He squeezed the trigger and one insurgent’s head burst with a spray of blood they could see from afar, even with the naked eye. The others became frantic, scrambling like frightened ants. Coulthard fired again and a second man went down as his chest burst open. Another shot and the wounded insurgent was hit in the shoulder and spun around to drop to the rock and crawl into the lee of a huge step out of sight. They had finally realised where the fire was coming from and the other man scrambled into cover as well.
“Fuckers,” Coulthard said again. He kept his eye to the sight and lay still, breathing gently.
Spencer sank to curl up against the wall at the back of the rock shelf. His arms wrapped around his head as he rocked gently.
“Spencer’s lost it,” Brown whispered to Coulthard.
“I know,” the sergeant said without taking his eye away from the telescopic sight. “Give him some time and see if he comes around.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Who knows? Right now, that fucking thing isn’t coming out of the tunnel and I’m certainly not going back in. There’s one unhurt insurgent bastard down there and one with a shoulder wound of unknown severity. For now, I plan to wait them out and give Spencer a chance to get his shit together. I suggest you have a rest.”
His tone brooked no further discussion. Brown moved well away from the tunnel mouth and sat down against the stone. It was cold on his back. Clearly Coulthard had lost it too, only he was dealing with it in a typically old-school military way. The big, musclebound sergeant had seen more action than the rest of them put together and he let all that training take over. Maybe it was a good strategy. If the man could divorce himself from his emotion and let his experience run him like a robot, perhaps that would actually see him out of this alive.
Time ticked by. Brown began to worry about more mundane matters like where they might sleep, how much they had left in the way of rations and water, whether there was any way out other than the way they had come in. And he certainly wasn’t keen to go back up the tunnel either.
He jumped as Coulthard’s rifle boomed.
“I knew I could outwait him,” the sergeant said with a smile in his voice.
“Did you get him?”
“Yep. He didn’t think I’d wait on a scope all that time. I’ve sat for longer than ten minutes, you murderous insurgent motherfucker. You’re a fucking amateur, you had to peek. A dead fucking amateur now.” He stood and slung the rifle over his shoulder. “All dead except the shoulder wound and I reckon he’ll bleed out if nothing else. Let’s go and see.”
Brown stood, brow knitted in confusion. “Go and see?”
“Yep. What else is there to do?”
Brown thought hard but came up empty. The sergeant had a point. They at least needed to look around if they didn’t plan to go back up the tunnel, so they might as well finish the job while they searched. It was pragmatism taken to the max, but it made a cold sense.
Coulthard went and crouched beside Spencer. “How you doing, soldier?”
“Not good, Sarge.”
“Me either. But we gotta move, okay?”
Spencer looked up, his narrow face white as bone under his brown crewcut. “I got a little boy at home, Sarge. He’s gonna be two next month. I’m due home in time for his birthday. I missed his first.”
Coulthard patted Spencer’s shoulder. “We’ll get out and get you on a transport home just when you’re supposed to be.”
“We won’t, Sarge. None of us are getting out.” He pointed at the spires and tower filling the cavern. “What the fuck even is that, Sarge? We’re gonna die here.” He sounded perfectly calm about it.
“We’re getting out,” Coulthard said firmly.
“My wife always worried I’d come home with no legs from an IED. ‘You won’t get killed,’ she said one night when we’d been drinking. ‘I can feel that.’ She was always what she called spiritual. Thought she was fucking psychic, you know? But it was harmless. ‘You won’t get killed,’ she said, ‘but I have a terrible feeling you’re going to be maimed by a mine.’ Great fucking prophecy, eh, Sarge? For all her spirituality, she certainly didn’t foresee this shit!”
Coulthard laughed. “I don’t think anyone foresaw this shit.”
“I was supposed to go home in two weeks, Sarge.” Spencer’s eyes brimmed with tears.
Brown gaped as Coulthard did something he would never have anticipated. The sergeant gathered Spencer into a tight hug and held the man against his chest.
“Let it out, solider,” Coulthard said, and Spencer sobbed.
Brown stood uncomfortably off to one side for a good minute while Spencer bawled. The medic wondered why he felt so calm, so cold inside, and realised he had his terror, his panic, locked up in his chest. His true self and all the emotions it harboured was in a sealed box inside him and at some point he would have to unlock that box. It frightened him to think what might happen when he did, but for now, it stopped him falling to pieces. Did that make him a better soldier than Spencer? A worse human being? For all the atrocities he’d seen, all the wounds and trauma he’d become accustomed to, surely this day’s experiences should break him. He had no wife or kids like Spencer to yearn for. But the sergeant did and he was holding it together too. Maybe Spencer had just lost control of his locked box for now.
Coulthard pushed the man away. “Right. Now on your feet, son. Feel better.”
“Sorry, Sarge, I just…”
“Fuck sorry, Spencer, it’s all done. You ready to move out?”
“Yes, Sarge.” Spencer’s voice still quavered, but there was some confidence back in it.
“Brown?”
The medic nodded, shook himself. “Yes, Sarge.” At least, he thought, as ready as I possibly can be.
Coulthard sniffed and settled his pack. “Well, I am certainly not going back the way we came. That thing in the tunnel, whatever it is, seems to want to stay there, so we’ll leave it well alone. There must be another way out. Nothing that size,” he pointed at the monumental structure filling the cave, “can possibly only have one tiny tunnel leading in. Let’s go.”
“Sarge,” Brown said, finally ready to give voice to a nagging worry that had tickled his hindbrain since they had emerged onto the rocky ledge.
“What?”
“The thing in the tunnel hasn’t followed us out. Maybe you’re right and it’s too bright in here.”
“Yeah. And?”
“Well, if it’s meant to guard this place, but hasn’t followed us out, that must mean something.”
The Sergeant narrowed his eyes. “Like maybe there’s something else in here to do the same job and that thing only worries about its tunnel?”
“Something like that.”
“You have a point. Better keep your weapon ready. Let’s go.”
They moved along the ledge, heading for the giant stairway the insurgents had used. Brown whistled softly as they came abreast of a massive bronze plate pressed into the wall, ten metres high and five wide, inscribed with strange cursive symbols and patterns that made him dizzy to look upon. His eyes kept sliding away as he tried to make sense of them and nausea began to stir his guts.
“Over there,” Spencer said. “And there.”
They followed his pointing finger and saw other plaques on other ledges dotted around the cave. Small tunnel openings here and there accompanied them just like the one they had entered through.
“Any of those tunnels could have a fucking monster like the one that attacked us,” Brown said.
“We have to assume each one does,” Coulthard said. “We have to keep looking for something else. Move on.”
Another twenty metres along their ledge gave them a vantage point past the monumental structure and they all saw it at once. On the far side of the vast cave, at the top of another giant staircase that went even higher than where they currently stood, a huge tunnel mouth yawned.