Stephen Knight - Slaughterhouse

“Boats, fire in five,” Turner said over the radio.

“Five. Roger,” Boats responded perfunctorily.

Turner leaned back into his weapon and lined up on one of the Klown Humvees equipped with a Mk 19. The gunner was already leaning back in his cupola, grenade launcher elevated and firing over the wall.

Five seconds couldn’t come soon enough. Turner and Boats fired at the same time, each tube ejecting a missile that trailed fire. The projectiles were surrounded by bursts of brilliant light as their eight flight fins deployed and the booster motors fired, keeping the projectiles oriented on their targets. The missiles rocked briefly in the air as they made final adjustments then hurtled toward the Klown vehicles at speeds approaching nine hundred twenty feet per second. Turner watched with no small delight as his missile slammed into its targeted Humvee and obliterated it, turning it into flaming wreckage and propelling huge chunks of it through the air. The high-explosive warhead’s detonation caused a shock wave to rip across the battlefield, mowing down a dozen Klowns in an instant. Turner had no idea if they’d been killed by the blast, but they’d certainly had their bells rung in a big way.

“Reload!” he shouted as he began unclipping the expended tube from the base of the launcher. Another explosion blossomed into being as Boats’s round hit a tactical truck, completely eradicating it and leaving only the twisted frame remaining.

That’s how we do it, Turner thought. Take that, you fucks.

The ferocity of the two explosions surprised Lee, even though he had been expecting them. However, the Klowns surrounding the two trucks didn’t even seem to notice. They just continued their run to the container walls, screaming and yelling and generally having a good time. Lee rolled up his window then reached down and grabbed the M57 Firing Device from the seat. More commonly referred to as “the clacker” because it consisted of a large, flat trigger that made a distinctive noise when it was depressed, the unit would detonate the Claymore mines attached to the truck’s side rails.

“ Claymore !” Lee shouted into the radio.

Then, he slapped down on the M57’s trigger.

The night erupted once again as the mines on either side of the first truck exploded within microseconds of each other, blasting their payload of steel pellets outward like lethal, metallic fans. The Klowns jammed in tightly around the vehicles were instantly mowed down, no more capable of surviving the onslaught than a field of wheat could withstand an attack from a farmer’s combine harvester. Bright sparks erupted across the nearby vehicles. While the armored Humvees withstood the barrage of pellets, softer-skinned civilian vehicles were turned into something akin to Swiss cheese as the projectiles ripped right through them—and their occupants.

At a hundred feet out, Klowns continued to fall to the ground, their flesh shredded and bones shattered as the pellets did their nasty work. But farther out, the effects of the Claymore blasts were not as immediately lethal. The Infected still fell, perhaps mortally wounded, and writhed on the ground, twisting and laughing and shrieking in pain-fueled ardor.

The second truck released its payload of mines a moment after the first, and more overlapping cones of destruction blazed across the battlefield, ripping, tearing, maiming and killing. In less than two seconds, over two hundred Klowns had been slain, and in the seconds and minutes that followed, twice that number would also perish from the grievous wounds they had sustained from the mine blasts. For a moment, the two trucks were isolated from the rest of the Klowns, surrounded by a barrier of dead and twitching bodies.

“ Up !” Muldoon shouted. “Get your MOPP on and fight !”

The soldiers pulled on their MOPP overgarments and face masks and got to their feet, leaning against the side rails of the truck as they raised their weapons. Rawlings did the same. She shouldered her M4 and opened up on one of the Klown-controlled Humvees, riddling it with fire. The attack was mostly ineffective. The uparmored vehicle’s plating and special glass panes turned her rounds, though the already-dead gunner in its open cupola shuddered and jerked from bullets passing through its mangled corpse. Then the Humvee transformed into a ball of expanding fire as it suddenly accelerated toward the container wall as if kicked by a giant. The vehicle slammed into the container and turned into a twisted hulk of burning metal. It took Rawlings a second to figure out what had happened. One of the soldiers in the second truck had hit the Humvee with an AT4, right in the ass, and the ensuing explosion drove it forward. From the rear of her truck, another AT4 roared, and a second Humvee exploded with such ferocity that it leaped into the air and came crashing down on its side.

Several hundred feet away, the Klown force that finally figured out that something was going on. They turned toward the two trucks as the vehicles came to a halt just before the container wall and, in the flickering firelight, Rawlings could see that they had no problems understanding what had just gone down.

The enemy was among them. Outside the walls. Fresh meat.

With a roar, they charged toward the two trucks.

The lightfighters responded with withering firepower from their assault rifles and SAWs, cutting down the first ranks of attackers. Those with M203 grenade launchers added more fire to the fight, and bright, sporadic explosions ripped through the Klown lines, tearing off limbs and rupturing bodies. More and more Infected fell writhing to the ground, howling and screaming with delight even as their blood gushed out of them. Rawlings leaned into her rifle, capping off round after round into the approaching mass of deranged humanity. Men and women fell—some dead, most not—but for all of those she removed from the fight, a hundred more took their place.

Thunder roared.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

Six explosions rent the night, back to back, sending bodies flying through the air as the mortar unit’s first rounds slammed into the Klown force, shredding flesh and shattering bone. The lightfighters cheered, emboldened by the sudden violence of the mortar attack, even as bits of debris and torn organic matter rained down on their heads. The Klowns cheered as well. Death was what they lived for, and pain was a welcome addition to their existence, even if it meant their demise was just around the corner.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

Another salvo of mortar rounds tore through the Klowns, bottling them up and delaying their approach because they had to pick their way across the limb-strewn landscape, slipping and sliding in the blood-wet earth. But still they came, inching their way closer and closer to the trucks, focused on getting to the soldiers and either killing them or infecting them.

A piss-filled balloon splattered against the truck’s bent side rail, and rancid urine splashed across Rawlings, dripping down her waterproof MOPP gear. She gained a new appreciation for the sight-restricting mask that prevented her from smelling the foul liquid as it pooled in the truck bed. She continued firing, draining one magazine then another. Expended cartridges, coupled with the slickness of the cooling urine in the truck, made maintaining solid footing difficult. Rawlings found herself slipping more often than not.

Atop the container wall, more soldiers moved behind the layers of concertina wire. They fired down into the crowd of Klowns and hurled fragmentation grenades into their midst.