by Chuck Dixon
Another long burst brushed the packed mob of skinnies back farther. The flares were dying, and in the returning gloom, Dwayne could clearly see the path of white tracers as they strobed out from the dark in shallow arcs.
A second and heavier weapon opened up closer to Dwayne. The ring of skinnies faded back, leaving a number of them writhing on the ground bleeding out. The crowd broke up then and ran in full wailing panic for the protection of the surrounding huts.
“On your feet, Rangers!” Chaz shouted as he trotted out of the gloom, two green-glowing discs where his eyes should be.
Chaz pumped rounds toward the huts from the M-4 rifle in his fists. He unslung a second rifle from his shoulder and tossed it to Dwayne along with a cloth bandolier holding ten magazines.
“You remember how to use that?” Chaz said and dropped to a knee by Jimbo and touched the still man’s throat with two fingers.
“Fucking A,” Dwayne grunted. The feel of steel in his hands gave him a new surge of strength. He worked the action back to chamber the first round and sprayed the huts with a blaze of fire that was joined by automatic fire from a position to his three o’clock, a pounding noise from that heavier weapon. A Squad Automatic Weapon of some brand was throwing out eight hundred rounds a minute. A weapon with awesome killing capabilities in the right hands. If that was Hammond out there in the dark, Dwayne thought, it was as close to having God on your side as any soldier was ever likely to experience.
A fearful keening rose from the village all around them. Dwayne slung the bandolier over his shoulder.
“Lee?” He nodded toward the source of fire in the dark.
“None other. Cover me while I get Jimbo up.”
Chaz lifted Jimbo into a fireman’s carry, and they backed away from the bonfire and toward the rock face. Both fired suppression all the way. The skinnies stayed in the shadows barking and hooting. These little bastards were just too damn dumb to be scared.
Dwayne whirled at the sound of a sharp crack echoing from the cave mouth. He ran for the opening as a sudden flash bloomed from the dark interior followed by a second crack.
The derringer. Caroline.
Inside, he found the white painted shaman lying with the back of his head blown off, a blood-slick flint knife in the sand by him. The chemical stink of gunpowder hung in the air. The old hag lay by the fire with her throat cut ear to ear. Caroline’s still form lay propped against the back wall of the cave in the shadows cast by the fire. Dwayne dropped to his knees and crawled to her.
She stared wide-eyed at the frozen grimace of the shaman glaring sightlessly at her. There was a puckered black hole punched in his face just below one eye. She threw the smoking derringer aside.
“He killed the old bitch and came straight at me,” she said and shook herself.
“We’re going home,” Dwayne said and helped her to her feet.
“We are home,” she said to herself. “Just way too early for us.”
He helped her toward the cave mouth. Outside, the sounds of the one-sided firefight heated up.
“They’re holdin’ back,” Chaz said. He was on one knee to one side of the cave opening and scanning the huts over the sights of his rifle. To his eyes, through the NOD’s lenses, he could see the village as a bilious world of shimmering green and white. The eyes of the villagers glowed silver like countless pairs of coins bobbing as they kept a watch from what they believed was the safety of the dark. He popped a large male through the head, and the field of glowing discs vanished in a heartbeat.
“They were born with night-vision. They’re waitin’ to see what we do next,” he said. “We got to move soon. They’re gonna follow us all the way up the mesa. Plenty of choke points on the way, and they know them all.”
“This is their hunting ground,” Dwayne said.
Dwayne was down by Jimbo who was sitting up now and sipping at a bottle of Dasani. Jimbo winced as the water washed over broken teeth. His mouth was bloody from a long gash in his lower lip.
“You maintaining, bro?” Dwayne said.
“One of those little ankle-biters brought me down with a rock,” Jimbo said with a weak laugh and held up a black automatic, his own Browning High Power brought to him by Chaz. “I can move. I can shoot.”
Fire from the Minimi swept over the huts, short suppression bursts. Thatch blew upwards and tracers lanced through mud walls.
