Free The Assault by Brian Falkner

ammo hatch. Goes up like the Fourth of July. Boom! Blows the one nextto it right off the road. Over a cliff.
Boom, boom, boom
, all the way down.”
    “Buy one, get one free,” Monster said.
    “Guys,” Chisnall said. “Guys, seriously. Listen up. No more talking about killing Pukes. We’re in the heart of Puke country now. We’ve got to start acting and thinking like Pukes. Everything you say, everything you do from now on, you’re a Puke. You want to pick your nose, use two thumbs at once, like they do. You want to scratch your ass, don’t. Pukes see you do that, they’ll spot you for a fraud from a klick away.”
    “Don’t Pukes ever get an itchy arse?” Monster asked.
    “If they do,” Brogan said, “they’re polite enough not to scratch them in public.”
    “Gonna scratch their asses right off our planet,” Wilton said.
    “Our planet?” Brogan asked.
    “Hell yeah, our planet,” Wilton said.
    “How’d you figure that?” Brogan said. “Pukes control Australia, Africa, Europe, and most of Asia. We’ve got the Americas.”
    “We still got Antarctica,” Price said.
    “Only ’cause they don’t want it. I figure we have less than forty percent of the Earth’s landmass. Which gives the Pukes over sixty percent. It seems to me that if this planet belongs to anyone now, it belongs to them.”
    “Piss off,” Price said. “It was ours in the first place.”
    “And after the white folk conquered the American Indians, who got to run the country and who got to live on reservations?” Brogan asked.
    “You’re saying the Pukes are going to make us live on reservations?” Wilton asked.
    “If we’re lucky,” Brogan said. “It’s just evolution, that’s all.”
    “What are you talking about?” Wilton asked. “How is it evolution?”
    “We used to be just a bunch of flea-bitten monkeys living in trees and scratching around in the dirt like all the other animals,” Brogan said. “We weren’t very big or strong, but we got smart, and soon we were the top of the food chain. Top of the pecking order. But not anymore. Now there’s someone else at the top of the food chain, and we don’t like it.”
    “Guys,” Chisnall said. “You need to—”
    The first burst of gunfire must have been well above their heads, but the whistle of bullets in the air sounded as though they were right by their ears.
    “Contact front!” Price yelled.
    Chisnall’s instincts took over. His combat visor was down, his coil-gun in his hands, before he had even formed a conscious thought. He rolled to the right, seeking cover behind a boulder. He scanned the desert ahead of his position, looking for movement.
    “Muzzle flashes, one o’clock,” Brogan yelled.
    There shouldn’t have been muzzle flashes. The magnetically powered coil-guns did not flash like human weapons,and alien gunfire did not sound like the explosions of cordite; the rounds broke the sound barrier on their way out of the barrel. This gunfire sounded and looked like an assault rifle. A human weapon.
    The others had also dived for rocks or scrub, whatever they could find. Chisnall stuck his head above the rock for a second to try and spot their position and was rewarded with another burst of fire. Chips of rock exploded from the top of the boulder right in front of him. From the sound of the firing and the way the rock fragments had flown, he had a pretty good idea of the location of the shooters. He shucked his backpack off his shoulders.
    “Covering fire,” he yelled into the comm, and immediately was encased in a cocoon of sound as his team responded with a hail of shots. They were firing wildly, but the targets didn’t know that, so it should keep their heads down for a moment.
    Chisnall rolled sideways out from the cover of the rock and onto his feet in one fluid motion, sprinting to a sloping rocky shelf a few feet away. He reached it just as return gunfire rang out from the other side, and bullets
zizz
ed through the air around