by James Tarr
“Fucking traitor bitches!” he swore as the two other soldiers in his Growler got out, their rifles ready.
There was no movement in the flipped Growler and as the soldier walked toward it he grabbed at a fresh magazine for his rifle.
“Don't get too close, jackass,” one of his companions told him.
The soldier, after fumbling about a bit, got the fresh magazine into the magazine well of his rifle, and looked over his shoulder at the other two men. “Fuck off, Willie. You haven’t seen shit, you just got to this damn city.”
He hit the release and the bolt slammed forward with a manly authoritative thunk. The soldier turned back to the flipped vehicle with the intention of putting another magazine into it, then he all at once screamed, dropped his rifle, and fell to the ground, clutching at his ankle, which was now a mass of bone splinters and blood. The other two soldiers hadn’t heard anything and they looked at each other and back at the screaming third of their group in confusion. That gave Renny enough time to line up his sights through the fractured rear side window at another of the soldiers. He fired his Glock three times. The broken glass of the window door deflected his first bullet but the other two found their mark. The soldier fell to the ground dead. The third man fired a wild burst at the overturned Growler as he dove behind his own vehicle.
The Growler which had been paralleling Weasel on the far side of the freeway finally raced up, having discovered the first overpass where they’d tried to cross blocked by wrecked vehicles. It stopped fifty feet on the opposite side of the overturned vehicle.
As the second Growler was pulling up Weasel was finally able to extricate himself from the steering wheel. After three savage kicks he managed to force open his door far enough to wriggle his way out on his back. Bleeding from cuts on his face and hands, and confident he had several broken ribs and maybe a fractured bone in his left arm, Weasel extended the stock of his MP5 with a yank as he got to his feet.
His thumb flipped down the selector level lever as his sights cleared the top of the overturned vehicle. The Growler which had just arrived, he was glad to see, was not armored, and he emptied his entire magazine into the windshield, working it from one side to the other. Then he ducked down as the remaining man of the trio which had flipped his vehicle popped up to fire at him.
As he deftly reloaded his MP5 Weasel said to Renny, “Can you get out of there?”
“I’m trying,” the old man said, but he was wedged between the seat and the door by his rifle. Weasel didn't have time to look in the back seat to check the status of Sarah or Quentin, but neither of them was making any noise.
Fresh mag in his subgun Weasel crabwalked four feet to the side before popping up again and firing a long burst before even looking to see where the Tabs might be. His first long burst had killed the driver, so the vehicle hadn’t moved. One of the other soldiers was trying to wrestle his companion from behind the wheel. Weasel swung his submachine gun over and emptied the remainder of the magazine into the man through the door. The armor-piercing ammo did its job and the young soldier fell to the ground, screaming.
Weasel ducked back down, reloading once again. “Weaver!” he shouted. “Sergeant Sarah Weaver, what the fuck are you doing?” His shouting was rewarded with a low groan. Bullets spanged off the Growler above his head as at least two of the soldiers fired at him.
Still crouched down behind his overturned vehicle he fired blindly over the top at the two other Growlers, short bursts to keep their heads down. Then he heard a loud thud seemingly inches from his head. He straightened up enough to see over the top of the Growler and there, sitting on the vehicle’s frame inches from his face, was a grenade. Without thinking he reflexively grabbed it and threw it at the Growler which had flipped them over.
It seemed he’d barely ducked back behind his cover before the grenade exploded. Weasel instinctively charged toward that Growler, knowing that by using his overturned vehicle for cover he was just drawing more incoming fire toward the wounded people inside it. The Tabs behind him fired at his fleeing form, and he heard the bullets whipping past his head but he didn’t slow down. He didn’t see the soldier on the far side of the Growler he was running toward, so he hoped that it was mutual and the soldier hadn’t seen him leave his cover either.
Weasel ran around the back of the vehicle, using it to shield himself from the other soldiers and came around the back of it with his MP5 up. The soldier was just turning toward him, having heard something. Weasel fired a burst into the man’s groin and as he collapsed to the ground screaming he finished him off with a two-round burst to the face.
