Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(102)
In the windows and doorways, he can sense eyes watching him. Shadows shift. The inside of the Humvee keeps fogging up, so they have the windows cracked and he can smell the reek of sewage and garbage and sour-sweet decomposition.
At the edge of town they pass a graveyard outpaced and overrun by bodies. Some graves are marked and some are not. Some bodies are buried and some are not. Mounded in barrows of snow or laid out in the open air or blanketed with rocks. Half-decayed blackened bodies. Skeletons the color of old ice. A dog trots out carrying a femur in its mouth like a stick. Every now and then a man or two or three will rough a shovel into the stony, frozen soil and dig a fresh grave, but they can’t always keep up with the death, and when spring comes, when the weather warms and the rain falls, decayed flesh will muddy the ground and flies will gather like storm clouds.
He watches this all with passing interest, but his mind’s eye turns inward. He can’t stop thinking about his father and his shed, the notes left behind and what they might tell him. Because of this, the busyness of his mind, he doesn’t feel as nervous as he should. Trevor sits next to him—the wolf pelt still attached to his helmet and draped down his back, a meaty smell puffing off it. Every time Trevor tries to speak, the squad leader tells him to shut his hole. For this, Patrick is grateful.
They drive north out of the valley and then east between two low, flattopped hills, the roads deteriorating further with every passing mile. They skirt the edge of a fjord and a flock of seagulls surrounds the convoy briefly, screeching over the engines, beating their wings outside the windows, before drifting away. Then striped canyon walls surround them and they head up into a narrow winding passage that will bring them into the next valley, where the combat outpost is located.
The sun is directly in front of them—aligned perfectly with the chute of the canyon—and blinding when reflected off the snow. Patrick squints even with sunglasses. The afterimage of the landscape singes into his eyes, the whiteness seeming to infect him so that whiteness is all he sees, nothing distinguished, everything running into the next thing, as formless as spilled milk.
Decker is at the head of the convoy and Patrick hears his voice squawk over the radio. “Slow down. Trouble ahead.” The canyon opens into a U-shaped clearing five hundred meters long and half as wide. At the far end of it, where the road again narrows through canyon walls, a rockslide has blocked their passage.
Trevor curses when he tries to drink from his canteen and the Humvee brakes to a sudden stop. “Goddamn do I have the worst luck,” he says and swipes pointlessly at the spill dampening his chest.
There is a tinkle of glass when the bullet rips through it. Trevor’s head whips to the side. His eye has vanished, replaced by a hole from which blood leaks. His canteen drops to the floor, sloshing and gurgling as it empties between his boots. He shakes, as if in an epileptic seizure, then tips over and lays his head on Patrick’s shoulder.
Patrick isn’t sure how much time passes. Maybe a few seconds, maybe a minute. He is too caught up in the sensation of blood warming his shoulder, the pressing weight of Trevor’s head there. An explosion wakes him from his daze, so powerful that the windshield cracks and the Humvee rocks. Near the front of the convoy he can see a black wraith of smoke twisting upward, blotting out the sun. He is about to ask his squad leader what to do when he realizes he is the only one left in the Humvee. The driver and passenger door are open and the air outside crashes with gunfire. Men scream.
He scrambles for the door handle when another bullet sings through his window and embeds itself in the seat next to him. Because of the way the Humvee is angled, he realizes he is on the battle side of the vehicle and will end up ribboned by bullets if he steps out. He hears another bullet ping and ricochet off the door and he curses and ducks down and clutches his M4 and climbs over Trevor’s body to the opposite side of the Humvee and falls out the door and flattens his body into the snow.
He hears a voice screaming, “Squad vee, squad vee!” Two fire teams forward, one fire team back. Somehow the drivers reacted as they should and the Humvees and MRAPs have parked at a strategic diagonal rather than a straight line against the fire zone.
He peers around a tire and sees one Humvee blackened and broken. Whether destroyed by an IED or RPG, he doesn’t know. He spots three soldiers in the snow, their bodies still and sprawled out, their blood so bright against white. Another dangles backward from the gun turret of an MRAP.
The lycans have positioned themselves against the sun. Patrick is blind to them. He tries to visor his eyes with a hand but can make out nothing outside of their gunfire flaring like sunspots. They seem to be above and below, on top of the canyon walls and dug into the rockslide, how many of them he cannot say, whether a dozen or dozens.
Fish in a barrel, he thinks. That’s what we are.
He recognizes Decker toward the front of the convoy. The sergeant positions a SMAW on his shoulder and steps around the nose of the MRAP and launches a rocket. It spits flame and emits a firecracker hiss when it travels fifty meters through the air and impacts the canyon wall.
There is earsplitting thunder. A giant fist of flame erupts. Rock rains down on the lycans. Patrick tries to remember his training. Firing from rubble, firing from barricade, fighting from prone supported. Alternating between slow and rapid fire so that he might analyze each round and determine a hit or miss. Locating the target by hasty search and if hasty search fails, employing a systematic examination of the terrain with an overlapping strip method, fifty-meter sweep, hundred-meter sweep, one-fifty-meter sweep. All of this and more, clotting his brain, paralyzing him for the space of a few seconds.