Slaughterhouse

TWENTY-THREE.

Rawlings crawled up the muddy river bank, shivering in the night air. Even though the night was warm one—well over seventy degrees and humid as hell—the waist-high water of the Black River was icy cold, and the rushing river’s embrace had sucked away a great deal of her body heat as she and the rest of the soldiers forded the tributary, holding their weapons over their heads.

She had been issued night vision goggles—those had been taken from one of the fallen—as well as body armor and a full lightfighter kit. She struggled beneath the weight of all the gear. While she was no dainty kitchen fairy and was used to physical labor—her job with the National Guard had been to keep heavy equipment running, and that involved a lot of heavy lifting—humping a hundred pounds of gear across a fairly swift-moving river was no easy task.

She had to leave the file to grab Nutter when he tripped over a rock and went under. She spent a few frantic seconds casting about in the darkness with one hand, while holding her rifle out of the water with the other. The river’s surface tended to reflect light like a giant serpentine mirror, so she’d lost a visual on Nutter as soon as he went down, despite the night vision goggles. But her searching fingers grazed his rucksack, and she grabbed it and pulled with all her strength as one of the soldiers behind her steadied her, preventing her from going down as well. Nutter came to the surface, sputtering, trying to mute his coughs.

“Fuck,” he said after hacking up at least a cup of water. “I can’t believe I got saved by a girl.”

“Takes one to know one, asshole,” Rawlings said.

“Knock it off and keep going,” the soldier behind them said.

Nutter grunted and pressed on, holding his waterlogged rifle above his head.

Later, slipping in the mud, Rawlings followed Nutter up the bank and into the dark woods that stood silent watch nearby. The soldiers who had already made it into the tree line had taken up defensive positions, waiting for the rest of the element to close up.

Rawlings took a knee and checked her rifle. It seemed to be fine. Water slowly rolled off her, dripping to the forest floor. A hundred meters to their right, New York Highway 26 spanned the river, and a hundred yards beyond that, a small set of waterfalls roared, providing some acoustic cover as the lightfighters behind pressed into the woods. They moved as quietly as they could, but just the same, branches snapped and dried leaves rustled. If there were any Klowns in the vicinity, they would have heard the approaching force and come to investigate.

Rawlings looked up as the commander, Colonel Lee, surveyed the area with light-intensifying binoculars. They were already inside the perimeter of Fort Drum. Beyond the trees, Rawlings could see a good-sized building surrounded by a parking lot. A thousand feet to the northwest lay the post airfield, but Rawlings couldn’t see it just yet. She presumed that the lack of operating aircraft indicated the field was out of service. From deeper inside the post, gunfire ripped through the night and sporadic flashes of light briefly played along the horizon. Hell lay in that direction.

Lee put his binoculars away, dropped his NVGs over his eyes, and got to his feet. He motioned for the rest of the soldiers to do the same. The lightfighters rose to their feet, weapons clanking, feet shuffling, muffled oaths uttered. Lee pushed out of the trees, followed by the hulking figure of Muldoon and the other lightfighters.

The battalion had come home.