Part 11: At the Mining Camp

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Chris Sommurkorn and I were walking back to the diner to clean up. We’d gotten dirty loading his snow-tank on my trailer. The diner had a large men’s room we could use for that purpose.
I wasn’t a spring chicken any longer and Chris didn’t look so hot either. He looked like he was sick. He’d told me why he didn’t feel so well earlier but the weather probably didn’t help any. The weather was NASTY…all foggy and misty and cold.

Chris was stumbling along cause he was sick. I was stumbling along cause my bionic legs didn’t work so well under those conditions. I was relying heavily on my SmokePole for balance while slowly hobbling along a bit behind Chris. Chris was just doing the best he could to keep from falling down.

I was having a little bit of a hard time navigating all those potholes. I swear, some were big enough to raise catfish... if it hadn’t been so damn cold. Chris was WAY younger than me, and even though he was sick as a dog he was ahead. He was breaking trail so to speak. I was a little bit distracted, both from worrying about him and I was still thinking about that one particular waitress back in the diner. Before we’d left the diner we’d had dinner. When she had poured me that last cup of coffee she had leaned forward. She had given me an eyeful down the front of her blouse. She had nice assets. ‘Bare it and we’ll all share it’, was my motto. It must have been her motto too.

Thus, distracted by a nice memory, and concerned about my new friend, I was completely taken off guard. When someone shot me in the back.

The bullet slammed into my back and knocked me tail over teakettle. I heard the report from the sniper’s weapon even before I hit the ground. That meant the gunman was pretty close, otherwise there would have been more delay before I heard the sound of the shot. The gunman must be real close. Oddly enough it sounded like two gunshots. I guessed that there was an echo.

“You Son of a CockRoach!” I shouted, rolling in the mud ,muck and icy water. “That frickin HURT!”

The bullet hadn’t killed or even wounded me. My coat was armor. I’d have a bruise though, if not a cracked rib or two. I belly crawled, squirmed and slithered through the muck and mud. I slid into the pothole along side Chris. Chris had hit the ground too. Almost as fast as I had even though I’d had help.

Nice reflexes.

It was a big hole... half-full of icy water, heavy on the ice. Good thing it was big. It gave us a bit of cover. First time I’d ever been appreciative of potholes. The snipers had caught us by surprise in the middle of the lot, away from the trucks or any concealment. Laying in a pothole was the best cover could get. We both hunkered down in the slush.

Bullets were kicking up all around us. We were in a gunfight.
The FIRST rule of GunFights is...have a gun. I had one. Even better than a gun actually. My SmokePole was stacked full of intelligent micro-missiles.

“BOOM!” Chris was coughing and sneezing but he still managed to get off a shot from right beside me.

Whelp...that took care of GunFight rules two and three.

Rule Two : Invite friends that have guns to participate.

Rule Three : Use calibers that, at minimum, begin with the number four.

His gun was definitely bigger than forty caliber. It sounded like a damn hand-cannon… music to my ears.

“You OK?“ I asked, him.

“Not really, I think the Jon-tar have found me. They want to hijack my load.” He said, I could barely hear him. My ears were still ringing.

“Do you see anything? I think I got the one that shot you.” I think he said.

I didn’t answer right away. I was busy thinking to my SmokePole. I was proud of that thing. It and my truck were personally designed and grown for me by my favorite nephew and others in my family…. It does all KINDS of geeky stuff.

Jon-tar did he say? I’d heard of them. Not nice guys. I thought the guys that were shooting at us were just garden variety bandits. Huh…maybe not. Oh. Well. They was still trying to kill us. Like Captain Mal said. “If someone is trying to kill you…kill them right back.”

I intended to do that.

I laid my SmokePole on the ground, lengthwise between me and Chris…pointing at the bad guys. Then I activated the “Umbrella” function. A fairly large graphene canopy blossomed from the end of the pole...between us and the bad guys.

