The Frozen Wastes by Robert Santore (bookreader txt) 📖

Mounting my horse, I signalled Argenteus and Julius to get ready to head out into the wastes. We moved out at a pace reserved for long distance travel, not fast, but faster than walking. The dim gray gloom of the clouds made the landscape look foreboding, and full of hidden dangers. The chill Winter winds howled across the frozen plains, and whistled through the few pines that haven’t died yet, despite the years of winter and limited sunlight. In the distance to the north there were a few bare hills of granite that had been scoured clean by the unrelenting winds. Behind us to the south was the border outpost Flumen Tene (riverside hold) sitting on an outcropping of rock with a sheer cliff face down to the churning frigid waters below. To the east was the Dead Forest, a wretched cold place filled with trees long dead. And to the west and beyond where the Montibus Excelsis (High Mountains) that led to our home, Nova Roma. Looking at the land I searched for anything that looked suspicious.

    In the distance there appeared to be a person, bringing my binoculars up to my eyes, I scanned for the small figure again. The man (he appeared to be one at least) was trying to be discreet, obviously to hide from us, which was definitely worth checking out. It was obvious he was trying to get into the mountains to the west to get into Nova Roma, and out of the lawless and barbaric Eastern Reaches. Calling out to my companions I went off into a gallop after the figure in the distance. After a few minutes of hard riding the man spotted us and started running for the cover of a thicket of pines.

    Glorying in the chase we whooped and yelled taunts that it was doubtful our prey heard or even could understand very well, as we were speaking in the language of our homeland, Latin. To my right and left my companions spread out to we were each about 15 feet away from each other, and we all drew out our horse guns. These guns are old time military carbines from before the Wars, and are much better weapons than the newer guns that are made now by hand, and often with inferior metals.

    Approaching the thicket he went into, I saw that it was larger than it appeared, and so I sent out Julius and Argenteus to circle around and make sure he didn’t try to slip out the back when I rode through to flush him out. Entering the treeline I searched for clues of his trail, and saw a few footprints in a bare patch of snow that had been sheltered by a fallen tree. following the sparse trail, besides the footprints he seemed to know what he was doing, I was nearing the other edge of the small forest when I saw something odd. It looked like there was a partially hidden entrance to an underground tunnel.

    I got off my horse and took out a flare and set it off to get Julius and Argenteus back to me, then went about the area looking for other odd things. I realized one thing, many people have gone through this recently. Hearing hoofbeats coming I went back to my horse and waited for my companions to arrive. When they came I told them what I had discovered, and we decided we would wait for more men to come and help us look through the tunnels.

    Walking over to my horse, I opened up a saddlebag and got out our radio. It took a few false tries to get a hold of Flumen, but once I explained the situation to the centurion he told me that he would send us five more troops to help with the search, and that they would arrive in the morning.

    We set up a small camp for the night and made a dinner of rice and dried beans from the homeland. Then we cleaned our carbines, and oiled our gládii, which are short swords suitable for stabbing and chopping in close quarters, and inspected our horse spears, in preparation for tomorrow’s search, and possible eradication of the barbaric eastern squatters. We spoke little, everything we did had been done many times in our forays out into the wastes, and were almost reflexive. During my watch nothing more peculiar than a few animals came by, and after I woke up Julius for the next watch I fell asleep with no trouble.

*     *     *     *     *

    I awoke at first light knowing something was wrong. I quietly grabbed my gladius and headed into the freezing dawn. Outside the wind was raging, as always, but I saw a predator going through the forest. I quickly woke up Argenteus and Julius and they also readied themselves against the possible threat.

    The predators are leftovers from the biological and nuclear weapons of the Wars. They are odd mixes of many animals, and in some cases humans, but they have been warped into twisted things. They are very dangerous, and thankfully this one was a lone one, as we are not equipped for a pack. It appeared to be a wolf mixed with a bear, and possibly a hound. It was moving with the odd grace that something so disfigured should not have, and so far it had not noticed us. Then suddenly it raised its head and looked behind it, ears perking up at odd angles off its bulging skull, and quickly, quietly ran off.

    Thinking the danger was passed we lowered our weapons and relaxed. Until we heard a crashing through the forest over the wind. The Sound quickly became louder, and we scurried for cover behind a few exposed rocks. Looking into the forest under the lightening sky we saw three huge ursi, or bears, coming towards us. They were terrifying looking, much worse than any other predators I’ve ever seen, with huge distended jaws, and teeth like those on a saber tiger. Their eyes were red and maddened, and they were coming right at us.

    When They were in range I yelled, “shoot at will,” and we started pouring out bullets with our semi-automatic carbines. The bullets only seemed to make them angrier, and they were almost on us. Seeing that there was no hope in a hand-to-hand fight I called out to my compatriots, and ran for the tunnel entrance, too intent on saving myself to see if they followed. After a few long seconds I reached the covering and tugged it open. I Jumped into the dark hole in the ground and hit solid rock a few feet down, rolling out of the way I heard my companions hit the ground behind me.

    Looking into the now blinding light of the surface I saw one of the ursi trying to get into the tunnel, and when it found it could not fit it screamed its displeasure, not roared, screamed the sound was ear shatteringly loud and reverberated off the walls of the cavern, deafening us. In the low light I saw my companions screaming in pain, hands to their heads and blood running under their fingers. Touching the side of my head I was surprised to see blood on my hands, and the pain was becoming unbearable. When it finally stopped I looked up and saw that Julius had been shooting at the ursi with his carbine, and finally scored a lucky hit through the beast’s eye.

    When it was apparent that the deafness was residing we waited for a few minutes before talking.

    “Well we should wait until the reinforcements come before we try to leave the cave,” I said.

    Julius replied, “What about the other ursi?”

    “Yeah we can’t leave our commilitones (comrades) to the ursi without warning them.” Argenteus said.

In the silence of thought I studied my companions, all of us were dirty and ragged from the scramble into the tunnel, and blood was running from our ears. Argenteus was large and burly and made his carbine look like a toy. Julius was the total opposite, he was long and skinny and his heavy pack looked like he should be bent over like an old man. All of us looked ten years older than we really were, the wastes do not treat its peoples nicely.  

“We can’t kill them, they will shrug off out bullets. Nor can we run from them, as they run faster than us. But they are awfully loud, we can try to alert our commilitones by making them scream.” I offered. Argenteus and Julius looked at eachother, then looked at me.

Julius said, “Well I guess that’s the best we can do with what we have.” and Argenteus nodded. That decided we pooled our resources to see what we could use against the ursi. We had our carbines, three flash grenades, a smoke grenade, and our gladii. The flash grenades had promise, as did the carbines.

“So, should we use the grenades, or the guns?” I asked.

“Well the guns can be useful in the caves, the grenades, not so much. So we should use those,” Argenteus said

We all agreed that this was the case. Now we had to decide how we were going to accomplish this without getting killed, as its hard to throw flash grenades properly at moving targets, especially when your target is moving very quickly towards you.

Text: Robert Santore
Editing: Robert Santore and Friends (you know who you are)
Publication Date: 07-01-2013

All Rights Reserved