“We got to move and stay on the move.” Chaz dug in his shoulder bag. “Hammond’s gonna cover the right side of the east trail to the mesa.” He tossed Caroline a t-shirt and a pair of cut-off jeans.
“Your brother sent them,” Chaz said.
She stepped into the cut-offs over her boots and pulled the t-shirt over her head. It was an XXL with a silk-screened portrait of Celine Dion emblazoned on it, and it fit her like a mini-dress. Parviz and Quebat. Had to be.
“Lead the way, Chaz,” Dwayne said and took up the drag position, covering their six o’clock as they moved around the rock face back to the same path Jimbo and he had taken down on their approach only an hour before.
HAMMOND MOVED UP TO a ledge where he could watch the village from a better firing position. The Minimi was hot in his hands after running several hundred rounds through it. His NOD gear specs revealed the figures swarming between the huts in restless huddles. They weren’t yet moving to pursue the rescue group as it climbed the east trail toward the mesa. The flares seemed to freak the locals more than anything else.
The field through which the Rangers and the woman would return to The Now was under an hour’s fast hike away. With wounded in tow, it would take half again that time at least. Maybe two hours. A long two hours. Hammond would dog their flank to keep it clean of attacks.
Eventually, the skinnies would wise up and come running. They were hunters, and they brought down prey by running it to exhaustion then attacking in numbers like aborigine hunters had for tens of thousands of years. The Cheyenne hunting buffalo and deer. Inuit after caribou. Masai stalking oryx. His own ancestors painted in blue woad to run down elk.
The way back to the mesa top was a winding path through dense pine scrub with defiles and rock formations that would make perfect stages for ambush for the Rangers so long as they could keep the lead. These twists and rocks and deadfalls could just as easily provide bushwhacks for the skinnies if they fell behind schedule. Or if Hammond let the little monkey-ass fuckers get ahead of them.
Hammond was covering the far right of the retreat path and would put a fright into the vicious little men, keep them backed off so the rest could make the safety of the high ground. Chaz was to stay to his left to form a moving enfilade and keep the back trail brushed clean and skinnies away from the escape route.
A knot of skinnies was moving forward along the narrow lanes between the huts. They were running to break out of the village. Hammond shouldered the big gun and sent a stream of tracers down toward them. He walked rounds right into the congested knot. The group scattered, leaving a few bodies behind. More small clutches were running forward and emerging from the village at different points, testing their hidden tormentor. He worked the Minimi from one bunch to another, but more than a few were making it into the brush at the bottom of the hill and below his line of fire.
They knew from the trajectory of the tracers where he was and were moving up the hillside to flank him. If they got between him and the rest of his fleeing brothers he’d be no good to anyone. Chaz was right when he warned Hammond that these little fuckers didn’t scare easy or scare for long. His situation was deteriorating fast. Hammond crashed through the scrub to scramble up the hill and get his ass farther above the skinnies and closer along the path of Chaz’s line of withdrawal.
As he moved, he could hear muted hooting from the foliage around him. They were letting each other know their positions and would rush him when they determined they had the edge. This is how they hunted. This is how they brought down the monsters they stalked with nothing more than spears and clubs. But Hammond was a n
ew kind of monster.
He plucked an HE grenade from a vest pouch, pulled the ring, and flung it high to his left and downslope. The canister tinked and tonked through pine boughs and went off with a flat, sudden crack. The woods all around went silent. No more hoots and hollers.
That gave the little shit stains something to ponder.
Hammond moved swiftly uphill to a new position to cover the evac trail. As he did, he could hear renewed voices from below calling out, punctuated by the barking of the dog pack. The skinnies gave up all pretenses at stealth now. It was going to be a chase now pure and simple. Run and gun all the way to the evac zone.
CHAZ TOOK A KNEE beside the trail and waved for the others to pass him. The blast of the grenade echoed up to them through the trees. It was a sign that the skinnies had broken cover and were closing on their ass.
Jimbo and Caroline Tauber climbed past him. Dwayne stopped and looked back.
“How long you been back here?” Dwayne said.
