Francisco watched as one of his gangbangers, wearing a red hoodie, walked fearlessly up and down on the sidewalk beside the road, executing Latino men too scared to fight. Then his man’s head blew apart in a red mist, dropping him to the pavement.
“Bring up the tanks!” Francisco screamed. “Bring up the tanks now!”
Not for a second did Jeff consider surrendering. In this world, surrender meant certain death for his family and friends. This enemy would strip the Homestead bare, and they might even massacre everyone still standing. Without food, water and wood, agonizing starvation would be a certainty. For the Homestead, this battle would be fought to the last man.
The vast number of enemy wasn’t something Jeff had anticipated, but he and his men had planned for this battle. The road leading up to the neighborhood gave them every tactical advantage so long as they executed with precision.
The lessons of the Roman battle of Cannae cut both ways. This enemy came to battle with elephant-like battle armor. But the lie of the land heavily favored Jeff Kirkham. With a steep slope on the downward side of the road, and an even steeper slope towering above, Jeff’s QRFs could rain death upon the advancing army with precision shots and the advantage of high ground.
The Battle of Cannae was considered one of the greatest defeats in Roman history. A large Roman army came against the army of Carthage, led by Hannibal at the Aufidus River. The Romans numbered ninety thousand, and Hannibal’s army numbered half that many. Hannibal carefully deployed specialized troops, such as his Numidian and Spanish cavalry and his expert rock slingers, to maximize their advantage. Then Hannibal blocked his flank with the river, concentrating the Romans in a tactical pocket where he could attack them on three sides.
The hillsides above and below Vista View Boulevard would block out most attempts to flank his forces, plus Jeff’s shooters would fire from the homes above, hopefully stalling the enemy’s advance and winnowing their numbers, forcing them to linger in front of each roadblock. Like Hannibal, Jeff bet everything on sucking the enemy into a pickle barrel where his small army could shoot at them from three sides.
Jeff ran forward to join his defenders at the second barricade. The approaching army couldn’t see the second, third or fourth barricades from their position. They would be wading into a fight they didn’t understand. Jeff prayed they hadn’t reconnoitered beforehand.
The Homestead only had one belt-fed machine gun, and it had already been lost. But Jeff had arranged firing positions in the homes and backyards that towered over the boulevard. Every time the enemy slowed to clear a barricade, they would die by the scores. Then Jeff’s troops could retreat farther up the road, harrowing the enemy yet again.
Each retreat of Jeff’s defenders would force the enemy to pass through a gauntlet of highly accurate rifle fire. Every one of Jeff’s men carried an assault rifle, battle rifle or scoped hunting rifle, and they had trained extensively for two weeks and, in some cases, they had trained for years.
The gangbanger army appeared to employ a random assortment of weapons—rifles, shotguns, .22-caliber rabbit guns, and even some assault rifles. Jeff didn’t know it, but he faced the guns stolen from the Avenues, mostly handguns and hunting rifles.
As Jeff watched the Latino army surge up the road, he could see no coordination other than a general push forward. No apparent effort was made to expand the fighting front of the enemy. The entire front line seemed to be confined to the width of the boulevard and the park strip on the downhill side. Jeff hoped against hope that the enemy would continue as currently disposed, in a massive frontal assault.
The first phalanx of men marched up the road toward Jeff’s barricade like a hoard of rats intent on overtaking the farm.
“Bring the fifties and the hunting rifles up right now.” Jeff spoke into his radio, careful not to shout. “We need to kill that armor.”
Jeff grabbed two of the men closest to him and laid out a strange, desperate plan.
Jason geared up in time to jump in with QRF Two in the back of the Pinzgauer truck. Eight guys sat wedged in the back of the little personnel carrier, racing down the mountain toward battle. Jason had put in a little time to train with QRF Two, but he hadn’t been fully spun up with the team. Alec, the team commander, would be using him in a special unit with two other shooters.
Before the collapse, Jason had trained with his SOF buddies, but that didn’t mean he knew the ropes in QRF Two. For one thing, he had missed too much training to be clear on their radio protocols, and he didn’t know their react-to-contact procedure. So Alec wouldn’t be using him in his main force.
As he raced into combat, Jason didn’t feel prepared. His stomach was doing back-flips and he knew the only cure to those jitters was training, training and more training. The thing that bugged him most was his rifle. He had been busy managing the Homestead over the last two weeks, and he hadn’t had a chance to put together his .308 battle belt and chest rig.
Jason was kitted out with his ultra-light AR-15 rifle, with the diminutive .223 round . The four-pound gun felt like a toy, legitimate killing power in a package that weighed the same as a plastic Nerf gun. He had built the gun before the collapse because he knew he could wear it on his back all day without setting it down. While it was incredibly convenient, it wasn’t the rifle he wanted for battle. Besides shooting the underwhelming .223, his custom ultra-light was even more unreliable than a standard AR-15. The titanium bolt was better suited to competition shooting. All Jason could do was pray the little rifle wouldn’t let him down.
All his angst coalesced around the gun. He kept looking at it, cradled between his legs, and wished he were carrying one of his big SCAR Heavy .308 rifles. A rifle is a rifle is a rifle, he kept telling himself, but he couldn’t help but obsess over the insufficiency of the ultra-light AR-15. The gun was a convenient place for his angst to land, and it was fogging his brain.
Jason shook his head like a dog trying to clear its anxiety. The Pinzgauer squeaked to a stop and everyone piled out the back.
The partial pincer strategy, borrowed from the Battle of Cannae, worked even better than Jeff anticipated. He watched through his ACOG scope as the enemy dropped like God himself smote them.
A man in a red hoodie walked among the Latinos huddled on the pavement, and began shooting them, presumably for cowardice. Jeff let out half a breath and put a .308 bullet through the man’s skull. He fell to the ground as though his legs had turned to pudding.
Still they came. For every dozen men felled by his overwatch shooters, a hundred more appeared from below. After the third wave, the Latino assault died in the no man’s land beneath the bluff. There, Jeff noticed a pattern.
“QRF One. This is Jeff. Over.”
“Go ahead.”
“Target anyone wearing red. They are command. Do you copy?”
“Copy that. Kill the bastards in red. Over.”
Jeff dropped the radio back into the pouch on his chest rig and looked around the concrete barricade with one eye. More men appeared over the slope in the road, as if rising from hell itself, cloaked in the shimmer of early morning mirage.
As he worked back and forth with his .308, putting careful rounds into one head, then another, Jeff felt the deep rumble of something heavy, groaning through the pavement. The vibrations came up through his feet and reverberated in his gut: the sound of a machine coming to grind them under its wheels.
A new volley of desperate fire rained down as his men on top of the bluff reacted in a panic.