Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 028

The clock tower was no longer a defensible position, and both of them knew it.

Soren turned from the window. Behind him, two of the seriously wounded had dragged themselves upright against the wall, reaching for the rifles propped beside them. The cannon fire and the grinding of tank treads had done what pain alone couldn't, pulling them back from the edge of consciousness and into something older and more stubborn.

Caleb put a hand on Soren's shoulder. His voice was steady. "Go. They need you down there more than I need you up here."

"You should come with me."

"Someone has to stay with them." Caleb held up the rifle in his other hand and gave it a small shake. "My shooting is good. You said so yourself."

Soren looked at him for a moment, then nodded. He pressed the last M1915 stick grenade into Caleb's hand. "Don't do anything heroic. That's not your style. After I leave, blow the staircase. It'll buy you time."

"I'll be fine." Caleb took the grenade without argument.

Soren went down the stairs at a run.

The two MG08 heavy machine guns were audible from the ground floor, their heavy, sustained fire rolling through the streets in waves. That sound meant the Ivory Army was already inside the perimeter. He slice the pied the doorway before stepping out, confirmed the immediate area was clear, and moved into the street.

Two soldiers came sprinting out of a building to the north, and their faces visibly relaxed when they saw him. He didn't let them slow down. "North intersection, reinforce the MG08 position. Don't let that tank through."

They ran. He pulled the clock tower door shut behind him.

Then gunfire cracked from the west, and rounds punched into the wall beside his head.

He dropped and spun in the same motion, bringing the rifle up. A section of Ivory Army soldiers had pushed through the western approach, the one gap in the defense where no unit had been positioned. They'd found it by luck, or by patience, and now they were inside.

He put a round through the soldier carrying the light machine g*n, pulled a M1915 stick grenade, and threw it into the group without waiting to see where it landed. The soldiers scattered into the nearest buildings. The grenade detonated behind them, and Soren used the gap to move north.

He reached the northern T-intersection in time to see the Saint-Chamond tank push through the last of the defensive fire and roll into the town. At the MG08 sandbag emplacement, Fisher was on the trigger with both hands, the heavy machine g*n hammering the tank's frontal armor in a sustained burst that would have shredded anything made of flesh. Against the tank's plating it left bright scars and nothing more.

The 75mm cannon traversed.

The shot obliterated the sandbag emplacement in a single blast. Soren saw Fisher come apart in the explosion, there one moment and simply gone the next, and the sight of it landed somewhere beneath conscious thought, a cold, hard thing that settled in his chest without words.

He raised the rifle and put four rounds into the same point on the tank's frontal armor, each one precisely placed, each one absorbed without effect. The hull machine g*n swung toward him.

A door burst open on the tank's left flank. Thomas came out at a dead run, the grenade bundle already in his hands, the cords already pulled. The infantry behind the tank opened fire immediately. The rounds hit Thomas in the chest and side and he went down hard, but his arm was already moving, the last motion of a body that had decided what it was going to do and was going to do it regardless. The grenade bundle left his hand and skipped under the front of the tank's left track.

The simultaneous detonation lifted the front of the vehicle and dropped it sideways. The track came apart in sections, and the Saint-Chamond ground to a halt in the middle of the street, engine still running, going nowhere.

The machine g*n team Soren had sent north earlier came out from behind a building on the right and opened up on the infantry that had been sheltering behind the tank, catching them exposed and disorganized in the open street.

Soren looked at Thomas on the ground. He looked at the space where Fisher had been. He took three slow breaths, and then he put the whistle to his lips and blew a long, continuous blast.

From every corner of Tullane Township, the remaining Greyline Army soldiers began moving toward the sound. The Ivory Army pressed hard to stop them from consolidating, pouring fire into the streets from windows and doorways. The western section that had broken through earlier was pushing toward the crossroads now, trying to link up with the forces coming from the north.

Soren went to meet them.

He came around the corner fast, put three rounds into the lead soldiers before they registered the movement, and drove straight into the middle of the group before the survivors could react. He grabbed the nearest sergeant by the collar, pulled him close, and fired the Luger P08 pistol twice into the man's torso at contact range. He kept the body between himself and the others, firing around it, dropping two more soldiers before the magazine ran dry.

Four still standing. The Luger P08 pistol was empty, and he had no time to reload.

A shot from the clock tower window took one of them in the head. Caleb, still up there, still watching. Soren moved on the distraction, driving a knee into the nearest soldier and putting him down, but the remaining two fired at almost the same moment, and the rounds punched through the sergeant's body and into Soren's chest and abdomen.

