by Jake Bible
She turned to check the status of the vehicle and frowned. The front tire was basically strips of rubber while sparks lit up the holes in the motor cover. Amanda had no idea what had been hit, but specifics didn’t seem to matter too much as smoke started to pour up out of the holes.
“Shit,” she said as she hurried around to the back of the speed roller and grabbed the fire extinguisher that was right there at the side of the hatch.
She raced back around and jammed the nozzle into one of the motor cover’s holes then squeezed the trigger, filling the space with foam. Smoke and sparks stopped which meant the vehicle was no longer in danger of possibly igniting and destroying the precious cargo she’d just found. She also figured the vehicle was no longer able to start up and run which pretty much destroyed her escape plan.
Not knowing if more combots were coming or not, Amanda made a decision.
She started unloading all of the weapons, supplies, and ammunition from the cargo hold and moved as much as she could, as fast as she could, back into the armory. It wasn’t easy considering she had to navigate around the downed combots, but she refused to give in or give up.
If escape wasn’t happening, then she planned on making one hell of a last stand.
***
“We used up all of the stun thumpers in the first attack,” Mike said as he modified Cash’s stun thumper in a way that was considerably more elegant of a job than Amanda had done. “Only way we survived.” He hefted the weapon and stood up. “Done. Who gets the honors?”
“That would be me,” Haskins said.
“Jesus, Lucas, you don’t have to volunteer for every fucking suicide mission,” Olivia snapped.
“I’m the operator that is least effective in combat, Liv,” Haskins said, shrugging his shoulders. “We need Ivy to stay healthy so she can cover our asses. We need Mike healthy to do shit like he just did. We need Tressa healthy because she knows as much about this base and Flipside as anyone else. And Doc doesn’t have legs.”
“Which leaves me,” Olivia said, holding her hand out to Mike.
“You got guts and bravery bordering on psychotic,” Haskins said.
“You can say that again,” Ivy responded with a laugh.
“Psychotic guts and bravery trump the stump,” Haskins said and waved his stump yet again. “I’m the expendable factor.”
“No one is expendable,” Cash said and pulled the modified stun thumper out of Mike’s hands. “I’ll make the toss. I’ll have better aim with two arms.”
“But you’re Trevon Cash,” Haskins said, his tone well over the line of sarcastic. “The hero come to save us all!”
“Haskins can be a bit of a gloomy Gus,” Dr. Raskov called from the darkness.
“You’ll need to carry Doc,” Haskins said. “You’re the only person large enough and knows how to fireman carry someone across a battlefield. Because you’ve done it before.”
“That’s a good point,” Ivy said. “Doc is far from mobile.”
“I’m not totally feeble,” Dr. Raskov said as he came into the dim light, crawling up on his hands as he dragged the rest of himself behind. “I can move.”
“That lasts about three minutes before his arms give out and he falls on his face,” Haskins said. “Look at his nose.”
Cash did look at the doctor’s nose and it had seen better days.
“I got ya, Doc,” Cash said and went and picked the man up, throwing him over his shoulder exactly as Haskins said he could. “We doing this?”
“We get to the speed roller and the weapons first,” Ivy said. “We set everyone up securely in the armory then you and I sweep the base for survivors and take down as many combots as we can without getting our guts spilled onto the ground. You good with that plan, Mr. Cash?”
“I am good with that plan, former Mrs. Cash,” Cash replied.
“I’ll go with you two,” Olivia said.
Cash started to argue, but Ivy caught his eye with a head shake. He raised an eyebrow and Ivy nodded. Cash looked Olivia up and down.
“You’ve been training?” Cash asked.
“No, I ended up looking like that Linda Hamilton chick from that flat movie back in the 20th because I have low self-esteem and wanted to overcompensate,” Olivia snapped.
“What movie?” Cash asked.
“We’ve had a lot of time to go through the vid library on the base,” Mike said. “And she really does look a lot like that Linda Hamilton chick.”
