James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

The fifth- and sixth-floor landings were covered with Tab bodies, and the air was thick with the smell of blood. Weasel met them on the sixth floor, beaming. “You guys are fucking nuts, I love it. Come on up.” His face and webgear were splashed with generous amounts of dried blood, none of which seemed to belong to him.

“It’s your house, were do you need us?” Ed asked.

“There’s four stairwells, one on each corner, plus a fancy one on the front—the south side. We don’t really have enough bodies to cover them all, so I’d like one guy here…”

“Quentin,” Ed said.

“Got it,” Quentin said, posting himself at the top of the stairs as Weasel led the squad down the hallway and turned a corner.

“’Nother guy here,” Weasel said, pointing at a stairwell door.

“Early.”

“Yeah boss, on it.”

Weasel pointed at a nearby open doorway. “Renny was in there, but then we went up on the roof for a bit. Dude can fucking shoot, I’ll give him that. Now we’re all hunkering down inside, you’ll see why. C’mon.” He led the way west down the long side of the building.

“Most of the apartments seemed empty, but any people still here have to be long gone now after all the shooting,” Weasel said. He gestured to their left, where closed doors lined the hallway. “Those open onto the south-side apartments, which look out onto West Grand. Killed an IMP out there with an RPG, but we’re all out of ammo for it. Got a few Tabs on foot out there still, somewhere.”

“One of them fired at us running over. How many doggies you have here?” George asked him.

“Left, after the Tabs pushed in and up the stairs? Me, Old Man Quigley, and two of the guys from RoadRunner. That’s it. We lost two, but we made ‘em pay. You think that stairwell you came up is bad with bodies, you should see the northwest one, got blood running down four floors like a horror movie. Assholes.” He flashed a mean grin and gestured to the left. “Got a fancy open staircase here, lots of glass. No way to cover it without exposing yourself to the street outside, so we’ve got it trip-wired with grenades on the second-floor landing. Better to dart across than drag ass.”

The building was a giant rectangle, and the west and east side corridors were shorter. Around the corner to the hallway accessing the west-facing apartments the squad reunited with Renny, as well as Harris and one of his men. All of them were crouched in the hallway, away from a nearby open doorway. Renny gave the men of Theodore a nod.

“Appreciate the moral support, but I’m not sure what else you’re going to be able to do here,” Harris said. Although the sight of all the slung Spikes lifted his spirits.

“Take a look,” Weasel told Ed, nodding at the open doorway.

“Carefully,” Renny added, his big rifle resting on its butt beside him.

Ed slid up to the open doorway and edged his eye past the frame. Beyond was a small but nicely appointed studio apartment. Against the left wall were cabinets above and below a stove and dishwasher. To the right was an open-air bedroom. Directly across from the door was the double window.

“Jesus,” Ed breathed. The drone’s video feed hadn’t really done the scene justice. He pulled back, grabbed his binoculars, then held them vertically and peeked past the doorframe again, looking through just one lens. He looked back and forth a bit, ducked down to cross to the other side of the open doorway, then looked some more from that angle. “Take a look,” he told George, handing him the binos.

The west side of the apartment building was just over one hundred yards from the near service drive of the Lodge Freeway. The far service drive was perhaps an additional seventy-five yards further away.

The Tab forces were arrayed along the far service drive as if it was the parking lot after a rock concert, with most of the vehicles turned to face toward the threat. Two Toads, two IMPs, and what had to be ten Growlers. A few Growlers were positioned a quarter-mile north, and one was equidistant south, but the majority of the vehicles were spread across West Grand in a skirmish line.

The Tabs were all buttoned up inside their vehicles. They seemed to be waiting for some signal before proceeding. Maybe they’d been instructed to stand back until the other forces approaching from the south could gather some intelligence on the dogsoldiers still in the area.

Ed frowned. The Tabs had to know there were dogsoldiers in the apartment building not too far from their front, heck there was a disabled IMP on West Grand right in front of it, but they seemed unconcerned. Maybe they thought their numbers provided some measure of protection. Maybe they suspected the dog soldiers were all out of armor-piercing weapons.

Ed pulled back and studied the squad filling the hallway before him. He counted. “Six Spikes left, total?” He looked at George.

“And I’ve got eight AP rounds for this thing,” George said, hefting the six-shot grenade launcher.

“They won’t do shit against a Toad,” Ed told him. He chewed his lip. “As for the Spikes, yeah we’re up six floors, but they’re way out there. I’m worried that we won’t have enough of a down angle to penetrate the armor, if we do manage to hit what we’re aiming at.”

“You can get up on the roof for a little more height, but you’re exposed as shit up there,” Weasel said helpfully.

George scratched his head. “We have to assume as soon as we try anything they’re going to blow the shit out of this entire building.”

“Sarah, you back up?”

She had the controller and viewscreen for Almighty’s drones, but had packed it away for the move across the open parking lot. She’d pulled it out of her pack as soon as they’d reached the sixth floor. “Yeah,” she said distractedly. The drone was one thousand feet up, directly over their building. “There’s a Growler on the north side here, parked close, but I don’t see any movement.” She and Ed had met up with her commanding officer as Morris and Conrad had come jogging into the Concourse beneath the Fisher Building. He’d left it up to her whether she would escape with him into the sewer tunnels or join with Ed and the others on their more-than-risky mission to back up Quigley and inflict additional damage on the Tabs. It hadn’t been a hard decision for her.

“I think that belonged to the dead guys in the stairwell,” Weasel said. “Came with the IMP we killed.”

“Tabs have a drone up as well in the area,” Ed told them. “I don’t feel like pulling out the satellite window sheet at the moment, so let’s just assume they’ve got satellite coverage as well.”

“If you can hit the front of the Toad’s turret with the Spike you won’t disable it, but there’s a good chance you’ll blind it so they can’t use the main gun,” Sarah reminded Ed and George.

Weasel eyed the drone controller in Sarah’s hands. “You talk to Morris? How’d we do?” he asked Ed.

Ed looked at Harris. “Sounds like all the Kestrels they had are done.”

“Everything in my hangar was toast, and the other hangar was blown to shit too,” Harris said.

“From what Morris told me and what I’ve seen from the drone, including Outlier’s IEDs, sounds like we killed one Toad and damaged another. Took out at least five IMPs and maybe a dozen Growlers. So that’s their whole air wing and at least a third, maybe half their vehicles, not counting Toads. Killed forty, maybe fifty Tabs in addition to whoever died inside the vehicles. So what is that, eighty to one hundred enemy KIA total? Morris was very happy.”

“They had their asses well and truly kicked,” George agreed. Hopefully their success was being repeated in all the other cities behind enemy lines where the ARF had planned similar operations.