by James Tarr
“Toad! Toad!” Barker shouted, his forehead pressed against the window pane. He and the rest of Kermit looked from the tank to the front of the Fisher Building, which was now enveloped in a cloud of smoke. The tank rolled to a stop next to the IMP. Which was almost directly underneath them.
“Smash out that fucking window,” Barker shouted to his squad, pointing, as he ran back to grab a Spike. He heard glass breaking from the vigorous application of rifle butts as he grabbed the rocket launcher and began getting it ready to fire. He’d practiced deploying it the day before until he was ready to punch someone, but the repetitions helped as his hands moved over the tube seemingly of their own accord, pulling out the safety pin and flipping up the sights.
“Skybox West, Skybox West, this is Almighty. You have a Toad right underneath you. I repeat, you have a Toad right underneath you on the street, right now, over.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Barker muttered. The windows were narrow, with black aluminum frames. His people had busted out the top half and Barker stuck his head out. There, right below him, was the Toad. Ten stories down. What was that, fifty yards? Not even. He hoisted the Spike and pressed it against his shoulder, then leaned forward, feeling the window frame against his waist. Distantly he heard Almighty talking to the squad on the other side of the same building, telling them to break cover as well.
“Somebody grab my belt. And watch out for the backblast, it’s gonna be nasty!”
Barker felt hands on him, and he leaned out even further, hearing the window frame creak. He lined up the rocket’s iron sights on the center of the tank’s turret, and saw the top of a helmet. He depressed the red safety lever with his two middle fingers. His thumb found the trigger. Behind him, Petal had two hands on his plate carrier and one foot braced against the wall. She turned her head away from the rocket launcher and hunched, hoping the rocket exhaust wouldn’t cook both of them.
Dietz yanked down at the back of the M240B to get its nose up and fired a long burst at the eighth floor of the Fisher Building, even though he didn’t see any movement where the tank’s HE round had impacted. The exterior wall of the skyscraper had ruptured along with every window in a thirty-foot radius, and he could see into what appeared to be offices. Then he swung the gun down and put another burst into the ground-floor lobby. Bullets were still bouncing off the front of KICKASS from the tangos in the lobby, and it was pissing him off
“Kirkland!”
“Yeah!”
“You get another round loaded?”
“Loaded!”
“Put a round into that lobby in front of us, right through those doors.” The Major had said to wait for her call before engaging the target building, but fuck that. Twice.
As the main gun slewed over and started to drop, glass bounced off the top of the turret in front of him. Glass? Dietz blinked, then looked up. There, way high up on the high-rise, what the hell was that? It looked like a guy, hanging on the side of the building like Spider-Man. And then there was a brief flash.
Barker pressed the trigger and the office around him seemed to explode as the rocket’s exhaust disintegrated the suspended ceiling of off-white acoustic tiles. He fell back from the window, coughing and waving his hands in front of his face, the rest of the squad doing the same. The air around him seemed filled with flour.
“Shit, did I hit it?” He rushed back to the window and looked down through the dust pouring out the gaping window frame. The Toad was still there below him, and at first it appeared no different. Then he saw the smoke pouring out of the hatch, and saw the Tab who’d been standing inside it was now halfway down the side of the tank, hanging headfirst from the hatch by one boot. The Spike had shot straight down into the open hatch, killing the entire crew.
Barker grabbed his rifle and began firing at the few Tabs still in the street. The rest of his squad moved to adjoining windows and did the same, but after seeing the Toad get taken out the Tabs decided to abandon their idea of using it for cover and ran underneath him, into the Cadillac Place building.
“Skybox West, all squads. Got fucking guys in my lobby,” Barker spat. “But the Toad’s dead.”
“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” Lydia said, staring at the parade of armored vehicles rolling up Cass Avenue toward them. She had both her palms and her forehead pressed against the glass.
“Get away from the window,” Chan told her. He glanced around. He had all of Yosemite plus Morris’ loaner with him. So far they hadn’t done anything since reaching the tenth floor of the Cadillac Place building but listen to other squads on the radio. All the fighting was on the opposite side of the building. But the Tabs’ main armored column was moving up to support the advance force. They were still over a block away, and moving slow, but they kept coming, straight up Cass. Straight toward him.
