by James Tarr
“Or maybe they’ll be waiting at the bottom for us.”
“It’s not stupid if it works.”
“Yes it is. Stupid is stupid.”
Barker shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Both men had their rifles up as the freight car wheezed its way to the third floor and the doors clanked open. It was empty.
“Two?” the man asked Barker.
“One. I want to make sure we get under them.”
The big metal-walled elevator seemed to take forever to descend to the first floor. “What the fuck’s your name?” Barker asked.
“Royce.”
Barker nodded. “We’ll head across to the bottom of the stairs you were at, it’s closest.”
Not only was the freight elevator slow, it seemed as loud as a slow-motion car crash to the two men, but finally it came to rest and the doors eased open. Barker and Royce were in opposite corners, crouched, rifles up, but no one was immediately visible in the hall.
Barker scooted out, rifle up, but the hallway was clear. He signaled to Royce and they moved down the hallway carefully. Barker quick-peeked the corner but didn’t see anyone. They headed down the main corridor to the stairway entrance. No one was initially visible, but they could hear shouts, and the occasional gunshot. The Tabs seemed at least one floor up, but that was just a guess.
The two men staged on either side of the stairway door. Barker used hand signals, telling Royce what he wanted to do, and the man nodded. Royce pushed the door open as smoothly and quietly as he could. The first flight of stairs was clear. Rifles up, the two men slowly advanced up the stairs, shoulder to shoulder, trying to make no noise. There was a turn halfway to the second floor and they paused just before it. They could hear several Tabs above them, talking loudly because their hearing had been destroyed by the gunfire. The stairwell smelled of sweat and blood.
Barker traded a look with Royce, then they pushed forward and around the corner. Four Tab soldiers were clustered on the second-floor landing and in the open doorway leading into the hallway, all of them looking upward. Barker and Royce started firing, pulling their triggers as fast as they could, ejected cases from their rifles bouncing off the walls and blood flying from their hits. The four men died before they had a chance to return fire.
Royce jumped over a body into the second-floor hallway and immediately came under fire from the other stairway at the end of the building, from the Tabs underneath Petal. Morris’ man dove across the hallway into an office as Barker leaned out of the doorway and fired down the hall. One of the Tabs fell and the other men with him pulled him back into the stairway, out of sight.
“Kermit, you up there?” Barker called up his stairwell.
“That you Barker?”
“Yeah. Go back up Petal, I’m doing an end run.”
Barker pulled a grenade off his chest. He looked across the second-floor hallway at Royce. He gestured he was going to head back down to the first floor and circle around. “Keep ‘em busy,” he told the man, then pulled the pin on the grenade and let the lever fly.
“One Mississippi…and the horse you rode in on!” Barker shouted, and heaved the grenade down the hall. Maybe it would have more effect than the two he’d tossed down the same stairwell. He turned and headed down without waiting to see if the grenade made it all the way to the stairwell door. It blew right before he hit the ground floor.
Back on the first floor he moved down the main hallway to the next stairwell while reloading, sticking his partially spent magazine behind a full one in a pouch on his chest. He still had plenty of loaded magazines, which was a nice change.
He listened at the door to the stairs. If there was anybody right on the other side, they weren’t making any noise. Barker gritted his teeth, then pushed the door open, leading with his rifle.
Nobody. But somebody very close above him on the stairs was swearing up a storm. There were thin trails of smoke in the air, presumably from the grenade.
Barker edged up, one step at a time, rifle shouldered and his red dot optic aimed at the landing above him, just waiting for someone to pop into view. He reached the landing mid-floor and heard shooting directly overhead, someone (probably Royce) firing in the distance and the Tabs just above him returning fire. Empty cases bounced down the stairs around him. The echoing noise in the enclosed space was deafening.
Barker used the distraction to move up the rest of the way. There were two soldiers, one on either side of the second-floor landing, eyeing the open doorway, with two bloody bodies on the floor before them. They had their backs to Barker.
He was below them and between their helmets and body armor he had no angle on their heads or necks. He coldly shot the men in the base of their spines, below their body armor, and as they fell to the floor, screaming, he shot them in their faces.
