Nathan Jones - Determination

In spite of firing her first shot later Jane’s second shot came at almost the same time as his. After that the blockheads were scrambling for cover, leaving food and packs behind. Lewis abandoned attempts to aim, squeezing the trigger whenever his crosshairs settled for more than a moment on anything he thought he could hit. Jane was still firing slower, more methodically.

Ten shots in, while the enemy was still panicking and seeking cover, Lewis’s instincts kicked in. He engaged the safety, snapped the bipod legs back against the barrel of his G3, and in a smooth motion slung it over his shoulder while resting a hand on Jane’s back to alert her. She followed suit, fumbling slightly in her haste as she realized they might’ve stuck around longer than was safe.

Moments later they were sprinting down a fold in the slope, towards the evergreens densely lining the hillside below. There was a game trail there that was well concealed and led west in the direction they wanted to go.

The enemy was hundreds of yards behind, still hopefully scrambling to figure out what had just happened, let alone where their attackers had been shooting from. Even if they also sprinted they’d have trouble catching up, and long before then Lewis and Jane would’ve cut back to the more familiar terrain they’d taken to get here.

Coming the other way he’d seen a few good hiding spots, where they could conceal themselves to watch the trail behind them and see if they’d been pursued. Those spots would also give a good view of other approaches, in case the patrol had called in backup that was coming from other directions. Lewis wasn’t about to assume they were in the clear, but he was optimistic.

Half a mile later they reached the first of those spots and dropped down behind cover, panting as they checked the trail behind them. To Lewis’s dismay he saw that the enemy had sprinted to follow them. They didn’t seem to know where exactly he and Jane were, moving too fast to do any proper tracking, but they were headed in the right direction.

“Do we try ambushing them again, slow them down or turn them back?” Jane whispered.

Against upwards of sixteen or seventeen enemy soldiers, who were obviously in good physical condition and were out for blood? Lewis shook his head. “They don’t know exactly where we are, and running like that they’re obviously hoping to flush us out. Let’s try taking it slow in a different direction from the one they’re going, see if we can slip away.”

Her short, coppery ponytail bobbed slightly as she turned to look at him. “What if we can’t?”

Lewis reached up to touch the pocket on his combat vest that held a fragmentation grenade. “Then we find a choke point where they’ll either have to clump up or string themselves out. Either way gives us a better chance of taking out enough of them to turn the rest back.”

His wife nodded, expression grim, and Lewis squeezed her shoulder before setting off.

Their fears were unfounded. The enemy patrol might’ve been good, but even they couldn’t sprint and track at the same time. As Lewis and Jane veered south the blockheads kept going west, and within an hour they couldn’t see or hear any sign of them. They turned for home, wary of the enemy reappearing or other patrols converging on their location, but there was no sign of either.

A couple hours after that they waved as they passed the defender sentry guarding the northeast corner of their territory, and Lewis felt tension ease out of him that he hadn’t realized he still held.

It wasn’t exactly the attack he’d hoped for, but all was well that ended well.

Trev volunteered to lead the hunting parties, those first few days after his failed ambush.

What remained of his squad seemed happy for the chance to get away from combat for a while. At the moment it was just him, Trent, Rob Jonas, Hans Miller, and Alice. Rick and Mason were still recovering from their wounds, while after losing her husband Susan Donnell had returned to the refuge to be with the rest of her family. Although nobody had begrudged her the decision, she’d still promised to join the defenders there as if she needed to justify leaving.

Since Matt had more than enough people to guard the slope, Trev didn’t see any problem with heading west along and up it to reach a perpendicular mountainside, then going right up and over that one’s ridge to the other side. He wanted to see if game was more plentiful there, which it was, and as an added bonus it was out of view of the valley and the constant looming presence of the blockheads there.

His group was fairly somber in spite of the change in scenery. Especially Alice, who seemed to carry the weight of Tom and Fred dying and Rick being wounded almost as much as Trev did. With his permission she spent a lot of time with Rick, so it was a surprise to have her come out with them on the fifth day since the ambush.

Trev still felt a twinge every time he bent or twisted sharply, but it was nothing compared to the first day. His bruises had been a burning mass throbbing across his back by the end of that hunt, and he’d been physically incapable of helping carry the buck they’d brought down.

Today he had no trouble handling his half of another field dressed buck, wrapped in a tarp and slung from an aspen sapling between him and Trent, that they were bringing in. Behind them Rob, Alice, and Hans were spelling each other carrying a smaller doe they’d also brought down. The hunting had been good that afternoon.

They’d topped the ridge and were making their way along and down the slope, halfway back to Matt’s camp, when they reached an overlook in the trail that provided a good view of the valley below.

It seemed like a good spot to rest and get some water, so Trev called a break and set down his end of the sapling with a soft groan of relief. Behind him Trent set down the other end with an expression like he had another five miles in him, while farther back the trail Alice and Rob dropped the doe with similar relieved noises.

Hans had already edged past them to the overlook, staring down at the valley below as he took a sip of water from a stainless steel canteen. When Trev stepped up beside him he handed the water over, and Trev nodded in thanks as he took a drink.

“I still don’t get why the blockheads don’t just rush us with everyone they’ve got,” Hans said, eyes on a convoy crawling its way towards Huntington on a side road to get around a damaged section of Highway 10. “All those thousands of troops, and we’ve only got a few hundred to stop them. They’re losing so many anyway, they might as well do it rolling over us like a tide over a sand castle.”

Trev handed the canteen and cap back over, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “It’d be pointless.”

The slightly haggard man turned to look at him. “Pointless? I thought taking the mountains was the whole point.”

“With access to roads, maybe.” Trev motioned to the slope below. “Let’s say the blockheads spend a thousand lives taking that and the other slopes overlooking the valley. So what? They’d be coming after us, on foot, climbing steep mountainsides under fire from fighters in fortified emplacements. Let’s say they actually manage it. At that point there’s another line of slopes beyond these ones that we can retreat to and make them do it all over again. So they’ve wasted a lot of lives to take some hills and they’re in the same position.”

Trent joined them, waving off Hans’s canteen as he produced his own plastic water bottle. “It’s not quite that cut and dried.”

Trev glanced at Hans. “Things usually aren’t. How do you see it?”

The squad’s new member gulped down some water before answering. “Sure, as long as we’ve got people and ammo and they’re only coming from the one side, it probably plays out like that. But if they manage to completely break through somewhere, and do it before we can regroup and send reinforcements, they get to flood into the gap and swarm across the hills. At that point it’s easy to attack us from behind and to the sides. Same thing if they kill us all in the attack, and there’s no one left to go defend the next slope along. Or if we run out of bullets and they can walk right up to us and shoot us in the face.”