The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker, Part 15 of 17

The officials have taken on the worst of Eberkopf, but when fighting a great monster, even its death throes can be fatal. Department Three is no longer looking to protect themselves or torture the officials: their home has been defiled. They are looking for revenge.

The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

This is Part 15 of Operation Arm Breaker. If you haven’t read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14 yet, check them out first.

Content Warnings: Death, Gore, Violence, Gun Violence, Animal Violence, Mild Swearing, Body Horror, Nazis

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 14, 1943
ABOVE SCHLOSS MITTELSÄULE, EBERKOPF
BADEN-ELSAß, NAZI GERMANY

The next shell struck like lightning, piercing the thick ceiling and punching through the emptied lake bed before bursting in the chateau's foundations. Its concussive boom ripped the air from Lucky's lungs and popped his ear drums, almost sending him back to the elevator floor. A huge crack opened in the fortress' looming walls, shattering the reinforced concrete like porcelain.

Lucky held his breath, waiting for the fissures to race up the bedrock column and send their dangling elevator plummeting downward. The cracks never formed. The stone held while the Nazis structures around it crumbled.

Somewhere, deep in the guts of the fortified chateau, Lucky imagined Johann Metzger and his foul patrons reduced to trembling jelly by the blast. Neither Marius Volger's surgically-perfect frame nor Katrin Abendroth's abominable immortality could withstand the full fury of the Russian barrage.

Another shell sliced through the roof and whipped past, this one striking through the gaping front door of the chateau. Marble, gold, flowing banners, and leering oil paintings were reduced to powder in a silent instant. Lucky's ears rang with ethereal pealing as more shells riddled the south end of the compound. To him, the shells popped no louder than balloons.

Sheets of concrete larger than apartment buildings fell free from the ceiling, descending into rising clouds of dust and smoke, flattening everything beneath. Nazis died by their miserable hundreds. Red, black, green, yellow, gray, blue, and orange swirled together in Eberkopf's hollow basin.

Goldbrick was shouting, pointing up. The false sky was creeping closer, yard by hard-earned yard as the shaking elevator struggled upward. The hangar loomed closer by the second, packed with who-knows-how-many angry, desperate, vengeful Nazis and anything else. Lucky readied the De Lisle carbine.

He might be beaten and broken, but he could still fight.

Sunlight blinded him and the elevator lurched, hard. A trio of holes opened just twenty yards east, washing pulverized concrete over the dangling officials as the blasts buffeted them from below. Lucky fell to his knee, again. There was enough red on him that he couldn't tell if he was bleeding fresh blood or if it was someone else's. The chateau fall away, collapsing as smoke and flame boiled through it. Glass-sharp wind roared upward, searing Lucky's skin and forcing him to roll to protect his face and leaving him splayed across the floor on his back.

The other officials were getting back up, helping the wounded to their feet when Lucky noticed the elevator cable. It was rattling against the column, its fibers straining against the heat and blasts. He looked back down at the chateau and saw a ripple rising up the cable's length.

Far below, far below, it had snapped.

Lucky's green hand acted on its own, before he realized what he wanted it to do, that there was something he could do.

He punched through the metal elevator cage like it was wet paper.

They hadn't dropped six inches before the severed cable was in Lucky's grasp. Its sheared end continued whipping up and around, sonic-boom-fast, and lashed against the other side of the elevator cage. Officials were knocked across the car. The dent it left was deep enough to decapitate a grown man.

Still, somehow, Lucky held fast and the elevator stayed aloft. The cable was grinding against his stained skin. Needle-sharp fibers pressed through his palm, but it didn't hurt. He felt pressure, insistent and impatient, but not what he should have felt with tons of metal and bodies pulling against his hand.

Lucky didn't know why he could do this, he didn't know that he could do this. He just did it.

The Colonel didn't wait to question it either. He barked muted orders to Grease. Lucky still couldn't hear a word, but the Grease understood: he shoved his fingers through the grated wall Lucky'd punched through, then, with a effort that spurted blood from his wounds and flexed every implanted muscle in his body, peeled the steel open like a tuna can. He took the cable in his own hands and heaved down on it with all his might. The elevator lurched upward, and Lucky released his death grip on the cable and stumbled away.

