Unloaded

by Eric Beetner

  Devlin was already on his feet. “Then we’d better shut him up.”

  Chapter 2

  I brought up the rear while Devlin lead the way; charging up the slight hill like a fullback. Barrows was close behind him with the Thompson.

  That’s when I saw Cain crawl out of the shell crater. He’d been covered by dead leaves and dirt from the exploding shells. I wouldn’t have been able to see him even if I’d risked looking around the log.

  The screaming German was less than a hundred yards away. We would’ve reached him in no time if we’d been running across a flat field, but we weren’t in a field. We were in a forest that had been blown apart by several tons of artillery. Trees had splintered and fallen. Trunks and limbs stuck up from the ground at sharp, awkward angles. Craters pockmarked the forest floor, making every step tricky. The hazy gun smoke burned our eyes; making the going even tougher. The forest didn’t smell of death yet, but I knew it would soon. Then the bugs would come and make everything even worse than it already was.

  But I didn’t bother thinking of any of that just then. All I cared about was shutting that German’s mouth.

  I flinched as the clack of sporadic machine gun fire echoed from elsewhere in the forest. I ducked into the nearest shallow crater and waited for the bullets to start hitting, but I realized the sound was too far away. Unfortunately, it was meant for Marines elsewhere in the forest.

  I got up and started running again, faster now. The broken ground became easier to navigate once I knew how to move through it.

  I watched Devlin, further ahead now, reach clear ground in front of the machine gun nest. The area hadn’t been shelled as heavily and the ground was level. Devlin was a big man, bigger than I’d thought he was at first and moved like a track star. He pulled two trench knives from his belt—six-inch blades with studded steel knuckles on the handle—and vaulted the sandbags in front of the machine gun pit.

  The screaming stopped a second later.

  By the time I caught up, Cain was scanning the forest while Devlin and Barrows were trying to dislodge the machine gun from the firing pit. Devlin pointed at Cain and me. “You two watch our flanks. See if you can’t figure out where the next machine gun placement is. We’ll try to take this damned thing with us if we can. Might come in handy when...”

  That’s when I saw the outline of German helmets coming our way through the haze of the gun smoke still drifting through the forest. There was no way to count them all. There wasn’t enough time.

  “Whatever you’re going to do,” I said, “you’d better do damned quick. Because we’re about to have company.”

  Chapter 3

  Devlin pulled on a helmet from one of the dead Germans. “You three take positions on the other side of these sandbags. Keep low and follow my lead until I give the signal. When I do, open up on the bastards with everything you’ve got.”

  Cain, Barrows and I did what he’d told us. Cain was in the center, with me and Barrows on either side of him. Cain and I kept an eye on Barrows, who had his shoulder against the sandbags, ready to come up firing with that Thompson.

  He must’ve felt us looking at us because he threw us a wink. “Don’t worry, boys. The captain’s always got a plan. You’ll see.”

  I could see Devlin through a narrow gap in the sandbags. I watched him lift one dead German and lay him on the edge of the pit, then laid the other right next to him. Neither man was a lightweight, but the captain moved them as easily as if they’d been pillows.

  One of the approaching Germans called out and I knew our goose was cooked. I didn’t speak a word of German and I didn’t think Barrows or Cain did, either.

  That’s when Devlin proved me wrong and answered the Hun bastard back in his native tongue. Whatever he’d said drew a big laugh from the men.

  Something of a dialogue went back and forth between Devlin and the man I figured was in charge of the patrol. I kept my head down but my Springfield ready as I heard them getting closer.

  Then I heard Devlin grunt as if he was moving something heavy.

  When I heard the clink, I knew what he was doing.

  Devlin had just picked up the machine gun and moved it to the other side of the pit.

  The boss German was still talking when Devlin opened up on them with the machine gun. The three of us popped up on a knee and began firing as well.

  Most of the Germans had fallen where they stood before they could get off a shot, but I tracked one who’d managed to break off to the left. He’d taken up a position behind a skinny tree when I shot him in the chest. Cain fired twice and Barrows’ Thompson fell silent.

