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Now the small, questing branches could whack him on the cheek and bridge of Valentine's nose. A good deal more painfully, as the truck had picked up speed.
He tasted his own blood and felt something sticky on his neck, but he didn't feel anything worse than a scratch or two.
The night smelled like blood, wet leaves, and rotten eggs.
Valentine reloaded as the harpies made their run. He could see their beady eyes reflecting red in the moonlight.
One of his soldiers in misty denim, a big man with bushy sideburns, let loose with a double-barrel, dropped the gun to someone below, and took up a pump action. Valentine aimed and fired. He watched his target plunge, falling loopily as a kite with a cut string, but suspected the man resting his aiming arm on the cab hood had downed the beastie.
The others dropped their explosives. Grenades bounced all over the road. The man hanging off the brush cutter disappeared into flash and smoke, but when they emerged again from the blasts he was still there, blackened and frazzled but evidently intact.
Valentine, with the thick fuzzy head and the muffled hearing of someone who'd been a little too near a blast, saw another harpy fall, brought down by the truck behind. The flock, perhaps not liking the punishment being handed out with little to show for it, turned and gathered to the east, doing a sort of whirling corkscrew aerial conference.
"Eyes on the road," Patel bellowed at the driver.
A pushed-over tree blocked the road.
The driver braked hard, and the truck jumped to a tune of squealing brakes. The Wolf on the front, evidently uninjured but stunned by the explosion, was thrown by the sudden braking, struck the trunk of the downed tree, and went heels-over-head onto the other side of the trunk.
Valentine, more or less secured by the bungees, lost nothing but his dignity as he saw himself swinging, holding on to the bars over the passenger window.
Patel was already out of the truck, running with a first aid kit.
Valentine saw a big, wide-winged shape flapping away low. He raised his gun, aimed, and fired at the big target.
The gargoyle lurched but kept flapping.
Valentine swore. The big, soft-nosed bullet should have brought it down. His old marksmanship trainer in the Labor Regiment had promised the kick in the shoulder was nothing to what the target experienced. He'd seen a round take a softball-sized chunk of flesh out of a wild pig. He must have just clipped it on a limb.
It disappeared behind a line of trees.
Valentine looked at the roadblock.
What kind of super-gargoyle could push over a tree? Nothing short of a Reaper could.
Valentine looked at the tangle of old, weatherworn roots. The tree had been downed some time ago and moved off the road. The gargoyle had simply moved it back. Still, an incredible display of strength. Their flying arms were supposed to be powerful.
Worse, the harpies were heartened by the stationary trucks. They formed a new shadow, and then an arrow, pointed straight at the delayed trucks.
"Get that tree out of the way," Valentine shouted.
The men piled out of the trucks while the other Wolf helped Patel with the injured man.
"Faster," Valentine urged. He raised himself up so he could shout to the truck behind.
"Second squad, deploy. Let's keep those bastards off us."
The men, with their varmint and bird guns mixed in with the militia rifles, spread out.
Valentine fired into the flying mass without picking out a target. Hitting with the wonky old rifle was purely a matter of chance.
"Watch each other's backs-there's more coming around from eight o'clock," Valentine shouted.
The rest began to pepper the harpies with careful shots. One pair, Rutherford and DuSable, shifted position to give better covering fire to the men working on clearing the fallen log.
Valentine made a note of it-the noise and confusion of gunfire short-circuited some and they forgot the bigger picture. A flier spun down; another followed intentionally, coming to its aid.
Perhaps they were a mated pair.
