Brodie ran through the anteroom, the adrenaline pushing away the pains all over his body from the impact.
He dashed outside. The wind was whipping through the camp now, blowing sheets of sand everywhere. He could barely see the blue sky above, and the storm clouds were close.
“Brodie!”
He hobbled through the dusty air in the direction of Taylor’s voice. She and Dixon were crouched next to an armored personnel carrier, taking shelter from the wind and sand while training their EMP rifles on the door to the Vault.
Sergeant Miller stood nearby, also taking aim with his EMP-equipped M4.
Brodie got himself to a safe distance before aiming his launcher. Through the haze he saw two Rangers holding grenade launchers at the ready.
“They’re bottlenecked!” called out Miller. “Let’s roast these bastards!”
The guy who’d been on the roof with his M2 Browning was getting a hand bringing the machine gun down.
Brodie heard the boom of distant thunder. Lightning flickered over the dark hills to the south.
The Rangers got the M2 on the ground and set up. The gunner settled into firing position.
Brodie’s eyes drifted over the Rangers as they waited, enveloped by wind and desert sand, eyes and barrels locked on the door the enemy was about to breach. They’d found their moment at last. After months of engineered defeat and simulated death, this was it. This was the real battle, the final battle, and it was for everything.
CHAPTER 49
BRODIE KEPT HIS EYES LOCKEDon the metal door. The winds blew parallel to the front of the Vault, affording partial visibility.
Seconds passed. The dark thunderheads rolled north, gradually blotting out the sky.
The door swung open, and Brodie fired a grenade. So did two Rangers, and the guy with the M2 opened up, spitting out a streak of armor-piercing bullets.
The three grenade rounds met their target within milliseconds of each other and the successive explosions created a fiery blast that blew the door off and destroyed part of the concrete wall around it. The D-17 that had come through was scattered in charred pieces across the sand. Brodie spotted a metal leg smoking and melting from the heat. He quickly reloaded his launcher.
The winds blew the black tendrils of smoke into the plumes of desert dust, and Brodie squinted against it all, trying to detect movement. He saw nothing.
Then through the haze he glimpsed the shape of another D-17 running past the ruined wall and smoldering metal.
The gunner fired first, and the tin man twitched backward as twenty holes punctured its titanium shell, followed by a grenade hit from one of the Rangers that blew it to pieces. Brodie had held his fire, and he was glad he did, since he only had six more rounds.
They waited for another breach. Brodie didn’t see any movement.What the hell were these things doing? Coming at them one at a time like henchmen in a bad kung fu movie?
Or… were the tin men trying to lure them in? Deplete their ammo? Screw with their heads? It made no sense. In the training exercises they came as a wave, sacrificing a few so the rest could get through and take everyone out. It was efficient, brutal, and deadly. And this time their ranks were swelled, they had infrared vision to cut through the thick veil of dust, and they were up against fewer than a dozen humans struggling to see their own hands. Something about this wasn’t right. What was he missing?
As they waited, Brodie tried to angle his body away from the great sweeps of sand while maintaining his aim on the Vault. No more D-17s emerged.
Of course they wouldn’t act the way they always had. They’d been granted access to a sophisticated neural network now, one that had been in stealth mode for nine months, sucking up and processing vast quantities of information. Everything had changed.
The wind died down for a moment, enough for Brodie to see the Vault building, its front wall in ruins among the blasted remnants of two tin men. Then he caught sight of something on the Vault’s interior south wall—the old radiation sign left over from the building’s original purpose as a nuclear fallout shelter.
Of course. Any fallout shelter that size would have a second way to get out…
He ran around the back of the APC to Dixon. “Caroline! Is there another exit down there?”
She kept her eyes and her rifle trained on the building as she replied, “No.” Then she turned to him. “Wait. The storage room. There’s a section in the wall behind some shelving that’s brick instead of concrete. Someone told me they bricked up a tunnel entrance.”
“Can I assume the D-17s can break through a brick wall?”
She nodded slowly, understanding what had happened. “Of course they can.”
“Where does it go?”
