Standing at the Gate: Seasons of Man Book 3 by S.M. Anderson

Author:S.M. Anderson [Anderson, S.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MCE Press
Published: 2022-07-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Pittsburgh

Lucas waited until the first enemy vehicle, a pickup truck with a welded tripod mounting a machine gun, emerged from the tunnel’s cityside entrance. It looked like any one of the technicals that had found utility in every shithole war of the last forty years. The four men in the back of that pickup had no idea how lucky they were; there was nearly a mile-long line of vehicles and men behind them in the tunnel.

He pushed the button himself. The buried charges erupted out of the hillside above the tunnel. The rain-soaked dirt and hillside muffled much of the force of the explosion. He watched in fascination as the hillside directly over the tunnel entrance moved downhill a few feet as if tugged by an invisible string. A small cascade of mud poured over the lip of the tunnel onto the road before stopping.

“It didn’t work, sir.” Jay Delvechio, the Marine next to him, almost yelled from behind his binoculars.

Another vehicle, this one a Humvee, emerged from the mouth of the tunnel, spraying mud with all four tires before squirting to safety. An up-armored dump truck tried to follow before losing traction and spinning to a stop in the thick mud that was slowly deepening in the road.

“Wait for it,” Lucas cautioned.

Ray had set those charges in preparation to block what they expected to be chasing them out of the city, and the guy knew what he was doing.

“Sir, look!”

He followed the end of the Marine’s arm reaching past him, pointing well up hill from the tunnel entrance. A house, a quarter of a mile away and two hundred feet above the tunnel’s entrance, moved as the ground around it began to flow downhill. The sound of the mudslide grew quickly. It was part passing train, part rushing river, with a low frequency rumble he could feel through his knees from where he knelt. Seconds later there was an arrowhead shaped wound of raw hillside exposed in the space that had been a neighborhood a moment earlier.

A hill of mud, still flowing outward as it flattened under its own weight, blocked the tunnel entrance directly atop the dump truck he’d been watching. The truck was gone. He guessed there had to be twenty feet of mud atop the roof of the cab. The western tunnel entrance he could see was completely buried for more than a hundred yards from where the tunnel entrance had been.

“Steeler Actual, Snow Plow One. The gate is closed,” Lucas reported.

He was happy to have Major Bruce back in range of the tactical radios. He and a bunch of the Potomac Marines had made a point to cover their crotches with their hands every time they used the sat-phones, telling some of the younger Pittsburgh defenders that it cooked brain cells and lowered sperm counts. Truth was, the radios were just a lot handier. It was just one of those things that had kept them entertained over the last few days while they had waited for the Assholes to attack.

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