Hellbenders

Doc’s leg came free, and he was just edging his way out of the hole when he felt the cast begin to give way around him. By unplugging the gap he had caused, he had freed the vacuum and allowed the hole beneath to suck in the rest of the cast.

“It is going!” he yelled as the earth fell away beneath him, dragging him with it until he fell free with a sudden jolt that made his shoulders lurch sickeningly. In turn, Jak felt the sudden pull of gravity on Doc’s weight shoot through his own shoulders before he, too, was rendered defenseless by the loss of the cast surface beneath him. Agony shot through him as his knees buckled the wrong way, his legs kept rigid by that part of them anchored to the solid earth by Dean.

“Quick, help him,” Danny yelled, seeing the agony on Dean’s face as he tried to cling to Jak and Doc, and attempt to pull them out of the hole, which had now fully opened. The other three members of the recce party were quick to move to Dean’s aid, helping Danny to secure Dean and take some of the strain by grabbing at Jak’s legs.

Pulling back, Mik and Tilly had hold of Dean, while Lonnie and Danny reached out over the hole to grasp Jak and haul him in, Lonnie grabbing hold of Doc as he came into view.

Before too long, Jak and Doc were on solid ground, the older man lying on his back, gasping for breath and feeling the burning agony of stretched muscle and tendons, while Jak lay facedown, gathering himself. Dean rolled over onto his back, breathing heavily, and spoke to the sky.

“Thanks” was all he could utter.

Lonnie was about to say something when a distant rumble stopped him dead. Jak looked up sharply, his senses instinctively placing the sound as under the earth.

“Big trouble,” he said.

Chapter Seven

Mildred lined up the target, drawing a bead with her ZKR. The Czech-made target pistol sat lightly in her hand, palm firm around the grip, finger coiled around the trigger, squeezing with an infinite gentleness and care. Her free hand was cupped lightly beneath, supporting but not pressuring. She could feel the eyes of the Hellbenders she had joined at the target range bore into her back, willing her to screw up.

No way. In the days before skydark, when she had won a silver medal at the last Olympiad before the nukecaust, she had felt eyes boring into her many times. Then it was idle competition; this time it was deciding whether she could hack it in a life-or-death situation. In many ways the pressure was equal. It all came down to whether Mildred could shut herself off, focus on the task in hand and score on the target.

No problem.

She squeezed her trigger finger and let loose a cluster of four shots, two to the center of the target that circled the mannequin’s chest, and two to the target that was—of necessity—much smaller and situated in its head.

“Check that out,” she said clearly as the deafening noise of the cordite explosions began to subside in the enclosed target room.

A lean black man with a shorn crop of black-and-gray hair that was receding took hurried strides toward the target mannequin. He was shorter than Mildred—about five feet four—and was composed almost entirely of muscle. He was the only black man in the entire redoubt, and had been eying her since she had arrived in the shooting gallery. The fact that she was the only black woman may have had something to do with it, but Mildred wasn’t too keen to address this fact. She wanted to get in the shooting practice that Correll had ordered and get back to her patient. Cy had come around shortly before she had left the med lab, and she wanted to run a couple of tests.

“Hey, sister, that was pretty fine shooting,” the man at the target yelled back over the length of the room. “Two clean shots in the center of each area. That’s a good eye.”

“A still target isn’t a problem,” she replied with a dismissive wave. “A moving one is much more of a challenge—and much more realistic.”

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