James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

Over the top of his rifle Ed eyed the tanks. There was smoke shooting out of the top of the tank on the right, the one at which he’d fired his rockets. It was too far away to tell for sure, but he thought he saw a hole in the top of the turret. As for the tank on the left… he saw a hatch pop open and a helmeted man stick his head and shoulders out. The Tab put his hands on the big belt-fed machine gun in front of him.

“Contact front!” Ed shouted, hopefully loud enough for his voice to carry up and down the hallway. “Machine gun!” Before he’d finished shouting his warning the man in the tank had begun firing. Ed dove to the ground to the floor pulling George down with him.

The bullets thudded into the walls behind them, the sounds of the bullets impacting drywall and wood seemingly as loud as the distant gun firing. More of the Tab soldiers opened up, the chattering of their weapons accompanied by the sound of bullets hitting around him and smacking the front of the building.

Lying on his side on the floor George finished reloading the grenade launcher. Ed rose up onto one knee and peered out the window. As he did, he saw the main gun on the still-functioning tank swing over toward him.

“Incoming!” he screamed. He grabbed George by the collar and gave him a yank as he rose to his feet and lunged toward the door. As he reached the doorway the entire building shuddered as the high-explosive tank round hit somewhere close. He fell to his knees but was back up instantly as dust fell from the ceiling. “Where’d that hit?” he started to say.

George hurled himself through the doorway and body slammed Ed into the wall as Sarah and Harris bailed out of their apartment as well. As he bounced off the wall and fell to his knees Ed saw Harris had a Spike tube in his hands.

“That thing still hot?” Ed asked him.

“Yeah,” Harris replied, “I wasn’t fast enough on the trigger.”

“No time like the fucking present,” George growled at him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Harris said. “Backblast!” he called out, running into the apartment he’d just vacated. As Harris shouldered the rocket launcher Sarah looked past him through the open doorway. She saw the main gun of the Toad traversing once again, seemingly swinging over to point directly at them.

“Displace!” she screamed, running left, away from the men and around the corner. Ed and George had just turned to run in the opposite direction when the BANGWHOOSH of Harris’s Spike roasted the drywall and filled the air with fresh particles, the sound followed almost immediately by a huge explosion that tossed them to the floor and covered them with debris.

“You can see the difference between the up-armored and the regular Growlers,” Mark told Jason as they waited for the signal, crouched in the dim apartment. He pointed out the windows, the two of them keeping back from the glass and being very careful to stay down and move slowly. The last thing they needed was to get spotted by the Tab forces not quite two hundred yards away.

“Yeah,” Jason said, squinting. The windows on the up-armored Growlers looked like glass boxes clamped to the doors.

“Looks like about half those Growlers aren’t armored,” Mark said. “When the shooting starts you hammer them,” he told the teenager. “As fast as you can, put rounds into the passenger compartment, front seat, back seat, whatever, they’re probably full of troops. Once the action starts the vehicles might take off, or the soldiers may bail out of the vehicles. You shoot, and you just keep shooting,” Mark told him. “How many magazines do you have?”

“Six here,” Jason said, gesturing at his at the mag pouches across his chest, “and at least as many in my pack. Plus the one in the gun.”

Mark nodded approvingly. “Well you just keep shooting until I tell you otherwise, or there’s nothing left to shoot at.”

“What are you going to do about the armored Growlers?”

“The passenger compartments are armored. And the underside, against bombs. But there’s no armor on the sides or front of the engine compartment, and the tires are just tires. They used to be fitted with run-flat tires at the start of the war, but we trashed all of those. You’ve got to park that thing sometime, right? Well, you pour gas on ‘em, run-flats burn just as well as regular tires. Now, maybe only one in four tires on a Growler has that run-flat insert. So I can’t kill the guys in them… but I’m going to kill the shit out of the vehicles.”

When the lady Sergeant fired the first rocket Jason heard the noise more behind him echoing down the hall then he did outside through the glass. Almost immediately Mark began firing his belt-fed SAW, the gun set up on a counter in the middle of the studio apartment. Jason fired a few times, but the red dot of his optic was bouncing around so much he didn’t think he was hitting anything. He backed up to the open doorway of the apartment and braced his left forearm against the door frame. That steadied him greatly and he was able to direct his fire much more accurately at the Growlers on the far side of the freeway.

Between his carbine and Mark’s belt-fed the noise was incredible. He couldn’t tell if his rounds were having any effect at first. He fired about a dozen times at one Growler turned broadside to his position, peppering the front and rear side door windows with bullets. He then swung over two vehicles, to the next unarmored Growler, and began putting rounds through its windshield. Compared to his Marlin lever action the military carbine barely had any recoil. He saw movement inside the vehicle and it started to roll. He directed his fire more carefully toward the driver as the Growler accelerated north up the southbound service drive. His bolt locked back on an empty magazine but the vehicle continued north, still accelerating.

Jason heard an explosion and felt the floor shake under him. When he got a fresh magazine inserted and closed the bolt he looked over to see the hallway filled with people. Then he realized someone had shouted “Displace” over the sound of Mark’s SAW, but it wasn’t until afterward that the words registered on his brain. There was another explosion, this one much closer, and the entire apartment rumbled around them and the hallway was filled with clattering debris.

\Set up in the northwest corner apartment Renny fired and worked the bolt. He knew he’d broken the trigger cleanly but he didn’t know what kind of deflection the window glass would cause to the bullet, if any. As soon as he worked the bolt he was back focused through his scope, looking at the IMP’s roof gunner. The man was still there and just starting to fire the big fifty-caliber machine gun atop the armored personnel carrier. Renny unfocused his vision enough around his rifle scope to see that the big Hornady bullet had blown a foot-wide hole through both panes of the double window, so he no longer had to worry about glass deflection, at least in that direction.

He settled back behind the gun, got the crosshairs steady on the gunner’s neck, and pulled the trigger once again. He worked the bolt smoothly and was back on the gun almost before it was done recoiling. He saw the soldier was now slumped over the big machine gun, bright red blood everywhere.

Renny swung his rifle over to the first unarmored Growler he saw. The vehicle was facing him but at an angle. Renny fired and the remainder of the window glass in front of him blasted away. Through the scope he saw the window glass had deflected his bullet and it had hit two feet to the left near the edge of the Growler’s windshield. He was back on target in an instant, tried to quiet his body, and stroked the trigger. The big gun bucked and a white spot appeared in the glass right in front of the Growler’s driver.