Free Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) by Noah Mann Page A

swung the gloved palm across his face. The impact jolted him, his body shuddering as though some electric shock had run through it. His head swiveled left and right, his gaze finally settling on me. There was life in his eyes again, I could see. At least partially, Nick Withers was back with me.
    “We’re gonna move, Nick, okay?”
    He looked left and right, cringing instinctively as incoming fire bracketed our position, already dead trees threatening to topple as their wasted trunks were chewed away by the unrelenting streams of bullets.
    “Nick?”
    Again he fixed on me and nodded.
    “Stay down and when I grab you we move west, got it?”
    “Got-got-got it.”
    The fear-induced stutter at least told me that he was processing what I’d said to him, which meant, hopefully, that I wouldn’t be hauling dead weight through the woods back toward town.
    More fire shifted north. The force out there was moving to flank us. And I was beginning to hear voices in the distance. Commands being given. In English. For a moment I was grateful that the Russian force we’d decimated along the Alaskan coast hadn’t reconstituted and followed us home seeking revenge. But I quickly realized that American bullets would make us dead just as quickly as Russian ones, and it was time to make our move before that happened.
    A final time I leaned left past the rocks and fired off bursts at the enemy’s northern advance. My AR ran dry and I let it drop to hang from the sling across my chest.
    “Now!”
    I grabbed Nick and pulled him away from cover, pushing him ahead, his own feet propelling him through the trees as we weaved left and right around the trunks, chunks of decaying wood spraying down from above as incoming rounds struck high.
    “Move!”
    Thankful that I wasn’t having to drag a catatonic friend away from the danger zone, I urged him on, reloading as I ran nearly alongside. A hundred yards into our retreat, with sporadic fire still whizzing past, I halted briefly, motioning for Nick to keep moving. I brought my AR up from where I stopped next to a knot of young pines that would never reach maturity. By the time I had it aimed in the direction of the enemy, the incoming fire stopped. Just ended. As if a cease fire order had been given.
    I held that position, ready to cover any pursuit, not hoping to stop any such advance by the enemy, but to delay it until reinforcements could arrive. There was no doubt in my mind that the firefight had been heard, at least on the eastern end of town. The three checkpoints there, all hardwired into the phone system, would have reported what was happening. Help would come.
    As it turned out, none was needed.
    Five minutes after I’d halted my retreat the first backup arrived, Sergeant Lorenzen and Private Quincy, with a half dozen armed civilians in tow.
    “Where are they?” Lorenzen asked.
    I pointed east and drew a sweeping arc to the south.
    “Some were moving north when we broke contact,” I said. “I sent Nick Withers toward town. He was—”
    “Pretty shaken up,” Lorenzen said.
    “We sent two shooters back to town with him,” Quincy said.
    “How many are out there, Fletch?”
    I looked to the sergeant before answering his question.
    “Too many.”
    Lorenzen stood with me for a moment as Quincy directed the civilians to form a defensive line. We waited for five minutes, then ten, the sound of more reinforcements arriving behind us rising. Twenty minutes after the last bullet had been fired we were a force of fifty, including Schiavo.
    “Enderson has a reaction force in town ready to move if this was just a feint,” the captain said.
    Lorenzen thought for a second, then shook his head.
    “The truth is, Captain, I don’t know what this is.”
    Schiavo walked past her sergeant a few yards, into the no man’s land ahead of our line.
    “Fletch,” she said, and I walked forward to join her.
    “Yeah?”
    “Do you think they were waiting for you, or do you think they were on