Officials gathered around him, clapping his shoulders and jostling to see how he’d done it, but Lucky paid them no mind. Instead he held up his green hand and studied it in a beam of infiltrating sunlight. Its vibrant color seemed to drink the light in. It looked alien to him, as if a tentacle were growing out of his sleeve. There were deep cuts and abrasions on it, and steel threads the size of bobby pins had pushed through Lucky's palm yet had drawn no blood.

Miller leaned in and examined Lucky's hand. He could tell Miller was speaking, probably offering some explanation for what had happened, but all Lucky could hear was the high-pitched reverberation of mortar shells exploding.

Lucky tugged one of the impaling fibers free with his right hand. No blood followed the ragged needle, and Lucky watched the small hole pucker and seal. He pulled out the rest, throwing them onto the floor.

His scrapes smoothed themselves out while he stared, and the cuts weren't as deep as they had been a second before. Lucky shoved the green hand under his opposite armpit, like it was wounded, and leaned against the elevator car, steadying himself against the nauseating rhythm of Grease hauling them upward. The sights outside the elevator did nothing to settle his stomach.

Eberkopf was leveled. A dozen more pact-breakers had struck while Lucky was in his stupor. Few buildings had survived the pinpoint barrage. The chateau was gone, it had been replaced by fire and dust. The gremlin rookery was spread across half the base, its supersonic rubble having bulldozed through every surrounding building. Not a single one of the ornate concrete eagles adoring the Brotherhood facility were still standing, and even the furthest, most stable buildings had fissures that threatened to bring them down at any moment. The ceiling had collapsed in by the acre. Huge swaths of gray sunlight glowed down, while the solid section remaining had been perforated over and over.

Sinclair was asking about something, eliciting vigorous nods of approval from the Colonel and Goldbrick. Their voices only came through Lucky's battered ears as excited mumbles, intonations without words, but he was relieved to hear anything.

Bucket was on board with whatever Sinclair was scheming, so he leaned Quint up to rifle through his pack, pulling out every munition he had left: a pair of hand grenades and a landmine. Explosives appeared from various bags around the elevator. There were thermite and flashfog canisters, a pair of glue-coated anti-tank grenades, a magazine packed with Randall rockets, and three rifle grenades among the offerings. They’d produced enough munitions to crack a heavy bunker wide open.

Casings and shells came apart in a flurry of screwdriver work. In less than a minute, Bucket had disassembled all of the weapons and removed their charges, then wired it all together into a Frankenstein bomb, packed with everything from TNT to plastic explosive. It was shaped into a block a foot long. He jammed a detonator into the middle and held up his creation, grinning.

“Well, stick to it,” Sinclair ordered, uneasy at the sight of the unstable bomb. Lucky's hearing was back.

Bucket clenched his tongue between his teeth, holding the weapon in both hands. Grease paused his work and hauled the straining cable to the side, giving Bucket room to reach through the hole in the elevator cage. Goldbrick held his belt while he leaned out. He pressed the bomb onto the raw stone column, securing it in place with some of the viscous glue off the anti-tank grenades.

“Twenty minutes enough?” Bucket asked the team. Lucky could hear again. No one objected. He unbuckled his own watch and expertly pried the back plate off. A few quick modifications and he had it hooked into the detonator, set to blow. He wiped his hands on his pants, looked around and said: “I guess we should move.”

“Hang on, you mooks,” Grease grunted. He hauled downward on the cables wit renewed vigor, drawing them another yard higher. He took another handful twisted steel and pulled again, repeating the motion as they lurched upward in a steady rhythm, foot-by-foot.

“Gather yourselves,” the Colonel advised. The hangar they were approaching was laid out like the one they had Paul Bunyan’d: armored and black, save it was hung from the ceiling rather than being able to hydraulically lower itself to the ground. There were several cranes inert on its sides, large enough to lift and lower massive loads of cargo.

Grease brought them up to a landing that bridged the space between the hangar and the column. With just a few more tugs on the cable, Grease had them level with the platform.

“Everyone out,” Grease grunted. He planted his peg leg against the torn open wall of the elevator car and pulled with all his might to hold them steady. The blood had stopped pouring from his wounds and what was left was a slick, copper sheen that coated every inch of his body, seeping through his bandages.

“Hop to it,” Goldbrick ordered. Together the Colonel and Goldbrick heaved the doors opened and began directing everyone out. The elevator shook as they disembarked onto the rattling platform. It was about twenty feet from the elevator to a sealed door, a steel hatch designed to swing inward. Lucky could almost smell the scrambling Nazis on the other side. Below, raging fires pulsed through the grating. The living lake was gone, its abandoned bed bone-riddled and bomb-churned.