“I’m in that kind of shape all the time,” Ivy stated. “No one compares me to a movie star!”
“Still don’t know who any of you are talking about,” Cash said. “We going or what?”
“Yep,” Haskins said as he took the stun thumper from Cash. “Here goes nothing.”
Ivy moved out of his way and took up a position with her .338 directly behind him. Everyone else lined up behind Ivy and tensed as Haskins threw the bolts then shoved the door wide open. He tossed the humming stun thumper outside then fell to the ground, his one hand covering the back of his head.
The stun thumper detonated as the combots outside opened fire, but they only got off a few bursts before the EMP dropped them.
Haskins was retching as Ivy grabbed his shoulder and helped him to his feet before she took point and led the group away from the cellar.
“You good?” Cash asked her.
“Shhhh,” Olivia said from behind him.
Ivy nodded, but Cash wasn’t so sure that she was telling the truth. He’d been as close as she had to a mini-EMP before. That shit churned guts and boiled brains. By the way Ivy had her shoulders almost up to her ears, he knew she was feeling the effects. But as the transportation for a man without legs, there was nothing Cash could do except follow his ex-wife into the wreckage of Flipside FOB.
***
The second time Thompson came to, he wasn’t in quite as much of a panic as the first time. Having a ten-ton dinosaur protecting you tended to make one relax slightly.
But only slightly.
Thompson was very aware of the precarious situation he was in. Even a full-size Ankylosaurus was no match for combots. Elvis could take them out with a surprise attack, since he was cold-blooded and their thermal imaging didn’t pick him up as fast as it picked up warm-blooded creatures. But the dino was now stationary and basically a sitting duck in the opening to the crawler’s cargo hold. The combots didn’t need anything but normal optics to see him if they came looking.
And Thompson knew they’d come looking. Unfortunately, he was very familiar with combots, considering the Russians had bought the original designs off of Topside Industries decades earlier. Every military force in the world had a version, but the Russians had taken the combots and perfected them. The Russian military rarely used human soldiers anymore for combat. No need.
So, combots would be coming, which made staying in the crawler kind of silly. Or at least staying in a stationary crawler kind of silly.
Thompson pulled himself to his feet, waited for the lightheadedness to pass, then walked to the small hatch set into the front wall and slid it open. He grimaced at the sight of the corpses, but didn’t let a couple of dead bodies slow him down. He was slow enough as it was.
Squeezing through the small hatch, Thompson shoved the corpse out of the shotgun seat so he had room to move. He didn’t need the driver out yet. No point if the vehicle wouldn’t run. He reached across the corpse and pressed the ignition button. The powerful electric motor hummed to life, then basically tore itself from its anchors in the motor compartment as parts ground against parts that weren’t meant to grind against each other.
Thompson shut the motor down fast and scrambled back through the hatch as fast as he could move. The failure had made a considerable amount of noise.
“You don’t die this way,” Thompson mumbled as he navigated the cargo hold and came to a stop behind Elvis. “We do not die this way, right, my good boy?”
There was no way the dino could really understand wha
t Thompson said, but he chirruped agreeably and swung his head back to look at the old man. His beak bonked on the rear hatch’s frame and Elvis grunted with displeasure before facing forward again.
“Okay, you will not like this, but it’s gonna have to be the way,” Thompson said as he clambered up over Elvis’s rear by using the dino’s tail as a handhold.
Thompson was up on Elvis’s back, squeezed between two rows of armored spikes, by the time the dinosaur realized what was happening. And, like Thompson had expected, Elvis was not pleased. Not pleased at all.
The Ankylosaurus took off running. He sprinted away from the crawler at full speed, his beak wide open and bellowing his displeasure at being treated like a bronco. It was a good thing that Elvis wasn’t built to buck like a bronco or Thompson would have been sent flying before the dino had even gotten a yard away from the crawler. But, being a torso-heavy species with short legs, Elvis couldn’t comprehend bucking.
