"Catch up to him!" Valentine shouted, glancing through the armored glass. No wonder the driver was driving from the higher seat, the thin slits didn't give much visibility, and what there was had leaves and branches latticed across it.
Valentine went under to reach the gunner's seat in the armored car, noting that you could fit perhaps four men in the compartment between the driver and gunner positions. There were firing slots for them. Bags of gear were netted on the floor and against the ceiling.
Valentine saw a box of grenades and took a couple. He sat in the bloodstained seat and evaluated the weapon.
You pivoted it with a pair of pedals, and once pointed in the right direction, the gimbal allowed the gunner about a twenty-degree field of fire.
He saw the first vehicle with its dead gunner. Its driver was better than Duvalier; he was hurtling down the road, swerving around the bigger tree trunks, sending a constant hail of clipped-off branches back at the followers. He must be aware something awful was up.
Duvalier had to thump along in his wake as best as she could.
Valentine tried a burst, then a second. The bullets made a hole or two, but he could see no other effect.
Their quarry swerved and Duvalier struck a red oak trunk with a glancing blow, tearing off a sheet-sized piece of bark and knocking Valentine out of the seat. The Georgia driver had waited to the last second to swerve around it and only Duvalier's keyed-up reflexes prevented them from crashing into it.
No good throwing grenades in this mess. Valentine climbed out of the cupola, flexed his fingers and tested the skin on his hands for machine oil.
He crouched next to Duvalier.
"Get right up behind him!" he shouted in her ear.
She hit the gas, edged closer in the green tunnel.
Valentine crawled across the top of the armored car, the little cylinder of the grenade held carefully in his lips and teeth, like an oversized cigar butt. Overgrowth ticked off his legworm leathers.
Weirdly, he thought of the saunas he sometimes took in the winter up in Minnesota. The locals up there liked to hit each other with birch branches, claimed it brought the blood up to the skin and was good for the circulation. A bunch of naked men flogging away at each other in a stone-heated room made an impression on him as a preteen, and he'd tried a branch on his arm. It felt like this thresher of a green tunnel.
He tapped Duvalier, pointed at the forward armored car. She nodded, pulled up close enough for him to see the hinges on the forged steel grids over the rear lights.
Valentine waited for a gap in the growth above-he didn't want to be knocked by a tree limb under Duvalier's wheels-and leaped.
He landed hard, and badly, with the wind knocked out of him and the grenade rolling away. He somehow ignored the instinct to hold on with both hands and tried to retrieve it, and missed. It rolled up against the gunner's ring, wobbled there as though deciding which way to go, and he picked it up this time.
Ring out, lever off-he got around the gunner Duvalier had nearly decapitated and underhanded the grenade toward the end of the driver's compartment.
"Grenade!" he heard someone shout within. So there was a third man in this car.
The driver looked over his shoulder.
Valentine showed him the grenade ring.
The driver got one arm out, then the explosion launched him like a champagne cork.
Valentine found himself atop a careening armored car. It bounced off a tree root.
Duvalier was braking, hard.
The world tipped on its side and Valentine felt momentarily weightless, before he landed, painfully and like tricky old Br'er Rabbit, in a thorny tangle.
When he regained his bearings he felt the warm sensation that meant the pain would come in a minute or two. He cautiously moved each limb and looked down at his body. He felt like Scarecrow after the monkeys had finished tearing the straw out of him.
Duvalier appeared, smiled through a mask of drying blood, and held out a hand.
"I think we're each down one of our lives," she said. She helped him to his feet.
They sure build these things tough, Valentine thought. Typical Control quality.
They found the driver of the first armored car, bleeding and unconscious. She drew her skinning knife.