Without Law 4

by Eric Vall

  “You two, push through the forest and get up that hill!” I faintly heard one of them shout.

  I couldn’t stay here. The machine gun had too much ammo, and would keep me pinned long enough for the other troops to surround me if they got the chance. Even if Tara pulled their attention off me it’d be easy enough for them to surround me if I didn’t move, so I stayed on my belly and started to push myself away from the crest of the hill and back towards the trees.

  A fresh wave of confusion fell over the soldiers as a shot rang out from the other side of the woods. The machine gun went silent.

  “Fuck! Shooters on both sides!” one of the men yelled.

  “Fall back into cover!” another added.

  I smiled, slipped into the trees, and took up a new position behind a fallen log in view of the caravan. The latest gunner was slumped over the makeshift barricade with blood dripping from the back of his head. The rest of the soldiers scrambled to find new cover as another shot rang out and caught one of the men in the arm.

  For the moment I was all but forgotten, and I lined up a clear shot as the soldiers started to fire wildly into the forest on the opposite side.

  One of them tumbled backwards as Tara caught him in the eye.

  I grinned as the men only seemed to grow more frantic. Then I squeezed the trigger and caught another one of them in the neck.

  It was hard for them to find anywhere safe now that there was one of us on either side.

  “What do we do?” a Guardsman screamed. “They are on both sides of us!”

  From my new vantage point I saw a burly man with a bald head dart out of cover, grab the machine gun, and duck out of sight before I could line up a shot.

  “Stay calm and keep your eyes open!” he shouted.

  The guys around him seemed to listen well enough, meaning they probably had some sort of history together.

  “You guys focus on that side, I’ll see if I can take care of the first guy,” the bald man said. He popped up and anchored the machine gun atop the small folding table the men had been playing cards on a couple minutes ago.

  I swung my rifle into place, lined up a shot, flipped and rapidly pulled the trigger three times. The weapon punched into my shoulder as three rounds were sent downrange.

  The man barely got off a single shot before he took the bullets to the chest and staggered backwards out of cover. He gasped for air and tried to make it back into cover, but I let off four more rounds and took him down.

  “Shit!” a soldier yelled.

  “God damnit, where are they now?” a third cried out.

  The whole convoy had been overtaken by a state of panic and confusion, and the constant irate mooing of the cows probably didn’t do them any favors.

  “I see you, you fucker!” a soldier peeking over the left side of a truck taunted as he opened fire “This is for my friends!”

  His shots were actually pretty accurate, so I had to duck behind my log for a few moments. Then the chunky sound of the M249 took over. The chunky sound of its constant gunfire echoed through the trees as it started to tear the forest apart around me.

  I peeked over the log for just a moment and saw the two guys who had pinned me down. They had taken cover behind one of the trucks in a way that meant they couldn’t be seen by Tara. I was the only one who could really get a shot off at them, but they were keeping the pressure on.

  “Shit, this isn’t good,” I muttered to myself. I was pinned, and my options were limited. If I didn’t have to worry about Jenny and the livestock, I would have chucked a grenade. Instead I swapped out for a fresh magazine and weighed my options.

  I could run, but there was a very slim chance that I could make it to a safer place without taking at least one bullet. Another option was to blindfire over the rocks and hope I suppressed them enough to make a move. Again the problem was that I didn’t know what I was shooting at and I could too easily hit Jenny by accident. If I knew where she was it wouldn’t be an issue, but there had been no way to tell for sure which truck she was in.

  “Move up!” the machine gunner shouted. “We’ve got this guy pinned so surround him and make sure he doesn’t get away.”

  Time was running out. Every second I sat there my chances for survival dropped. If I could take out that gunner then I would not only take out their biggest gun but also the thing holding this team together. There was a chance that his death would send them into a panic once more giving me the precious seconds I needed to fire back and force them into cover. My only hope would be to roll the dice and hope that I got lucky enough to pull it off.

  I took a deep breath and tried to prepare myself for what I had to do as I heard footsteps approaching. Suddenly the machine gun went quiet, and a moment later a grenade landed at my feet.

  “Fuck,” I mutterd.

  Instinct took over, and I dove forward, scooped up the grenade, and cast it into the woods in front of me. The small green ball exploded in midair thirty feet in front of me. I let out a yelp as an intense pain shot through my upper arm. I looked down to see a jagged tear across my bicep. It wasn’t serious, but it hurt like hell, even through my raging adrenaline.

  For a moment everything went quiet, though I could just as easily have been deafened by the grenade.

  “Did we get him?” someone asked. The sound was muffled, like I was underwater. I needed fucking earplugs.

  The sound of a distant rifle rang out. It must have found its mark since I heard the soldiers swear.

  I peeked over my cover and saw the gunner dead with a hole in the side of his head.

  The few remaining guardsmen looked to be hiding behind heavy cover. I couldn’t see more than a bit of uniform or gun barrels sticking out.

  “How many of them are there?” another guy asked.

  “I don’t know, but keep your heads down,” his buddy replied.

  I winced as I pushed myself up high enough to set my rifle on the log. As I gripped the rifle, the throbbing pain grew more intense, but I gritted my teeth and tried to focus. These guys were going to get tired of hiding eventually, and all I had to do was wait until they showed themselves.

