One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  “There goes Plan A, fucked in the ass,” the Pima managed before passing out on ground as soft to him as a hotel mattress.

  50

  Plan B

  The team was together again by late afternoon. There was nothing happy about the reunion. Two members, Rick and now Jimbo, were down.

  Chaz found the sad collection forted up above the southern bank of the river bed. He followed a trail of blood from a litter of wolf carcasses lying center stream near a deadfall to a level spot above the turn in the river’s course.

  There Byrus had pulled together a sort of redoubt using thorn brambles arranged in a rough circle. The Macedonian was a born tactician and tireless soldier. The makeshift hedge hid the group as well as serving to slow any potential attacks.

  Inside the ring of thorns, Rick lay barely conscious. N’itha dabbed his lips with a wet rag. Jimbo’s left arm was in a sling made by Bat from his own t-shirt. His good eye betrayed the pain the bite was giving him. The cloth of the sling was stained black from the wolf bite. They all looked pale with fatigue.

  “I got a morphine shot if you want it,” Chaz said, taking a knee by the Pima.

  “No, thanks. Need to stay sharp. We’re going to need every gun,” Jimbo said in a hoarse voice.

  “Stay sharp, bro? One eye. One arm. You’re no good to us anyway.”

  “I’d rather not sleep through what comes next.”

  “Your call,” Chaz said.

  “What’s pursuit like?” Bat asked.

  “Getting heavier. The blue fuckers have friends they brought along. Lee and I capped a few to keep them to their side of the river. But we’re running low on ammo.”

  “You think they’re up for a stand-up fight?” Jimbo said.

  “They look pissed. God knows they’re fresher than us. As far as organization, there isn’t much. They won’t come in one rush. It’s more like war bands of twenty or so. Small independent units. But if one or more broke across and got around behind us it could go bad for us,” Chaz said. He stood and scanned the banks for Lee.

  Hammond surprised them all by seeming to materialize out of the forest gloom above them.

  “This our Alamo?” Lee said.

  “I prefer Rorke’s Drift,” Jimbo said in reference to the stand-off during the Zulu Wars in which less than two hundred British soldiers successfully stood off repeated assaults by thousands of Zulu impi. “

  Lee shrugged. That movie did have the happier ending.”

  “How far are they behind you?” Chaz said.

  “Not far enough. And we’re six or seven klicks short of the dam from here,” Lee said.

  No one said anything for a few moments. Lee didn’t ask if they could make it. He could see that they couldn’t. Make a run for the choke point, and the odds had them out in the open when the blue crew and their cousins caught them up. It would be a melee on ground not of their choosing. If they were all in prime condition, it would be worth the risk. But Rick was hors de combat, and Jimbo was close to the same. Byrus and the girls weren’t much better off.

  “We need to keep the bad guys on the other side of the river away from us,” Chaz said.

  “Look at our Dollar Store von Clausewitz,” Lee smirked.

  “Fuck you. We’re low on ammo,” Chaz said. “We can’t hold them off. And sooner or later they’re going to get over their fear and work their way across. We can’t watch the whole river. There’s only one way to make them keep their distance long term.” He scraped an imaginary river in the dirt at his feet with a stick. “Okay,” Lee said.

  “Blow the beaver dam,” Chaz said and stabbed the stick in the dirt at the head of the river he’d drawn.

  “That’ll be me.” Lee began shucking out of his Molle vest, belt, and t-shirt until he was down to his BDU pants and boots.

  “Why you?” Chaz challenged.

  “Because I’m faster than you. Always have been,” Lee said and handed his M4 off to Bat. He held his hand out for the Smith and Wesson .500. Bat handed it over, and Lee stuck it in his waistband. She gave him the handful of shells that remained. He pocketed them. He crouched and rooted around in his pack until he found their last two bricks of Semtex and two detonator sticks. He was surprised when Bat locked him in a hug as he stood.

  “Just a little run, babe. Back before you have a chance to miss me,” Lee said with a hand in her hair.