“Ford! Hall! Sinclair, Miller, Halistone! Whoever can walk, get under this!” Goldbrick was shouting from the elevator. He had his shoulder underneath the elevator’s doorframe. Behind him, Grease was stuck in the car, leaning his full weight into holding the severed cable in place. If he let go, he and the whole car would drop. Goldbrick barked again: “Move your asses!”

Those that could still walk rushed to Grease's aid, lining up around the elevator car. It was sinking, dropping millimeter by millimeter as Grease’s superhuman strength waned.

“Lift, you bastards!” Goldbrick shouted. Lucky put his back into it, shoving the elevator car upward with all his strength. His ribs ached, but he ignored them, an act that was becoming normal for him. Together they muscled the car up, taking its full weight on their hands and shoulders while the cable slackened in Grease’s shredded hands.

“Hoof it, sasquatch,” Bucket wheezed. Grease let the cable loose and dove through the open elevator door. The elevator lightened by a quarter-ton, but each second Lucky held it increased the chances he’d lose his grip.

“Drop it on three,” Goldbrick grunted, feeling the weight as well. “Three!”

They all let go ducked away in unison. The elevator dropped like a rock, trailing its cable behind it. The ragged metal line hissed through its pulley above, shaking the whole platform as it followed the car down.

A bone-deep exhaustion wracked Lucky's body and he stumbled a step then slumped to one knee. The exertion of holding the elevator up had finally cracked the veneer of willpower that had kept him standing. His ribs were mush in his chest, his face was split and battered, his hand throbbed with poisonous heat and alien strength. The lingering effects of the PEP pills were all that kept him conscious.

“Private Ford,” Miller said. Lucky looked up to see him at his shoulder. A half-dozen tape crosses dotted Miller's chest, sealed bullet holes, while more tape held the seam at his collar closed where the Waldgeist had slit his throat.

Lucky tried to smile at Miller to tell him that he was okay. The best Lucky could manage was a pained smirk.

Miller seemed to get what Lucky was trying to say. He held his hand out to lift Lucky up when a cracking sonic boom split his chest open.

Ice crystals sprayed Lucky's face, frigid and shocking against his warm pain. The ragged, razored end of the elevator cable had whipped through the pulley above and lashed into the open space on the platform, snapping inches past Lucky and leaving a gaping machete chop that nearly cut him in two. The severed cable left a silver scar in the steel floor before snaking down the hole in the floor, following the plunging elevator car.

“Bloody hell,” Grand said.

Miller gurgled some kind of response, but stayed standing. His organs pulsed inside his open torso and freezing air whooshed out of the open suit. Lucky could count the ribs the cable had separated: every one on the right half of Miller's chest.

He had beaten Lucky's record.

Lucky gagged, but he tried to shove himself off the ground to help.

Miller waved him off. His intrinsic sapient current was working double-time. He pulled his web gear on either side, squeezing his open body shut like an over-stuffed suitcase. When everything was pressed back into place, he clipped it in the middle with a carabiner. Lucky could hear Miller's bones grinding together, fusing into whole structures again.

Lucky's own ribs shifted, almost doubling him over again to hurl. He could feel them move, but the pain was dull, more a vivid memory than an active sensation. The Popeye pills were still working. They weren't fixing anything, but they were helping him ignore the problem. His job now was to make sure he didn't make anything worse.

Miller wiggled in his environment suit, lining up his bisected body to help the unnatural healing process work faster. He took his well-used roll of hurricane tape off his belt and stretched out a two-foot length. This went over the long cut whistling out of his front, but he stopped when the tape adhered to his gloved thumb.

“Perhaps I do require some assistance,” he gasped, waggling his hand and the floppy tape stuck to it. His lungs were already sealed up enough to talk. Lucky tried to chuckle, but all he got was an excruciating wheeze.

Bucket came over and took the tape, pasting it over the slash. Miller had been cut and shot so many times, they were justing layering tape atop tape.

“Thank you, Sergeant Hall,” Miller said.

“No sweat,” Bucket said. He spun Miller around and taped up his back, too, careful to avoid any leaks. He worked oblivious to the collapsing base around them.