“Long enough to double-time to your position,” Chaz said. “We opened up when we saw them getting ready to filet you.” His eyes scanned the dark woods crowding in on either side of the trail.
“How long back in The Now?”
“A fucking long six days.”
“The field will be closed when we get there,” Dwayne said.
“Probably. We hold the mesa until it opens again.”
“You already thought of that?”
“Because you taught me to, Top.” Chaz spared him a glance. “Stick with Jimbo and the lady. I’m waiting on Lee so I can overlap his fire.”
“Don’t stay too long. We’ll need every gun hand up at the exfil point,” Dwayne said and climbed the slope after Caroline and Jimbo.
“Roger that.”
Chaz looked over his sights into the dense shadows between the tree boles. A bloom of light flashed down to his right, followed by staccato pops. The dark closed in again and a second shimmer gleamed from a new position closer to him. Hammond was closing the distance, firing suppression as he moved. The skinnies were close and working closer, climbing the hill to get above Hammond and encircle him.
Glassing the left side of the trail, Chaz could just make out humped figures moving between shadows a hundred yards down the trail. He kept the sights trained on them. A shushing sound came up through the low hanging boughs down the trail, a rippling movement closing fast on him.
He opened up with his rifle as a pack of dogs exploded into view and ran to close the gap between them and their prey. They ran shoulder to shoulder, haunch to haunch up the narrow trail. The bullets pounded into the rushing mass in a long burst. The dogs’ charge collapsed as a half dozen of them tumbled to the trail.
Chaz stood to eject the magazine and slam in a new one. He scanned the hill as he drew back the action and let it slam home with a clack. Canine body parts littered the trail below him in a mess that sent vapor into the cooling night air. The whimpers of the wounded rose from the brush.
“Chaz!” Hammond called from somewhere below and right.
“Yo!” Chaz called back. “Movin’ to your two o’clock!”
“Contact my ten o’clock!”
Tracers ripped through the trees below him, zipping across the trail in arcing trails of glowing white. They tore into the section of the brush where Chaz last saw movement. Hammond was sweeping the trail. Chaz sent some three-round bursts down and to the left just above where he saw figures humping up the hill. He could hear a bunch of someones crashing through the brush below and moving quickly away downhill. They were discouraged for now. But they’d be back up the trail when it got quiet again.
“Make for Little Rock!” Hammond called when the firing died down.
Little Rock was the formation of boulders that formed the designated one-third mark up the trail through the trees. It was near where they found the kid in the Batman shirt on the first day. He’d walked it with Hammond yesterday back in The Now as they mapped their approach path and withdraw strategy. His contingency plan with Hammond was to use the tumble of boulders as a pre-designated defensive position to cover their fallback if things got tight.
And they were puckered-up sphincter tight right now.
Chaz turned and ran up the grade at a sprint, knowing that his brother Ranger had his back. He didn’t look back as the Minimi opened up below in long, controlled volleys. Hammond was conserving ammo and, more importantly, trying not to burn out the SAW’s barrel this early in the fight.
Priority One, Lee needed Chaz to make that group of rocks and cover the retreat.
Chaz arrived at the rocks bathed in sweat and gasping. Repoing cars was honest work, but it didn’t keep a man fighting fit or Army strong. Chaz bitched at himself for the hundredth time since starting this gig for letting himself become an out-of-shape asshole. He knew Hammond was moving fast below him and probably not even popping a sweat, with a heart rate below seventy even as all the shit came down around him. Back to the gym, back to the track for this proud black man, Chaz promised himself.
But first, they all had to get back to the year they came from and the hell out of this place.
Chaz propped the M4 on a flat section of rock in a natural embrasure. He regained his wind taking long, even breaths. This was the perfect redoubt and covered the hill one-eighty around. It was much like it was when they hiked out and surveyed it yesterday except the rocks were more sharply defined here and now, not worn down by millennia of wind and water. And they had a cover of brushy plants with clumps of yellow berries hanging from them.
