The sun beat down on the ancient asphalt trail. They were walking in the lowest road in a sunken valley, dried brush plants overgrowing the top of the dirt sides that flanked them for the last ten miles. This road was forbidden to venture into by legion decree, and with good reason. Because, even though the road itself was in a sunken valley, there were a dozen ideal mini-mountains, flat-topped mesas, at any time visible from far-away overlooking the steep twenty-foot slides of dirt. This would be, and used to be, the safest natural territory in America for any well-supplied military force to occupy, as the many abandoned legion searchtowers and tents adorning the reddish-white mesas could attest to. You could hold the roads with absolutely no problems against any land-based force. But there was just one tiny, minor detail that made it into 'Here be Dragons' territory for the legion.
Cazadors didn't walk. They flew.
ED-E started a series of beeps. A red indicator appeared on his helmet display from the North-East on his compass. Owen held up a fist, and the armed merchants stopped.
"Quiet. Something's ahead." He scanned the long road ahead, but couldn't find anything. The red dot disappeared. He waited and waited, but nothing happened.
"...I don't know, friend. Are you sure it's not the heat-wave playing fiddle with the robot's sensors? I've seen some crazy things in those mirages coming off the road myself that weren't there." Juan broke the silence.
Owen's gut felt funny. He'd only felt this feeling a couple times before, and when he did, it was never good.
"No. I feel something. Stay silent."
He crouched down, and put his helmeted left ear to the cracked and paved ground. It took a few seconds, but he heard a sound. A dull but fast thudda-thudda-thudda-thudda, like some slowly accelerating engine.
God, what was that sound?
"I don't know what that sound is. Stay here, I'm moving to higher ground."
He heard Juan and Henry whisper something about 'Stir-crazy desert rangers' and 'Going to go sell drugs to the legion again', but he barely registered it. He climbed the steep dirt cliff, punching gloved hands into dirt and sand to kick and climb himself up the twenty-foot dirt slide in about five seconds, ED-E merely hovering a few feet up with him. He made sure to walk along the edge where he could still see the hapless engineers sitting down on a large rock, giving their legs what little rest they could find and drinking from a straw out of their camelbaks.
The masked face scanned the now-slightly expanded horizon, but whatever ED-E's biosensor's detected, they were gone. Although, there were many valleys and villas for someone to hide behind around here...
"+Maybe the bad guys have stealth suits, too?+" Bonnie quipped. They were far enough away that the egghead trio couldn't hear them.
"Don't be ridiculous, Bonnie. They could hide well enough around here even without a pro like you to help them out. Remember those guys that used to try and ambush us twice a day? We're in the middle of their turf."
"+I remember them! So many fun games of hide and seek. Good thing we never lost!+"
"Bonnie..." Owen sternly reprimanded her.
"+Well, mostly we never lost. We're still the 'best twins in hide and seek' award winners three years running, though!+"
Owen let himself give a small laugh. "Yeah, I guess we are, huh?"
Then, ED-E beeped again. Many, many beeps.
"+Fighty-ti… Oh.+"
"Oh? What's 'Oh'?"
In the far, far distance, about two kilometers, Owen saw a dark cloud moving from the top of a mesa. He un-shouldered his trail carbine from the straps on his back and looked through the scope at it. As it turned out, 'Oh' was a a completely mesa-covering swarm of black-and-red carapaced cazadors flying what appeared to be slowly towards him, but he knew it was closer to twenty or thirty miles an hour. Panic set in, but Owen stomped down on it. He had around thirty grenades. He could do this, if he did it absolutely perfectly.
"ED-E, start taking care of them." ED-E played an old west jingle from some forgotten movie and then started blasting the far-off dozens of cazadors.
Owen ran back to the steep dirt cliff and yelled down at his crew,
"Get the fuck up here! We got cazadors coming, TwoO'Clock!"
They yelled back "But what about the cow?!"
"FUCK the cow, get your asses up here, now!"
The trio, to their credit, were fast to try and get up the hill. 'Try' being the key word. Twenty feet of steep dirt is hard to surmount even to experienced survivalists. It might've been just one small part of Desert Ranger training, but to most people in the wasteland that was something that'd take a solid minute. Unacceptable, seeing as they only had three before they'd all perish. Owen took his ranger duster off and grabbed both ends, spinning it around and around like a towel. He tied one end into a knot, and held it down for the others to grab.
