by Jack Hamlyn
Sandy was shaking.
She’d been through a lot and was not exactly anyone’s idea of a hardcore survivor type. She was pretty and blonde and leggy, strictly cheerleader fodder, the baton-twirler sort. Not exactly the person you’d want to share a foxhole with or have watching your back.
“Any last words?” Robin asked her with her usual sarcasm. “I’ll see that they put them on your headstone.”
“Shut up,” Sandy said quietly, a little uneasy about incurring Robin’s wrath being that Robin had already belted her once earlier in the day for being a drama queen.
Robin giggled. “Go ahead, just pretend you’re writing your senior will again. I leave my perfectly adorable pretty purple pumps to Buffy and my ponytail rings to Summer and all the wild times at Key Club to Bambi! Kaay! Kaay! Raa! Raa!”
I felt Sabelia growing tense next to me. It seemed like every muscle in her body had tightened. She was going to tell Robin to shut the hell up—which rarely did any good—but Sandy beat her to it. “How about you just kiss my ass?” she said.
Sabelia loosened next to me and tried not to smile.
“Score one for the princess!” Robin said.
Where it all was leading, I didn’t know, and I never found out because there was a loud explosion very close by and the Guardian trembled.
“It’s not the chopper!” Tuck called down to us. “But we got incoming!”
There were two more explosions, neither of them near enough to do more than rattle us, but they were getting closer.
The radio crackled again and Jimmy, sounding a little shaken, said, “We’re getting shelled…might be mortars…I can’t tell.”
He was right. I could hear the thumping of them in the distance, then the whistling/screeching sound as they passed overhead. Two more hit and the Guardian shook with the impact which sounded like trees cracking in half.
Tuck said he hadn’t seen the chopper again and Jimmy confirmed that if it was around, then it was flying high. Whump! Whump! Whump! The shells were getting closer. Whoever was firing them was trying to march them in on us. I’d been through barrages in Iraq when insurgents harassed us with 82mm mortars. I knew very well the sort of destruction those things could bring down.
In the back of the Guardian, nobody was saying a thing. Even Robin wasn’t smarting off for a change. We were all on edge, wired tight with stress. We were juiced with adrenaline, our hearts thudding in our chests. Sweat kept running down my face and gathering under my eyes. The Guardian was essentially a metal box on wheels and it was getting hot in there.
“We got high hills to either side of us,” Tuck said. “They must be up there, sighting us in.”
There was nothing we could do but pour on the speed and hope we made it out of the breach in one piece.
Sandy was breathing very hard. “I want to get out,” she said, the claustrophobia enfolding her like arms. “Please…I really need to get out of here.”
“You can’t get out,” Sabelia told her. “You’d get torn apart out there.”
“We got shooters in the woods! We’re in a fucking funnel!” Jimmy cried over the radio.
Diane told him to keep pushing on, that we couldn’t stop now. There was no going back.
Bullets began to graze the armor of the Guardians. Ping! Ping! Ping! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! They were pouring small arms fire at us from the treeline, but I had yet to hear the bark of any big guns, mostly 9mms and the like I was guessing, some light machineguns. The Guardians could withstand that. Our only real hope was that we’d drive right out of it.
I got up and went up front with Diane.
The jarring of more incoming mortars nearly threw me off my feet. The flashing of their explosions was blinding up in the cab. Bullets were still grazing the outer plating of the vehicle and I could see green tracer rounds coming at us from both sides of the road. This couldn’t be a coincidence. This many men all lined up and ready to shoot…no, we had been expected. This was a trap and we had rolled right into it. But it was too late to retreat now.
I could see Jimmy’s Guardian directly ahead of us. There were so many tracer rounds flying, it looked like a luminous green spider’s web was dropping over it. The slugs threw off sparks as they hit.
Up in the basket, Tuck was swearing.
He did his best work when he was pissed.
