Page 29 of Flames and Blood

The first vehicle comes up into the narrow stretch and slows into the turn, just as we expected. I step out into the road, and it comes to a halt. The headlights are blinding.

The driver’s door opens because the driver wants to see what’s in front of him. That’s a mistake. I take him out of the seat before his boot touches the gravel.

The man beside him gets a hand on his weapon. Kent comes off that shelf and crosses twenty feet of open road in the time it takes the man to lift it. Then the man is face-down on the gravel with Kent’s knee between his shoulders.

“Don’t,” Kent tells him, and the man stops reaching for his radio.

More doors open. Four more men come out of the first vehicle. I’d expected four in total.

Goddammit!

Then the second one comes around the turn behind us, and it isn’t slowing to stop. It’s slowing to let men out.

“Behind us,” Meyer calls. “Doors both sides. Six of them. Maybe more.”

Six back there. Six on the first one, counting the two we’ve just put down.

Twelve men on this road, and I planned for four.

Amateur hour, Crowe. Idiot.

I can’t remember the last time I got it so wrong.

Boots hit the gravel in a rhythm too even for men in a hurry. These have done this before. Heavier gear than anything I see in the first truck. Rifles, plates, the lot.

“The box is mine,” I call, already moving. “Everything else is yours. Keep them off it.”

“Go!” It’s Meyer to Kent, who clocks the guard on the ground with the butt of his rifle, then takes off at a run, ducking low.

Gravel, then rock, then gravel again. Muzzle flash reaches me before the sound does. Nobody out here is wasting rounds on anything they can’t see.

I put myself where they’ll shoot at me. That’s the job now. Every step I take, I take away from that box, and they come with me, because I’m the biggest thing moving. I go left, into the rock, off the road, and two of them follow me and put rounds where I was, which is what I wanted.

Meyer pushes three more backward down the road, a few feet at a time, and keeps them there.

Then he goes down. I hear it over everything. It’s the sound a man makes when he lands on rock without choosing to.

“Report,” Kent shouts.

“Up,” Meyer says.

He is, and he’s already moving again. Whatever hit him is already healing while he works.

The sky over the ridge hasn’t started going gray. Not yet.

I come back through the middle of it. A man steps out from the front of the transport with his rifle already up, and I take the rifle first and him second with enough force that when he hits the truck, he crumples and stays down. Another comes off the second vehicle’s tailgate. He gets one round away before I reach him, and it goes high, over the road, over the rock.

The two who followed me into the rock have come back out, and they’re moving up the road. I go at them straight down the middle where there’s no cover, because straight is faster, and I can take being shot if it means ending this.

Something goes through my side. I keep going. The first one I put into the rock wall. The second one gets his barrel around toward the transport, and I knock it off line with my forearm and put him down under it. Kent is at the back corner of the box.

He’s put himself between two of the guards and the door, and he doesn’t move off that spot. He takes a hit that was coming for my back, and then a second one, and the second one breaks his arm. The bone won’t close as fast as the rest of it. He’s still there.

When I reach him, he’s reloading one-handed, braced against the bumper.

“Door’s yours,” he says through his teeth. “Make it count.”

The handle is cold under my hand. Colder than the air, warded like everything else on this convoy. I take hold of it and ignore the sizzle in my palm.