Lucky groaned his way to his feet and leaned against the De Lisle like a cane. Grease wheezed, but got his boot under himself as well. The team was ragged, but standing. Quint had come around, standing on his own and holding Goldbrick's shotgun in his remaining hand. The general himself was holding a German MP 40, no doubt scooped from the bloodied floor of the great hall. Cheddarwright looked pale but held her own, clutching her bandaged stomach with her bandaged hand. Her prized longbow was nowhere to be seen, but she'd pulled her cloak to the side for easy access to a Luger she kept strapped to her hip.

Sinclair and the Colonel had stacked up on the hatch. The Colonel had his saber at the ready while Sinclair wrestled with the unyielding lock, pistol in hand.

“Hold on,” Grease told them. Despite the metal slivers pin-cushioning his hands and the yards upon yards of coagulated gauze draped over his frame, the wiseacre grabbed his punt gun off his back. He pushed a green slug into the cannon's hungry breach and leveled it at the hatch, the last thing between him and daylight.

“I just so happen to have a key for this particular door.”

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 14, 1943
TURBINEWAGENHALLE ZENTRAL, EBERKOPF
BADEN-ELSAß, NAZI GERMANY

The hangar door folded itself over Grease’s lead slug and bounced, crashing through stunned Nazis like a cannonball with corners.

The Colonel bloodied his sword on two krauts while Sinclair let his grease gun chatter, mopping up stragglers. The smarter Nazis were already gone: they'd run when the Russian bombs started punching through the roof. The zealots who stayed behind fought hard but not smart. They were dealt with easily enough.

The big bay door in the ceiling was open, letting ash drift down. Weak sunbeams fought desperately to break through the cloud cover, backlighting the suspended cinders. The sky look like the roiling surface of a gray pool, and the officials were staring up, drowning in the earth. The sunlight that had felt so blinding below was nothing more than a strangled aurora pulsing through volcanic thunderheads.

Red glistened off the lip of the open bay door. Lucky didn’t know what had happened up top after they’d descended, but it hadn't been pretty.

Only three flying cars remained in the hangar, two of the MG 42-toting recon cars they’d encountered earlier and a single larger vehicle designed to haul a pair of pressurized tanks the size of laid-out ice boxes.

“These will do,” Bucket said. He hopped into the nearest cockpit, one of the smaller two. The controls were second-nature to him, and a few flipped switches got the car roaring exhaust through all four engines and hovering a yard off the ground. He disappeared under the dashboard and came up holding an operator’s manual. He didn’t get past page one before he started laughing.

“I know we don’t have time for this, but do you know what they call these things?” he shouted over the engines between mad guffaws. “Kolibris!”

His reaction was so absurd that it cracked smiles around the somber group. Even the Colonel was biting his tongue. Bucket took off his glasses and wiped his tears.

“It translates to ‘hummingbirds,’” Miller explained, but no one was listening.

“Who else wants to learn how to fly?” Bucket asked once he had recovered.

“Miller and Sinclair,” the Colonel said. Before anyone else could volunteer, he added: “You both have two hands and two feet, those are the qualifications today.”

Miller would also be able to memorize the schematics of the flying car. Bucket began explaining each of the hummingbird's instruments and controls as if he had designed them himself.

Those officials still on their feet loaded the wounded into the larger hummingbird, nestling Grand, Cheddarwright, and Quint between the cylindrical tanks. Goldbrick helped them settle in, then tapped one of the tanks with the butt of his Colt 1911. Both tanks sounded empty: whatever chemical weapons the Nazis had filled them with were long gone, dumped on enemy troops or unsuspecting civilians.

“I reckon they’ve been crop dusting,” he snarled. He tapped a pressure gauge with his finger, making sure that it read 'zero.' He huffed at the sight of something, then peeled a paper label off the bottom of the tank and handed it to Miller, who had just slid into the cockpit to test out the controls. Goldbrick told him: “I’m no good with formulas, and that one’s long as my leg.”

“Irrsinnum tri-carnozone,” Miller reported.

“Jesus Christ,” Lucky let slip. The krauts were using crazy gas. The thought of twitching legions of victims driven to violent madness by the gas' effects tied his stomach in knots.

“I never thought I’d say it, but I'm glad those bastards dropped their whole payload,” Goldbrick said. “Long as these tanks aren’t full, they’ll make good cover. Where are we at on those controls?”

“Nearing lift-off, General Stephens,” Miller reported. Across the hangar, Sinclair had gotten his hummingbird off the ground, even with Grease and his punt gun clinging to it. The flying car sputtered and roared, ready to find sky.

