I don’t handle abrupt awakenings in the middle of the night very well.
One time during freshmen year when some of the guys from my intramural soccer team snuck into my dorm room at four in the morning. I was sleeping off a few beers… and few shots… and maybe a few forties (hey, it was college). I stayed asleep as the other drunken, but still conscious, idiots jimmied open the door to my room and crept in with all of the grace of an ogre in a fireworks factory. I only woke up when Pablo, an exchange student from Spain, put a vuvuzela to my ear blew it like he was at a FIFA World Cup game. I reacted reasonably well by yelling incoherently, jumping out bed with my comforter wrapped around my head, and crashing into the wall; all while Pablo laughed his ass off. He was kind of a dick but he is probably a slave to one of the Old Gods by now or dead, so I try not to hold it against him.
Being in the army, fighting against the Chumash and the Aztecs, and then CIA training had honed my reflexes and instincts. I now slept light and could awake in an instant and react however the situation demanded. Fight, flight or even staying totally still and pretending to be asleep if that was what worked best to further my mission and my survival.
In theory.
When the sounds of a battle reverberated through the dwarves’ cavern and awoke me, my training and experience kicked in.
I shot to my feet and promptly collided with Kris who was doing the same from the other cot in our small quarters. We fell backwards into my cot which collapsed around us in a tangle of canvas, broken wood and curses.
“Idiot!” snarled Kris as she pushed herself off me, punching her left hand into my gallbladder as she did so. Her right already held the same little .38 revolver that she had aimed at my forehead the night I was forced to rekindle our relationship in the interest of saving my ass (at least she wasn’t pointing it at me this time.)
She darted to the door of our little shack and took a peek out into the cavern. Though still extricating myself from my own bed, I could see the light of flames illuminate a small sliver of her face and body in the darkness.
“What is happening out there?” I asked, finally pulling myself free from the wreckage of my cot. It was dark, but my hands still found the Glock 17 and sawed-off shotgun right where I had left them. I could hear the confusing din of voices and combat echoing through the dwarves’ cavern. Shouts and screams, the clash of metal on metal and the occasional gunshot. It sounded like Johan and his people were putting up some fight.
“Volk,” hissed Kris, “and elves.”
“Shit,” I hissed back with feeling. I had been hoping that maybe we were dealing with a random werewolf attack, which would have been bad but possibly survivable.
“They are coming out of the main entrance…”
“The one that we came through?”
“Yes. And they are already amongst the cottages.”
“OK, is there a back door out of this hole?”
“Yes, there should be an escape tunnel behind us and to the left.”
“We go for it now, quick and quiet.” I kept my voice hard as stone, I couldn’t allow her to hear any of my own misgivings. “We might get out of here before they notice us.”
“What about the dwarves?” Kris’s voice held a tremor of uncertainty.
“Between us, we have two small caliber pistols and a rusty shotgun that I have all of six shells for. We’d be almost useless in a stand-up fight, the best way to help the dwarves is to get out of here so just maybe these assholes will chase us and leave them alone.” I did feel like a heel leaving our hosts like that, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t right.
“Let’s go,” I ordered pushing myself past Kris before she could argue further. The window for us being able to stay alive and unnoticed was closing rapidly.
I opened the door just enough from me to eel through it and immediately spun around it to the back side of the shack. Despite her misgivings, Kris followed right behind me. We kept the shack between us and the carnage enveloping the dwarven commune. I snuck a peek around the corner and I could see at least a dozen men and three or four elves surrounding the cottages, one of which was already ablaze. There were several bodies on the ground and hounds, the ones that had led the Wotanvolk here, prowled at the edge of the firelight.
As I watched, the dwarves in one of the cottages attempted to break out before their building could be set ablaze too. Submachine gun fire rattled out from one of the windows and cut several men down before Johan led a rush out of the front door with an axe in one hand and a pistol in the other. With a defiant bellow he charged the Wotanvolk with his pistol blazing and his axe whirling.
My blood stirred at the sight. Maybe the grumpy Resonate would take some of the Volk with him.
I had seen dwarves fight before and it was like watching a rockslide in action; indomitable and unstoppable. They could take huge amounts of damage and dish it back out in return. Normally, I would bet heavily on a dwarf in any fight and would have been glad to have them on my side. The problem was that I had also seen elves fight before and I knew how this skirmish would end. I couldn’t help Johan, I could only take advantage of the distraction the deaths of he and his people would give me.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“We go now,” I hissed over my shoulder knowing that I was barely audible over the sounds of battle.
“But…”
“No. Now,” I backed away from the shed and then turned to sprint towards the back wall of the cavern. I clutched the shotgun in a death grip, but my Glock slammed awkwardly against my thigh with each stride. That cheap bastard Vaclav didn’t even give me holster so it was just bouncing around in my pocket, I half expected it to go off. Behind me, I could sense Kris hesitate for a just a second before following. I was betting on my path keeping the shack between me and most of the Wotanvolk and the slaughter of the dwarves as I ran into the dark. I barely stopped myself in time before crashing into the nearly invisible cavern wall and Kris did stumble into me before she could fully stop herself. Normally, I would have taken the time to rib her about that, the sounds of combat were dwindling and with them our odds of escape. I skirted to the left, running one hand along the wall and I prayed that Kris wasn’t wrong about where the escape tunnel was.
