by Chuck Dixon
“Take it slow,” he said. “Your stomach is empty, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “There wasn’t really anything on the menu I cared for.”
Hammond walked backward, covering the ridgeline below them with the Minimi. Beyond the tree line, the bleats of horns sounded more frequently. Soon the skinnies would be climbing after them in force, and Hammond watched the ridge and the tree line for signs of the first scouts to come into sight. The skinnies were close but not exposing themselves. They’d developed a healthy respect for their quarry’s reach.
A long blast on a horn from the edge of the woods was answered by another ahead of them. “Shit,” Dwayne whispered. The group dropped low and, from their vantage, they could see spear points against the dawn sky visible over the waving stalks of grass, dozens of spears between them and their goal. The skinnies were moving to block the path to the mesa top.
“Contact forward!” he called back to the other two Rangers.
“We can’t stay here,” Hammond said. Still no movement from the tree line.
“And we’re running low on ammo,” Chaz said. He laid Jimbo down on the grass and trained his rifle on the growing collection of spearpoints gathering two hundred yards before them.
“And they have all the ammo they need,” Dwayne said and lifted a handful of stones to let them fall to the tumble of scree at their feet.
Hammond stood without a word and double-timed past the group for the mesa.
“Hammond!” Dwayne called out.
Hammond didn’t answer. He just trotted toward the spearpoints catching sunlight ahead. Chaz shouldered Jimbo and stood. He started after Hammond.
Dwayne helped Caroline to her feet and walked behind her as they moved over the open ground.
A collective roar went up from the mob of skinnies at first sight of their prey moving toward them through the grass. The hunt leaders blew long bleats through the horns. A thunderous blast emerged from a horn fashioned out of a tusk that had to be supported by two males. It was answered in kind by more horns in the tree line. The strangers were trapped between the two groups with nowhere to escape.
The skinnies began to pound the butts of their spears on the rocks in a ragged rhythm. They were stoking their rage. These strangers killed their chiefs, their shaman, and their witch mother. They’d roast them alive over their firepit and peel their skin away in strips as they crisped. They’d feed their guts to the dogs. Many more of the village would die, but only revenge mattered. The tall strangers would die, and the village would go on.
From their vantage point, the rank of hunters in the grass below the mesa lip could see their brothers already emerging from the shelter of the trees. They would drive the strangers forward onto the waiting spears of the growing mob waiting ahead. The children who accompanied the hunters on the climb up from the beach were already gathering rounded stones in piles. Some stood and clacked stones together over their heads in time with the pounding of the spear butts.
Dwayne turned back to see skinnies behind them, forming a wide half-ring to cut off any sideways flight. They were effectively trapped. The large force above them was cutting off retreat. A growing force below them was driving them forward. The two groups could rush simultaneously and overrun them at any moment. The skinnies had proven that they were willing to absorb punishing casualties and still keep coming on. The only chance for the Rangers was to break through the smaller force waiting ahead of them and gain the high ground of the mesa top.
Their options had shrunk to desperate flight followed, if that succeeded, by a holding action of undetermined length.
The skinnies dropped out of sight as Hammond sent a burst downrange from the Minimi. They were learning. They were laying prone and letting the fire go over them. Spearpoints moved to the right and left, a pincer move to match the one below them. The two arms would meet, and the Rangers and Caroline would be in the center of a tightening circle. The rocks would fly and then it would be hand-to-hand with any left standing and all the advantage to the overwhelming numbers of man-eating sons of bitches.
“Stay tight to me,” Dwayne said, and Caroline trotted next to him over the rock and grass behind Hammond and Chaz. The two Rangers on point were firing as they moved up the slope. Dwayne fired a long volley behind them at the pursuers now sprinting from the trees to close the distance between hunter and prey.
The dirt and grass seemed to come to life along one flank of the onrushing skinnies breaking from the tree line. A half dozen fell and the rest scattered. Clumps of dirt flew up in the air. Dwayne looked back in disbelief. His M4 didn’t do that. More dust erupted as tracers streaked through the grass and into the skinnies tearing them apart in a bloody spray. Legs, arms, and innards were exploding from the bodies. A long thunderous roar rolled down to them from the rocks along the mesa ledge.
Up on the lip of the mesa, a dense white cloud was drifting away on the wind. From the cloud a continuous stream of tracers swept downhill to work across the ranks of skinnies, sending them running back to the trees in a ragged mob. The tracers followed them the whole way, and Dwayne could see figures tumbled and tossed.
“The Ma Deuce!” Chaz called back. His face was split in a grin.
“Who’s working it?” Dwayne shouted. “Who gives a fuck?” Hammond said and stood, firing the Minimi at the confused ranks of the skinnies ahead of them below the mesa lip. The hunting party milled about uncertain of what to do in the face of the approaching Rangers and the spray of white tracers streaking over their heads from the rocks above.
