James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

“Skybox West, Skybox West, this is Almighty. You have a Toad right underneath you. I repeat, you have a Toad right underneath you on the street, right now, over.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Barker muttered. The windows were narrow, with black aluminum frames. His people had busted out the top half and Barker stuck his head out. There, right below him, was the Toad. Ten stories down. What was that, fifty yards? Not even. He hoisted the Spike and pressed it against his shoulder, then leaned forward, feeling the window frame against his waist. Distantly he heard Almighty talking to the squad on the other side of the same building, telling them to break cover as well.

“Somebody grab my belt. And watch out for the backblast, it’s gonna be nasty!”

Barker felt hands on him, and he leaned out even further, hearing the window frame creak. He lined up the rocket’s iron sights on the center of the tank’s turret, and saw the top of a helmet. He depressed the red safety lever with his two middle fingers. His thumb found the trigger. Behind him, Petal had two hands on his plate carrier and one foot braced against the wall. She turned her head away from the rocket launcher and hunched, hoping the rocket exhaust wouldn’t cook both of them.

Dietz yanked down at the back of the M240B to get its nose up and fired a long burst at the eighth floor of the Fisher Building, even though he didn’t see any movement where the tank’s HE round had impacted. The exterior wall of the skyscraper had ruptured along with every window in a thirty-foot radius, and he could see into what appeared to be offices. Then he swung the gun down and put another burst into the ground-floor lobby. Bullets were still bouncing off the front of KICKASS from the tangos in the lobby, and it was pissing him off

“Kirkland!”

“Yeah!”

“You get another round loaded?”

“Loaded!”

“Put a round into that lobby in front of us, right through those doors.” The Major had said to wait for her call before engaging the target building, but fuck that. Twice.

As the main gun slewed over and started to drop, glass bounced off the top of the turret in front of him. Glass? Dietz blinked, then looked up. There, way high up on the high-rise, what the hell was that? It looked like a guy, hanging on the side of the building like Spider-Man. And then there was a brief flash.

Barker pressed the trigger and the office around him seemed to explode as the rocket’s exhaust disintegrated the suspended ceiling of off-white acoustic tiles. He fell back from the window, coughing and waving his hands in front of his face, the rest of the squad doing the same. The air around him seemed filled with flour.

“Shit, did I hit it?” He rushed back to the window and looked down through the dust pouring out the gaping window frame. The Toad was still there below him, and at first it appeared no different. Then he saw the smoke pouring out of the hatch, and saw the Tab who’d been standing inside it was now halfway down the side of the tank, hanging headfirst from the hatch by one boot. The Spike had shot straight down into the open hatch, killing the entire crew.

Barker grabbed his rifle and began firing at the few Tabs still in the street. The rest of his squad moved to adjoining windows and did the same, but after seeing the Toad get taken out the Tabs decided to abandon their idea of using it for cover and ran underneath him, into the Cadillac Place building.

“Skybox West, all squads. Got fucking guys in my lobby,” Barker spat. “But the Toad’s dead.”

“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” Lydia said, staring at the parade of armored vehicles rolling up Cass Avenue toward them. She had both her palms and her forehead pressed against the glass.

“Get away from the window,” Chan told her. He glanced around. He had all of Yosemite plus Morris’ loaner with him. So far they hadn’t done anything since reaching the tenth floor of the Cadillac Place building but listen to other squads on the radio. All the fighting was on the opposite side of the building. But the Tabs’ main armored column was moving up to support the advance force. They were still over a block away, and moving slow, but they kept coming, straight up Cass. Straight toward him.

The radio lit up again. “Skybox, Tower. I think a few made it into your lobby. Three out of those four vehicles are down.” Chan could only hear the gunfire and explosions as faint echoes through the glass.

The convoy was rolling two abreast up Cass. There was an IMP and Growler in the lead followed by four more Growlers, another IMP, two Growlers, and, finally, a Toad. Ten vehicles. “Fuck,” Chan muttered under his breath. He hadn’t seen that much enemy armor together… ever. It reminded him of the stories he’d heard about the intense battles at the start of the war.

“Skybox West, Skybox West, this is Almighty. You have a Toad right underneath you. I repeat, you have a Toad right underneath you on the street, right now, over.”

The column of vehicles was barely a block away now, coming close to rolling underneath Yosemite’s position. “Everybody grab your shit!” Chan shouted. He moved a step closer to the window, to get a better viewing angle. One IMP and three Growlers broke off and headed east on a side street. The two lead vehicles in the now-shortened column had paused half a block back from West Grand Boulevard, as it kept them out of sight of the Fisher Building, ostensibly behind cover.

They were right underneath Yosemite.

As Chan stared down at the IMP, Toad, and four Growlers, Morris’ overwatch team jumped back on the radio. “Skybox East, this is Almighty East. You’ve got a whole traffic jam underneath you right now. Go loud, do not wait, I repeat go loud, it’s never going to get better, give ‘em everything you’ve got.”

Chan had made the same decision a quarter-second earlier. “Let’s light ‘em up!” he shouted. He looked at Lydia as the sound of multiple windows being broken echoed around the empty offices. “Make it rain, right here,” he told her, pointing at the lighter in her hand. Then he grabbed a Spike. Two windows down his second-in-command was leaning out the window and firing the fancy new six-shot grenade launcher straight downward. He heard the hissing roar of a Spike being fired from the next office over and a white dust cloud shot out the office doorway into the hallway.

Chan flipped the sights on the rocket up and was pressing the safety lever down as he leaned out one of the freshly broken windows. One of the Growlers was already burning. Chan focused on the Toad, which lurched and then began moving backward.

Oh no you don’t , he thought. He aimed the sights at the leading edge of the tank but then had to pause as it passed underneath the fourth-floor walkway between the building and the adjacent parking garage. As it reappeared he pressed the trigger, but just as he fired the tank slewed sideways, intending to reverse into the closest side street. The rocket missed the body of the tank entirely and hit the treads. The impact rocked the tank, which accelerated off to the side. Chan saw the massive vehicle had rolled out of its right-side track and left it on the street like a discarded snake-skin, but it still seemed able to move. Then it was gone, out of sight behind the parking garage. “Shit!”

Lydia was working like a madwoman next to him, lighting the fabric wicks of Molotov cocktails and frantically tossing them out the closest window in every direction. There had to be thirty of them in various sized glass bottles, stored in two milk crates and secreted up here, by her, over the past six months, one bottle at a time. They were filled with whatever flammable liquid she or Tom in the Fisher Building’s maintenance department could get their hands on—rubbing alcohol, paint thinner, acetone, nail polish remover, even a little bit of gel hand sanitizer—basically everything but gasoline, as that was too valuable. There were two additional crates on the opposite side of the building too, and one crate in a maintenance closet on the sixth floor of the Fisher Building.