“So, they’d run us to ground before we can get around the lower notch and kill us in the woods?”
“That seems likely, and they won’t use spears and knives to do it. They’ll use those ‘space marine’ rifles.”
“And that’s still a better plan than getting the snow plow out and just pushing through the snow?”
“Snow in the notches is gonna be too deep to plow. Can’t use the grenades we have on the snow either because they’re high explosive anti-personnel fragmentation, and what we need is something thermal to vaporize enough snow for the plow to work. Not to mention the explosions could cause mini-avalanches and attract the unwanted attention of the trogs.”
“And you don’t have a flamethrower, do you?”
Mack glanced at KC. “Not a conventional one, no, and a flamethrower seems to me like it would be too slow for the job, not to mention napalm is no good for nobody’s health.” He shrugged again. “Let’s call using the snowplow Plan B.”
“What we need to do is distract the trogs when they attack,” KC suggested. “Have our volunteers take a stand here, draw them in and keep them focused on us here. Then, Natty can lead our non-combatants to the gas station and call the police.”
“Wait... ‘call’?” Mack stammered. He rubbed a hand down across his face and unzipped his field jacket. “I am so stupid sometimes. I totally forgot I had this on me!”
He pulled what looked like an old brick cell phone out of a pouch under his right arm.
“We don’t have cell service,” Teddy protested.
“Not a cell phone. It’s a satellite phone,” Mack corrected. He powered the device up. “Yes! They’re not jamming!” He looked up at the rapidly clearing sky. “Should be clear enough to make a call.”
“Who’re you gonna call?” Teddy asked. “And if you say ‘the Ghostbusters’ I’ll hit you.”
“Yeah, sat-phones don’t work like cell phones, do they?” Iva asked, joining the conversation.
“Well, with clear line of sight to an in-network satellite, they sorta do,” Mack said as he rummaged in a pocket for his wallet. “Phone connects to the satellite; the satellite connects to a ground station, and the ground station connects to the regular telephonic network.”
“What are you looking for?” Teddy asked.
“Business card with a specific number,” Mack answered as he plucked said business card out of his wallet. He had the number memorized, but not the information hand written on the back of the card.
He tapped the number into the phone and waited for the connection to go through. A few seconds later he spoke, reading from the back of the card, “Direct connect Sauvage Delta-One-Niner, pass code ‘fuzzy sausages cause vegan madness’.”
Mack passed the card over to KC who giggled.
“Hey, Zane, hope I’m not waking you as we’re in different time zones and such,” Mack said cheerfully into the phone. “Well, I am sorry about that, but I am in sore need of a friend right now, and I am just about positive this is a Cassandra Protocol situation, just not one that’s been written down far as I’m aware of. I’m in a little off-the-grid resort called ‘Silver Dollar City’, used to be a ghost town... oh! You’ve heard of it. Okay, good, and do you know where it is precisely? Excellent. Oh, well, what I need is some really heavy fire support, the kind that comes in black helicopters because the town’s under attack by monsters.”
“Who is he talking to?” Teddy whispered.
KC motioned Teddy to silence.
“Yeah, that’s the point, there’s no classification for them in the tables. Local’s already dubbed them ‘troglodytes’ after the D&D monster, which they resemble, but they’re not lizard folk. I’d describe them as being a cross between a saurian and a skunk ape, and I mean that literally. Somebody is doing some serious genetic engineering, and they’re arming them with modern weapons. They’ve got a rifle that’s like a cross between a Colonial Marine’s pulse rifle and that knock-off pulse rifle from Starship Troopers. Yes, Zane, I said monsters with guns.”
Mack listened for a moment. “I’ve got close to sixty people with me. We’re dug in with the non-combatants squirreled away in a safe room. I’m expecting the trogs to attack tonight, probably in force, but we should be able to hold out for tonight.”
He listened again for a moment. “Yeah, we’ve kept it on the DL so far, but everybody’s seen the critters, and they’ve already killed two people and injured another. What do you mean that’s a shockingly low body count? I’ve got KC and two other family members with me, a brother Marine and KC’s pit-bull-like bestie.”
