Franks surveyed the damage. There were several men wounded and crying out, and many more bodies lying unmoving in the moonlight. One of the trucks had been unarmored and had caught fire. It drove into the side of a warehouse and stopped with a crash. The doors opened and men bailed out, followed closely by orange flames. On the back of that vehicle was a logo consisting of a gold PT but then the gas tank caught and the whole thing was engulfed in fire.

He’d been spotted. On one of the vehicles the sun roof had been changed into a turret. A man in a helmet came up through the hole and took hold of the mounted mini-gun, cranking it toward the water tower. Franks could withstand a few bullet wounds, but that wouldn’t last at six thousand rounds per minute, so Franks ran to the side as the mini-gun opened up. One leg of the water tower was cut in half almost instantly. The empty tank toppled. The crash was loud, but more importantly, it threw up a cloud of old dust, and that provided concealment. There was a deserted factory building just ahead. The glass from the windows was long since busted out and boarded up, so Franks aimed his body at the flimsy wood and launched himself through, splitting boards like they weren’t even there. He hit the floor, rolling hard through thick dust.

The gunner had tracked him through the haze. Light and sparks filled the darkness as tracers cut through the walls. His minigun fired so quickly that a hundred holes appeared seemingly in an instant all around him. There was a dark gap in the ground ahead of his face. The floorboards there were broken. Franks crawled toward it as the mini-gun sliced and diced the factory into pieces all around him.

There was no time to do it safely, so he just rolled into the hole. It was so pitch black that even his eyes couldn’t see the bottom. Hopefully he wasn’t about to impale his body on a bunch of rebar spikes. He’d done that before. It had been unpleasant.