“Ford, I want you behind the the gun,” Stephens said, pointing to the MG 42 strapped to the big hummingbird's hood. “Let's get these officials home.”

Goldbrick checked his watch. Lucky didn't have to ask why: Bucket's twenty minute timer was about up. The tent pole keeping this whole circus out of the dirt was about to come down. Miller flipped a bank of switches and the six turbines on his hummingbird coughed to life. The big rig lurched a foot off the floor. Lucky hauled himself aboard; his ribs didn't slow him down.

The Colonel and Bucket took point, rising slowly out of the ground through the gaping ceiling door. Volcanic winds buffeted the small aircraft, but the sergeant held steady. Sinclair and Grease came close behind, their hummingbird a little less steady, each movement an overcompensation trying to keep the car underneath Grease's bulk.

“Hold on,” Miller shouted over the sound of his engines. The six turbines rose in pitch and volume, chewing through air and spitting out fire until they had enough power to lift the big hummingbird out of the hole in the ground.

Its engines drowned out the world.

The wide meadow that disguised the underground base extended around them, flat and dead. Bottomless pits dotted its expanse. The gray blizzard had let up while the officials were underground, allowing some determined sunlight to battle its way through. The southerly winds had shifted, pulling the volcanic storm and its igneous thunderheads away, but a miasma of ash still clung ten yards off the ground. Lucky could not even see the great wall that surrounded the enclosure, or a single one of the thousands of aurochs it housed.

Goldbrick tapped Lucky on his shoulder and pointed at the MG 42, then up.

Lucky spotted what the general had seen. The other hummingbirds were higher than they were, fifty or sixty feet up, circling around. Twinkling lines of tracers ran between their guns and the ground. Their fire seemed tracked a moving target, something that was getting closer to Lucky's straggling hummingbird .

“Up, up, up!” Goldbrick shouted. Miller struggled with the controls. The big hummingbird was slower and heavier than its counterparts, and only had so much lift. The windscreen split in the middle, so Lucky lowered his half and stood on his seat to snag the machine gun. It came free easily and clamped onto the sill, covering the forward arc.

The descending tracer trails were coming closer, converging just a hundred yards ahead of Lucky's ride in a cloud of rising ash.

Lucky racked the machine gun's bolt back and took aim. The other hummingbirds opened fire again, swooping like dive bombers. The only thing Lucky could see was a rising gray rooster tail. He settled his sights on it.

“Up, Miller,” the general said. “Up.”

They were only a few feet off the surface when Lucky heard the roar, louder even that the six engines screaming around him.

The trench shark burst through the ash less than fifty yards away. She had been battered with hundreds of rounds from above. They only served to get her bent out of shape. With Lucky locked in her black eyes, she spat out an aurochs head and a mouthful of blood.

“We need more up!” Goldbrick yelled. Miller jammed the throttle down as hard as he could, bringing the engines' cacophony to a crescendo. Lucky pulled the trigger, slamming fifteen rounds-per-second into the shark's snout.

That pissed her off even more. Her six legs pumped beneath her, charging head-on through the barrage like a carnivorous wrecking ball.

They were eight feet off the ground when she leaped, the feline pounce of a practiced hunter. Her front two legs dug into the hummingbird's hood while she tore the windscreen and MG 42 clean off with one ravenous bite. Lucky and Miller ducked under the dash while her razor-sharp teeth snapped over and over where their heads had just been.

The hummingbird's engines screamed again, battling the added weight. It dropped down, slamming its front end into the dirt. The shark shoved off the ground with her rear legs, climbing over the cockpit and dragging her soft belly over Lucky's head to get at the wounded, bloody officials in the vehicle's bed.

Lucky ripped his knife out of its sheath and slashed at her white belly. The blade dragged across her leathery hide, unable to scratch the mutant monster.

The shark smelled blood. It knocked Goldbrick aside with its armored nose and set its sights upon Cheddarwright, oozing red from her side.

“¡Basta! ¡Dejala sola, puta!” Quint shouted. He was on his feet, shotgun in his remaining hand. A blast sent the shark backpedaling, salty slime erupting from her ragged right eye socket.

The trench shark roared, its alien bellow shaking the hummingbird's chassis down to its rivets. It scrabbled forward, scraping its segmented legs across the hood and over the open top of the cockpit. Lucky brought the De Lisle up and fired, bouncing a round off the shark's thick skin. An arctic hiss sprayed him in the face. The lead had pierced Miller's shoulder.