"We got two and a half minutes before we're all dead, so if you would kindly hurry the hell up we might have a fighting chance."
That motivated them, and even a man as old as Henry got a move on. Once they were all up, the cazadors were much closer than they did the last time he looked at them. Owen shuffled around in his explosives bag, suddenly not minding how much his back hurt anymore. He'd fished out some small duct-tape covered black bricks and grenades, handing them out to each of them. "Stick the bricks to the left of the rock face. If we're lucky, it'll cause a rock slide. If we're not, it'll take some of the cazadors with them."
Henry protested, "If that rock cliff explodes, it'll take us with it! Are you nuts?!" The others seemed apprehensive as well.
"I've done this before but if you'd rather convince them-" he pointed at the swarm of giant vicious insects flying through he air closing the distance a kilometer away "-that my plan is bad, then be my guest." Owen looked into each of their eyes, and saw apprehensiveness. He'd seen that kind of look before. It was universal. Whenever a rookie soldier meets his first taste of real combat, with a real chance of dying if they fucked up, or even if they were just unlucky, they gave him this look. Trying to communicate their regret and fear with one look in the eyes, as if he could just convince the enemy to walk away and let them live another day. Owen wished he lived in a world like that. But war demands that someone dies. You, or your enemy.
"We don't have all fucking day, ladies. Get on it."
They started setting the C-4 a fair two dozen feet away, around the edge of the mesa face to their left. The effective range of Thump-Thump was somewhere around 600 meters, a range the cazadors were quickly about to enter. The distant 'Thudda-thudda-thudda' had now become an awful buzzing screech, each cazador's four wings and the dozens of the hell-insects themselves making a sound that sounded like metal angrily and constantly shredding itself into pieces. Which the cazadors could easily do. An unholy drone echoed through the valleys, making the swarm of angry insects even more intimidating. ED-E was doing all he could to drop them, and while he had seen a few drop out of the air on their way to murder him, it was much too little. With one hand on his unstrapped grenade launcher, and the other reaching into his explosives bag, he remembered something.
I only packed three rounds of airburst.
His mind raced into overdrive formulating a plan. There were probably four dozen or so, five dozen in the worst case, of cazadors. Mojave Cazadors were about five by six feet long and wide, but Colorado Cazadors were seven by eight feet. The muzzle velocity of Thump-thump was around two hundred and forty meters a second, the airburst rounds having a clean-kill radius of fifteen feet and a wounding(for humans, anyway) radius of around forty feet. If he aimed where the cazadors would be in just under three seconds, he'd be good. Could drop at least a dozen and a half that way with the airbursts, then he'd have time for six more grenades before they'd be right on top of him and it'd be far too dangerous… Ah, but the dirt? The dirt might end up being their greatest weapon.
Two seconds had passed, and he had his plan. He loaded and raised the grenade rifle to his eyes, calculating the speed and trajectory of both his yet-unshot airburst grenades and the winged death that was speeding its way towards him.
"Get those gun safeties off, gentlemen. When I say 'Fire', you fire. Empty the mags, aim for the wings. When you run out of ammo, prime the grenades, throw them in front of you, and slide back down the dirt hill. Then start running back the way we came. Understood?"
A nervous but firm "Understood." came from all of them. Owen smiled a hidden smile. Untrained, but resolute. He'd make rangers out of these men, yet.
"Get behind me."
As they did so, submachine guns with their selector switch set to full auto and the wire stocks pulled out and at the ready, Owen got the belt of grenades out from his bag, and tightened them around himself.
"+Bad guys in range. Wind speed is: Ten. Miles. West. ETA is: Thirty. Five.Seconds. Have fun!+"
THUMP
By the time the grenade landed in the midst of the flying insect-demons, Owen already had a new grenade in the launcher and fired. The shot landed, and six of those black and red cazadors fell screaming and burning to the earth. Dust and dirt was shaken into the air all around him from the grenade's muzzle blast.
THUMP
He did it again, the last airburst round he had soaring through the air and dropping more of them. Still far, far too much of them. Far away, but closing the distance faster than usain bolt.