“Love you, too,” Pilar sang out.
“We’ll do our best, but don’t take your time. KC’s got one of her bad feelings. Roger that, Zane.”
Mack broke the connection. “We have to hold out until sometime tomorrow. The cavalry is on the way.”
“Did you call the state police?” Teddy frowned.
“Uh, no, I called a government agent that we’re friends with. His agency, it, um, well, it actually deals with situations like this. They’ve got a reaction force based in Denver that’s gonna come, well, rescue us, but it’s gonna take time to get them awake, prepped, briefed, and launched, so we’re on our own until then. I do think we’ll be able to proceed with Plan A, though.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, when the trogs attack, we fight back hard. Under cover of the battle, Natty leads the non-combatants out the escape tunnel and to the gas station where she calls 911. We hold the trogs here until the cavalry arrives.”
Chapter Eight
Twin Lakes, Colorado
Friday, March 15, 2019
THE ATTACK CAME JUST before midnight. A force of twenty trogs attacked the Livery, searching for the bodies of their missing and dead comrades. This group did manage to recover all but two of the bodies, a male and the lone female from the first three trogs to die. Ole Ahlstrom had those two bodies laid out in a back room of the bank where he was doing as detailed a necropsy as he could manage.
Another force of trogs, approximately fifty warriors in total, attacked the Bank from the direction of the tiny home enclave. Normally, according to the Great Ones’ own doctrine, such a force would have only twenty blaster-warriors, but the Paladins who trained The People had insisted that the Great Ones should use more blasters for this operation. So, half the warriors in this company had blasters, fully loaded and ready for war. This was not a stealth mission. The other half of the warriors were armed with pump crossbows, and everyone carried both a dagger and a hand axe as sidearms.
The crossbow-warriors took aim at lights, burning or not. Hyoo-mans needed light to see in the dark. The People did not. The blaster-warriors readied themselves to kill any hyoo-mans who came to investigate the shattered lights. None of the warriors of The People were expecting to be fired upon with their own grenade weapons!
LIAM HAD SPOTTED THE trogs coming from the direction of the RV park and quickly alerted Mack. Mack passed the word on to Teddy, and several more defenders mounted the roof. Thankfully, most of the residents of Silver Dollar City had chosen 12 gauge shotguns as their personal defence option, and of those shotguns most, not all, most had three inch chambers that allowed them to load the trogs’ own shotgun grenades.
Mack opened up the festivities with the Hammer on full auto, feeding from a 50-round drum. He operated the rifle like a light machine gun, sweeping suppressive fire across the trog company’s front. As he was dropping his first drum to load the second, KC signalled for the shotgunners to open up. The barrage of shotgun grenades was relatively brief. Most of the shotguns were hunting pump guns that could hold only three or four rounds. Besides Mack & KC’s Mossberg and FN SLP, only two other shotguns could hold seven or eight rounds.
Even so, the grenades wreaked carnage across the former residential neighborhood. With the RVs removed only thin-walled trailers remained. Very few of the non-trailer tiny houses had thick walls. The trogs had a concealment, but they had very little
actual cover. Grenades exploded with enough force to send shrapnel tearing through RV trailers, which in turn generated more shrapnel coming out the other side. Thanks to their body armor, very few trogs were killed by the grenade barrage, but they were all bloodied and shaken.
Then, the Hammer opened up again, accompanied now by other rifles. Mack’s Hammer wasn’t the only .308 firing. Many of the town’s residents also owned hunting rifles, and the .308 was a popular deer and bear round. Others had AR15 platforms. It was the most popular weapon in America, after all. Not to be left out, at least two residents had actual AK47 rifles, which were being added to the weight of fire coming down on the trog company.
Mack quickly glanced over at KC. She’d slung the SLP behind her back and picked up their Ruger Hawkeye Alaskan, arguably the most powerful bolt gun among the defenders, and she began deliberately picking out and shooting down trogs holding rifles.
