Chương 104: 3.28 A Call to Arms - James Horner (3:08)

Z3ke (Original Poster) We tore our way through the Dead Corridor and, for the first twenty miles or so, everything was strangely quiet. All the gunfire and shouting and screams and constant burst of rifle fire that had followed us on our race across the Deadlands all seemed to fall away. We were left with nothing but the sound of our engines and the ragged breathing of everyone crammed into the jeep with me. Jackie was leaning over the steering wheel with her shoulders hunched up and her head ducked down.

Elnor had his head on a swivel, constantly scanning every road we passed. The two Pale Regiment soldiers next to me still both had their masks on, which meant that I couldn't see what they were thinking. But they were probably starting to untense just like the rest of us. It was in those first thirty minutes in the Dead Corridor that the convoy started to relax. Not entirely. We all knew that we were still being chased and it was still dangerous.

But we'd just come through the Deadlands without losing too many people and now we were rolling our way through the Dead Corridor and the Black Teeth hadn't shot at us for a while. Jackie kept us tucked neatly into the middle of the convoy, just like we planned. We wove our way through the old industrial roads and the abandoned loading docks and the rusted machinery and all the rest of what was in the Dead Corridor.

After thirty minutes of just driving, I allowed myself to wonder if we'd pulled off something clever. The idea to head through the Dead Corridor had been an obvious one. I think Castellan had the same plan as Haynes and Vicks and had laid it out previously. The Black Teeth were masters of convoy warfare. There was none better. They were amazing at fighting out in the open.

They had more and faster vehicles, could move across open terrain like they were born to it, and had slowly been chewing apart our convoy before we reached the Dead Corridor. It was obvious that we wouldn't survive long out in the Deadlands. Haynes thought our best defense was the Corridor. In his mind, an army that was used to traveling through the wide-open expanse of the Deadlands would undoubtedly have difficulty picking their way through the narrow corridors and twisting turns of where we now found ourselves.

While the Black Teeth were trying to come to terms with the maze of broken roads and dead industry, our convoy would be able to drive through it and head straight towards the nearest Pale Regiment base. At least, that's what I assumed was on Haynes' mind. But then reality caught up with us and it once again proved that I've got nothing but bad luck. We rolled through a crumbling intersection, following the trucks ahead of us.

I was keeping my eyes on the road and watching as our convoy was threading its way through collapsed buildings and over roads that had gone without maintenance for decades or centuries. We were coming up on the intersection when it happened. Something burst through the dust from my right. It was a massive bus, covered in spikes and steels and chains and people. The bus plowed straight into the side of a Pale Regiment cargo truck, and the impact of it smashed into my chest.

The sound of metal screeching against metal assaulted my ears, and the cacophony of the crash thumped into my bones and rattled them. Both vehicles slid sideways across the pockmarked concrete street until they slammed into a retaining wall. I have no idea how the people clinging to the sides of the bus held on. They'd been latched onto the doors and crouched on the roof like they were surfing on a post-apocalyptic pirate ship.

I think I saw something like bungie cords or ropes or whatever attached to their waist, but I didn't get a good look before they were on the ground and firing into the cargo truck. There were screams and cries for help. The cargo truck that had been hit wasn't one of the ones carrying ammunition or fuel or supplies. It had been loaded down with the wounded from Devro. I saw flashes of stretchers and bodies and equipment tumble through the air and come to rest on the street.

The whole thing had happened so fast I could barely process it. One second the truck had been there and the next it was broken and all its pieces were sprawled out on the intersection. The Black Teeth bus tried to reverse course but the crash had locked the two vehicles together. There was grinding and tires spinning uselessly as the twisted metal refused to let either vehicle separate.

The wounded Pale Regiment soldiers fired from inside the wreck while the Black Teeth poured rounds into them and the rest of our convoy split around the wreckage like water flowing around a rock. The drivers found the gaps and pushed their vehicles through and kept going. The Black Teeth were quickly cut down as the Pale Regiment soldiers in the rest of the convoy fired at the bus.

But despite the fact that the Black Teeth raiders had soon been cut down to a man, none of the Pale Regiment stopped to help the cargo truck pinned to the concrete wall. Nobody was jumping out to rescue the wounded. We all just kept driving. I don't think anyone was proud of what they were doing, but I think they were all silently mouthing thanks to whatever is out there that they weren't the ones who'd been hit.

Haynes' voice came over the radios clear and somewhat harried, yelling at us to leave the intersection and not stop. He also told us to keep on the lookout for more Black Teeth vehicles approaching from the sides. As if he needed to. That is when I realized we might have all fucked up. We were being hunted now. I figured that out at the intersection. You could say that the Black Teeth had been hunting us before, back when they were chasing us through the Deadlands, but it was different now.

