He took off at a run toward Archer but stumbled to a stop.
“Sweet Jesus,” Chuck whispered.
Churning through the roiling flames of the burning barn, a swarm of tiny drones blew through the smoke, churning it in their wake. An undulating wave of dots stretched up and away into the purple sky. Rounds impacted the corn husks around him. Chuck sprinted for the church, but one of the flamethrower drones had survived and spat flaming liquid across the grass to his right.
Someone screamed and ran, arms high and flailing in flames. Had to be one of Ken’s men stationed beside the barn.
“Motherf...” Chuck pivoted to the right. Leaned into the turn and pounded his legs as fast as he could. Incoming fire zipped and sprayed dirt into his face and arms from the corn rows.
Where was that coming from? Seemed to be coming from all sides. The flames of the barn burned hot on Chuck’s face as he ran toward its right edge.
With their signal jamming equipment destroyed, the little drones had nothing to stop them—and there were hundreds of them up there.
He looked again.
Not hundreds.
Thousands.
Lauren swung her weapon back around. Bright light blinded. Her night vision was overloaded by the searing explosions. She pulled off the goggles. Maybe worse. Now just blackness before her eyes as her retinas tried to adjust.
She could barely make out the rooftop of the house against the lightening sky, so she trained her weapon down the edge and to where she thought it met the ground.
Muzzle flashes lit up the blue blackness.
Left and right. Center.
She unloaded a burst at the spot she thought she’d last seen the man hiding beside the house, then rolled to her left under the balcony. A hailstorm of incoming rounds impacted and sprayed wood splinters. She had on a visor, but shards of wood bit into her cheeks.
On all fours, she scrambled under the deck toward the side entrance that opened on a set of stairs to the basement. Two of the local teachers, Rhonda and Belle, fired over the concrete edges of the stairs, taking aim at the muzzle flashes that lit up the dark shadows under a stand of small fir trees by the edge of the property a hundred and fifty feet away, halfway back toward the seething flames now engulfing Joe’s farmhouse.
Lauren scrambled on her elbows and knees to the stairs.
“Friendly coming in,” she screamed.
Rhonda grabbed Lauren by her shirt collar and hauled her into the protection of the stairwell. Lauren tumble-rolled in. The concrete stairs bit into her forearms and knees. Her submachine gun clattered against the cement.
She needed to reload. Got back up into a crouch on the stairs. Tasted blood in her mouth.
“Maybe three or four to the front,” she said to Rhonda, who nodded she understood.
Lauren took stock of the purple-blue sky and braced for the sight of a searing white flame of a missile raining down. Her kids were in here with more than forty others huddled together. She squinted and tried to find the dot of a bulkier drone against the sky, used the back of her hand to clear away the wood fragments from her visor.
Her vision seemed to shimmer.
But it wasn’t her eyes.
The sky swarmed with dots of tiny drones. Flickering clouds of them against the deep blue sky. Cold dread iced down her spine. It was too many. Too much.
“Two targets, right under the small firs,” Rhonda said and pointed.
Lauren blinked and snapped her attention back to the fight. “Another there?” She pointed to the right of the spot Rhonda indicated.
The woman nodded.
Lauren asked, “Any sign of Chuck or the others?”
“Saw muzzle flashes way out in the field after the first explosion,” Belle said, her eyes forward as she fired a controlled burst into the base of the fir trees. A return stutter of rounds spat concrete fragments into the air before them.
“But nobody got back here?”
Belle looked back at Lauren for an instant, locked eyes, shook her head. The woman had dark skin but looked pale, like all of the blood had drained from her face.
“Keep looking,” Lauren said. “Get them some cover.” She slipped down the stairs, keeping her head low, and opened the door.
The basement of the church was a wasps’ nest of activity. The small windows blacked out. Hay stuffed over them to dampen noise. They hadn’t put all the generators in the barn. They kept half here in the backroom, vented with the windows open. Only started them up once the first shots were fired.
Damon waved at Lauren. “You okay?”
“Two of them under the small fir trees to the north of the farmhouse, two more under the one just south. And one guy to the west side of the house, another one to—”
“I got them,” Travis said.
He was at the foldout next to Damon. Two rows of tables, all with monitors set up on them. Damon had the young people from the town manning the controls, with Luke helping. Everyone in the town who was good at video games, Travis had said the night before, could assist with their makeshift drone program—it had worked for the US Air Force, so it would work for Vanceburg.
Travis said the attackers had to have some heavier hardware in their arsenal, something they hadn’t brought out yet. The attacker’s recon must have indicated that the townspeople weren’t running away. That they were armed and standing their ground. Travis reasoned they needed some juicy bait to draw in the attackers, so they wired up Selena and used her advanced signal processing to begin counter-jamming the radio waves the attackers flooded into the valley.
They sacrificed the truck.
Travis and Damon and everyone else had cleared out of the barn under cover of darkness and run back to the church. This was the real control center.
“Damon, one more missile strike and we’re all dead,” Lauren said nervously. “I’m not sure this storm shelter can take it.” The roof was poured with a foot of rebar-reinforced concrete, but it was a storm bunker, not a nuclear fallout shelter.
