Midair, chest throbbing from the blow, Archer aimed his sidearm and unloaded at the blur, hoping to at least slow the thing before it went after the rest of his squad. And before he broke who-the-hell-knows-what when he landed.
Half his damn bullets ricocheted off the haze, blasting back with double the firepower. The other half didn’t seem to hit anything.
Crash imminent, no avoiding the rocks that cluttered the entrance to the canyon, he clicked on his safety and tucked for impact. Slamming into the gravel, ass first, he gritted his teeth and pushed the pain back. Without pause, he pivoted behind the nearest boulder.
Catching his breath, he quickly checked his injuries. Razor blades sliced into his lungs with each inhale. He braced his sternum, cautiously drawing in air. That hit, whatever the fuck that thing was, a goddamn hazy fist as big as his head… He’d thought it was a trick of the light or even a damn shadow, but his bruised ribs said otherwise.
Sidearm aimed steady, he peered around the edge of the rock. Nothing except for the cloud-diffused sunlight glinting off the littered shrapnel where his shots had landed, far from the target. Not even the shadowy fist that had swung at him.
“Archer? Talk to me. You good?” Chan’s voice, steady as ever, came through the com in his ear.
“Yeah.” Each breath sliced into his sternum. Hand braced against his chest, he masked the breathlessness and ordered, “Echos, report.”
A series of acknowledgements from his squad chimed in. Walker’s voice was hoarse, but strong. “Lost consciousness for a blink, hell of a goose egg, but I’m good.”
“Walker, you’re on lookout, nothing more.”
“Roger.”
In sequence, the squad confirmed consciousness, at the least. He sucked in a sigh of relief, recoiling as the movement aggravated the pain.
“Kerse. Sauer. Report from on high?”
From her sniper’s position atop a massive outcrop just outside the mouth of the canyon—one of many odd formations in the shale talus they were hiking up—Kerse answered, “Before that blast, it was hazy, but now I can hardly make you guys out through the smoke.”
Across the mouth of the canyon, from a similar perch, Sauer rumbled through the com, “Same. What am I aiming for? All I saw was a blur of shadows.”
Pulse pounding under his veins, aching where his ass had taken his weight as he landed on the rocky shards coating the canyon floor, he creeped further around the edge of the boulder, but couldn’t make out shit. Aborting wasn’t an option, not without some clue as to what this was and how to take it out. But they sure as hell weren’t going in far enough to die like all the others.
Hundreds of soldiers’ lives had already been lost trying.
Archer tried to explain what he’d seen, knowing his squad would give him shit. If they made it out alive. “This hazy fist thing swung at me, so I fired at it, but it… Fuck. I don’t know. Don’t shoot at it, or we’re more likely to get hurt than… it.”
“Fist?” Chan hissed from her position a few meters back.
“Um, sort of,” he admitted, rubbing the dust caked onto his eyelids. Across the rubble of the canyon floor, he searched for the… Whatever the fuck that was that ruined his damn day, but the thing seemed to… Okay, maybe he was losing his damn mind, but it seemed to blur like an unfocused photograph of Bigfoot, then it dissipated as quickly as it had appeared.
“Forget your reading glasses?” Sauer teased, chortling at his own joke.
“Fuck off.” He held the eye-roll, but fully intended to nail him with a comeback later. Once he could see straight. “I’m moving closer.”
A thunderous crash echoed ahead, like a stack of boulders tumbled into the basin all at once.
A shadow, nothing more, seemed to ooze closer. Muggy and roasting like a North Dakota summer, the heat emanating off the figure filled his lungs, choking him with the viscous wind that permeated the paper-thin air.
From her post above, Kerse shifted her sniper rifle. A steady voice in his ear whispered through the com. “I see something. I’m taking the shot.”
“Wait,” he hissed. “I don’t think it likes being shot at.”
Brock kept his voice low and said over the com, “I’ve got a clear path.”
“Go. Eyes only,” Archer agreed. Shooting at shadows was likely to leave him with more than a bruise on his ass and a few cracked ribs.
Whatever this thing was, it had to be massive. Some sort of defense system he’d never encountered.
“I’ll come around the other side,” he said. He shifted his hand off his chest and let the splintering pain lash through each breath, raising his sidearm—out of threat and habit, more than an intent to risk using it again.
At the opposite side of the canyon entrance, Brock held his weapon ready and wove upstream from boulder to boulder.
Archer glanced back and saw Walker moving to the base point Brock had vacated.
Silence over the com, the squad held their breath, waiting.
A stream babbled down the center of the canyon. If you had your eyes closed, it might feel like a pleasant day in paradise. But the somber, bone-dry rocks all around, the matching gray clouds above, told you this was the gateway to hell. Or maybe it was the realization that it wasn’t some secret weapon protecting this canyon, but something far more terrifying. Fuck, his report wasn’t going to make a lick of sense.