Maybe it would provide some cover, if not protection. It WAS graphene. That stuff is pretty tough. It seemed to be working. When a bullet hit the canopy the ribs flexed some and dug more firmly into the muck. It wasn’t punctured though.

How bout that?

“Hunker down behind this” I told him “It might hide us a little.”

“What do you mean Jon-tar.” I asked him “I thought these were just ordinary, everyday bandits.”

“Could be” He said. “Maybe I’m being paranoid. I’ve been paranoid a lot lately since I returned from Antarctica. Oops…I wasn’t supposed to say that. Forget you heard it. Oops…I’ve already told you. I’m kinda delirious. I Haven’t been sleeping well lately either, been having bad dreams, like I said. I’m babbling aren’t I?”

Yup. He was definitely babbling. He was definitely going to see a doctor. I didn’t care what he said. First we had to survive.
There was no time to think about who our attackers were right now. We’d discuss their pedigree later, if we survived.

I told the SmokePole to “Fnd where the bullets are coming from ”… it did so. I’m forever grateful to that nephew.

“Heh” Chris must have had a similar App. He coughed and said “Will you look-it that? They’re using standard cell phones to talk to each other, weak encryption too. I’ll be damned, not even spread-spectrum. Can you believe it? Innocent little lambs.”

I dunno about how innocent they were.…but my SmokePole had located them too. It marked the location of a number of signal sources on my virtual heads up display provided by my ThumBrain. I could see right where they were without even having to raise my head. That was another advantage …built in cameras.

The sniper’s weren’t using flash suppressors either. That provided a visual signature as well as electromagnetic and sound. Too easy. They might as well have been standing in the open holding a big sign saying “Shoot Me”.

I aim to please. I told my SmokePole to “kill ‘em.”

A muzzle flash, a gun report or a cell phone transmission from the bad guys attracted a tiny intelligent micro-missile launched from my smoke pole. I suspect they were accurate…SteelSleet Micro-missiles usually are.

Chris was doing the same thing only different. I don’t know what kind of weapon he had, only that it was BIG bore. It definitely wasn’t a rocket. It was loud. I wouldn’t be hearing out of that ear for a while.

They kept shooting and so did we. When they added RPG’s to the mix we gave up shooting back and tried to burrow into the ground. There were explosions everywhere. It was like old home week back in the war where I lost my legs.

You’d think other people would notice the attack…and sure enough some did. Here and there about the parking lot other truckers began returning fire.

Some of them boys had long guns from the sound of it. I swear one of them had a cannon, or maybe just a Barrett. Surely that wasn’t the sound of a Gatling gun?

Shirley not.

Chris and I didn’t dare look up to check it out, we tried to wiggle into the muck like a sidewinder wiggling into the sand.

The barrage continued. An airburst exploded damn near right overhead. I got peppered pretty good. My ballistic jacket didn’t cover everything. If I’d had real legs like Chris I’d be hurting.
Chris didn’t seem to be too worried, or at least he wasn’t saying much. Pretty cool for a young kid.

“Ah..right on time.“ Chris stated, he might have been talking about the weather for all the excitement he was showing.

“Here they come.” Chris sounded almost bored. “I rather wish they would hurry up.”

“This reminds me of something Chris.” I told him “Get ready”.

The bandits had used the rocket barrage to get us to hunker down so they could get real close. Then the poor fools tried a Banzai charge, the old human wave. Yeah...they were that stoopid. Chris and I and several others picked them off one by one and in job lots. The bad thing was that there were a whole LOT of them.

They were shouting as they ran at us.

“Aloha SnackBar! Aloha SnackBar.!” or something like that.

“Aloha SnackBar! Aloha SnackBar.!” They charged across the parking lot. They had worked themselves into a berserker rage…or maybe they had some GOOD drugs.

Opposing overwhelming odds and fighting to the death was nothing new to a Texan.

To Be Continued

To Be Continued
The Next Episode is Part 12: At the Mining Camp (continued)
The Last episode was
Part 10: Interlude # 2
the first episode was
Part 1 : Winter Storm

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