for the orb, I bent over and picked it up in my gloved left hand. I barely noticed the bullets whizzing their way past my head as I peered ever closer. I couldn’t discern any details from the images within, nor were they overly interesting. They appeared as a still photo would and were grainier than a photograph from the 1940s, yet I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Like the blaze of a fire or the steady drip of a leaky faucet, for some reason I was entranced by what I was seeing.

With my right index finger, the only finger not covered by my gloves, I poked at the sphere. My hand moved without thought, without conviction, but it moved all the same. The globe felt soft, despite its hard facade, made out of a material completely foreign to me and I felt my finger begin to push through the surface. At this point I was completely oblivious to the sounds of battle raging on around me. All I could think about was the silky surface of the sphere and how I knew I had to probe deeper. Buried to the second knuckle, my finger suddenly felt resistance, then, a tugging sensation. It was gentle at first, but soon became very persistent, steadily pulling my finger inside. It wasn’t long before my entire hand was submerged in the sphere.

That’s when I started to panic.

I didn’t feel any pain at first, but when the tugging stopped, my eyes widened in terror at what I somehow knew was coming. It was the calm before the storm. In one instantaneous moment, all the insanity occurring around me became nothing, before becoming something again. The globe instantaneously sucked the entire room inside out in one fell swoop, taking everything with it in a brilliant blue explosion. The dead bodies, my friends, the containers, even the staircase. It was the single most nauseating experience of my life. More so than the roller coasters as a kid, the weekend drinking binges during college, or the life threatening rolling truck little more than an hour ago. It was the same with the pain. Unlike anything I’ve ever felt, or dreamed I could have felt, it was if my very soul was being ripped from my body only to be stitched back together, piece by piece.