She rested the M-4’s handguard on her knee as she sat on her butt with one leg supporting her weight on the rooftop. The plastic handguard was cold on her skin through her jeans as it dug into her knee. She lined up her shot. The Iranian sat on a chair looking out over the road, clueless or careless, Sidney would take either one.
She exhaled and dug the rifle’s stock into her shoulder. The next thing she knew, the rifle bucked gently into her, temporarily breaking her view of the target. She quickly reacquired the sight picture and looked for the guard. He was nowhere to be seen. Had she missed and he jumped down? In a panic, she stood, gaining three feet as she peered through the scope. Then she saw him. The guard’s body was in a heap beside the chair. He wasn’t moving, but the body was threatening to slide off the roof. It would be problematic if it did.
She waved an arm over her head to tell Mark that the guard was down. He waved back and she watched as he edged around the building. Within seconds, he was racing across the blacktop to the fence line. He was completely exposed. If anyone from inside the camp happened to look out and see him, or an infected was nearby, then it was game over.
Mark draped the rope of plastic explosives over the three strands of wire, then pushed the blasting cap into the center of the Play-Doh-like substance. He began unravelling the wire as he walked quickly back across the road.
Then, the shouts of alarm began. She swung the rifle over to where the guard’s body had been. It was gone, fallen from the roof, and someone had found it. Men emerged from buildings, scrambling around in the poor lighting. Most were in night clothes consisting of a mixture of gowns and pajama pants. There were a lot more than seven of them and every one of the bastards carried weapons. They yelled to one another in their foreign tongue, scrambling to take up prearranged defensive positions.
By the time Sidney focused in on Mark once more, he was already behind the building and inserting the wires into the firing device. He didn’t look up to her for confirmation or ask for permission now that the Iranians were alerted to their presence. The boy went ahead with the plan and initiated the detonation.
The explosion wasn’t massive, but it was bright and deafening, even from the two or three hundred feet away that Sidney was. After a moment to rub at her ears, she took advantage of the confusion to sight in on the camp and fire a few rounds at defenders in an effort to even the odds. She only risked the three shots while the smoke and dust helped to obscure her location.
The door in the house below closed and she thought she heard the locks engage. Then footsteps on the stairs. They sounded too heavy for Mark. Had someone found out where she was? She turned her body around, barrel of her weapon pointed just to the side of the window that granted access to the roof. If it wasn’t Mark, the intruder would have an extra nostril to breathe from for the final moments of their life.
“Sidney, it’s me,” Mark’s voice came from inside the bedroom.
“Okay,” she sighed, letting out the breath she’d unconsciously held. “You can come out.”
The screams of the infected echoed around them as Mark scrambled out onto the rooftop. ”Holy crap!” he whispered, pointing toward the camp.
She turned back. The Iranians had turned on the big generator powered floodlights. They knew they had a hole in their perimeter, so they were going to make their stand with the area illuminated so they could see. It wasn’t a great idea since the lights would just draw more of them in, but then again, it wasn’t a bad idea since they needed to be able to see what they were shooting at. The US Army had experienced the same dilemma down at Fort Bliss when she was there.
A nudge on her shoulder brought her back to the present. “Huh?”
“I said, look.”
The shadows around the house moved as infected streamed toward the sights and sounds. There had to be hundreds of them as they materialized from the long-dead cornstalks that would never be cleared around the little neighborhood cluster outside of town.
“Damn,” she hissed, realizing the folly of her plan. They were going to be trapped here as well.
“I know, they’re gonna fuck those dudes up!” Mark said, laughing.
Rifle fire erupted from the camp perimeter as the first of the infected emerged from the shadows. It was soon joined by the heavier, guttural sounds of Iranian machine guns as they raked back and forth into the crowd. Sidney sighted down on the nearest machine gunner and fired, hitting him in the chest. She quickly switched to the second gunner and realized that he was elevating his weapon in their direction. He’d seen the muzzle blast from her rifle.
“Get down!” she yelled, shoving Mark roughly as the shingles exploded beside them. “In! Get in the house!”
They scrambled for the window and Sidney felt her feet slip on the old roof, loosening thousands of tiny rock granules from the shingles. “Oh…shiiii—”
She began falling. Her weight carried her to the edge, she couldn’t stop herself. First her feet went, losing all traction, as her rifle fell away in
