Several Klowns tried to climb into the trucks. Muldoon and the others, laughing as maniacally as they could, pushed them off.
“Military only!” Muldoon would shout. “You ain’t a lightfighter, you ain’t shit!”
“I am military, you fuckin’ gorilla!” one NCO shouted back. In his old life, the soldier would have been a wizened, Yoda-like lightfighter. In the grips of madness, he was no more than a cackling lunatic.
“My ride, my rules, Master Sergeant!” Muldoon said, chuckling. Rawlings couldn’t see a good deal of his face behind his night vision goggles, but she was certain the mirth he feigned wasn’t mirrored in his eyes.
“Hey, fires are shifting!” Nutter tittered, grabbing onto the side rail as the truck lurched again.
Rawlings could barely hear him over the din of combat, but she saw the defenders had slewed most of their guns to the south and started hammering away at the combatants downrange, slashing through them with twenty-millimeter rounds and forty-millimeter grenades. The trucks had a fairly clear avenue of approach, and the chances of fratricide had just been markedly reduced.
The Klowns saw the shift, as well. They surged forward, jeering and rushing toward the container walls like some gigantic, single-celled organism. The trucks accelerated, racing them to the edge.
So did several Klown-driven Humvees.
“Okay, here we go!” Muldoon shouted. “Get ready, fuckers!”
Rawlings moved to the center of the truck’s bed with the rest of the soldiers. They crouched, steadying each other against the rig’s incessant swaying.
THIRTY-ONE.
Turner saw the trucks begin their push through the Klowns from his position to the north. Sitting in an uparmored M1045 Humvee equipped with a TOW missile tube mounted in its cupola and two more in the back, Turner watched scene unfold through the TOW’s optical sight. Several Klown vehicles—mostly Humvees and trucks, along with a mix of battered civilian vehicles—surged toward the wall surrounding Hays Hall. A couple of those closed with the trucks and pulled alongside them, effectively cutting them out of Turner’s line of sight.
“Six, this is Seven,” he said into his radio headset’s boom microphone. “You’ll have to take care of the vehicles closest to you. We’ve got no sight picture. Over.”
“Roger, Seven,” came the terse reply.
“Wizard, this is Seven. Party in ten. Over.”
“Seven, this is Wizard. We’re in position. Break. Thunder, fire in ten. Over.”
“Wizard, this is Thunder. Rounds out in ten. Over.”
Turner turned and checked the second Humvee parked abreast of his. Boats was in the cupola, already leaning into the sight of his Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided missile system. Behind the Humvee, two soldiers stood with spare TOW tubes that contained one missile each. After each unit fired, the gunner would need seven to ten seconds to rearm. Ahead of each Humvee, more soldiers crouched down with their weapons out and ready, prepped to repel any reprisal the Klowns might launch when Turner’s element attacked.
“Boats, fire in five,” Turner said over the radio.
“Five. Roger,” Boats responded perfunctorily.
Turner leaned back into his weapon and lined up on one of the Klown Humvees equipped with a Mk 19. The gunner was already leaning back in his cupola, grenade launcher elevated and firing over the wall.
Five seconds couldn’t come soon enough. Turner and Boats fired at the same time, each tube ejecting a missile that trailed fire. The projectiles were surrounded by bursts of brilliant light as their eight flight fins deployed and the booster motors fired, keeping the projectiles oriented on their targets. The missiles rocked briefly in the air as they made final adjustments then hurtled toward the Klown vehicles at speeds approaching nine hundred twenty feet per second. Turner watched with no small delight as his missile slammed into its targeted Humvee and obliterated it, turning it into flaming wreckage and propelling huge chunks of it through the air. The high-explosive warhead’s detonation caused a shock wave to rip across the battlefield, mowing down a dozen Klowns in an instant. Turner had no idea if they’d been killed by the blast, but they’d certainly had their bells rung in a big way.
“Reload!” he shouted as he began unclipping the expended tube from the base of the launcher. Another explosion blossomed into being as Boats’s round hit a tactical truck, completely eradicating it and leaving only the twisted frame remaining.
That’s how we do it, Turner thought. Take that, you fucks.
THIRTY-TWO.
The ferocity of the two explosions surprised Lee, even though he had been expecting them. However, the Klowns surrounding the two trucks didn’t even seem to notice. They just continued their run to the container walls, screaming and yelling and generally having a good time. Lee rolled up his window then reached down and grabbed the M57 Firing Device from the seat. More commonly referred to as “the clacker” because it consisted of a large, flat trigger that made a distinctive noise when it was depressed, the unit would detonate the Claymore mines attached to the truck’s side rails.
“Claymore!” Lee shouted into the radio.
Then, he slapped down on the M57’s trigger.
THIRTY-THREE.
The night erupted once again as the mines on either side of the first truck exploded within microseconds of each other, blasting their payload of steel pellets outward like lethal, metallic fans. The Klowns jammed in tightly around the vehicles were instantly mowed down, no more capable of surviving the onslaught than a field of wheat could withstand an attack from a farmer’s combine harvester. Bright sparks erupted across the nearby vehicles. While the armored Humvees withstood the barrage of pellets, softer-skinned civilian vehicles were turned into something akin to Swiss cheese as the projectiles ripped right through them—and their occupants.
At a hundred feet out, Klowns continued to fall to the ground, their flesh shredded and bones shattered as the pellets did their nasty work. But farther out, the effects of the Claymore blasts were not as immediately lethal. The Infected still fell, perhaps mortally wounded, and writhed on the ground, twisting and laughing and shrieking in pain-fueled ardor.
The second truck released its payload of mines a moment after the first, and more overlapping cones of destruction blazed across the battlefield, ripping, tearing, maiming and killing. In less than two seconds, over two hundred Klowns had been slain, and in the seconds and minutes that followed, twice that number would also perish from the grievous wounds they had sustained from the mine blasts. For a moment, the two trucks were isolated from the rest of the Klowns, surrounded by a barrier of dead and twitching bodies.
“Up!” Muldoon shouted. “Get your MOPP on and fight!”
The soldiers pulled on their MOPP overgarments and face masks and got to their feet, leaning against the side rails of the truck as they raised their weapons. Rawlings did the same. She shouldered her M4 and opened up on one of the Klown-controlled Humvees, riddling it with fire. The attack was mostly ineffective. The uparmored vehicle’s plating and special glass panes turned her rounds, though the already-dead gunner in its open cupola shuddered and jerked from bullets passing through its mangled corpse. Then the Humvee transformed into a ball of expanding fire as it suddenly accelerated toward the container wall as if kicked by a giant. The vehicle slammed into the container and turned into a twisted hulk of burning metal. It took Rawlings a second to figure out what had happened. One of the soldiers in the second truck had hit the Humvee with an AT4, right in the ass, and the ensuing explosion drove it forward. From the rear of her truck, another AT4 roared, and a second Humvee exploded with such ferocity that it leaped into the air and came crashing down on its side.