Back on the first floor he moved down the main hallway to the next stairwell while reloading, sticking his partially spent magazine behind a full one in a pouch on his chest. He still had plenty of loaded magazines, which was a nice change.
He listened at the door to the stairs. If there was anybody right on the other side, they weren’t making any noise. Barker gritted his teeth, then pushed the door open, leading with his rifle.
Nobody. But somebody very close above him on the stairs was swearing up a storm. There were thin trails of smoke in the air, presumably from the grenade.
Barker edged up, one step at a time, rifle shouldered and his red dot optic aimed at the landing above him, just waiting for someone to pop into view. He reached the landing mid-floor and heard shooting directly overhead, someone (probably Royce) firing in the distance and the Tabs just above him returning fire. Empty cases bounced down the stairs around him. The echoing noise in the enclosed space was deafening.
Barker used the distraction to move up the rest of the way. There were two soldiers, one on either side of the second-floor landing, eyeing the open doorway, with two bloody bodies on the floor before them. They had their backs to Barker.
He was below them and between their helmets and body armor he had no angle on their heads or necks. He coldly shot the men in the base of their spines, below their body armor, and as they fell to the floor, screaming, he shot them in their faces.
“Clear!” he shouted. “Petal! Kermit! On me!”
Royce appeared in the open doorway. Petal popped her head out around the corner above him on the stairs, rifle up just in case it was a trick. She lowered her muzzle and then eyed the bodies on the floor. “We need to help Chan and the rest of those fuckers,” he told the remaining members of his squad. “Down to one and then cut across. Quiet. Hopefully we can come up behind them again. But let’s try to be quick, I think we’re going to have company real soon.”
Chan and his people had run into the Tabs halfway down to the ground floor and gotten into a messy firefight. The Tabs had retreated, then tried a blitz, heading up four stairways at once. It hadn’t quite worked, but then it hadn’t quite not. Currently it was a stalemate. Yosemite was currently holding four stairwells by the skin of their teeth, but couldn’t move down, and the Tabs didn’t seem to have the manpower or the balls—or both—to try another assault.
The Tabs had all the time in the world, with reinforcements incoming. The dogsoldiers, on the other hand, did not.
Chan and Lydia were holding the easternmost stairwell, posted on the fourth floor. A bullet had taken a chunk out of Chan’s left palm and gone through his radio before burying itself in the armor plate over his chest. His hand hurt like hell, and was still bleeding slowly, but the injury wasn’t life threatening. Not being able to get the hell out of the building, however, that was life threatening.
Lydia had a rifle she’d grabbed off one of the Tabs they’d killed, the donated Glock still stuck in her waistband. She kept an eye on the stairwell while Chan peeked down the fourth floor hallway. Only one man from Yosemite stood guard at the closest stairwell. There were too many stairwells, and they were spread too thin.
The Tabs below them sounded like they were getting antsy, and Lydia stuck her liberated, camouflage-stocked M5A3 out and fired a few shots, hoping to get them to ricochet off the walls and into the Tabs. No such luck. The gunfire was so loud she was flinching even before she pulled the trigger.
“Come on down, we give up!” one of the Tabs shouted from below, followed by laughter.
“We promise not to shoot,” another voice called out.
“Fuck this,” Chan muttered under his breath. They’d been static for far too long. He leaned close, his lips almost touching Lydia’s ear, and spoke quietly. She nodded, slung the rifle over her shoulder, and headed up the stairs as fast as she could.
“We’re surrendering, come on up!” Chan shouted back to the soldiers.
“You’re dead, you’re all fucking dead,” one of the Tabs yelled, voice bitter. Apparently he’d tired of the banter. “We’re going to tear this building out from under you.” Faintly they could hear gunfire in a distant section of the building, then the crump of a grenade.
“When you don’t have armor to hide behind you’re a bunch of pussies,” Chan called out. He was trying to goad them into doing something stupid. “And you can’t shoot for shit.” He was angled out and had his Steyr AUG shouldered, waiting for a Tab to sneak up the stairs and poke his head out.
No such luck.
He heard Lydia before she appeared, although she was trying to be quiet. She had a plastic milk crate in her hands, and the few remaining Molotovs were in it. She set it down on the landing. Chan bent to her and whispered in her ear, and she nodded.
Lydia unslung her carbine as Chan took the lighter. She moved down the stairs to the next corner as silently as she could. Chan stepped down behind her. They traded a look, then she stuck her carbine around the corner and fired a long burst on full auto, much of it into the ceiling as the awkwardly held gun recoiled in her hands.
She pulled back and return fire filled the air with dust and chips of concrete. By the time the Tabs stopped firing Chan had the wick of the Molotov lit, moved up to the corner, stuck his arm out, and heaved it downward. They heard the crash as the glass bottle broke on the cement, and the WHOOMPF! as the fluid ignited. There was an immediate shout, then a scream. Chan grabbed a second bottle and heaved it after the first, not bothering to light it. It crashed and added to the flames, which filled the stairwell with flickering orange light and horrific screams.
Chan paused for a five-count, and the heat even around the corner began to grow uncomfortable. Then he popped around the corner, but the three men writhing on the landing were in the last throes of death, and he didn’t waste any ammo on them.
“Next one,” Chan said, coughing from the smoke and the smell of burning flesh. “Grab the box.” They had three more Molotovs. He realized they’d work great for temporarily blocking stairs as well.
With a loud whine the turbodiesel in the Toad kicked in as the tank headed north on Woodward. The Tabs hadn’t taken long to clear out their wounded and get them loaded into the back of the IMPs. Bill and Seattle had watched, hoping the Woodward Avenue column would turn around and head back south, either to the military base or to the force on Cass Avenue which had been badly damaged by the truck bomb, to render aid. Nope.
“Well, shit,” Seattle said succinctly. The armored vehicles on Woodward were directly east of them, heading north up toward the dogsoldiers still engaged with the remnants of the first Tab armored group. “Looks like there’s nothing more we can do here.”
Bill rubbed his chin. “I don’t know that’s true.” He looked at their rifles, then out the window toward the convoy on Cass. “We start popping melons over there, maybe that column on Woodward turns around. Or maybe slows down. The cans’ll buy us a little bit of time at least before they figure out where we are.” He meant the sound suppressors mounted on their rifle barrels.
“Not much. We’re in the tallest building around, and there’s busted windows. I give them ten, maybe fifteen seconds before that tank swings its gun over and pops a round in here just in case.”
“I think it’ll be more like thirty. So we take out the tank commander and the roof gunner on the IMP, then whoever else we can, keep shooting only as long as it takes to blow through one magazine, then we get the fuck out. They’re fucking bivouacked in the middle of the street, doing triage, we can’t pass this up.” He frowned. “I don’t think we can hook up with Morris, that area’s going to be too hot, so we’ll have to head northwest to the closest sewer access.