Death or Glory

Book 2: Doomsday Recon

by Jason Anspach, Ryan Williamson

Genres: Military Fantasy; Military Sci-Fi; Science Fiction Fantasy

Synopsis

Storming Hell was only the beginning…

It was supposed to be a simple mission—hit the legendary mist-shrouded realm of an ancient people, secure the artifact that can send them back to Earth, and get out—but nothing is simple in the Land of the Black Sun.

Corporal Nephi Bennett finds himself lost in a deadly land where time and space behave strangely.

Pursued by armies of jaguar-men, cannibal pigmy lizardmen, powerful necromancers, and fallen friends given over to the blackest evil, Bennett must push forward at all costs or risk being trapped forever.

Supplies run low and the body count grows high.

For Bennett and his fellow scouts, the only choice left is… Death or Glory!

 

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Release date: April 4, 2024

Publisher: WarGate Books

Sample

Chapter 1

 

The taloned hand raked my chest as I leapt away, and my back slammed against the wall of the pit. Above, the chitter and squeaks of the cheering crowd urged us on. My opponent was small, about four foot seven, but the scaly lizardman was fast as he danced toward me. He hissed, and the dewlap under his chin unfurled bright red. The spines running down his head and back quivered.

Blocking another swipe, then kicking straight out to give myself some room, I struck with a low round kick, hitting his thigh with my shin. I heard the satisfying crack of his femur breaking. He stumbled to the left with a squeak of pain, and whipped his long tail in my eyes. I managed to catch the barbed tip on my forearm and strike out with a snap kick to his clavicle that sent him sprawling in the bloody sand of the pit’s floor.

The cheering of the reptilian crowd overhead rose to a crescendo.

I surged in, leaning low as he attempted to get to his feet, batted away a feeble strike, and then jabbed a feint with my left before delivering a right cross that caved in the frontal bone of his skull.

Dancing back, I wiped the blood and sweat out of my eyes and surveyed the carnage before taking stock of my own injuries. Three of the pygmy saurians lay motionless in the sand. I had a cut on my forehead that was bleeding profusely but probably wasn’t serious, lacerations and bites on my arms, legs, and chest, and some tender spots that were going to turn into pretty spectacular bruises. The barbs embedded in my forearm made the swollen skin numb and red, but better my forearm than my eyes.

I looked up at the crowd of lizard people rimming the pit, wondering if they were going to throw in any more opponents. I was shaking from the adrenaline dump, and my mouth felt like dry parchment. Someone tossed down a waterskin and my claw knife.

Sir Angus McKenzie, the only other human I’d seen in this village and a slave fighter like me, had warned that the pit matches could go all day. I’d been here one week now, ever since the scaly freaks had captured me when they ambushed my platoon, but most of that time was spent curled up next to the chamber pot in my cage vomiting out of both ends as my body tried to accustom itself to my new diet of pulped corn and larva and whatever was in the murky water they gave us.

One hellish week I honestly didn’t think I’d live through, and now I was in the pit for the first time.

Sir McKenzie was an interesting man. He claimed to be a World War I flying ace and renowned explorer, but I don’t recall hearing about him in any history lessons. He was a big Scottish-Canadian man, with long matted red hair and a bushy beard, and had been a prisoner of the little saurians for over a year. He was convinced he was lost somewhere in the British Honduras and the year was still 1919, even though I’d tried to explain we weren’t even on Earth anymore. When I told him how my platoon of Cavalry Scouts had been sucked into this realm of the Aztec god Smoking Mirror from Panama in 1989, he declared me insane and said the lizardfolk had bashed me on the head too hard when they captured me.

During some of the worst days of that first week, I wondered if he was right.

Picking the waterskin and knife off the sand, I pulled the cork out with my teeth and drank the tepid water. It tasted slightly fresher than whatever my keepers delivered to my cage each morning.

Another prisoner, a female lizard woman, was frogmarched to the edge of the pit and thrown down. She was a dun green color and lacked the dewlap and bright blue cheeks of the males, but like most females of her species she was bigger than the males, probably five-two and a good hundred and thirty pounds. A bone-tipped spear was cast down after her, and she picked it up, watching me warily and keeping her distance as I drank.

She was a slave like me, a captive from some other lizardfolk tribe. One of us would live to fight again another day; the other would have their head shrunk and the rest of their body eaten. We had no way to communicate. They spoke in a language of squeaks, hisses, and chittering chirps that was impossible to mimic—or understand.

When we’d first arrived in the Land of the Black Sun, the god—or extra-dimensional entity, as Captain Brown insisted—Smoking Mirror had granted us Outworlders the ability to understand the other beings of his realm, what the Kuauchanejkej called the “Gift of Tongues.” But he’d apparently withdrawn that Gift not long after we’d descended into the underworld realm of Mictlan and destroyed his soul-powered forge. One moment we were conversing fluently with our native allies, and the next we were a mass of confusion with them speaking dialects of Nahuatl and us English and neither able to understand the other any more than I could now understand my lizard captors.

It was fortunate that I already possessed a working knowledge of Nahuatl from the time I spent in Southern Mexico on my proselytizing mission, and so could serve as a translator with the Kuauchanejkej, and they knew some Spanish from their friar who had lived among them for decades, so we got by with a sort of pidgin of English, Nahuatl, and Spanish. In fact we did remarkably well, considering. Captain Brown speculated that months of using the Gift had also unconsciously accelerated our understanding of each other, because once loss of the Gift forced us all to learn the other’s language, the learning came rapidly. Within a few weeks of dedicated effort we’d smoothed things out to a point where our pidgin allowed communication that was almost as good as it had been before Smoking Mirror’s take-back. The only person in our group whose speech still had a flavor of “Me Tarzan, you Jane” was Epasotl, and that was because she insisted on using English only. “So I learn.”

