As soon as the second gun stopped, he saw a black barrel appear, followed by a shoulder. A couple short bursts of automatic fire came from the gun. Bill’s gun opened up next to him, throwing three rounds down. Peter held his own fire, seeing as his target was just hurling some barely aimed suppressing fire his way.
The payoff came when the second gun opened up again. The man Peter was stalking peeked his head out for a look, ducked back in, then stood up. That was the cue. Peter gave his trigger a gentle squeeze. The kick was enough to break his sight picture on the target. When he got it back, he saw his target on the ground, crawling back toward the cover of the big tree. Peter put the crosshairs as close as he could to center of mass and fired again.
“One wounded,” he said, just loud enough to carry over to Larry and Irene.
“I think we’re four on four now,” Bill said.
“Ready to pull back?” Peter asked.
“I think so,” Larry said.
“Okay. Bill, you watch our guy. Irene, you and I suppress across the field. Larry, let us know when you’re ready.” Peter turned to his left to cover the field.
“They’re in the trees but keeping to level ground,” Irene said. “I don’t think they’re trying to climb up and over us.”
“Ready,” Larry said.
“On three,” Peter said. He peered at the tree line, trying to catch any sort of movement. “Two…One…Go!” He, Irene, and Bill all started firing.
Larry popped up, and immediately, a barrage of rounds started flying in. Peter heard two crack uncomfortably close from his flank, and then heard Larry scream and crash to the ground. A third round sizzled right past, making it clear that his position was completely exposed to at least one gun from the flank. Whether it was the man he’d hit or his buddy, Peter couldn’t tell, and he didn’t have time to think about it. Larry was down.
The one consolation was that Larry was swearing profusely. If he could talk, he was alive, conscious, and breathing.
Both Bill and Irene opened up again. Peter lifted his eye from his scope to get a wider-angle view and caught sight of movement. While he was bringing his rifle back into firing position, he heard Irene say, “One wounded but not out.”
Larry kept swearing and writhing on the ground.
“My two are getting bold,” Irene said.
Peter was reluctant to pivot again to help her, not with it clear that the gunman he was tracking had a solid line on him if he shifted. The incoming rounds had lightened up again, giving him hope that as long as Larry stayed flat, the bad guys couldn’t see him.
All of a sudden, a person burst out from behind a tree Peter was watching. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d seen a spray of blood just before the man stepped forward and dropped onto his belly.
“Wasn’t me,” Bill said.
Peter thought he heard a couple more distant gunshots, seeming to come from out beyond the road. With the threat to the flank possibly neutralized, he felt it was a good risk to swing his attention back to the other tree line.
“You mobile at least, Larry?”
“Yeah. Shoulder.”
“Game trail?” Bill asked.
Peter snapped off a couple shots at some movement. “What do you say, Larry?”
“Yeah. Cover me.”
“On three,” Peter said, and gave Larry another countdown. This time, while he laid down some cover fire, he heard his friend get several steps up the hill before he stopped.
“Irene, you’re next,” Peter said. “On Larry’s signal.”
As he heard the next countdown, Peter looked at the pile of fresh produce, including two backpacks full of fresh sweet corn. He wondered whether at least grabbing one ruck when it was Bill’s and his turn to head up was an acceptable risk.
Behind him, he heard Larry finishing a countdown. He looked up the slope and selected his route. On signal, he sprinted up, his leg shouting at him again as he worked the damaged muscle. He was nowhere near as fast as he wanted to be due to the wound, and struggled to make the last few steps to solid cover instead of just throwing himself to the ground and hoping for the best.
His heart was hammering, and he was convinced that if the two guys coming up from the highway hadn’t been knocked out of the fight, he never would have made it without getting hit.
“Status, Larry?” he asked.
“Left shoulder. Can’t aim for shit but can keep up suppression.”
“Got a dressing on it yet?” Bill asked.
“Can we afford the delay?”
Peter listened to the sounds of gunfire. There was still a fire-and-maneuver rhythm coming from his left, maybe a trio if he was reading the pattern correctly. Nothing still from the right flank, until he heard a single distant shot ring out.
“Take it,” Peter said. “Bill, I need you to keep eyes on our original two, make sure one isn’t up and making a quiet approach. You close enough to patch your boy up, Irene?”
“Yeah, on it,” she said.
“Okay. I’ll keep watch on your front. Work fast,” Peter said.
There was just enough undergrowth on the part of the slope they were on to be both a help and a hindrance. Peter was having a hard time getting a clear view down toward where he heard the incoming shots coming from. At the same time, that fire was also scattered and unfocused, bullets striking all over the place and not seeming to narrow in effectively.
He knew that didn’t mean he could relax yet. Their foes were still on a steady march forward, and it would only take one bullet hitting home to kill somebody, or injure them seriously enough that they’d need to be cared for under fire or abandoned.
“Got it,” Irene said.
Since she and Larry were still downslope from Peter and Bill, he called out to them. “Pick your next cover and let us know when you’re ready.”
“Still quiet to the right,” Bill said.
Peter kept his eyes out, desperately trying to put eyes on a target.
“Ready,” Larry said.
Peter counted them down and emptied the remaining rounds in his magazine in a series of rapid shots. Once Larry and Irene signaled that they were in position, he reloaded by touch while looking past them for his next position.
It took six more leaps for the whole team to get back up to the road the homestead was on. At the top of the ridge, they all flattened down on their bellies and took a good, hard look back the way they’d come. There wasn’t any movement and there hadn’t been any return fire for the last couple of leaps.
“Think they broke off?” Irene asked.
“Check out the intersection with Bennet Road down there,” Bill said.
Peter panned his rifle left and adjusted the focus to account for the increase in distance. “Yep. Last thing I wanted to see.”
“Ignore the truck—look at what’s happening around it.”
A little bit of careful scanning, and Peter saw what Bill was talking about. Three men in camouflage were crouched in a ditch on the north side of the road, alternately staring into the fields across from them and looking behind them, gesturing frantically.
“Three on the move toward the truck, one is carrying somebody,” Larry said.
“If there were six total, that means there’s still two down in the field,” Bill said.
“Able to fight or not, though?” Irene asked.
“Worth it to go back down and take a look?” Bill asked.
Peter immediately felt three pairs of eyes turn to him. “If they’re effective, they’re camouflaged and will have time to get hidden while we move in. Even if one of them is mostly dead, if he’s able to get even a single shot off, it could be the end of one of us.”
“So we’re just going to abandon those spuds?” Larry asked.
“Your brains fall out through that hole in your shoulder?” Irene asked.
“Just saying.”
“Focus,” Peter said. “I’m pissed at how much good food we’re leaving behind down there, too, but it’s not wor
th any of our lives.”
“Anybody else notice some shots from across the highway while we were fighting?” Bill asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Peter said. Irene and Larry both shook their heads. “I wonder if our friends to the south had seen us working and were just keeping an eye out.”
“I think I would credit one solid hit to them,” Bill said.
“Second one on our side that went down?” Peter asked.
“Yeah. Got a clear look at the exit wound in the middle of his chest while he went down.”
“Sounds like the kind of wound somebody won’t get up from,” Larry said.
Peter could hear the hopeful note in his voice. “His buddy is still an unknown quantity.”
“Hey. The truck’s moving,” Irene said.
Peter turned his attention from the conversation and back to his scope. The truck was backing up slowly. Somebody was on the passenger side running board, aiming across the hood of the truck to the fields south of the highway, but there was no sign that any gunfire was being exchanged.
The shape of the man hanging on the side of the truck was unmistakable, massively built above the waist, thin below it. It was Carter.
The truck did a Y-turn and took off back toward Black River Falls.
“We heading back home or down to pick up our groceries?” Larry asked.
“Home,” Peter said. “We need to get some proper care for that wound you’ve got.”
14
When he heard the first shots, Hank Carter let loose a streak of obscenities that just about peeled the paint off his truck. He’d told his men to just go get a look at the people he’d seen working in the farm field. Instead, judging by the sound of things, his guys had decided to just open up.
Unless the folks in the field also had access to old military hardware that could fire on full auto.
“We tried so hard to do this right,” he said to his driver. All the way across the valley, he’d stopped the truck so he and his team could take their time to give the fields below them a solid recon with binoculars and rifle scopes. That’s how they’d picked up a couple people out harvesting by hand.
Then he’d had his driver idle the truck slowly, so they could move as quietly as possible until they hit a long downhill where he just shut the thing down and let it coast to the intersection.
“I told those assholes, ‘Look, don’t shoot.’ Didn’t I?” Carter turned a withering glare on his driver. “Didn’t I?”
“Those were your exact orders, sir.”
“Damn right, they were. So why does it sound like a D-Day down there?”
In amongst the high-pitched rattling of M-16s going full out, Carter could hear the deeper barks of heavier rounds, semi-auto, disciplined.
“What if they got spotted and fired on first?” the driver asked.
“Then they should be pulling back to here. Does that sound like it’s getting closer?”
The driver sat still for a minute, frowning into the distance. “I mean, they’re doing that buddy thing.”
“Yeah, but they’re not doing it in this direction,” Carter snarled.
“Should we go get them?”
“No. They should be coming back to us.”
The driver started to say something, until Carter balled his fist.
The gunfire kept going, the fully automatic M-16s chattering away, the other weapons responding.
“You hear that, sir?”
“What?” Carter asked, looking at his driver.
“New players.” The man pointed out across the field to the south of the highway, planted with some sort of low, leafy green crop.
Carter leaned out the cab of the truck and put a hand behind his ear, trying to block out the steady noise of the firefight his men shouldn’t have started. Try as he might, he couldn’t catch any other sound. “I got nothing,” he said, slipping back into his seat. As he did so, a bullet cracked through the cab. Two more rounds pinged off the hood of the truck.
The driver punched the truck’s ignition while scrunching way down in his seat.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Carter said, dropping down below the level of the dashboard.
“Just getting ready.”
Carter opened up his door. The three men he’d kept back with him had been off the road, sitting in a sunny spot on the grass. As shots started coming in, they’d flattened themselves and were crawling toward the truck.
“Form a line,” Carter said, pointing along the ditch beside the road. “Find who’s shooting at us.” He put just enough of his head over the dash to be able to see the clump of woods his men had disappeared into, waiting for them to come on back.
Several minutes passed. No more gunshots came at his truck from across the highway, and the firing from his scouting party stopped. Soon after, he started seeing men coming out of the woods up ahead.
“Looks like we’re two short,” the driver said.
“Not necessarily,” Carter replied. “Two went along the highway to flank.”
“You mean the direction those shots came from?” the driver asked, pointing to the fresh gouges in the paint on the truck’s hood.
“Yeah. Shit.” As Carter watched, the other two men never materialized. And one of the four he could see was slung over the shoulders of another, not moving. Of the remainder of the group, one was holding his right upper arm, the sleeve of his uniform completely soaked through with blood.
“Get low!” Carter shouted. “We’ve taken fire from across the road.”
The two unencumbered men dropped to a crouch and started running. The one carrying another did his best to pick up the pace. Assuming they were all still being watched even though they hadn’t been fired on for quite a while, Carter hoped the slow-moving man wouldn’t make too tempting of a target.
Mercifully, his men were allowed to cross the field to the truck. “Load up, everybody,” Carter said, grabbing his driver’s rifle and stepping out onto the running board. “What the hell happened? Eyes only, no bullets were my exact orders.”
“They made us,” the man carrying another said. “Looks like they’ve got some dugouts put together down there. I was about to call the rest back when Stubbs’s team just opened up on them. Figured we could abandon him to get killed or finish what the dumbass started.”
“So, where is he?” Carter asked.
His man shrugged as best he could with an unconscious body draped over his shoulders. “I think he and Willy got their dumb asses killed.”
Carter leaned over the hood of the truck, aiming across the road. “Just get in the back.”
As soon as he got the signal, the driver started backing the vehicle toward the last intersection, a hundred yards back. He got it turned around, and Carter hopped back into his seat. “This was not how things were supposed to go down. We were supposed to find that prepper house up on the ridge that Rocky told us about.”
“I can still head up the hill here. I think that’ll get us up onto that road,” the driver said.
Carter took a look. It seemed to be going even farther down into the valley, not up to the ridgetop. But he’d already figured out that the roads in the area went up and down or bridged rivers unexpectedly. There was no way to look at one and be able to guess what it did around the next bend.
“No,” he said. “Let’s just get back to our staging area and see what we’ve got.”
Fifteen minutes later, the truck stopped in a place that met only the loosest definition of a town. It was a gas station, general store, and three houses. There wasn’t even an intersection, but there was a sign letting people know they were in the unincorporated community of Kluskey. The cartel had cleared the place while Carter and Prange had been in Bowman. The couple of farms close enough to see into “town” had also been forcibly emptied out. The parking lot of the general store was one of the staging areas where people were brought out to work the fields and the crops were picked up.
“Fill it up,” Carter said to one of the cartel me
n, sitting by a weird assemblage of a muck pump and a stationary bike set up by the ports of the underground fuel storage tanks. He went to the back of the truck and watched his men as they hopped off. They just left the badly wounded man in the back as they all filed out. The other wounded man had his arm heavily bandaged.
“Well?” Carter asked, looking at his guys.
A couple shook their heads but didn’t say anything.
“Then get a couple shovels and bury him. We’re not going to just haul him around with us.”
He quickly picked out the one man he’d sent on the recon that wasn’t dead, wounded, or covered in blood from carrying the now dead man. “So, what the hell happened out there?” he asked.
“We told you. We were keeping an eye, and realized they must have noticed us, because they all got weird and started dropping their goods and going into the tree line. No reason to do that unless somebody spotted us. So we just froze and tried to get a count, then Stubbs just took and lit ’em up.”
“So how many were there?”
“Three we could see,” the man said. “Don’t know how many we didn’t. At least one up where they were piling their haul, plus whoever they had across the road.”
The man hadn’t been part of the original crew into Bowman, so it wouldn’t do any good to ask if he recognized any of the people. “Sounds like you all had a good fight on your hands.”
“Yeah. We did notice they were all carrying while working. Rifles at least. They also got at least as much training as we did, taking turns on the shoot and scoot.”
“You get any of them?” Carter asked.
“Heard one guy yowling like he got hit.”
“So we’ve got one wounded, one dead for sure, two unknown, and you’re telling me you all maybe wounded one?”
“We may have taken more, but that’s the only one I can speak to,” the man said.
“I’ve got half a mind to go out there and haul Stubbs in just so I can kick his dead ass back to life and kill him again,” Carter said.
“We kept the pressure on the other dudes as long as we heard Stubbs going. Once that shooting stopped, we figured him and Willy were knocked down, pinched in between the guys we’d seen and whoever was across the way.”
Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival Page 9