Stephen Knight - Slaughterhouse

“Thunder, Crusher Three-One. If we can get you for another pass, adjust fire! Drop one hundred, fire for effect! Over!” The deal was that Thunder would give them one pass then resume supporting the fight at Hays Hall. Muldoon was playing his whiny-bitch card by asking for more rounds, but he didn’t care. If Thunder turned him down, he was just going to be dead a little sooner. He got back on his rifle and started returning fire.

“Reloading!” Rawlings shouted beside him.

“Crusher Three-One, this is Thunder. You owe me a case of Guinness for each round. Fire for effect, drop one hundred. Shots out. Over.”

Muldoon didn’t have time to reply. Three Klowns made it to the tree line and crashed through the foliage, firing assault rifles and aiming for the muzzle blasts of Muldoon’s men. He heard a tick as something slipped past his helmet, a graze so light that it didn’t even alter the angle of his NVGs, but a close call nevertheless. He raised his rifle and banged out eight shots. Two of the attackers stumbled and faltered, still wheezing with laughter that his rounds failed to stifle. The third kept coming. Muldoon had missed him entirely. He went down suddenly as Nutter ripped off a burst on full auto.

“Damn, Duke! You shoot like a school girl!” Nutter shouted.

“Crusher Three-One, this is Thunder. Splash. Over.”

“More incoming!” Muldoon yelled. One of the Klowns he had shot struggled back to his knees. He was a civilian, and Muldoon recognized him as one of the public works guys he had seen around the post, a former NCO who had retired and gotten a job driving snow plows during the winter and cutting grass in the summer. Muldoon shot him in the face, and the man fell over into the brush.

The three mortar rounds landed, much closer, and Muldoon swore as the shock waves tore through the trees, kicking up a storm of grit, leaves, branches, and bloody ribbons of flesh. Muldoon continued firing, even though his sight picture was mostly full of obscurants. He had no idea whether he was hitting anything or not, but the potential to at least wound a Klown or two was worth the time and effort. Behind him, he heard the Mk 19s opening up, and he hoped their grenades would traverse parabolas short enough to hold back the attackers but not so abbreviated as to start landing among the lightfighters in the trees.

He needn’t have worried. The explosions rippled outside the tree line, pretty much dead on target.

Fuckin’-A, Sergeant Major.

But as the dust cleared, Muldoon was monumentally disappointed to discover that neither the mortars nor the grenades had dissuaded the Klowns from surging into the trees.

Then, the mag in his rifle ran dry.

It took a lot longer than ten minutes to get Hays Hall evacuated. When the troops had built the walls surrounding the two-story headquarters building, they’d dragged one final container in place to seal the vehicle access then used a crane to hoist a second container on top of it. The crane had been taken out of commission earlier in the battle, so the only way out was to rappel from the wall or come down caving ladders.

The delay was one of the longest in Lee’s life, virtually unendurable as he crouched next to the wall with Twohy, his radio telephone operator, and four other soldiers who had clustered around him, trying to provide protection while he quarterbacked the fight from the front. Charlie Company had halted its advance and formed a trailing wedge, becoming a type of wall that the Klowns would commit suicide trying to scale.

From the roof of Hays Hall, the remaining defenders poured it on with everything they had left as the first of the soldiers trapped inside the compound made a break for it. The wounded went first, several of whom were litter-borne. Lee called for the ambulances to be moved up, so those men could immediately be transported off-site. That involved pulling some of Echo’s soldiers forward out of the blocking position they had taken in the rear. Lee couldn’t leave the ambulances unguarded, as the medics operating them were armed only with pistols. The Klowns would have loved to take them down, and Lee was quite predisposed to ensure they didn’t have the chance.

Twenty minutes after the evacuation began, the rooftop defenders had abandoned their posts. That left only the ground combatants standing between them and the Klowns. Lee ordered Hallelujah Hayes to retrograde his elements back toward Walker’s position, where they would be directly backed up by the remaining Echo formations. That way, the battalion would be more centrally located and better able to defend itself should the Klown reinforcements make their way past the small task force led by Turner and Muldoon.

Not that there’ll be much left to defend with. The battalion had been expending its munitions at a fantastic rate. It was difficult to know how much longer the unit could maintain its current tempo, especially with Echo deployed in a battle formation. While the unit was still supplying the battalion, it was doing so with only a small percentage of personnel. No one was able to keep a good count of what was going down to the company level, and the battalion had been fighting pretty much the entire time on the road to Drum. Lee hoped—prayed, actually, which was the first time he’d resorted to that in quite a while—that they could pull Mountaineer out of Hays Hall and get the hell out of Fort Drum.

“Colonel!”

Lee turned. Two Alpha Company lightfighters were escorting another man with them. Unlike the lightfighters, the newcomer didn’t have any MOPP gear on, though he was armored up and carried an M4 carbine. He was shorter than Lee but more squared off in a heavy-jawed sort of way that reminded Lee of Sergeant Major Turner. The olive-skinned man had bright green eyes that shined beneath a furrowed brow.

“Colonel?” the man echoed.

Lee felt the blood leave his face. The man was Brigadier General Salvador, the deputy commanding general of the 10 thMountain Division.

Lee saluted.

“Sir, you need to get behind the line!”

Salvador looked Lee up and down then leaned forward, staring right at the subdued lieutenant colonel oak leaf insignia on Lee’s armor. He raised his eyes back to Lee’s masked face.

“I don’t know of any Colonel Lee attached to the First Battalion. Who the hell are you, soldier?”

Lee decided not to sidestep the issue. It wasn’t very important at the moment, anyway. “Harry Lee, former S-3, First Battalion, Fifty-fifth Infantry Regiment,” he said. “You need to get off the battlefield, General. As in, right now.”

“The S-3? So you’re a captain ?” Salvador snapped. “Why the hell are you wearing lieutenant colonel insignia? Where’s the XO, Walker?”

“Major Walker is not here, sir. If you follow these soldiers, you’ll be taken to him, and he can fill you in on everything that’s gone down since the battalion pulled out of Boston. I’m busy here.”

Salvador pushed his way forward and got right in Lee’s mask-covered face. “Are you out of your fucking mind ? Do you have any idea how badly you’ve basically butt-raped military tradition, not to mention how many regulations you’ve violated? Boy, you’re in some serious trouble here!”

Lee looked at the two soldiers who had accompanied the general. Both were half crouched because of the gunfire ripping through the air, and not all of it was coming from the battalion. The Klowns were rebounding since Hayes’s company had pulled back. The void had given the infected enemy time to regroup, and they were focusing solely on Charlie Company, hammering them with everything they had.

“Get this man out of here!” Lee yelled at the pair just as several soldiers still manning the wall above them opened up with full automatic gunfire.