Instead, he headed straight for a clump of broken and warped struts that stuck out from a mostly collapsed building about thirty yards away. Thompson risked glancing up and rolled his eyes at the predictable nature of the dino he rode. Elvis was going to try to scratch him off.
“No, boy!” Thompson called. “It’s me!” He slapped at Elvis’s hide over and over. “It’s me, boy!”
Elvis slid to a stop, his head wagging back and forth, confused.
“Up here,” Thompson called. “I’m on your back. We need to get away, boy. We need to run.”
Elvis turned in a tight circle as he struggled to find Thompson. He spun around and around until he had to stop because he was getting dizzy. His stubby legs wobbled under him and he sat down with a hard thunk.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Thompson swore. “This was a stupid idea.”
There was a high bleep from a few yards away and Thompson craned his neck to see around Elvis.
Combots. Two of them and they were calling more. Thompson realized there was a reason he hired highly trained, highly experienced men and women to handle security. He was a businessman, not an operator, and his lack of good judgment over his choice of escape tactics proved that right away.
His lack of good judgment when it came to choosing his escape partner exacerbated the situation.
Elvis stood back up and faced the combots head on. Then the dino turned tail and ran the opposite direction as fast as it could. Thompson whooped with relief as they went around a corner and the combots behind them were lost from sight.
Three more combots appeared in their path and Elvis squealed in alarm then skidded to a stop.
“Dammit,” Thompson said and tried to nudge Elvis and get the dino to scramble for cover inside the semi-collapsed building he’d been heading toward for a good back scratching. Elvis did not scramble for cover.
The combots’ belt guns whirred to life then everything went haywire as a speed roller collided with the machines, knocking all three up into the air. The combots landed hard several yards away and instantly began orienting themselves in order to stand up. Legs bent at strange angles and hoisted them up off the ground. The belt guns were now on the machines’ bellies instead of backs and it didn’t seem to faze the combots at all.
One took aim at Elvis and Thompson while the other two took aim at the speed roller. Which was moving again. Right at the combots.
A second collision resulted in all three combots being forced under the vehicle. The speed roller reversed and ran them down again. Then again. Then again and again until all that was left were pieces and parts from both the combots and the front end of the speed roller.
The driver-side door opened and an operator that Thompson didn’t recognize got out and waved a hand at him. The man swayed on his feet, blood soaking everything from his abdomen down. The black tactical gear was made even blacker by the freely flowing fluid. Then the man keeled over, dead.
“Go, go, go!” Thompson snapped as he tried to smack Elvis on the shoulder.
But the dino was back to turning in tight circles again. At least until the two combots behind them came around the corner, their belt guns whirring.
“Dammit!” Thompson shouted and closed his eyes.
His shout was answered by heavy-caliber gunfire. He waited for Elvis to scream in pain, knowing the combots would target the dino first, but after a second, the gunfire stopped and Elvis was once more spinning in circles.
“Huh?” Thompson asked as he tried to get a view of the scene between twirls.
“You having fun up there?” Cash asked.
Elvis trumpeted and stopped spinning. He rushed to Cash and shoved his beak against the man’s shoulder that wasn’t loaded down with a sagging and pissed-off-sounding Dr. Raskov.
“Son? Oh, thank God, I thought I was… Is that Dr. Raskov? He wasn’t on this mission.” Thompson stopped talking as he sat up on Elvis’s back and got a good view of the group. “Tressa?”
“Hello, father,” Tressa said. “So glad you could join us. I would have cleaned up before you got here, but we’ve been living day to day, you know, surviving for a few months, so I stopped giving a shit about what you thought, oh, week five or so.”
“Week three,” Olivia said. “You went on that seventy-five-minute rant.”
“I remember that one,” Mike said. “Week eight’s rant was considerably more opinionated, but week three was pretty epic.” Mike held up a hand. “Hello, Mr. Thompson.”
“I don’t understand,” Thompson said.
“Music to my fucking ears,” Tressa said.
“We need to move,” Ivy snapped.
