It was a lesson from the predark days that had stood her in good stead since she had emerged into the Deathlands.
Mildred wasn’t going to let these bastards even get out of their wag. She took from a coat pocket a gren that J.B. had given her, for use in an emergency situation.
She pulled the pin and stepped forward, focusing her eyes on the wag that was almost at a standstill. She took a firm stance and, without leaving the safety of her shadows, she threw the gren.
It was a good pitch. Hard and true, with just a slight amount of lift to it. It flew at the wag before the mercies had a chance to register what it was, and clipped the top of the windshield, just enough to break its path and momentum, and tip it into the interior, where the men still sat.
The gren went off in a flash of light and a roar of sound. It was a shrapnel gren, and Mildred hit the dirt, covering her head with her arms against any debris.
Inside the wag, the mercies didn’t have a chance to realize what had hit them as the shrapnel ripped them to shreds seconds before the explosive charge triggered off the plas-ex they had with them, and ignited the wag’s gas tank.
Threat nullified by the second big explosion of the night. Mildred looked up to see a smoking chassis and little else where the wag had been standing.
She wondered how John was doing.
J.B. WAS, in fact, a man whose almost infinite patience had been stretched unnaturally thin. There was little he could do in his position out near the blacktop that fed a side road to the refinery and well. A small hut there held building materials for the road, and the Armorer had been able to secure a hiding place. But this supply hut was the target for this point, and if it was to be hit, he was directly in the firing line. He just hoped that the mercies would want to lay a bomb and not just use a gren. If the latter was the case, then J.B. was dead meat before he had a chance to bite back.
He was the first to see the wags approach. Five of them, in convoy. There was something about someone in the leading wag that seemed oddly familiar, but he dismissed the thought. Let whoever got that wag deal with the problem. Then four of them peeled off the blacktop and down the side road, past the hut where he was hidden and off across the desert to their allotted tasks. With the amount of grens he had on him, plus the M-4000 and the Uzi, it was tempting to try to take them out as they passed. But before he could have got them all, his position would have been identified and bombarded.
Better to let them pass.
That had galled him, but now he sat waiting for the last wag, which still stood on the ribbon of blacktop. He didn’t dare risk firing until it started its run toward him, as then the crew would just have to concentrate their blasterfire on the hut or pitch a gren at it to completely obliterate him. But leave it too late, and he would be blasted out of existence before he could pick them all off.
Did they know he was in there? It certainly seemed to him that they were mounting a war of nerves…and winning.
The Armorer felt sweat bead on his forehead and trickle down the bridge of his nose, past his spectacles. He blinked as the sweat stung his eyes, but kept his Uzi, set to rapid fire, trained on the wag. That was his best first-line defense.
Finally, just when it seemed that his nerves were screaming at him, the wag began to move. He could only assume that they had been waiting for the other wags to make distance so that they could time their raids in unison.
Through the small window hole of the hut, the snubbed barrel of the Uzi stood out. If he let them get too close, they would see it and start to fire. But too far and they would be out of effective range.