Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(42)
“Well, shit,” Jeremy said. “Maybe they are gonna have us fight one of the other teams.”
Beck raised a fist for quiet. She listened as hard as she could through the helmet, trying to hear any clue about what they were about to face. Her eyes darted across all the quadrants of her vision as Reeves taught them, pausing on a gleam of metal nearly hidden by a wide length of cloth.
Short spears. Maybe other weapons. Ten feet in front of them. Beck pointed silently, making sure everyone saw them. She gave the signal to move in two columns, and to remain silent.
Beck scanned forward and trusted Tala and Lucia to keep their eyes open to the left. Jeremy and his team would watch the right. They reached the cache of weapons without a problem, Beck kneeling down to pull the cloth away. She met some resistance, only seeing the thin wire attached to the cloth after it was too late. Whatever it ran to made a metallic jangling noise.
“Take them!” Beck said. Whoever they were up against here certainly knew where they were. The entire team broke ranks and snatched up weapons, which turned out to be four short spears about four feet long and two metal clubs.
Then the enemy was on them. The only warning was the rapid scrape of stone on stone and a sudden, ragged inhalation that turned Beck’s blood to ice. She knew that sound. Everyone did.
The Pale burst out from behind a hanging cloth and threw itself at Jeremy from a yard away. The world went slow as he instinctively raised the club in his hands sideways, as if to block an overhead strike from a similar weapon. In a way, this worked; the Pale’s outstretched forearms slapped against the length of metal with a hollow thud.
Beck stepped wide to one side to let Tala and Lucia move forward with their spears. That this worked exactly as they trained for was a minor miracle Beck noted in passing. The two women rammed their weapons into the ribs of the Pale, throwing their hips into the turning motion of their bodies to lend as much force to the strike as possible.
From Jeremy’s right, Jen did the same. Wojcik’s reaction was less automatic; he fumbled to find his balance and grip the spear correctly. Sympathy flashed through her as she took in the sight. Sometimes no matter how well you trained or how hard you tried, in that first moment of crisis you could default to a blank slate. Beck had been there herself in the mine.
The Pale reared back as three spears penetrated its stony skin, letting out a roar that startled Beck into nearly freezing both from its volume and the disturbingly human quality of its tone. Jeremy took the opportunity to step back and in one smooth motion find his balance to attack. His club flew in a beautiful arc to crash into the head of the screaming Pale.
The hit did not kill it, though the Pale’s eye socket and part of its temple crumpled from the force. Beck sucked in a breath and took careful aim, bringing her own club up from the left in a diagonal swing across her body. It was awkward, but the only way to avoid chancing a hit on her teammates by accident.
Whether by luck or from Wojcik’s careful timing, Beck slugged the Pale in the back of the head exactly when Wojcik was finally able to make his move. The point of his spear took the Pale under its jaw, her club adding tremendous forward momentum. Beck functionally hammered the Pale’s skull right down onto the point of the spear.
“Holy shit,” Wojcik said, panting. “We did it.”
Beck shook her head. “Get those weapons free and ready. We don’t know how many are in here, but we’re damn sure gonna find out.”
Only this time, they would be the hunters.
20
Eshton stood without armor in a dark corner of Acuet, waiting. He, like Caleb and so many others, had endured his training when in his early teens. Those brutal days instilled lessons only etched more deeply with each passing year, understanding carved so deeply that he sometimes feared the shapes of them were all that was left. Like a plain cut deeply by the passing of glaciers and torrential rain, leaving only peaks and valleys behind with no sign of the landscape that once existed.
He lived daily with the understanding that he could die at any moment, which Beck and her cohort were just now beginning to see. This truth was why Eshton was not nervous about being caught here even though the consequences would be dire. There were ironclad rules for recruits and Watchmen alike, and mingling between the two outside of the staff here was strictly forbidden.
Yet Bowers had given Eshton the order himself, and so he came.
Beck drifted across the lit portion of the footpath twenty feet away, the low-power LED lights casting a ghostly bluish glow across her. She was allowed to be out, of course. Recruits were given freedom after their late dinner. If they were foolish enough to waste their time with other endeavors than sating the constant and voracious hunger for sleep their physical activities demanded, well, that was on them.
Eshton was the interloper here.
“Beck,” he said, softly. She froze on the track and looked around exactly as she was trained, barely moving her head as she scanned for the origin of his voice. Eshton brought out his tablet and flashed the screen at her.
As she moved toward him, the wounds on her became clear. A gash ran down from her hairline to the corner of her left eye, glued back together but still raw and red.
“I got your message, obviously,” she said in a low voice. “How the hell did you get here without Reeves or anyone else knowing?”
Eshton smiled in the darkness. No amount of training could knock the curiosity out of her, and he found himself glad for it. “Bowers has overrides for every Loop system. The sensors don’t even know my carriage got close. I left it in a service tunnel off the main branch about a mile from here and walked the rest of the way, along with my suit. The rest was just avoiding people, though I got a little help from my tablet.” He showed her the locator program, a modified version of the system the Watch used to track its people in the field. The map glowed with dots representing every BIM installed in a skull within the confines of the Rez.