Luke remained focused on his screens, his hand on a stripped-down game controller.
“There’s two targets under the trees right out front?” Damon said to Lauren.
“That’s right.”
“Tell me if I hit the mark,” he said and indicated the door.
Lauren retreated, opened it an inch, and peered out. The sky brightening to azure. Shadows appearing in the distance. Shapes of trees materialized from the dark.
A growling hum and the ground began to vibrate.
The churning roar grew louder.
Screams and curses from the front of the church.
A giant machine churned up the street from east to west, a dark figure running ahead of it. The man turned and fired back into the drone tractor. The bullets had no effect on the hulking machine as it bore down on him.
Straight in front of Lauren, a massive corn head tractor crashed into and over the small fir trees. The farmhouse flamed into the sky behind it. Yelping screams as the gnashing blades on the twenty-foot intake churned up the hapless victims. The two men under the next set of trees broke cover just as the next corn head slammed into those pines.
Rhonda and Belle took aim and unleashed controlled bursts of fire.
Chapter 40
LAUREN WATCHED LUKE, wedged between Travis and Damon, his face bathed in the light of the displays arranged in a semi-circle on the tables around them.
“Didn’t expect coming up against drone-tanks with razor teeth, did they?” Damon’s mouth twisted in a grim smile lit by the glow of monitors.
Beside him, also fixated on the screens, Travis said, “Taking off the speed limiters worked. We’re hitting maybe twenty miles an hour. They can’t outrun us.”
Lauren said to her son, “Those are humans on those screens. This isn’t a game.”
Luke glanced up and nodded that he understood, but he still looked excited. She didn’t have the time to process it right now. She tucked her feelings away and refocused.
“Are you still getting a signal?” Lauren asked Damon.
That had been the biggest worry in trying to reconfigure the corn heads as giant remote-controlled toys. When they fought off the fires the week before, Damon had rewired two of the hulking machines to cut fire breaks, so copying what worked before had been straightforward for the other four. The bigger problem was overcoming the signal jamming.
The attackers had to leave gaps in their wide spectrum jamming in the 10 GHz ultra-wideband range for their own drones, Travis had explained. Problem was that Damon didn’t have hardware that could communicate in that range.
The solution was brute force.
They had a team of people raid the hardware store the night before, grab every bit of wire and cabling they could find—anything that would conduct electricity—and use it first to create another antenna around the church, and then to lay wires out into the next street and across the field into Joe’s farm, where Travis set up remote antenna and meshnet nodes. He said they only needed to defend and be able to operate within a short distance of a few blocks.
Lauren crossed to behind Damon and watched one of the screens. An image of the road ahead appeared in pixelated color. The picture froze and didn’t update quickly, but the feed was working.
Damon scavenged a geopositioning emitter from Selena and set up a local GPS from the attic of a house across the street. A map app was open on one of his laptops, showing the positions of the six attacking machines.
“We got them scrambling,” Damon said excitedly.
Lauren looked up at the cement ceiling. They might have the attackers scattered on the ground, but in the air? How long would it take their adversaries to figure out the command post had moved to the church? She unclipped the magazine from her submachine gun and clipped in another. Her last one. They needed to conserve ammo from this point on.
“Move the big one left,” crackled a gruff voice over a walkie-talkie.
“Is that Archer?” Lauren asked.
Travis had his walkie-talkie in one hand and mumbled a reply, then nodded to Lauren. “They’re guiding us from position. Just like we did in Syria and Iraq, but we’re the low-tech guys this time.”
“That’s it, more left,” Archer yelled into the walkie-talkie.
He held it to his ear to try and listen above the noise but couldn’t make out any reply. It didn’t matter. Damon and Travis were doing a surprisingly good job of sheep dogging.
Two corn heads rumbled across the field, and another one of the attackers had to break cover and run for it before he was turned into maize mulch. Archer was on his stomach, Chuck twenty feet to his right, and Rick and Ken a hundred and fifty yards past them toward the north and the Ohio River. They both fired on a figure running ahead of them.
The man fell into the corn husks.
But then got back up.
These bastards had heavy armor on. Hard targets. A second later, the corn head rolled over the man, probably removing the threat of him ever getting up again. Archer heard Chuck calling in commands over his walkie-talkie as he tried to figure out where the rest of the attackers were hiding in the cornfields.
On top of everything else, Archer had to babysit Mumford. He had to admire his enthusiasm, but with one arm gimp and the other a prosthetic—and beaten-up as he was—the guy wasn’t exactly battle ready.
Then again, that’s what soldiers did. Stayed in the fight.
Overhead, masses of the tiny drones buzzed. The sky an azure blue.
Archer suspected the little drones were hanging back as the attackers weren’t sure about the EMP device. Except Luke had destroyed it in a fit of rage after killing Joe with it.
Losing the EMP was a serious setback.
The Mitchell kid should have restrained himself. It wouldn’t take the attackers long to figure out they didn’t have the tool at their disposal. On the other hand, it had been Luke’s idea to use the corn heads as tanks.
Archer had sharpened the circular intake blades on the machines. He wasn’t much good at technical stuff, but sharpening blades? That was right in his wheelhouse.