“Clear!” he shouted. “Petal! Kermit! On me!”
Royce appeared in the open doorway. Petal popped her head out around the corner above him on the stairs, rifle up just in case it was a trick. She lowered her muzzle and then eyed the bodies on the floor. “We need to help Chan and the rest of those fuckers,” he told the remaining members of his squad. “Down to one and then cut across. Quiet. Hopefully we can come up behind them again. But let’s try to be quick, I think we’re going to have company real soon.”
Chan and his people had run into the Tabs halfway down to the ground floor and gotten into a messy firefight. The Tabs had retreated, then tried a blitz, heading up four stairways at once. It hadn’t quite worked, but then it hadn’t quite not. Currently it was a stalemate. Yosemite was currently holding four stairwells by the skin of their teeth, but couldn’t move down, and the Tabs didn’t seem to have the manpower or the balls—or both—to try another assault.
The Tabs had all the time in the world, with reinforcements incoming. The dogsoldiers, on the other hand, did not.
Chan and Lydia were holding the easternmost stairwell, posted on the fourth floor. A bullet had taken a chunk out of Chan’s left palm and gone through his radio before burying itself in the armor plate over his chest. His hand hurt like hell, and was still bleeding slowly, but the injury wasn’t life threatening. Not being able to get the hell out of the building, however, that was life threatening.
Lydia had a rifle she’d grabbed off one of the Tabs they’d killed, the donated Glock still stuck in her waistband. She kept an eye on the stairwell while Chan peeked down the fourth floor hallway. Only one man from Yosemite stood guard at the closest stairwell. There were too many stairwells, and they were spread too thin.
The Tabs below them sounded like they were getting antsy, and Lydia stuck her liberated, camouflage-stocked M5A3 out and fired a few shots, hoping to get them to ricochet off the walls and into the Tabs. No such luck. The gunfire was so loud she was flinching even before she pulled the trigger.
“Come on down, we give up!” one of the Tabs shouted from below, followed by laughter.
“We promise not to shoot,” another voice called out.
“Fuck this,” Chan muttered under his breath. They’d been static for far too long. He leaned close, his lips almost touching Lydia’s ear, and spoke quietly. She nodded, slung the rifle over her shoulder, and headed up the stairs as fast as she could.
“We’re surrendering, come on up!” Chan shouted back to the soldiers.
“You’re dead, you’re all fucking dead,” one of the Tabs yelled, voice bitter. Apparently he’d tired of the banter. “We’re going to tear this building out from under you.” Faintly they could hear gunfire in a distant section of the building, then the crump of a grenade.
“When you don’t have armor to hide behind you’re a bunch of pussies,” Chan called out. He was trying to goad them into doing something stupid. “And you can’t shoot for shit.” He was angled out and had his Steyr AUG shouldered, waiting for a Tab to sneak up the stairs and poke his head out.
No such luck.
He heard Lydia before she appeared, although she wa
s trying to be quiet. She had a plastic milk crate in her hands, and the few remaining Molotovs were in it. She set it down on the landing. Chan bent to her and whispered in her ear, and she nodded.
Lydia unslung her carbine as Chan took the lighter. She moved down the stairs to the next corner as silently as she could. Chan stepped down behind her. They traded a look, then she stuck her carbine around the corner and fired a long burst on full auto, much of it into the ceiling as the awkwardly held gun recoiled in her hands.
She pulled back and return fire filled the air with dust and chips of concrete. By the time the Tabs stopped firing Chan had the wick of the Molotov lit, moved up to the corner, stuck his arm out, and heaved it downward. They heard the crash as the glass bottle broke on the cement, and the WHOOMPF! as the fluid ignited. There was an immediate shout, then a scream. Chan grabbed a second bottle and heaved it after the first, not bothering to light it. It crashed and added to the flames, which filled the stairwell with flickering orange light and horrific screams.
Chan paused for a five-count, and the heat even around the corner began to grow uncomfortable. Then he popped around the corner, but the three men writhing on the landing were in the last throes of death, and he didn’t waste any ammo on them.
