Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 023

The gunfire outside was loud, but Soren had gone still enough inside to hear past it.

Someone had come partway down the stairs and stopped. Then the footsteps had retreated back up, slow and deliberate, trying not to make noise and failing. He'd heard it clearly. One man, going back to the second floor.

He came through the rear window in a single movement, pulled the door shut behind him, and took stock of the room. Three M1915 stick grenades had gone off in this space over the course of the last hour, and the sitting room showed it. The furniture was matchwood, the walls pocked and scorched, nothing left of the original layout that could be identified at a glance.

He kept his rifle on the stairwell opening and didn't move toward it. Instead he backed to the rear window again, eased his head out, and looked up at the second floor. The window above was dark. No silhouette, no rifle barrel, no sign of anyone watching from it.

He went back out through the window and started climbing.

The exterior stonework was old and rough, with enough gaps between the courses to find purchase. He moved carefully, keeping his weight distributed, favoring his right side where he could. The wound above his hip pulled with every reach, but it held.

He brought his eyes level with the second floor window and looked in.

The room appeared empty.

He scanned it twice, certain he hadn't imagined the footsteps. Then the bed shifted, just slightly, a few inches scraping across the floorboards with a sound that was almost nothing.

Almost.

At the same moment, shouts rang out from the street below. A patrol had spotted him, pressed against the wall in the moonlight, and opened fire. Rounds snapped past him, close enough to feel.

Soren didn't hesitate. He pushed off the wall, cleared the window frame, and landed on the table beneath it. He unslung the rifle from his back in the same motion and fired down through the bed frame, working the bolt between each shot, putting all five rounds through the mattress and the boards beneath it in a tight grouping. Then he reloaded, stepped off the table, and kicked the bed frame aside.

The Greyline Army officer was underneath it. Two rounds had found him, one through the torso and one through the head. The Ruby pistol had fallen from his hand and lay on the floor beside him.

Soren picked it up and turned it over. A copy of the Browning M1903, semi-automatic, chambered for 7.65mm. He dropped the magazine, checked it, and seated it again. Full, nine rounds, plus one already chambered. He found two more full magazines in the officer's coat pockets and tucked them into his chest pocket where his left hand could reach them without looking.

He stood there for a moment, feeling the weight of the pistol. "Bolt-action is more accurate," he said to himself, "but the rate of fire is a serious problem. Semi-auto is better for this kind of work." He glanced at the rifle leaning against the wall. There was nothing to be done about it. The timeline was 1918. He used what the timeline gave him.

The sound of boots hitting the front door reached him from below. He moved to the stairwell and took position against the wall beside the opening, pistol up, and waited.

Three soldiers came up the stairs in a loose file, moving slowly, calling out a name as they climbed. The officer's name, most likely. They'd checked the bodies downstairs and hadn't found him, so they weren't sure what they were walking into. Their rifles were up, but the barrels were leading the way around the corner before their eyes were, the stairwell too narrow for anything else.

The point man's rifle came into view first.

Soren grabbed the barrel with his free hand and stepped out, pressing the Ruby pistol against the man's chest from the hip and firing. He kept the body upright, using it as a shield, and leaned right to put rounds past him into the two soldiers behind. The stairwell gave them nowhere to go. Ten shots, the magazine emptied, three men down. He shoved the bodies back down the stairs, stripped the spent magazine, and slapped in a fresh one before the last of them had stopped moving.

He already knew what was waiting below. He walked back into the room, ejected the partial magazine, and topped it off from loose rounds on the table while he thought.

Going down the stairs meant walking into a prepared position. However many soldiers were on the ground floor, they'd heard everything and they'd be ready. Even with the Ruby pistol, he couldn't take multiple aimed rifles head-on in a confined space and expect to come out of it. There was only one other option.

He pushed the table away from the window and looked out.

What he saw stopped him cold.

The tree line to the north, lit clearly by the moonlight, was moving. Not with wind. More than a hundred Ivory Army soldiers were emerging from the forest, advancing across the same ground the column had crossed hours earlier. On the field embankment, the last dozen or so Greyline Army soldiers were caught between the fire from the town and the force coming in from behind. It was already over for them. They just hadn't finished dying yet.

A shout from below. Someone had seen him in the window.

Rounds came up through the floor. Soren pulled back, and the shots that followed clipped the window frame where his head had been a half-second earlier.

He was still processing his options when two M1915 stick grenades came bouncing up the stairwell.

"Oh, come on," he said.

The blast took the room apart.

________________________________________

Soren opened his eyes and nearly pulled the trigger on reflex before he registered where he was.

Trees. Fog. The smell of mud and gunpowder. A familiar voice beside him, talking too fast, the words carrying that particular edge of someone who was frightened and trying very hard not to show it.

"Lieutenant Lloyd is dead. I watched it happen right in front of me. What do we do now? Do we still carry out the mission?"

Thomas. The forest. After the ambush, before the consolidation. The reset had pushed him back further than any of the previous ones.

The pain in his skull was sharp and immediate, bad enough to blur his vision for a few seconds. He stood still and let it pass, breathing through it, waiting for his surroundings to come back into focus.

"You alright, Snyder? You've gone pale."

"I'm fine." Soren shook his head once. He was already running the timeline backward in his mind, cataloguing the distance between this moment and the point where things had gone wrong.

Movement in the fog. Two figures resolving into Fisher and Hoffman, both intact, both relieved to find Thomas alive. The reunion played out the way it had before, loud and warm, the kind of noise that came out of men who'd expected worse.

Fisher noticed Soren standing slightly apart and raised an eyebrow. "Hey, Snyder. You look rough. You hit somewhere?"

"Snyder saved my life," Thomas said, before Soren could answer. He pointed to the body on the ground nearby, the French soldier Soren had dropped with a single shot. "Ten meters at least. One round, clean kill."

Fisher's expression shifted. "Is that right." He looked at Soren with something closer to respect than he'd managed before. "Not bad. I had you figured for someone who was better with a shovel."

"Some people just surprise you," Hoffman said, with the mild tone of someone stating an obvious fact.

Soren didn't respond to any of it. He was already somewhere else in his head, running the previous attempt from the beginning, identifying every decision point where the outcome could have gone differently.

The night assault had been the wrong call. He'd understood that in the moment, watching the column walk into the same ambush for the second time, but he hadn't been able to stop it. The problem wasn't the fighting. He could handle the fighting. The problem was the sniper in the clock tower, the one who'd taken him out before he'd even had a chance to get properly oriented, and the reinforcement column that had arrived before he'd had time to clear the building and push toward the center of town.

Going in at night had given the Ivory Army the initiative. They knew the ground. They knew the buildings. The darkness that was supposed to provide cover had worked against the column more than for it.

He needed a different approach entirely. Not a night assault, not a straight advance across open ground. Something that took the sniper off the board first, before the column committed to the approach, and kept the relief force from closing the trap before he was done.

He filed it away and came back to the conversation around him.

There was still time before Caleb arrived. Still time before the column reformed and began moving toward Tullane Township. He had the shape of a better plan forming at the back of his mind, and he was going to need every minute between now and nightfall to work out the details.