by Sam Sisavath
There was a lone woman among the soldiers, and Gaby watched her breaking a window with the stock of her rifle before peeking inside. It wasn’t much of a search on her part, but she seemed satisfied with it and jogged over to rejoin the others. Gaby didn’t blame her for wanting to stick as close to the weaponized trucks as possible.
“Technicals,” Danny and Will called them. The ones she was looking at were blue and red, and both had machine guns mounted in the back, each one manned by a soldier. They weren’t wearing gas masks, but she could see the breathing apparatuses hanging from their belts as they moved about. She guessed they didn’t need them in daylight, without the ghouls around to mistake them for the enemy.
She was glad to be rid of the mask herself. It sat somewhere on the counter behind her now, along with the uniform of the dead man she had put on last night. All three of them had swapped back into their old clothes, though they had kept everything else, including the rifles, gun belts, and supply pouches. It was more than they’d had even after the trip to Taylor’s cottage outside of Larkin.
“We should have brought lunch,” Nate said.
“I never asked, but can you cook?”
“Hell no. What about you?”
“Why? Because I’m a woman I should know how to cook?”
“Well, yeah.”
She smirked, and he chuckled.
“They sure are taking their sweet time, though,” Nate said, focusing back on the street.
She wasn’t at all concerned with the deliberate speed of the soldiers. It was those machine guns that made her wary. She had seen what kind of damage those things could do up close. Bonnie had become very good with the M240 they had onboard the Trident, and she’d seen the ex-model obliterating targets in the water with one pull of the trigger.
The soldiers were less than fifty yards when she said, “Get ready.”
“Danny?” Nate said.
“Soon.”
“When?”
“He didn’t say. But soon. Just be ready.”
Nate stood up, his body sliding against the wall next to the glass window, and stretched his legs. She did the same thing on her side, extending first her right leg, then her left. Her hands had numbed a bit while waiting, and she forced blood to circulate along the rest of her limbs now.
She zeroed in on the men inside the two vehicles. Only the blue one had another soldier in the front passenger seat besides the driver, and that man was talking into a radio. When he was done, he put it on the dashboard and said something to the man behind the steering wheel. The fact that she hadn’t heard the radio clipped to her hip squawk when the man was using his told her they had, smartly, switched channels after last night.
There were nine of them that she could see—“could see” being the operative phrase. Who knew how many more were further up the street or in other parts of Starch? How many were waiting on the outskirts of town right now, ready to swarm once these nine located their targets? How many were the collaborators committing to flushing them out? Or maybe the better question was, how many could they afford to commit, with Mercer’s people still running around out there?
Even if this was it, nine was still a lot for them to kill. For her to kill. And they’d have to do exactly that to get out of Starch alive. The Trident was waiting for them somewhere out there. They’d never leave until they had exhausted every effort to find them. Danny was right about that. She had seen how long Lara was willing to wait for Will; her friend would never just abandon them after a few days. A few weeks from now might be another story, though.
“Holy shit, is that…” Nate said from across the store.
She turned to him and was about to ask what “that” was when she heard it, too.
It was a slight buzzing sound that came out of nowhere and gradually increased, until she knew exactly where it was coming from: Outside, but more importantly, from above.
Gaby glanced out at the street and saw the soldiers jumping up the sidewalks and seeking shelter against building storefronts. Their heads were upturned and following the object as it glided across the open skies. It was hard to miss, because it was the only unnatural thing up there.
It was a plane.
Round and fat and gray as it moved high above them.
Gaby’s first instincts were similar to the collaborators: Run and hide. She was already hiding, but how much cover would the hardware store provide when that plane started dropping bombs? Or, if it was anything like the Thunderbolts that had laid waste to T29 and the Larkin airfield, started its strafing runs? Anyone outside would be most vulnerable—
Danny.
He was out there, in the open, and was a sitting duck to any type of aerial bombardment. She looked anxiously up at the ceiling, wondering if he had come to the same conclusion as she had, and waited to hear him scrambling around up there, where he had taken up position ever since sunrise filled out Starch.
Except the plane didn’t shoot, even if it did seem to be dropping something out of its belly. White…something was falling in long, jagged lines down to earth from the craft. More than a few of them landed on the rooftops in front of her, some on the streets. One fluttered almost majestically to the sidewalk—
Crack!
The shot had come from above her, from the hardware store’s rooftop.
Danny!
She almost smiled. Of course the ex-Ranger would be the only one to realize the perfect opportunity to strike, while everyone (including her and Nate) were distracted by the appearance of the plane.
She focused back on the street just in time to see the soldier standing behind the machine gun on the blue technical collapse into the truck bed. The weapon he had been manning swiveled as he released it, the muzzle aiming harmlessly up at the cloudless sky.
“Now, Nate, now!” she shouted.
She stepped away from the wall and lifted the M4, lining up the red dot with the soldier standing in the back of the red truck. He was in the process of taking aim at the rooftop of the hardware store with his weapon and was crouching slightly to get a better angle.
