Out of the Dark (48 page)

A corner of his brain had already noted that
these
trucks seemed to be covered in something he hadn’t seen before. Probably it was the improvised armor Mitchell and Vardry had described to him. If so, it wasn’t likely to stop one of the Barrett’s big slugs, but it might pose a problem for Wilson’s lighter .308s.

Deal with that when you get there,
that same corner of his brain told him. The open front lens cover gave his sight some protection from the rain. The fact that the rain was coming from his right rear, rather than directly
towards him, helped even more. He could just make out a shadowy, blurred, indistinct form through the windshield where the diagrams told him the driver ought to be, and the recoil of the big, bellowing rifle came as a surprise to him, exactly the way it was supposed to.

•  •  •  •  •

Laifayr’s “APC” was just beginning to accelerate when the 647-grain bullet blew a head-sized chunk of the windshield into fragments and the rest into a crazy-quilt web of cracks, then struck his driver just below the center of his chest.

The sheer concussion of being that close to a bullet that big traveling that fast when it struck something solid would have been bad enough. The finely divided spray of blood and tissue that blasted out behind it was even worse.

The senior squad commander’s eyes went huge in shocked disbelief as about half his driver’s total blood supply exploded across him, and that shock turned rapidly into something far worse as the vehicle swerved wildly. The bullet’s impact had half-disintegrated the upper portion of the driver’s torso, and the improvised “APC” responded by going completely out of control and turning sharply to its left.

The good news was that the driver’s sudden and violent demise had thrown his entire body back, away from the Shongair equivalent of the gas pedal, as well as the steering. The sudden swerve, coupled with the abrupt disappearance of any pressure on its accelerator, told the truck’s onboard computer something had gone wrong. It was a simpleminded device, but it knew what to do in that case. It applied the brakes automatically, and the armored truck began slowing rapidly before it could hurtle completely off the highway and into a rain-soaked patch of trees east of the road.

That was the good news. The
bad
news was that the flesh-and-blood driver of the patrol’s second vehicle didn’t have time to react before it plowed broadside into Laifayr’s. The impact drove the lead vehicle the rest of the way off the road and into the trees after all. It also locked both of them together, and the senior squad commander heard shouts of panic—and pain—from the troopers huddled together for warmth under the cargo bed’s fabric cover.

The
worse
news was that whoever had just killed his driver was still shooting from a bunch of trees three hundred
urma
to the south and on the
west
side of the highway.

•  •  •  •  •

Dvorak watched the two lead trucks run into each other and slide off the road. From the screeching sound—funny, a part of him noted even now,
how Shongair brakes and human brakes sounded exactly the same in a situation like this—and then the echoing sound of impact, they’d hit at a high enough rate of speed he could pretty much ignore the two of them for the moment.

He switched his point of aim to his left and, sure enough, the third truck’s driver decided to come around the collision on that side, where the highway’s median and southbound lanes offered him more clearance.

Idiot,
the human thought coldly.
Last thing he needs to be doing is charging straight into my sights!

His finger stroked the trigger again.

•  •  •  •  •

In fairness to the third driver, he had no idea what was going on. All
he
knew was that both of the vehicles in front of him had abruptly accelerated and then, for reasons unknown, the two of them had collided. Dvorak’s position was completely invisible from his position at the rear of the short column, and it never occurred to him that the “accident” might have been the result of hostile action.

It might well have occurred to him a second or two later, but he was too busy avoiding the two trucks in front of him to think about it at the moment. And, unfortunately, the unanticipated arrival of Dvorak’s second shot meant it never
would
occur to him, after all.

•  •  •  •  •

Rob Wilson was less confused than the unfortunate Shongair driver. As a consequence, he knew exactly what he should be doing. Like Dvorak, however, he’d realized what the peculiar slab-sided layers of material on the Shongair trucks had to be and, also like Dvorak, he had no idea whether or not his fire would penetrate it.

One way to find out,
he told himself philosophically, and opened a rapid, aimed fire. From over a hundred yards away, in the rain, he couldn’t tell whether or not his rounds were penetrating, but at least he didn’t see any of those dramatic, sparkling ricochets the movies had always loved.

•  •  •  •  •

Dvorak switched back to the first truck, putting a round through the area where the radio was supposed to be. He was shooting blind this time, because the vehicle had turned partly away from him with the impact, presenting him with a three-quarter view of the solid rear of the cab. On the other hand, there wasn’t much question about whether or not
his
fire was
getting through. Even in the poor light and the rain, his telescopic sight clearly showed him a sudden hand-sized patch of bare alloy or composite where whatever the Shongairi used for paint had been literally blasted away by the bullet’s impact. There was a dark hole in the center of that bare patch, and he moved his point of aim to the second truck, punching bullets through
its
cab.

•  •  •  •  •

Senior Squad Commander Laifayr crouched as low as he could, sandwiched between the mangled bodies of his driver and his communications tech. If anyone had told him someone was shooting at him with a mere rifle, he would never have believed it. And, in fact, the bullets coming at him from Dave Dvorak’s rifle were actually larger than the high-explosive shells of the ten-millimeter cannon on the roof of his “APC.”

But what they were being launched from was far less important to Laifayr at that moment than the consequences of their arrival.

Panic yammered at the back of his brain. Without an RC drone, and with his communications tech dead (not to mention the shattered hole the bullet which killed him had punched through the com unit itself) there was no way to summon assistance. None of their personal units had the range or the power for that kind of work, anyway. He could only hope one of the other vehicles had managed to get off a message, and whether it had or not, no help was going to get here in time to save any of them unless they did it on their own.