Still, the withdrawal of the Gift meant we could no longer speak with anyone else. Like the lizard people. Sir McKenzie had no issue communicating with them—as an Outworlder who hadn’t pissed off Smoking Mirror by destroying his precious soul forge, he possessed the Gift of Tongues—but I was reduced to communicating in pantomime.

My hissing, chittering opponent leveled her spear at me and circled slowly. I tossed the drained waterskin away, testing the weight of the knife in my hand. It was a good weapon, well balanced, with a five-inch claw-like blade and a ring in the hilt. Our platoon medic, Doc, was a savant with the things and had been teaching me the finer points of their use. I held it in a reverse grip in my right hand, with my index finger in the ring, and settled myself into a steady crouch, awaiting her inevitable lunge.

When it came, I was ready, slapping the spear point away as I sidestepped and let her momentum carry her past me, then whipping out my right fist and slashing deeply into her flank.

She pirouetted and swung the butt of the spear in a low feint before reversing her strike, thrusting the bone tip at my throat. I blocked with my left and struck out with my right, but she was too fast and ducked, slamming the butt of her spear into my inner thigh, just inches away from some very exposed and tender bits.

Did I mention I was naked? Yeah, so I had that going for me.

She jabbed again with the butt, going for my solar plexus. I hopped back, knocked the spear away, and followed through with a reverse roundhouse to her head that managed to connect with a whole lot of air as she rolled past me and did her best to impale me through the gut. I spun, blocking the spear with a high left knee, and simultaneously whipped out with my right hand in a low diagonal arc that slashed across her chest. Then I dropped and swept her feet, but she was already airborne and flipping over me. I let my momentum carry me around on my knees to face her, blocking a series of strikes before I found an opening and struck at her thigh. I must have hit her femoral artery, because the spray of blood blinded me and I had to execute a backwards somersault to get some distance.

Back on my feet, I wiped blood from my eyes with my forearm as she staggered around the pit drunkenly, trying to level her spear tip at me. She didn’t stagger far before collapsing and falling over backwards, her chest rising and falling in great heaves that soon gave way to a shudder and then stillness as she bled out.

Thumps on the sand alerted me to fresh opponents behind me, and I leaped forward in a roll that ended with me on my feet and facing two spear-wielding males who were already advancing in a rush. I dodged to my right, placing one opponent behind the other, and hammered the nearest in the eye with my claw knife’s ring. He reeled back while his companion surged forward, aiming his spearhead at my groin. I twisted aside and managed to get several inches of sharpened, serrated bone in the meat of my left thigh as a reward for being too slow. He ripped it out and went again for my gut while his one-eyed friend moved to circle behind me.

I let them come and flowed into the attack, grasping the spear coming for my belly and using my attacker’s momentum to draw him into the path of my right hook, catching his throat with my blade and nearly severing his head clean off as the second spear whipped past my shoulder. One-Eye overextended, and I swung in low with a disemboweling blow that sent him stumbling backward as lizard guts poured out onto the sand.

The crowd roared approvingly.

My thigh was bleeding heavily, and I limped to the center of the pit, trying to apply some pressure. The spear hadn’t hit an artery, but I wasn’t feeling so hot. The crowd above jeered in chittering taunts, and I screamed up at them hoarsely and, I’ll admit, somewhat incoherently.

Their medicine man, or whatever he was, came to the edge of the pit and began chirping at me.

“You want some too?” I shouted back. “Come on. Get some!”

He replied in a series of squeaks and clicks, and made a throwing-down gesture with his right hand.

I held up my knife threateningly. “What? This? You want me to drop it? Screw you!”

Several of the warrior lizards, male and female alike, raised their spears over the edge of the pit, readying to throw and turn me into a pincushion.

I got the message.

“Fine!” I tossed the knife onto the sand. “Fine. There. I dropped it. What now?”

Someone lowered a rope ladder into the pit. Apparently showtime was over. I sighed. False bravado aside, I was totally beat, and bleeding from more cuts and bites than I could count, plus there was the ragged hole in my thigh.

I climbed the ladder and heaved myself over the lip of the pit to be greeted by a forest of spears. I just stood there, naked and sweating and bleeding, my chest heaving.

“What now?”

More clicking and chirping from the medicine man as he snorted a fine white powder out of half a clamshell. Then two males with gourds scuttled up and dipped their long fingers into some kind of green goop and moved in to—I didn’t know what. I backed up, and one of them squeaked. He sounded angry. The medicine man was angry too, and the warriors jabbed their spears at me.

I held up my hands in surrender.

The green goop was some kind of ointment that they painted my wounds with. It had a numbing effect, and it hardened after just a few moments, closing up the worst of the punctures and lacerations like wintergreen Krazy Glue. My thigh wound got a plug of something nasty-looking inserted in, then sealed inside with more green goop. Finally they escorted me back to my cage.

Once they had me secured, the medicine man gave me a long lecture accompanied by wild gestures I couldn’t begin to parse.

I turned to Sir McKenzie in the cage next to me. “What’s he going on about?”

“The fights were too fast,” McKenzie replied. “Gotta give ’em a show, eh? Take your time.”

“Seriously?”

The medicine man chittered something more.

“Or they’ll wound you before the fight to make it fair,” McKenzie added.

“Fair? Fair? I barely made it out alive!”

“We’re here to entertain the king.” The big man shrugged. “From what Ezekiel is saying, it sounds like the king wasn’t so entertained this morning.”

McKenzie had given all the lizards names, usually Biblical ones. I wasn’t even sure how he managed to tell them apart.

“Ezekiel, huh?” I turned to the medicine man. “Okay, Ezekiel, next time I’ll give you a show. Sound good?”

He chirped something that could have been approval and wandered away with his retinue of guards.

I leaned back against the stoutly woven branches of my cage and inspected my injuries. Whatever that green glue was that they’d used to treat me, it worked; I didn’t feel a thing. I absently traced a black vein running down my leg.

“You sure that isn’t catching?” McKenzie asked.