Instead of staying together as one enormous convoy and keeping up with us like they'd done out in the Deadlands, they'd broken themselves into dozens of smaller packs. Motorcycles and dune runners and pickup trucks and buses and other vehicles were all racing through the Dead Corridor independently. They were taking advantage of its maze of industrial roads to stalk us and peel us apart one vehicle at a time.

This might not make much sense and I've gone back and forth about telling it and it might seem a little jarring, what with me just having told you all about how the Black Teeth rammed a cargo truck filled with wounded soldiers off the road. But it was all I could think about when I was writing this. I knew this kid back in the third grade, and he was obsessed with the Civil War.

Every day after school he'd race home and throw Glory into the DVD player and watch the whole thing from start to end before doing it all over again the next day and the next and the next. That was his introduction to the Civil War. It's what piqued his interest. He slowly went from watching Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Matthew Broderick facing off against the confederates and racism, to reading about tactics and strategy and all the other things that drive engagement about the Civil War.

I remember he'd come to class and the only thing he wanted to talk about was line infantry and rifling and artillery and all these ancient battles. I never really got the appeal. I like war movies just as much as the next guy, but constantly talking tactics and arguing about something that happened ages ago? Not really my cup of tea. Uh… I don't really remember where I was going with this other than that he kinda reminds me of you Castellan. Or you remind me of him. I don't know.

Either way, you both seem inordinately fascinated with how battles unfold and, after living through this one, I think you and Haynes had made the same calculation and it was… not great. Like I said before, the idea behind heading through the Dead Corridor was sound. At the time. We could try to use the terrain against them and hope that they are too disorganized to really pursue us.

Instead of staying out in the Deadlands where the masters of convoy warfare could slowly grind us down, we bring them into the Dead Corridor and force them to abandon their advantages and chase us through terrain that neither of us really knew about. That was kinda stupid of us. Out in the Deadlands, you knew where the danger was. You could see the Black Teeth coming. Kinda.

You could see the cloud of dust and dirt and sand that followed them through the Deadlands and when their cloud smashed into our cloud, you knew you were in for a fight. But now? In the Dead Corridor? Every collapsed warehouse blocked our line of sight and every side road disappeared behind another row of abandoned factories and every intersection became associated with fear; the fear that another Black Teeth bus could barrel through the convoy before we even knew it was there.

By the time we'd been in the Dead Corridor for about half an hour, everything had changed. We weren't looking behind us for the Black Teeth. Instead, we were worrying about literally every direction at once. The Black Teeth had learned how to use the Corridor against us. Every intersection, every warehouse, every side road, and every collapsed building became another area they could spring an ambush on us before disappearing back into the industrial maze.

We'd barely put the wrecked cargo truck behind us when the next attack came. We were racing through the shell of an enormous warehouse district where half the walls had collapsed in on themselves. Concrete support pillars and rusted beams jutted out of the ground on either side of us and ancient overhead cranes hung frozen above the roads. Shattered skylights filled the air with dusty sunlight that somehow made it even harder to see anything around us.

A motorcycle exploded out from between two loading bays and came up alongside us so fast that I barely had time to think about it before the pistol in the rider's hand was already leveled and firing at us. There was a flash and the bullets slammed into the side of the jeep and Jackie instinctively wheeled away from the incoming fire. The jeep bounced and spun and I felt us starting to roll and my stomach climbed up into my throat.

While I was busy freaking out, Elnor and the Pale Regiment soldier to my right reacted before I knew what was going on. Both spun towards the motorcycle at the same time and braced themselves against the bouncing jeep while tracking the rider through the chaos. The motorcycle kept weaving in and out and around chunks of broken pavement and was setting himself up for another pass when Elnor and the soldier fired. There was some pink mist that flooded the air and the rider jerked sideways and the motorcycle wobbled.

It clipped a concrete divider, launched into the air, and cartwheeled into the side of one of the abandoned warehouses. By the time we flew past him, all I could see was twisted metal skidding across the pavement in a shower of sparks. That little victory only last about five seconds before another motorcycle came at us from the other side. The rider didn't bother slowing down.

He raced past and swung his pistol towards us, squeezed the trigger, and the sound of a rusty zipper finally cutting loose filled the warehouse. Brr-rrrip. The burst of gunfire tore straight through the back of the jeep. The Pale Regiment soldier seated on my left went completely limp. Blood splattered across the seat behind him and began dripping through the mouthpiece of his porcelain mask. His rifle slipped from his hands and his body folded sideways against me and, just like that, he was gone.