“Get down from there,” Cash said. “We’re heading to the armory.”
“I’d love to get down, but I lost a considerable amount of blood,” Thompson said, pointing to the compression bandage. “So it may be best if—”
“Whatever,” Cash said and patted Elvis on the beak. “Come on, buddy. You get to carry daddy because daddy should never have come on this mission in the first place. Daddy’s stupid ego—”
“Enough, son,” Thompson snarled.
“Just sayin’,” Cash replied as he patted Elvis on the beak again and walked off after the group that was already moving.
Elvis followed obediently, obviously happy to be walking after some of his favorite humans.
Ten
“That’s highly alarming,” Olivia said as she ducked her head back around the corner and faced the rest of the group. “Bunch of combots decided to pick a fight with the speed roller.”
“The speed roller that holds all of our weapons,” Ivy said as she ducked back around too. “I don’t see movement, but the roller’s rear hatch is wide open. So is the armory.”
“Because there are combots holding the door open,” Olivia said. “Someone tried to make a stand and failed.”
“You said there isn’t movement, right?” Cash asked.
“Right,” Ivy replied.
“You see any bodies?”
“No.”
“You see splashes of blood?”
“No, but doesn’t mean there isn’t a ripped-apart corpse either inside the roller’s cargo hold or the armory,” Ivy argued. “You’re welcome to find out, but there’s no point. The vehicle we need is toast.”
“We’ll see,” Cash said and eased Dr. Raskov onto the ground, leaning him up against the wall they all stood close to. “Give me your rifle.”
“I’m not giving you my rifle,” Ivy replied.
Haskins was already holding his out before Cash had to ask, a resigned look of fatalism on his face.
“Thanks,” Cash said as he checked the magazine, checked the chamber, and made sure the weapon was ready to go.
“That wasn’t insulting at all,” Haskins said.
Cash moved around the corner in a low walk, the rifle to his shoulder and his right eye sighting through the scope. The base had enough illumination from the few active automatic klieg lights around the area to give Cash plenty of light to see by, so he didn’t need to
switch the scope to night targeting. But shadows were everywhere, making it very hard to keep from reacting at every little sound that echoed in the night.
Cash steadied his nerves and moved closer to the speed roller. He studied the combots as he got closer and realized they’d been blown up. Grenade craters and the debris patterns were easy to read.
Stepping over the ruined machines, Cash made his way around the vehicle to the cargo hold’s hatch. He swept the rifle across the opening, but no one and no thing was inside. No sign of the weapons, either.
Cash spun about and pointed the rifle at the open armory entrance. He low-walked his way there, made sure the combot blocking part of the door wasn’t going to jump up and rip him a new one, then stepped over the machine and into the center chamber of the entrance. The inner door was open as well and Cash could see that the armory’s lights were out.
That’s when Cash paused and switched his scope to night targeting. The inside of the armory turned from blackness to a world of green light. Cash could just make out a hastily built barrier at the far wall of the armory. A flick of the switch and night targeting became thermal targeting. A very human form was hiding behind the barrier.
“This is Trevon Cash,” Cash called out, ready to throw himself to the ground if gunfire erupted. “Identify yourself.”
“Oh, thank fucking God!” Amanda exclaimed as she stood up. “Where the hell did you go, Cash?”
“I thought I heard Elvis and then…” Cash trailed off. “You know what? Long story and I can only tell part of it.”
Cash whistled as he lowered his weapon and moved inside the armory. The lights came on as soon as he crossed the inner door’s threshold.
“I couldn’t get the motion system to turn off,” Amanda said as she came around the barrier. She glanced past Cash as footfalls echoed through the entrance. “Who’d you find? How many of us made it?”
Amanda’s jaw fell open as Mike, clumsily carrying Dr. Raskov over his shoulders, Tressa with Thompson resting against her, Olivia, Haskins, then Ivy pulling up the rear, came hurrying inside the armory. Ivy turned and took a knee just inside the inner door, her rifle trained on the entrance.
