Biting his lip against a sudden bolt of pain in the joint area, he focused through the sight on the guns. They were big and menacing, yet as a demolitions man, he knew disabling them was as simple as knocking out their stands to send them crashing downward.
Heep fired the rocket and watched a black streak whisk through the air, gathering speed. The expected burst of flames was brief and hardly dramatic, but the first of the big guns tumbled sideways like a slain giant. He got even luckier on his next two shots, finding ammo dumps with both of them, which coughed fire and smoke high into the air.
“Fucking A,” Heep muttered through his pained grimace, starting another Laws upward.
No time to play it safe …
Blaine leaped over the church’s porch and met the charging soldiers head on. There were just two of them but they were spaced apart and firing as they ran. McCracken caught one in his first spray and exhausted his clip in the other’s direction as he rolled out of line of that man’s burst. His arms were scraped raw by a poor dive and he looked up to see huge mounds of plastic explosives wedged into the church’s brick construction.
The sight seemed to recharge him. He rolled behind the cover of an adjacent building as rifle bullets kicked cement fragments up everywhere around him. He came to a halt with his pistol out and aimed at the shape still moving toward him. He took the man down with two shots, then lurched back to his feet and bolted for the church’s rear doors once more. The windows were too high to utilize as a viable escape route so he was left with the heavy, chained doors.
“Stand back!” he screamed and stripped a grenade from his belt, hoping those inside could hear him.
He pulled the pin and rolled the grenade across the porch, lunging to the ground for safety.
The explosion coughed splinters and shards everywhere. From inside, the door was ripped off its hinges. A stream of humanity started out; a screaming, wild pack with no clear path or destination, though a clear purpose lay before them.
“Follow me! Hurry!” McCracken shouted and took the lead toward Main Street.
A soldier staggered before him with his guts hanging out as Guillermo Paz made his way in a crouch across the street to a shop containing additional weapons. He was halfway there when the front of the building exploded outward. All of Main Street seemed to be burning, buildings reduced to flaming shells that sent splinters into the smoky air. The crackling continued, easily mistaken for gunfire, causing still more confusion in troops still rushing about the street looking for someone to shoot at.
All the jeeps he could see were demolished. Worst of all, Paz had lost contact with his men on the hillside. They were either dead or disabled and could no longer be relied on for help. But the generator was going to remain safe even if he had to defend it himself.
The horrible roar of the mob crossed onto Main Street, as Paz scrambled behind a building en route to the hills.
Once freed, only a few of the residents, women carting children and old people, had veered away from the battle. And only the very first to emerge noticed McCracken at all, the rest giving no consideration to the means of their freedom, just glad for the freedom itself.
Blaine hid himself among them, blending, slowing his pace occasionally as those around him reached down for a stray rifle or one still gripped by a soldier’s corpse. Others opted for sections of wooden planks or steel shards separated from the structures that had once occupied Main Street.
McCracken searched for Paz as he ran in the center of the mob. His troops had been reduced to chaos, the ones still in the streets trying hard to run from the mob once their clips were exhausted. Those soldiers the enraged citizens of Pamosa Springs were able to catch were pummeled with whatever the citizens were able to get their hands on. Buildings continued to burn and cough up fragments, smoke dissipating with the wind to reveal jagged holes in walls and roofs courtesy of Sheriff Junk’s rockets. The residents seemed not to notice. Their fury continued, increased, fed on itself.
Heep had stopped firing the rockets at the first sign of the mob rushing into the street. Exuberantly, almost near tears, he stuffed a host more grenades into his pockets and grabbed his M-16. Signaling his intention to the wounded Dog-ear, he started down for Pamosa Springs, hobbling the whole way.
McCracken moved with the stride of a commander who knew his troops were winning. The fires at the western edge of town signaled the ruin of the final gun battery, which left only foot soldiers between him and the gulley containing the generator gun. And at this rate men would prove little bother so long as the tide in the battle of Pamosa Springs continued to go his way.
His greatest enemy remained time, one perhaps too great to overcome with barely twenty-five minutes to go before the beam was activated.
Before him, Sheriff Junk emerged from the side of a building, steadying himself against it with his M-16 blasting toward a congestion of fleeing soldiers. Blaine veered away and had reached Heep’s side just when the spits started. Just more crackling, he thought at first, but soon all around him bodies of the residents of Pamosa Springs began to go down. Blaine hit the cement hard and rolled to the sidewalk within the cover of a still-standing drugstore as bullets traced the ground around him. He judged their trajectory and knew instantly they were coming from above, from soldiers who had strategically managed to gain rooftop positions where they could fire down at will.
Sheriff Junk hit the ground wincing in pain next to him. “What the fuck….”
A squad of Paz’s soldiers had charged out from positions of cover they had fled to, grabbing the offensive again, firing into the hordes of helpless who had delivered themselves into a slaughter.
Blaine saw the grenades hanging from Heep’s belt. “The grenades! Quick!”
Heep passed a few over, realizing his intention, and together they rose, ripping the pins out with their teeth and hurling the promised death upward in the direction of the rooftops. Not being sure where the fire was coming from, they relied on instinct to aim their lobs. The blasts followed quickly and just as quickly the fire from above ceased.
But the issue seemed only delayed, for Paz’s troops had control of the town again and were massing in the center of Main Street, moving in a fast walk forward, shooting at anything that moved. A few broke off toward Blaine and Heep, who were firing desperately in an attempt to subdue them. Blaine heard Junk’s clip click empty and leaped sideways to shield him with the rest of his bullets. Hardly enough, though, to stop the soldiers, a fact Blaine had just accepted when he caught the sound of heavy-caliber machine gun fire an instant before he was ready to accept death. Nothing else registered besides the fact that Paz’s soldiers were dropping all about him, cast once again in the role of the ones scurrying for cover. Blaine looked up into the sun and caught the extension of a machine gun’s barrel supported by a tripod peering down from the rooftop of a building further up the street.
Who, damnit, who?
He recalled Dog-ear’s story of a mystery avenger as he lunged back to his feet after casting a quick glance toward Heep who was scrambling for one of the downed soldiers’ guns. Again the tables of the battle had started to turn with the residents of Pamosa Springs confronting the rest of their captors.
McCracken joined the battle at its center. He alternated between downing what soldiers he could with a stray rifle lifted from the ground, and dragging several of the wounded townspeople to safety. From the roof well beyond him, single gunshots continued to pour down, the work of an expert marksman picking off Paz’s men one at a time. Blaine had been in many battles before, including firefights in Nam in which a hundred lives were lost in a minute, but this was the worst of any he’d seen. The soldiers’ numbers severely dwindling, they nonetheless held the advantage of weaponry and position, while the residents relied on raw determination and the aid of a phantom from a rooftop above. Things improved for the townspeople when several grabbed the rifles of dead soldiers, but only a few of them could make the weapons work in any effective way. The hits they recorded were lucky. The remaining soldiers paid them little regard.