James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

Seattle swung his binoculars over to John R. The severely damaged IMP was limping along and had turned west, hoping to hook up with the Woodward detachment for security. The Growlers behind it remained where they’d rolled after the blast, the men inside dead.

He then checked Cass. The cloud over Cass was thinning. The front of the office building was crumpled and cracked. Growlers were mangled and flipped, and one of the IMPs had toppled over onto its side. The Toad at the rear of the column appeared undamaged, as did the IMP that had been traveling with it. The IMP moved forward to the north end of the scene to provide security, and the Toad set up at the south end. Shapes could be seen staggering around the street. That column was no longer combat effective, they’d be taking care of their wounded for quite some time.

The two men exchanged a look. They’d inflicted a lot of hurt on three out of the four Tab detachments, but there were still a lot of men and vehicles heading toward the dogsoldiers. Even more as soon as the Woodward group collected their injured. It was too bad the Tabs hadn’t split up into seven columns, and used every bridge… there’d been surprises waiting for them on six of the seven. The combat engineers had smuggled half a ton of C4 into the city for this party. Seemed a shame not to use it all.

Barker pounded down the hallway and grabbed Miller’s loaner—he couldn’t remember the man’s name—and shouted, “On me!”

The man had been trained well; he’d been assigned to Kermit, and Barker was in charge of the squad, so he immediately peeled away from the stairwell door he’d been guarding with three other men and followed the short squad leader.

Barker ran down the hall, around a corner, and then stopped and hit a button. “What are we—” the man behind him said, then blinked. They were back at the freight elevator. He gave Barker a look.

“They’re fucking us on the stairs. Everyone knows you don’t take the elevator when there’s a fire or a gunfight, so maybe this is so stupid it’s smart.”

“Or maybe they’ll be waiting at the bottom for us.”

“It’s not stupid if it works.”

“Yes it is. Stupid is stupid.”

Barker shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Both men had their rifles up as the freight car wheezed its way to the third floor and the doors clanked open. It was empty.

“Two?” the man asked Barker.

“One. I want to make sure we get under them.”

The big metal-walled elevator seemed to take forever to descend to the first floor. “What the fuck’s your name?” Barker asked.

“Royce.”

Barker nodded. “We’ll head across to the bottom of the stairs you were at, it’s closest.”

Not only was the freight elevator slow, it seemed as loud as a slow-motion car crash to the two men, but finally it came to rest and the doors eased open. Barker and Royce were in opposite corners, crouched, rifles up, but no one was immediately visible in the hall.

Barker scooted out, rifle up, but the hallway was clear. He signaled to Royce and they moved down the hallway carefully. Barker quick-peeked the corner but didn’t see anyone. They headed down the main corridor to the stairway entrance. No one was initially visible, but they could hear shouts, and the occasional gunshot. The Tabs seemed at least one floor up, but that was just a guess.

The two men staged on either side of the stairway door. Barker used hand signals, telling Royce what he wanted to do, and the man nodded. Royce pushed the door open as smoothly and quietly as he could. The first flight of stairs was clear. Rifles up, the two men slowly advanced up the stairs, shoulder to shoulder, trying to make no noise. There was a turn halfway to the second floor and they paused just before it. They could hear several Tabs above them, talking loudly because their hearing had been destroyed by the gunfire. The stairwell smelled of sweat and blood.

Barker traded a look with Royce, then they pushed forward and around the corner. Four Tab soldiers were clustered on the second-floor landing and in the open doorway leading into the hallway, all of them looking upward. Barker and Royce started firing, pulling their triggers as fast as they could, ejected cases from their rifles bouncing off the walls and blood flying from their hits. The four men died before they had a chance to return fire.

Royce jumped over a body into the second-floor hallway and immediately came under fire from the other stairway at the end of the building, from the Tabs underneath Petal. Morris’ man dove across the hallway into an office as Barker leaned out of the doorway and fired down the hall. One of the Tabs fell and the other men with him pulled him back into the stairway, out of sight.

“Kermit, you up there?” Barker called up his stairwell.

“That you Barker?”

“Yeah. Go back up Petal, I’m doing an end run.”

Barker pulled a grenade off his chest. He looked across the second-floor hallway at Royce. He gestured he was going to head back down to the first floor and circle around. “Keep ‘em busy,” he told the man, then pulled the pin on the grenade and let the lever fly.

“One Mississippi… and the horse you rode in on!” Barker shouted, and heaved the grenade down the hall. Maybe it would have more effect than the two he’d tossed down the same stairwell. He turned and headed down without waiting to see if the grenade made it all the way to the stairwell door. It blew right before he hit the ground floor.

Back on the first floor he moved down the main hallway to the next stairwell while reloading, sticking his partially spent magazine behind a full one in a pouch on his chest. He still had plenty of loaded magazines, which was a nice change.

He listened at the door to the stairs. If there was anybody right on the other side, they weren’t making any noise. Barker gritted his teeth, then pushed the door open, leading with his rifle.

Nobody. But somebody very close above him on the stairs was swearing up a storm. There were thin trails of smoke in the air, presumably from the grenade.

Barker edged up, one step at a time, rifle shouldered and his red dot optic aimed at the landing above him, just waiting for someone to pop into view. He reached the landing mid-floor and heard shooting directly overhead, someone (probably Royce) firing in the distance and the Tabs just above him returning fire. Empty cases bounced down the stairs around him. The echoing noise in the enclosed space was deafening.

Barker used the distraction to move up the rest of the way. There were two soldiers, one on either side of the second-floor landing, eyeing the open doorway, with two bloody bodies on the floor before them. They had their backs to Barker.

He was below them and between their helmets and body armor he had no angle on their heads or necks. He coldly shot the men in the base of their spines, below their body armor, and as they fell to the floor, screaming, he shot them in their faces.

“Clear!” he shouted. “Petal! Kermit! On me!”

Royce appeared in the open doorway. Petal popped her head out around the corner above him on the stairs, rifle up just in case it was a trick. She lowered her muzzle and then eyed the bodies on the floor. “We need to help Chan and the rest of those fuckers,” he told the remaining members of his squad. “Down to one and then cut across. Quiet. Hopefully we can come up behind them again. But let’s try to be quick, I think we’re going to have company real soon.”

Chan and his people had run into the Tabs halfway down to the ground floor and gotten into a messy firefight. The Tabs had retreated, then tried a blitz, heading up four stairways at once. It hadn’t quite worked, but then it hadn’t quite not . Currently it was a stalemate. Yosemite was currently holding four stairwells by the skin of their teeth, but couldn’t move down, and the Tabs didn’t seem to have the manpower or the balls—or both—to try another assault.