As they moved into the canyon, the heat intensified. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, static crackling over his skin.
Archer crossed closer to Brock. He caught his eye and nodded ahead. Locked and loaded, both stepped into the middle of the canyon.
Thunder without a storm roared, vaulting from wall to wall.
Shifting his gaze, he scanned the gray nothingness.
Two, maybe three figures. Or maybe nothing at all. Shadows. Dust. Haze. The threat loomed just out of sight.
Rising like a phantom, chilling his blood, a darkness cast over them.
Bigger than his head, yet not more than a blur, that fist grew and rushed toward them. Archer rushed to knock Brock out of the way, but the wind from the blow knocked him back.
Too late. Too fast, the fist caught a piece of Brock and sent him tumbling down the canyon floor.
On the move before it could swing through again, Archer holstered his weapon as he sprinted for Brock. Sinking in the stream that rose higher and deeper with each passing second, out cold, Brock lay motionless. His blond hair and beard were rinsing clean as the fresh water rose higher over his lifeless form.
Without pause, needing to hope his friend was still alive, Archer heaved him over his shoulder. “Let’s move,” he hollered over the com.
Retreating at his order, the others took off downslope toward the Hummers. Half were limping and bleeding, the other half were either nursing head wounds or worse, but they didn’t hesitate.
Whatever the hell this was, it was pissed. And it wasn’t some new tech, no matter what Army intelligence wanted to believe.
Loose rocks shifted under his boots. Cool water splashed at his ankles, growing deeper with each step as the stream grew to a creek.
Gusting behind him, he felt the wallop of shadowy wind reaching for him, as if the canyon were pissed as hell to let anyone leave alive.
The air seemed to rumble in protest as they escaped from the mouth of the canyon. Approaching a six-foot ledge in a series of terraces down the talus, he maintained his brutal pace and launched over. Dread burned in his mind. No way of landing soft on wet, jagged shale. Midair, he tightened his grip on Brock so his friend didn’t land headfirst.
Archer dug the thick heels of his boots into the loose rocks to break the fall. Brock jostled in his grip and the pair slammed backward into a pile of rocks, rising water from the creek rushing over them.
Walker and Chan appeared seconds later and grabbed the unconscious Brock from Archer’s protective hold.
Archer ignored the searing throb where his backside had hit the ground and leaped to his feet, bracing his sternum, and followed close behind.
Walker loaded Brock into the backseat of the nearest Hummer before running to his own transport. Archer dove in behind him as Chan took the driver’s seat, slamming on the gas before even closing the door.
Bracing himself against the rocking of the Hummer as they sped away over rough ground, Archer checked his friend. Brock lay curled on the seat, a strike over his forehead already black and blue, his ankle puffing to the size of a grapefruit.
Archer held his fingertips over his wrist. Stable enough. Pulse was strong, his breathing labored, but effective. While Chan drove like hell, Archer braced himself and checked Brock out as best he could. As best as he could tell, no major neurologic damage.
Sucking in a razor-sharp breath, Archer closed his eyes and whispered, “Hang in there, Brock.”
This canyon had claimed enough lives. It wasn’t claiming another today. Nothing more he could do, the mission not done, he buckled Brock in as secure as he could, shrugging off his jacket and cushioning it under his head.
He climbed up front next to Chan. Behind them, the blur seemed to darken in a superior rage. Overhead, the clouds rumbled and swelled, satisfied to have maintained its boundaries.
“Did you get a good look?” Chan asked as she steered them down the rough terrain. “What are we up against?”
He gritted his teeth and checked the side mirrors. “No fucking clue.” He’d half expected the place to explode in their wake like a nineties action flick, but the canyon dimmed as quickly as it had awoken. “It was like a blur of…” Fuck, he didn’t want to say it out loud, feeling crazy enough already.
“What?”
“Fury,” he admitted. “Like we were trespassing on its territory, and it wanted blood.”
Chan’s voice was hoarse, her grip tight on the steering wheel. “That was a thing? I thought it was a funnel cloud or something.”
Archer shook his head and rubbed his mud-caked hands in his hair. “Definitely a thing. Or a few things. Or… Not. I don’t know. Must be losing my damn mind.”
“Break it down. What exactly did you see?” Chan asked as the Hummer bounced over another rocky berm, her knuckles white as she gripped the wheel to keep them from spinning out at the breakneck speed.
“Nothing. Something. I don’t fucking know. It was like a blurry, cheap snapshot of… a troll or something. And this massive blob of darkness coming at us. Or maybe it wasn’t so big. Like it could have been the size of the canyon or shorter than you. It was like some blurry image that only conspiracy-theorizing fucks would admit to having seen.” He grimaced as the rig jarred down, his ass and chest throbbing with each tiny bump in the path.
Brock winced as he lurched against the seat. Relief welled under Archer’s gritty eyelids.