Below him, he spotted the intermittent flash of Hammond’s big machine gun. Sucker weighed over twenty pounds before the fat box mag was attached, but Lee played it like an air guitar. Stick and move. Stick and move. Working his way closer to Little Rock and Chaz’s protective field of fire.
Figures moved closer coming up either side of the trail. The skinnies assumed the brush and shadows would hide them. To Chaz, they were plainly visible in a perpetual lime-green high noon. Men with long spears in their hands humped up the trail at a run, with dogs loping ahead of them. They were to Lee’s left and were moving fast to cut him off in a wide flanking movement. That brought them square into Chaz’s arc of fire and clearly defined in the light through the NOD lenses.
Chaz laid the blade of the sight ring on the leading runner and squeezed the trigger. The skinny’s head vanished in a red cloud and, as he dropped lifeless to the trail, Chaz laid single shots left and right and brought down two more from a good hundred-yard range. The group leapt and crawled to either side, and Chaz stood to send longer bursts downhill. Their advance was broken up, momentum lost. The dogs stood barking and snapping but stopped their forward progress.
A crunch and spatter of rock scree to his right. He swung his sights to see Hammond pounding up through the trees to the foot of Little Rock, snaking and zagging. A spear flew past the running Ranger followed by a second and third. Chaz emptied the magazine at figures closing on Lee’s six. The skinnies scattered back downhill to the cover of the trees.
The bastards were learning. They were using cover. They knew they had the numbers but were growing wary, moving more cautiously.
Chaz marveled at how their esprit de corps maintained in spite of taking catastrophic casualties. Either that or their strictly animal instincts had taken over and only rage and hunger moved them. Chaz could dig that. Back to basics. Pissed off with an empty belly.
Hammond scrambled between two upright boulders and up onto an exposed ledge ten feet above Chaz; a natural tower.
“I got this,” Hammond called and locked a fresh box mag in place. Then he pulled two frags from his vest and pulled the rings. “Catch up with Dwayne. Make sure they stay on the trail and on route.”
Chaz moved without speaking and humped uphill, keeping the formation of Little Rock at his back. A basso thud shook the earth under his boots with another just after. The Minimi picked up immediately in coolly controlled three-round bursts behind h
im. He climbed upward toward the field of stars visible now through the thinning treetops and the clouds racing east.
UP THE TRAIL, DWAYNE TOOK POINT.
He divided his attention between the path ahead, the woods on either side and making sure the other two kept up. The game trail they were following was the same as the one he and Jimbo took down to their hide above the village. The narrow run was cleared by the passage of centuries of hooves and paws. It led straight up the slope by the path of least resistance. But it was easy to lose where it was overhung by long ferns and heather. It was also crossed by other trails, and the wrong choices led to the ridgeline by more circuitous routes or away to dead ends in the woods. Getting hopelessly lost was a matter of a few paces down the wrong track.
Up ahead it widened where it joined a gouge torn in the slope by rainfall that had rushed downhill in the past. It was a straighter path up to the crest with banked sides where years of runoff tore a path to the sea below.
Caroline was going steady, running on her last reserves of adrenaline. She’d crash soon. They all would. Jimbo was the one slowing them down. He was having problems with his balance and fell to his hands and knees to vomit twice, which only made him weaker. Caroline was supporting him by the elbow and muttering encouragement as they came to where the trail hooked sharply around a deadfall. She held Jimbo’s Browning now. He kept letting it fall from his hand. Her lime-washed skin looked phosphorescent in contrast to the black t-shirt that covered her to just below her crotch.
The banks along the gully would hide them from sight but offer concealment for bushwhacks as well. Dwayne looked up and could see more sky through the trees. They were nearing the edge of the tree line and would soon be at the open grassy ground leading up to the field area. There’d be less cover there, but the possibility of ambush would decrease. When it came to range, the rifles gave them every advantage. He could tell from the gunfire and grenade blasts coming from below that Chaz and Hammond were having a bitch of a time keeping the skinny hunting parties from flanking them. If they were cut off from one another, each little group would be overwhelmed in a hurry. Their automatic weapons wouldn’t mean dick if they were surrounded in dense brush.
