The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Ten

After triggering a nine round burst, Sergeant First Class Ryan Carmoody  breathlessly whipped the barrel of his 5.56mm NATO-round M16A4 assault rifle away from the shadowy figures moving rapidly some twelve meters behind him.  Carmoody was running hard, following in the wake of Mystikyll, The Ambassador, as they evaded capture and assault by the creatures that had killed Carmoody's teammate, Madigan.  The damn things were fast, frighteningly so, and they were unexpectedly bullet-resistant, making it harder than hell to bring them down with regular automatic fire.  Belatedly, Carmoody was forced to acknowledge that Karamanga's whining when they'd first arrived was more than justified: this place was dangerous, really dangerous.

 The loose shifting soil of the dunes made running a treacherous enterprise as well as an exhausting one.  Normally, even when off-duty, Carmoody could keep a very respectable pace during a ten kilometer run in blistering heat and over natural terrain, but running full-out over sliding sand wearing sixteen pounds of body armor and a forty pound backpack was exhausting.  He didn't see how someone as physically sickly-looking and seemingly nonathletic as Mystikyll was accomplishing it so easily: the panicked Ambassador was streaking some sixty to seventy strides ahead of Carmoody as if the veteran Special Forces soldier were moving in slow motion.

 As his booted feet pounded into the gritty, loosely-packed dune surface, Carmoody was already working out plans to attain some kind of defensible position from which he could protect Mystikyll and himself from the relentless assault of these strange, zombie-like alien warriors.  Given the fact they teleported, winking in and out from existence through those weird watery looking portals in the air, Carmoody knew that continuing to run was a short-sighted delay of the inevitable: he and The Ambassador would eventually be corralled and cornered by the screeching things and summarily murdered, likely torn apart.  Before his time with Broken Mirror, Carmoody was a veteran of action as an adjunct military "advisor" to NATO forces during "Operation Mistral 2", during the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict, and a more recent tour of duty in Riyadh, Afghanistan, during the allied troop surge with a Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Team.  He'd survived some hairy, hellish situations in both war zones, but he'd been able to take full advantage of his training and experience in those situations.  But that was nothing like this.  Here, on this weird alien world, he was dealing with monsters.  There was no preparation for that.  Hell, he'd just seen a top-flight, experienced combat vet impaled by something from out of a nightmare.  And there was no way he was going out like that.  No way.

 A heavy gust of hot wind suddenly blew in from offshore, propelling a man-high, gritty wave of dust and sand through the air that completely obscured Mystikyll and forced Carmoody to a stumbling stop or else run the risk of twisting his ankle on the dunes' shifting surface.  He tasted coarse salt and loose grains of rock particulate on his dry lips.  He waited a trio of heartbeats, then two more as the insistent blast of air swirled and buffeted the sand into a blinding curtain that induced in the soldier a dread feeling of claustrophobia, a feeling of being walled off from the dangerous world through which he had run.  The gradually wind died down...

 Carmoody's heart sank.

 Mystikyll was being held by his throat at arm's length, suspended in the air, his dangling feet kicking ineffectually, by what could only be described as a Golem -- the hulking creature was easily three meters tall and composed from what could only be described as flexible gray rock.  The mighty head was sloped and ape-like  but its facial features were like that of some demonic fox or feline.  It was dressed in the tattered remnants of what looked to be some kind of military uniform and it carried a lethal-looking two-headed axe in the gargantuan fist at the end of its other superhumanly-muscled arm.

 Another creature, a gaunt and spidery, long-limbed, lantern-jawed man with flowing, silken orange hair and smooth, almost metallic, golden skin spotted with patches of diseased and inflamed lesions, crouched next to the Golem.  It held in each of its knobby-knuckled, long-fingered hands a long-bladed, bone-handled dagger.  Some kind of long weapon resembling a combat rifle hung from a strap draped over its narrow chest and bony back.