She pulled the trigger as fast as she could and then dropped down behind the trunk as a storm of lead flew her way. The pine tree that had given her cover was torn apart; branches and needles and chunks of bark fell all over her, thick as rain. The tree trunk rumbled and shook and splinters filled the air. A scream ripped from her throat; it was uncontrolled, adding to the near overwhelming panic that made her want to race out of there at full speed.
Only the realization that she still had a job to do kept her in place. Captain Grey and PFC Morganstern were counting on her. Their head start had been minutes only and if Sadie ran away right then, they wouldn’t make it another mile. She had to stay and fight, and yet she couldn’t stay where she was much longer either. There were simply too many bullets passing all around her and the trunk and the air inches above it. One of those bullets would find its mark sooner or later.
Staying flat she wormed her way back to her starting point and, with a quick breath, she hopped up and started shooting—at what she didn’t really know. The trees and the mountains and her enemies were nothing but a blur of colors, and there was no time to aim at anything. She fired five or six times in the space of a second and a half and likely didn’t hit a thing.
But that was okay with Sadie. Since there were so many of them, killing three or four or even ten of them wouldn’t do much in the long run. Her purpose there was to buy time. To that end, she wriggled a few feet further along the trunk and this time, she didn’t leap up to fire, she simply stuck the barrel of the M16 over the trunk and pulled the trigger three times.
She went up and down the forty feet of trunk, repeating this process four more times. On the fifth try, the trigger wouldn’t budge; she was out of ammo...completely out. The only thing she had left to shoot with was the grenade launcher.
“Better than nothing,” she said as she worked one of the 40mm fragmentation grenades from the bandolier. There was an issue with the grenade launcher: she couldn’t fire it at random to keep her enemies huddled behind cover. They would know and they would grow bold and close on her too quickly. This meant that she would have to expose herself again. If she had testicles, they would have shriveled at the thought.
As it was, she felt a sudden lance of fear in her gut. The Azael had gotten used to her erratic movements and they were no longer simply reacting. Now they were shooting at random spots as close above the tree trunk as they could. Sadie knew there was a good chance that she would stand up into the path of a bullet.
“Fuck!” she growled, angrily. There was no lie to her anger; for too long she had been hunted and persecuted, and the reasons? Greed, lust, racism, and superstitious idiocy! She had a right to be furious. It was her enemies who had made her what she had become. It was their fault she was a killer…a murderer.
“Fuck!” she yelled again, psyching herself into doing something that commonsense told her was really, very stupid. With bullets zipping at her from almost every little clump of trees along a curving crescent in front of her, she popped up, sighted down the side of her gun at the thicker part of the forest on her right flank and pulled the odd forward trigger of the under-barrel grenade launcher.
Foomp! Bang!
There was a satisfying scream before the entire mountain side seemed to erupt in a million gun blasts. Sadie felt strangely exhilarated by the action of the grenade launcher. It was more...more manly-feeling, more of a savage weapon, than the simple bang, bang, bang of the M16.
She loaded the next round and did so with a grin.
This time she forced herself to wait half a minute before shooting the grenade. It wasn’t out of fear, though her throat was so tight that she couldn’t have swallowed a Tic-tac, she waited because it seemed to confound her enemies. They blazed away at the trunk with more ferocity than before, changing their tempo and direction of fire, all with the purpose of tripping her up.
It made her grin. Strangely, once she started, she couldn’t stop. The grin was simply glued to her features. Her face felt tight around it and, had she been thinking straight, she would have been worried about what it said about her mental state. Instead, she went with it. It was a death grin, like one found on the Jolly Roger, or on every Halloween mask ever made.
The next time she fired, she waited until the guns were going hot. She could tell they were afraid of the grenade launcher, their bullets were now passing four feet above the tree trunk. She was up and shooting before anyone could react. Again screams accompanied the explosion.
“Damn,” she whispered, working another fat shell into the chamber. “I am good.”