He crawled and squirmed across the seat, kicking and pummeling the driver’s mangled corpse out of his way, and managed to open the door on the far side from whoever was shooting at them. Thoughts of the auto-cannon did flicker through his mind as he rolled out into the painful scratchy embrace of the tree limbs, but he brushed them aside quickly. He’d left his own rifle in the cab, and his sidearm couldn’t possibly reach whoever was shooting at him. A little voice suggested he should go back and get it, but he brushed that voice aside even more quickly than he had the thought of the cannon.

It wasn’t his responsibility to get tied down in a firefight, he told himself. No, it was his responsibility to impose some sort of order on this ravening chaos. And if that just happened to keep him out of the direct line of fire of whatever demon had torn apart the other two troopers in the cab with him, so much the better.

He fought his way through the clinging branches of the scrubby trees which had enfolded the “APC,” then reached up and pounded on the improvised armor of the cargo bed and started bellowing orders at the troopers he hoped were still alive inside it.

•  •  •  •  •

The second “APC’s” commander—braver (or stupider) than Laifayr—did force his way up through the access trunk and grabbed the firing grips of his auto-cannon. Unfortunately, his movements attracted Dave Dvorak’s eye. A moment later, the commander himself attracted another of Dvorak’s bullets.

Rifle barrels were beginning to thrust out of some of the firing ports cut through the vehicles’ “armor.” The Shongairi behind those rifles had strictly limited fields of view. One or two of them, though, had seen the impressive flash from Dvorak’s muzzle brake in the gathering darkness, and their fire started sizzling back towards the two humans belly down in the sodden woods.

•  •  •  •  •

Jesus,
there’s
A bunch of them! Rob Wilson thought as Shongair muzzles began to flash.

He didn’t know whether or not the Shongairi had gotten off a contact report. If the information they’d been provided by the state troopers who’d had more contact with them was correct, their communications weren’t very good without those drones of theirs, and he’d neither seen (nor heard) one of them. It looked like Dvorak had ripped hell out of the trucks’ cabs, too. It seemed unlikely there was anyone alive in there, anymore, and if there were, it struck him as a pretty fair bet Dvorak had taken out their internal radios.

Which, unfortunately, left what looked and sounded like thirty or forty
really
pissed-off Shongairi inside the trucks’ cargo compartments.

“Hey!” he shouted at his brother-in-law. “I don’t know if I’m even getting through! Start ripping up the truck beds—I’ll handle any runners!”

•  •  •  •  •

Sweet Dainthar!
Laifayr thought as he heard the bloodcurdling shriek and saw one of Dvorak’s slugs punch right through the
far
side of the truck’s “armor.”

He could hear the steady, measured reports of the human’s monster rifle now, and his spirit quailed at the thought of facing that sort of destructive power. Another round slammed into the troop compartment. At least this
one didn’t come all the way out the other side, but more screams told him it had found a target anyway.

“Out of the trucks!” he heard himself shouting. “
Out of the trucks!
Don’t just sit there—we’ve got to go
after
them!”

•  •  •  •  •

Dvorak and Wilson saw the Shongairi come boiling out of the tangle of vehicles. It didn’t look as if most of the aliens had a very clear fix on their enemies’ positions, but they obviously had at least a general notion of where the fire was coming from. Some of them clearly
did
know where to look—probably from Dvorak’s muzzle flashes—and they’d obviously figured out that sitting in place wasn’t going to work for them.

Now thirty-seven Shongair troopers started towards the two humans, a football field and a half away, firing their weapons as they came.

•  •  •  •  •

Shit
, Wilson thought.
I feel like fucking Butch and Sundance in Bolivia!

Shongair bullets began to whine and crackle entirely too close for comfort. He made himself ignore the sound, concentrating on servicing targets and wishing for the first time that his rifle had a full-auto setting.

A hundred and fifty yards didn’t seem like all that far with forty or so murderous aliens charging towards you across it.

•  •  •  •  •

If, In fact, the Shongairi had simply charged—charged as quickly as they could possibly move, taking their losses to close the distance—it would all have been over in a hurry. Human troops, realizing they were taking fire only from a pair of semiautomatic weapons, might well have done just that. The Shongairi weren’t accustomed to taking aimed rifle fire at
all,
however. There were very few veterans of combat against humans in Laifayr’s patrol, and even their experience was limited. So instead of charging, or even using one squad to lay down suppressing fire while the other one charged,
both
squads surged forward in a sort of half run, half trot, firing as they came.

It gave them the worst of both worlds. They were moving too rapidly to aim, but moving slowly enough to give the humans more time to engage them.

•  •  •  •  •

Dvorak ejected A spent magazine and slapped in another.

“Next-to-last!” he shouted to Wilson.

“
Told
you those big-assed bullets took up too much frigging space!” Wilson snarled back.

“Squinchy little Irish bastard!” Dvorak replied, squeezing off another round and watching yet another Shongair fly backward. “At least when I hit one of them, the fucker goes down!”

“
When
you hit one of them!” Wilson agreed as Dvorak’s next target stumbled just as he fired. The bullet missed completely, and Dvorak snarled, readjusted his point of aim, and fired again.

“Better!” Wilson congratulated him.

“Glad you liked—”

The bullet wasn’t aimed, not really. In fact, the Shongair trooper who’d fired it was already going down with one of Rob Wilson’s .308 slugs in his chest when his finger jerked convulsively at his trigger.

None of which made any particular difference when it slammed into Dave Dvorak.

Wilson heard a hard, slapping sound. Then his brother-in-law grunted explosively and he felt something that wasn’t rain—something hot, not cold—splash the left side of his face.

He couldn’t turn his head and look, not then. Not with the Shongairi still coming for them.

“Dave?” he called.
“Dave?!”