He opened up on the treeline with the 40mm grenade launcher, saturating enemy positions with high explosive and white phosphorus rounds. The HE shook them out of their hides and the WP lit their world on fire. He fired the launcher off and on, switching between it and the M2 .50-cal machinegun, ripping apart the real estate and knocking trees down. I distinctly heard men screaming and the firing slacked off some. Jimmy’s Guardian was pouring fire into the opposite side of the road, lighting up the treeline.
Both vehicles were moving at top speed by then, shaking and rattling and it wasn’t exactly a comfortable ride. Mortars screamed overhead and each time they hit, the vehicle shook and gear flew off the racks. Sandy was screaming, fighting with a belt of machinegun ammo that had dropped on her.
Maybe the small arms fire was tapering off, but the mortars were really raining down. Their blasts made the Guardian jump and lurch and I was thrown down and when I got up, I was thrown down again. I fought my way to my knees and a mortar round exploded right in front of the vehicle with a rocking concussion and a blinding white flash. Shrapnel slammed into the windshield.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
RPGs now. They were landing all around us, mixing it up with the mortar rounds. Sometimes a series of convulsive explosions made the Guardian jump up in the air and come crashing down. But again and again we were in one piece, still pushing forward, unstoppable, it seemed.
Then an RPG slammed into the side of the Guardian and there was a rocketing explosion. Shrapnel came right through one of the windows, even though the outer ceramic plating absorbed most of the blow.
Diane cried out and I saw her cover her face.
Sandy was shrieking.
I crawled up to Diane, jumping behind the wheel. A sliver of shrapnel had creased the crown of her head. No real damage, just a lot of blood. In the chaos, Sabelia got the first aid kit and wound Diane’s head up in gauze. It was the best that could be done under the circumstances.
Now we were really in the shit.
Not just mortars and RPGs, but IEDs now. The road had been mined and we were driving right through squalls of shrapnel. Flying dirt and smoke filled the air and I couldn’t even see Jimmy’s Guardian. It was like being at ground zero in Hell. Tuck was still blasting away, but more selectively and I knew he was running low on ammo. If we didn’t get out of this fucking mess soon, we wouldn’t get out at all.
“Keep pushing it!” Tuck called to me, as he racked the bolt on the M2. “Don’t fucking slow down for a second!”
I had no intention of that.
He hammered away with the .50-cal and I knew he wasn’t doing anything but laying down a curtain of suppressive fire to shut down the shooters and particularly the RPG guys.
The smoke cleared for a moment or two and I saw an RPG slam into Jimmy’s Guardian followed by a second or third that made it jump all over the road. It couldn’t take much more beating.
“I got wounded over here!”He called out.
“Keep rolling!” I told him. “You’ve got to keep rolling!”
Those words had barely left my mouth when an IED was triggered just beneath his Guardian and the entire thing burst into flame. Then another and another exploded and it was thrown up into the air, crashing down and rolling over…right on top of another IED that went with a thundering roar and the Guardian went up into the air again, crashing down broken and burning, but somehow righting itself.
“JIMMY!” I shouted.
I slowed as dust and smoke enveloped our vehicle and there was an immense explosion, throwing me to the floor and I was knocked cold.
SURVIVORS
There was smoke. Thick acrid
smoke that burned my eyes and seared my throat. I tried to blink my eyes and it felt like there was salt in them. I tried to swallow but my throat was dry as dust. I kept going in and out of consciousness, trying to stay awake but finding it very difficult. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a decent night’s sleep. It was bound to catch up with me, of course, but I could have thought of a better time and a better place.
Voices were calling my name.
I felt hands on me and for a moment or two I thought they might be ARM puss-heads or maybe the dead. But these were not rough hands. They were gentle yet insistent. I think part of my brain came out of it before I was completely conscious because what snapped me awake was my own voice saying, “What the hell do you want?”
Somebody said something and I was dragged outside and placed on the ground.