The last dwarf died with a scream and the two remaining cottages roared into flame just as my hand dropped into an opening that was nearly indiscernible in the low light. Kris and I ducked into the tunnel mouth as the fires from the cottages filled the cavern with light and smoke. The tunnel was cramped, as befitting its creators, and dark. I had to bend at the waist and charge ahead with one hand outstretched in front of me like a blind man’s cane. We didn’t have time to find a light and I did not want to give my pursuers any beacon in the dark.
I stopped once the last light of the fires in the cavern were completely swallowed by blackness around me.
“Do you know where this leads?” My whisper far quieter than the thunder of our breathing within the enclosed space.
“Yes,” she replied around her own heavy breathing, we had not run far but adrenaline has that effect. “There is small shed about one hundred meters from the barn where we left the mules.”
“Good, do you have any explosives? Anything at all?” I had asked for some from Vaclav but he had just snorted and said that it was my job to get them explosives.
“A grenade. Do you want it now?”
“Give it to me when we get out of here.” Thankfully, we did not have much further to go. After only a few more twists and turns the escape tunnel abruptly ended in a door that I found when my outstretched hand slammed into and jammed my thumb and finger painfully back into their sockets. I cursed under my breath and feverishly felt around for whatever latch or handle the dwarves had built into their escape hatch. I could hear echoes coming down the tunnel, the sounds of hounds and soldiers. The Wotanvolk had found our escape route.
My hands jerked down the door’s lever even as the sounds of pursuit grew louder in my years. Kris and I stumbled through the open door into the night shrouded shed which was only slightly less dark than the tunnel behind us. I slammed the door closed again and looked around the rest of the shed. It was hard to discern details in the night amongst the junk that crowded the small building. The door itself had been cleverly disguised to look like the back wall of the dilapidated shed. Luckily, I found what I was looking for hanging on the wall.
“Grenade!” I snapped as I took the small coil of light rope down off the wall and tied one end to a dead lawn mower and then tied the other to the pin of the grenade that Kris held out to me. I cut the rope and used the rest to hang the grenade alongside the door, roughly waist high and positioned so that when our pursuers forced the door open it would push the grenade away from the lawnmower and pull the pin. It wasn’t elegant, but the whole operation took me maybe ten seconds and I estimated even odds that it would actually work. We fled the shed, a small structure that had been built into the hillside probably four hundred years ago as a root cellar for some German farmers, and into the dark embrace of the woods.
Normally, running about in the forests of Old Europe at night wasn’t something that I would recommend for anyone, especially myself. After the Resurgence all of the worst characters resumed their residence in the woods of Central Europe and remade the pleasant green woodlands into the nightmares of our ancestors. They were again places where children were eaten by witches, where lycanthropes prowled and trolls lurked. Yet, that was still preferable to being trapped underground with Wotan’s servants; at least a werewolf would make it quick.
“Do you even know where you are going?” gasped Kris as she followed my headlong rush into the underbrush.
“Yes. Away from here,” I panted back. It was almost impossible to keep your bearings in a forest at night under the best of conditions. In a strange area while being pursued, it was totally impossible. So, I didn’t even try.
We had made it only a hundred yards from the shed when a muffled explosion boomed out behind us. “Hopefully… we collapsed… that damn tunnel… too,” I panted.
Despite the success of my trap, we kept running until we were both spent and thoroughly lost. That happened about the same time the first greys of dawn colored the sky through the tree branches. We collapsed behind a large, moss-covered log and sat for a few minutes and listened as the forest awaked from its nighttime slumber. Other than birdsong and out own heavy breathing, I heard nothing. No sound of pursuit, the baying of hounds or the shouts of men penetrated through the ranks of tree trunks around us.
“Shit,” snarled Kris with feeling once she had caught her breath and then repeating herself again in German when that did not seem quite adequate. “Scheisse!” She hammered her fist savagely against the duff covered ground and I could only nod wearily. The initial rush of adrenaline had long worn off and I was definitely feeling those lost hours of sleep and between the run in the woods and yesterday’s mule ride my legs felt like they were made of spaghetti and broken breadsticks.
“How did they find us? How did they find us?” Her second repetition had the character of a raw scream even though it was quiet enough to only be heard by me.
“Maybe the same way they found me,” I replied. “Those assholes somehow compromised the CIA’s network here. Would it be that surprising if they did the same to your organization?”
“We are compartmentalized… in cells,” said Kris, her head shaking in denial. “If they knew enough to find Johan’s commune they can destroy the entire Resistance network in Saxony.”
“That could be exactly what they are doing. The one-eyed bastard was just waiting for the right moment.” Kris didn’t respond and just hammered her head back against the log. “It could be worse,” I observed helpfully. “At least we didn’t get jumped by a werewolf when were running through the woods.”
“You should really, really, be thanking me for that,” rejoined a familiar voice from the tree branches above us.