Forty yards. Easy shot with a carbine.
She fired, the bullet smashing the window in front of her, and a split-second later the machine gunner disappear out of her scope.
Then Nate was firing to her left, unloading downrange with three-round bursts. Gaby blocked out his shots and zeroed in on the driver of the red truck. The man had slammed on the gas because the vehicle started lurching forward, picking up speed as it went. Her second bullet drilled through the windshield, spiderwebbing it, and—missed!
Shit!
She scrambled to line up the sight, but before she could squeeze off a frantic make-up shot, the truck’s windshield spiderwebbed again, but this time directly in front of the driver. The man slumped forward into the steering wheel and a loud blaring sound—the horn—filled the air. She waited for the vehicle to stop, but instead it kept coming—straight at her.
“Nate!” she shouted, trying to be heard over his three-round bursts. “Incoming!”
He pulled his eye away from his scope just in time to see the truck. She was already moving even before he did and had to be satisfied with the knowledge that Nate was too smart to stand there and gawk at the technical as it barreled its way up the street at them. She hoped, anyway.
She gripped her rifle with both hands as she swerved around the aisles until, finally, saw the counter at the back. She thought about grabbing the attic door and going up, but there wasn’t going to be enough time. She could already hear the loud roar of the truck’s engine (was it revving?) as it approached the front windows—
The massive crash! she had been waiting for, as the vehicle’s front fender took out the remainder of the glass curtain wall that she and Nate hadn’t already obliterated, along with the door. Her ears rang, even as she heard the continued pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire coming from above her, from Danny as he continued raining fire on the soldiers in the street.
Now, now, now!
> She dropped and slid the last few feet along the dirty floor, flinching at the gross image of leftover blood from last night that she was soaking up with her clothes like a sponge. Her slide was true, and she disappeared through the entrance of the back counter at the same time all hell broke loose behind her. Her forward momentum carried her past the counter and she tucked her body into a ball, the rifle clutched against her stomach, and careened into the wall with the back of her neck.
As she unfurled, she found herself with a perfect vantage point to see Nate as he was hopping over another part of the counter in some kind of parkour move she had only seen in the movies. She wasn’t prepared for that. She always knew Nate was athletic and in excellent shape, but she didn’t know he could do that.
Nate landed facefirst, somehow managing to stick out his hands in time before impact, but his rifle wasn’t so lucky, and it clattered loudly as it struck the floor and skidded away. He scrambled to get as far under the countertop as he could manage as glass shards and nails slammed into the wall and fell around them. She thought he had the right idea and scooted forward to be next to him.
He glanced over as the last few items inside the hardware store settled around them, and grinned. She returned it, but their moment was short-lived because gunshots were still ringing out from the street as well as above them, where Danny was still perched—which meant the truck crashing into the building hadn’t brought down the roof.
Thank you, Jesus.
She scrambled up to her knees and looked over the debris-strewn counter. The red technical was buried halfway into the building, tossing shelves and all the abandoned tools on them everywhere. The driver had finally taken his foot off the gas and was nowhere to be found.
“Danny?” Nate said.
She craned her neck as two shots boomed above them, as if on cue.
“Still kicking,” she said, and got up and ran back through the store, skirting around the vehicle that had claimed a large piece of the interior. The crunch-crunch of objects under her boots and from behind her sounded as Nate followed on her heels.
There wasn’t anything left of the storefront, a fact that occurred to her just as she slid to a stop, about the same time a bullet buzzed! past her head and pinged! off the tailgate of the truck behind her. She was standing out in the open with absolutely nothing to hide behind, like an idiot, and Gaby would have dived to the floor for cover if it weren’t covered with sharp chunks of brick and mortar and an ungodly amount of broken glass.
Instead, she turned around as—ping!—another bullet nearly took her head off, but hit and ricocheted off the truck a second time instead.
Pop-pop! from the other side of the truck as Nate opened fire into the street.
She smiled to herself (He’s covering my retreat. God, I think I love this man.) as she ran back to the driver-side door and opened it. A body fell through and slumped on the floor at her feet, but she ignored it and moved behind the broken window. On the other side, Nate had slowed his shots now that she was safe.
She spied a figure moving behind the blue technical still parked in the middle of the street. There were bullet holes in the front windshield, either Danny’s or Nate’s doing, but no signs of the driver. The figure stuck its head out from the back bumper. It was the woman Gaby had seen earlier, and she was lining up a shot at Nate.
Gaby fired twice in the woman’s direction, both rounds hitting the side of the truck, one smashing the back lights. It was enough to drive the woman behind cover before she could pull her own trigger.
The crunk! of a car door opening as Nate followed her example on the other side of the useless vehicle. She looked across the bloody front seats as he slapped a fresh magazine into his M4.
“You okay?” she asked.
He glanced over. “Yeah. You?”
“One piece, thanks to you.”
“Just don’t let it happen again.”
She smiled. “I’ll do what I can.”