  From the pit, Devlin asked, “How many you get, Charlie?”

  “The one who broke off to the left, sir.”

  “Jimmy Cain?”

  “Two who fell back behind that mound over there, sir.”

  “Good man. And you, Mr. Barrows?”

  “Just cleaned up one you’d already winged, Jack. Fine shooting.”

  Devlin tossed the German helmet aside and put his own back on. He opened the gun’s casing and yanked out the firing pin. “Glad I could put the damned thing to some good use for a change. Bastards won’t be using this to kill any of our boys with that for a while. It’s too heavy to bring with us, so we’ll leave it here.” He climbed out of the pit. “How’s everyone on ammo?”

  “Four left here,” I said.

  “Those were my last two shots, sir,” Cain admitted.

  “Probably half a magazine left, mon Capitan,” Barrows said.

  “Charlie and Jimmy,” Devlin said, “loot those dead Krauts for their rifles and ammunition, but keep your Springfields with you. A loaded Kraut gun is better than an empty American one.” To Cain, he said, “Where’s your pack?”

  “I ditched it back there some place. Was slowing me down.”

  “Then search them for rations, too. We’ll all have to make do with what we have until we meet up with the rest of our forces somewhere down the line.”

  “If there are any of them left,” Barrows added.

  Devlin tucked his trench knives back in his belt. “If we’re alive, some of our boys are alive. And we’ll find them.”

  The chatter of German machine guns picked up again to our left. The sound echoed through the dead forest like angry grasshoppers. And by the look on his face, I knew Devlin had heard it, too.

  He nodded down at the men we’d just killed. “Drink any water they might have on them and don’t be proud about it, either. Might be a while before we get this kind of respite again.”

  The machine gun fire continued as Cain and I began looting the dead men for ammo and water.

  Barrows hung back and I heard him ask Devlin, “Where we going from here, boss?”

  I heard muted yells in English over the sound of the German guns.

  Devlin pick up a German rifle and levered the chamber open. “Where do you think?”

  Click here to learn more about The Devil Dogs of Belleau Wood by Terrence McCauley.

  Back to TOC

  Here’s a sample from Mark Coggins’ No Hard Feelings.

  Chapter 1 - Winnie

  When she got to San Francisco and found that August Riordan wasn’t there, she decided to kill herself. She took a cab from downtown to the Presidio and walked out on the Golden Gate Bridge. She went past the historical marker placed by the Native Sons of the Golden West, past the section of the walkway bordered by a chain-link fence, and onto the part where the only barrier between pedestrians and a two-hundred-fifty-foot drop was a chest-high railing.

  At midspan she stopped to contemplate the lumpy ocean below. Although it was summer, the weather was miserable. Wind shrieked in her ears, and heavy mist coated her face. The oppressive rumble of the traffic behind her—punctuated by tires bumping over the steel joints in the roadway—was nearly as unpleasant. This was not the romantic, graceful end she had imagined.

  But how long would she retain th
is final freedom, the freedom to take her own life? Today she was able to walk. Today she was able to move her arms and hands, to interact with the physical world nearly as well as an undamaged person—instead of the quadriplegic that she was. Being able to do that tomorrow or the next day was no longer certain.

  The experimental technology that had restored her mobility was failing. The Winemaker, the man who stole the technology from her husband, murdered him, and sent mercenaries to kill or capture her, was closing in. And now, after months of struggle, she learned that August Riordan, her only living ally, had left San Francisco.

  She put her hands on the railing, thinking about what it was going to be like when she hit the water. There almost certainly wouldn’t be any pain: after all, she had no feeling below her neck. With any luck, she would plunge straight into the water, drown or die from the impact, and be swept out to sea. It wouldn’t be so bad...