“Next one,” Chan said, coughing from the smoke and the smell of burning flesh. “Grab the box.” They had three more Molotovs. He realized they’d work great for temporarily blocking stairs as well.
With a loud whine the turbodiesel in the Toad kicked in as the tank headed north on Woodward. The Tabs hadn’t taken long to clear out their wounded and get them loaded into the back of the IMPs. Bill and Seattle had watched, hoping the Woodward Avenue column would turn around and head back south, either to the military base or to the force on Cass Avenue which had been badly damaged by the truck bomb, to render aid. Nope.
“Well, shit,” Seattle said succinctly. The armored vehicles on Woodward were directly east of them, heading north up toward the dogsoldiers still engaged with the remnants of the first Tab armored group. “Looks like there’s nothing more we can do here.”
Bill rubbed his chin. “I don’t know that’s true.” He looked at their rifles, then out the window toward the convoy on Cass. “We start popping melons over there, maybe that column on Woodward turns around. Or maybe slows down. The cans’ll buy us a little bit of time at least before they figure out where we are.” He meant the sound suppressors mounted on their rifle barrels.
“Not much. We’re in the tallest building around, and there’s busted windows. I give them ten, maybe fifteen seconds before that tank swings its gun over and pops a round in here just in case.”
“I think it’ll be more like thirty. So we take out the tank commander and the roof gunner on the IMP, then whoever else we can, keep shooting only as long as it takes to blow through one magazine, then we get the fuck out. They’re fucking bivouacked in the middle of the street, doing triage, we can’t pass this up.” He frowned. “I don’t think we can hook up with Morris, that area’s going to be too hot, so we’ll have to head northwest to the closest sewer access.
“Fuck.” Seattle knew his partner was right, but he didn’t have to like it. “Pack everything up but the rifles, we need to grab and go.”
It took only a matter of seconds to get their packs ready, then the men settled down behind their respective rifles. The Tabs had circled their wagons, so to speak, using their undamaged armored vehicles as barriers on the north and south ends of the bomb blast zone. Bill quickly used his laser rangefinder. “The two IMPs closest to us are two-eighty. That Toad on the far side is…three forty-six. Dial it up. You’re a better shot than me, and that Toad commander is turned sideways, so he’s yours. I’ll wait for your shot. You work back to front, I’ll work front to back.”
“Roger that.”
Bill grabbed his radio. “Outlier will be going loud, then displacing from this position, over.”
The radio immediately sprung to life with Morris’ voice, as if he’d been waiting. “Almighty copies on that, Outlier. Almighty to all squads, be advised enemy ground units three hundred meters east our position, approaching on foot while armor is in overwatch. Repeat, enemy dismounts numbering approximately eighty, three hundred meters east our position and approaching our location and SkyBox under cover of armor. Large enemy armor column also now at West Grand and the Lodge Freeway near Quigley. Repeat, large enemy armor presence just west of Quigley. They do not seem to be approaching as yet, have assumed a defensive position.” There was a pause, then the Lieutenant Colonel said, “You’ve all done a hell of a job, but I’m calling it. Virginia, Virginia, Virginia. Good luck, and God speed. Almighty is displacing. Over and out.”
‘Virginia’ was their code-word to cease operations in the area and retreat or escape via any means possible. Upon hearing it, Bill and Seattle exchanged a look.
They cranked their Vortex scopes up to 10X and dialed in the elevation, which wasn’t much. Bill popped his neck and then set himself behind the glass. He placed the center dot of the reticle on the nose of the soldier behind the Mk19 of the IMP. It was parked, nose out, next to the other IMP which had been flipped over in the blast. Behind it a number of soldiers were visible, the wounded and those tending to them. Bill spotted someone who had to be an officer, waving his arm as he talked on a radio.
“I’m up, ready on your go,” Bill said. He flipped off his safety, and took up the slack on his Geissele SSA trigger. It would take less than three additional pounds of pressure to break the shot.
