by Jack Hamlyn
He was right about Sandy; I had no doubt of that. But as far as the other two went, I didn’t know them. I couldn’t adequately judge them other than the fact that I didn’t trust them. They gave me a bad feeling and I said so.
“Your feeling was right on,” Sabelia said. “You didn’t get to know them like we did at the Silo. We all worked together to make our lives better, but those two were always trying to get out of work, always in collusion about something.”
Jimmy agreed. “That’s true enough. Now, I don’t think they were disloyal to our cause or cowardly or anything like that. I knew guys like them in the Navy and when I worked in the shipyards. Just the sort that like to get out of things and make it as easy for themselves as they possibly can. Opportunists, I guess. Even when we decided to raid Perryville—and we ended up finding you and the girls—they didn’t want to come. That much was obvious. You’re talking about two shiftless sort of guys here. The sort that like to pass the buck. Why should they risk their necks if they could get someone else to do it?”
I had a pretty good idea of the kind of characters they were. I’d known guys like them myself. We all have. Sometimes, though, if you could separate people like that from one another they would turn out okay. Honestly, though, they weren’t my main reason for going out in the streets again. Sandy was. Sure, she was a pain in the ass and a weak link under the best of circumstances, but I still worried about her and I still felt protective of her because she was so messed-up. I mean, hell, I’d been there when she watched her sister die in the streets of Perryville and it had been an absolute horror.
We moved on.
I led the way around the corner, suspicious of every shadow and darkened doorway. None of them held any true threat; it was all in my mind. I was becoming professionally paranoid and the only thing that would cure that was downtime and a lot of sleep. And I knew damn well I wasn’t going to be getting much of either in the foreseeable future.
By the time we got to the end of the block, we began to see a lot of wreckage—buildings hit hard by artillery rounds or rockets, facades scarred by gunfire, houses burned down to frameworks. This was the sort of thing I expected to see when we entered the town. Somehow, it relaxed me to see these things. As we moved past gutted ruins, stepping over bricks and around overturned cars, I saw telephone poles had been knocked down and trees split in half. In the distance, I could see that a tall building had been obliterated and its remains filled the street, blocking it entirely.
“Looks like somebody had themselves a real shooting war here,” Jimmy pointed out.
“And then some.”
I started to get nervous. I don’t think I was the only one because Sabelia had grown very quiet and Jimmy, on the other hand, was chattering nervously.
As we prowled the streets, moving silently and low to the ground now, our eyes were in constant motion, looking, searching, hoping to avert a catastrophe before it happened. At any given moment, some nutbag could open fire on us from the roofs or windows or from behind wrecked cars, as well as an infinite number of other places.
That was the ugly reality of urban guerrilla warfare.
No jungle in the world had so damn many hiding places.
Sabelia paused, breathing hard. “I have a feeling we’re not alone.”
I had that feeling, too, and I’d been having it for sometime.
“Let’s scout to the end of the block and then make a hasty retreat,” Jimmy suggested.
We all agreed silently with that.
We moved forward. Sabelia was leading now. I’m not sure how it happened, but she was out front. Not walking point or anything, just ten feet or so ahead of Jimmy and me. She was stalking like a cat, rifle up and eyes fixed, every line of her body wiry and feline and somehow dangerous. She had been in more than one girl street gang in her teenage years, so this came almost naturally to her. Stealth and combat in the streets was part of who she was…or had been, I reminded myself.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Jimmy muttered.
Sabelia flinched as if he had broken her concentration.
I was starting to sweat. I hadn’t seen anything unusual or even remotely dangerous...yet, I was certain we were being watched. It was coming from no particular direction, but it was heavy and ominous in the air. I didn’t think it was the dead. This had nothing to do with walking carcasses and their insatiable hunger, this was directed, this was secretive, this was intelligent.
“I got a real bad feeling that I’m way too old for this shit,” Jimmy said.