The big fifty cal growled into action again and changed its angle of fire to chew up the ground occupied by the skinnies in the shadow of the ridgeline. The angle was bad, and most of the hunting party was sheltered by the mesa wall. But they didn’t grasp what was happening. They wanted to get as far from that terrible chundering sound as their feet would carry them. The skinnies fled from the shadow of the mesa ledge straight into the killing field where heavy slugs the length of an index finger dismembered them instantly. Fish in a barrel. The mob broke up and ran shrieking away to the north and south, clearing a path for the Rangers and their line of retreat.
Hammond unlimbered his shotgun and pumped double-aught into a few holdouts huddled in an overhang. Chaz led the way, and they moved up the slope of broad wash to the mesa top under the protective fire of the big .50 roaring over their heads.
They made it to the field area to find Rick Renzi, in green surgical scrubs and missing half his hair, crouched behind the big machine gun with his hands on the trigger pulls. He stopped when he saw them and lit a cigarette off the hot barrel shroud of the Browning .50.
“You still have my lighter, bro?” he asked.
Caroline nibbled Wheat Thins and sipped Evian while seated atop an ammo crate in the shade of a tarp the Rangers rigged up atop the mesa. She watched Chaz making Jimbo comfortable, propped up and conscious now, and holding a cold pack to his mouth.
There were heavy plastic totes on groundsheets around them. It looked like any other desert camp outing except for the guns and ammo cans and blood.
“Don’t drink too much,” Chaz said and popped an Evian for Jimbo. “You puke, and you drop your hydration level.”
“You carried me all the way up here?” Jimbo said, muffled by the icepack.
“I been carrying your ass for years, my red brother.” Chaz washed some cuts on Jimbo’s legs with an orange-colored antiseptic.
“You bring my long gun?”
“Yeah,” Chaz said. “I packed your Winchester along. Get some rest and I’ll break it out for you.”
As the sun rose high in the sky, Caroline fought to keep her eyes open. The others were busy with tasks that required a minimum of conversation. Dwayne leaned back on a flat rock, relacing his boots. He wore a fresh set of camouflaged fatigue pants and a clean t-shirt. Hammond lay in a position behind a pile of rocks and scanned the approaches below the mesa with a pair of 30x binoculars. Renzi was busy fitting a new bar
rel to the big black machine gun on its tripod, a Marlboro pressed in his lips.
A scattering of long brass cartridges littered the area around him. She idly picked up one of them. The base was stamped with US 04. Caroline daydreamed about a team of archeologists digging up these artifacts in a stratum they had no business being in.
“We’ll need to clean up here,” Caroline said, mostly to herself.
“Huh?” Renzi looked up.
“All of this crap. All of it,” Caroline said. “It has to go back through the Tube with us.”
“All I want to get back through there is my ass in one piece, honey,” Renzi flicked the Marlboro butt away.
She could see it was hopeless. Either that, or she was just too tired to argue. Or just too tired for anything. She closed her eyes, vowing it would only be for a few seconds, and fell instantly into a deep sleep.
Jimbo wiped sweat from his eyes and shook his head before pressing his eye to the cup of the scope again.
“You up for this, Cochise?” Hammond said beside him.
“Just tired,” Jimbo said and looked down the scope atop his Winchester, the wood stock warm and comfortable against his cheek. He was prone by Hammond, who sat up spotting for him through the binoculars.
“Downrange about three hundred plus,” Hammond said. “A few ticks right of that clump of greasewood.”
“Don’t have it yet,” Jimbo said. All he could see was rock and scrub down to the tree line, the ground dotted with the dark shapes of the skinnies brought down that morning. Birds had swarmed down into the no man’s land and were gathered around the corpses in amorphous black clumps. More dark shapes circled overhead.
All afternoon they listened to the bleat of horns from the woods. Some kind of jungle telegraph was heating up. Or maybe the skinnies were just bored off their ass waiting on the sun to go down and the hunt to begin again.
“Sounds like a soccer crowd in Somalia,” Chaz said.
“Skinnies are skinnies no matter where you go,” Renzi said.
“That’s racist, dickhead,” Chaz said.
“Fuck you, Reverend Sharpton. Far as we know those monkey motherfuckers down there are white,” Renzi said.
Chaz had to laugh at that.
Jimbo raised up on his elbows to look over the open sights to find the copse of clumpy bushes. He dropped his eye to the scope cup and scanned over with the 30x. The stand of brush popped close, filling the lens. There was movement there. Two, maybe three, skinnies watching the mesa from what they believed was a concealed position.
“Easy-peasy,” Jimbo muttered and let his breath out.
The first heavy round exploded the head of a skinny. Jimbo pulled the bolt back, jacked a new round, and returned his eye to the scope. The second round took another skinny center mass as the sound of the first rifle shot reached them. A third skinny was up and running for the trees.
“He’s gonna make that gully,” Hammond said, watching the show through binoculars.
“Bullshit.” Jimbo slid the bolt home and settled the posts on the back of the skinny who was bobbing in and out of view as he pelted over the rough ground for cover. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the shape vanished from his view.
“Nice,” Hammond hissed. “Dead before he hit the ground. Took him somewhere between thoracic three and four.”
“That’s pretty specific, Lee.” Jimbo turned on his back and rested his head on a rolled-up towel.
