“Tabs!” Renny suddenly shouted, pointing across Weasel’s chest.
Weasel looked out his side window and saw another Growler pacing them on the opposite service drive. “He’s driving the wrong way,” Weasel said. “He’s gonna get a ticket.”
He stomped the accelerator harder, hoping that he could somehow outrun the other Growler. Everyone in the vehicle had eyes on the vehicle across the freeway, which is why they didn’t see another Growler race up behind them. They didn’t hear its roaring engine until it was nearly on top of them, and then it rammed them in an attempt to make them crash.
“Shit!” Weasel shouted as the wheel twisted in his hands, but he kept control of the vehicle. “Shoot those fuckers!” he shouted, looking at Renny, but Renny was at a loss. He wouldn’t be able to bring his big rifle into play unless he opened his door. It stretched from the floor to the roof.
“Give me your subgun,” Renny said, reaching out for it.
“It’s on a sling,” Weasel told him.
“Sarah,” Renny said, fumbling with the MP5, trying to figure out how to unhook the complicated sling, “keep them busy.” The Growler shuttered under another impact and went briefly up on two wheels. Renny bounced away from Weasel against his door.
“Shit,” she swore, but stopped trying to tend to Quentin and grabbed her suppressed SBR with blood-slick hands. The Growler was right behind them, racing up to ram them once again. Sarah flipped her selector to auto and did a full mag dump into the windshield of the pursuing Growler. The Growler was armored, but her accurate fire so unnerved the driver that he swung the wheel to the side in a blind panic, barely able to see out of the spider-webbed armored glass in front of him.
In his panic the soldier was able to do accidentally what he’d been trying to do on purpose—the front bumper of his vehicle clipped the rear of the vehicle in front of him. The back wheels of Weasel’s Growler lost their grip. The Growler swung into a long sideways slide, the tires shrieking. Just as it seemed the Growler was going to come to a stop the tires hooked on the edge of a pothole and the vehicle flipped, almost in slow motion, landing heavily on its roof.
For all of its faults, and all the complaints the soldiers voiced about it, the Growler was a robust vehicle and the roof did not collapse. It was, however, deformed and all of the windows cracked. The pursuing vehicle skidded to a stop, then the driver threw it in reverse and backed up fifty feet. He opened the door and got out because he couldn’t see anything through his bullet-pocked windshield. He grabbed his rifle, shouldered it, and emptied a magazine on full auto into the side and undercarriage of the flipped Growler.
“Fucking traitor bitches!” he swore as the two other soldiers in his Growler got out, their rifles ready.
There was no movement in the flipped Growler and as the soldier walked toward it he grabbed at a fresh magazine for his rifle.
“Don’t get too close, jackass,” one of his companions told him.
The soldier, after fumbling about a bit, got the fresh magazine into the magazine well of his rifle, and looked over his shoulder at the other two men. “Fuck off, Willie. You haven’t seen shit, you just got to this damn city.”
He hit the release and the bolt slammed forward with a manly authoritative thunk. The soldier turned back to the flipped vehicle with the intention of putting another magazine into it, then he all at once screamed, dropped his rifle, and fell to the ground, clutching at his ankle, which was now a mass of bone splinters and blood. The other two soldiers hadn’t heard anything and they looked at each other and back at the screaming third of their group in confusion. That gave Renny enough time to line up his sights through the fractured rear side window at another of the soldiers. He fired his Glock three times. The broken glass of the window door deflected his first bullet but the other two found their mark. The soldier fell to the ground dead. The third man fired a wild burst at the overturned Growler as he dove behind his own vehicle.
The Growler which had been paralleling Weasel on the far side of the freeway finally raced up, having discovered the first overpass where they’d tried to cross blocked by wrecked vehicles. It stopped fifty feet on the opposite side of the overturned vehicle.
As the second Growler was pulling up Weasel was finally able to extricate himself from the steering wheel. After three savage kicks he managed to force open his door far enough to wriggle his way out on his back. Bleeding from cuts on his face and hands, and confident he had several broken ribs and maybe a fractured bone in his left arm, Weasel extended the stock of his MP5 with a yank as he got to his feet.
His thumb flipped down the selector level lever as his sights cleared the top of the overturned vehicle. The Growler which had just arrived, he was glad to see, was not armored, and he emptied his entire magazine into the windshield, working it from one side to the other. Then he ducked down as the remaining man of the trio which had flipped his vehicle popped up to fire at him.
As he deftly reloaded his MP5 Weasel said to Renny, “Can you get out of there?”
“I’m trying,” the old man said, but he was wedged between the seat and the door by his rifle. Weasel didn’t have time to look in the back seat to check the status of Sarah or Quentin, but neither of them was making any noise.
Fresh mag in his subgun Weasel crabwalked four feet to the side before popping up again and firing a long burst before even looking to see where the Tabs might be. His first long burst had killed the driver, so the vehicle hadn’t moved. One of the other soldiers was trying to wrestle his companion from behind the wheel. Weasel swung his submachine gun over and emptied the remainder of the magazine into the man through the door. The armor-piercing ammo did its job and the young soldier fell to the ground, screaming.
Weasel ducked back down, reloading once again. “Weaver!” he shouted. “Sergeant Sarah Weaver, what the fuck are you doing?” His shouting was rewarded with a low groan. Bullets spanged off the Growler above his head as at least two of the soldiers fired at him.
Still crouched down behind his overturned vehicle he fired blindly over the top at the two other Growlers, short bursts to keep their heads down. Then he heard a loud thud seemingly inches from his head. He straightened up enough to see over the top of the Growler and there, sitting on the vehicle’s frame inches from his face, was a grenade. Without thinking he reflexively grabbed it and threw it at the Growler which had flipped them over.
It seemed he’d barely ducked back behind his cover before the grenade exploded. Weasel instinctively charged toward that Growler, knowing that by using his overturned vehicle for cover he was just drawing more incoming fire toward the wounded people inside it. The Tabs behind him fired at his fleeing form, and he heard the bullets whipping past his head but he didn’t slow down. He didn’t see the soldier on the far side of the Growler he was running toward, so he hoped that it was mutual and the soldier hadn’t seen him leave his cover either.
Weasel ran around the back of the vehicle, using it to shield himself from the other soldiers and came around the back of it with his MP5 up. The soldier was just turning toward him, having heard something. Weasel fired a burst into the man’s groin and as he collapsed to the ground screaming he finished him off with a two-round burst to the face.
He now had some distance from the other combatants, and better cover, as this Growler, sitting on its wheels, stood higher off the ground. At that thought his eyes opened wide and a half second later he had dropped to his stomach on the pavement behind the boxy vehicle. Growlers were designed to go anywhere. That meant not only were they four-wheel drive, but they had excellent ground clearance.