“Quiet,” Sabelia snapped. She had paused, cocking her head, scanning her weapon back and forth. She had picked up on something and I was plugged into the same source. The nape of my neck was tingling. My lips were so dry they were stuck together.
“Listen,” she whispered.
I could hear the soft padding of bare feet. Many feet. On the roofs, in the alleys. Whoever was here was about to show themselves and there was no doubt that they were hostile. Ordinary, peace-loving people did not run around barefoot in October. That was the sign of unhinged minds. At least, that’s what occurred to me.
Sabelia backed up and nearly bumped into me. She put her lips against my ear. “We’re practically on top of them.”
Up ahead was an overturned school bus, weathered orange with rust. All of its tires were gone. It was a good place to hide behind, to spring an ambush from and I had a nasty feeling that’s what was about to happen. I slipped my NVGs over my eyes, hoping they’d work and they did. There was plenty of moonlight to see by, but I wanted an edge.
I motioned Sabelia to get behind me and I edged in closer.
I scanned around the bus. I knew they were hiding behind it. I could feel them out there getting ready to pounce.
Then I saw something.
A hint of movement…a lock of hair blowing in the breeze from around the side of the bus. Someone was waiting for us. My body felt like coiled springs, my heart was racing. It was the way I always felt before the shit started flying.
I motioned Jimmy and Sabelia to pull back even farther.
Quietly, I dug a WP grenade from the canvas sack looped around my shoulder.
Closer.
I pulled the pin. Pungent white smoke twisted in the breeze.
Closer still.
I let the spoon fly and tossed the grenade over the top of the bus. It clattered to the ground and went with a great Whoosh! of fire and smoke. Flames spread out behind the bus. There were screams and bestial howls. About ten people charged out at us wearing little more than rags, their hair long, their eyes hateful, their mouths hooked into grimaces of hate. They carried clubs and knives, nothing more.
We pulled back and started shooting.
It was no contest.
We dropped the attackers within seconds. Their bullet-ridden, blood-soaked corpses twitched in the street. Others stumbled out from behind the bus and fell, burnt and smoking near their comrades. I moved in cautiously and turned one of the dying over with my boot.
It was a man, age indeterminate.
His hair was long and unkempt, snarled and streaked with soot. His eyes were open, his cracked lips attempting to form words. He and the others had gone feral and I really didn’t know why. Was there another germ floating around out there that I didn’t know about? Judging from the look of them they might have been homeless people before Necrophage swept the world into the graveyard. Maybe they had taken the next step into barbarity.
The smell of burning flesh and pooling blood was nauseating, so we began our retreat before any more crazies showed up. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that there weren’t more out there.
Sabelia cried out and started shooting.
Jimmy and I whirled around, bringing up our weapons.
Five of the savages were charging from across the street and three more followed in their wake. Sabelia dropped two of them, then she was beaten to the ground by the other three as they jumped at her, knocking her rifle aside. They were fast a
nd violent.
One of them turned in mid-stride and charged me. I drilled three rounds into him, blowing his face off in spray of flesh and blood. He screamed and stumbled in a circle, ripped muscle and shattered bone attempting a grimace. Then he fell.
Jimmy was firing on full-auto at the other three and a dozen more that had crept from the shadows brandishing axe handles and baseball bats.
I hesitated in firing with Sabelia lying there and one of them vaulted out at me. I cracked him in the face with the M4 and kicked him in the head when he went down. I took out another with a spray of bullets, opening up his belly. The guy went to his knees, trying to push his internals back in as they bulged between his red, dripping fingers. I dropped him with a kick to the temple and killed the other one with a barrage to the chest. He went down, too. Several others that had shown up turned and ran. I shot their legs out from under them. Behind me, I saw, the one I’d cracked in the face with my rifle was rising with a sneer, his face a bleeding mess, his fingers hooked into claws. I blew his head apart.
As Jimmy fired off into the shadows to drive the others away, I went to Sabelia. She was all right, just stunned. She’d taken a fist to the forehead and was bleeding, but other than that she would be fine. I helped her to her feet and handed her her rifle. I put my arm around her to support her, but she shoved me aside and started putting rounds into the shadows, too.
“YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!” she screamed. “DIRTY FUCKING SONSOFBITCHES!”
They were gone by then.
Jimmy and I just looked at each other, knowing we were witnessing her violent Latin temper that had made her a real terror in the streets of the Bronx when she was a teenager.
She stopped firing and balanced her M4 on her shoulder. In the moonlight with her dark good looks she looked like a pinup girl for a revolutionary army. “Sorry,” she said. “But I had to get that out.”
Well, if I hadn’t known it before, I knew it then: Do not piss off Sabelia Cortez.
BARRAGE
Then the shit really started.
It began in the distance with scattered small arms fire. We all heard it and it stopped us there in the street. It was answered by the distinctive burning hiss of RPGs and their attendant explosions. And these were very close because the noise echoed through the streets and the flashes were very bright. A chopper flew overhead and I heard the sound of running feet, many of them.
“What the hell’s going on?” Jimmy said.
The thing was, I didn’t know, but I had the oddest feeling that we were standing dead center of a siege. Now there was gunfire from the roofs and the clattering of machinegun fire. More explosions. Fire belched into the air down the block as an abandoned car burst into flame. The crazies were shaken out of their hides and ran down the sidewalk as bullets torn into the facades of buildings they passed.
“COME ON!” I said.
We dashed towards the protection of the buildings on the other side of the street and good thing, too, because a light machinegun opened up, rounds ripping holes in the pavement. The LMG kept sweeping back forth and we huddled behind a pickup truck that had been abandoned on the sidewalk. But with the RPGs, that was definitely not a good place to be.
“Are they after us?”
“No,” I said. “Not specifically. I think we’re caught in the middle of something here.”
Two APCs rolled across the intersection in the distance. I couldn’t tell what they were, but they were both firing .50-cal machineguns and nothing means business like a .50-cal. One of them was hit by an RPG and the concussion was deafening. A ball of red flame rose into the night and a man began to scream his head off. I think they had targeted the .50-cal gunner and taken him out. He continued to scream and the volume of fire intensified.
It was getting closer.
The heaviest fighting was probably two blocks away, I was guessing, but it was moving towards us from two different directions and we were going to be caught between two opposing armies. I wasn’t about to let us become collateral damage.
I could hear vehicles rolling in our direction, search lights sweeping around. Assault rifles were firing nearly nonstop. Bullets were pinging all around us. A chopper passed overhead again, casting lights into the street. I saw figures moving out there, caught in some weird strobing effect by the clouds of smoke in the air.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We left the protection of the truck and right away it was strafed by bullets. We jogged up the block. There were shooters now on rooftops and in doorways across the street who ignored us for some reason. As an APC turned the corner behind us, it took a heavy volume of fire from windows above. An RPG was fired from the rooftop and it passed just over the APC, striking a dumpster with a booming metallic sound that threw the dumpster ten feet into the air. It came down with a clanging reverberation, rolling end over end.
Jesus, we were really in the shit.
I was worrying that Tuck and the others might try and come after us, but I knew that wouldn’t happen now. As I snuck up to the corner and peered around, I saw the fighting in the streets was heavy down by the house. There were explosions and gushing clouds of fire, lots of small arms fire. The vehicle down there was almost certainly a LAV-25 and it was firing its chain gun, tearing up the real estate around it, attempting to suppress enemy fighters.
By that point, I thought I had a fair idea of what was going on.
The choppers and APCs were no doubt part of an ARM contingent. The other fighters moving by foot were guerrillas of some sort, probably people from the town who would not submit to ARM control. Maybe, maybe not, but it definitely sounded like a good guess.
Some of the rounds were getting too close, so we ran across the street, taking advantage of the blowing shrouds of smoke. The APCs behind us were coming and so was the LAV-25 from the opposite direction. We were about to become the meat in a sandwich. There was absolutely no way we could make it back the way we had come. The closer the vehicles rolled, the more intense the fighting grew. It was only a matter of time before we were caught in the crossfire.