He felt the impacts as pressure first, then heat, then a spreading heaviness that pulled at his legs. He squeezed the trigger twice more and heard only the dry click of an empty chamber. Caleb fired again from above, dropping the last man standing.

Soren went to one knee. He reached for the rifle on the ground beside him, got his hand around it, pulled the trigger, and heard nothing. Round not chambered. He worked the bolt handle with fingers that were losing their coordination, and then a sustained burst from the eastern MG08 swept across the western approach, and the pressure from that direction collapsed.

The firing was thinning. He couldn't tell if that was because the battle was ending or because he was.

The clock tower door crashed open. Caleb came out at a low run, grabbed Soren by the shoulder of his coat, and started pulling. "Stay with me. Do you hear me? Stay with me." His voice was very loud, or perhaps everything else had gone quiet. "Thomas and Fisher didn't die so you could give up on a doorstep."

A wounded soldier came through the door behind Caleb, propped his rifle against the frame, and laid down covering fire with the pale, set expression of a man spending the last of what he had. Caleb hauled Soren through the doorway and let the door swing shut.

The floor was cold. Soren was aware of Caleb cutting his coat open, of hands pressing hard against his side, of words being said that he was no longer fully processing. His vision had narrowed to a grey circle with darkness at the edges. He tried to focus on the ceiling and found it difficult.

Then the gunfire outside stopped.

Caleb raised his head. A long silence, and then a familiar voice from beyond the door.

"Snyder? Lieutenant Caleb? Is anyone in there?"

Hoffman.

Caleb exhaled in a single long shudder. "We're here."

The door opened. Hoffman came in with three soldiers behind him, and his face was doing several things at once, relief and grief and something close to disbelief. "The reinforcements arrived. The Ivory Army pulled back."

"Reinforcements." Caleb said the word like he was testing whether it was real. Then he sat down heavily on the bottom step of the staircase, dropped his rifle beside him, and pressed both hands over his face.

Hoffman saw Soren on the floor and went still. "Snyder."

No one answered him.

Outside, five troop carriers rolled into the square, Greyline Army soldiers jumping from the beds before the vehicles had fully stopped. They spread out through the streets and halted when they saw what was in them. The bodies of soldiers from both sides lay across every approach. The disabled Saint-Chamond tank sat in the middle of the northern street, still smoking. Every wall was marked with bullet holes and blast scarring. The handful of surviving defenders came out of the clock tower and stood in the square, looking at the new arrivals with the particular expression of men who had been through something that words were going to struggle with.

A captain stepped down from the passenger seat of the lead vehicle. He was an experienced officer, and the scene in front of him still made him breathe in sharply, the smell of smoke and blood catching in his throat.

Caleb came out of the clock tower door, saw the vehicles, and crossed the square at a near-run. "Get Snyder to a field hospital. Now. He needs surgery." He didn't wait for the captain to respond, didn't acknowledge the man's attempt to ask what had happened, and disappeared back through the door.

The captain lowered his half-raised hand.

A minute later, Caleb and Hoffman came back out carrying Soren between them and loaded him into the nearest vehicle. Caleb climbed into the driver's seat without asking permission.

"Wait, Caleb, you can't just..." the captain began.

"Move," Caleb said, and drove.

The captain stood in the square and watched the vehicle disappear down the road, then turned to Hoffman. "What happened here? Who was that man?"

Hoffman looked at the street, at the tank, at the bodies, and back at the captain. "A hero, sir."

"A hero."

"Yes, sir. A hero."

________________________________________

"Hey. Hey, are you okay? You're scaring me."

The voice came from somewhere above the surface. Soren broke through it all at once, sitting upright with his right hand already reaching for a weapon that wasn't there, scanning for threats that didn't exist.

The ship's hold. The rolling motion of a vessel at sea. Dirty walls, dim light, the smell of diesel and unwashed bodies. Evan crouched in front of him, eyes wide. Howard was a few feet away, watching with quiet concern. The armed crew members were where they'd been before.

"You just... passed out," Evan said. "For like five seconds. Then you woke up like that." He looked at Soren's face, at the red-rimmed eyes and the tension in every muscle. "Did you have a nightmare or something?"

Soren lowered his hand slowly. He took one breath, then another, and let the ship's hold come fully into focus around him.

"I'm fine," he said.