The radio lit up again. “Skybox, Tower. I think a few made it into your lobby. Three out of those four vehicles are down.” Chan could only hear the gunfire and explosions as faint echoes through the glass.
The convoy was rolling two abreast up Cass. There was an IMP and Growler in the lead followed by four more Growlers, another IMP, two Growlers, and, finally, a Toad. Ten vehicles. “Fuck,” Chan muttered under his breath. He hadn’t seen that much enemy armor together…ever. It reminded him of the stories he’d heard about the intense battles at the start of the war.
“Skybox West, Skybox West, this is Almighty. You have a Toad right underneath you. I repeat, you have a Toad right underneath you on the street, right now, over.”
The column of vehicles was barely a block away now, coming close to rolling underneath Yosemite’s position. “Everybody grab your shit!” Chan shouted. He moved a step closer to the window, to get a better viewing angle. One IMP and three Growlers broke off and headed east on a side street. The two lead vehicles in the now-shortened column had paused half a block back from West Grand Boulevard, as it kept them out of sight of the Fisher Building, ostensibly behind cover.
They were right underneath Yosemite.
As Chan stared down at the IMP, Toad, and four Growlers, Morris’ overwatch team jumped back on the radio. “Skybox East, this is Almighty East. You’ve got a whole traffic jam underneath you right now. Go loud, do not wait, I repeat go loud, it’s never going to get better, give ‘em everything you’ve got.”
Chan had made the same decision a quarter-second earlier. “Let’s light ‘em up!” he shouted. He looked at Lydia as the sound of multiple windows being broken echoed around the empty offices. “Make it rain, right here,” he told her, pointing at the lighter in her hand. Then he grabbed a Spike. Two windows down his second-in-command was leaning out the window and firing the fancy new six-shot grenade launcher straight downward. He heard the hissing roar of a Spike being fired from the next office over and a white dust cloud shot out the office doorway into the hallway.
Chan flipped the sights on the rocket up and was pressing the safety lever down as he leaned out one of the freshly broken windows. One of the Growlers was already burning. Chan focused on the Toad, which lurched and then began moving backward.
Oh no you don’t, he thought. He aimed the sights at the leading edge of the tank but then had to pause as it passed underneath the fourth-floor walkway between the building and the adjacent parking garage. As it reappeared he pressed the trigger, but just as he fired the tank slewed sideways, intending to reverse into the closest side street. The rocket missed the body of the tank entirely and hit the treads. The impact rocked the tank, which accelerated off to the side. Chan saw the massive vehicle had rolled out of its right-side track and left it on the street like a discarded snake-skin, but it still seemed able to move. Then it was gone, out of sight behind the parking garage. “Shit!”
Lydia was working like a madwoman next to him, lighting the fabric wicks of Molotov cocktails and frantically tossing them out the closest window in every direction. There had to be thirty of them in various sized glass bottles, stored in two milk crates and secreted up here, by her, over t
he past six months, one bottle at a time. They were filled with whatever flammable liquid she or Tom in the Fisher Building’s maintenance department could get their hands on—rubbing alcohol, paint thinner, acetone, nail polish remover, even a little bit of gel hand sanitizer—basically everything but gasoline, as that was too valuable. There were two additional crates on the opposite side of the building too, and one crate in a maintenance closet on the sixth floor of the Fisher Building.
“Just toss ‘em!” Chan shouted at her. He grabbed two bottles in each hand and threw them out as far as he could. You only had to light the first few; as long as the rest impacted an area on fire, they would ignite as well. And the entire street below them seemed to be on fire, Lydia had already thrown a dozen bottles out the window. One of the Growlers had broken away and was racing north up Cass along the sidewalk, one of its wheels on fire. The IMP wasn’t moving, it had been hit by a Spike, and a Tab, after realizing he couldn’t angle the roof gun up enough to engage them, was crawling out of the upper hatch and across the top of the vehicle. Another man was below him in the vehicle, which was bracketed by flame. One of the Growlers was split open like a burst tin can from a grenade hit. As Chan watched he saw the doors of a disabled Growler engulfed in flames open, and the two Tabs inside came stumbling out, trying to make it through the flames to the safety of the building. The soldiers made it across the street and out of sight, but before they’d disappeared from view they’d all been aflame. He could hear at least one man screaming horrifically.
