“Go!” Ryan shouted, his eyes raking the deserted street of the township.
J.B. was already moving, putting the wag into first gear and slamming his foot on the gas. The roadblock didn’t leave much room on either side of the LAV. The gap was only around eight feet, to deter anyone trying to run it at speed. The armored vehicle was precisely seven feet, two and a half inches wide. There was less than five inches clearance on each side.
The dying man in his torn and bloodied fur vest had fallen across the gap, almost as though he had made the deliberate decision to try to use his corpse to try to check the escape of the outlanders.
All four wheels on the left side ran over the man’s right arm, chest and head.
Ryan felt only the slightest jolt as the skull was splintered to shards of smeared bone, none of them any larger than a silver dollar.
“Company, right, thirty.”
The voice of the Armorer whispered urgently into Ryan’s ears, warning him that other residents of Huston Wells were coming out at them, thirty degrees from the front of the wag, on the right side. Three figures came running out of a movie theater, one holding a machine pistol like she knew how to use it.
“One ahead, hundred yards.”
Ryan glanced down the street. There were alleys and narrow side roads along the western flank, each one with pools of bright sunlight spilling out across the street. There was a man, tall and white-haired, standing in one of those dazzling golden lakes, slowly bringing a bazooka to this shoulder.
“Fireblast!”
J.B. had spotted him. “Not much ammo left for the MG, Ryan. Want me to try and take him out?”
To have a safe shot at the man with either the SIG-Sauer or the rifle, Ryan needed a stable base to shoot from. The LAV, rocking and rolling over the humps and potholes in the street, wasn’t going to be a help.
“Bust him, J.R, now!”
He snapped off a couple of rounds at the trio of attackers on his right, seeing the woman go down, clutching her leg, the Uzi skidding away down the seed-strewed sidewalk. A bullet screamed off the armaplating just behind the turret, and Ryan instinctively ducked a little lower.
“Get ’em, Noah!” The shout came from a window above one of the stores to the left, but Ryan couldn’t identify which one and held his fire.
The silver-haired man seemed impervious to any threat of danger from the approaching armored wag, standing quite still, surrounded by the halo of brilliant light. He held what looked like an old M-72, the muzzle gaping toward Ryan, as big as the mouth of a mine shaft.
Against a soft target, the weapon had an effective range of more than three hundred yards. Less than half that if the target was on the move.
But the LAV was barely fifty yards away, coming straight at him, with no chance of veering to one side or the other.
“J.B., do it!” Ryan yelled.
The machine gun opened fire, but the wag had just hit an ancient speed-bump and tipped up and down, throwing Ryan against the side of the turret, dealing his right elbow a sharp blow that nearly made him drop the automatic.
He saw the stream of bullets tear into the shingled wall of the frame house just beyond the figure with the blaster, a figure that Ryan guessed was probably the same Noah Huston who ran the small ville.
From high up in the turret he heard the repeated clicking as the machine gun ran out of ammo.
It wasn’t a time for hesitation.
Ryan braced himself as best he could against the yawing and pitching of the wag, raised the automatic and opened fire at the man by the alley, not pausing, pouring a river of lead, his index finger working at the trigger, until the mag was empty.
There was chaos all around.
J.B. fought the controls, as the vehicle swerved and clipped a supporting post from a storefront, bringing half the building down in a shower of dust and rotted timbers.