Free Fear the Survivors by Stephen Moss

killing its lights and relying on his acute vision to guide him through the dusk to find the buggy’s cohorts.
    Wrenching the car around, he used the vehicle in ways it had never been driven before, cutting in a frenzied slice through the paths of other assault buggies in the platoon.
    While he had been able to spare the first two, he could not afford such leniency with all of them. There were simply too many. Ripping the machine gun from its mount above his head, he wielded it like a scythe as he crossed each car’s path, his speed far outstripping the cautious twenty miles per hour the human drivers were managing in the fading light. He tried to maim rather than kill, but at the speeds he needed to drive at in order to catch them all before they reached the huts, even he could not place all his shots as accurately as he wanted.
    One after one the bullets ripped through legs and shoulders as he bisected the paths of the oncoming trucks. The shots carved brutal paths through flesh and bone, and screams filled the helmets of the remaining pilots, drivers, and gunners as dark death swept through their ranks. It did not take long for them to see the pattern of their assailant’s movement in the order of the buggies being attacked, and the helicopters shifted their massive firepower to face whatever was tearing them apart in the night.
    The light Shahed 285 Iranian Attack Helicopter carried twin autocannons and a barrage of air-to-ground missiles. They were homebred in Iran, and while not a match for their American or European cousins, they still brought vastly more guns to the game than the plethora of buggies whose drivers Lord Mantil was busy maiming or worse.
    Shahim sensed the nearest helicopter veering toward him and saw it only a moment before its infrared-enabled pilot saw him too. The pilot shouted to his gunner. The buggy in their sights was going the wrong way and was coming at them from the direction of the death cries rattling their radios.
    There was no way they were going to wait for orders on how to handle this apparition, and the gunner went weapons hot. Shahim did not hesitate either, leveling his machine gun and emptying its belt at the coming chopper. The pilot saw the muzzle flash in the distance an instant before the rounds started to impact his armored chopper. The sound was like an angry lead hail pelting the screen in front of him, which started to crack and shatter almost instantly. He instinctively veered hard right and responded in kind, his helmet-targeted front machine gun whirring to life as he squeezed the trigger, glaring furiously at the spot where he had last seen the buggy.
    A thousand bullets ripped from the spinning cannon and raced toward Shahim, vastly larger and more deadly than the hail his popgun could return. Shahim’s reactions were fast but the fire was wild, and a storm of lead erupted the sand around him as it rained outward from the helicopter. The buggy’s sharp turn brought his left side to bear on the metal needles as they blurred the space between him and the damaged chopper, and the line of destruction that the bullets were burning into the ground scythed across the buggy like a chainsaw. The rear left tire shredded a moment before the empty gunner’s seat behind spat foam, and the next bullets hit Shahim square. The woven skin on his left shoulder ripped open as a hypersonic bullet bounced off the armor beneath and the next hit him hard in the ribs. Internal alarms sprang to life in his mind as his systems reported damage from the hits.
    Deciding with machine rapidity that the buggy was now little more than a hindrance, Shahim propelled himself upward out of the seat, leaving the car to stumble onward into the night.
    The copilot in the chopper was hard at work as well, sighting his first missile group on the car, he fired immediately, and two small but deadly heat-seeking missiles rocketed outward toward the small vehicle even as Lord Mantil landed in a roll and began