I sat there and just stared at the man, shocked at how fast it had happened. Part of me was kinda ashamed because the first thought that crossed my mind was 'thank god it was him and not me.' The other part of me wasn't ashamed and instead wanted to sigh and say 'thank god it was him and not me.'

While I was just staring at the newly dead body, Elnor reached across me and shoved the body down so it wouldn't block Jackie's view whenever she checked the rearview mirror, grabbed the rifle and situated it onto the floorboards before it bounced out of the jeep, and immediately went back to scanning the roads for the next attack. Jackie and Elnor and one remaining Pale Regiment soldier and me. Four people. That's all we had left.

I briefly thought about opening the door and shoving the body out so I'd have room to move, but quickly pushed that thought away. The other soldier was still sitting right next to me and something told me that he wouldn't like the fact that I was shoving his friend's body onto the road. The next intersection was much wider than the others. Instead of another motorcycle hitting us, a massive truck roared out from one of the side roads and accelerated until it was running alongside us.

The road was wide enough that we could both fit and the truck moved alongside us until we were so close I could have reached out and touched it. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. There were people hanging from the side of the bus, clinging to handles with one hand while swinging clubs, maces, sharpened lengths of rebar, hooked poles, and every other type of weapon you could imagine. More were crouched up on the roof, screaming down at us.

It looked like a porcupine racing alongside us, trying to poke and gouge us to death. The driver kept trying to slam into us and force us off the road. Every few seconds he'd drift sideways and hammer into Jackie's side of the jeep and grind us off the road and into the shattered industrial buildings lining the street. Each impact sent us skidding across the broken pavement, the tires screaming as Jackie fought to keep control. I've gotta say that we were lucky as hell to have Jackie driving us.

I have no clue what her Driving skill is other than, I'm guessing, it's high. She fought the steering wheel with both her hands and corrected every one of us slides and kept us moving forward while the truck tried to shove us aside. Two of the Black Teeth jumped from the roof of the truck and landed on us. The first raider launched himself towards the back of the jeep, but the soldier next to me was ready.

A short burst from his rifle caught the raider in midair, and his body twisted awkwardly in the air before crashing into the narrow gap between our jeep and the truck. A heartbeat later, the truck rolled over him with a loud, sickening crunch and never slowed down. The second raider had better timing. He landed on the hood of the jeep, his boots caving in the metal as one hand grabbed the empty windshield frame to keep himself from being thrown clear.

Then he raised a sawed-off shotgun with his free hand, looked straight at me, and leveled both barrels directly at my face. Everything slowed. I know people say that time slows when you're about to die and I always that that was just… I don't know, a writing technique or something? Someone said it once and everyone after that was like 'oh, time slows? Sure. Let's write that.' Well, time slows. Standing there - or more accurately sitting there - with a shotgun pointed at my face and my brain just stopped thinking.

I knew how it was gonna end. The Black Teeth raider was gonna pull the trigger and the blast would hit me square in the chest from only a few feet away and there was nothing I could do about it. I'd collapse in the backseat and bleed all over everything and maybe Elnor or the Pale Regiment soldier would kill the guy afterwards but it wouldn't matter. I'd still be dead. The jeep would keep driving. Jackie wouldn't stop just because I was dead. Haynes would still be shouting over the radio.

The Pale Regiment would still be racing through the Dead Corridor. The Black Teeth would still be slowly carving them apart one vehicle at a time. It's just I wouldn't be part of it. I'd have been killed in the back of a jeep in the middle of some godforsaken abandoned industrial district on a planet I wasn't even supposed to be on and had no clue how I came here. My story would end with a shotgun blast and a forum post that never got written. Then Elnor fired. The blast from his shotgun brought me back to reality.

It punched through the raider's neck and took half his face with him. His body rolled backwards off the hood of the jeep and Jackie slammed on the gas. The jeep lurched forward just as the truck beside us started falling behind. There was a heavy thumb beneath the tires as we bounced over the Black Teeth raider's body.

Jackie fought the steering wheel through the impact, the jeep fishtailing across the broken pavement before she hauled it back under control and pulled us away from the truck before anyone else could make the jump. My hands were shaking to the point that I could barely unclench my fingers. I'd almost been killed and all I could do about it was just sit there and… what? Let Elnor handle things? Let the Pale Regiment handle things? Why was I so useless?

I looked down and found the Pale Regiment soldier's rifle still lying beside me from where Elnor had finagled it onto the floorboards so it wouldn't bounce out of the jeep. Before I had time to think about it I picked it up and leaned out over the side of the jeep and pulled the trigger. I wasn't even aiming. I just pointed the rifle behind me and squeezed the trigger and hoped and prayed that I'd hit someone.