Sabelia spotted an alley down the way and we ran for it, making it, luckily, in one piece as heavy guns hammered and I could hear the booming of artillery pieces in the distance, the ground shaking each time a shell landed.
As we got to the end of the alley that opened up onto a street with burning buildings, I saw fighters scurrying around in the rubble. One of them must have seen me and he fired in my direction as he ran off. The rounds didn’t come anywhere close. I saw more fighters in full retreat now, making for the shell of a building just up the block. Then, out of the rubble came soldiers. They were definitely ARM. In the light of the fires I could see they wore Russian shadow camouflage.
Jimmy and Sabelia brought up their M4s to shoot, but I told them to lower them. This wasn’t our fight. We wouldn’t get mixed up in it unless we had no choice.
Now the ARM pukes and the guerrilla fighters were firing back and forth, tracers flying like hot embers. Grenades were thrown. ARM troopers positioned a machinegun to fire on the building the fighters were hiding in. They burned off thirty or so rounds, just strafing the building and shooting through the missing windows. Brave, suicidal fighters kept darting out, firing, then leaping for cover.
ARM pushed in.
The machinegun was giving them the necessary cover. They crept in. One of them was hit and dropped shrieking in the street. When two others tried to retrieve him, they were hit, too. The fighting got heavier as more ARM troopers pushed in. The firing was going nearly nonstop now. The snout of an LMG pushed out of one of the windows and started firing on ARM positions, driving them back. The ARM machinegun answered. Then an RPG hissed from the rooftop and hit the ARM machinegun crew with a devastating blast. When the smoke cleared, the gun was destroyed and there were body parts everywhere, the pavement shining with blood.
“We have to get out of here, Steve,” Sabelia said and I knew she was right.
ARM was worked up in
to a kill-happy froth, a boiling frenzy where their own lives were immaterial and the only thing that mattered was payback for their dead comrades in the street. I could almost feel it in the air. The ARM force lost all cohesion and discipline and there was a lot of shouting and screaming. They were taunting the guerrilla fighters, calling out about what they were going to do with their wives and daughters. When that happened, it was only a matter of time before the men started losing it.
And they did.
One by one or in pairs, they charged the building, all of them getting cut down almost instantly and that just drove the others wilder. Their commanders were yelling at them to pull back, but unit discipline was gone and more charged out. I heard a rumbling and I knew what the commanders were up to. A LAV-25 rolled down the street, opening up with its chain gun on the building, blowing great holes in the walls. Some rounds went right through windows and exploded with crashing sounds. I heard men screaming in the building. A pair of crazy fighters raced from the ruins, opening up with what looked like old Vietnam-era M-16s, their bullets pinging harmlessly off the LAVs armor. A gunner on top fired with his 7.62mm machinegun and cut them nearly in half.
We ran and I’m not even sure what direction we went.
It was sheer chaos.
Everywhere, it seemed, there was gunfire and explosions, burning vehicles and smoldering structures. There were bodies in the streets. The lucky ones were in pieces or had drowned in pools of their own blood. The unlucky ones were still breathing, maimed and mutilated things that were missing limbs, punctured with shrapnel, cored by bullets, burnt and suffering wrecks that crawled under porches and into gutters to die slowly and painfully.
Their screams and ragged, desperate moaning seemed to come from every direction.
And still the guns never ceased and the incoming never stopped falling as the faces of buildings were erased or cracked open, and the roofs of houses collapsed and piles of rubble were further reduced to pulverized fragments whose dust twisted in the wind.
After we watched ARM blow the shit out of the building where the guerrilla fighters hid, we took advantage of the chaos and ran through clouds of acrid smoke, leapfrogging corpses and debris, hiding behind bullet-pocked vehicles, and seeking one safe zone after the other. Most of which were gradually compromised as the war pushed in closer, dragging itself to us on worn, bloody feet.