Stephen Knight - Slaughterhouse

Everyone dropped to the ground, including Salvador. The general might have been pissed, but he hadn’t forgotten he was out in the open, in the middle of a shooting war. Something buried itself into the shipping container wall behind him with a sharp noise, and Lee looked back to see an arrow lodged there.

Higher up, one of the infantrymen manning a defensive position was reacting to the fact he had one stuck in his left thigh.

Oh, fuck!

“Get Salvador out of here!” he shouted, bringing up his rifle.

The soldier with the arrow in his leg started shaking as the first wave of giggles hit him, and he immediately lowered his weapon and opened up on the men below. One of the soldiers who had escorted Salvador jerked as several rounds struck him. Next, Salvador grunted and started discharging his M4 into the ground. Lee’s RTO curled up into a ball as the general’s errant volley stitched a trail right in front of him. Lee pulled his rifle’s trigger, sending three bullets through the infected soldier above him, just as the others on the wall brought their own weapons around and began firing on the same man. The infected soldier danced a ballistic-driven jig as a score of rounds slammed into him, driving him off the wall and out of Lee’s view.

Lee turned to the men beside him. The first soldier who had been hit was lying face down on the ground, a puddle of blood forming near his head. Salvador thrashed next to him, his left hand clamped over his right shoulder, where his short neck met his body. Blood pulsed from between his gloved fingers. His eyes were wide with fear and shock. He knew he’d been hit, and he knew it was bad.

“Get him out of here!” Lee shouted to the remaining soldier and the RTO. “Twohy, get him to a medic, right away!”

More people ran toward them, and not all of them were in uniform. Lee took up a fighting position, but one of them threw up his hands, waving in the darkness.

“No, no! We’re from Hays!” the soldier shouted.

“How many of you are left inside?” Lee asked.

“I think we’re it, other than wall security. They’re on their way out now.” The man looked down at Salvador as the Twohy helped the other soldier heave him into a fireman’s carry. “Shit, is that the general?”

“It is,” Lee said. “Help these men get him out of here. Twohy, you know where the ambulances are?”

“Yes, sir,” said the RTO.

“Then get him to Nightingale, right now!”

“On it,” Twohy replied, and the group moved off, carrying the injured general with them.

Lee turned back to the fight. Charlie Company was continuing to fall back. They were extracting a healthy penalty on the Klowns. Bodies were stacked up four deep only a few hundred meters away. But the Klowns kept coming, clambering over the dead and twitching near-dead and cackling with glee as they retaliated with assault rifles and hand grenades of their own. One of the containers down the line exploded when an AT4 round burrowed into it and detonated, sending red-hot shrapnel whirling through the air. The fire had come from behind the Klown lines. The crazies were bringing some heavy weaponry to the party, which meant it was time for the battalion to beat feet.

“Wizard, this is Six!”

Walker came back immediately. “Six, this is Wizard. Over!”

“Wizard, are we about done with the extraction? We’re losing the line over here. Chaos is being pushed back. Time’s up, we have to go. Over.”

“Six, this is Wizard. Roger, we’ve got a few stragglers, but they’ll be out in less than two minutes. We’re ready when you’re ready. Over.”

“Wizard, Six is ready right now. Pull Alpha back under covering fires, then do the same for Charlie and any other forward units. Start that right away. Over.”

“Six, this is Wizard. Roger that.”

Muldoon rolled onto his side and snatched a fresh magazine from his harness. Rawlings started firing again, shouting behind her mask as the Klowns toppled to the brush right in front of her. Nutter ripped off another blast on full auto then shouted that he had to reload.

On the other side of Nutter, a soldier got to his knees and hurled a grenade, yelling “Frag out!” Before the lightfighter could cover, he jerked backward with a choked scream as a bullet tore through his mask. The soldier toppled onto his back and lay still, his legs curled up beneath him.

Muldoon fired three rounds into the Klown rifleman staggering through the brush. The attacker’s movements were made clumsy by the fact he didn’t have night vision gear and was laughing like Frank Gorshen’s Riddler from the classic Batman TV series. More shapes loomed behind that one, and they returned fire. Muldoon heard bullets crack as they zipped past, missing him by mere inches.

“Be an awesome time to shoot the fuckers in the face, Duke!” Nutter shouted, his voice a high-pitched shriek as he frantically tried to reload his M4.

Muldoon obliged, firing six rapid shots into the approaching gunmen. One of them curled up with a giggle and fell to the ground, while another only laughed harder while one of his arms flopped uselessly at his side. The third ducked to the right, putting a small tree between him and Muldoon as he blindly fired around it. His rounds went high, killing nothing more than leaves and possibly a couple of robins in the tree branches overhead. Rawlings drilled the Klown twice, and he sagged to the ground, gurgling.

Muldoon heard shattering glass as a sudden glow grew in feverish intensity, almost as if the small forest they lay in had been hit by a nuclear weapon. He smelled gasoline, and as his NVGs went into white-out, he knew that one of the Klowns had tossed a Molotov cocktail at them. Flame burned, bright and hot, and it found more than just gasoline to feed it. Dried leaves and brush and tree trunks that hadn’t seen a decent rain in quite a few weeks added fuel to the blaze, and thick smoke billowed.

Muldoon flipped up his NVGs. The fire was only twenty feet away, and he could see Lee’s boys—Murphy and Foster—retreating from the conflagration. In fact, Foster frantically slapped at the flames on his uniform with his gloved hands while Murphy, his SAW slung across his chest, dragged the man away.

Muldoon didn’t have time to worry about it, because more Klowns rushed into the trees. He cut several of them down, but more than a few wore body armor, and he had to hit them repeatedly to have any effect.

Then, his magazine ran dry again.

“Reloading!” he shouted, turning onto his side to reach for a fresh mag as more Klowns pushed their way in.

One of them spied Rawlings and lunged for her with a hitching whoop. The Klown raised an ax over his head.

“Fuck!” Rawlings screamed. She fired her M4 directly into the Klown’s crotch.

The man howled with laughter as his pelvis disintegrated beneath the force of several full metal jacket rounds. He collapsed to the ground, still swinging the ax as he fell. Rawlings turned at the last moment, and the ax head plunged into the earth beside her.

Muldoon lashed out with his empty rifle, and the M9 bayonet at its tip pierced the man’s chest. That only made the Klown laugh louder. The laughter amidst the sound of the sucking chest wound was a horrible sound, but Muldoon kept stabbing him, again and again. He could feel the heat of the blaze mounting, and the fire roared as it consumed every combustible in its path. Nutter finally got his rifle loaded, and he fired two rounds into the Klown as it sagged, falling away from Muldoon and his bayonet.

“Thanks for nothing, Nutter!” Muldoon yelled as he pulled his rifle back and yanked a fresh mag from his vest. “Rawlings, you all right?”