THUMP
Now, he had to use something different. Airburst rounds were gone. Hive rounds were ineffective at this range, and against giant cazadors in general. Plasma's blast radius was too small. That left one option.
THUMP
He didn't pause to see if it would hit them. If he broke his rhythm, it would be wasting precious time, and he'd have to re-calculate everything with his head instead of letting muscle memory and experience take over. That'd take precious seconds.
THUMP
"+Three hundred meters. Twenty seconds.+"
Many of the larger-than-man sized ebony cazadors were on fire. About half of them. Despite that, only a few were dropping out of the sky, at a much more leisurely pace than before.
THUMP
Now, instead of half of them, most of them were on fire. That didn't stop them from making their way towards their prey, if anything it sped them up. It'd be a solid thirty seconds to a minute and a half before any of them died from burns, but it'd make the cazadors frenzied in the meantime. Angrier, but less tactical. Less Perceptive.
THUMP
He'd need that if he was to survive up close with them, but it would also make them pissed and on fire. Owen was fine with that trade-off. It was a gamble he'd made before, with the prize being him still standing. With any luck, the heat of the fire would damage the venom. He flicked the lever to the right with his thumb, gravity pulling the tube down even as the smoke from it went up, and his left thumb and finger pulled the ouch-hot can out, discarding it into the dirt to his left with the other cans. Then, he got a new can out, pushed it into the smoking hole, and closed the tube back up, flicking the switch to the left with his thumb. He raised it back to his shoulder, aimed, exhaled, and fired.
THUMP
It was a process that took about three seconds. The time between the grenade firing and it exploding became less and less each time. Now, he could see about twenty-four giant black cazadors, their legs, wings, and eyes a bright red, and an hourglass symbol in the same color on their thoraxes. They were close enough now to make it blatantly obvious how even one of them could tear all of them apart. Un-naturally large, un-naturally fast, and putting the fear of the unholy into all of them. They were sixty feet away. Enough time for one more grenade.
"+Ten seconds till melee.+"
"We're dead meat! Fuck this!"
Owen heard rapid footsteps behind him. Juan was running away. He wanted to tell him cazadors flew faster than any man could run. That the hive would split up if they split up. That he'd be a dead man if he did it. But as it was, he only had nine seconds. Not enough time to warn anybody. Only time for one word.
THUMP
A glowing green ball of plasma engulfed a fair bit of the cazadors, leaving…
Nineteen of them flying. And still on fire. And five of them were going after Juan, who was already down the dirt cliff and running back to the trail, the cazadors following him through their escape route.
'Fuck.'
"FIIIIIIREEEEE!" Owen shouted at the top of his lungs.
"Five." Bonnies sultry and out-of-place tone whispered in his hears, before the even but rapid staccato of two M-3 submachine guns rang out, the two engineers Ollivewood-movie type shooting, waving the gun in the air, back and forth, actually proving to be the best course of action in this situation. With three of them, there'd be ninety bullets to hose the cazadors with, hopefully taking out all of their wings. As it was, there was only two of them, with nineteen cazadors. They downed about five of them with their guns, wings unable to take flight but still crawling towards them as man-sized monsters on fire. Owen unholstered his revolver and put three of the flying, burning, pissed off monsters down for good. That left eleven still flying, and five of the determined monsters with exoskeletons melting off crawling fast and menacinglyjust twenty feet away from them.
"FRAG AND RUN! FRAG AND RUN!"
'What I wouldn't give for a securitron or a ranger right now.'
Mitch and Henry fumbled with the grenades as they ran back to the dirt slide. They took the pins out, tossing them behind them just before they went down the dirt, which happened to be in front of Owen. As Owen was following them at full speed. A very eloquent poem went through his head as he skidded his leg into the dirt and started running to his left.
'Fucking rooks I meant at the cazadors not at the slide fuck didn't think this through God this is how I die shitshitshitshit'
He hurled himself over a rock cliff, the cliff incline not being 'Steep' so much as not there at all. He dropped for a good two, three seconds and then heard something snap feeling a pain shoot up his arm, followed shortly by a feeling of numb euphoria.