She was good. Destroying the howitzers had given her a boost of confidence that nothing else would have. She had accomplished what trained soldiers hadn’t been able to.
“I’m good, and don’t forget it,” she said on her fifth shot. Her face ached with the maniacal grin frozen on her lips and her trigger finger was stiff from the recoil that went straight through her hand and up into her forearm with every shot.
She was just shaking out her hand when she saw movement to her right. In a flash of insight she knew she had been flanked. Her position behind the trunk, so impregnable for the last eleven minutes was now untenable. There was no cover down the slope on her right.
Immediately, she wriggled backward, passing through the underbrush like a lizard until she was on the back side of the hill. There was a great deal of excited gunfire coming from the right but, thankfully, they were shooting at where she had been and not where she was currently.
When she had crawled for a minute, she found herself in an area of forest so thick that she felt she could chance some speed. Up she jumped. In a blur, she began racing along the deer trail that Grey and Morganstern had been following. Branches swiped at her and roots tried to catch her flying feet, yet nothing could slow her.
She had sprinted two hundred yards and was feeling a good burn in her lungs when there was suddenly more gunfire to her left. At first she didn’t know that she was being targeted. She foolishly thought she had left the Azael far behind, however, in all the time she had crouched behind the trunk, a large contingent of them had been racing along a ravine at the base of the ridge. They were now sweeping up the slope in a wave.
With the leaves snapping off the trees all around her and bullets whining off the rocks, Sadie started running in earnest. She sprinted like only she could and, with the steep slope, it felt as though she was outrunning the hot lead blazing through the air. She ran a hundred yards in Olympic time.
And yet she couldn’t outrun everything. She sped up a little, tree-covered hill and was halfway down the other side before she realized that Captain Grey and Morganstern were standing on the path and that there were people in the dell thirty yards to her left. The people were all armed to the teeth and a number of them were dressed in the colorful scarves of the Azael.
“Don’t do it, Missy,” one of the men said, as Sadie slipped her hand under the barrel of her M16. He had her in his sights and at that range, he couldn’t miss. They were caught.
Chapter 18
Captain Grey
The world would not stop spinning. It went round and round whenever they let him stop for a breather, leaning against a pine tree with his face hard against the rough-edged bark. He would also rest when one of them stumbled on the tiny deer trail. It was almost always Grey doing the stumbling. There was a lancing, through and through quarter-inch tunnel in his left calf that bled freely, while his right, lower leg was one continuous blister that ached miserably.
His left arm hung and was practically useless. The fingers on that side were numb and weak from lack of blood flow. He was also shot through the side, just above his left hip bone. That wound wasn’t bad. It barely bled compared to the other holes in his body and only hurt, miserably if he moved.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t stopped moving except to pause for a few gulps of air and they hadn’t done that more than once or twice in the last hour. They just kept going with Grey, in spite of his injurie
s and his flagging stamina, forcing them on.
He pushed them right up until they were out-flanked by the Azael who trapped them neat as you please up against the hard face of the ridgeline. There were a dozen of the Azael, maybe more, surrounding them. It was hard for Grey to focus enough to count, great black spots began to swim before his eyes.
As the leader of the Azael swung an M4 around and barked orders about dropping weapons and turning about, it was all Grey could do to stay on his feet. He needed to rest badly. He also needed something to drink in a way he had never felt in his life.
Four years before, he had served in Iraq where the summers were arid and blistering, leaving one parched simply by walking to formation. It had not been an easy tour, going on patrols under the weight of a full combat load in a hundred and ten degree heat and yet it was nothing compared to what he was feeling just then.
It’s the burn, he thought to himself. It was the burn on his leg, coupled with the ten mile mountain run he had embarked on earlier…and the loss of blood. It had him reeling in place and when Morganstern and Sadie dropped their weapons and turned, Grey simply refused. He wasn’t armed, and he was such a bloody mess they had to see he was practically harmless.