When she looked back, the street outside had grown eerily quiet, though she might have heard faded scratching from above her. Danny, maybe moving around for a better shot. He had the high ground because Danny was smart and this was what he did. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have to face him and Will at the same time.
She focused out the smashed front wall of the hardware store and concentrated on the two bodies next to the blue truck—one was on the sidewalk; the other lay almost perfectly in the middle of the two-lane road. Two bodies that she could see, but more that she couldn’t. She knew for a fact there was one body in the back of the red truck she was hiding behind at the moment, and another one at her feet.
Two plus two made four collaborators accounted for.
Then there was the blue truck’s driver and the dead machine gunner in the back.
Two plus four made six.
“Take out the machine gunners first,” Danny had said this morning. “Those bad boys are going to chew us up and spit us out in little vomit chunks if we let them get going.”
So she had waited for Danny to take out his man before she targeted hers while Nate sprayed the street to sow confusion. One of those bodies on the streets might have been his—not that any of them were going to be taking a tally after this.
That left them with three live bodies to account for, including the woman. Unless the passenger of the blue technical was already dead and somewhere on the floor of the vehicle. Then that would leave two. Two or three.
She had to admit, she liked those odds.
Gaby watched and waited. What were the remaining two (or three) going to do now? If they were smart, they’d stay right where they were and radio for backup. Which meant…
She looked into the truck and saw the two-way, covered in blood, on the front passenger seat. She waited for it to squawk, for the soldiers outside to radio for help, because there had to be other collaborators outside Starch at this moment, right? These nine couldn’t possibly be all there were. Maybe—
A flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned around in time to see a figure—a man—leaping up the back of the blue truck. He was going for the machine gun. That was the plan, anyway, but the man hadn’t finished throwing his other leg over the tailgate before a shot rang out and he stopped his forward momentum. A second later, he collapsed and disappeared over the back.
“So much for that idea,” Nate said. “One left?”
“Maybe two.”
“You saw two?”
“No, there might be two, but definitely one more. The woman.”
“What’s she going to do now?”
“The smart thing would be to call for help.” Gaby glanced back at the silent radio again.
“You’re assuming they’re sm—” Nate started to say, but he ended up shouting “Shit!” instead as two figures made a run for it on the street.
She stepped sideways, away from the door, and tracked them. She ended up filling her optic with the back of the woman, and fired—and missed again! Her bullet went high, and the woman ducked and turned left—toward the mouth of an alley.
Gaby took her time and fired a second bullet and saw the woman spin in mid-stride.
Gotcha!
Next to her, Nate was shooting, his bullets raking the wall behind the woman, who was still moving despite her wound. A second later the figure disappeared from the sidewalk.
Or not, she thought when there was a single crack! from above them, and the man who had taken off at the same time as the woman stumbled and dropped to the opposite sidewalk, about eighty yards up the street.
“Gaby!” Danny shouted from above them. “Secure Speed Racer!”
Gaby raced out of the building. Nate, as always, was right behind her.
She jogged up the street, waiting for the man to make a move, but he never did. He must have known he wouldn’t have gotten far even if he managed to pick himself up. Gaby peeked at the alleyway where the woman had disappeared just as she ran past it. Splashe
s of blood on the sidewalk, but no signs of the collaborator.
Pieces of paper, the objects she had seen falling out of the plane earlier, reflected back the sunlight around her, littering the streets, but she didn’t have time to stop and pick one up.
“I got the alley!” Nate shouted behind her.
She continued on toward the wounded soldier alone.
He was lying on the pavement on his back, clutching his right leg. Danny’s shot had gone through his thigh and the collaborator was grimacing in pain. His teeth were clenched, and Gaby wasn’t sure if he was going to curse her or scream for help when she finally reached him. A pool of blood gleamed under him.
“Fancy meeting you here, beautiful,” the man said. “I should have known it’d be you and your little friends running around out here causing trouble again.”
Mason.
Of course he was still alive. The man really was like a cockroach, showing up whenever they least expected him.
“You’re looking well,” he said as she picked up his rifle lying a few feet away. He held his hands up in surrender as she pulled his handgun out of its holster and stepped back.
“Clear!” she shouted.
She took a moment to scan the streets. There was no way someone within miles of them hadn’t heard those back-and-forth volleys. If there were more collaborators around, they would be here within minutes. The fact that they hadn’t shown up yet put her slightly at ease. Maybe Mercer’s attacks had spread them out thinner than she had imagined.
Footsteps behind her, followed by Nate’s voice. “The woman’s gone. You got her good, though. She bled all the way to the back of the alley where she went over a fence.”
“I guess I should have gone left instead of right, huh?” Mason said.
“Guess so,” Nate said. Then, recognizing the man, “Sonofabitch. You again.”
“I’m like Steven Seagal. Hard to kill, even though I’ve been marked for death, under sieged, and have stood on deadly ground many a times before. Get it?”
“Get what?”
“Never mind,” Mason sighed.
More footsteps behind her, then Danny’s voice: “How was my shot?”