“I was living with a chiropractor a year ago,” Hammond said as he continued to scan the open ground before the tree line. “She sure straightened my bone.”
“What made you come on a clusterfuck like this? I can’t believe you didn’t think Chaz was punking you. A time machine, goddamn,” Jimbo said. He was getting his mind off his still throbbing head. The pain in his jaw radiated right around to the back of his skull.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Hammond said. “You were working border patrol on the reservation, right?”
“You mean ‘catch and release.’”
“That bad?”
“Same shit every day. Same faces every day. A guy likes to think he’s making a difference. But the rules were written to protect the lawbreakers and lawmakers. Fuck the law enforcers.”
“The rules of engagement,” Hammond said and took his eye from the scope. “That’s what I like about this gig.”
“There’s no rules of engagement here.” Jimbo opened his eyes and turned to Hammond.
“Exactly,” Hammond said without a change of expression.
“You seeing this?” Chaz said and handed the 30x binoculars over to Dwayne.
Dwayne glassed the trees below and could see the smoke of a fire rising from the position where the village lay.
“Look out along the shoreline,” Chaz said and placed a hand on the back of Dwayne’s head to shift his vision.
“Shit-damn,” Dwayne hissed. There were more smoke columns coming from all along the trees at the edge of the sea. It looked like miles of signal fires.
“Reinforcements,” Chaz said.
“More like a goddamned surge,” Dwayne said and scanned the trees, listening to the growing number of hunting horns.
Dwayne tapped Caroline’s shoulder gently. She opened her eyes with an effort and slowly sat up. He was offering her a bottle of water.
“You need to drink some more water,” he said and crouched by her.
“How long did I sleep?” she said and took a swallow. The shadows were longer and stretched behind them. She turned to where the field would appear when it opened. Just sunbaked rock and dry grass.
“Not long enough,” Dwayne said. “But you need to hydrate and try to eat something.”
“I just collapsed.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He laughed. “You napped right through Jimbo firing his cannon downrange all afternoon. Didn’t move a muscle.”
“You watched me sleep?” she said with a wry expression.
“I checked on you.”
“I look like hell,” she said. “I itch like hell. All I wanted a few hours ago was a drink of clean water. Now I’d kill for a shower.”
“You may have to,” he stood and looked west. “They’ll be coming once it’s dark. If we’re still here, it’s going to be a long night. Those skinnies own the night. Nocturnal hunters.”
“Skinnies?”
“Our hungry little friends,” Dwayne said. “Army slang. Goes back to Somalia when the Rangers were in Mogadishu. The locals were skinnies.”
“Why do you have to call them anything?” she said.
“You have to call them something,” he said. “In your head.”
“Well, I guess I’ve been thinking of them as aborigines. Though that’s not strictly accurate. They’re hominids of some kind.”
“Well, ‘skinnies’ is shorter.”
“But doesn’t that demean them? Make you superior to them?”
“They have a name for people who can kill total strangers without reducing them to less-than-human status,” Dwayne said.
“What’s that?”
“Psychotics.” He stood to go.
“You’re all Army?” she asked in order to keep him there by her. She didn’t want him to walk away.
“All Rangers. Ex-Rangers. This is our kind of action. Rough country. Outnumbered.”
“How in God’s name did my brother find you guys?”
“Friend of a friend.” Dwayne smiled. “He’s a very dedicated brother.”
“Yeah,” she said and tipped the bottle. “Let’s hope he dedicated his ass to getting the back door open again.”
He shook a pair of white pills into the palm of his hand from a small plastic vial.
“Take these,” he said and took her hand to drop the pills into her palm.
“What are they? Salt?
“Amphetamines,” Dwayne said. “Like I told you, it’s going to be a long night.”
He watched to make sure she swallowed them and returned to
his position along the mesa ledge.
19
Night Falls
The blare of the horns increased as the sun fell. There were more of them than before, and it sounded like they were coming from all around. For hours they kept up a continuous ululating noise like a World Cup football crowd, short honks mixed with long mournful tones rising from the woods and rocks.
To the north, the mesa dropped off at a near-vertical angle. The western and southern approaches were long and open—a killing ground. Behind them heading east, the mesa was flat and went on for twenty miles of dry prairie.
The attack lines were clear and predictable. They’d come at a creep or a rush from the tree line. But there was always a chance they’d slip a party up the vertical slope. There was no reason to think the skinnies couldn’t climb like goats. They’d seen them scramble up the cliff face above their hometown fast enough.
For that contingency, they set up Caroline in a mini-bunker made of piled totes to keep an eye on the section of the mesa that dropped sharply to the valley below. Dwayne spent twenty minutes showing her how the M4 operated and let her run through a magazine for practice.
“You don’t need to hit anything,” he assured her. “Just make some noise if you see anyone coming over that ledge. This is a potential blind spot, and we need it covered.”
When it got darker, he fitted a NOD set to her head. Dusk turned to noon through the lenses, and the dying sunlight made the face of every rock a mirror. She blinked as she turned her head to look at Dwayne.