“Hands up!” the leader of the squad of Azael screamed. He was angry and keyed up, his finger on the trigger of his weapon.
“One second,” Grey said. Slowly, he reached for his canteen as the screamer glared over his aimed rifle. “Just getting a drink,” Grey told him as he put the canteen to his lips and chugged the water and relishing every drop. Right at that moment, he might have welcomed a bullet…a properly aimed bullet, that is.
The leader of the group was sloppy, not only in his stance, but in his entire attitude toward the situation. He appeared to be of two minds: on one hand, he was strangely excited, and on the other he strove to give off an air of nonchalance, as though gun battles, explosions, and frantic chases were an everyday occurrence for him. All in all, it made it so that there was no telling what he would do, except shoot straight, that is; that didn’t seem likely.
“He’s unarmed,” Morganstern told the man. “So why don’t you relax and aim that gun somewhere else.”
The man did as asked, though from Captain Grey’s perspective, he seemed to do so in slow-motion. The M4 swiveled like a minute-hand on a clock face away from Grey and towards Morganstern. When the rifle was aimed midway between them, a sharp crack! sounded from off to their right. It was followed by an entire string of ‘pops’ from further up the ridgeline.
The leader with the M4 wore a look of confusion, right up until his face exploded outward, spraying the tall mountain grasses in front of him with blood and teeth.
Grey was the quickest of the three to drop to the ground. Just like at the stream, the quart of water from his canteen was like an instant infusion of energy. It wouldn’t last and so he was determined to make the most of it while he could. He dropped to the dirt and, knowing that crawling with bad legs and a useless left arm wouldn’t get him very far, he rolled like a log toward where the leader’s lifeless corpse was face first in the dirt.
With bullets whipping from every direction, Grey took up the M4 one-handed as though it was the largest pistol ever made, and fired it at a blurry figure crouched behind a blocky boulder a few feet away. The man spasmed, his hands flaring out and his head pitching back. Grey shot him a second time as a precaution and then changed targets.
He sighted on a second of the Azael, but as he did a bullet went through the man’s eye and blasted out the side of his head above his ear. Grey started sweeping his gun to the left but stopped as the man he had just witnessed being shot, unexpectedly and unnaturally stood up.
Battle was frequently full of amazing quirks that defied all explanation and this Azael man with the hole in his head was a perfect example. With his weapon lying in the grass and forgotten, he stood up with bullets flying all around him and simply walked away as though he had heard his mom calling him home to dinner. There was a lull in the shooting as everyone stared at the freakish sight and it was likely they were all feeling the same queasiness in the pits of their stomachs as Grey was.
The second that the forest hid the man from view, the fighting resumed in a furious exchange with all pretense toward civility or humanity cast away by either side.
By the disciplined pattern of the shooting from up the hill, Grey knew that it was his men arrayed upslope from them. In spite of their exhaustion or injuries, six of them had stuck doggedly to the trail and now were in a perfect position to spring an ambush.
Even with their initial attack, which saw a good number of the Azael drop to the ground lifeless, the soldiers were outnumber three to one. What was worse, they were limited by the small amount of ammunition they carried. The Azael, who weren’t hampered by a lack of ammo, ripped-up the hill side, going full auto in many cases, keeping the soldiers pinned down or scurrying back and forth from cover to cover.
And yet the soldiers weren’t new to firefights. They chose their moments, they laid down cover fire, they actually took the time to aim, and they were fearless. The fearful man hurries his shots, sometimes missing by yards in his desire to get back down behind cover where it was safe. The soldiers, and that included Grey and Morganstern, were amazingly steady in the face of danger. And they rarely missed.
For a good thirty seconds, the Azael were too confused by the sudden onslaught to realize that Grey had managed to find a weapon. He killed three more men before they got wise. Their return fire was appalling in its volume. The bullets came like hot rain and only a slight gully kept him from being killed ten times over. As it was, he received two more nicks: one high up on his right shoulder from a bullet that traveled down the barrel of the M4 and another that creased his lower right leg.
