He was familiar with the Fixer body armor now and knew that there were vulnerable points. No armor made could protect every single area of the body. The need for flexible and nimble movement came with a price. That was half the challenge; the other half was to stop them without killing either, because he didn’t think he could outrun the resulting blast.

He swapped the drum of explosive rounds for double-aught buck, and as they ran past, he opened up on full auto from twelve feet. The heavy sprays of buckshot scythed through the flexible knee joints, and both Fixers screamed as they fell. One of them lost his entire lower leg in a grotesque shower of bright blood.

Bunny was up and moving before either had a chance to bleed out.

He got all the way down to the road when that side of the hill seemed to tear itself free of the earth with a monstrous thunder strike of sound. Pieces of torn turf and shattered trees chased Bunny, hammered him, and finally smashed him to the ground.

The blast plucked Mia out of her hiding place behind a massive dogwood. The leaves of the tree burst into flame as pieces of burning debris landed among the branches.

Flash-burned and half-dazed, Mia staggered away, blinking and pawing away blood from her nose. She suddenly realized that she no longer held a gun, but when she looked back, the entire area around the dogwood was ablaze. The breeze was blowing from the north, pushing little dancing demons of flame into the tall summer grass.

“Oh … shit,” she wheezed as she turned and ran. She slapped the Sig Sauer from her holster and held on to that for dear life, as much for its deadly potential as for a talisman.

She reached the road ahead of the semi and saw that every one of the Fixers was either firing toward the trees where Belle’s sniper fire had come, off to the east where she’d seen Bunny hightail it, or toward the explosion up the slope. No one was looking in her direction.

Then there was a roar as the semi’s big engine growled itself awake.

Her heart sank, because there were now three fighting machines on the back of the semi with drivers in them. More than half of the Fixers were aboard, too, using the rest of the packing crates as cover as they waited to simply be driven out of the firefight.

She and her friends in Havoc Team had done a lot of damage, but not nearly enough. These Fixers and their deadly weapons were going to escape.

Gunfire erupted from two different points—the sniper rifle and an M5—on the far side of the loading area, which meant that Andrea had stopped playing with his toys and was joining the fight on the ground.