There was rifle fire to either side of him, but after scanning the street he didn’t see anything left to shoot at, the soldiers were either dead and burning or had made it to cover. One IMP and three Growlers were disabled. The Toad, of course, had lost a tread but managed to escape. That tank’s crew would be worried about anti-tank rockets, but the range of the Spikes was far less than that of the Toad’s main gun, which could accurately target vehicles out beyond two miles, if Chan remembered correctly.
“Grab your shit! We need to displace before that Toad finds a spot to snipe us!” he shouted to his squad.
Lydia was looking at him wild-eyed. “Did they work?” she asked, panting. She had a Molotov in each hand. There were only a few left in each milk crate. She’d been too busy throwing to look out the window.
“Perfect,” he told her. “There’s a sea of fucking fire down there. But we gotta go.”
“Cambridge East has vehicles circling around to the north of our position,” they heard over the radio. “Engaging.”
Charlie One-Six, -Seven, and -Eight, one IMP and two Growlers, had broken off from the rest of the assault force early, as ordered, and swung west on Amsterdam, moving more slowly than the advance force. They’d driven several blocks west to 3rd Avenue, then turned north.
The railroad bridge over 3rd was actually down, and had been for some time, but none of the men in the vehicles were aware of it. They came to a brief stop, then drove up the embankment to the left, and slowly across the four sets of train tracks. They rolled through a vacant lot and turned left, then almost immediately turned right on the service drive to the Lodge Freeway. As they did two vehicles appeared directly in front of them, rising into view as they took the freeway exit for West Grand Boulevard.
“Oh Jesus Fuck, Tabs!” Harris screamed from behind the wheel of the pickup as the IMP appeared right next to them. They were so close Harris felt like he could reach out and touch the massive vehicle. He stomped on the accelerator. He wasn’t even sure the driver of the IMP had seen him yet out of the narrow port that served as his windshield, but the Tabs in the two Growlers behind it sure had.
A dogsoldier in the Tahoe behind the pickup fired his grenade launcher and took out the trailing, unarmored Growler. It veered off and crashed into the side of a building. The roof gunner on the IMP swung his .50 belt fed over and let loose a long loud burst, stitching the SUV from the engine compartment all the way to the rear bumper. Doing that distracted him long enough for Harris’ passenger to get his carbine out the window of the pickup and fire ten rounds at the roof gunner as fast as he could pull the trigger, killing the soldier.
The Tahoe behind them slowed and drifted away, every man inside it killed by the deadly burst of the heavy roof gun. Even with its flat tire Harris’ pickup accelerated away from the heavy armored IMP and the one Growler still behind it as the Tabs inside the personnel carrier were distracted, wrestling with the body of their dead comrade, trying to clear him from behind the roof gun.
Outnumbered two to one Harris knew they had to get away from the other vehicles, and even though Growlers weren’t fast he couldn’t outrun one driving a pickup with a flat tire and a man in the bed hanging on for dear life. Besides, the man in back had an RPG, and he wouldn’t be able to get it back into play while being bounced around in a car chase.
“Hold on!” he shouted, loud enough for the man in back to hear, and took a sharp right turn, then punched the gas pedal again. He heard the IMP’s engine roar behind him as the driver accelerated to pursue.
Harris looked around and suddenly realized he was on West Grand Boulevard. The Fisher Building and Cadillac Place a quarter mile ahead of him, rising up into the sky. He knew exactly where he was, and knew that meant he was racing right toward more Tabs, and had only a second to make a decision.
