Chapter 437 — The Dead Fight Back III (Bonus)

Chapter 437: Chapter 437 — The Dead Fight Back III (Bonus)

It came apart for the British after that.

Dwyer had the track at the back of the quarry, so the vehicle was not going anywhere. Finn and his half-section came up out of the fallen stones on the right, behind the riflemen on the lip, and the riflemen had to turn to face them. James sent every skeleton he had left into the quarry itself. He sent them at the last of the guards, in among the rock and the scrub, so every British soldier in there had something coming at him and nobody had time to help anyone else.

And there, at the back of the quarry, beside the vehicle, was Longbow.

It was a rifle.

That was the first thing James saw, and he did not quite believe it. It was a rifle, not a spell or a Challenger or a ward. It was a long rifle, longer than a man was tall, lying across a bipod on the bonnet of the vehicle. The barrel was as thick as his wrist, with a heavy block of a muzzle brake at the end. There was a box beside it on the bonnet, open, and in the box, packed in foam, were rounds as long as his forearm.

Two men had been trying to lift it off the bonnet to get it into the back of the vehicle. One of them had a hand on the stock and one on the barrel.

The other had let go of it.

He was a sergeant, by his stripes, older than the rest. He had the rifle’s sling still round one shoulder. He turned, looked down the length of the quarry and saw James coming.

He knew who he was. James saw it on his face.

He put his eye to the scope.

---

James was fifty metres away, out in the open, with nothing in front of him.

There was a skeleton twenty metres ahead of him and to the left, one of the British ones, missing its arm. It was standing among the rocks at the bottom of the quarry wall, halfway between James and the vehicle.

"*Cover him!*" Cronin’s voice, from somewhere behind. "*Fire on the vehicle! Fire on the vehicle!*"

Irish rounds started going into the side of the vehicle and the rock wall behind it. Off to the right, Finn’s group opened up on the last two guards by the vehicle’s back wheel, and they went down behind it.

The sergeant did not flinch. He was settling his cheek on the stock.

`[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]`

`[MANA: 1,120 / 3,100]`

The world folded and he was among the rocks beside the one-armed skeleton, thirty metres closer, at an angle.

The bad second hit him. The ground tilted. His side lit up where the stitch had gone. He put a hand on the rock and held it.

He heard the sergeant swear.

He could not see him yet. His eyes would not settle. But he heard the man swear, then the sound of a rifle being dragged across a bonnet, and boots on stone.

The second passed.

His eyes came back.

The sergeant had seen where James had gone and had not been able to swing the rifle round in time. He had let go of it. He had left it on the bonnet and was going away round the front of the vehicle. He was not going toward Dwyer at the back, but up the side of the quarry, to the rocks, to try to get out over the top.

James went after him.

It was twenty metres. The sergeant was older and heavier, and he was not a Challenger. He had nothing but a pistol on his hip. He got it out as James came round the vehicle and fired twice. James felt one round take him in the shoulder plate and turn, and then he was there.

The sergeant brought the pistol round again.

Durendal came down.

He went down against the quarry wall, at the foot of the rocks he had been trying to climb.

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 1,150 / 3,100]`

`[EXP GAINED: +200]`

James stood over him for a second, breathing hard, with his hand pressed against his side.

That was the man who had fired three times that afternoon.

---

The rest took two minutes.

The man who had been trying to lift the rifle off the bonnet put his hands up when Dwyer’s section came round the vehicle, and they put him on the ground. The last two guards behind the back wheel were dead. The skeletons had pinned one of them against the rock, and Finn’s group had shot both. Dwyer’s scouts on the back lane reported nobody coming out. The ones on the Carrickrobin road reported the same.

Nobody had got out of that quarry.

Finn came round the vehicle with his axes still in his hands.

James watched him. He had thought Finn would go to the rifle first, to look at the thing that had killed Eamon.

Finn did not look at it.

He went and stood over the sergeant at the foot of the quarry wall. He looked down at him for a long time, a grey-haired man in British uniform with a pistol by his hand.

Then he turned and looked at the rifle on the bonnet, at the long barrel and the box of rounds.

He did not say anything. He did not touch it.

After a while he hung his axes back on his harness, one and then the other, and went to help Dwyer’s men with the prisoner.

