The MOPP gear intended to protect from immediate infection worked against those who wore it by reducing fields of vision, smothering hearing capabilities, and impeding movement. The newly-risen Klowns were able to strike before the protected soldiers could adapt to the situation, either by killing them outright or by tearing off their masks and overgarments, which exposed them to the putrid contaminants speckling the truck bed.
Adding to the confusion was the orbiting Huey that continued to fire at those soldiers not in the truck. The remaining uninfected lightfighters were forced to either find cover or return fire.
“Keep firing!” Rawlings yelled.
She was fifty feet from the truck’s tailgate. She had been tossed into the meadow with several other soldiers when the vehicle crashed through the guardrail and rolled down the incline on the other side. She’d lost her M4 and had spent several seconds combing the tall weeds for it. By the time she found it, the UH-1 was almost overhead. The gunners had missed her, but a limping soldier ten feet away had taken a round that had passed through his helmet and into his skull without even slowing. On balance, Rawlings thought he’d been lucky.
The fighting in the truck stopped as the UH-1 wheeled away, trailing smoke. It continued down the highway, its occupants tossing out more fuel bladders and other containers at the open trucks despite the fusillade of small arms fire directed at it. Rawlings turned back to the truck and saw several soldiers arming themselves. Some stopped to smear the blood of the fallen onto their uniforms, cackling as they did so.
“The truck!” she yelled at the soldiers closest to her. “The troops in the truck—they’re Klowns!”
The firing began anew but from the truck outward. One of the soldiers near Rawlings grunted and staggered backward as several rounds struck him. Rawlings had no idea if the body armor saved his life or not as she crouched in the weeds, reducing her silhouette as much as possible. She had no armor, no real protective gear of any kind. She had even lost her cap in the tumble from the truck. The weeds provided conceal-only cover that was marginal, at best. Added to that, she was caught between two soldiers and the Klowns on the truck as they duked it out with assault rifles. She needed to keep her head down and find some substantial cover, and fast.
A Humvee pulled up to the side of the road, just before the twisted gap in the guardrail. She was disappointed that the vehicle didn’t have any mounted weapons, but when its doors opened, a few armed lightfighters stepped out and took up defensive positions. They wore MOPP gear, and they had their weapons oriented toward the truck.
That’s as good as it’s gonna get, girl.
Rawlings started crawling toward the Humvee. One of the soldiers dived to the ground, doing a virtual face-plant on the shoulder of the road as a salvo of bullets struck the vehicle, ricocheting off and leaving its armor pockmarked. The second soldier on that side knelt and ripped off an entire magazine on full automatic, hosing the truck with thirty rounds of 5.56-millimeter ball ammunition. For his efforts, the Klowns concentrated their fire on him, dropping him.
Rawlings kept crawling. Even though it had been hit, the Humvee was still drivable, and she wanted to get some armor around her. The gunfire in the meadow continued, and over the uproar, she could hear the Klowns cackling with wild glee.
She came across the body of the soldier who had been killed in the strafing run. Flies were already buzzing around the corpse. Rawlings took a moment to roll the soldier over onto his back. His face was misshapen, courtesy of the bullet that had passed through his skull and exited out his chin, tearing away half his jaw. One eye peered at her sightlessly. Metal winked from inside the remains of the soldier’s mouth—a dental implant exposed when the crown affixed to its abutment had been shorn off, an expensive piece of hardware that probably cost more than the lightfighter’s M4. Rawlings ignored the gore and went for the soldier’s tactical harness, intending to liberate some ammunition.
She spotted two M67 fragmentation grenades clipped to the front of the harness.
Behind her, the Klowns were starting to dismount, howling and jeering as they fired into the weeds.
Rawlings grabbed one of the grenades, cupped it in her right hand, and squeezed the safety lever. Rolling to her feet, she held the explosive waist-high and gripped the pin with the fingers of her left hand. Unlike how it was done in the movies, she didn’t pull the pin—she pulled the grenade away from it, ensuring she didn’t lose her grip on the safety lever. With the pin ripped out, she rose, spreading her feet to adopt the throwing stance she hadn’t had to assume since basic training. Her back was to the Humvee, and she wondered what the soldiers there would think when she suddenly popped up in their firing lane.
Dear God, please don’t let them shoot me in the back.
One of the Klowns saw her and leered, bringing up his assault rifle. She recognized the goofy platoon commander who had kept repeating, “I’m in charge!” like a healing mantra.
“Gonna fuck you up the ass, bitch!” he shouted.
Rawlings hurled the grenade. “Frag out!” She leaped across the dead soldier’s body and dropped to the ground behind it, using the torso for cover. Rounds ripped past her, tearing the tops off the weeds as Rawlings tried to flatten her body. One of the uninfected soldiers near her ripped off a burst on full automatic then lunged toward her, covering her body with his own and smothering her beneath his weight.
The grenade went off with an ear-splitting roar that left Rawlings half deaf. The soldier on top of her jerked then lay still. A queer silence descended on the meadow, broken only by a muted buzz that filled Rawlings’s ears. Then she heard the distant patter of debris raining down all around her, followed by more firing. Someone was shouting orders, and Rawlings believed it was that giant of a man, Muldoon. The firing rang out in stark, staccato bursts that seemed to come from everywhere, punctuated by the shouts of men in battle against cackling lunatics, a nightmarish orchestra playing over a bed of basso rotor beats.
Get in the fight, or get to the Humvee, she told herself.
“Hey, get off me,” she yelled to the soldier on top of her.
He didn’t move, so she gathered her arms beneath her and literally did a pushup against his dead weight. He rolled onto his side, his eyes open and staring. He was a skinny black kid, maybe no more than nineteen years old, his face smooth and devoid of age lines. Written in neat block letters in black pen across a band around his helmet was the name KEALTY. Rawlings put a finger against his jugular. He had no pulse. She inspected him for injuries and found a small dark slit on the back of his neck. A grenade fragment had hit him, flying benignly right over her and severing his spinal cord before tearing through other structures in his body. He had died instantly, since the expression on his face didn’t show even a hint of surprise.
“Rawlings! Get on your feet!”
Rawlings looked up and saw Muldoon striding toward her like some avenging angel. Beside him, Nutter struggled to keep up. Several more soldiers fanned out behind them, weapons out, scanning for a threat. Beyond, the M925A1 was on fire. Bodies lay everywhere. One soldier in a tattered uniform was still moving near the flaming wreckage. He wore a MOPP overgarment, but no facemask. He was horribly burned, and he shuddered as he coughed.
No. He wasn’t coughing. He was laughing.
Muldoon followed her gaze and saw the soldier. He stopped, raised his rifle, and put one round through the Klown’s forehead. The infected soldier dropped and moved no more.
Muldoon turned back to her, and without his sunglasses, she saw his eyes were a clear blue.