He thought the leg injury was worse than it was as his leg felt almost instantly wet. When he glanced down, he saw that the bullet had ripped open a blister the size of his fist and that it was only interstitial fluids that were running down his calf.
A grunt that implied interesting escaped him and then as the dirt all around the gulley kicked up, he lost all interest in the wound. With rolling now out of the question, he started thrusting forward using just his right elbow and the toes of his right foot. After a minute, he left the shooting behind him and took a quick peek above the grass.
He counted fifteen of the Azael left. From up the slope, there were four men still in the fight, while there was only silence from where Grey had last seen Morganstern. Poor odds indeed, especially as the captain wasn’t able to move and aim with anything close to his full capabilities.
Hunkering back down, he clicked his weapon over to three-round burst before lifting back up so that he was just above the tips of the grass. Again, he fired his weapon pistol style, this time at a clump of men squatting behind a row of thigh-high boulders that stuck out of the ground like the spine of a dinosaur.
At least one was hit. There was a cry as the men dove into the heather sending a scattering of shots his way; all missing high. Grew was already back down in the rut, kicking and scrounging forward, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Someone on the hill fired on the same group of men, complementing Grey and hitting another.
Even as one of the soldiers on the hill cheered, one of the Azael lifted his weapon up from behind a termite-riddled log and emptied his magazine, hitting the soldier more by accident than by any skill. Before Grey could come to grips with the latest loss, there was a sudden rattle of gunfire east of them. It was answered by what sounded like a thousand guns erupting all at once.
“What the hell?” he groused, wondering what fresh craziness was happening. A separate and very one-sided battle was playing out but who was shooting who, he didn’t know. He hoped that the two groups of Azael had blundered into each other and were now killing themselves.
It would be their only chance, he figured.
Only, he hadn’t figure on Sadie. She popped up suddenly, aiming her M16—Foomp
! Bang!
The blast was so close that Grey had to shield his eyes from the effect of the explosion. Three seconds later: Foomp! Bang! Grey hugged the earth as shards of metal zinged about. He wasn’t the only one. All of the Azael were cringing instead of fighting. Even when there was a pause while Sadie reloaded they were afraid to lift their heads.
Grey needed them to move. He needed them running as if their life depended on it. After Sadie’s third shot, he leapt up and cried: “Now! Kill the Azael. Kill all of them!” The next few moments were a blur. His eyes were both angry and crazed, and his face, streaked with mud and blood was that of a wild creature’s. He looked and acted like a man possessed; his injuries were altogether forgotten as he charged.
The remaining Azael broke and fled, many flinging aside their weapons. Grey shot after them until his gun was spent. When it clicked dry, it dropped from his hand, forgotten; there were quite a few guns lying about, and quite a few men as well. Some were stretched out in calm repose as though sleeping, the holes in their bodies barely visible, some were simply the pale white of cadavers laid out on morgue slabs, and some were contorted, mangled and bloody, evidence of their hard death.
He was sure some of the men were faking, holding their bodies rigid to keep from shaking, hoping that they wouldn’t be found out. With the firing continuing sixty yards to the east, Grey didn’t have time to hunt them out. Nor did he have the inclination to. The brief flare of energy that had carried him through the battle was ebbing, leaving him feeling shaky and weak.
“Let’s get moving,” he called out. “What’s our casualty situation?” Up the hill, three men stood and glanced around before one held up three fingers. Three more men he had led to their deaths. Three more souls he was responsible for. Grey buried the thought somewhere deep.
“We can’t leave Morganstern,” Sadie said as she came up. Like Grey, she was burying things deep. She held her chin tilted up slightly and wouldn’t look at the corpses sprawled around them. “He’s fighting, like a hundred of them, singlehandedly. I told them I had passed by a bunch of guys with guns and he said something about flanks or I don’t know what, and then he left.”
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