  “You know what, fuck this!” one of them shouted.

  “Yeah, I didn’t sign up for this,” another agreed.

  “Run!” a third one yelled out from where he hid.

  Idiots.

  All but three of the soldiers left their cover and tried to make a break for it. They didn’t get far before Tara and I filled them with many holes and dropped them to the ground.

  I ducked back behind cover and reloaded. This fight was all but ours, though if I got careless things could still go poorly. I looked back over to the ridge I started on. If I could get back on top of it, there was a chance that the elevation would make the soldiers cover worthless.

  As I started back up towards the ridge I saw that, across from me, Tara was on the move as well. She was just inside the treeline and quickly hurried to take cover behind the base of a large tree. She crouched down behind sparse cover and cleaned up a clean shot that went right through one of the remaining soldiers.

  The last three guys turned at the sound and went wide eyed as they watched their buddy fall to the ground as blood poured from his open wound.

  “Hey, I think I see one,” one of the soldiers said as he pointed in Tara’s direction.

  Tara ducked down, but the Guardsmen never got the chance to shoot at her.

  I opened fire and caught the man with several rounds. He staggered to the ground as his kevlar absorbed most of the impact. The man tried to speak but couldn’t find the words before another two bullets ripped apart his skull.

  Tara leaned out of cover, rifle in hand, and took a couple shots at the remaining guys. None of them connected, but it kept them pinned.

  One of the soldiers looked at the direction of the sound of my gunshots. “Shit, he’s on the ridge again!”

  “Yeah, and the other one’s behind us!” his buddy replied.

  The
other Guardsman threw down his gun and raised his hands into the air. “Alright, don’t shoot, I give up.”

  “What about you?” I yelled to the other one as I leveled the rifle at him.

  The guy thought it over for a moment as he stared at me, but then sighed and tossed down his gun. “Alright, fine, I surrender.”

  Tara rushed out from her spot behind the tree, kicked their rifles away, and took away their pistols. These particular guys weren’t armed with grenades like the soldiers we fought at the farm, so she didn’t spend a lot of time searching them.

  “Now get on your knees,” she ordered.

  I picked my way down the hill and met her on the road.

  “Please, don’t hurt us,” one of the two, a fat faced man with a curly beard, begged. “We’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  The other Guardsman, a short man with hairy hands, and a buzzcut looked back and forth between me and Tara. “Wait, is it just the two of you?”

  “Yeah,” Tara hissed.

  “How the hell did two people take out our entire convoy?” the fat faced soldier asked.

  “Because you are all a bunch of bitches,” Tara growled. “Now, tell me where the girl is before I put a bullet in your fucking heads.”

  “That one,” the buzzcut soldier gulped as he pointed to one of the trucks.

  “Stay put,” I told them. “Tara, if they move, shoot them.”

  “Gladly,” she said.

  I walked over to the truck, pulled the flap back, and looked inside. There were boxes of dry food, some toiletries, blankets, and half a dozen pillows. There at the back, tied to the truck, was a very frightened looking red headed woman. It was Jenny. Tears streamed down her face and for a moment she tried to scream through the tape that closed her mouth.

  “Hey, it's alright,” I said quietly as I stepped into the truck. “It’s me, Tav.” I clicked on my flashlight and shined it on myself.

  Jenny stopped trying to scream and tried to wipe away her tears. She raised her bound hands in front of her and nodded at them.

  “Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get you free,” I said with a nod. I pushed past the stolen goods, pulled out my knife, knelt in front of the trembling woman and cut her free.

  Jenny immediately tore the tape off her mouth, threw her arms around me, and started to sob uncontrollably.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said as I rubbed her back. “Those guys who took you won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Thank you,” she managed to get out between sobs.

  For a few minutes I just knelt there and let Jenny cry. I didn’t know if they had done anything to her, and I didn’t care to ask.

  “Is everything okay in there?” Tara called out.

  “Yeah, we’ll be out shortly,” I replied.

  Jenny pulled back and wiped away her tears. She sniffled for a moment, shook her head, and then took a deep breath.

  “I have a couple of the National Guard guys prisoner,” I said. “I need to ask them a few questions before we take you home. You can stay here if you’d like.”

  “I think I might do that,” Jenny said quietly.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said with a soft smile. Then I gave her one last pat on the shoulder and went back outside.

  Tara paced back and forth behind the two soldiers. Both of the men quietly stared at the ground in front of them as if it was the most interesting thing they had ever seen.

  “Your arm--” Tara started to say.

  “It’s fine,” I interrupted her, but then I looked down and saw blood dripping from my fingers and a smear on my bicep where I’d hugged Jenny.

  I’d deal with it later. Now I had to take care of these assholes.

  “Where to begin,” I said as I stepped up to them. “I’ve never met a group of soldiers I disliked more than you lot. Kidnapping women? Come on, is that really the kind of men you’ve become?”

  One of them looked up at me and frowned. “We were ordered to bring back any attractive women.”

  “Who gave you that order?” I asked as I crouched down and stared directly into his eyes.