Chan kept her eyes on the road. “It’s got to be what killed the Rangers.”
“Intelligence said they were killed by some new weapon the insurgents came up with, something that creates a fog and heat that will melt your skin off.”
“That wasn’t a weapon.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Hot, but not melting, and blur, not fog. Nothing manmade. But someone had to describe it in credible terms.
He reached back and checked Brock’s wrist again. His fingers twitched, then clung to Archer’s hand.
“Hang in there,” Archer murmured. “We’ll be back home, sharing a pint at Tumbleweed before you know it.”
No one knew what this was or how to describe it, and few had gotten close enough to feel the threat that emanated from the canyon itself. Which was why they’d been sent in. When an entire platoon of Rangers goes missing, the nearest known insurgent encampment miles away at the opposite end of the canyon, and intel from satellite imagery said the canyon in between was quiet as a mouse and dark as night?
Rumors were flying that the head of insurgents was hiding out in a northern branch of the canyon. The only entrance from the south was this haunted mouth of the canyon. Despite a failed Echo mission a few years back to infiltrate Batvinia from the south, right before Archer had joined the squad, things were heating up fast the last few weeks, and the Army decided to try again, sending in Rangers.
The Army blamed the Rangers’ deaths on some new weapon the insurgents had found. But that wasn’t a weapon.
“Archer? I can hear those wheels cranking from here. What’s on your mind?” Chan kept her tone light, but he knew she was equally worried.
Best of the best, his special ops unit was one of a kind. No identifiers. They were unofficially referred to as Echo, but on the books, they were just another Ranger squad. Most of them had been Rangers at one point anyway, but they were their own entity, and not even the Deltas knew about them. They were sent in where no one else could—or should—access.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and puffed out his cheeks. “What do we have on the history of that canyon? Geography, politics, geology?”
Without questioning that he knew as well as she did, Chan rattled off the facts, working out the problem with him. Again. “The escarpment marks the border between Otrivka in the south and Batvinia to the north. The Otrivkan region surrounding the canyon has been little more than quarries, as the natural resources are slim and it’s classified as a rare pocket of desert. Before the attempted coup a few years ago, the Batvinia end in the north was pretty quiet, home to a number of rural villages.”
Something wasn’t adding up. Why was this end of the canyon so impassible? Sharper, narrower, different rock formations. Hell, the stream running through it should be vastly bigger based on the local watershed. For miles around the canyon, the weather was eternally cloudy, bone dry, and a constant dust cloud of ground-up shale.
Nothing was adding up.
“When trouble began brewing in Batvinia, the UN wanted to secure the canyon as a route to quietly infiltrate the southern point of the insurgents’ stronghold.”
He withheld a breath and braced his chest to draw air in. “Which is why the Army sent infantry in, but they were wiped out, no survivors, no witnesses. Echos were sent in to investigate, and only two walked away. Mission failed, canyon considered impassible. Peace talks were making headway, so military efforts eased. Fast forward five years, and the insurgents bombed the shit out of the capital and turned tail when Batvinian military, with UN support, pushed back hard.”
Ribs starting to ache as swelling set in, he glanced back and checked Brock again. Still breathing.
Chan turned the wheel sharp to avoid a tire-sized rock in the road, and continued his thought for him, “After the failed coup, insurgents are doubling down, the border’s a goddamn mess. Their leader is said to be holed up in the encampment at the north end of the canyon, so Rangers are sent in through the south end of the canyon. Eighty percent casualties, only those at the outskirts having survived.”
Mission fail. Again.
But politics were politics. With the win at the capital, the UN was looking to have the upper hand. But nothing was that simple. Insurgents were changing their strategy, recruiting heavily from disgruntled rural areas and blocking aid.
As it always seemed to end up, the Echos were pushed into the middle of things. While the higher powers patted themselves on the back for protecting the economic center of Batvinia, the rural border regions were ready to boil over. So, sneak special forces in through the southern end of the canyon and take out the insurgent leaders in their sleep. Covert as fuck, no one even knows who took care of the little problem.
But these decisions were above his paygrade. So Archer worked the problem.
Teeth gritted tight, Chan glanced in the rearview at Brock. “You said only two Echos walked away before. Did you know them?”
“Yeah, I knew them. I was one of the replacements for the Echos that died in the canyon. Connery and Simmons were the only survivors.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Yeah, well, they made us look like a bunch of pansies. Classified legends. Then they both died in a training op back home.”
As the path finally flattened, the combat outpost coming into view, Chan flashed him a look, her dust-encrusted brow drawn tight. “You don’t buy it.”
“All the Echo squads were at that training. I was going to join them after my brother’s wedding.” The terrain evened out as they turned onto a dirt road. He checked behind to see the other Hummer still followed close behind. “Fuck, I don’t know what I’m getting at. Somebody has to know something about what’s blocking that canyon. I want to know what Connery and Simmons saw. And how they survived.”
