James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

“Yeah, but it’s open, it’s daylight, it would be running toward the Tab column, and plus they’ve got soldiers inside their building between them and the ground floor. Even if they make it to the sewer, the Tabs will see their bolt hole and come into the sewers after them. Shit, they’ll be right on top of us right where we’re coming out of the narrow pipe, and there’s no cover down there. Quigley can’t get out, not that way, not when there’s anyone around to spot them, unless they want to kill us all.”

“Shit.”

“Nakatomi Tower to Ground, switch over to alternate.”

Ed changed the frequency on his radio. “Yeah George, go.”

“If we move over to the parking garage we’ll be a lot closer to that armor element by Quigley. I’ve still got a few grenades, and we’ve got two Spikes.”

Ed tried to pull the map of the area up in his head. “You’ll still be stretching it, that’s a Hail Mary for a Spike.”

“Well, from the parking garage to their apartment building is maybe a hundred yards, and I think their building will block us from view of the Tabs, as they’re on the far side.”

“You want to run it?” Ed asked. Hannibal, listening in, blinked his eyes at that.

Ed could almost hear George’s shrug. “Or you could run it while we cover. You’ve got Spikes left, right?”

“It’s a wide-open parking lot? Between the two buildings?”

“And a street,” George agreed.

“He can’t be serious,” Hannibal said in disbelief.

“You go,” Ed told Hannibal.

“What?”

“Tunnel. Head to the tunnel with your people. We’ll figure this out, but you need to get everybody else out of here.”

“Seriously?”

“They’re my guys, I’m not leaving them.”

“I get that, but… fuck. Shit. Dammit.” He sighed. “Go with God.” He slapped Ed on the shoulder. “Flintstone, on me!” he called out loudly, his voice echoing around the marble lobby, striding toward his men. He pointed at Brooke, who was on her back on the floor. His men had been working on her. “Can she travel?”

His medic turned to him, and Hannibal knew what he was going to say before the words came. “She’s dead.”

“Shit.” He pointed at Robbie, who was blinking and blank-faced and splashed with her blood. “This is not on you. You did your best. Nobody could have done better, and with all that blood there was no way to know she was gut-shot. But grieve later, we’ve got to go now. Flintstone! We’re heading down, NOW!”

“Theodore!” Ed waved. Jason, Early, and Morris’ loaner Sergeant Sarah Weaver were the only members of Theodore still in the lobby. “Over here.” He grabbed his radio. “Stand by,” he told George. He flipped back to the main frequency. “Almighty, do you copy? Almighty, do you copy, over?”

“Go for Almighty.” Morris sounded like he was moving fast.

“Do you still have eyes in the sky? Over.”

“Roger that.”

“This is Nakatomi Ground. I need to rendezvous with you and get that controller, I need those eyes.”

“Currently departing SkyBox, be there presently. Over.”

The three members of Theodore jogged across the huge echoing lobby, turning their heads to watch the rest of the dogsoldiers heading for the stairs down to the lower level. Ed eyed the trio. Relatively fresh, having only fired a few magazines at Tabs and their vehicles. And, and perhaps most importantly, between the three of them they had four Spikes.

“’Sup, Cap’n?” Early drawled. Jason looked back and forth between them.

“You want the good news or the bad news?”

At some point early in the anarchy a vehicle had crashed into the concrete wall enclosing the ground level of the Fisher Building parking garage. The vehicle was gone, but the rupture in the wall remained, and it was wide enough to admit a person. George slipped through it, having studied the open parking lot on the far side for a bit.

Per one of Almighty’s drones the freshly-arrived armor convoy was staged on the far side of the Lodge Freeway from one side of West Grand Boulevard to the other, but from his position on the ground the only Tab vehicle George could see was the IMP on West Grand in front of the apartment building. Weasel had indicated it was disabled by an RPG, and it certainly seemed inert, but Weasel had let them know there’d been Tabs on foot near the vehicle giving them harassing fire recently. George could only hope the soldiers had moved west to join up with the column when it had arrived.

“Fifty-foot intervals,” he said quietly, then moved away from the garage as fast as he could under his gear.

If the parking lot he was cutting across had been littered with vehicles that would have been something, a little cover, provided some security either real or perceived, but there were only a few abandoned and desiccated hulks in the lot and they were nowhere near the path he had to travel. The asphalt lot was wide open, and (as usual) he feared the worst… but he crossed it without incident, hopped the curbstones, jogged across the narrow street, and reached the cover of the far apartment building without receiving incoming fire. He stepped through an empty floor-to-ceiling window frame into what had been a bank lobby.

George cleared his surroundings then turned and covered the approach of the rest of the squad; Jason, followed by Early, Sarah, Mark, Quentin, then Ed. Kelly had peeled off from George’s group to rejoin Flintstone, not wanting to join in on their “Fucking stupid-ass suicide mission,” as he called it.

They moved into the building silently, not sure how close any Tabs might be, and took up defensive positions. When Ed was halfway across the lot something caught George’s eye. He squinted and saw a moving dot high in the air north of the Fisher Building. A drone, and not one belonging to Almighty.

Someone to the south on the ground opened up on full-auto when Quentin and Ed were still in the open, but didn’t hit anything but pavement and parked cars. It was an M5, George’s seasoned ears told him, and they were tough to control on semi-, much less full-auto. Still, both men sprinted all out, then checked themselves for hits after they made it into the building.

“Quigley, Theodore’s in your building, on the east side,” Ed said quietly into his radio, still panting. “You want to talk us into your position? We just took some fire from south of the building.”

There was a long pause. “Seriously?” Weasel sounded incredulous. “You were supposed to bail.”

“We’re not heading into the tunnels with all these Spikes,” Ed said firmly. “Not when there’s something to shoot them at right here. You’ve got Tabs in the building?”

“Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Not sure where, now. Watch your ass. We’re all up on six. There’s a stairwell at the northeast corner, take that up. Morons. Over.” Despite his casual insult he sounded delighted they were there.

Jason was behind Ed and Early as the squad moved slowly and quietly into the building, down a hallway, and began climbing the stairwell. The day before, after Morris’ briefing, Jason had been charged with adrenaline; it seemed he had joined the war effort at just the right time. Here he was with less than a week under his belt and he’d be involved in the largest offensive in the city since the start of the war. But… ever since that afternoon briefing his life has been nothing but a mixture of boredom and misery. Or misery and exhaustion.

The trek to get to the skyscraper codenamed Nakatomi under eighty pounds of gear had been the most horrific thing he’d ever done in his life, especially crawling the last 300 yards through a narrow pipe, which if anyone had asked he would have guessed at half a mile or a mile in length, it had seemed so long and painful on his hands and knees. Then he’d been with the group which had staked out the lobby. The few Army soldiers stationed inside it had been gunned down by the running men ahead of him so quickly he hadn’t seen them fall, and then… Nothing. Nothing until the enemy armor showed up across the street and he, like everyone else with him, shot at it, not with any hope of doing damage, but rather as a distraction. The IMP grenading the north entrance had been exciting and loud but not dangerous to him at all. In fact, it all still seemed a bit surreal to him. He’d been more scared during the ambush of the Army patrol, which now seemed like it had happened weeks ago. Now they were in yet another building, but at least he hadn’t had to crawl through a tunnel to get there.