Neither of them said that it was over.

---

Cronin came up into the quarry with two of his section.

He looked at the rifle for a long moment without going any closer.

"Nobody touches it," he said. "Nobody picks it up. Nobody opens anything. Nobody goes near that box." He keyed his radio. "*Castlebellingham, Cronin. Suspected Longbow position at Carrickrobin quarry taken. Weapon confirmed. It’s a rifle. Captured intact, I think. One operator dead, one prisoner. No escapes. I want somebody who knows what they’re looking at up here before anyone moves it. Over.*"

The radio was quiet for a moment.

"*Cronin, Castlebellingham. Received. Secure it. Do not touch it. Transport’s coming. Over.*"

Then, a minute later, more voices came on the radio, from the other units on the line. The British were pulling back north out of the sector, from the junction and the river line and the eastern houses. It was organised and steady, but they were going. Whatever had been left in this part of Louth to keep pressure on the junction had decided it was not worth staying for.

"*All units, Castlebellingham. Hold positions. Do not pursue. Nobody goes north without orders.*"

James sat down on a rock at the bottom of the quarry wall, beside the one-armed skeleton.

He opened his window.

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 51]`

`[MANA: 1,150 / 3,100]`

`[EXP GAINED THIS ENGAGEMENT: +600]`

`[EXP: 33,385 / 96,000]`

He closed it and thought about Eamon turning round by the ambulance with a question half out of his mouth. He thought about Farrell behind the jeep, with her hand pulling at his sleeve and her eyes on the soldiers at the pumps.

The man who had done both was lying ten metres away at the foot of the quarry wall. The thing he had done it with was lying on the bonnet of a car.

It did not give either of them back.

---

Finn stayed at the quarry with Dwyer’s section to hold it until the morning.

James went back with the rifle.

He did not carry it. Two engineers came up from Castlebellingham in a truck with a crate. They spent twenty minutes photographing it where it lay before anyone touched it, then lifted it into the crate in foam with gloves on, the box of rounds separately, in a second crate. James sat in the back of the truck with the crates and two soldiers. The skeletons stayed at the quarry. He told the last of them to stand at the mouth of the track and not let anything through.

Cronin came back on the radio before they left.

"*Ganner. I’m putting it in the report. All of it. Kelleher and the captain. Every name. The quarry. Who did what.*" A pause. "*Hanlon found the gap in the stones. Make sure they know that.*"

"I will."

---

It was getting dark when they reached Castlebellingham.

The GAA clubhouse still had every light on. Officers were still bent over the maps in the bar. Somebody had put a casualty board up on the wall where the trophies had been, a whiteboard with names on it in marker.

The news about the British pulling back had got there first. The faces were less grey than they had been.

Then the truck pulled onto the pitch and the engineers started unloading the crates, and every officer in the clubhouse came out to look.

The colonel came out last.

He stood on the pitch in the floodlights and looked at the crate, at the long shape in the foam.

"That’s it?" he said.

"That’s it," said James. "That’s what killed Kelleher and Farrell."

The colonel looked at him.

"Tell me."

James told him plainly, all of it. He told him about the first shot that took Eamon through A-rank armour beside an ambulance, and the second that went through a jeep’s engine block into Farrell. He told him about the third, which had been for him, and the skeleton he had left in his place. He told him about the British dead and the quarry, the gap in the stones and the sergeant at the foot of the wall.

"I don’t know how it works," he said at the end. "I don’t know what’s in those rounds. I don’t know why it goes through things that should stop it. I saw what it did, and I saw the man firing it. That’s all."

The colonel nodded slowly.

"That’s more than anyone in Ireland knew this morning," he said.

He turned to the engineers.

"Inside. Secure room. I want it guarded day and night, and I want nobody touching it until the people from Dublin get here." He looked back at the crate. "Nobody."

They carried it in.

James stood on the pitch in the floodlights and watched the crate go through the clubhouse door, with four soldiers either side of it.

Britain had built that thing to kill people like him. The British had brought it all the way down from the border and dug it into a quarry, and used it to kill Eamon Kelleher and Nessa Farrell without ever having to look either of them in the face.

Now it was in a locked room in a GAA clubhouse in Louth, and the Irish army was going to take it apart and find out exactly how it worked.