“Fuck happened?” I said.
“IED,” Sabelia said. “Thank God you’re okay.”
“Is anyone…?”
She shook her head. “No, they’re fine. Banged up but fine.”
A cigarette was placed between my lips and I took a pull of it. Robin was holding it. “Shit, Big Steve, I thought you were dead.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Figures. I already had the music picked out for the service and I was going to recruit a couple deadheads to be pallbearers.”
She giggled at that. Nobody else did. Nobody really seemed to understand her sense of humor.
I saw a shape come walking over. It was limping a bit, but I could see it was Jimmy LaRue and he was still in one piece. He was carrying a carbine like the others. “Glad to see you’re still kicking, Steve,” he said.
He told me his Guardian got hit by RPGs and two command-and-control IEDs. I knew that much. I saw it get blown up into the air, breaking apart and on fire when it came back down. Jimmy survived it okay, as did his crew, miraculously. I thought they were goners. Ginny had taken some shrapnel in her left arm, but she would survive. Carrie was unscathed for the most part. They were all banged-up pretty good, but they were lucky to be alive and whole. Jimmy said he was sore as hell, but nothing was broken. Maybe he was in his sixties and beginning to lean toward seventy, but he had survived a tour with the River Rats in the Mekong Delta back in 1967. He was definitely a survivor type.
Diane came over, her head bandaged like Henry from The Red Badge of Courage, one of my favorite books. She laid everything out for me very carefully. Both Guardians were done in. Jimmy’s was pretty much totaled. I knew that because I could see it down the road, still burning. The one I had been driving would never run again without a mechanic. But they had scavenged ammo and grenades from it, as well as the first aid kit, water and MREs, the SAW—Squad Automatic Weapon—and several belts for it. Carrie and Tuck were out reconnoitering.
“No sign of ARM?” I asked.
“No sign of anybody,” Sabelia put in. “If it was ARM, they must have pulled out after they blew up the Guardians.”
That didn’t make much sense to me unless that had been their objective all along—to knock us out of commission. Maybe…still, though, I was suspicious. We were about half a city block from the wrecked and burning vehicles. There was plenty of light to see by, but thus far no one had shown.
The others moved off to guard the perimeter, even Robin who had found something of a friend in Ginny. Probably because they both had little patience with Sandy who sat alone, back up to a tree. When they were gone, Sabelia pressed her lips against mine. Maybe she didn’t expect me to kiss her back, but I did. I kissed her like I had never felt a woman’s lips before. For the longest time I had pretty much ignored her interest in me out of respect for Ricki, but with what I had been through in the past six weeks or so I wasn’t wasting anymore time.
“Well, you did miss me,” she said.
I held her face in my hands. It was a pretty face—high cheekbones, full lips, big dark eyes and perfect olive skin marred only by an old knife scar across the bridge of her nose that gave her face real character and a brooding, exotic sensuality. “Want to go in the woods and fool around?” I said.
She laughed and so did I. It felt good to laugh.
Tuck came back with Carrie in tow. He called us together. “We got a town down below,” he told us, stroking his gray ZZ Top beard. “We got to hump it over a few hills and up a ridgeline, but there’s definitely a town down there. Good-sized. We can’t hang around here.”
There was no argument on that.
We formed up with Tuck out front carrying the SAW, Sabelia and I taking up the back door, everyone else in-between walking single file, weapons at the ready save for Ginny and Diane given their injuries. Everyone was carrying M4 carbines, save for Seppy and I who had Mossberg 500 tactical shotguns. The SAW is an M249 light machinegun, an infantry support weapon that gives you the fire power of a machinegun but is portable and easy to handle and very accurate. I’d carried one more than once in Iraq during a few weeks of house to house fighting in Fallujah. We had four soft packs of 200 rounds each for it. Combined with everything else we were carrying, we were loaded for bear.