“What? This?” I gestured to the spiderweb of blackened veins across my chest, face, and limbs. “No. Like I said before, it’s a cancer of the soul… and body, I suppose. I’m death-touched. I’m dying. But it’s not contagious. I was infected when one of the ravenous undead blew some kind of powder in my face.”

“Ravenous undead, eh?”

“Servants of the death god Mictlāntēcutli. Zombie cannibals. Most death-touched turn into them. Some don’t. I didn’t.”

And most who don’t turn become psychopathic murderers anyway, I didn’t add. Beyond killing me slowly and giving me a bad temper, I wasn’t sure what the effects of being death-touched were. The changes had been gradual, but I felt stronger and faster than before. Better reflexes. Harder strikes. I’m hardly an expert at combatives, but I’d fared well enough in the pit. I felt my arms and chest. I didn’t seem noticeably bigger—not all swole and pumped like my friend Sergeant Wilson, but I had more definition where maybe there hadn’t been before. Although that could also just be from hard living over the last several months in the Land of the Black Sun. I wasn’t sure. Either way, in my mind I was just a kid from Utah; I was no killing machine.

But maybe I was becoming one.

“Mictlāntēcutli,” McKenzie repeated in a low voice. “The Lord of Mictlan. I explored a crypt dedicated to him once. Evil place, that was. You could feel it in your very bones.”

“I’ve been to Mictlan,” I murmured.

“So you say.” He gave a low chuckle. “I still say you were hit on the head too hard, Future-Man.”

I gave a shrug.

Some guards approached his cage, and he got up.

“Looks like it’s my turn,” he said with a sigh. The guards led him away to the pit, and a few minutes later, I heard his deep voice rumbling through the persistent mist.

“Moritūrī tē salūtāmus!”

“Avete vos,” I muttered.

---

Chapter 2

 

The king of the lizardmen, whom McKenzie had dubbed “Zedekiah,” sat under the lone surviving wing of a crashed plane, being fanned by two servants. Slaves, probably. He was tall for a male, and grossly obese. The plane was of the smaller twin-prop cargo variety, and hung a couple meters off the ground, caught in low branches and vines. It looked like it’d been hanging there for a long, long time.

“They practically worship the thing,” McKenzie said. “Say it was a gift from the sky gods. Or its cargo, rather. You ever seen an aeroplane like it? I say it’s no wonder it crashed. Damn thing’s made all of metal, eh? Wonder it could fly at all.”

“The cargo?” I asked.

“Powdered cocaine,” the large man replied. “Crates and crates of it.”

“You’ve been up there? Inside?”

“Once. There’s weapons and ammunition too. Whole load of ’em. Didn’t get much of a peek, but the markings on the crates were U.S. government.”

“I don’t see any of the lizards toting modern weapons.”

“They don’t know what they’re for, eh? They just care about the white powder. [JA1] Now that they worship.” He turned to one of the guards standing next to us. “Ain’t that right, Peter? You love your powder of the gods.”

The diminutive lizardman chittered in reply and snorted from a shell.

McKenzie smiled at me. “Peter and I are old mates.”

“He’s your jailor.”

“They’re not all bad sorts, once you get to know them.”

“And they’re all addicted to cocaine. Explains a lot.”

He gave me an amused sidelong glance. “Them an’ us, lad.”

“Speak for yourself. They offer it before fights, but I always refuse.”

He laughed, a rough sound from deep in his belly. “Laddie, it’s in your slop.”

“Fantastic.” I’d thought my increased energy and sharpened senses were somehow due to my… unusual condition… but apparently I was simply a junkie now. “Just great.”

He shrugged. “Why’re your knickers in a twist? I always took a tab or two of Forced March before a flight. Gave me an edge. An’ when you’re up in the sky trading bullets with Jerry, anything that gives you an edge is a good thing.” He motioned to the wide pit before us. “Same as down there, eh?”

“I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. And I certainly don’t do drugs. Not intentionally.”

“Ah, one of those.”

I nodded sourly.

“Crivvens! Got yourself a wife then, eh?”

“Yes.”

He spit off to the side. “That be one too many if you ask me. Bairns?”

“What?”

“Kiddos. You got little Bennetts?”

“Uh, no.”

“That you know of, eh?” He elbowed me in the ribs. “I ’spect there be a couple or three wee McKenzies running about. Maybe you left her with a bun in the oven, eh?”

My wife, Xochi, was back at the refugee camp we’d relocated her people to after the attack on their villages. I hadn’t seen her in over a month. The thought of her possibly being pregnant was something I hadn’t considered. It didn’t seem possible. We hadn’t been married very long, only a few weeks really, and I told McKenzie as much.

“All it takes is once, lad,” he replied with a deep chuckle.

We hadn’t been married long, but we’d certainly made… good use of the time we had together before my platoon shipped off to this strange land of perpetual mist. The prospect of potentially being a father was sobering, and my thoughts turned once again to escape. It’d been two weeks now, with no sign of rescue. I’d tried making a run for it twice, and I’d keep trying, no matter how severely they whipped me before throwing me back in my cage.

My platoon had arrived here, wherever here was exactly, several weeks ago through a portal our Chaneque guide and resident sorceress Epasotl had conjured. It transported us from the Kuauchanejkej refugee settlement of Tepeuakan to this land of mists, which was possibly another continent in the Land of the Black Sun, or possibly another world altogether—we simply didn’t know. All we did know was this was the place where we’d find a critical piece of the puzzle that would get my platoon-mates back to Earth in 1989. We didn’t even know exactly what we were looking for, other than it was some sort of navigational aid, an artifact, or codex, or something, which would provide us, or Epasotl rather, the intel she needed to create a portal back home to what the guys called the “real world.”

And somehow in all of this I was the key to finding what we were searching for.

