Other Terrors by Vince A. Liaguno

Author:Vince A. Liaguno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning was just as hot early on as it had been midday of the museum visit. I didn’t notice I was setting out with a hangnail until we began digging the initial layers. Before embarking on my connecting flight through Portland, the TSA had confiscated my nail clippers after taking me aside into a room, where they made me expose myself just for the shits and giggles of it.

I knew my biting at the nail would only make it worse, so I asked members of the team if they had any clippers. If in reaction to this blank stares or smirks were dollar bills, I could’ve taken the next flight home with more cash than this project’s guarantor.

These people were nerds but not my kind of nerds. Even Craig seemed out of his element this morning, aloof and not running at one hundred percent.

Sofer had marked well where the previous excavators had uncovered the mule skeleton, and a few yards farther along, the buckles that had been appraised as true of Roman legionnaires.

The flags were not far from the famed swamp that had winched Varus’s forces against the Kalkriese hill. The Romans had been harried for three full days not only by Arminius but by the place itself. Also the gods had not favored them—the downpours had ruined their shields and arrows, and their sense of duty had only served to play into the hands of the “barbarian” Germanic tribes. The whole thing had been a rout and a deceit. Not many appreciate this in hindsight, but these soldiers were people, not robots. Many days’ ride from home, I could speculate for their terror and bewilderment as I stood surveying the site. It brought to mind the fictionalized depiction of the collapse of the Marines in the xenomorph hive in Aliens, and that was maybe twenty soldiers compared to the nearly twenty thousand who’d met their demise here.

Panic, disorientation, and the Roman way all forsaken to the sticks, mud, and ancient mounds.

A tiny chipmunk darted in front of me after I passed the paving stones meant to approximate the forest track made by the doomed Romans.

I hoped it was a good omen.

Instead, the distress of the small, furred courier transferred, and took my physical dysphoria to a level I hadn’t experienced since arriving in Europe. There is no army in across-the-Rhine Germany—

“What’s up?” Dieter asked at my shoulder. “You’ve been staring at that area since we got here.”

I shook my head.

“It was the swamp,” I said. “It was drained hundreds of years ago, but in the time of the battle it was a pinch point. I keep thinking of how many of them tried to make for it when they were outnumbered.”

“Or how many bodies were recovered.”

I wanted to ask if Dieter was from Hamburg, but was still wary of him because he and Ivan had been such fast friends. He looked like he was about to ask me something else when someone cried out to us.

The layering had begun slowly, so I’d have been surprised if they’d found anything already.

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