  “T-The Colonel,” the man stammered.

  “Who’s that?” Tara asked.

  “He’s the officer in charge of the outpost,” the hairy handed man muttered. “He’s the one who sent us out here in the first place.”

  “This Colonel have a name?” I asked

  “His name is Col. Harkness,” the pudgy man said with a nod. “No one calls him that though. For some reason he doesn’t want people to use his name. Instead he insists on just being called The Colonel. He’s the kinda guy who would probably shoot me if he knew I told you that.”

  I rolled my eyes. I had dealt with a couple of wannabe military assholes like this in the past. They were self-proclaimed tough guys who gave themselves titles that they thought would make them sound imposing

  “Well I’m really tired of hearing the ‘I was just following orders’ excuse,” I said as I stood. “When was your convoy expected to return to the outpost?”

  “We were given three days,” the buzzcut one said. “The Colonel didn’t know what sorta resistance we might meet, so he told us to take our time.”

  “Is this your first day out?” I asked.

  “Yeah, things were going smooth too,” the soldier said. “We were going celebrate our spoils tonight then head back in the morning to impress The Colonel.”

  “Did anyone tell him you were coming back tomorrow morning?” Tara asked.

  “No, because if something happened we didn’t want to keep him waiting,” the pudgy one muttered.

  “That means we have a couple days before this outpost knows somethings wrong then, right?” Tara asked as she looked at me.

  “Yeah, it gives us a bit of time to plan,” I said with a nod. “Where is this outpost of yours?”

  “It’s like ten miles down route 116 toward Burlington,” buzzcut said. “You’ll see it when you get close. The first thing we did when we arrived there a couple days ago was to set up watchtowers.”

  “I heard you also had some sort of fortifications,” I said.

  “Do you want to get shot in the fucking face?” Tara growled as she slapped the side of her rifle barrel into his face. “We ask the questions. You answer, fucker.”

  “Sorry!” he whined after Tara smacked him.

  “What sort of fortifications are we talking about?” I continued.

  “Well, we set up in an old elementary school so we have a nice chain-link fence surrounding our entire area,” buzzcut said. “There’s a real small town around the school too, and we have all the roads blocked with those concrete construction barriers.”

  “We’ve boarded up all the windows too,” the other one said. “All unnecessary entrances have been barricaded to give us less to defend, and in addition to watchtowers we have patrols that walk the fence to make sure there are no breaches.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a lot done in two days,” I said. “You must have brought along a lot of civilians.” The statement was redundant given what we had learned earlier, but I wanted to make sure our information was correct.

  “We brought almost fifty civilians with us,” buzzcut said. “Most of them are male, but there are a dozen females that are being used to help keep morale up among the troops.”

  “That’s what the girl in the truck was going to be used for too,” the other one said.

  “You fuckers didn’t even bother to learn her name did you?” Tara scoffed.

  I saw her grip tighten around her rifle, and I raised a hand to calm her before she did anything rash.

  “What else can you tell me about this outpost?” I asked. “What do you plan to do once you have all your fortifications set up?”

  “We were going to start working on traps,” the pudgy one said. “The Colonel figures that either the bikers will be back at some point, or whatever group took them out might head his way.”

  “What sort of traps?” I asked
.

  “We have a few bundles of razor wire,” the other one said.

  “Why the fuck do you guys have razorwire?” I yelled. “You were supposed to set up a refugee center, yet you have razor wire, machine guns, and grenades.”

  “At first, all we had were service rifles and sidearms,” buzzcut said. “Food at the refugee center was running out and tensions were getting high. Then the Colonel showed up with forty extra men, and a whole bunch of hardware. He helped us keep the civilian population in check and fend off the bikers.”

  “He butted heads with our CO though,” pudgy said. “That’s why he was sent to start up this outpost.”

  I shook my head and gritted my teeth. Each new bit of information only served to anger me more. Though the story made at least some sense in my mind. This Colonel guy sounded like he wasn’t officially part of the military. At least not anymore. He probably took a bunch of gear and the troops that were loyal to him and headed off to find a place he could control like a little tyrant.

  Jenny emerged from the truck. There were no tears in her eyes anymore, but she held herself tightly and didn’t get too close.

  “Hi Jenny, I’m Tara.” My friend rushed over to the redhead and wrapped her in a large hug. “How’re you doing?”

  “I’ve honestly had better days,” Jenny said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “It’s okay, it’s over now,” Tara said. “These guys can’t hurt you anymore.

  “It’s not over yet,” Jenny said as she nodded to the remaining soldiers. She looked down at Tara’s gun and then at the soldiers on their knees in front of me. “Let me finish this.”

  Tara looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  I looked at Jenny, and then at the two men in front of me. I didn’t have any more questions for these two. They had shown me what sort of men they were the moment they surrendered.

  “Give her your gun,” I told Tara. I’d gotten all I needed from them.

  “Wait, I thought you said you would let us live,” the pudgy one said.

  “What I said was that I might let you live,” I said.

  Jenny brushed past me with Tara’s handgun clutched tightly in one hand.

  “Hey, we didn’t even do anything to you!” Buzzcut exclaimed.