The blond man turned around, annoyed. “What’s the rush?”
Behind them, the blonde woman and the other two men had just emerged from the security room. The door to the loading dock, now between Peter’s group and the stragglers, burst open and three metallic objects flashed into the air.
Peter saw the blonde woman recognize the aerial objects and turn about on her comrades, forcing them back into the security room. Lynn was shoving him through a door, as Asya pulled his shirt from the front. They all landed in the room with a split second to spare. A thunderous crack sounded, filling the corridor behind them with light and smoke as the door to the room slammed shut.
Peter raised his head, looked at the room they’d fallen inside, and smiled. “You chose the right place for a standoff, dear,” he said. The others turned their eyes from the door to the room behind them, taking in the rack after rack of military hardware, explosives, rifles, handguns and grenades. An armory.
“I think I just got a Manifold stiffy,” the blond man said, smiling, as he reached for a strange looking rifle with three barrels.
THIRTY-TWO
“You never said anything about lions, damn it!”
“True,” Alexander grunted, as he wrestled a four-hundred-fifty pound lion to the ground and then head-butted the creature. “But I did tell you the Oscans would eventually lose to the Samnites. You were the one that said we should help out the little guys.”
King stalked across the marshy ground in a slow circle, his crude iron sword up, the thick-maned brown lion snarling as it kept pace with him. He found himself wishing he still had the Sig Sauer — or the damn AK that Alexander had lost at sea four years ago, when they had first travelled backward in time. The lion stopped moving suddenly and leaned back, but King knew it was preparing to spring and not retreating. He squatted, making himself an easier target, the blade held close to his side, and the tip extending just past his hunched body.
Although Alexander had bestowed him with eternal life, pain was still pain, and being eaten alive created the very unpleasant possibility of being a long meal. Plus, while the larger Greek had an otherworldly strength in addition to immortality, despite King’s newfound healing ability, he still possessed only the strength of a normal man. Against an angry, underfed lion on a battlefield in rural Villanovan-era Italy, he stood only a slim chance.
The creature sprang at King, its mouth opening up in a toothy roar, ready to devour him, just as the invading Samnites had planned when they had fired bloody chunks of mutton at the Oscans from makeshift trebuchets. Once again, King had been surprised at the inaccuracy of historical accounts, as he had read that catapults and trebuchets hadn’t been common place until the third century BC. Once the bloody meat began to fall from the sky, the Samnites had loosed five lions as their vanguard. The starved beasts had wasted no time racing toward the crude defenses King and Alexander had helped the locals build around their village.
Now the deadly lion was airborne for King’s position, and he needed to time things just right. The creature closed the distance with its huge lunge, and at the last second possible, King shoved upward, throwing the full weight of his body behind the blade, and then sidestepping the incoming mass of fur and claws. King rolled over backward on the ground, landing in a crouched position on his feet, his balance having become much better after years of living outdoors and engaging in frequent hand-to-hand battles.
The lion impaled itself on the broad blade of King’s iron sword, landing without grace on its head and snapping its own neck in the process, as the full weight of its attack came pounding down to the ground. Even if the sword hadn’t ended the lion’s life instantly as it ripped through fur and flesh and muscle, the broken bones might have finished the creature off. King stepped cautiously toward the beast, but it was done. Its huge chest no longer moved. King could see the animal’s ribs clearly, and once again he raged at the thought that men had tortured and abused this majestic animal, training it for war against a mostly unarmed and peaceful people. King knew the history. He and Alexander had spent long hours discussing the ways things went down. He knew his actions wouldn’t change the historical outcome, but he intended to take as many of the Samnites with him as possible, before the fight was over.
He pulled the bloodied sword from the lion’s chest-wall, and bid the creature a safe passage to its next life.
When King turned, he saw Alexander extracting his meaty fist from the shattered head of the lion that had attacked him. Yellow fur was matted with blood and bone across his knuckles. King knew Alexander, like him, took little joy in killing animals, but sometimes it was the only way.
“That’s the last of them,” Alexander said, standing up and wiping his hands down the front of his already filthy robe. “The spears will come next.”
“We’ll be ready for them, then,” King said with a lopsided grin.
“Or we could just move on. We know the outcome,” Alexander replied, but from the smile on his own face, King knew the man was just playing Devil’s advocate and he had no intention of leaving the fight now. Over the years, they had found a common ground. Despite King’s continued anger at being temporarily trapped in the past — if twenty-five years could be called temporary — his painful longing for Sara and Fiona and his continued concern for the fate of his team and family, he could not turn away from people in need. And to King’s surprise, neither could Alexander.
“Who’s to say whether one of the Oscans we save today won’t go on to father someone important? If we stay and fight this losing battle, then we always stayed and always fought this fight. That’s your theory on time travel, right?” King walked back toward the crude wooden battlements he and Alexander had built. They had discussed their working theory on time travel dozens of times over the years, but without any further evidence of their actions from King’s time, and knowing the vagaries of inaccurate historical accounts, the issue was truly moot.
“Who is to say,” Alexander parried, “that we didn’t always leave this fight in the middle, abandoning the Oscans to their fate?” The big man followed King, and they put on jovial smiles for the worried locals, both of them knowing they would fight and both of them knowing that in the end, they would lose. But the locals — kind people who had sheltered and fed them, who loved songs and lived simple farming lives — had no such knowledge. So the men would show them brave faces and teach them radical battle techniques.
“Who is to say?” King grimaced. “My conscience.”
Alexander nodded. “Your conscience has gotten us into more scrapes…”
“Not just mine,” King said. Alexander had gone to extremes in his pursuit of time travel. He had put a lot of people in harm’s way. Maybe worse. But now that he was here, in the past, moving toward saving the woman he’d missed for thousands of years, his true self was showing. Hercules had been a hero, or at least, he was now. King decided to let Alexander off the hook. “Besides, it’s not like we have anything better to do. How is the practice coming along?” King asked.
Alexander frowned.
For months and months he had been practicing the simple phrase he had tortured out of Richard Ridley. A single expression in a nearly extinct language. The mother tongue. Alexander didn’t want the whole language. Just one sentence. The one that would allow him to create a lifeless human body out of inanimate clay. A body that would completely pass for human. The body of his wife, Acca. For five years, Alexander had been practicing the sentence, first in the safety of the Omega facility in 2013, and now creating inert bodies that the two men would leave buried all over Italy. With each attempt, Alexander’s work was more and more perfect, with one exception.