City of Ruins

SIXTY-EIGHT



Coop could see the trouble building down the mountainside. Roads filled with official-looking vehicles. He knew that there would be a small army of people heading up to the cave opening before he officially found out the group was in trouble.

Immediately, he had Dix and Perkins stop interrogating the guides and move them to a rock formation some distance away. Then Coop got his team into position around some of the rises on the mountainside.

He gave the team a simple order: disable the ground vehicles, but not the people in them. He wanted everyone to get out of this with no injuries at best, minor bruises at worst.

The old-fashioned carts were coming in low, and not nearly fast enough. More and more vehicles were joining the chase up the side of the mountain, both on and off the roads.

A few people in those vehicles were standing and firing some kind of weapon at the carts. He couldn’t tell if those were projectile weapons or not, only that the shots didn’t seem to be causing any damage.

He sprawled next to his team, his own weapon out. Then he gave the order to fire.

First they shot up the ground ahead of the land vehicles, hoping that would stop them. But the damn things just bounced over the ruts. So he gave the order to shoot the vehicles themselves.

The carts got closer, and they were full.

That was the biggest problem he could foresee. Those carts were badly built, with technology so old—new? (the idea of that made his brain hurt)— that they might not be able to take the weight of the additional people they’d have to carry.

He hoped those things would get them back into the caves, at least. From there, some of his team could run if they had to.

He counted at least twenty vehicles. He shot two. Four others spun out and blocked the road. The others just went around.

The carts came in low. For a minute, he thought they would just go down into the caves, leaving his team to fend for itself. Instead, they touched down.

He signaled his team to shoot as they hurried toward the carts.

He and Dix came in last, disabling three more vehicles before running to the carts.

Two carts had already gone underground, with four of his people gone. Only he and Dix remained.

One of the carts had a driver he didn’t recognize; the other was the woman they all called Boss.

Coop leapt into her cart, Dix into the other.

She waited for that cart to head into the caves before she followed.

Ground vehicles came up over the mountaintop. Coop and Rossetti shot at them, overturning one and knocking it into another. Three went around.

Coop cursed. He hoped to hell those ground vehicles couldn’t go into the caves. If they could, someone was going to get killed.

And he was going to make sure that if anyone died, it wouldn’t be someone on his team. Or Boss’s team.

He was going to protect them at all costs.

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