Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 022

Soren took the stairs fast.

Thomas was on the floor, sprawled on his back in a spreading pool of blood. The heavy wooden table he'd dragged up as cover had been punched through in several places, and the rounds that made it through had found him. His chest was soaked red, the uniform fabric dark and wet, and his breathing was the shallow, rattling kind that didn't have long left in it.

He raised one hand when he saw Soren come down. His arm was shaking badly, and he managed to lift it just enough to point at the window before the effort gave out. "Outside," he said, barely above a whisper. "Someone's..." The word dissolved into a cough that brought blood with it. His hand dropped. His eyes went still.

Damn it.

Soren didn't stop moving. He dropped low, stayed away from the windows, and pressed himself flat against the wall beside the front door. Outside, footsteps were closing in, more than two sets, moving with purpose. He couldn't get a count through the noise.

The door crashed open. Two soldiers came through first, rifles up, and their eyes went immediately to Thomas on the floor and the other bodies scattered across the room. They moved toward the fallen men without sweeping the corners, stepping closer to check on their comrades.

Soren moved.

Not toward them. His first move was to slam the door shut behind them, cutting off whatever was waiting outside. Then he spun toward the window, sliced the angle in a single sharp step, and fired. The soldier positioned outside took the round and went down.

He turned back before the echo died. One of the two men inside was already rising, reaching for his weapon. Soren reversed his grip on the G98 Mauser rifle and drove the stock into the man's temple with a full rotation of his torso behind it. The soldier dropped like the floor had been pulled out from under him.

The second man hadn't gotten his rifle up yet. Soren closed the distance in two steps, planted his boot into the man's chest with a hard front kick, and sent him stumbling backward into the wall. Before he could recover, Soren was on top of him, left hand pressing down on his forehead and eyes, pinning his head and killing his vision. The combat knife came out of its sheath and went in three times in rapid succession, throat, chest, abdomen, each strike fast and deliberate, each one finding something vital. The whole sequence took under three seconds.

Then the shooting started from outside.

Soren rolled clear as the door splintered, rounds punching through the wood in a line. He snatched Thomas's rifle off the floor and backed toward the rear window, returning fire through the door as he moved. Neither side could see the other clearly. The exchange was fast and blind, both parties unwilling to commit to a push without knowing what they were walking into.

Soren didn't wait for them to work up the nerve. He went out through the rear window, dropping into the narrow alley on the other side of the building, and kept moving.

Behind him, after a moment of silence from inside, someone outside made the decision not to risk it. A M1915 stick grenade came through the window instead. The explosion shook the building. Then boots hit the door, and four soldiers pushed inside with rifles raised, scanning every corner.

The room was empty.

Soren was already around the far side of the building, back pressed against the stone, putting distance between himself and the entry point. He reached for his ammunition pouch and stopped.

His hand came away wet.

He looked down. In the thin moonlight, the dark stain spreading across the left side of his coat was unmistakable. He hadn't felt it until now, the body doing what it does under enough adrenaline, but the moment he registered it the pain arrived all at once, a deep, burning pressure just above his hip that tightened with every breath.

He'd taken a round during the exchange through the door. He'd moved as fast as he could and it still hadn't been enough.

"Damn," he said quietly, and leaned against the wall.

He pulled the coat aside and checked the wound by touch. The bullet had gone through cleanly, in one side and out the other. A through-and-through wound was about as good as it got in a situation like this. If the round had stayed in, the rotational energy alone would have been enough to put him down within minutes. As it was, he was bleeding steadily and the pain was going to keep getting worse.

He took a slow breath and thought it through.

The gunfire from the main column's direction had thinned out considerably. Either they'd broken off and retreated, or there wasn't much of them left to make noise. The distraction they'd been providing was running out.

He could still walk. He could still shoot. And somewhere in this town there was a sniper in a clock tower who had already killed him once and would do it again if given the chance. The smart move, the survivable move, was to find a dark corner and stay low until the twenty-four hours ran out. With the Ivory Army focused on the main field and their attention scattered, a man moving carefully along the edges of town had a reasonable chance of making it through.

He almost did it. Then he thought about Thomas pointing at the window with a hand he could barely lift, spending the last of what he had to pass along a warning that came too late to matter.

Soren pushed off the wall.

"Fine," he said to no one. "Die again, reset, try something different."

He tore a strip from the inner lining of his coat and pressed it hard against the exit wound, then tied it off as tight as he could manage one-handed. It wasn't going to hold for long, but it would slow things down.

He checked his ammunition. Enough for another push.

Around the corner of the building, one soldier stood guard at the front door, rifle held across his chest, scanning the street. The other three were still inside. Soren couldn't confirm their positions, but the building's layout hadn't changed.

Under normal circumstances he would have pulled back, found a better angle, worked the problem methodically. But the wound was going to make him slower by the minute, and slower meant dead before he could do anything useful. Slow was the one thing he couldn't afford right now.

He chose the direct route instead.

He stepped out, put a round through the guard at the door, drew the last M1915 stick grenade from his bag, pulled the cord, and threw it through the doorway. The explosion blew the shutters off the ground floor window. Soren dragged the dead guard in front of him, used the body as cover, went prone, and opened fire on the soldiers converging from further down the street.

Four shots. Four men down. The rest scattered behind walls and doorframes, returning fire in short, cautious bursts.

In the center of town, shapes were moving through the dark. A relief force, closing in from multiple directions. He didn't have much time left at this position.

Then he heard it. From inside the building, a deliberate slowing of footsteps on the wooden stairs, each creak carefully spaced, someone trying to move quietly and not quite managing it. One person, coming down from the upper floor.

Soren kept his eyes on the street and his ears on the door, loading rounds one by one into the magazine, and made his assessment.

Inside, the picture was becoming clear to the man on the stairs. Two of the three soldiers who had entered after the grenade blast were down, scattered across the sitting room floor. The third, a Greyline Army officer, had come down from the second floor to find the room in ruins and the front door standing open. He understood immediately what had happened, and more importantly, he understood what was about to happen next.

One German soldier. Two of them at the start, one dead almost immediately. And that single man had done all of this.

The officer was not going to go out the front door. He knew that. He also knew that when the street became untenable, the German would come back inside, and when he did, the upper floor was the only defensible position left in the building. Which meant the upper floor was exactly where that soldier would be heading.

And the officer would be there waiting for him.

He didn't have a better option. He turned and went back up the stairs, one slow step at a time, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he didn't really have a choice at all.