'+Some Med-X will make the pain go away.+'
Not wasting a second, he put his left arm, ignoring the weird feeling, into the explosives bag. He found a duct-taped handle, and knew exactly what it did. He pressed his pointer finger down, and a loud BTOOOOM echoed throughout the valley, as a shower of rocks and flaming cazador parts flew over the cliffs and into his sight. He pushed himself up with his good arm, and reloaded the revolver single-handedly, flipping the gun into the air to eject spent casing, and coming up back to meet the gun with a wheel of fresh bullets into the chambers. He snapped the wheel shut with his thumb, and looked to the right, gun pointing that way. Juan was still being chased by a few cazadors, but Henry, Juan, and Mitch were all working together with their SMGs to kill them. They seemed to be doing an alright job. Owen fired a few bullets into the giant bug-eyed heads from around sixty feet, downing three of them in half as many seconds from a long distance. Henry and Mitch took care of the last two, filling their soft underbodies full of lead. Then, Owen heard a chirping sound. A 'Skreeee-Skriiiitch'. A giant cazador, one wing blown completely off, the other trapped beneath a big rock, was stuck. It was hissing and trying to get at him. Owen regarded it for a few seconds. Then, he walked closer to it.
"You're stuck, aren't you?" It only gave a more agitated 'Skreee-Skriiitch', annoyed another animal was entering its territory, getting up close and personal. Owen crouched down, face to face with it. It tried lunging at him, biting him, but Owen was just a few inches too far away, its one good wing being trapped underneath a rock.
"God, you're an ugly motherfucker."
Owen stood up, and shot it in the thorax. It gave out an even more agitated 'Skreee-Scriiiiitch!' of pain.
"Tell you what, I got an idea. You've really pissed on my day. So I'm going to piss on yours." Owen unbuttoned his strichtarn trousers, and took his… equipment… out of it's confinement. He put his right foot on the back of the bugs head and started urinating on the cazador's bullet wound, enjoying the 'Skreee-Skriiitch! Skreee-Skriiitch!' noises of pain the hell-bug made.
"Does it burn, huh? Does it fucking burn, huh? Piece of shit, I hope it does. You fuckers had this coming for a long time. Think you can gang up and sting me? Kill me? I do the stinging around here. I do the stinging everywhere. The west and east belong to me. You fucking hear me? It's mine. I'll kill every last one of you shit-beetles with a goddamn shovel if I have to. Flying piss-ant freak-of-nature motherfuck-"
At that moment in time, while Owen was busy 'marking' his kill, he neglected to notice his charges were walking back towards him.
"Hey Mr. Bedaurn, we got the cazadors all cleaned u-… Oh my God." Mitch stopped talking.
"Muchos Gracias for saving my cajones, Mitch. Would've been dead if not for… Dios Mio."
"You guys are being dramatic, the man's injuries aren't that ba-… Well holy shit. He's real."
Owen was still relieving his bladder on the cazador, spitting out obscenities, when he noticed a certain kind of silence that was not there before. He turned his head to the right to and found himself looking at three seemingly shaky, relieved, and terrified at once engineers. "Guys, please, there's a million places you can look at. Besides my junk. If you fought as many of these shit-beetles as I have, you'd understand. I'll be done in like ten seconds. Please, seriously, stop looking. I have performance anxiety." But as he looked at them, he realized they weren't looking at his pants… area…
They were looking at him in fear. At his helmet, specifically.
"Wait, did I..."
He looked back at the rocks on the side of the cliff face. Over there, was his bandanna and straw cattleman's hat. The ones that covered up the… unique, putting it nicely, words written on the front of his desert ranger headgear. Owen started to sweat inside his helmet.
And it was such a nice job while it lasted.
"Listen… please don't tell my boss I copied his helmet. He'd through a hissy fit if he found out."
"Y-you're..." Mitch started, the pitch of his voice a bit higher than normal.
"A real idiot, blah blah, get shot for impersonating an officer, blah blah, like I said, please don't say anything."
"You're the…!" Juan joined in,
"Are you even listening to me? Let me spell it out for you: I'm. Not. The-"
"You're The Goodsprings Courier!" A mixture of terror and boyish wonder in mixed measures was present in both their voices and eyes.
Owen leaned his head back, sighed and buttoned up his pants with his one good arm. Then he took the pointed machete out from beneath his bandolier and stabbed the cazador once in the internal spine, making the bug silent and its legs slowly retracting inwards.
There goes my sleep for the rest of this trip.