Fireteam Delta, J. Halpin [online e book reading .txt] 📗

group out of commission. He was readying another when he felt something kick him from behind. Bard fell into his back just as he fired his weapon. Summers turned, expecting another intruder, only to see the man firing directly into the back wall.

“What—?” Summers stopped as he noticed that the wall was gone. In its place was an extremely surprised thin man, still standing at the bottom of the hill, the floor of their bunker gradually giving way to grass. Impossibly, behind the man, Summers could still see the bunker they were in.

It was at that point he remembered he was holding a live grenade.

“Oh, fuck!” Summers hurled the grenade at the thin man. He stumbled at the impact, and the portal collapsed. The wall of the bunker reappeared once more. Chunks of square, cut concrete clattered to the ground in its wake.

Summers stared wide-eyed at the sight. If the thin man had tried the same trick he’d done before, Summers might have blown them all to hell.

“Uh, good job.” He clapped Bard on the back.

Just as Summers finished, a distant roar sounded. Then, suddenly, it was closer. Much closer. He turned to see the face of the dragon nearly a hundred feet from the bunker, charging at them through a portal being held open by a very pissed-off looking thin man.

“Oh . . .”

Summers grabbed Bard and pushed him toward the center of the bunker.

“We need to get out of here, now!” Summers raised his rifle, firing at yet another man in the doorway. The creature’s footsteps were shaking the ground with every step. Summers was not optimistic about the bunker’s chances of stopping something like that.

“I don’t think that’s happening!” Nowak answered, as gunfire peppered the entrance.

Summers scrabbled for an idea before he remembered the room below them.

“Down. Through the hatch—go!” Summers fired a continuous burst toward the groups of enemies still climbing the hill, hoping to give the others enough time to retreat.

It took only a moment’s hesitation before they began to move. Summers could see the dragon still charging, seconds away.

“Summers!” Nowak shouted.

Summers saw that the others had made it to the hatch, and he turned on his heel to follow, just as something caught his leg. He heard something tear.

Summers turned to see the bag that had been at his side lying partially open, the activation wire tangled around his boot. The metallic tinkling of the levers hitting concrete let him know that a few of those grenades had come loose, and they were now live.

Summers really, truly hated that bag with every fiber of his being.

“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Summers grabbed the bag and heaved it out the window with everything he had, straight into the path of the dragon. He felt the rest of the tape tear loose as the grenades spilled out, not nearly far enough away for his tastes.

Summers moved as fast as he could. He saw the surprised looks on his friends’ faces as he slammed the hatch shut on them, just before an explosion of light, sound, and concrete overtook him.

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Summers awoke to find himself sprawled on the ground, looking at the half-collapsed ceiling of their former bunker.

He saw the head of the monstrous dragon lying in front of him. He tried to get to his feet before the pain stopped him.

Then he realized it wasn’t moving.

Summers stopped struggling as he noticed the substantial crater in the creature’s neck, large enough for Summers to see its spine. Its head was leaking some kind of liquid that was probably important.

He’d never gotten a good look at the creature when he’d first seen it, but up close, it looked to be falling apart. Even discounting the damage he’d done to it. Pieces of flesh sluffed off the bones of its torn wings, and the skin looked rotted, like it had been dead for weeks.

Summers didn’t linger on that long, though. The important part was that it wasn’t moving. Which was good, because Summers was fairly sure he’d broken something.

He tried again to get to his feet, only to feel a strange resistance from his back. He looked down to see a large piece of rebar sticking out from his chest.

Shit.

His first instinct was to ask for help. But as he looked over to the hatch, he found that it had been buried beneath a small pile of rubble.

“Of fucking course.”

After a moment of psyching himself up, Summers pulled the piece of metal from his chest with one fluid motion, gritting his teeth with the effort. Blood flowed freely from the wound—something he was sure he’d have to handle quickly. For now, he limped over to the hatch, a dull thumping growing louder as he approached. He understood immediately that the others were trying to get out.

Then the hatch disappeared, and Summers found the bloody, partially burned form of the thin man in front of him. He only had a moment to react before the man’s hand snaked out toward his neck, grabbing him before he could stumble away.

“That’s enough for now.” The thin man looked at Summers, a soft smile on his face. “I have to say, you are by far one of the most interesting individuals I’ve come across here. How did you get outside our control range?”

Summers struggled to break the man’s grip, only to realize he was as strong as Summers. Given the monster they’d just killed, that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“Fuck . . . you . . .”

“Original.” The thin man effortlessly threw Summers into the dragon’s corpse. He felt something snap on impact, but from the pain in his side, he wasn’t sure if it was the dragon, or him.

Summers looked up in time to see the thin man walking forward, more of the beast-like men