What was that Lara liked to say? Adapt or perish.
One of the men had short blond hair, and he straightened up behind the hood of one of the trucks — a black GMC that looked fresh off the lot — and peered up the highway at Nate and Gaby. Thirty yards separated them. That was just far enough of a distance for the soldiers to see them (The uniforms; focus on the uniforms we’re wearing), but not too close to reveal everything. A part of her was afraid they might spot the bullet hole in the back of the uniform she was wearing. Which was silly, because she was facing them. Unless there was a fifth man back there…
Please don’t let there be a fifth man. Please, please…
She could hear nervous movement behind her from inside the truck. It was either Annie or Milly, because it couldn’t have been Claire. The thirteen-year-old knew better. Claire was a born soldier, and Gaby could trust her to remain perfectly still as they attempted this charade. All they had to do was keep their heads down when the shooting started.
Just a little bit longer…
“Who sent you?” the blond shouted at them.
“Mason sent us over as reinforcements,” Nate said. “In case those guys in the truck came back. They up there, or what?”
“Mason sent you?”
“Who else? You think I’m out here for my health? I’d rather be back in town.”
God, he’s good at this, Gaby thought, glancing briefly across the truck at Nate. If she didn’t know better, she would have believed him, too.
“Where you from?” the blond asked. It was almost conversational, like he wasn’t looking at Nate from behind the iron sights of a rifle.
“L17,” Nate said.
“We’re from L11.”
“I’ve been there. You know Hank?”
“Yeah, I know him,” the blond said.
That seemed to do it. Two of the men flanking Blondie started to relax, and one of them took his hands off his M4 lying over the roof of the other truck — a white Toyota pickup — and actually stood back a bit. The third man had also straightened up from behind his cover and now let his rifle hang at his side.
The only one who hadn’t shown any signs of easing up was the fourth man. He was older than the other three by at least ten years and had a large beard. He looked as if he was wearing a uniform that was at least a size too small, making him seem bigger than he really was. He was still watching the Chevy from behind the back of the GMC, as if he expected a gunfight to start up at any moment.
The man must have sensed Gaby staring, because he looked over in her direction and they stared at each other across the short distance. She didn’t know how long that lasted. Maybe it was just a second, or a few seconds. It could have been just a split second.
Oh, shit.
Gaby responded on pure instinct. She wasn’t even aware of what she was doing until she had squeezed the trigger on the M4 and hit the side of the truck.
She had fired too fast and missed!
Fortunately for her, the solid ping! as her round drilled into the vehicle must have startled the bearded man enough, because instead of shooting back at her, he ducked behind cover. That gave her the precious extra second to flick the fire selector on the carbine to burst fire and squeeze the trigger again.
She strafed the truck with the first three-round volley, swinging her rifle from right to left, shattering the driver-side window in the process. She kept squeezing the trigger even as the other three men were slow to react, as if they couldn’t decide between hiding and returning fire. One man was struggling to get a hold of his rifle, while another was racing along the length of the pickup.
Thank God for amateurs, Will.
She was already backing up, moving behind her open passenger door (hoping and praying Nate was doing the same on his side) while continuing to pull the trigger again and again and again—
Then, a second later her own gunfire was lost in the torrential downpour of brap-brap-brap! coming from behind and slightly to her left.
Danny.
Gaby threw a quick look back and saw him standing in the back of the Chevy. He was firing the M240 machine gun over the cab, the nonstop clink-clink-clink of empty 7.62mm brass casings pouring down and bouncing off the roof and landing in the truck bed around his feet. Some flickered onto the highway behind Gaby, while others somehow managed to rain down the front windshield and clank against the front hood.
Danny held onto the heavy weapon with both hands and was moving it right and left, bracing its bucking weight against the truck’s roof to keep it under control as he oscillated his fire. He was slightly bent over, eyes looking behind the iron sights of the weapon at his targets thirty yards up the highway.
There was a loud explosion as a tire blew, then another one. Windows shattered against the constant ping-ping-ping! of bullets punching through aluminum and metal and steel. All the noise and fury drowned out her own labored breathing. She couldn’t even hear (though she could see) Nate, outside the driver-side door on the other side, still firing up the highway. The smell of gasoline wafted across the highway to her nostrils as the two perforated vehicles began leaking fuel.
Gaby didn’t realize she had stopped pulling her M4’s trigger until Danny finally stopped shooting. By the weight of her weapon, she guessed she still had half a magazine left, so she switched it back to semi-auto and focused on the two vehicles.
Or what was left of them.
The last half dozen or so shots from the M240 were still echoing off the sun-baked highway and the walls of trees to both sides of them when she finally recognized her own shallow breathing. Slowly, slowly, she forced herself to settle down, just as the last gunshots faded.
“Clear it!” Danny shouted. She didn’t know why he was shouting until she realized he was probably slightly deaf from firing the machine gun and didn’t even know it.
Then there was just the silence again, with the occasional clinking as she moved forward, kicking casings out of her path. Nate was moving forward, parallel to her. They exchanged a brief look and nod before continuing on to the GMC and Toyota.
They were wrecks. Worse than wrecks. The tires were blown, every window smashed to pieces, even the ones on the other side. Danny hadn’t spared a single round, and she made a promise to herself never to get in front of one of those weapons.
She didn’t say a word, and neither did Nate as they scooted toward the shredded metal carcasses. She counted two bodies on her side, including the man with the beard and the blond. There were two more on Nate’s end. Thick red blood pooled under and around their still bodies, wet and unnaturally bright against the sun.
Gaby lowered her rifle and looked back down the interstate at Danny and waved. He nodded back and put the M240 away and climbed out of the truck. She didn’t have to be able to see his face to know that all those little motions were causing him a lot of pain with his broken leg. Not that Danny said anything as he hobbled over to the driver-side door and looked in at the girls.
She glanced across the lanes at Nate. He was staring at the bodies, and she couldn’t quite tell what the expression on his face was at the moment. Regret? Sympathy? Guilt?
“Nate,” she said. “We should take their weapons and look for anything else we can use in the trucks, then get out of here.”
He nodded back but didn’t say a word. He looked inside the Toyota through the broken front passenger-side window, and she did the same to the GMC. There was a case of MREs in the back, along with green cans of ammo. She grabbed a tactical pack from the floor and found it filled with extra clothes that she yanked out and replaced with the MREs before collecting two M4s from the ground.