He scanned the fields.
Glanced at the circling drones overhead. To his right, Chuck cursed into his walkie-talkie as he tried to get the operators to circle back.
An ear-splitting roar. A flash lit up the field.
Another missile tore down from the sky, an instant later detonating in the cornfield a hundred yards straight ahead. The explosion lifted a mound of dry earth and just about flipped the corn head on its side. The blast of heat and concussion wave of straw and dirt scoured past Archer and he put his head down. The machine plummeted back to earth and began circling. They hadn’t destroyed it, but it was disabled.
Another missile speared down on a spurt of white flame past the farmhouse and church.
His team wasn’t going to have those farm tanks operating for much longer. Archer glanced up at the massing cloud of tiny drones. By now the attackers had to know their EMP was disabled. They didn’t have much time until those little bastards got into the fight.
When that happened, this was going to be over fast.
Chapter 41
ARCHER SCANNED THE cornfield to his left and right.
“Stay here,” he said to Chuck.
Archer could just make out long black hair on a target fifty yards in front of him. He was surprised she’d come in so close on a raid, but he didn’t know how desperate they were or how many operators were in the unit. The target was watching ahead, didn’t see Archer behind her. He coughed to get her attention, sprinted on a path that would take him ten feet to her left.
Made like he didn’t see her hidden under the corn husks, like he was watching the corn head circling in the flames from the missile strike.
At the last moment, he dropped.
She fired over the top of him, the flash and suction of the bullet passing so close he felt it on his cheek. Archer hit the deck at a roll, once over, twice. He dropped his rifle in the dirt before he ducked and had his knife out in his right hand.
Dug the blade straight into the neck below the face guard.
It had to be Amina, the leader. Long black hair. The target was slender, couldn’t be more than one-twenty pounds. No match for Archer’s two-twenty. She clawed at the knife lodged in the side of her neck, gagging and gurgling. Reached for her waist, searching for a weapon.
Archer rolled again and pressed his full weight over her and pinned her arms. Seemed too easy, but then, that was often the way it ended.
“Your left!” Chuck screamed.
Archer reacted without thinking. A scarlet dot flashed down. He dodged right, rolling over Amina. The machine exploded in a crunching thud into the dirt two feet past him, spraying corn husks and pebbles into his face. Archer continued the roll up onto his feet. More red dots danced closer in his peripheral vision.
“Run!” Archer yelled, already pumping his legs.
Between the surging flames of the barn and farmhouse was a stand of silver birches, about a hundred yards away. He took off at a sprint and grabbed Chuck’s collar as he passed, jerking him into motion. In college, Archer had been a running back, used to do fifty yards in five-five. He wasn’t going to be able to manage that, but he needed every split second he could muster.
Rick and Ken ahead of them.
Another corn-head tank, two hundred yards distant at the edge of the flaming barn, turned and began moving toward them. Travis and Damon must have seen them running and were trying to send cover, but it was too far away.
Archer felt the beady machine eyes following him but didn’t look back.
He and Chuck made the first of the birch saplings as the whining drones grew louder over the strained heaving of his chest sucking in air. Chuck and Archer split off from each other and hit the dirt, then grabbed cords hidden in the earth and heaved. A darting swarm of bots flew into a net that fell from between the trees, trapping their fluttering wings like fish in a gill net.
/> More swooped in behind them even as they tried to alter course.
“Keep going,” Archer urged.
The mass of enmeshed bug-bots exploded in a roaring bloom of yellow-orange flame.
Ken and Rick pulled up the nets on the opposite side of the stand of trees, but the obstacles wouldn’t keep the machines back for long. The net behind them was already flaming and disintegrating.
They needed a passageway past the farmhouse to the church. A quick escape.
Flickering dots raced through the treetops. Most of the miniature drones in the circling cloud overhead were still holding back. Had to be waiting for someone to unleash the EMP, but the attackers would soon figure out Archer and his crew didn’t have it.
Another flash lit up the trees to the left, followed a beat later by a thudding concussion and blast of heat. The steeple of the church, past the blazing farmhouse, splintered in a mushrooming orange fireball.
“No!” Chuck screamed.
Archer yelled, “Your right!”
Chuck was staring at the church, but flitting drones weaved through the tree trunks straight at him. At Archer’s warning, Chuck glanced right, ducked to grab a cord to raise another net but slipped back in the dirt. Scrambled for his shotgun, but it skittered out of reach.
Archer jolted forward and pulled up his sawed-off shotgun.
The drone-bots swarmed into a tight circle around Chuck and cut Archer off.
Chuck feinted left, then ducked right and stumbled through the open shed door. One arm flailed to find the door to close it. A drone whipped in before he could. Reflected orange flames lit up the interior of the shed as it detonated within, an agonizing scream below the hollow thud of the blast.
Before Archer could react, four more of the machines lanced through the open door. A succession of thumping detonations. Flames spurted through the open door and gaps between boards of the shed like a blowtorch.
Archer kept low and crossed the last twenty feet of open space to the church basement at a run. He waved, hoping the women pointing guns at him saw he was a friendly. Last thing he needed was a bullet from one of his own.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 27
