Stephen Knight - Slaughterhouse

Focused on getting to the trucks, the Klowns ignored them.

They were now less than a hundred meters away, too close for mortar engagement. It was up to the troops to hold them back.

Something streaked across the sky as another volley of mortar rounds slammed through the Klowns, and from the corner of her lens-shielded eye, Rawlings saw a TOW missile annihilate another Humvee that came barreling toward the trucks, the M2 fifty caliber machinegun in its cupola chattering. The Humvee’s speed prevented the gunner from hosing the trucks, and the resulting explosion removed it from the tactical picture.

“Dismount! Dismount!”

Rawlings recognized Harry Lee’s voice, and the colonel appeared on the ground in front them, waving the soldiers out of the truck while his driver opened up on the approaching Klowns with a pouch-fed M249 SAW. The soldier held the light machinegun low and ripped off several bursts before he dropped to the ground and deployed the weapon’s bipod before he resumed firing.

“Bound out!” Muldoon shouted. “Rawlings, you’re with me!”

“Roger that!” she replied.

The lightfighters began dismounting in pairs while the troops still on the truck kept pouring on suppressive fire. Rawlings saw that “suppressing” the Klowns was no easy task. They didn’t try to duck and avoid the incoming fire. Instead, they just kept coming until they were taken down. The SAW gunner on the deck was helping stem the tide, however. He was aiming low, taking their legs right out from under them.

The truck quickly emptied out.

Muldoon slapped Rawlings’s shoulder hard enough to rattle her teeth.

“Go!”

She turned and headed for the lowered tail gate, slipping on spent cartridges as she moved. A spray of bullets suddenly raked the truck, forcing her to duck.

Muldoon wasn’t having any of that. He pushed her forward roughly.

“Come on, Nasty Girl! The vehicles are becoming ballistics magnets! Move your ass!”

Rawlings half-fell, half-jumped out of the truck. She rolled across the ground as another Klown vehicle exploded, shorn in two by a TOW missile. More mortar rounds slashed into the attacking Klowns, causing disarray in the center of their formation. That didn’t stop several hundred of them from surging forward, shouting and jeering as they bore down on the lightfighters. Rawlings rolled onto her belly, checked her lane of fire, then added her own M4 to the mix, popping away at targets as quickly as possible. But the Klowns had the numbers, and despite the mortars, the rifle and machinegun fire, the twenty-millimeter cannons, and the flying grenades, they had the mass.

A raging firestorm erupted, and Rawlings thought someone had decided to have a New Year’s celebration early. Dozens—no, hundreds —of assault rifles and machine guns and grenade launchers opened up. Tracers ripped across the sky, slamming into the Klowns and blasting them backward as the rest of the battalion surged forward and joined the battle. The troops released fearsome battle cries. A score of Mk 19 grenade launchers blasted the advancing Klowns into obliteration, filling the air with whirling chunks of organic matter that trailed viscera and gore.

She checked left and right. There was movement on all sides of her position. Two light infantry companies had arrived, and brought all their toys to the fight.

“They’re here! First of the Fifty-fifth, they’re actually here !”

Brigadier General Ernesto Salvador had been aware the battalion was on post, but he’d had doubts that it was a friendly unit. He’d bottled up what little optimism he had left and waited for a full battalion of infected lightfighters to descend upon the defensive elements surrounding Hays Hall. Once that happened, it wouldn’t be long before the last remaining vestige of the 10 thMountain Division was eradicated. There was just no way his collection of defenders could repel an entire battalion. He’d been encouraged when the first elements to come in contact with the Klowns began attacking them, and that feeling eventually blossomed into a pale sense of hope when indirect fire rained down on the infected hordes. All of that had been dutifully reported to him by the senior NCOs manning the rooftop defenses and the officers commanding the platoons defending the walls. But full-on joy hadn’t materialized until he’d heard the reports that the hundreds of troops amassed to the north were advancing—and engaging the Killer Clowns.

It appeared that the 1 stBattalion, 55 thInfantry Regiment (Light) appeared to be full of a bunch of joes who were still good guys. Salvador knew Lieutenant Colonel Prince well, and he wasn’t surprised that the cocky son of a bitch had not just survived the situation in Boston, but made it all the way back to Drum.

Salvador looked around. Only three other soldiers were with him in the basement, which served as the division’s final tactical operations center. The upper floors of Hays Hall had been riddled with bullets, and the brick-faced structure hadn’t been designed with the thought of withstanding direct enemy contact. The basement was the only place that was still secure, and Salvador had ordered the operations personnel to head underground while the rest of the troops—a collection of military policemen, cavalry, and the remains of the post’s garrison—tried their best to defend Hays Hall from the Klown onslaught. Those professionals had been backed by cooks, orderlies, medics, even two chaplains. A week ago, when Salvador’s boss Major General Lew McLaren had still been alive, they’d had a force three hundred strong. Since then, the numbers had been severely diminished, and with the last head count, Salvador had been told that only ninety or so troops remained combat effective. And a good percentage of those were wounded.

“Okay, get me Wizard Six Actual,” Salvador ordered his radio telephone operator. “We need to seriously consider unassing, and we’re going to need Prince’s troops to do the heavy lifting.”

“Six, this is Wizard. Over.”

Lee almost missed Walker’s transmission in the heat of battle. The battalion was fully engaged, with two companies on either side of the Hays Hall defensive perimeter, slowly rolling back the Klowns. It was a tough fight. The Klowns weren’t afraid of getting killed, but they weren’t interested in dying needlessly, so they were getting crafty. The military members in their ranks were rising to prominence, and they were clearly directing the rest of the crazies as they rallied and counterattacked.

Since Lee had deployed forward with the rest of the combat troops on the eastern engagement area, he had lost most of his overall situational awareness. As such, he’d ordered Walker to hang back with the rest of the headquarters company staff to coordinate resources while Captain Hayes oversaw combat operations in the western engagement area.

“Go for Six,” Lee said. He hunkered down behind Murphy and fired his M4 over the soldier’s prone figure.

Murphy was still working on the Klowns with his SAW. He had already gone through a couple of two hundred round ammo pouches.

“Six, this is Wizard. Mountaineer Five wants a heart to heart on foxtrot four three three. Wants to discuss retrograde options.” Walker paused. “Six, Mountaineer thinks Prince is still commanding the battalion. Over.”

Lee heard a quaver of nervousness in Walker’s voice. As the battalion XO, Walker had willingly stepped aside to let Lee assume command. While that wasn’t illegal—Lee had much more direct field experience than Walker—the fact that he had encouraged Lee to also assume the rank of lieutenant colonel was doubtless weighing heavily on him. General Salvador would certainly wonder just what the hell was going on, with a captain pretending to be a lieutenant colonel, and he’d probably expect a really good explanation from Walker.