The trogs were not idle. Their riflemen began firing back, including aimed grenades. Crossbow-wielding trogs tossed aside their issued weapons to take up the rifles of fallen comrades. Not a single trog was left without a rifle after that initial grenade barrage from the human defenders.
“Action rear!” Pilar shouted.
The smaller troop of trogs had abandoned their original task to come to the aid of their comrades. The stealth-armed trogs had climbed up to the roof of the livery and were making their way across the rooftops to attack the defenders there. They had not been counting on Pilar’s sense of smell detecting them and raising the alarm.
The petite werewolf was with Chloe when she’d noticed the oncoming attackers. The two women opened up with their semi-automatic rifles. Pilar’s natural werewolf reflexes and eye-hand coordination, even in human form, made her an excellent shooter, but Chloe was actually a better shot. She’d never allowed her former biathlon skills to deteriorate. While she’d been recovering from her injuries the previous year, she’d gone to the range every day, shooting rifles from a seated position, and she’d gotten very good at it. At the moment, she was shooting at in-human monsters, so she never hesitated to go for the perfect kill shot. Twenty rounds between the two of them ended the lives of ten trogs.
The other half of the smaller trog group, the ones armed with atlatls and rifles attacked the back door of the Bank. A pair of grenades removed the back door from its frame, but as the trogs tried to enter the breach they’d made, Jack Samuels was ready and waiting for them in the mud room. He had a double-barrel shotgun loaded with two grenade rounds, his Glock 17, and a Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum from Teddy’s gun collection.
“Feelin’ lucky, motherfuckers? Come get some!” Samuels yelled at the trogs as he loosed first one then the other barrel of the shotgun.
His first grenade disintegrated the trog standing in the doorway and killed or seriously wounded two more. His second grenade exploded somewhere close to the gate of Porcia’s Hermitage and doing no other harm. Samuels dropped the shotgun and pulled the .44 out of his waistband. The next trog head he saw caught a .44 slug in the snout. A dart hurtled through the door, barely missing Samuels and slamming into a wall.
“Son of a bitch!” Samuels cursed as he triggered two more rounds from the massive revolver. “Come say that to my face! I dare you!”
A trog somersaulted through the door. Samuels fired the .44 as fast as he could, emptying it after three rounds. He just dropped the big gun and pulled his Glock from its holster. The trog stood up, brandishing a dagger in one hand and what looked like a tomahawk in the other, grinning a sharp toothed grin. Samuels fired three rounds rapidly into its chest. Then, he strode over and fired three more rounds into its face. He turned to see more trogs clearing the breached doorway, entering the backroom with him. Samuels began firing as quickly as he could.
Suddenly, Samuels shouted in pain. He’d been pinned to the wall behind him with a dart that had passed through his stomach just below his tactical vest. The slide on the Glock clicked back at that point, too. A trio of trogs stood facing him, all with wicked, toothy grins on their faces. Samuels ejected the magazine and placed the pistol in his other hand so that he could fumble for a spare mag with his good hand. He was losing consciousness fast.
The door next to him burst open. It was Ole Ahlstrom, who’d been in the room next door finishing up his necropsy. He had a gun in his hands, another relic of Teddy’s gun collection, a .30-06 M1 Garand. Never meant for close combat, Ole nonetheless began firing from the hip as soon as he could get the gun up. Samuels marveled at the fact that the old Garand even had an old WWII-era bayonet fixed to the end of the barrel.
The leftmost troggy took four heavy rifle rounds to the chest and face. The second fared the same as the first, but the Garand emptied with the distinctive “ping” of the mechanism ejecting the emptied clip from the internal magazine. Ole merely turned the rifle toward the final trog, and with a roar charged forward to drive the bayonet into the trog’s chest and pin the monster to the wall next to the missing door.
“Damn, Ole, you a badass,” Samuels said with a giggle. “Who knew?”
The security man died with a smile on his lips.
