Slaughterhouse

THIRTY-EIGHT.

Muldoon rolled onto his side and snatched a fresh magazine from his harness. Rawlings started firing again, shouting behind her mask as the Klowns toppled to the brush right in front of her. Nutter ripped off another blast on full auto then shouted that he had to reload.

On the other side of Nutter, a soldier got to his knees and hurled a grenade, yelling “Frag out!” Before the lightfighter could cover, he jerked backward with a choked scream as a bullet tore through his mask. The soldier toppled onto his back and lay still, his legs curled up beneath him.

Muldoon fired three rounds into the Klown rifleman staggering through the brush. The attacker’s movements were made clumsy by the fact he didn’t have night vision gear and was laughing like Frank Gorshen’s Riddler from the classic Batman TV series. More shapes loomed behind that one, and they returned fire. Muldoon heard bullets crack as they zipped past, missing him by mere inches.

“Be an awesome time to shoot the fuckers in the face, Duke!” Nutter shouted, his voice a high-pitched shriek as he frantically tried to reload his M4.

Muldoon obliged, firing six rapid shots into the approaching gunmen. One of them curled up with a giggle and fell to the ground, while another only laughed harder while one of his arms flopped uselessly at his side. The third ducked to the right, putting a small tree between him and Muldoon as he blindly fired around it. His rounds went high, killing nothing more than leaves and possibly a couple of robins in the tree branches overhead. Rawlings drilled the Klown twice, and he sagged to the ground, gurgling.

Muldoon heard shattering glass as a sudden glow grew in feverish intensity, almost as if the small forest they lay in had been hit by a nuclear weapon. He smelled gasoline, and as his NVGs went into white-out, he knew that one of the Klowns had tossed a Molotov cocktail at them. Flame burned, bright and hot, and it found more than just gasoline to feed it. Dried leaves and brush and tree trunks that hadn’t seen a decent rain in quite a few weeks added fuel to the blaze, and thick smoke billowed.

Muldoon flipped up his NVGs. The fire was only twenty feet away, and he could see Lee’s boys—Murphy and Foster—retreating from the conflagration. In fact, Foster frantically slapped at the flames on his uniform with his gloved hands while Murphy, his SAW slung across his chest, dragged the man away.

Muldoon didn’t have time to worry about it, because more Klowns rushed into the trees. He cut several of them down, but more than a few wore body armor, and he had to hit them repeatedly to have any effect.

Then, his magazine ran dry again.

“Reloading!” he shouted, turning onto his side to reach for a fresh mag as more Klowns pushed their way in.

One of them spied Rawlings and lunged for her with a hitching whoop. The Klown raised an ax over his head.

“Fuck!” Rawlings screamed. She fired her M4 directly into the Klown’s crotch.

The man howled with laughter as his pelvis disintegrated beneath the force of several full metal jacket rounds. He collapsed to the ground, still swinging the ax as he fell. Rawlings turned at the last moment, and the ax head plunged into the earth beside her.

Muldoon lashed out with his empty rifle, and the M9 bayonet at its tip pierced the man’s chest. That only made the Klown laugh louder. The laughter amidst the sound of the sucking chest wound was a horrible sound, but Muldoon kept stabbing him, again and again. He could feel the heat of the blaze mounting, and the fire roared as it consumed every combustible in its path. Nutter finally got his rifle loaded, and he fired two rounds into the Klown as it sagged, falling away from Muldoon and his bayonet.

“Thanks for nothing, Nutter!” Muldoon yelled as he pulled his rifle back and yanked a fresh mag from his vest. “Rawlings, you all right?”

“Good to go,” Rawlings said.

“Gotta pull back, Duke!” Nutter shouted. “This fire’s getting too hot!”

“Roger that,” Muldoon said, slapping the magazine into his rifle and hitting the carrier release. Click! The M4 was back in business. “Fall back fifty meters!” He fired several shots through the growing smoke, hoping to keep the Klowns off balance long enough for the team to retreat. “Nutter, Girard is down, grab him!”

“Hooah!” Nutter grabbed the fallen soldier’s vest and dragged him through the brush.

Rawlings hung back while the rest of the soldiers vacated their positions, joining Muldoon in firing at the shapes that swam about in the smoke.

“Go on, Rawlings! Fall back!” Muldoon snapped.

“What about you, Sergeant?”

“Don’t worry about me—I’ve got this! Get the hell out of here and reform fifty meters back!” He paused long enough to pull a grenade from his vest, yank the pin, and hurl it into the smoke. “Frag out!” That was his last one.

Muldoon crouched down as Rawlings reluctantly retreated, sidestepping away, rifle held at low ready. The grenade exploded, and the detonation caused a chorus of laughter just outside the tree line. The weapon had put a hurting on the enemy, even if they thought it was great fun.

He checked the area, and saw that all his soldiers had pulled out. He got to his feet and made to follow them. More figures emerged from the smoke suddenly, guffawing with manic glee when they saw him. Muldoon swore and turned to engage them, and found he couldn’t. His rifle got hung up momentarily in a vine-laden bush. Four Klowns rushed him with a communal, cackling howl.

Muldoon ripped his rifle free of the vines, flipped the fire selector to AUTO, and ripped a burst into the first Infected at a range of less than four feet. The man died instantly, but his inertia carried him forward until he impaled himself on Muldoon’s bayonet. Muldoon backpedaled but couldn’t move fast enough. With a dry chortle, the Klown crashed into him, hands flopping against Muldoon’s mask.

“Fuck!” Muldoon screamed as his feet got tangled up, and he fell onto his back.