  “Sure,” she said into his shoulder and tightened her grip for just a second before letting go and stepping back.

  He stopped just long enough to secure the bricks in one cargo pocket and the detonator sticks in another.

  “See you when I see you,” Lee said and moved off at a trot through the trees and down the dry bed.

  Their vantage point from within the thorn ring was optimal. It was inside and above the elbow turn of the river. The approach from the trees on the far bank and the whole expanse of the river bed were visible for a quarter mile or more. Clear fields of fire from high ground. The climb to their makeshift redoubt was a steep one. The opposite bank formed a natural glacis. Anyone coming down it to the river bed would be fully exposed and well inside accurate range.

  “You chose your ground well, girl,” Chaz said. “Location. Location. Location.” Bat smiled back. “You’re going to hold here. I’m going to work the hillside. You have the M4 and Jimmy’s long gun. There’re three twenty-mil grenades left. Save ’em for when things get tight.” Chaz touched the fat lozenges where they lay inside the loops of a bandolier.

  “I’ll use the Winchester until the ammo runs out. I’m good at distances.”

  “Lebanon, right?”

  “And a few other places,” she said, suddenly more tired than before.

  Chaz divided the remaining magazines between himself and Bat. She noticed that he gave her six full magazines of thirty rounds and kept only three for himself. The significance wasn’t lost on her. If he got nailed out there, she’d need the bulk of the ammo to make their last stand.

  “Just stay out of my sight lines,” she said.

  “Roger that. I’ll be to the east moving and sticking. Maybe I can divide them if they come in a bunch. If not, I’ll pick ’em off around the edges. Blunt their momentum. In theory.”

  “It’s solid.” She nodded, and the black man was away through a gap in the thorns.

  She glanced over at Byrus. He smiled at her, a feral leer from a face painted crimson with drying wolf ’s blood. The Macedonian had skinned the lupine carcass he brought back with him from the slaughter below. He wore the wolf ’s hollowed out head atop his own, the fangs of the upper jaw shadowing his brow. The rest of the skin formed a bloody cloak over his shoulders. With the stone club and tomahawk in his fists, he looked more dangerous and wild than the men who were after them. Bat took some comfort in that. Only the New Balances on his feet spoiled the image.

  “You look like Hercules, Bruce,” she said. He looked puzzled.

  “Hercules,” she repeated and reached out to touch the ear of the wolf ’s head.

  “Hyaculeaz?” Byrus asked.

  “Hercules. Yes. The son of Zeus.”

  His smile broadened like a child’s.

  51

  Thorns

  Lee Hammond sprinted flat out along the harder ground closer to shore. He ran with the big revolver held tight in his fist. There was no time for mini-moves and stealth. This was a race. At most, seven kilometers more to where he recalled the dam to be. A quarter marathon.

  Movement to his right. Dark shapes loping low in the tree line. He saw the black forms of dire wolves in the shadows there. The pack had enough for one day and only watched silently as he ran past.

  The stream at the center of the bed was a natural watering place. He startled flocks of birds into moving away to allow him passage. Smaller mammals slinked off before he could identify their species. Might be those midget horses Jimbo talked about. At one stretch of the river, a herd of large, antlered animals filled the bed from bank to bank. The size of caribou wit
h cream-colored stripes running through chocolate colored fur along their flanks. They blocked his way. An alpha male lowered his head in challenge as Lee ran headlong for the herd.

  He raised the big revolver and fired two shots in the air. The twin booms were enough to startle the herd to movement. They turned and bolted up a hillside of broken shale toward the trees above. Lee ran on without breaking stride. After five klicks, he was dizzy with the exertion. He paused long enough to drink water from the stream and duck his head into the water. Raising his head to shake the excess from his scalp, he saw glittering eyes regarding him coldly. From a muddy wallow along the bank, an alligator the size of an SUV lay studying him. Around it swarmed dozens of baby gators. Its brood.