Robin still wasn’t walking real good from the bullet that grazed her leg in Perryville, but she was doing okay leaning up against Ginny. We pushed through the woods, up one hill and down another. As we got up on top of the ridgeline, we could see the town spread out beneath us. It was dark, very dark, but we didn’t have much choice.
“I have a real bad feeling about this, man,” Diane said.
I was used to her and her prophecies; they seemed to run in the family. Mostly I dismissed them, but as we moved down towards the town I was almost certain that she was right.
DEADTOWN
When we got into the town proper—we still didn’t know the name of the place—I was struck by the eerie silence that laid over the streets. Other than overgrown lots and abandoned vehicles, everything looked relatively untouched. The sound of our marching footfalls was unbearably loud and it went right up my spine. I was reminded a little too much of the horror in Perryville. There was no goddamn way I was going through something like that again, just no way.
But I was being paranoid.
I saw no bones in the streets, nothing but debris and some scattered wreckage.
Nobody spoke. Nobody dared to. We were expecting the zombies to show and if not them, maybe the local militia or whatever stripe of crazies that called this place home.
I marched along with the others, unable to shake the unsettling feeling that we were being watched. I don’t know if anyone else felt it, but for me it was bad. The moonlit streets seemed to be filled with moving shadows. Every time I blinked, they were gone. It was just nerves. That’s what I kept telling myself, but I didn’t believe it much as I wanted to.
The paranoia began to increase in me.
It was more than just what Diane said. It was real, almost palpable around me and I couldn’t put a name to it. I didn’t think this town was like Perryville; I thought it was even worse. But I had no reason to think that.
I saw abandoned cars everywhere. These were not dramatic abandonments, but simply cars left at curbs and in driveways to rust and flake away through the seasons. No one would ever climb into them again. Street by street, the town was deserted. We passed silent churches and moved through neighborhoods whose houses stood like monuments in a cemetery. I was amazed at what seemed to be the lack of looting and vandalism. The windows of stores were not broken, the homes seemed tidy even if their lawns were overgrown. This was not what I was used to seeing. I saw no bones. No wreckage. No evidence that battles had been fought or even simple firefights. The town was like a movie set or a restored ghost town. It was empty, as far as we could tell, but it did not feel exactly untenanted.
“Is it just me, man, or is this place creepy?” Diane said.
Tuck shushed her because he did not want any talking. His military mind was expecting the worst. And that was something which had kept us alive and breathing many times. He was tense, maybe expectin
g an ambush. I was expecting something, too, but it was nothing of that variety. Just what, I could not honestly say. We were moving in perfect, single-file formation the way soldiers do on patrol in enemy territory. Tuck was on point, about twenty feet ahead of us now, moving carefully and quietly.
Oh yes, he was tense all right.
Very tense.
But was that because he expected trouble or because, like me, he felt menace but could not identify it?
ARM had hit us pretty damn hard out on the highway and we had no reason to think it was over. Yet, none of it made any real sense. Okay, they used a combination of RPGs and carefully-concealed IEDs to take us out, to disable our vehicles. But once that was done, why didn’t they come out and mop us up? Why did they let us live? What could be the point?
Unless this was the point.
They had to know that we would seek shelter and this conveniently placed town was the first place we would go. It was only logical. Had all the earlier shooting just been to drive us farther down the road to the RPG/IED trap? Or was I just being hopelessly paranoid? As I walked those dark, echoing streets it did not seem paranoid at all, regardless of the planning that would have gone into something like that. Maybe the trap was already set. Maybe they saw Tuck and the others pass in the Guardians and figured they’d be coming back. Christ, I could have filled a bag with what-ifs and maybes.
I decided the best thing to do, was to concentrate on what we were doing and quit speculating.
Tuck kept leading and we kept following. I think by that point, I was all for high-tailing it out and sleeping in the woods. The town was getting under my skin and the further we went, the deeper it burrowed in until it began to gnaw at my nerve endings.