Seattle fired, his rifle making a hissing crack that sounded as much like Indiana Jones’ bullwhip as a gunshot. Trigger prepped, Bill fired half a second later. His scope moved, but he saw his bullet impact, an inch to the right of where he was aiming, hitting the soldier in his cheek instead of his nose. The soldier’s head snapped back as the bullet blew through the man’s skull and hit the inside of his helmet sideways.
As Seattle fired beside him, and fired again, Bill moved his reticle down to the presumed officer behind and to the side of the IMP. He was sideways, gesturing once again, having missed both the sound of the gunshot and the impact, and Bill took him under his arm. Then he began firing at the numerous Tabs visible tending to wounded. Between the weight of the rifle itself, and the suppressor, and the well-tuned gas system, his rifle had very little recoil. It took another two seconds before the Tabs on the ground figured out what was happening, then they all ran for cover. However, because of the noise of the idling diesel engines and the echoing nature of the buildings surrounding them, they had no idea from which direction the shots were coming.
Bill shot a soldier crouching beside a twisted Growler in the thigh, the man next to him in the upper arm. A row of wounded Tabs was sitting on the pavement inside the vehicle perimeter, and they were too slow. He shot a head here, a leg there, an arm, a foot, a hand, a running Tab in the legs, several men in the face as they popped up to fire in his general direction and didn’t duck down fast enough.
He didn’t know if the row of bodies on the pavement in the center of the encampment were dead or just seriously wounded, but he fired his last five shots at them. “I’m out!” he shouted, jumping out of his chair. Seattle fired one last shot and then he was dry as well.
The two men shrugged on their backpacks, grabbed their rifles, then headed for the stairwell on the north side of the building. Bill knelt down with a grunt and grabbed the grenade with which they’d boobytrapped the door to the stairs. He was just hooking the handle onto his vest when the Toad fired its 120mm main gun. The high-explosive round was angling up and detonated in the middle of the ceiling behind them, the blast wave throwing both men through the open stairwell door.
“You’ve gotta keep moving or we’re going to die,” Robbie gasped. He had Brooke’s good arm around his shoulders and was half carrying her. She was weaving and nearly incoherent, but she was still on her feet. Even if she hadn’t been wearing fifty pounds of gear Robbie knew he wasn’t strong en
ough to carry her more than fifty or one hundred feet, and they had a lot further to go than that. Through the entire length of the hotel, then across New Center One.
He was pretty sure he’d put the tourniquet on right, but she was such a mess it was hard to tell. Her skin was deathly white where it wasn’t smeared with half-dried blood. The lower half of her left arm hung useless, only a few strips of skin and sinew connecting it.
Luckily the walkway from the New Center One building was on the same level as the walkway connecting the hotel, so he didn’t have to worry about climbing any steps with her. He struggled along with Brooke, both of them gasping. One foot in front of the other, one step, then another, then another, that’s all he could focus on. Then he heard a shout and looked up blearily, wondering if Tabs were about to shoot him, and saw a dogsoldier running to help him.
Barker actually fell backward onto his ass in surprise as the soldier burst through the doorway in front of him, screaming and on fire. Petal and Royce downed the man with a volley of shots.
“Motherfucker,” Barker swore.
There was a pause, then a shout down the stairwell. “Barker?”
“Chan, you fucker, you weren’t supposed to set this building on fire,” Barker shouted back from the floor. He struggled to his feet. The air inside the big office building had been starting to haze with smoke even before the Human Torch had made an appearance.
Chan appeared above them on the stairs, rifle up, just in case. Then he moved down the stairs, the remaining members of Yosemite behind him. “It seemed the thing to do at the time,” he panted, and the sweaty men smiled at each other.
There was chatter on the radio, and then the men heard, “Virginia, Virginia, Virginia.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Chan said.
Barker nodded. “Down!” he called out to everyone there. He did a quick head count. Kermit and Yosemite had suffered twenty-five percent casualties. “To the tunnel. We’re heading back, getting the fuck out of here while the getting’s still good.” He waved his people past him and they began stampeding down the stairs.