In all the thunder of gunfire, Branch knew his rifle ran empty only when it quit hunching at the meat of his shoulder. He switched clips twice. On the third switch, he paused to gauge the killing.
To his right and left, his boys went on machining the darkness with their gunfire. Maybe he wanted to hear the enemy beg for mercy. Or howl for it. Instead what he heard was laughter. Laughter?
'Cease fire,' he called.
They didn't. Blood up, they strafed, pulled dry, fresh-clipped, strafed again.
He shouted once more. One by one, his men stopped firing. The echoes pulsed off into the arterials.
The smell of blood and freshly chipped stone was pungent. You could practically spit it out of your mouth. That laughter went on, strange in its purity.
'Lights,' said Branch, trying to keep the momentum theirs. 'Reload. Be ready. Shoot first. Sort it out later. Total control, lads.'
Their headlamps came alive. The corridor drifted in white smoke. Fresh blood spoiled the cave paintings. Closer in, the carnage was absolute. Bodies lay tangled in a foggy distant mass. The heat of their blood steamed, adding to the humidity of this place.
'Dead. Dead. Dead,' said a troop. Someone giggled. It was that or weep. They had done this thing. A massacre of their very own.
Rifles twitching side to side, the spellbound Rangers closed in on their vaporous kill. At last, thought Branch, behold the eyes of dead angels. He finished refilling his spare clips, scanned the upper tunnel for latent intruders, then got to his feet.
Ever cautious, he circled the chamber, threw light down the left fork, then the right. Empty. Empty. They'd taken out the whole contingent. No stragglers. No blood trails leading away. One hundred percent payback.
They gathered in a semicircle at the edge of the dead. Over by the heaped kill, his men stood frozen, their lights casting downward in a collection pool. Branch shouldered in among them. Like them, he froze.
'No fucking way,' a troop darkly muttered.
His neighbor refused the sight, too. 'What's these doing here? What the fuck these doing here?'
Now Branch saw why his enemy had died so meekly.
'Christ,' he breathed. There were two dozen or more upon the floor. They were nude and pathetic. And human. They were civilians. Unarmed.
Even mauled by the shrapnel and gunfire, you could see their awful gauntness. Their decorated skin stretched taut across meatless rib cages. The faces were a study in famine, cheeks parsed, eyes hollowed. Their feet and legs were ulcerated. The sinewy arms lay thin as a child's. Their loins were cased in old waste. Only one thing might explain them.
'Prisoners,' said Spec 4 Washington.
'Prisoners? We didn't kill no prisoners.'
'Yeah,' said Washington. 'They were prisoners.'
'No,' said Branch. 'Slaves.' There was a silence.
'Slaves? There's no such thing. This is modern days, Major.'
He showed them the brand marks, the stripes of paint, the ropes linking neck to neck.
'Makes 'em prisoners. Not slaves.' The black kids acted like authorities on the
subject.
'See those raw marks on their shoulders and backs?'
'So?'
'Abrasions. They've been humping loads. Prisoners, labor. Slaves.'
Now they saw. Cued by Branch, they fanned out. This had just gotten very personal. Spooked, high-stepping, the troops moved among the limbs and smoke. Most of the captives were male. Besides the neck-to-neck rope, many were shackled at the ankles with leather thongs. A few bore iron bracelets. Most had been ear-tagged, or their ears had been sliced or fringed the way cowboys jingle-bobbed cattle.
'Okay, they're slaves. Then where's their keepers?'
The consensus was immediate. 'Gotta be a keeper. Gotta be a boss for the chain gang.'
They went on looking through the pile, absorbing the atrocity, refusing the notion that slaves might keep themselves slaves. Body by body, though, they failed to find a demon master.
'I don't get it. No food. No water. How'd they keep alive?'
'We passed that stream.'
'That's water, then. I didn't see no fish.'
'Here we go, see here. Jerky.' A Ranger held up a foot-long piece of dried meat. It looked more like a dried stick or shriveled leather. They found more pieces, mostly tucked into shackles or clutched in dead hands.
Branch examined a piece, bent it, smelled the meat. 'I don't know what this could be,' he said. Then he did. It was human.
It had been a caravan, they determined, though an empty one. No one could say what these captives had been hauling, but hauling they had been, and for long distances and recently. As Branch had noticed, the emaciated bodies had fresh sores on their shoulders and backs, the kind any soldier recognized, from a heavy load carried too long.
The Rangers were grave and angry as they made their way through the dead. At first glance, most of these people looked Central Asian. That explained the strange language. Afghanis, Branch guessed from the blue eyes. To his Lurps, though, these were brothers and sisters. That was enough for them to think about.
So the enemy had beasts of burden? All the way from Afghanistan? But this was sub-Bavaria. The twenty-first century. The implications were staggering. If the enemy was able to run strings of captives from so far away, it could also move armies... beneath humankind's feet. Screw the high ground. With this kind of low ground, the high ground was nothing but a blind man waiting to be robbed. Their enemy could surface anywhere, anytime, like prairie dogs or fire ants.
So what's new? Who was to say the children of hell hadn't been popping into mankind's midst from the start? Making slaves. Stealing souls. Raiding the garden of light. It was a concept too fundamental for Branch to accept easily.
'Here he is, I found him,' the Spec 4 called near the back of the heap. Knee-deep in the torn mass, he had his rifle and light aimed at something on the ground. 'Oh yeah, this the one. Here's their boss man. I got the motherfucker.'
Branch and the others hurried over. They clustered around the thing. Poked and kicked it a few times. 'It's dead, all right,' the medic said, wiping his fingers after hunting for a pulse. That made them more comfortable. They gathered closer.
'He's bigger than the rest.'
'King of the apes.'
Two arms, two legs: the body looked long and supple, lying tangled with its neighbors. It was soaked in gore, some its own, to judge by the wounds. They tried to figure it out, carefully, at gunpoint.