Inside Straight

Even here, Klaus thought grimly, even now. Pale light danced around him, hardened, became breastplate, greaves, gorget, gauntlets. He leaned into a turn and accelerated, pushing the old motorbike as fast as it would go, and leaving Jonathan’s wasps well behind. A little farther on, he came upon a woman clutching her child by the hand as blood streamed down her face. She flinched at his approach, and Klaus did not have the time to set her fears at ease. He screamed past her, his armor shining. The gunfire grew louder, staccato bursts that echoed off the hills. He could hear other sounds as well, shouts and screams, the roar of some great beast and the chudder of a helicopter’s rotors.

The jackals had no helicopters. The army, Klaus thought, the army has moved in to stop them. For a moment he was relieved.

When the valley opened up before him, Klaus hit his brakes and swerved to a sudden halt in a spray of dust and pebbles. He let his helm dissolve for a moment to give himself a better view, but even so, it took him a long moment to understand what he was seeing. The camp down there was much smaller than the one by the colossi, and half of it was in flames, rag tents and cardboard shacks alike sending up greasy pillars of smoke into the sky. A truck was burning, too, a large flatbed with a green canvas awning. Corpses littered the ground. Through the smoke he saw armed men moving, dim shapes with automatic rifles in their hands. He heard rifles chattering, a woman wailing. Above it all the helicoper moved, firing at something on the ground.

Some of the wounded had rushed toward the nearest of the ancient tombs and were trying to tear down its steel scissors gate to seek refuge inside. Klaus saw three men appear behind them and open up, raking the refugees with bullets. Their bodies danced and jerked under the impacts, like marionettes gone mad.

And then the lioness appeared. Even from a distance she was huge, larger than a pony, almost as big as the draft horses that pulled his father’s wagon up the mountain. Flame swirled from her jaws as she leapt onto the soldiers. Two fell screaming, wreathed in fire. The third she opened from throat to crotch, tearing at his intestines until the helicopter’s shadow fell across them. Then she whirled to leap, but the copter was beyond her reach. Klaus saw her hammered to the ground by a stream of machine gun fire, heard her roar of pain, saw the bullets kicking up dust all around her as she turned and raced away.

Jackals do not have helicopters. Through the smoke and dust, Klaus could see the uniforms, patterned in the tan-and-dun of desert camouflage. Not jackals. Those are soldiers. It is the Egyptian army doing this. This time he would not be facing paint-ball guns, or the cheap Czech pistols of the Bavarian Freedom Front. The jackals had always fled before him after a perfunctory shot or two, but these men were trained and disciplined, and there looked to be a lot of them. But none with my armor.

At Peenemünde, the scientists had argued for months about the nature of that armor. Doktor Fuchs theorized that it was made of coherent light, Doktor Alpers suspected quantum particles, and Doktor Hahn coined the term “hardened ectoplasm.” Klaus did not understand half of what they said, so he went on calling it ghost steel. Even after six months of study, the scientists still could not say with certainty whether it was made of energy or matter, but their tests did show that it was impervious to knives, axes, bullets, flamethrowers, acid, shrapnel, lightning bolts, and everything else that they could find to throw at him. The Egyptian soldiers were not nearly as well-armed as the good doktors. There was nothing they could do to harm him.

Klaus fed the motorbike a little gas and gathered speed as he went rolling down the hill. Mists shimmered around his head and became his warhelm again, its wide white wings outstretched. When he raised his hand his sword appeared, shining bright. Today we will give Jonathan something true to blog about, he thought.

~ ~ ~

Afterward, Klaus could not have said how many men he had faced, or how many he had slain.

The smoke from the fires drifted everywhere, acrid and choking, so thick at times that friend and foe alike seemed to vanish and reappear like phantoms in a dream. Sounds echoed in his ears—screams, shouts, the whine of rifles and the chudder of the big machine gun, the chopping of the helicopter’s blades, Sekhmet’s terrifying roars. The she-lion was off to his right, behind him, just ahead; try as he might, Klaus could not find her. At times he could have sworn there were two of her.