  Suddenly, she laughed aloud. She probably would die in the Bay, but if she lived—as some few did—she might actually make things worse by severing her spine in a new place, rendering the technology useless. She would be paralyzed once more, the thing she feared the most. And there was more. Whether she lived or died, the Winemaker would very likely get possession of her body and harvest the last few secrets of the technology. She couldn’t let that happen.

  She stepped back. She had to reframe the decision. Killing herself meant doing it right: a gun to the brain or a razor to the wrist. None of this romantic soaring into the golden afterlife bullshit. And she would have to do it alone, in a place where her body would never be found. Not killing herself meant fighting through the episodes of intermittent paralysis and continuing her search for Riordan. And maybe, just maybe, stopping the Winemaker and avenging her dead husband.

  She trudged back to the Presidio parking lot, where she found the taxi driver who had brought her here munching on a Chinese pork bun. He drove her down the Peninsula to the San Francisco Airport—and after two hours of staring at airplanes taxiing on the runway—she felt a renewed resolution to go forward.

  Riordan, she had been told, had moved to Palm Springs. It was a long way to travel in her vulnerable state. If she flew, she risked losing her ability to move while surrounded by a plane full of people. That in itself wasn’t dangerous, but the hoopla of an onboard medical emergency would draw attention to her, especially if it was reported in the news. She knew from firsthand experience that the Winemaker’s people were watching for ER patients with sudden unexplained paralysis.

  If she rented a car, she risked losing control of it on the freeway. While she knew that could mean death or serious injury, she decided it was better than being captured by the Winemaker’s thugs. She gave Hertz a credit card and a license with a fake name and in return received a Lincoln sedan, which she pointed south down Highway 101.

  Inside her purse, which was lying beside her on the passenger seat, was an electronic device about the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes. Its inventor called it a neuromuscular transceiver. She called it a garage-door opener, not because it had anything to do with opening garage doors, but because she had found that it was the best way to explain its presence in her bag.

  The transceiver’s real purpose was to capture and retransmit impulses from her brain through a set of surgically implanted neurostimulators on either side of the break in her spine. It served, in effect, as a kind of wireless jumper cable for her motor impulses. But it only worked in one direction. It enabled her brain to tell her muscles how to move, but it didn’t allow her body from the base of her neck down to tell her brain what she was sensing.

  She was used to the one-way nature of the system. She’d been living with it for ten years, ever since she had been selected as a subject for an experimental system intended to aid spinal-cord-injury victims. What she was not used to was having it fail. The transceiver had failed abruptly twice in the last month, depriving her of movement, depriving her of control. The first time she had been jogging, with the transceiver strapped around her arm as if it were an MP3 player. It cut out on her in midstride and she collapsed like she’d been shot. That time, the transceiver resumed functioning almost as soon as she hit the ground. The next time she was not so fortunate.

  She’d been in a hotel bed with the transceiver in her purse on the nightstand. She had reached for her cell phone and accidently knocked the purse off the stand. The transceiver had shut off, and her outstretched arm overbalanced her, causing her to tumble from the bed.

  She lay with her nose buried in the carpet, thirsty, nearly suffocated, the scratchy fibers of the carpet irritating her skin, until 1:08 p.m. the next day when a knock had sounded on the door and someone had mumbled, “Housekeeping,” from the other side. She had cried out for help, the door opened, and a stout Latina woman in a hotel uniform ran to her side.

  “I fainted,” she had lied to the maid. “Would you help me roll over?”

  The maid had dropped to the floor, shoveled the purse and its spilled contents out of the way, and grasped her by the shoulder to turn her face up. Then, just as abruptly as it had cut out, the “nerve tone” to her lower extremities had returned. She sprung to a sitting position.

  “Thank you,” she had told the startled woman at her side. “I feel much better already.”

  She decided that the transceiver had a loose connection since each breakdown and restoration had been accompanied by a jolt or a sudden movement of the device. She thought about taking the box apart to check, but she quickly rejected the idea. She lacked the manual dexterity for one thing, and she was terrified of making things worse. She settled for wrapping the device in a sheath of foam rubber to protect it against shocks. A more permanent fix would have to wait for Riordan. Everything now depended on finding him in Palm Springs.

