He looked at all the bodies in the road and said, “Rest easy, soldiers.” He turned to Dixon. “We need to move.”
She remained still, staring at the fallen Rangers. “We can’t just leave them here.”
“We have to.”
“We can move them somewhere. Cover them.Something.”
Brodie grabbed her by the arm and gave her a shake. “We’re in themiddle of a battle, Caroline. And if we lose, they will all have died fornothing. Don’t you understand?”
She looked at him, eyes full of fear and grief behind her dusty glasses. Then she ripped her arm away from his grip. “No, I don’t understand! I’ve never been in a fuckingwar, Scott.”
“That’s right. You just design wars in a lab. Good gig.”
Dixon did not respond. She looked at the dead men and said softly, “There has to be another way. This way always ends the same.”
Brodie wasn’t sure what to say to that. He picked up the machine gun and gripped it with both hands. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 51
BRODIE AND DIXON JOGGED EASTalong the road, then turned left onto a wider road and straight into the oncoming sandstorm winds.
They pulled their shirts over their noses and mouths to keep the sand out and kept their heads low as they hugged the walls of the buildings. The air was so thick here that it would screw up even the tin men’s sensors. Or so he hoped.
From somewhere ahead came a loud, high-pitched whistle, followed a few seconds later by the pop of a small explosion. He called to Dixon over the wind, “Mortars!”
“What do we do about that?”
“Nothing!”
“Great!”
They continued down the road, and up ahead Brodie could make out flickering orange light. A fire. More mortars sailed off, and then something on the ground exploded. He had a bad feeling he knew what it was.
They came to the mess hall on their right. The door had been ripped off its hinges and thrown into the road, and all the front windows were smashed. This must have been where the tin men had busted out. And up ahead…
Dixon asked, “What is that?”
They approached the fire, which was at the far side of the intersection ahead. They were close enough now that he could make out the rounded shape of the Quonset hut’s steel skeleton. “It’s the armory. They took what they needed and burned the rest.”
“Shit.”
He saw something silhouetted against the fire, something low, and moving slightly. Could be an injured Ranger.
He signaled to Dixon, and they approached carefully, weapons raised.
Once they were almost clear of the mess hall building and at the intersection, he realized the silhouette was actually two things. The first was the body of a Ranger lying dead on his back. Crouched over him was Lenny, the one-legged tin man. Blood was smeared all over the side of Lenny’s midsection, around the open hatch that accessed the thing’s microbial fuel cell. Its left hand clawed at the Ranger and then shoved a bloody hunk of something into the hatch…
Dixon gasped.
Brodie braced the M240 against his body, took aim, and fired a burst of armor-piercing bullets at the bot. Lenny flew backward as its limbs twitched wildly. It attempted to get up onto its hands and single knee, and Brodie blasted it again, bracing the gun between his right arm and torso. The gun had a powerful recoil, and it was hard to keep a steady bead on the target, but it was good enough. Lenny crumpled to the ground and did not move again.
He heard Dixon hyperventilating behind him. “Scott… it…”
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t look.”
Dixon sank to her knees and the sand blew over her. She dropped her rifle.
“What are you doing?”
