The fuse was lit, and the rope holding down the cross arm cut. The arm traveled a brief arc and slammed violently against the stopping bar. The whole catapult shook, but the barrel in the scoop flew over the hill toward Front Royal. It fireballed only yards short of the wall, the windows shattering, men disappearing, the water in the moat seeming to boil under the barrage of nails and glass.
The browns rallied within seconds, the return fire chewing the ground along the top of the hill as they strived to reach the machine behind the mound of dirt.
“One inch longer fuse.” Henderson laughed, openly rubbing between his legs. “I want to see blood on this shot!”
The next barrel sailed over the wall and detonated above the city. Roofs collapsed, and screams of pain sounded from the dying and wounded.
Suddenly, the defenders in the windows started shooting at the trees on either side of the hill. Their sporadic fire became a steady stream of rounds, ripping the foliage of the forest apart. More than once the blind firing was rewarded by a yell of pain, or the scream of a dying horse. The Casanova troops dashed from the thick greenery to take refuge behind the hill.
“Why would they do that?” Henderson whispered softly. “It makes no sense. No sense at all! Unless”
Without further comment, Henderson quickly climbed onto a horse and galloped for the horizon. The rest of his troops were shocked at the behavior. The fight had only begun. What was happening here? A few of the wiser sec men saw the frightened face of their leader, grabbed horses and madly rode after the man. One corporal refused to release the reins of his mount, and a lieutenant shot him dead to get the stallion.
“Father?” Thomas cried out, watching the old man disappear into the distance. What could he be up to, some sort of trick to fool the browns? It had to be. They were winning the fight, soon Front Royal would be theirs!
Then in the woods, a man screamed in hideous pain. A blaster chattered. Another scream. A third begged for mercy, his words cut off abruptly. Then the monsters came out of the bushes on either side of the invaders.
The huge, massively muscled beasts only vaguely resembled the primitive dogs they had been bred from. Clearly a lot of mastiff was in the mixed blood, perhaps Doberman, maybe some mutie also, for the titanic animals stood chest high at the foaming muzzle. Pointed fangs filled their long mouths, their black coats as shiny as a wet road.
Silently, they moved among the yelling men, biting a groin and casting away the flesh, only to dart forward and attack another victim. They never stayed to savage the body or eat what they removed. It was uncanny, nightmarish.
Plowing through the troops, the black beasts bypassed the terrified horses and charged for the catapult crew. Thomas couldn’t believe it. How smart were these things? The first dodged a stream of bullets from a rapidfire and leaped upon a sec man, tearing out his throat, blood gushing from the grotesque wound. Shaking its head to toss away the bloody gobbet, the dog charged again and took another man in the groin. He dropped, screaming in a high-pitched voice, and fired at the beast, but missed. The dog savagely closed its powerful jaws on his exposed throat. There was a snap, and the noise stopped.
Now the remaining sec men started to fire at one another as the deadly canines darted from man to man, removing a hand, ripping out a throat, or a belly. One dog paused to swallow and was cut to pieces by cross fire from the blasters. None of the others made that lethal mistake.
A beast sprinted toward Thomas, and he fired a blaster point-blank in its face. The slug plowed a bloody furrow along its head, and the creature closed jaws on the hand holding the weapon. The sec chief shrieked and fired again, the blast going through the dog, and he recoiled with only stump at the ragged end of his arm.
“Henderson, you lying bastard!” he roared, trying to draw his second blaster with his left hand. The big man got it free of the holster but dropped it to the ground. The dogs took this as their cue, and several converged on the weakening man. He caught one by the neck and shook it with a jerk, the neck snapping like a twig. Then another dog got him between the legs, as a third attached to his throat. Thomas went down, his hand clawing for the knife in a sheath on the wrong side of his body. His screams didn’t last long, and soon there was only the sound of ripping flesh on the far side of the hill.