BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

A machine gun, sounding like a chainsaw, opened up. A line of holes appeared at the tail end of the cargo bay and walked its way forward. Metal was flying everywhere. The air stank of cordite, steel, blood, and human waste.

Plath grabbed Vincent by the jacket and yanked him to his feet as Wilkes undid his safety harness. Vincent let the gruesome body part drop, hesitated as if he might go back for it, and then Plath shoved him out onto the ice and jumped after him.

Wilkes landed on Plath, rolled off, and slithered on her belly. Plath glanced back and saw a Sno-Cat with a machine gun mounted on its roof, still firing from the far side of the wreck.

Then, with a woosh of searing heat, the starboard-side fuel tanks exploded, billowing out over the Sno-Cat. The man firing the machine gun was aflame, twisting, writhing, trapped somehow, and the machine gun stopped.

They were three hundred feet from the nearest building, which was one of the four gun emplacements.

“Run run run!” Tanner yelled, and led the way, slipping and staggering across the ice with the wind blessedly at his back. Plath saw immediately what he was doing. The gun tower was opening, shutters rising mechanically, revealing a long black muzzle. Tanner was trying to close the distance and get below the place where the gun could be depressed to target them.

It took twenty seconds for the shutters to open fully. Another ten seconds for the gunners to ready their weapon, and at that moment the gamble had failed. The gaggle of freezing survivors were in pointblank range.

The machine gun fired. Two rounds, killing one man instantly and hitting another in the thigh.

And then, the gun jammed.

Training took over for the ex-soldiers. They quickly closed the distance to the tower’s base and began kicking at the door. One fired at the lock. The door opened and small-arms fire—a pop! pop! pop! sound—came from within.

Tanner, yelling obscenities, picked up a fallen body and threw it through the doorway to draw fire. He was in through the door in a flash. More gunfire as those with weapons rushed the doorway after him.

Silence descended. Tanner and his men had taken the tower.

“Come on,” Plath said to Vincent and Wilkes, “we’ll freeze out here!”

A second Sno-Cat was barreling toward them from the center of the compound, trailing a cloud of ice particles and steam.

The top third of the tower now rotated, bringing the machine gun to bear on the Sno-Cat, which made the fatal mistake of hesitating, slowing, and then blew apart as Tanner poured fire into it.

Plath, Wilkes, and Vincent found themselves in a bare room at the bottom of a steel spiral staircase leading up. “Wilkes, stay with Vincent.”

Plath ran up the stairs to find Tanner still cursing, but also bleeding into his parka, a growing stain.

“Goddammit, goddammit, they shot me,” he said as he tore off his jacket, then burrowed through layers of warmth to find a hole in his left side.

A soldier squatted to take a look. He grinned up at Tanner. “Through and through, Captain. You’ll live if you don’t bleed out.”

“Slap on a compress, Sergeant O’Dell.”

Tanner looked at Plath. “You look okay for your first firefight.”

“Not my first,” Plath said. “Not even my second. It’s been a hell of a week.” She peered out of the shooting hole as the machine gun traversed left and right. Nothing moved. The plane and the two Sno-cats burned.

“All those buildings—shuttered. Bulletproof, most likely.” O’Dell, the ex-soldier who had tended Tanner’s wound.

“Jesus H.,” Tanner said. “It’s a fortress. See what we have here. Inventory weapons and do a head count.”

The bad news was that there were just six battle-ready men, plus Tanner, Plath, Vincent, and Wilkes.

The good news was delivered by O’Dell. “We have all the small arms we could want, plenty of ammo, and a dozen of these.” The “these” in question were shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

“I’m not familiar with those. Russian?”

“Chinese,” O’Dell said. “And to answer your next question, yes, they can be fused for impact.”

“Okay,” Tanner said. “That is not a professional outfit out there; otherwise, they wouldn’t have driven that Sno-Cat into range and then conveniently stopped. Amateurs with maybe a couple of veterans. Short-handed and poorly led, or we’d already be dead. Let’s not give them time to figure anything out. Sergeant, blow some holes in that first building. Ground level if you can. We need a door.”

The battle lasted two hours, by which time two more men had been killed. Plath and her friends had been given the job of ferrying wounded from the plane into the first tower while Tanner led the assault on the second.