ADAM

 

Wednesday January 15 - 0155 PST

Thirty-five minutes until Turbocharger activates

 

The helicopter made another high speed pass over us and my hands instinctively tightened on the roll bar because I knew what was coming next. About a second after it passed the guy in the rear door lit us up with his machine gun. Greenish-white tracers rained down on us like lethal hail bouncing off the ground around us and making a high pitched pinging sound when they hit the dune buggy.

"Is anyone hurt?" J.T. shouted over the steady thrum of the little engine.

I checked myself for bleeders but thankfully didn't find any. Everyone was shaking their heads at J.T. Again I was thankful. "Don't you guys have a Stinger or something?"

J.T. shook his head at me. "Where the hell would we put it?"

I suppose he was right. While a portable surface-to-air missile like the Stinger would have been handy right about now it would have been difficult to store on their tiny vehicle. The FIM-92 Stinger was a big tube holding a missile with a boxy control unit stuck on one end. Every open spot was already filled with gas cans, ammo boxes, or a goofy dude holding on for his life. There just wasn't room for something that was about as likely to be needed as a life raft in the desert.

Until it was.

The helicopter was already circling around for another gun run on us. We'd been lucky that it hadn't killed anyone yet but if they fired enough rounds at us they could beat the odds. I didn't feel like waiting around and letting that happen.

Hooking one elbow around the roll bar freed up my left hand to steady Dominus for a shot at the approaching chopper. I tried steadying my aim but it was next to futile while standing on the bumper of a dune buggy bouncing across the Nevada desert. If I didn't at least try to stop them from gunning down my teammates I would never forgive myself. So I fired anyway.

BOOM!

At night, on the back of a moving vehicle it was hard to tell if I missed or not. So I fired again.

BOOM! BOOM!

Still nothing. So I lined up another shot.

Then J.T. shouted at me. "Adam, check fire! Check fire! You ain't gonna hit him and we'll need those big rounds of yours when we get inside. We don't know what the hell we'll be facing in there."

Sadly, he was right. I had the biggest gun in the group. Along with the extra firepower came a pretty big drawback. The shells took up a lot of space. Each magazine only held five rounds and I'd just used up most of my first mag. And I had missed every single shot. If I kept it up I wouldn't have anything left for whatever was waiting for us inside the Stadium.

It wasn't really a stadium though, but I wasn't sure what else to call it. There were people on the walls shooting at us but we were so far away and moving so fast that the shooters couldn't get good shots on us. A stream of green tracers arced up from the top of the Stadium's walls and came down straight at us. It seemed like they were moving in slow motion. Bright green neon streaks of death that just lazily fell out of the sky at us. They didn't seem so dangerous like that. But then I remembered something J.T. had said earlier. It ain't the tracers I'm worried about, it's the five bullets between each of them that'll kill you.

The helicopter was zooming down over us again and I saw tracers coming up to meet it from the other dune buggy, the one Shadow team was in. Like my shots they went everywhere except where the chopper was. Just as the helicopter was about to pass us by I heard Captain Grider's voice across the radio net. "All Alpha and Shadow victors make a hard right now…hard right now!"

I held on for dear life as Gary almost rolled our dune buggy trying to make the turn. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a pair of backpacks hanging from a side roll bar go horizontal with the fierce centrifugal force of the turn. My grip tightened even more so I didn't end up flying off like those backpacks were trying so hard to do. I didn't really blame them because there was scary stuff where we were headed.

When the helicopter zoomed by I expected a spray of green tracers, but we didn't get any. Grider's gambit had paid off and the gunner in the rear door was looking at the patch of desert where we should have been if we hadn't made that hard turn at the last second. All he found was sand and tumbleweeds and whole lot of nothing to shoot at. It was a neat trick, but I had a feeling it was one of those that would only work once.

Grider knew it too and was back on the net. "All victors move to my lasso."

I wasn't sure what he was talking about but everyone was flipping their NVGs down again. So I did the same. Then I saw what his "lasso" was. Captain Grider was using the IR illuminator on his rifle to draw circles around a loading dock at the edge of the Stadium. Both of our vehicles turned toward it and now the incoming fire from the walls was getting thick. I tried making myself as small as I could but no matter how much I ducked down it wasn't small enough.

More tracers filled the air as hidden gunners on the wall lit us up. The air was so thick now with hostile fire that I was sure I would get hit at any moment. And then like that we were under the cover of the loading dock.

Someone tossed out smoke to cover us from the helicopter's gunner but those little smoke clouds didn't last long. Everyone was piling out in a hurry and running for the doors. That was the only place we would be safe from the chopper. But it was also where we would run head long into whatever nasty surprise our foes had waiting for us.