  The first four hundred miles or so of the drive passed without event. She endured the boring passage down Highway 5 to Los Angeles, fought LA traffic to Highway 10, and approached the western edge of the Sonoran Desert where Palm Springs lay. Near a dusty little town by the name of Banning, she stopped at a Sinclair station to fill the thirsty Lincoln’s tank for what seemed like the twentieth time. She was pumping gas, watching the late afternoon sun sink behind the station’s big green dinosaur sign, when a 1969 Chevy Chevelle rumbled up.

  Its rear tires were jacked up and its dual exhaust pipes were crimped in the shape of the Chevy logo. The driver’s and passenger’s doors opened simultaneously and two men in cowboy boots and jeans tumbled out. The driver was taller and wore a bandanna—a do-rag—with an American flag pattern. The passenger was fatter and dumber looking—if that was possible—and wore a T-shirt with the message THERE WILL BE NO QUITTERS UNTIL WE KILL ALL THE CRITTERS across the front.

  Both men checked her out in an obvious way. The fatter one elbowed the other and made a comment in an undertone. The only word she caught over the whine of a passing semi was “tits.” She impulsively raised her left hand with her middle finger extended. She didn’t want to call attention to herself unnecessarily, but she knew the Winemaker would never employ a pair of bottom-feeders like these. And she was long past the point where she was going to put up with shit from anyone in their pay grade.

  The men laughed. “It ain’t polite to eavesdrop,” said the driver. “Shrake’s observation about your fun bags was for my private consumption.”

  The Lincoln was a good five gallons from the fill line, but she figured she had enough gas to make it to Palm Springs. She clicked off the pump, shoved the nozzle back into its holster, and screwed on the gas cap. “Mouth off to me again,” she said, after she pulled open the door to the Lincoln, “and you’ll have the toe of my boot for your private consumption.”

  The retort caught the men flatfooted. She was behind the wheel of the Lincoln with the door partway closed by the time they answered. “Don’t go away mad,” yelled the fat one. “You haven’t heard what I was going to say about your ass...”

  She drove through le
ngthening shadows until she came to a sign for an upcoming rest stop. It reminded her that she had left the service station without going to the bathroom. Since she was unable to feel the pressure of a full bladder or bowels, she compensated by making frequent trips to the toilet. She pulled into the rest stop and parked directly in front of the women’s restroom. There were no other cars in the lot.

  She ran in and quickly did her business. She returned to the Lincoln and angled across the lot, heading for the exit. It was then that she hit a seam in the pavement that had been obscured by shadows. The car jolted across the gap, and she made the mistake of hitting the brakes. The Lincoln lurched to a stop, and her purse spilled forward on the passenger seat. Until that point, she had always belted it in after a stop, but in her hurry she’d been careless.

  The transceiver shut down, and she slumped against the door, pulling the wheel to the right as her hands fell away. Her foot slid off the brake, releasing the car to proscribe a lazy arc back toward the rest-stop buildings. There was another lurch when the front wheel hit the curb. Without a foot on the throttle, the car wasn’t going fast enough to propel it onto the sidewalk, so the Lincoln remained wedged there, idling as if she were waiting for someone.

  She lay with her cheek pressed against the sticky glass of the window, willing herself not to panic. This wasn’t as bad as the time in the hotel room, she told herself. Someone would come along soon and help. She would think of an excuse to get him or her to rummage through her purse—perhaps by asking for pills to help with her “condition”—and in the process the transceiver would get jostled and kick in.

  She was right about the first part: a car pulled up beside her in less than ten minutes. Unfortunately, it was the Chevy Chevelle from the gas station.

  Tweedledee and Tweedledumber slithered out of the muscle car, grinning with big yellow teeth. “Lookie here, Shrake,” she heard the one with the do-rag say through the glass. “It’s her. Our girlfriend from the filling station.”