  Mama gator either had a full belly or was just not interested in the two-legged morsel squatting frozen not thirty feet in front of her. The babies were curious though and began scurrying over the mud in Lee’s direction. Needing no more inspiration than that, the Ranger was sprinting west, legs and arms pumping.

  His lungs felt like he was sucking in sand and his legs were on fire when he sighted the bulk of the dam rising before him across the span of the river.

  An echo of distant thunder reached him from the east. Gunfire. The big-bore Model 70. Whatever was going to happen back, there was starting right now. With the last of his reserve, he ran for the base of the massive barrier of tangled brush and mud.

  Bat fixed her gaze on the trees on the opposite bank. She swept left and right, keeping her eyes relaxed, leaving her peripherals open for any movement that was out of place. On overwatch, you needed to cast your visual net wide and let it all in. Desert, urban, or the deep, deep woods, it was all about looking for what shouldn’t be there.

  Something filled in the place between two shadows for a fleeting second. The broad frond of a fern along the bank moved in a way counter to the wind. She dropped the front post of the Winchester on the spot, both eyes open and watching.

  A ghostly creature stepped out of the deep green shade and into the sunlight beaming down on the open river bed.

  A naked man covered head to toe in white powder. Lime caked on all his skin except his face, which was covered in dark black streaks of charcoal ash. He moved in imitation of a more primal being, knees bent and hands brushing the mud. The man stopped for a moment and raised his head to sniff the air as a beast might. Satisfied, he moved farther from the shelter of the overhanging branches and into the center of the river where the stream flowed.

  Bat sighted on him, her finger resting on the outside of the trigger guard. The tang of the sight hovered over his chest. She watched the man, well inside a range of one hundred yards and below her, as he capered into the water. From behind him, more men emerged out of the trees, peering around cautiously. Some were more of their blue-dyed tormenters. Others were of a different brand, bushy manes atop their heads and masks of black coal drawn across their eyes. These last carried spears with broad blades secured at the point. They looked more like stabbing weapons since the hafts were longer than their carriers were tall.

  That meant they’d have to come within the length of those poles to strike.

  Throwing spears, arrows, or even slings would have changed the equation radically in their favor. As long as Bat and Chaz’s fire could keep them at a distance, there was a chance for Plan B to work out. But a concerted rush and all bets were off.

  No sound from Chaz’s rifle. He’d be waiting for her to decide what was best for the position she and the others were in.

  “Lady’s choice,” she whispered and put her finger inside the guard and squeezed the ridged surface of the trigger home.

  The big Win Mag lifted the plaster-white scout clean off his feet. He actually flipped a one-eighty in the air, coming back to earth with a crash, stone dead.

  Rather than retreat back the way they came, the rest, maybe thirty in number, charged, splashing through the stream toward the near bank below Bat’s position just outside the thorn ring. Let them keep on like that, and they’d be out of sight down the hillside below her.

  She worked the bolt without moving the rifle from where it was pressed into her shoulder. Bat dropped first a blue man, then one of his wooly-headed compadres. The sharp report of Chaz’s M4 sounded, and three more fell spinning and clawing in the shallow water. Bat stood for a better angle and knocked a fourth then a fifth man into the water. The last took the round downward through the chest to exit low in his abdomen which sprouted a thick tangle of entrails like some hideous bloom.

  The bolt open, she jammed in three more rounds and slid a fourth into the smoking chamber and slammed the bolt home again. The sights were up, and she nailed a sixth and seventh. Chaz got a few while she was reloading. Eighteen targets lay either unmoving or writhing in the final spasms of death down on the dry bed. The rest were out of sight. By her quick calculations, that left a dozen or more unaccounted for on the wrong side of the river. They were out of sight on her side. She stood swinging the rifle side for side, watching for movement in the thick foliage below her. The M4 barked somewhere downstream. Whether it was targeted fire or suppression, she couldn’t tell.