He now had some distance from the other combatants, and better cover, as this Growler, sitting on its wheels, stood higher off the ground. At that thought his eyes opened wide and a half second later he had dropped to his stomach on the pavement behind the boxy vehicle. Growlers were designed to go anywhere. That meant not only were they four-wheel drive, but they had excellent ground clearance.
Weasel could see underneath his vehicle, across sixty feet of cracked asphalt, and underneath the other vehicle where he saw the two soldiers’ boots. The MP5’s magazine was too long to use from a traditional prone position, as Weasel had learned long ago while trying to hide behind a curb from incoming fire. He rolled over onto his side, pulled the MP5 tight against his shoulder, laid the front sight on the leftmost leg that he saw, and pulled the trigger. The remaining twenty-four rounds in the magazine sprayed out of the gun on full auto and he used the recoil to work the muzzle across the underside of the far Growler.
The two soldiers fell to the ground screaming but Weasel found himself with an empty submachine gun and in an awkward position from which to try and reload it. He rolled to one side, grabbed his M&P out of its holster, punched out in a two-handed grip underneath the Growler, and started pulling the trigger as fast as he could at the two thrashing men. By the time the slide locked back on an empty magazine the men had stopped moving.
Weasel reloaded both his weapons behind cover then advanced to the far vehicle in a dash. As he suspected both the soldiers there were dead. By the time he got back to his vehicle Renny had managed to untangle himself from his big rifle and crawled out Weasel’s door. He pulled his rifle out after him while Weasel wrestled with the rear door of the vehicle, finally scraping it open against the pavement.
Sergeant Sarah Weaver was alive, but he still got a fright because she was covered in blood. A quick check showed him that it wasn’t her blood. Quentin, the man with whom Weasel had shared maybe a thousand days under fire, was dead, his skin nearly gray from blood loss. “Dammit, Q,” Weasel swore. Biting back the sadness and anger he checked what pockets he could reach for personal items.
Sarah had taken a bad hit to her head and was disoriented. It took Weasel a good minute to get her out of the back seat while Renny covered them with his rifle. Weasel half-carried the muscular woman to the late-arriving Growler. He wrestled her into the back seat, then pulled the driver he’d killed out from behind the wheel.
The windshield in front of him was mostly shot out but the vehicle was otherwise undamaged. Weasel took a sharp U-turn and headed north on the service drive, then cut west across the first open overpass, more intent than ever to get the hell away from the area. A corner of his mind had registered Quentin’s death, but he didn’t have time to grieve for the man now, that would have to come later.
“There’s another Growler back there,” Renny said, looking out the back window.
“What?” Weasel’s hearing was mostly blown out from shooting underneath the Growler. Everything was ringing.
“Growler!” Renny shouted.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Weasel spat. He already had the Growler at an unsafe speed whipping through the debris-filled streets of the city. “See if you can grab her rifle, yours is useless in this car.” Weasel quickly glanced at Renny and caught the man’s eye. “Nice work with that Glock,” he told the man. “You saved our asses.”
&nbs
p; Renny just grunted as he bent over the seats and tried to figure out how to unhook Sarah’s suppressed carbine from the sling around her body.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
They’d made it to the railroad tracks, used them to cross the freeway, and jogged nearly a mile northwest. They’d moved out of the commercial zone and into a residential area with abundant tree cover and very few houses left standing, so Ed thought they were in the clear. Then he heard the roar of multiple engines. Ahead and behind them.
“Contact front!” Early yelled as a Growler stopped in the intersection ahead of them, a four-way stop in the middle of a neighborhood half-consumed by nature. The Growler was up-armored. From the sound of the other vehicles coming up behind them they were trying to box in the dogsoldiers. Early took cover behind a brick porch and began firing, his big rifle barking loudly. He’d fired ten well-aimed rounds before the soldiers inside the vehicle realized what he was doing. By the time the driver threw the vehicle into reverse Early had shredded the two tires facing him, and he moved his sights upward. Armored windows degraded from UV light, and this late in the war sometimes they got lucky. None of Early’s bullets penetrated the driver’s door window, but he got the Growler to reverse out of sight as fast as it had arrived.
Jason saw Tabs on foot behind them, the soldiers having bailed from pursuing Growlers. The camouflage-clad men were utilizing the half-collapsed homes for cover as they moved up. Using the brick corner of a house for protection he fired at them when he could see them, but they kept darting from cover to cover.
“Come on, move!” Ed shouted at him, grabbing at his arm. “We can’t stand and fight.” He fired as Jason ran past him. They were outnumbered, facing at least three vehicles by the sound of it, plus who knew how many Tabs on foot. The only chance they had was to keep running and gunning, and hopefully break contact.
Early and Mark were on the far side of the street, running north. One would stop and fire at targets of opportunity as the other darted for the next cover—house, tree, car, whatever would stop a bullet. Seattle was somewhere ahead of them, out of sight.
Jason was kneeling behind a pile of bricks that used to be a porch as Ed ran past him. Jason fired left and right, at enemy soldiers moving through houses and behind them through the overgrown yards. He heard another Growler—it seemed to be on the next street over, paralleling them.
On the north side of the few houses still left standing on the block were overgrown lots that had been vacant for decades. Early and Mark ran blindly into a patch of urban forest, hearing the Tabs firing perhaps a hundred yards behind them. They put on as much speed as they could, trying to increase distance, branches and leaves whipping their faces.
Ed glanced up into the sky, gasping for breath. The Tabs must have a drone up there, and were calling out their movements. But there had to be some transmission delay from the drone operator to the troops on the ground. As he Ed ran up to Jason, who was crouched against a small apartment building using a rusty Pontiac for cover, he didn’t go flying by him as usual. He grabbed Jason’s shoulder and pointed. The two of them ran behind the apartment building, across a completely overgrown alley, and into the narrow gap between two houses.
As they neared the front of the houses the sound of the Growler paralleling them grew loud. Ed peered around the corner and through a wildly overgrown privet bush caught glimpses of the Growler in the middle of the street sixty feet away, rolling straight toward them.
Ed frantically motioned to Jason and flattened his back against the side of the house. Jason pulled back against the opposite house, maybe six feet away. Ed’s eyes shot upward. There was a narrow slot of sky above him, but he didn’t see the drone, and even if it was up there they were in deep shadow.
“Grenade!” Ed hissed at Jason, pointing, then waved his hand. “I’m gonna do a thing, stay with me.” Jason grabbed the grenade hanging off the front of his webgear and tossed it over. Ed caught it, pulled the pin while keeping the lever depressed, and looked around the side of the house again. Then he spun out, let the lever fly, and tossed the grenade underhand.
It arced lazily through the air, bounced off the curb, then rolled out into the middle of the street, eight feet in front of the moving Growler. The engine block was directly over the grenade as it detonated, and the front of the vehicle jumped a foot from the blast. Ed charged out, Jason right on his heels.
As Ed tore across the lawn he saw the silhouettes of the men in the vehicle. They were stunned by the blast, but moving. The driver opened his door, retching, smoke pouring out. Ed shoved the muzzle of his rifle into the vehicle and emptied an entire magazine on full auto. Blood sprayed him in the face. Jason was beside him, firing into the back seat as fast as he could pull the trigger, not aware he was shouting. Then both men ducked reflexively as bullets whizzed by their heads. They looked and there were Tabs on foot at the end of the block south of them.
“Move!” Ed barked, and they ran back between the houses.
It was a good thing Weasel was already deaf from shooting underneath the car, because between the roaring diesel engine and the flat tire at the right rear going FLAPFLAPFLAP and Sarah shooting out the back window and the pursuing Tabs firing at them the noise was deafening.
“Are you firing blanks?” Weasel shouted.
“Fuck you, Gopher,” Sarah shot back as she dropped a spent magazine and reached for a fresh one. She was still a little groggy from the rollover, but the adrenaline seemed to be clearing that up quickly. “One of them’s armored.” And two Tabs were hanging from the open back windows of the other unarmored Growler, firing wildly at them. Weasel had to keep the vehicle swerving constantly to avoid the incoming fire.
“Go for the tires.”
“No shit.” She slapped the bolt release and got back up on her knees, aiming out the back window, which had mostly been blown out. She fired twice, the ejected cases bouncing off the ceiling and landing on the back seat, which was layered with spent cases. The Growler bounced angrily and she lost her balance. Then she was back up in the window, firing.
Weasel had taken so many corners he had no idea where he was. He’d been heading into a neighborhood when a second Growler had shown up and smashed into them, and he’d had to cut across a vacant lot, the vehicle bouncing so hard he hit his head on the roof. Now there were skyscrapers out the windshield and tall commercial buildings flying by to either side, which meant he was heading back toward downtown—the exact wrong fucking direction. He peered at the green and white street signs sliding by. Shit, was he on Woodward? How the hell did that happen?
Incoming fire thudded against their Growler. The other rear tire blew with a loud bang. “Fuck!” Weasel shouted in response. The vehicle slowed down even though he didn’t let off the accelerator.
“Sarah, you gotta make something happen!” he shouted. There was no response.
Renny, braced against the door and dash, looked over his shoulder. Sarah had tumbled up against one of the back doors, a dull look on her face, a hole in the middle of her forehead. “She’s down,” Renny told Weasel, his voice flat.
“What?” Weasel looked over his shoulder, but he couldn’t see her. “How bad is she?”
“She’s dead.”
The pursuing Growlers were right on his ass. His one tire had completely shredded itself and now the gunfire was accompanied by the shrieking sound of a wheel rim grinding against the cement.
“Dammit dammit dammit! Fuck! Can you get her gun?”
“She’s on top of it. It’ll take me five minutes crawling over the seats and bouncing around.”
“Fuck!” Weasel shouted again, pounding the steering wheel. He looked at Renny. “We gotta stop and make a stand, they’re just gonna keep chewing us up doing this.” Almost as if in response to his statement more bullets thudded into the passenger side of the Growler.
Renny grunted, and nodded. “I’m with you.”
Weasel studied the street ahead of them as he raced along. “When I stop y
ou bail out your side and try to get to her rifle,” Weasel told him. “I’ll keep them busy. You got a knife? Might be quicker just to cut the sling to get it off her.”
There was a big building up ahead, two stories, which looked like an elementary school. Mark and Early broke from the tree line and ran toward it. Their panting was harsh. The grass in the playground was knee high and slowed them down. They were horribly exposed but had no other options—the Tabs were pushing up behind them through the small patch of wildlands, they’d lost sight of the rest of their squad, and weren’t about to take on an unknown-size force of Tabs with just the two of them and no cover but the narrow trunks of trees which probably wouldn’t stop the incoming rifle bullets anyway.
The two men were through the grass and running across the parking lot when bullets started whipping past their heads. They ducked and then dove behind a tan Toyota Tercel that seemed to be melting into the gravel lot. More bullets hit around them and they heard shouting.
Early was gasping for air and Mark was so out of breath he was seeing spots. They sucked in huge lungfuls of air, traded a look, then got up on their knees behind the car. A half dozen or more soldiers were spread out in a skirmish line, just exiting the trees, jogging their way. They seemed confident that they had the numbers, and they were right. Mark shouldered George’s little carbine and began firing shots, the red dot bouncing with each pull of the trigger. Beside him, Early’s big rifle boomed. Two of the soldiers dropped prone and began firing rapid semi-auto shots, two took their knees and used full-auto suppressive fire, and the remaining men sprinted for the cover of the playground equipment, closing the distance. Mark and Early ducked back behind the car as bullets hit all around them.