The entire op was based on what Captain Brown was referring to as Metaphysical Intelligence, METINT. More specifically, we were relying on a vision that my wife, Xochi, had long before we’d even arrived in her world. It didn’t seem much to go on, although both Xochi and Captain Brown knew a lot more about this vision than they were willing to share with me. But some intel was better than no intel, and if the captain felt it was actionable enough for us to come here, I’d follow where he led. He’d never let us down yet.

I sighed as limp and bloody lizard bodies were dragged out of the pit to make room for the next round of contestants. McKenzie slapped a hand on my shoulder.

“Showtime, laddie.”

I rolled my shoulders and cracked my neck. Today the big man and I would be teamed up against whatever they threw down after us; tomorrow I might have to fight him. I wasn’t looking forward to that. We’d become friends, but I had no doubt he’d kill me if we were matched against each other.

Nothing personal, of course.

***

Since my second escape attempt, my keepers had taken to trussing me up like a hog when I wasn’t under guard, even in my cage. The ropes were strong and the knots were clever, and my bindings had a way of cinching tighter the more I struggled against them. Eventually I stopped trying.

But I didn’t stop plotting.

I’d run some of my schemes past McKenzie, but he’d already tried them all, plus some things I’d never even considered. For Stone Age saurians, these little lizard people knew how to keep prisoners. They’d give a supermax prison a run for its money, and I was no Houdini. It was depressing.

Pierce squatted down on the opposite side of my cage and studied his fingernails.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked.

The appearance of my dead teammate didn’t startle me. He’d been coming and going for weeks. I hadn’t told anyone yet—I wasn’t exactly sure why. Being haunted by your best friend certainly wasn’t the craziest thing we’d encountered in the Land of the Black Sun.

“I need to get out of here,” I said.

“You really do.”

“It’s been two weeks… I think… the days are starting to run together.”

“About that long, yeah. The guys are looking for you. Don’t lose hope.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“No, I still can’t wander far from your sorry white ass, but I know Captain Brown. He won’t give up until you’re found.”

“How’re you holding up?”

He gave a fractional shrug. “Being dead is boring as hell.”

“Haven’t met any hot dead chicks?”

He looked around melodramatically and waved a hand. “I don’t see dead people, man. Only the living. And only you can see or hear me.”

“Bummer.”

“For real. Can’t recommend it.” He shot me a Lando Calrissian smile. “You think that Sir McKenzie bro is right? Think you knocked up the princess? God knows you tried. You two were at it like rabbits.”

“We weren’t that bad.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“Please tell me you didn’t—”

“Watch?” He mock-gagged. “Gross, bro. I got as far away from you two nymphos as I could.”

“Crazy to think she could be pregnant. I need to get out of here. I should be with her.”

“Roger that. So how’re we gonna bust you out?”

As the night wore on and McKenzie snored, Pierce and I brainstormed and rejected new ways to free myself. Hours passed, and gradually the persistent mist grew into a thick fog. There was something unnatural about it, and it seemed to worry the sentries too. They chittered and squeaked in agitation as tendrils of silver-blue haze snaked along the ground and up over the village. A feeling of intense weariness came over me, and I sat up straighter, blinking hard to try and stay awake.

And then one by one the guards fell over where they stood—asleep, comatose, or dead.

The next thing I remembered was waking abruptly from a dreamless sleep with the smell of something horrendous in my nostrils.

***

Large green eyes flecked with gold glowed in the torchlight inches from my face. A bluish feline nose below them wrinkled.

“Wake up, Ben-Ette,” a soft voice hissed.

“What is that awful smell?” I asked in a daze. “Eps?”

She pulled her head away from mine and gave a Cheshire grin full of needle teeth. She was… not a pretty sight, but Chaneque never are. Pretty, that is. Even the women. Imagine a child-sized bluish-gray-skinned gremlin with the features of a Sphinx cat—you know, the hairless naked ones—adorned with a mop of lanky blue hair and no less than four large, bat-like ears full of bone piercings.

“You naked,” she observed.

“So are you,” I replied, averting my eyes from the glowing blue paint she’d daubed over her belly, breasts, and… other parts. Apparently it wasn’t just her ears that were pierced. Ouch. “Wait… why are you naked? Is this a dream?”

Nightmare, to be honest. Dreaming of Epasotl naked was a nightmare.

“Not dream,” she said. “Rescue.”

“But you’re naked.”

“No duh. Sleep magic work better this way.” She stoppered the small vial she’d been waving under my nose and swapped it in her haversack for a knife, which she used to quickly cut through my bindings. I rubbed my wrists and tried to look at her without, you know, looking at her.

“I wish you weren’t naked,” I said.

“Do not get excited.”

“Believe me, that’s the furthest thing from my mind.”

“Lucky for Xochi.” Epasotl gave a staccato hissing laugh and held her finger and thumb apart maybe half an inch. “Not much there if you were.”

“Thanks, Eps.”

“Come, we get the di di mao out of Dodge now. Your captors will wake soon.”

I scurried out of the cage after her and then paused. “Wait, we need to get McKenzie.”

“Who?”

“My friend. He’s in that cage. We can’t leave him.”

She loped over to where I’d indicated and called back to me in a hiss over her shoulder. “Are you sure he not sisimito?”

“Very funny.” In truth there was some resemblance between the big, hairy man and the gigantic, shaggy, red-haired beasts the Chaneque used as shock troops. “Here, give me the vial. I’ll wake him up. If the first thing he sees is a wrinkly naked blue cat-woman with glowing lady parts, he’ll freak out.”

She put her fists on her hips. “I look nothing like cat. And am not wrinkly.”

“You do and you are, a little. Come on.”

She handed over the vial. “Hurry. Little Kahuna wonder what take so long.”

“Moving with a purpose,” I muttered as I unfastened the cage and got the foul-smelling vial under McKenzie’s nose. He woke with a start and nearly throttled me before he came to his senses.

“Ach, Bennett! Scared the bejeezus outta me. What’s that smell, eh? What’s going on?”

