Arisen : Nemesis by Michael Stephen Fuchs

looked.
    It wasn’t.
    The six-ton truck bucked forward like a bronco in its pen, then struggled and grinded against the metal slats of the door. They bent terribly, twisting and crushing – but they wouldn’t break, and the door wouldn’t come loose. The crash of the helo had warped the whole structure, jamming the door in its grooves, and it didn’t want to come free. The truck had one cubic shitload of torque, but the lack of any running start was dooming them.
    Now Kate heard a voice that wasn’t shouting, but speaking almost at conversational volume, completely calm. And it was right in her ear. It was Kwon, over the squad net. He said:
    “Down in front.”
    Spinning to the rear, she saw he was now manning one of the M2s, out of the top hatch of the second vehicle. And she barely had time to think: I guess that’s why he’s the weapons sergeant.
    She dropped down into the truck bed and covered up her head as the throaty thunk-thunk-thunk of the .50-cal beat the air around them, and the roll-down door disintegrated in front of them like it was in an episode of MythBusters – .50-Cal Versus Garage Door. Thumb-sized slugs, fired from hand-sized shells, warped the air over her head like fat moths, and metal fragments shot off the steel slats and went zipping around the garage, some pinging off the chassis of trucks, others chipping and cracking the windshield that Todd huddled behind, still urging the truck forward.
    If anybody had engaged anything that close, in quarters that tight, with an M2, Kate had never remotely heard about it.
    And then her body went rolling and slamming into the back gate of the truck bed, inertia trying to keep her in place as the vehicle rocketed forward, like the bronco had finally been set loose from the pen, hurtling outside to throw its rider and stomp some rodeo clowns. The mangled garage door went tumbling away underneath the truck’s knobby wheels, and they were instantly blasting out into what was left of the American military presence in the Horn of Africa.
    What was left of Camp Lemonnier.
    * * *
    It was like a hundred years had passed overnight. Aside from the flames still burning, the camp looked like a ruin of itself. Tents were torn down, vehicles parked at odd angles or half sticking out of structures they’d crashed into, debris and shell casings carpeted the ground – and everywhere bodies lay face down or twisted at weird angles.
    And it was nearly morning now, so Kate could see everything. The sun was still below the treetops, but there was a yellowish-brown light blanketing the base. Or maybe, for all she knew, Djibouti was just naturally this grim color. She’d never seen it in the daytime before.
    She only had two seconds to regard the environment, because when they were not even fifty yards out of the garage, a gigantic white-hot explosion blossomed into the sky behind the convoy – as the Black Hawk, all its tanks of JP-5, plus the barrels of gasoline for the trucks, and the whole garage/helicopter hybrid went up together at once.
    Kate spun to the rear only to be assaulted by a rush of hot air and overpressure. Through slitted eyes she could see the breathtaking sight of fuel barrels arcing into the dun sky on pillars of brilliant fire, while thick waves of black smoke rolled out across the ground like tidal breakers, chasing off the gun trucks as if they were seagulls scuttling away up the beach.
    She ducked and covered up her head again.
    Bits of aircraft, rotors, rubber chunks of tires, sheet-metal sections of the garage, socket wrenches and lug nuts – and Kate really didn’t like to think what else, given that as far as she knew no one made it out that helo alive – arced hundreds of feet into the sky and started landing on and around her, and for hundreds of yards in every direction.
    The explosion hadn’t even settled before she heard small-arms and machine-gun fire ramp up behind her, and then Todd’s voice speaking in her ear: “Hey, you. In the