Carnifex

backed up. The condemned men dropped less than six inches each. Their feet immediately began to flail in panic. The nooses hardly tightened at first.

It was going to be a very slow hanging.

* * *

Patricio Carrera, aka Patrick Hennessey, Dux of the Legion del Cid, forced himself to watch the hanging from the second floor window of his adobe brick office. Though no one was looking, he kept his face a stony mask, even while the two doomed men struggled and twisted at the end of their ropes.

For the slowly strangling Sumeri who had murdered his own sister Carrera felt no pity. You stupid bastard. I'd have paid recompense money and moved her out of the country, married her off to one of my troops or maybe sent her to school somewhere. Even in your fucked up culture there's such a thing as out of sight, out of mind. You didn't have to kill the girl. And I'd still have hanged the man who raped her.

His own soldier was a different matter, for Carrera loved his Legion and loved the soldiers who composed it. Watching one of his own die slowly and disgracefully hurt.

Carrera sighed. But what choice have I, boy? When one of you rapes a girl he drives up resistance and endangers all the others. And it wasn't like we didn't have whores available for you. There was no excuse. And if I loved you, son, I hate you, too, for what you've made me do to you.

* * *

The definition of a bad death could be said to be one in which two or more deadly factors race at a snail's pace to kill the victim. In this case there were three such factors. While gravity pulled the men down, straining their necks and threatening to break them, the ropes tightened slowly, cutting off air and blood to the brain, even while the combination of impeded blood flow and terror promised eventual cardiac arrest. All this the two men suffered until, finally, the Sumeri's skinny neck gave way. His legs thrashed once, twice, and then he went still except for the unconscious rippling of dying muscles and the steady drip, drip, drip of piss and liquefied shit off still wriggling toes.

The choking and gagging Balboan legionary had a tougher time of it. With his much more muscular neck there was no chance of breakage. Nor did the rope cut off blood to the brain or induce cardiac arrest. Instead, his thrashing and his weight gradually tightened the noose until there was no more passage for air. Only then, and even then not for some time, did he lose consciousness and, finally, die.

* * *

All this Carrera watched, unwilling that he should not witness what he himself ordered, however horrible. Only when it was over, when the doctor in attendance placed his stethoscope to the victims' chests and made the signal that they were dead, did the Dux step away from the window.

Even as he did, he could still hear a Sumeri mother wailing.

8/3/463 AC, Ninewa, Sumer

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, racing to the scene of the latest bombing in the provincial capital. They weren't as common here as they were some other places in the country; yet they were far too common still.

Carrera, Sada, and their respective military formations did what they could to aid the local police and even to search vehicles themselves. It helped . . . somewhat . . . sometimes . . . in some places.

* * *

They'd tried both high-tech and low-tech solutions, from explosive sniffing machines to explosive sniffing dogs. Both methods had faltered under the simple terrorist expedient of sending forth small boys with spray bottles to spray underchassis and wheel wells, signposts and curbs with a solution containing various explosive compounds in low dilution. To the machines and the dogs, explosive was explosive. They were soon alerting on nearly everything. When everything smells like explosive nothing does. The machines were retired and the dogs sent to other duties.

There had been some successes of course. Early on in the campaign aircraft equipped to spit out every imaginable cell phone number and every possible radio frequency had overflown likely areas for bomb construction. This had blasted a goodly number of bomb manufacturers into the next world over a short period of time.

Those who lived had reverted to using infrared garage door openers to detonate their bombs. The Legion had not yet figured out a way to prematurely detonate those until they were already emplaced, which was all too often all too late.

* * *

The bomb which had just gone off in a market had been detonated in just that way. Fortunately, something had warned the civilians nearby who had, for the most part, gone scurrying. Casualties were remarkably low and for those there were there was a catch all phrase, il hamdu l'illah, to God be the praise.

Now, to either side of that attack site and the few bodies it held, other groups waited for some special targets to show up to detonate their own little gateways to Hell.

* * *

It had been a hell of an argument really. After the assassination of their three local leaders by men purporting to be from the news media, the first assumption had been that it was the foreign mercenaries' doing. As one of the remaining terrorist chiefs, Faisal ibn Bahir, pointed out, though, 'Really not their style. They never even searched the place for files. And they only took personal arms when they left and not all of those. No, I think it was a personal hit, maybe even because of that pressie that was blown up.'

'But the infidel press has shown it's been on our side from the beginning,' objected another of the leading terrorists, this one a representative of the Salafi Ikhwan.

'That's very true,' agreed Bahir, with a serious nod. 'And yet, does it not strike you as suspicious, my brother, that this same infidel press supports and advances the very things we loathe and fight against? Freedom for women, for queers, for atheists? Are they not the very essence of perfidy? Are they not the mothers of lies? Why then should we accept anything they say or do at face value? The only thing we can be sure of is that they take care of each other. And that, brother, is completely consistent with them assassinating, more likely paying someone to assassinate, our fallen comrades.'

'But . . . if the infidel press is against us, what chance have we?'

'This is why we must strike them,' insisted Bahir, 'to let them know who their masters are. After all, the 'courageous' infidel press is brave only when not pressed.'

'Should we assassinate then, or take hostages for ransom?'

This, Bahir contemplated. After a bit of deep concentration, he answered, 'Nobody expects us to honor ransoms anymore, not since that Masera houri was fed feet-first into a wood chipper.'

Giulia Masera, a progressive journalist from the Tauran Union, had volunteered to be a hostage for ransom early in the war. Her mistake had been in surrendering herself to Sada's boys, rather than the actual insurgents. These had taken the ransom, then murdered her for the cameras in just the way Bahir had said. This had had the salutary effect of stopping such voluntary hostage takings pretty much entirely.

'No,' Bahir continued. 'Let's pay them back in the same coin; kill a team or two and leave our calling cards on the bodies.'

* * *

'Don't press too soon,' cautioned the leader of the five man bomber team. 'Wait for the vultures to show up on their way to gorge on the meat from the bodies that lie dismembered in the market.'

The bomber with the infrared switch in his hand smiled at the metaphor. Good one, Anwar. What are the pressies, after all, but carrion feeders?

They didn't have long to wait. Ambulances passed. Military vehicles passed. And then came the word from