OF THE SEVENTY TROGS that had initially attacked Silver Dollar City, only twenty-three had survived the vigorous defense mounted by the humans. Those twenty-three were split into two groups of ten, each group coming together behind the best cover they could find. The other three trogs had been sent to fetch reinforcements. The remaining trogs were trading fire with their human opponents, hoping to keep the humans pinned in one place until more trog warriors showed up for another concentrated attack.
Of the twenty-five humans who had mounted the vigorous defense of Silver Dollar City, ten had been wounded and one, Jack Samuels, had been killed. None of the wounds were immediately life threatening, but Mack had ordered the wounded to head downstairs anyway along with four of his remaining effective fighters to help Ole cover the breached back door. The biologist was supposed to be down in the bunker with the other non-combatants, but he’d stayed behind to finish his work, and that had been a blessing.
Mack glanced at the time on his phone: 2 am. “Iva, I want you, TJ, Scot, and Chloe to go on down to the bunker.”
“What? Why?” Iva protested.
“Look, Natty’s already timed how long it’d take her to get to the end of the tunnel, cut that in half for the kids and the old folks, and we’re talking about a two hour hike. They need to start going in the next hour. That’ll get ‘em to the hatch by, say, five. That gives them only an hour, hour and a half of cover of darkness to get as close to the gas station as they can. They’re gonna need a rear guard once they’re out and moving. You’re the last security guard, so that gives you authority in the minds of the non-combatants. Chloe is a damn good shot. Frankly, TJ and Scot are probably expendable, but they’re also big fellas who can handle a gun.”
“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence,” TJ Young sneered. He was Teddy’s oldest child, and he was otherwise useless, but he’d fought bravely. So had Scot Dodson for that matter.
“Seriously, you two are hunting buddies, and I believe I can trust you to do the right thing if it becomes necessary to save everybody’s lives, can’t I?” Mack asked solemnly.
The two young men nodded.
“Good. Iva, I also want you to take the walking wounded with you. Tell them they’re extra security for the kids and old folks, okay?”
“Yeah,” Iva sighed in agreement.
“What about the rest of us?” Liam asked.
“We’re pulling back to the panic room, or right outside of it,” Mack said. “That’s where we’re gonna make our last stand.”
“Let’s hope it’s better than Custers,” Iva snarked.
ANOTHER FIFTY TROG warriors showed up. Every warrior in this company had a blaster. The Great Ones were becoming concerned with the tenacity of the defenders. The Rishon of the fresh company took overall command since the Rishon of the first company and the Rishon of the scout troop were
both dead. His name was Samech-Tisha Efes-Echad, the biological line father of Samech-Assara Efes-Echad. He was ready to take blood vengeance on the pesky hyoo-mans who had killed his son and so many of The People’s warriors.
The hyoo-mans had chosen the sturdiest building in the town to serve as their fortress, but the scout troop had managed to breach the back door. That would be where he would send a strong strike force, but he expected the wily hyoo-mans to expect that. So, he would send a second attack force to strike at the front door of the building. The troop’s worth of warriors who remained from the first company would leap-frog advance by squads on the building and climb to the roof to attack any defenders who remained there.
Samech-Tisha dispatched his Sheni with half the company to attack the breach. Samech-Tisha would lead the attack on the building’s front himself. The remaining troop would begin their advance as a distraction for the other two troops. It was a good plan. Once the fighters were dealt with, the remaining hyoo-mans would be slaughtered and served up as a victory feast for The People.
“THEY’RE COMING, AND it’s another fifty, sixty of them,” KC said.
The panic room was in the back left corner of the Bank, though what had once been the bank manager’s office. The Englishman had converted it into a study, which Teddy had kept. The former lobby of the Bank had been turned into a great room, and the teller area had been converted into the kitchen and dining room with storage rooms in the back. The original wall between the teller area and the lobby had been completely gutted in the renovation. The first floor was mostly open space, and all the furniture from that open space had been piled in a semi-circle around the door to the study. The study had once had tall windows for light, but that was where the Englishman had first installed the big diesel generators, and subsequently, the windows had been replaced with soundproofed walls. It had also, incidentally, made the study that much more secure from attack.
Cassandra Case Files Page 15