Lucky heard a desperate struggle as the officials tried to get out of the shark's reach. He hauled himself up enough to see one of the figures dive into her open mouth.

It was Quint, shotgun tucked under his arm, with an entrenching tool in his hand. He stabbed the shovel into the roof of the monster's mouth then twisted it upward, forcing her jaws wide open.

The trench shark hissed and roared, thrashing in rage. Wood cracked as the shovel broke, but a double-barrel-blast made the shark go limp. She wheezed and started sliding off the hummingbird's hood.

“Help!” Quint barked. The shark’s white belly scraped over Lucky's head as her own bulk pulled her off the straining flying car. He watched Quint’s boots sticking out of her slack jaw. He snagged them and hauled back while the shark fell away. Her teeth dragged against Quint, but he popped free and she collapsed into the gray.

Quint shuttered, wiping greasy shark brains from his face and wincing at the bloody lines scratched across his chest and stomach. Free of the dead monster's weight, the hummingbird jerked upward, throwing Quint into the seat alongside Lucky.

“Thanks,” Quint sighed. “They take my arm, I take their head.”

“Fair enough,” Lucky said. Quint climbed over their seat and collapsed in the back with the other wounded.

An explosion popped underground. It wasn't loud, not after the mortars, but it was earth-shattering.

Bucket's jerry-rigged bomb finished the job that the Russian shells had started. The remaining pasture began falling away in jagged sheets longer than football fields.

Dust, smoke, and ash rose like a roiling thunderhead and the ground below them was gone. The hangar was gone. The elevator and the column and everything else was gone. Only swirling gray remained below.

An air horn sounded over the continuing collapse. The other pair of hummingbirds were circling, eager to escape the chaos.

“Our exfil is to the south,” Goldbrick shouted. “Rothenberg will have everything set with the Deacons. Gun it!”

Miller knew their destination by heart. He jammed the throttle forward and the hummingbird roared, rising into the sky while the earth dissolved below.

It only took a minute to reach Eberkopf’s perimeter, but by the time they buzzed the top of the wall, the whole of the base had been swallowed into hell. Orange light illuminated the rising smoke from below. At the edge of the ragged pit, broken Nazis and dazed gremlins crawled free. They took the sunlight on their faces and treasured it, unconcerned with the trio of flying cars buzzing over them.

The officials dropped their hummingbirds' altitude once they were over the wall and past the minefield. Lucky could have reached out and felt pine needles whip by.

Trees melted into gray-green blurs when the hummingbirds got up to speed. They weren’t pretty or comfortable, but the damn thing coulds truck once they got in the air, that’s for sure. With the forward MG 42 bitten off, Lucky had Miller’s M3 grease gun in hand and the De Lisle carbine stowed in reserve, locked and loaded. They might not be able to take down a shark or a hummingbird, but they were better than nothing.

Lucky tied his last handkerchief behind the back of his head and pulled it up over his nose and mouth, desperado-style. The falling ash had slackened off, but flying through what was left with no windscreen was like running through a swarm of hornets. Lucky's helmet sat low on his brow, giving his eyes some cover at least.

Cheddarwright and Grand had stabilized under the care of Goldbrick and Quint. Their bleeding had stopped, but Lucky knew it was just as likely that they’d lost so much blood that their bodies just didn’t have the pressure to pump out any more. They were still, and pale, but breathing.

“General!” Miller called over his shoulder. “Contacts coming from the east!”

Goldbrick pulled his binoculars from his pocket and studied the half-dozen dots rising from the haze on the eastern horizon. The other two hummingbirds were already moving to intercept.

“We’ve got wounded, Miller. Stay on course,” the general ordered. “Ford, Quint: guns up.”

Quint lost his own loadout when he lost his arm, so Lucky passed Miller’s grease gun back to him. He tucked the wire stock up against his shoulder and rested the barrel atop the gas tank, keeping the steel cylinder between himself and the incoming Nazis. Lucky stood in his seat and leaned over Miller’s head, watching the growing dots. It was definitely a squadron, and they saw the large, overloaded hummingbird as a ripe target.

Lucky took a deep breath and held it. He only had the De Lisle, so unless one of its soft, subsonic rounds hit a rubber tube or an exposed pilot dead-on, the carbine didn’t have the juice to so much as scare the krauts with a muzzle flash.

Three hundreds yards away, Bucket and the Colonel came swooping down onto the enemy formation as full tilt, spitting tracers.