  A horn sounded from the far bank of the river. More men. Fifty or more emerged all along the bank and rushed across the mud, racing through the center stream before she could even sight on a target. She picked one particularly nasty specimen and blew his head off at the neck. Bat was pulling back the bolt to chamber a fresh round when a sudden movement crossed her sight to the left. She whirled, taking her finger from the trigger in time to prevent putting a bullet into Byrus who was bounding past her, weapons raised. The pit fighter let out a piercing shriek and leapt down the hillside, the grisly cape made of untanned dire wolf skin flapping behind him. He was out of sight in seconds, the shriek rising and falling from somewhere below. It was joined by the animal cries of pain or terror from whatever unlucky bastards he’d run into in his rush to battle.

  Bat was damned glad he was on their side, but she cursed him for getting downrange of her. She picked up the M4 and bandolier of grenades to move laterally along the slope, seeking the cover of a thicket of birches. It would give her a better firing line over an open strip of ground between her and the carpet of ferns closer to the bank. The better to tell friend from foe. It had the added advantage of drawing attackers away from N’itha and the two injured Rangers lying low inside the thorn refuge.

  Down on the river bed, men were crossing the stream for the near bank. Some rushed all out. Some bunched together, moving in halting steps as if crossing through traffic on a busy street. Their faces were turned to the sky as though watching for signs of celestial vengeance. Somewhere out of her sight, Chaz was picking off targets in an attempt to slow the advance. Bodies lay still or thrashing in the thick mud. Their shrieks of pain were spooking the less motivated.

  She picked up the M4 and slid the receiver of the grenade launcher forward to open the breach. The fat 20mm dropped home. She snapped it back and pressed the safety latch off. Standing up, she fired on a lateral trajectory at the largest clump of reluctant warriors standing midstream.

  The anti-personnel round went off in the midst of them.

  Thousands of feet of kinked steel wire fragmented, turning the living into ribbons of flesh in a deadly circle all around. A score or more turned to a mist that sprayed over an acre and a half as a fine crimson rain. At the farthest extent of the kill zone, still more dropped to the muck with missing limbs or heads. A gray fog dropped down to hang low over the river bed.

  Bat was dismayed to see the numbers of attackers grow rather than abate in the wake of the blast. Over the dying echoes of the explosion, she could hear a high, shrill voice from within the trees on the other side. It was a voice she’d never forget. The twisted freak these assholes worshipped was somewhere out of sight on the far bank. He was issuing commands at the top of his lungs. They were, as unfathomable as it seemed to Bat, still more afraid of that drooling man-child than they were of bullets and b
ombs.

  She listened hard for that keening voice, trying to determine its position and ignoring the onrush of savages now in the foliage just below her. Figuring the windage, she adjusted the angle of the M4 and reloaded the grenade tube. The launcher fired with a heavy bloop. The chubby grenade spun in a high arc out toward the tree line on the other bank. It created a muted wallop that sent shredded foliage and black soil into the sky in a high plume.

  When the resonance died away, the reedy voice was still there, shouting even more emphatically than before.

  “Shit,” she said at the waste of a round and turned the M4 toward the shapes clawing up the sheer slope toward her, using branches and vines for handholds. Their eyes burned with feral lust.

  Bat fought down the urge to spray them with a full mag. Byrus was still down there someplace. Her shooting had to remain steady and deliberate. There were more bad guys here than she had rounds for. It was combat economy, plain and shitty. She sighted on the closest man and recited a prayer, the Birkhat HaGomel as she squeezed the trigger.

  “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe,

  Who bestows good things upon the unworthy, and

  Has bestowed upon me every goodness.”

  52

  At the Choke Point

  .

  He waded into the pool of run-off water that bled from the face of the dam. It trickled down in sheets, filtering through the dense skein of branches and deadfall built by the giant beavers. The dam acted more to greatly reduce the water rather than stop it entirely. It stretched two stories above him. An engineering marvel that had taken months of work and denuding a forest to create. The water of the pool reached up to his chest.