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.”
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.