One hummingbird withered under their barrage, bursting in a flameless explosion that scattered its squadron. Before they could scramble too far, Sinclair and Grease came in from below, rising out of the gray fog that hugged the ground. The MG 42’s chattered, stitching up the unarmored belly of another hummingbird, but it was the thundercrack of the punt gun that turned the tide.

The hundreds of buckshot pellets scoured the open-topped vehicle, scraping the men away and leaving the targeted hummingbird careening through the air, spinning until the ash swallowed it whole. The officials whipped through the Nazi formation like a cue ball scattering the rack.

Their force halved in seconds, the Nazis turned on the gas and jetted forward, leaving their attackers behind. Bucket and Sinclair wrestled their hummingbirds around to come in for a second pass, but their prey was out of range.

The krauts lined up in a column and pulled up, rising higher than Lucky’s hummingbird. They were in the perfect position to strafe the slow, fat canister-carrier with their heavy guns.

The point craft plinked tracers off the hummingbird's chassis, sparking and spraying lead fragments with each impact. Wide holes opened in the hood, bleeding oil and steam. Lucky fired, racked, fired, and racked again until his carbine was empty. He couldn’t tell if they’d hit or not before the first attacker was past, swinging around after them in a wide loop.

The second hummingbird came in low and slow for its attack, cocky as they pounced on what they thought would be a fat hen.

Lucky and Quint made them pay for that.

Their bullets bit through his windscreen, shattering it in the Nazis' faces. Quint’s aim stayed steady and he holed the cocky pilot, knocking him back in his seat and sending the hummingbird into a fatal flip. The doomed gunner kept firing until they crashed full speed into a rickety barn, sending the whole structure up in a column of shattered boards and flame.

The trees had thinned into fields punctuated by the occasional house. Far ahead, Lucky saw the outlines of buildings. They were coming upon the limits of a large town. It had to be Immenstaad.

They were so close. Lucky almost felt safe.

His relief didn’t last long: the third hummingbird saw how his wingman had bit it and pulled up, only exposing his chattering machine gun to the officials' fire. His bullets raked across the rear of their craft, narrowly missing Cheddarwright where she laid curled on the deck. A hole as wide as a nickel opened in the deck not six inches from her face and Lucky could see the burned-out town rushing underneath them through it.

Their hummingbird shuddered as more rounds found its vital machinery. Smoke billowed from their undercarriage in a whipping black tail.

A hissing sound overtook the chugging engines and they slowed to a crawl.

“It is not me!” Miller shouted, anticipating Lucky's first concern, that he'd been shot up and was losing cold air. Lucky twisted around to see Goldbrick grimacing, pressing both hands over a bullet hole in the steel cylinder he’d been ducking behind. Frail blue tendrils slipped between his fingers before being dragged away by the howling wind.

“Tape!” Lucky shouted. Miller tore the roll off his webbing and shoved it into Lucky's open hands while wrestling the dying hummingbird’s controls.

Lucky scrambled over the back of his seat, drew a deep breath, and motioned for Goldbrick to get out of the way. On a silent count the general fell back from the bullet hole and Lucky dove in, pressing a strip of tape over the perforation. He put a dozen more strips down, making damn sure none of the horrible substance could slither through. Once it was sealed ten times over, Lucky fell back, leaning against the other, intact tank.

Only then did he dare to breathe.

Goldbrick was coughing, hacking up his lungs as his bloody face turned an even darker shade of crimson. Still, he gave Lucky a thumbs-up. He would be okay, and so would the wounded. Behind, Bucket and Sinclair were finally catching up in their hummingbird. Sinclair's MG 42 roared, sending rounds over Lucky's head.

“Private Ford!” Miller shouted.

Lucky looked ahead of us again to see Sinclair's target. The pair of enemy flying cars had completed their turn as well. They had their sights lined up on Lucky's smoking hummingbird and were swooping down like hawks, ready to tear out the officials' throats.

Lucky's chest went tight, and the enemy crafts' machine guns chattered. Miller jammed the gas and surged into the fray. More tracers zipped over them from behind, while still others whipped past them from in front.

Lucky thought that that might have been a good time for prayer, but words had rarely gotten the job done since he'd joined the Office. Instead, he reloaded his pistol, leaned across the hummingbird's hood, and tried to pick a target.

Friendlies were behind, enemies before, and Lucky Ford was caught in the crossfire.

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin.