Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1) by Aaron Schneider (my reading book .txt) 📕

shade of rust. Blinking like owls at dawn, the men in his guard turned to their captain.

He spun on his heel and headed for the freight tunnels.

The explosions could only mean one thing: the enemy was already advancing through the tunnels. One of the rigged tunnels, probably the one Alpha principi was responsible for, had blown, sealing it shut, but that was one of six main tunnels that fed into their position. Magrid’s mind raced, trying to come to grips with the reality that the German soldiers had covered half a mountain in such short order.

“Doesn’t matter,” he snarled, shaking his head savagely as he accelerated to a jog. He was thankful to hear the boots of his honor guard behind him.

He had to get to the freight tunnels, where the rails could carry him out of the blasted mountain to Jubal. From the fortified town, he could assess what had become of his command.

Another boom shook the dust from the overhead lights strung throughout the tunnel, and the captain fought to keep from flinching. His pace quickened as he tried to remember which passage was the quickest way to the freight lines. He choked back a scream of frustration as he passed a sign for the secondary armory chamber up ahead, realizing he’d taken a left instead of a right. He would have cursed the mute soldiers huffing behind him, but he was heaving air in and out in great blowing rushes.

Swiping sweat from his eyes, he took the next left and nearly sprinted down the winding tunnel. His heart was hammering in his chest, and not just with the effort. Screams had begun to echo through the tunnels, punctuated by the reverberating cracks of rifle and pistol fire.

He needed to reach that rail.

Like an answer to prayer, the tunnel unfolded into a cavern filled with crates stacked upon sagging pallets. Clusters of lights dangled from poles jutting ceilingward between the maze of wooden boxes, their glare casting sharp shadows across the floor but failing to reach the vault above.

A firm hand took Magrid by the shoulder as he made to forge his way between the crates.

“Please, Captain,” said the steady voice of Sergeant Major Pavoni, the head of the honor guard. “Let us secure the area.”

Magrid’s face twisted with the competing fears of an ambush and the enemy that was smashing his forces to bits behind them. A wild, almost joyful scream sounded from the tunnel they had just emerged from, then there was a crunching thump of a detonation, followed by a billowing cloud of dust.

“No time!” Magrid snapped, pulling himself free of Pavoni’s grip with a jerk.

The captain led his honor guard through the stacks, crying out as he spotted the rail carts between an alley in the hastily stacked assortment of supplies. Not waiting to see who followed, he squeezed down the alley, forced to turn sideways to scrape past.

“Nearly there,” he wheezed, failing to convince himself that he was encouraging his guards.

He slid free of the claustrophobic passage of stacked wood and gave a whoop of victory that fell apart in his mouth as he looked down the line of squatting carts.

The locomotive had been reduced to a mangled collection of gears and metal shards, and its jagged surface glistened with something dark and viscous. Before Magrid’s numb stare, the pile of gears shifted and collapsed in upon itself with an acidic hiss. The air stank of burnt ammonia.

“Treachery!” Pavoni snarled as the rest of the guard unslung their rifles and raised them to their shoulders. “Sabotage.”

Magrid continued to gape, unwilling to believe that for the first time in his not-undistinguished military career, he was about to face a battle he could not avoid and could not win. This wasn’t what he’d bargained for when he’d taken the assignment to Afghanistan.

“Enemy sighted!” one of the guards barked, and the honor guard turned as one.

The first row to rush in from the opposite side of the cavern was scythed down by a disciplined salvo of rifle fire. Men so dusty their uniforms were almost unrecognizable crumpled to the floor as heavy rounds punched through flesh and bone, many dead before the fatal shot’s shell casing struck the stone.

More piled in after the doomed frontrunners, toppling and lurching over their dead comrades. The second volley, more rushed and leveled at the erratically moving targets, only felled half of the men, the wayward shots biting into crates or sparking off the walls.

The honor guards were chambering a third round of fire when Pavoni’s voice echoed through the cavern like a mortar blast.

“Cease fire!” he howled, his voice almost pained.

Over a half-dozen Italian soldiers lay dead or dying, while more terrified faces pressed into alleys between the boxes. Like a bewildered herd, the men at the front were driven forward. They stepped on the fallen, whose cries were soon drowned out by the sobs and fearful curses of an entire platoon, some thirty men.

“What’s going on?” Pavoni snarled, glaring at the advancing faces of the men, not daring to spare a look at Magrid.

“Something’s in the tunnels!” a man shrieked as more men began to jostle forward. “We have to get out!”

Something? Not someone? The oddity of the statement drew Magrid’s mind, kicking and screaming, from his hasty escape plan to the men in the chamber.

“How far have the Germans advanced?” the captain demanded, forcing himself to use his battlefield voice. These sorry cowards were his best chance of getting out of here, and he was determined to get them sorted quickly.

“The tudro aren’t in the tunnels, sir,” said one of the forward men, passing a trembling hand over his terror-pale face. “It was something else.”

Again, “something.” The vague menace of the word infuriated Magrid.

“Say something sensible,” he snarled as he drew his pistol. “Or never speak again.”

Even staring down the barrel of the sidearm, the men advanced another few steps.

“I-I don’t know what it is,” the forward soldier stammered before taking a fear-swollen gulp as he genuflected.