The twitching Klown fell with him, still impaled on his bayonet. Muldoon fired off another burst—no target in sight, just an attempt to put the fear of God in his attackers, if that was possible—then rolled the corpse off of himself. For his trouble, another Klown landed on him, a young woman wearing a Lady Gaga T-shirt and ripped jeans, her black hair a wild and wooly nimbus around her head.

She drove a butcher knife right into Muldoon’s chest with all her strength. The blade met the metal plate in his chest protector and skidded off harmlessly, tearing some fabric before it got hung up in the tougher material of his tactical vest. Muldoon punched her in the lower ribs, and was rewarded with the sound of bone parting as the girl’s wind left her in the rush. As she doubled over with a hitching titter, Muldoon jabbed her in the neck. That stopped the girl from laughing, and she fell off him, eyes already glazing over as she tried to breathe through a shattered trachea.

“Throat-punch Thursday, bitch!” Muldoon shouted, even though it wasn’t Thursday at all.

A shotgun went off, and Muldoon flinched as he was covered in a shower of dirt, shredded leaves, and twigs. Another Klown bore down on him, racking the slide of the twelve-gauge shotgun. Muldoon tried to bring his rifle up as the laughing, infected man raised his shotgun to bear on Muldoon’s face. To Muldoon, the shotgun’s muzzle looked bigger than the Holland Tunnel.

The back of the Klown’s head exploded in a gooey mess that splattered all over the heaving, obese woman behind him. The tunnel disappeared as the man dropped to the ground.

Muldoon didn’t even have time to blink before the female went down too, a stitching eruption racing across her prodigious bosom. She’d been wearing a frumpy house coat and nothing else. Her bulk crashed to the forest floor, legs kicking as she tried to breathe with lungs that had been turned into the equivalent of blood-soaked shredded wheat. He had no idea what had just happened.

“Muldoon, get on your feet!”

Muldoon sat up and turned. Rawlings knelt a short distance away, rifle shouldered, looking like some demonic warrior in her MOPP gear and NVGs. She fired again, and Muldoon heard something thrash about in the brush near the fire.

“Hee-hee-hee-HEEEEEEE—!” A Klown’s high-pitched giggle grew in intensity.

Muldoon slogged to his feet and cast a quick glance over his shoulder as he tucked in his rifle. A Klown thrashed on the ground. Not only had Rawlings shot the man a couple of times, but he was also on fire. Despite the fact that he was burning to a crisp, the infected soldier was still trying to crawl toward Muldoon, leering at him with blackened lips. Rawlings fired again, letting loose a single round that flew straight and true through the Klown’s forehead.

But behind the bodies, more Infected flooded the woods. Many were severely wounded from the continuing grenade attacks, but many were whole and healthy, and they were looking to get it on in a bad way. Muldoon ripped off a burst at them then joined Rawlings as she rose and sprinted through the trees. They found the rest of the troops in a rough skirmish line deeper inside the trees.

Nutter shot Muldoon a thumbs-up.

“Now I don’t feel so bad about being saved by a girl,” the small, wiry lightfighter crowed behind his mask. “I just wish I’d been there to take a picture of her saving you, Duke!”

“Suppressive fire!” Muldoon shouted as he flopped to the ground beside Nutter, ignoring the soldier’s comments. “We’ve got heavy contact coming!” Into his radio: “Wizard Seven, this is Crusher Three-One. We need your fifties right now! Over!”

“Crusher Three-One, this is Wizard Seven. Roger. Put your faces in the dirt and keep your asses down, and call the BDA. Over.”

No sooner had Turner ended the transmission, three or four M2 fifty caliber machineguns started chattering in earnest behind Muldoon’s fighting position. Big rounds, several of them tracers, ripped through the trees at an altitude of maybe four feet, tearing through brush and soft-bodied Klowns who walked right into the shit storm without a care in the world.

Muldoon’s men ducked down and resumed firing as soon as they had targets. It didn’t take long for the bodies to start hitting the deck, but the Klowns died eagerly. But machinegun bullets weren’t death rays. They could only kill what they hit, and there were plenty of trees in between the Humvees and the Klowns. While a lot of Infected were hit, several more surged forward, facing down the buzz-saw defense the lightfighters threw at them. To Muldoon’s delight, the Klowns didn’t fare well in their strategy, and more shattered, bleeding bodies fell as they died laughing.

But the fire was growing, and the Klowns were moving away from the engagement area. Muldoon knew the Infected were seeking to flank them, and he ordered his troops to reposition, so their fires could be oriented more to the right of the formation. Fire was to the left; dark, empty woods were to the right. He radioed Turner to cease protective fires.

“I think they’re going to hit us on the right flank. Over,” he added, after filling in the sergeant major on the current situation.

“Three-One, this is Seven. Roger that. You and your troops need to start falling back. We’ll advance toward the intersection and draw some of their interest while you guys make for the truck. Over.”

“Seven, this is Crusher Three-One. Our mission isn’t complete yet. Over.”

“Crusher Three-One, this is Wizard Seven. Battalion is on the move, your mission is ended. Feel free to stay if that’s your preference, Muldoon, but send the rest of your element out while we can still support them. Over.”

Muldoon shook his head. Turner would love it if he were to go gonzo and hang out in the woods, dealing with the Klowns all by himself. Too bad he’d have to deal with another dose of bitter disappointment. “Wizard Seven, Crusher Three-One. Roger that, we’re falling back now.”

“Beauty,” was Turner’s cryptic response, but Muldoon smiled at the brimming disenchantment the message contained.