I can tell you now that I probably looked like one of those dudes in the middle east who, you see videos of them just waving guns at the enemy and when they open fire they are surprised when the rifle kicks. That was me. I don't even know if I hit anything. The rounds disappeared into the dust and I was doing good just pointing the gun behind me. Maybe I hit someone or maybe I missed all my shots by fifty feet. I don't know. I was angry and terrified and desperate to stop people from chasing after me.

If nothing else, I was happy that whoever I was shooting at would probably be forced to duck their heads, even if only for a few seconds. A notification blared in the corner of my vision and I swiped it away, keeping my eyes peeled for any more motorcycles coming up beside us or trucks that were trying to side swipe us. We twisted our way through even more abandoned factories, even more abandoned loading yards, and even more abandoned places of industrial decay.

Gunfire echoed ahead of us and behind us, reminding us all that the Black Teeth were still out there, hunting. Haynes finally seemed to accept what the rest of us had started to slowly realize. We weren't gonna outrun the Black Teeth. Heading through the Dead Corridors was a mistake. We needed to do something else. The radio came to life again and through the static I heard Haynes giving orders for the convoy to follow the lead vehicle.

One by one we all peeled off the main road and followed a lone jeep as it drove into one of the largest industrial complexes any of us had seen since entering the Dead Corridor. The complex was set in the middle of this massive loading yard that was empty of vehicles. Rusted pipelines crossed overhead and wide stretches of cracked concrete provided sightlines in every direction. At the far end was a massive warehouse where we circled the wagons and parked.

I looked around and couldn't help but think that it was the most defensible location we'd get. If the Black Teeth wanted to attack, at least we'd see them coming. Maybe with our rifles and everyone shooting in the same direction we could do something. The trucks and jeeps and cars all parked. The lead jeep's doors opened and I saw both Haynes and Vicks get out and I couldn't help but think: what would have happened if that jeep had been hit? Would we have all been leaderless now?

Would we have continued to limp our way through the Dead Corridor? What a blood bath that would have been, Haynes started shouting orders, lining the trucks up nose-to-tail in the form of a massive barricade. A few of the Pale Regiment soldiers crawled under the trucks and pointed their rifles out at where they thought the Black Teeth would be coming. Some of the more damaged vehicles, the ones that had barely limped along and not been cut loose, were driven into the gaps to provide more makeshift cover.

Our jeep was placed in one of the gaps and Elnor, Jackie and I got out. Ammunition was passed out to the soldiers. Magazines were topped off. The wounded - those who were too far gone to even lay there and hold rifles - were carried to the center of the defensive position where the medics would work without being too exposed to enemy fire. None of the Pale Regiment were talking about escaping. The idea was, if the Black Teeth wanted to attack and overrun us, we'd make them bleed for every inch.

That actually kinda pissed me off a bit. I looked over at Jackie and Elnor and there was a look that passed between the three of us. We were wondering if this was the time for us to leave the Pale Regiment and try to pick our way free of the Dead Corridor. Surely the Black Teeth wouldn't waste their time chasing after a single jeep escaping from them while the rest of the Pale Regiment was hunkered down. We weren't a juicy target, right?

While I was thinking about that, I saw Haynes and Vicks wandering amongst the soldiers. Haynes stopped every few feet and he pointed and gestured and argued and shouted orders. Both of them slowly made their way to Jackie and Elnor and me. Our Pale Regiment minder had disappeared in the chaos. He'd gone off somewhere to make himself useful and I didn't know where because with their masks they all looked the same to me. Quartermaster Vicks found me in the chaos and he saddled up next to me.

I was a little surprised at that. I guess since Haynes was sorting out all the defenses, Vicks had some time on his hands.

"Why are we stopped?" I asked.

"I thought the plan was to stay on the road and turn up at the nearest one of your bases. We're making ourselves stationary targets out here."

"There were…miscalculations," he said. I wanted to roll my eyes at that and just say 'no shit' but he continued.

"The Black Teeth were far more organized than we expected. We underestimated both their numbers and their ability to adapt in the Corridor." Jackie sighed beside me and I didn't even really know what to do with that. I don't think Vicks expected me to do anything. I was just about ready to turn away and ask Jackie and Elnor if we should take our chances out on the road when Vicks drew me back.

"We did manage to get a message out to the nearest outpost. Our comms managed to reach that far, and we requested some reinforcements."

"You got a message out?" I asked.

"When? How long ago? What'd they say? Are they coming to the rescue? Is that why we're hunkering down?" It took him a moment to answer and I could feel the regret in his voice.

"We're not sure. I said our comms reached that far, but they couldn't completely punch through the interference wrapped around this place. Too much metal."

"Uh. Okay. What does that mean?"

"It means that we sent the message, but we're not sure if it was received." What. The. Hell. What could I say to that? What could I do? What was I supposed to do now? The Pale Regiment was coming with reinforcements. Maybe. We were going to try and hold this warehouse. Maybe. Jackie and I should have just taken the jeep and booked it and not looked back. While I was kicking myself at that I looked at the preparations going on all around us for what was obviously turning into a major attack from the Black Teeth.

I could just feel that they were out there, somewhere in the Corridor, ready to pounce on us and tear us to shreds. I briefly wondered what I could contribute to the defenses. The notification in the corner of my vision was glowing, letting me know I'd gained a rank in guns. Rank 1. That wasn't exactly going to let me John Wick people to death. Were there any glyphs that I could come up with in the meantime?

I had the massive sacrifice glyphs, but that required a shit ton of mana and a major target and a whole bunch of the other smaller glyphs to prime it. There was the rubber band glyph, but we weren't fighting robots that would do nothing but charge us. I sighed and reached into my dimensional storage space and pulled out both my guitar and my tech slate.

There was a moment where I was gonna check in with all of you and ask for help, but at the same time I knew I'd just get a bunch of people bitching at me for getting stuck in this situation. Instead, I turned to all the things you all had been sending me. I had a collection of stuff I'd grabbed from the forums. PDFs filled with guitar tabs, theories about what different songs might do, and speculation about which melodies and riffs could strengthen people and would be most effective in a shootout.

I was standing there, trying to figure out which songs I could play and which songs I'd definitely not play, when I heard engines. At first it was faint, just another distant rumble echoing through the industrial ruins. It slowly grew louder until everyone in the defensive line started looking towards the same road leading into the warehouse complex. It had to be the Black Teeth. Or the mercenaries led by the Alderman. But what if it was reinforcements?

What if Haynes and Vicks had managed to get through to the Pale Regiment base? What if they had managed to contact reinforcements? I wasn't the only one thinking about it, either. Some of the exhausted soldiers all around me looked a little taller as the approaching engines grew closer. Then the vehicles came into view. They weren't Pale Regiment. They weren't Black Teeth.

They were ramshackle trucks that rattled into the complex beside patched-together cars that looked like they'd been rebuilt a dozen times from scrap. The people riding them weren't wearing uniforms or polished armor. They weren't decked out in the Mad Max chic I'd come to expect from the Pale Regiment. They were wearing mismatched rags, dented bits of scavenged metal, and ancient equipment that looked older than some of the buildings around us. I locked eyes with one of the people at the front of the group.

Half his face had been burned off. Or ripped off. Or something. The eyelid on the right side of his face had been carved off, exposing a milky eye that stared at me. Taking them in, at first I thought they looked terrified. I thought that maybe there was some sort of slave army that was being used to attack us, and all these guys were terrified of attacking the Pale Regiment because they knew that they'd be killed. But then I realized that I'd gotten it backwards. The mismatched and hodgepodge group of…

whatever I was looking at weren't afraid of us. They were terrified of disappointing whatever had sent them here. I don't even know how I knew that but… I knew it. There were symbols painted on their vehicles. Spirals and circles and triangles all painted in red and black and blue and green. Pieces of mirrored glass were tied to bats and machetes and hung from necklaces. Jackie let out a curse beside me and I turned to her, eager to hear what she knew of these new arrivals.

For the first time since we'd fled the base, I saw real fear on her face. She'd kept it together when we were running. She'd managed to drive us through the Dead Corridor and helped us fend off the Black Teeth. But now she was staring at the newcomers like she'd just watched a second nightmare arrive before the first one had ended. Beside her, Elnor's expression hardened and his shoulders locked in place.

"The Shard Choir too?" he mumbled, as if asking the gods what he'd done to deserve this.

"They're working with the Black Teeth," asked Jackie incredulously. Elnor shook his head.

"No. They don't work with anyone." He watched another truck full of cultists roll into view. Dozens of bodies left the truck and lined up and turned to us with faces that looked like they were…orgasmically religious. I think that's the best term to use for them.

"They're here because their priests convinced them this is where they'll find their God." I felt my stomach drop at that as I remembered what NullSigil had said a long time ago. The Shard Choir was to be left alone at all cost. They were religious psychos that hung out in the Rift Scar and worshipped it. And worshipped the Janus Storm. The same storm that had disappeared a few days ago. The same storm that I'd killed a few days ago.

I'd watched the thing collapse in on itself and I'd walked away from it thinking that that chapter of my life was over.

"Well…shit."