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There was blood on the pavement, and severed limbs. Camouflage clad figures were running in all directions and he could hear bullets whizzing through the air nearby. Gunfire echoed off the housefronts and the noise was incredible. He was hit in the side of the head by another smoking case as Early fired again.

Jason shouldered his rifle and fired without aiming at the armored personnel carrier still rolling down the street. He heard the clang and whine of the bullet ricocheting away. The sound of his rifle discharging hardly bothered him; it was like a muffled thump, a handclap buried by pillows.

He worked the lever automatically, still transfixed by the carnage in the street. Suddenly he saw there was a soldier atop the APC just yards from him and coming closer. This time he pointed the rifle more or less in the right direction before yanking the trigger.

His second shot went wide but then he saw the soldier was already dead, slumped over behind the roof gun. Jason worked the lever of his rifle again as a soldier appeared off the nose of the IMP. He was on the far side of the street, running flat out.

Hey! One’s getting away! Jason shouted inside his head, but nothing escaped his lips. The shooting seemed to be dying down. Didn’t anybody else see him? This time Jason put his cheek to the rifle stock. The soldier looked huge against the rifle’s front sight, impossible to miss, but Jason jerked the trigger and he could see his front sight pull off the running soldier.

He worked the lever again, cursing, and concentrated. The soldier was further away now, almost out of sight, angling for a gap between two houses. Jason held his breath, took up the slack in the trigger, and put the rifle’s square front post on the soldier’s lead shoulder. The rifle bucked in his hands as the trigger broke clean, and when it came down the soldier was nowhere to be found. Then Jason saw him, lying sideways in the grass, feet kicking awkwardly. The bullet had gone in just under the man’s armpit.

Jason saw another soldier on hands and knees scrambling backward beside the creeping IMP. One handed, the soldier raised his rifle and fired a shot past the vehicle’s rear hatch. Jason saw Ed across the street running for the IMP, and knew the squad leader couldn’t see the soldier. Jason brought his rifle back up, working the lever, and sighted in. The shot took the soldier behind the neck and he dropped without a twitch. Jason blinked twice, then looked left. Early wasn’t there.

Panicked, Jason looked left and right, and there was Early at the ragged hole where the wall had caved in. Early had turned back just as Jason took the shot and had been in line to see the soldier crumple.

“No time for gawkin’!” the big man yelled at him. “C’mon!” Early charged back across the house. Jason was right on his heels out the door.

Ed was five steps behind Weasel when he dived into the rolling APC. Before Ed could do the same the IMP thudded into the burned-out car hulk and began pushing it across the concrete. The screech of metal lasted just a few seconds before the wreck slammed into the curb and stopped the IMP’s forward momentum. Ed heard cursing from inside as Weasel tripped. There was a shredded body on the floor in back and the non-slip floor was awash in blood. Ed jumped over the body and almost fell.

The IMP’s driver was dead, that much was obvious from the low-speed collision. Ed left Weasel to check out the interior of the vehicle and turned to survey the street from the darkened interior. Every soldier he could see was down, although many of them were thrashing or screaming in pain. Or both. The Growler was farther away than he’d expected. The explosion had flattened all four of its tires and eliminated whatever forward momentum it’d had. The back of the four-by-four was engulfed in flames and sitting in a burning puddle of diesel fuel. That meant the fuel tank was perforated and not likely to explode, just burn. George was on the far side of it, moving in slowly, carbine sweeping back and forth. He fired at one thrashing body, which stilled, paused briefly to check another, probing with the muzzle of his weapon, then another. The heat from the flames kept him away from the Growler and two more still forms, but their indifference to the terrific heat told him all he needed to know.

“Are they all down?” Ed yelled at George.

George, still checking bodies, looked up and down the street. “I don’t know.”

Early and the kid emerged from a ramshackle house and scanned the street. Jason looked a little stunned but Ed didn’t fail to notice him clumsily reloading his little lever-action. “Watch the street!” Early told the young man.

“You gotta come see this,” Ed heard Weasel say from the front of the IMP.

“In a minute,” he snapped over his shoulder. The air smelled of blood and burning fuel and gunfire. “Anybody hurt?” he called out. “Anybody? Where’s Mark? Q?” Ed jumped down from the APC.

Quentin appeared just then from between two houses. “We’ve got at least one on foot!” he yelled, pointing back in the direction he’d come.

“Fuck. Jason! Get over here in front of the IMP and keep an eye out. You see anybody you yell out.” Ed pointed where he wanted the young man. “You hurt?” he asked Quentin. The black man shook his head.

“Coming out!” Mark jogged into view through the tall grass and stopped on the sidewalk, breath coming in ragged gasps. He bent nearly double, letting the SAW hang from its sling around his shoulders. “Too old for this shit,” the big forty-eight-year-old panted. “At least one, maybe two, zig-zagging through the yards, tearing ass outta here.” He waved a hand in the general direction. “Think I tagged one, but I couldn’t catch them. Fuckin’ teenagers.” He hawked a big wad of phlegm onto the cracked pavement.

“You hurt? No? Nobody? Unbefuckinglievable.” Ed was still jacked up on adrenaline, his whole body vibrating. He put a fresh magazine into his weapon, his last, and looked at the mag he’d just taken out. He could see four, maybe five rounds left in it.

“We’ve still got a fucking sniper out here,” George warned everybody. “Guy could be a friendly, or he could be a fucking wingnut and start taking potshots at us, so don’t bunch up.” That got their heads swiveling.

“You guys have two minutes!” Ed yelled at them. “Grab all the shit you can carry. Ammo, water, anything that looks like intelligence. And somebody get me a body count!”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ed clambered back into the IMP and shuffled toward the front, banging elbows and head on unforgiving steel. As big as it was on the outside, the armored personnel carrier was less than roomy. The firing platform for the roof gun took up a big chunk of the center of the compartment. The dead gunner’s body was visible from the chest down as he hung by his armpits from the hatch.

The IMP’s driver was slumped in his chair, one shoulder covered in blood from a head wound. Light came in through what passed for a windshield in the armored personnel carrier, a curving, four foot wide, four inch tall slit. The clear polymer in it was designed to stop most small arms fire and was divided into sections, or blocks, that could be replaced individually.

“What?” he demanded. Weasel, furiously opening the vehicle’s storage compartments, pointed at the block directly in front of the driver’s head. There, in the middle of it, like a mosquito trapped in amber, was a bullet. A big bullet with a silver tip.

“Our sniper?” Ed asked. Weasel shrugged. Ed looked from the bullet to the driver and back to the bullet. “So what killed him?”

“He took something in the side of the head. Shrapnel from a grenade or a stray round maybe. Back hatch was open and even though he’s got armor behind him shit just bounces around in here once it gets in.”