“You’re not going to like this!” he yelled. The Tabs had an advantage in numbers and armor. He couldn’t do anything about their numbers, but there was one sure way to negate the effectiveness of their vehicles.
Harris cut the wheel left and the pickup bounced across the grassy median between two small trees, straight for the front of an apartment building.
“What the fuck?” his passenger in the front seat had time to say before the pickup plowed through the glass front of the ground-floor business. Tables and chairs flew in every direction and the pickup clipped the corner of a counter before slamming into the far wall with a resounding crunch. Harris bounced off the steering wheel, smashing his nose, but the dash airbag deployed for his front-seat passenger.
“Un-ass the vehicle!” Harris shouted, kicking open his door. He looked past the bed of the pickup, through the wake of destruction they’d made through the former smoothie shop, and saw the IMP on the far side of the street, the Growler pulling up behind it. Harris caught the RPG launcher tossed to him from the man in the pickup bed and then flinched as the .50 atop the IMP opened up on them. The soldier climbing down from the pickup fell onto Harris and they both landed on the tile floor.
The first burst from the roof-mounted .50 went wide, thudding into the counter and walls. Harris and the two soldiers scrambled around the pickup and through the hole it had made in the inside wall. They found themselves in a short hallway and charged down it only to discover the formerly picturesque interior courtyard of the apartment building. There were raised concrete planters, most of the decorative perennials inside them grown wild. They ran across the courtyard, kicked in a door, and rushed through a small apartment that smelled of rotting food. Harris opened the apartment door, looked left and right down the hallway, then pointed. “Stairs!” His nose was broken, and all he could taste was blood.
The Boulevard had been a trendy, upscale apartment building, constructed not too long before the war, with retail spaces on the ground floor and five floors of studio, one-, and two-bedroom apartments above that. The three men pounded up the stairs, carrying their guns and gear. Third floor, fourth, fifth, then the sixth as they came around the corner. The stairs continued above them, heading for the roof. The door to the sixth-floor corridor was open, and there was someone standing there, gun in hand, an ugly look on his face.
“Who the fuck are you guys?” Weasel demanded.
“RoadRunner,” Harris panted. He staggered up the last flight of stairs and fell into the hallway. He looked up at Weasel. “You Quigley?”
Weasel frowned at him and his two companions. “Part of it, anyway. Grab that RPG, maybe we can put it wher
e it will do some good, and we all won’t die here. Fuckers.” But then he smiled.
They followed Weasel down the hallway and where it turned right there was an open door on the left. As they passed they looked in, and Renny was there in a corner apartment. Beyond him, through the open window, stretched West Grand.
“Nobody’s exited the IMP yet,” Renny called out to them as they passed. “IMP’s still in the same place, Growler circled around somewhere west, lost sight of it.”
There had been some long discussions as to where Renny and his rifle should be situated. He would have the most targets of opportunity, with the best visibility, looking down West Grand Boulevard. To the east there wasn’t really a good spot to situate him. To the west, however, one spot stuck out to everyone looking at the map—the six-story apartment building on West Grand west of the Fisher Building parking garage. Located on its top floor on the southeast corner he would have an elevated position looking east down West Grand while still being able to keep an eye on the Lodge Freeway offramps, one of the routes it was suspected troops might take up from the Army base. It wasn’t perfect, but it seemed better than anything else and would have to do. The position wouldn’t exactly call for distance shooting, at least as Renny saw it—from his proposed perch to the intersection of West Grand and Cass Avenue, where they expected a lot of action to take place, was barely four hundred yards. Weasel and a young soldier from Flintstone named Carrells were providing security for the sniper.
Weasel kicked open a door halfway down the hall and moved across the apartment. West Grand Boulevard was right on the other side of it, six floors down. And on the far side of the street sat the IMP, half-hidden from view by the short boulevard trees. “Probably can’t decide whether or not to waste time with you or go to the rescue,” Weasel said. The radio had been busy with chatter, Tower taking out the IMP and Almighty calling down both ends of Skybox on the Tabs below. He pointed at the IMP. “Take that fucker out.” He ran back to the hallway. “Carrells!”