One of Jon’s men-an oriental fellow wearing a Nike T-shirt and carrying a shotgun-sprinted for the cover of an overturned 18-wheeler. Dozens of hard projectiles fired by the bots sliced through the man. He fell to the pavement a bloody mess.
More enemy fire sought out the tank. Those shots that were so lethal to the guy in the Nike T-shirt could not penetrate the hide of the Abrams, but they did make a racket akin to a rainstorm of ball bearings.
Jon watched from the convenience store as the robot attackers demonstrated that they had dealt with armor before.
Three bots targeted the tank. The first fell victim to a blast from the Abrams. The second leapt into the air and landed atop the turret with a clang. It fired at point-blank range into the war machine. At such close proximity, the rounds from its guns chipped away at the armor plating.
The third bot stood twenty yards from the Abrams and opened fire. At that range, the projectiles merely bounced off the armor. However, those projectiles obliterated the Roachbot that had leapt onto the turret.
'Well, will you look at that,' Boylen gasped.
'Wow,' Jon replied as the pieces of the enemy robot dropped from the turret. 'Jesus. They’re like…I mean… these things are…they really are crazy.'
A-hehehehe.
The tank rolled forward, shaking off the last pieces of leg and faceplate. The Abrams fired another round, blasting away the Roachbot that had saved it from destruction. The alien machine sparked and splintered to bits.
A concentrated volley from well-charged Redcoat rifles destroyed the remaining bot in the parking lot, something regular bullets could not do.
The battle paused for a moment.
The majority of the Roachbot force crossed the intersection and climbed the grassy slope. They would reach the convenience store in a minute. Jon decided not to wait.
'Everyone, fall back to the mall. Boylen, get on the radio and have the gunners drop artillery all over this place. Maybe we can pick off some more with the big guns.'
'Aye.'
Jon hurried out of the store to the idling Abrams just as Prescott opened the hatch.
'Whew,' the Major removed his headset and wiped his brow. 'Thought they had us.'
'We’re going to fall back to the mall now,' Jon spoke, looking up at the Major. 'We’re going…going to… going…' he could not finish his sentence.
A destroyed Roachbot carcass lay next to the Abrams’ treads. Jon and Prescott saw metal circuits and hydraulic servos and other high tech wizardry there, all part of a chaotic assembly.
They also saw gore. Biological gore.
'Christ,' Prescott shivered. 'That’s a…that’s a human brain.'
More Roachbots crested the ridge.
A-hehehehe.
– Nina paced while a ground crew composed of kids who probably had never finished high school refueled her chopper in the lot across from the county courthouse. While that building still stood, most of the area remained piles of debris from last year’s Redcoat bombardment.
Nina’s thoughts, however, dwelled not on battles past but on the battle raging.
She knew a fair quantity of aviation fuel remained. That would not be the problem. Even the makeshift repair job she had done on the rear tail rotor did not worry her.
She worried more about the dwindling supply of munitions. She and Bragg had split the remaining thirty- millimeter rounds. She would have to make every shot count. Of course, if Bragg could not fix the jam on his own cannon then she would inherit his supply.
In addition, she had six small rockets for the hydra launcher and two Hellfire missiles.
Nina stopped pacing, closed her eyes, and listened to the steady thudder of the fuel pump, the cling and the clang of tools working on Bragg’s gun, and the shouts of veteran mechanics to their apprentices: 'No, over there,' and 'Put some muscle into it!'
Her attention floated away.
She remembered what the Old Man told her. She wondered if she should tell Trevor that the Old Man spoke to her.
No.
Trevor would want to know what the man — the entity- said but she could not tell.
She had learned that Trevor’s path led in an incredible direction, to places she could not follow. She had learned their tiny little battle in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania carried ramifications across the universe.
Universes.
What big concepts. What huge ideas. Her mind could not grasp the entirety of it.
Certainly the Old Man had not told her everything; only what her mind could handle.
However, she did fully comprehend one truth: she loved Trevor Stone.
Such a simple statement for such a complicated feeling.
He had brought out so much in her. She felt free to be herself with him, and free to be vulnerable. He had changed her from a shy outcast to a confident, complete person.
'Damn it, can’t you fuel this thing any faster?' she snapped at a teenaged technician. She wanted desperately to return to the air. She wanted desperately to chase away the sadness growing in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to get back to what she knew best: fighting. Apparently, it was all she would know for the rest of her life.
– The riflemen stood ready.
The Roachbots wobbled into the mall parking lot.
A-hehehehe.
A cluster of human fighters behind overturned cars charged their Redcoat weapons then popped out from cover like a line of prairie dogs to unleash a devastating flash of energy bolts. The blasts fired into the lead trio of attackers, causing them to smoke and spark. Metallic legs detached, synthesized robotic voices droned, and tubular bodies collapsed.
Four more Roachbots appeared through the smoldering haze emanating from the dead chassis of their brethren. These four did not wait to be blasted by energy bolts. They leapt like frogs over the automotive barricades and fell among the human troops. One landed on and crushed a girl wearing a Rolling Stones tank top. The revolver she held discharged into the boot of one of Prescott’s career soldiers.
The remaining fighters broke and ran.
The bots wobbled as their legs absorbed the impact of the jump, then fired at the fleeing crowd with a Tommy gun-like rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
An old man in a surplus Army jacket…a Hispanic woman clutching a gold crucifix…a young man who had lost an eye in a previous battle…the soldier with a bullet wound to his boot…torn to pieces by the enemy’s wild volley.
Jon retreated around the corner of an upended pick up truck and pulled a grenade from his assault vest. He yanked the pin and bolted around the truck, running in on the blind side of one of the metallic monsters.
He moved to within three paces of the bot’s frame and lobbed the explosive with an underhand pitch. It clinked among the cage-like bars lining the tube-shaped body.
Jon slipped in a puddle of human blood but righted himself in time to get behind the truck a half-second before the grenade exploded. The creature’s bars bent from the concussion and jagged shrapnel punctured the faceplate from behind. The beast flopped to the pavement motionless; another synthesized laugh silenced.
As Jon shouted, 'retreat!' Boylen stepped forward and threw a Molotov cocktail. The liquid fire splashed onto and seeped into one of the things. It staggered about wildly, screeching and firing at nothing and everything before suffering a terminal malfunction.
The human defenders who had not already run fled the ring of dead automobiles comprising the outer defenses. A pair of armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles rolled forward and covered the withdrawal to a second row of defenses closer to the cluster of mall buildings. There waited another thirty men and women with a few
