James Axler – Stoneface

With a sigh of ennui, Hellstrom arose from his chair and nonchalantly ambled into the AMAC. He had just shut the door behind him when a bullet spanged off the wag’s armored exterior, whining up into the night sky.

As Fleur shouted to the sec men to set up a fire zone inside the perimeter, Ryan and his friends took cover beneath and to the rear of the AMAC. They looked for something to shoot at and saw nothing.

The M-249 opened up with a staccato roar, smearing the darkness with bursts of orange flame. Fleur dashed to the sec man behind it and dealt him a fierce kick in the ribs.

“Head shots!” she shouted angrily. “Head shots, you piece of Farer shit!”

Ryan’s eye grew accustomed to the gloom. The moon and the stars provided just enough light to make out the dim shapes of trees, brush and the sloping valley walls looming on either side.

There was another fusillade of shots from the shadows. Ryan counted at least ten rifles, firing more or less simultaneously. None of the bullets came near him or his people, but one of the sec men howled and fell in a sprawl of kicking legs and flailing arms. The sec men returned the fire with their SA-80 automatic rifles, triggering short, random bursts.

J.B. elbow-crawled up beside Ryan, his teeth bared in a humorless grin. “Mebbe we should have taken out Joe when we had the chance.”

“You don’t know if it’s the Sioux out there,” Mildred said.

A moment later, several undulating, high-pitched cries floated through the night sky.

“I guess you stand correctedfor once,” J.B. told her calmly.

Another sec man made a run toward the closed door of the AMAC, but a storm of bullets struck sparks from its steel sheathing, and he was forced to dive beneath the chassis.

“If that’s the war party we saw today,” Ryan said curtly, “then we’ve got about two dozen to contend with. We’re bastard outnumbered.”

“But not outgunned. For some reason, they’ve got their blasters on semi,” Krysty observed. “Not full-auto.”

“Less chance waste ammo,” Jak said, gesturing to the sec men raking the darkness with the SA-80s. “Not like these stupes.”

Several full-metal-jacketed slugs ricocheted from the bodywork of the AMAC, screaming off in different directions. A sec man clutched at his leg and went down, screaming a curse. From a prone position, he squeezed the trigger of his blaster, sending streams of flame and lead into the shadows. There was no return fire until the firing pin of his SA-80 hit the empty magazine with dry, audible clicks.

Then a single shot cracked, a bullet zipped out of the darkness and caught him in the forehead, puncturing the X between his eyes. The impact bounced his head hard against the ground, the back of his skull breaking apart. His legs kicked, then he was still.

“Now that was a head shot,” J.B. remarked sourly.

Ryan reflected that if the Sioux were looking for scalps, the shaven-headed sec men would be grave disappointments to them. On the other hand, he and his people had full heads of hair of varying colors, lengths and textures, and they might present a terrible temptation. Krysty’s coppery mane in particular would be a valuable prize. He hoped that if Touch-the-Sky was with the war party, he would recognize them. An instant later he hoped the opposite. The Lakota had warned him and his people about Helskel, and he probably assumed they had thumbed their collective nose at his words of caution and, therefore, deserved everything that might come their way. Including scalping knives.

Hefting his SIG-Sauer in a two-handed grip, Ryan said, ” ‘Lay down a firing pattern. We may not know where our targets are, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of where they’re not.”

Krysty squeezed off several rounds from her Smith amp; Wesson 640, and the others followed suit, shooting into the gloom at different angles, trying to draw beads on shifting shadows, never knowing if they struck a target or just a piece of one. Doc’s Le Mat was fairly useless as a long-range weapon, but its ear-knocking blasts provided them with a psychological edge.