“Jailbreak,” I said hurriedly. “My friends are getting us out.”

He was about to exit his cage when his eyes fixed on Epasotl. “What the bloody hell is that?”

“That’s Epasotl,” I said.

“What in the blazes is an Epasotl?”

“Me,” she said proudly with a toss of her lanky blue hair. “We must break like wind and blow bicycle stand. Sleep fog wear off.”

“Quite right,” McKenzie said, slapping me on the shoulder. “Lead the way, lassie.”

***

“Might be easier to ask if there’s any part of you that isn’t cut, bruised, or lacerated,” Doc said as he gave me a twice-over under the light of his red penlight. “You were pit fighting?”

We were off to one side of the platoon’s assembly area deep in the jungles of… wherever we were exactly. We didn’t know for certain.

“Every day,” I said. “Before that I had a bad stomach bug.”

“Explains the weight loss. Damn, you’re a mess. I’d hate to ask what the other guys look like.”

“Dead. They look dead, Doc.”

He pursed his lips. Johnny “Doc” Yazzie was our platoon medic, a former Ranger E-7 busted down to buck sergeant and thrown out of the Bats for unknown but energetically speculated-upon reasons. I wasn’t sure myself—the man was one of the most squared-away dudes in the platoon—but bets ran high it involved a colonel’s daughter. Maybe a general’s even.

He touched one of my numerous scabbed-over cuts. “Looks good for less than a week old. You said they glued you back together?”

“Something like that, yeah. It was this green goop. Like menthol Krazy Glue.”

He grunted and felt my ribs.

“There’s, uh, more, Doc…”

“What’s that?”

“They fed us… well, they put cocaine in our food.”

“You mean like coca leaves? I wouldn’t worry. I give the guys shit for chewing them just because Captain isn’t totally down with it, but there really isn’t a risk to be honest. No worse than coffee or tobacco, which were two of my three major food groups before we ran out, same as most of the guys here. And it doesn’t seem to hurt the Sugar Skull Gals any. They chew it by the bushel.”

“No, I mean like cocaine. Real cocaine. The little freaks are total junkies. Some plane running drugs and guns went down, and they built their village around it. They snort it, drink it, put it in the food. They worship the stuff.”

“Ah. Well, I still wouldn’t worry. Withdrawal doesn’t have any serious physical side effects. You’ll be tired, grumpy, anxious, irritable, that sort of thing, but it’ll wear off. Let me know if you start getting seriously paranoid about shit or whatever. Mostly you’ll just be jonesing bad. Listen, get some leaves from Flaming Feather or Wilson to chew, or make a tea or something. That’ll help.”

“But Captain—”

“He’ll come around.”

“It’s against my—”

“Religion? Suit yourself, man. But if you start getting freaky, I’ll force-feed you the damn leaves.”

“Roger, Doc.” I stood and got dressed. “So, what’s your other major food group?”

He grinned. “Hate, of course. Caffeine, nicotine, and hate.”

“Once a Ranger…”

Doc laughed and then turned as McKenzie strode over, wearing nothing but a poncho liner around his waist. He’d been talking with Captain Brown and the senior NCOs and now it was his turn to get poked and prodded.

“Sir Angus McKenzie,” the big man said, offering a shovel hand.

Doc shook and motioned to a log. “Kindly step into my office, Sir McKenzie.”

I left them to it and headed over to where Captain Brown was sitting with Sanchez, our platoon sergeant.

“Take a seat, Nephi,” the captain said as I approached. “Doc clear you for duty?”

“Yessir. I look worse than I feel. Glad to be back.”

“Took a lot more trouble to track you down than I care to admit,” Brown said. “Shouldn’t have taken two weeks.”

“Roger that, sir,” Sanchez said. “These indigs are a pain in my ass.”

“The lizardfolk, Sergeant?” I asked.

“Scaly bastards been on us like white on rice. They hit, we fade. Repeat. But we found you, and we got you out. That’s what matters.”

“Hooah,” I replied.

“What can you tell us about them?” the captain asked me.

“Smarter than they look, sir. Tough, skilled fighters, but you know that. We can’t communicate, although McKenzie understands a bit of their odd language. I think there are several tribes, all at war with the others. They made me fight their captives in death matches. The ones who nabbed me, I think they’re the biggest group. They’ve built their village around a downed cargo plane. McKenzie said it’s got a load of arms and ammo inside. American, he thinks. The lizards don’t know what they are and haven’t touched them. I don’t know planes, sir, but it looks like it’s from our time. It’s full of drugs too.”

“Cartel?” Sanchez asked Brown.

“Or CIA,” the captain replied. “Sounds like you found us a resupply option. That’s welcome news. We’re going to need to stock up.”

“Sir?” I asked. “I thought we had plenty stored back at the Kuauchanejkej settlement. Especially after we raided the armory in Amoloyan—I mean, if we’re running low, Eps can just open a portal for resupply.”

“That was the plan, but it’s off the table now,” Brown said with a grunt.

“Off the table—I don’t understand.”

“The PFC can’t make a portal back to the settlement,” Sanchez said with a look of indigestion.

“I don’t under—”

“The dagger has been lost,” Brown clarified.

“Lost—!” I blurted. “But that was our exfil!” My wife’s bronze dagger, an artifact from an ancient people, the original inhabitants of the Land of the Black Sun, was a key component in the creation of temporal portals that could link vast distances. Without it we were stranded in this land of mists, and that meant I had no way of getting back to my wife. That was my first thought—Xochi—even though the larger concern for the platoon was that the dagger was necessary if we were ever going to get anyone back to the real world. The artifact we were here for, whatever it was, was just a navigational aid; it couldn’t create portals on its own. Or so we believed. Like I’ve said, we had very little intel. “I can’t believe she lost it!”

“Destroyed more than lost,” Sanchez said.

I looked at my platoon sergeant blankly.

“We were being overrun and attempted a hasty exfil,” the captain explained. “Too hasty, apparently. The portal was unstable and the dagger shattered. Epasotl blames herself, but I take responsibility for making her rush the procedure. Without a lodestone like the arches we used to access Mictlan…”—he spread his hands—“portal creation is riskier than we believed.”

“I thought…” I shook my head. “Isn’t Atzi supposed to help with that?”

“She was unavailable at the time,” Brown said. “I made a bad call and I own it.”

I could respect that. I did respect it. It takes a big man to own up to a mistake, and I didn’t envy the calls he had to make each and every day. The fact that he was right most of the time and admitted when he was wrong instead of shifting the blame when he easily could’ve, just made him a better leader. But losing the only means we had of getting back to my wife… that was a hard blow.

“You said you were being overrun, sir,” I said. “If the exfil failed, how’d you escape?”

Sanchez barked a laugh. “It was pretty spectacular when the portal failed. Scared the daylights out of those scaly little shits. Hell, I nearly pissed my own pants, truth be told. They haven’t bothered us since.”

“As for getting back…” The captain shrugged his massive shoulders. “We’ll figure it out. The dagger was an artifact of the very people we’ve come here to find. We’ll just have to beg, borrow, or steal a replacement.”

---

Chapter 3

 

The good news, for me at least, was that my kit and weapons had been recovered. The lizardfolk didn’t know what to do with most of it and the guys had salvaged what they could from the trash heap outside the village, including a few dozen rounds of hand-loaded .338 Lapua Magnum. Those were precious, especially since we couldn’t pop back to the settlement to fetch more from our stockpile. My NODs were busted, but Sybil, Pierce’s M24 sniper rifle I’d inherited, seemed no worse for wear. She was filthy though, and I spent most of the next morning giving her a thorough cleaning along with the rest of my gear.

Sergeant Wilson ambled over and slapped me some skin.

“How’s it hanging, Bennett?” the former surfer and bodybuilder asked as he took a seat on the log beside me.

“Righteous now that I’m back with Crazy Horse Platoon, Sarge.”

“So, pit fighting, huh? Pretty hardcore. You look like shit. I mean, you looked like shit before,” he motioned to the spiderweb of black veins on my face and forearms, “but now you really look like shit.”

“Thanks, man. How’re the gals holding up?”

“Gals are good. Super squared away, like always. You know Flaming Feather wasn’t hip to breaking up the Blackhearts and dividing them among the platoon like we did when we set out on this op, but it works better this way. She’s adjusting.”

The “gals” were our female Kuauchanejkej allies, known affectionately as the Sugar Skull Gals due to the striking warpaint they wore. Flaming Feather was the older sister of Wilson’s girlfriend, Dressed-in-Stars, and one of the more seasoned warriors of the bunch we’d integrated into the platoon. Most notably, Flaming Feather was… intense.

“And Stars?” I asked.

“Driving me crazy, bro.” He puffed out his cheeks. “This no fraternization in the field rule’s got me seriously bent. Captain says look but don’t touch. Bogus.”

“As if, man. I don’t believe you’re not sneaking off.”

“No bueno. Feather would have my balls and Captain would bust me down to private. Same as any guy who touches her girls. Don’t matter. Stars and I, we have a history, you know? We got a thing.”

“Probably for the best.”

“Still blows chunks.”

I nodded and scrubbed more nasty gunk off my assault pack.

Wilson slapped his thighs. “Anyway, bro. Tell me about the fights.”

“Not much to tell.”

“Don’t want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Now that Sir McKenzie dude, he’s got some stories. Seems like a good dude. He on the level?”

I gazed across the assembly area to where McKenzie was chatting up Takahashi and García, two of our senior NCOs. Someone had given him a spare pair of ACUs that actually fit him. Probably Captain Brown’s.

“I think so,” I said. “I’ve only known him a couple weeks, and half that time I was vomiting out of both ends, but yeah, I think he’s cool.”

“He said he’s fought some of those jaguar-men characters we’re looking to make contact with.”

“The Tlacaōcēlōtl. Yeah, he told me about that.”

“What a trip. I thought they were, you know, like men who dressed in jaguar skins or something. Not actual jaguar-men.”

“Last one he fought almost killed him. He was out of action for a month.”

Wilson gave a low whistle.

“You guys find any trace of them?” I asked.

“Not yet. Just those lizard dudes always on us like flies on shit until the portal went kablooey and scared them off. That was some seriously bad mojo. Eps almost died, you know? Portal just about sucked her in when it collapsed. Would’ve, too, if Sanchez hadn’t snatched her back just in time.”

“I didn’t know. I should go see her.”

“Think she’s still sleeping off the spell she used to put the village to sleep. Working magic like that knocks the kid out cold when it’s over. Still pretty dope she can do that shit. She’s gotten better, too. Spending time with that kitty Jedi Master while we were gearing up for this op taught her a bunch of new tricks.”

“Ueueokichtli’s not a Jedi.”

“Whatever. Dude was like a blue Yoda.”

I couldn’t help from laughing, because it was true. The Chaneque Teōicpauhqui—literally “one who makes with threads of god” in their dialect—was totally a blue Yoda. The master god-weaver even had funny backwards speech patterns. He was also a foulmouthed drunk, but that only added to his charm… if you want to call it that. Epasotl had sought him out via handy portal magic shortly after our little raid into the Underworld to destroy the soul forge, which, now that I thought about it, was a lot like Luke going to find his teacher on Dagobah—except in her case, she brought him back with her. Ueueokichtli had spent weeks training her while the rest of us relocated the gals’ people, the Kuauchanejkej refugees, to the secret settlement of Tepeuakan in the vast wilderness of the southern subcontinent and then prepared for this operation.

I stood and slung Sybil over my shoulder.

“I’m going to see if she’s awake,” I said.

“Roger that, bro.” He gave me a fist bump. “Glad to have you back. Almost missed you.”

“Same feels.”

Epasotl was up when I made my way over to where she and Sanchez had parked their rucks in for the night. She was chattering away with her spirit guide, Atzi, who inhabited a floating infant’s skull wreathed in blue flame.

“How goes it, sister from another mister?” I called out.

“I am tired, but doped up,” she replied.

“It’s just ‘dope.’ You’re dope.”

“Whatever. Is same.”

I didn’t bother correcting her again as I sat down cross-legged by her sleeping bag.

“Atzi,” I said in greeting to the flaming skull. It, or she rather, turned her glowing eye sockets at me and giggled, a sound like spring rain. “Thanks for saving my bacon, Eps.”

“Is what bros do, no?” Epasotl replied with a shrug.

“True that, sis. Still, thanks.”

I didn’t mention that I’d caught she’d said “bros” and not “slaves.” Technically, according to Chaneque custom at least, she was my slave and I was her master, since I’d captured her. The fact that she now thought of us as bros was major progress. Maybe she’d even stop asking me to torture her to death so she could regain her honor.

She fingered one of her ears absently—the one with all the notches cut out of it; every time she healed one of us she had to sacrifice her own flesh. There wasn’t much of that ear left now. But, as she would often quip, she had three others, so “no biggie, bro.”

“Was I interrupting?” I asked, motioning to Atzi.

“No,” Epasotl said. “We talk about you and Pierce.”

“You know about Pierce? Can you see him too?”

“I cannot, but Atzi can.”

“Pierce, Pierce, Pierce,” Atzi chittered in a singsong toddler’s voice. “He is not gone!”

“How long have you known?” I asked.

Atzi gave the floating, flaming skull equivalent of a shrug.

“Do you know why he can’t… you know… move on?”

Atzi just giggled in reply.

“Load of help she is,” I said to Epasotl.

“Spirits are flighty,” Epasotl replied. “Rain Spirit most of all. She believe he bound by duty to you and others, to help see them home. Then he go home too. That you see him and we cannot suggest strong connection between you. Why you not told anyone?”

“I don’t know… it just seems too crazy for anyone to believe.”

“Should tell Little Kahuna at least.”

“Sergeant Sanchez?” I pursed my lips. “Maybe. Captain Brown might be more open-minded to… this sort of thing.”

“Tell me what?” a quiet voice said behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Our platoon sergeant was the softest-spoken man I’d ever met, and he could move like a ghost. It was hella creepy.

He squatted beside us and gave me The Look. For a short wiry guy, he had all the presence of a rock giant.

“Uh, hey Sarge,” I croaked.

“What sort of thing would the good captain be more open to, Bennett?”

“Well… ghosts… and ah… well, it’s… you know… Pierce. He’s…” I waved a hand aimlessly. “… Always around. Somewhere nearby. We, uh, talk… about… stuff.”

“Is true,” Epasotl confirmed. “Atzi see him. He not gone.”

“Not gone! Not gone!” the skull twittered.

“You talk about ‘stuff’ with Pierce’s ghost?” Sanchez asked very softly.

“Yes.”

He nodded slowly and squinted at me.

“I’m not crazy, Sarge.”

“Maybe.” He quirked an eyebrow. “A ghost would make a good scout. We could use that edge. I’ll inform the captain we potentially have a new asset. And you tell Pierce just because he’s dead don’t mean he can slack off, you read me?”

“Lima Charlie, Sarge.”

“Good. As you were.”

He stood and walked away. When he was out of earshot, I exhaled, and Epasotl gave a staccato, hissing laugh.

“See, Ben-Ette?” she said. “Told you so.”

“I hate the way he sneaks up on me all the time. You knew he was there, didn’t you?”

“Of course,” she said. “But the look on you face—!”

***

Captain Brown had made some major changes to Crazy Horse Platoon in preparation for Operation MacGuffin with an eye to integrating the guys and gals. We were reorganized into two fully manned combat squads for this operation. Sergeant Takahashi led Gold Squad, which was composed of two full rifle teams led by Sergeant Wilson and Corporal Stanley. Wilson was in charge of three of the gals: Falling Leaves, Jade Talon, and Obsidian Tears. Stanley kept PFC Lawrence and got Specialist Cohen, plus he was given a young but accomplished warrior named First-to-Dance to fill out his team. Stanley was a pig when it came to women, and I wondered about the wisdom of adding one of the gals to his team, but I needn’t have worried—Dance made it clear on Day One she wasn’t someone to be trifled with.

García, who was the leader of Blue Squad, kept Specialist Cameron as an AG and got Private Anderson as his M240B gunner, plus Flaming Feather and Dressed-in-Stars as a second crew with a woman named Heart-of-Darkness to fill out his squad as a rifleman. Riflewoman, rather.

And apparently Sir McKenzie was coming with us as another rifleman in Blue Squad. Made sense, I guess. I mean, it’s not like he had anywhere else to go—and after having a long chat with the captain, he’d seemed to come to terms with the fact he wasn’t in the British Honduras anymore.

I guess the captain explained it better than I did.

As for me, seeing as I didn’t have a team to lead with Pierce KIA and all, even though he’s still around, sorta, I got rolled into HQ with the captain, Sanchez, Doc, and Epasotl. Lieutenant Whitlock had stayed behind at the settlement as an advisor.

But I kept my sweet X-Men call sign, so I wasn’t complaining.

All told, we were a couple squads short of a full infantry platoon, even though we were technically Cavalry Scouts, but 19Ds are basically infantry anyway, right? I mean, we carried everything on our backs now, so might as well give us a blue cord and call it good. Just kidding. I’m a trooper ’til the day I ride off to Fiddler’s Green. We were still cavalry. We were just… permanently dismounted.

Captain Brown had decided to hit the lizardman village immediately and secure the weapons and ammo from the plane, so we had a day and a night to kill before we raided the village at dawn. At some point in the evening, Captain Brown found me. It looked like he wanted to chat about something serious.

“Is he here?” he asked.

“Pierce?”

He nodded.

I thumbed behind me. “Yessir, right there.”

The captain squinted in the direction I’d indicated and furrowed his brow. He’d debriefed me earlier in the day, and I’d given him the four-one-one on my invisible friend. Later Sanchez told me Brown was “displeased” I’d withheld the intel for so long.

Translation: he was pissed.

And he’s not a man to piss off.

“I wasn’t so sure I wasn’t crazy myself, Sarge,” I’d told Sanchez.

“Doesn’t matter. You know something, you say something. That’s true back in the real world, and it’s double true here. You have intel, you share it. Crazy or no. Read me, son?”

I read him. Lima Charlie, Sergeant.

Now Captain Brown glanced at me, back to where Pierce was standing, then back at me.

“Not going to lie, Nephi,” he said. “I’m still skeptical.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Turn around.”

I nodded and pivoted to face away, somewhat confused by the order.

“Ask Stanford how many fingers I’m holding up.”

“Three,” Pierce told me. “Now five, now a fist, now the sign for nine. Now he’s repeating it all over again except it’s eight at the end, not nine.”

I relayed what Pierce said, and Brown grunted.

“I’m still skeptical, but Atzi corroborates it, not that I consider her the most reliable of sources. Either you’re right, or you’re hallucinating and suddenly telepathic. You can turn back now.”

“Yessir. I don’t know what to say. Like I told you before, I didn’t even tell Xochi. I’m still skeptical, sir.”

“A third option occurred to me,” Brown mused.

“What’s that, sir?”

“A malignant entity has attached itself to you and taken on Stanford’s appearance to gain your trust.”

Pierce swore. Rather creatively.

“That… something from X-Men, sir?”

One of Captain Brown’s quirks was quoting from the Gospel of Chris Claremont. It might sound a bit silly, especially coming from an officer, and a former Ranger at that, but trust me, it wasn’t. The wisdom he pulled out of those comics had saved our skins more than once.

“Bible, actually,” Brown corrected.

It took me a few seconds to make the connection, but I automatically blurted out, “2 Corinthians 11:14.”

Not for nothing, I was a missionary for two years. I might not know X-Men, but I know my Bible verses.

“What the hell is a Second Corinthians?” Pierce asked.

“Means you could be a devil disguised as an angel,” I said over my shoulder. “Basically.”

“Oh for Chrissakes,” Pierce said. “This is bullshit. I’m not the damned Devil. Not an angel either, bro. I’m just dead and stuck haunting your sorry ass.”

“He says he’s not the devil, sir,” I told Brown. “Or an angel. He’s just stuck haunting me.”

“I don’t think he’s a devil or angel either,” Brown said. “But I question if this entity you see and hear is truly the spirit of the late Specialist Pierce.”

“I can’t believe this,” Pierce sighed.

“We’ve talked a lot, sir. If it’s not Pierce, then whatever it is, well, it does a dang good impression of him.”

“Good enough to trust your life to it?” the captain asked.

I pivoted and considered my friend standing behind me. He stared daggers back at me.

“You have to admit Cap’n has a point,” I told Pierce.

“Seriously, bro?”

I shrugged and spread my hands helplessly.

“Okay,” Pierce finally admitted. “He has a point. Maybe. But if I’m not me, whoever I am is doing a damn good job of pretending to be me, because they’re fooling even me.” He frowned. “Wait! Ask me something only I would know.”

I thought for a few moments. “Ireland or Crawford?”

“Neither. My vote’s for Adaora.”

“Who the heck is that?”

“Remember the SI from the future? The one with that Upton chick on the cover? Polar Bare?”

“I never saw it. You only told me about it.”

“Yeah, well there was this Nigerian chick in it. Adaora Akubilo. She gets my vote.”

“Better than Upton? Better than Ireland?”

Pierce shrugged. “She’s a sister, so yeah. Duh.”

“Why are you talking about swimsuit models?” Brown interjected.

“Sorry, sir. Forgot the conversation’s one-sided. Just a sec… Hey Pierce, what did you ride on your dad’s ranch?”

“Beat-to-hell-up KDX.”

“And where’d you finally really pop your surfer’s cherry?”

“No one actually says that, bro, but Jalama.”

“Dunno, sir,” I said to the captain. “He’s three for three. Sergeant Wilson could probably interrogate him on surfer stuff. I doubt a malignant entity would know all that. When it comes to surfing, I’m just a Scoobie.”

“Shubie,” Pierce corrected, rolling his eyes.

“Four for four,” I said. I would’ve given Pierce a high five, but… ghost.

“That’ll do, Nephi,” Brown said. “It doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but I suppose it’s encouraging, assuming you’re not simply imagining him. We’ll proceed with optimistic caution.”

“Imagining? But, sir. Counting the fingers—?”

“Delusional and telepathic is also an option.”

I sighed. “Roger, sir.”

Brown moved off to attend to officer things, and I pulled my assault pack around to rummage for a bite of Epasotl’s famous pemmican; I was saving my last MRE for a special occasion. Pierce plopped down beside me and blew out his cheeks.

“I’m not some kind of ‘malignant entity,’ bro. You know that, right? It’s just me.”

“I want to believe that, man. I really do. But Cap’n’s got me a little freaked out now. Being haunted by my best friend is one thing… but being haunted by some… thing pretending to be my friend… that’s seriously bad mojo.”

“Well, shit.” Pierce plucked at a small shoot and flicked it away.

“Don’t sweat it. I’m sure you’re you and—holy crap!”

“What?” Pierce said in alarm.

“You just—you picked something up and threw it!”

“Damn! I did, didn’t I?” He tried and failed to pluck up another shoot. “Dammit! How’d I do that?”

“I have no frigging clue, but that was totally rad. It’s progress!”

Pierce grinned from ear to ear. ...