Ring of Fire III(11)
“Can he walk?”
“Hell, Rita, he’s not even conscious. We’ve got him in a wheelbarrow we found, but we’re not making much progress any longer. We’re pretty well worn out.”
Given Siers’ size, Rita wasn’t surprised. “Well, we can spell you on that chore.”
By now, all of her people had come out into the street. So had Amanda Boyd and—sure enough—Dina Merrifield.
Böcler came forward. “I will handle the wheelbarrow. I am not doing anything else and I am not much use with firearms.”
Uncertainly, Rita stared at him. The secretary wasn’t even five and half feet tall. He had pretty wide shoulders for a man his size, but a good part of his bulk looked to be fat rather than muscle.
Bonnie had obviously been thinking along the same lines. “Ah...Hank Siers is awfully heavy.”
Böcler shrugged. “So I will be very tired by the time we reach the Pelican. But I will be able to rest then. I am not much use with airships either.”
The gunfire that Rita could hear had become rather desultory and all of it was now coming from the direction of the artillery barracks. She was pretty sure that her husband’s unit was the only one still putting up a fight. They were probably well-fortified and the Bavarians had stopped trying to take the barracks with a frontal assault. They’d be settling in for a siege and waiting until they could bring up some cannons.
Suddenly the sounds of intermittent gunshots was replaced by a cacophony. That was the sound of hundreds of guns being fired mixed in with the sound of men shouting. Here and there she could hear the clap of grenades, too.
She felt a surge of hope. That might be Tom, leading a charge to relieve the siege of the barracks.
The hope was short-lived, of course. Tom could easily get killed in the next few minutes.
But that thunderclap of battle also gave them their best opportunity to get out of the city. Any enemy patrols would be drawn toward the sound.
“Let’s go,” she said. Böcler left immediately, heading toward the shadows where the wheelbarrow was located. Rita turned to Weaver. “Bonnie, stay on top of Johann Heinrich, will you? I think he’s overestimating his strength and endurance. And you know what men are like in front of a bunch of women.”
Bonnie grinned. “Yeah, he’ll refuse to admit he can’t handle it until he collapses and we’ve got to carry two of the silly bastards. Neither one of whom would ever grace the covers of GQ or Esquire.”
Rita chuckled. “God, can you remember a world where they published magazines like that? Do you miss it much?”
“Not the magazines. I sure as hell miss the plumbing, though, any time I venture out of Grantville. Wait’ll you see what passes for toilet facilities on a seventeenth-century airship.”
“Gah.”
“You did bring your own toilet paper, I hope. No? Boy, are you in for a treat.”
“Gah.”
Chapter 5
Tom never remembered much afterward about the assault that drove off the Bavarians besieging the artillery barracks. The light thrown by a three-quarter moon only seems bright when everything is calm and peaceful. In the chaos of a battle, there were shadows everywhere and all colors were leached out. You could detect motion clearly, and that was about it.
That might have been a blessing. Tom still had vivid memories of his first real battle, when he and Heinrich Schmidt had driven off an assault on Suhl by Wallenstein’s mercenaries almost four years earlier. The horror hadn’t stemmed from the fighting itself. There hadn’t been much of that, since they’d been firing at an enemy in the open from behind good fieldworks. The end result had been a lot closer to a massacre than what you could really call a battle. Afterward, the field had been carpeted with bodies. And blood; and intestines; and brains; and some things whose identity Tom had never been sure about and didn’t want to be.
There wasn’t so much of that tonight. Not because it wasn’t there but because you couldn’t see it very well. Fighting in the darkness, by the light of a moon and the flashes of gunfire and grenades, all a man had time for was motion. Once an enemy went down, you ignored him. The blood spreading out from his body blended into the cobblestones. Everything was a shade of gray, and blood was no different.
There were drawbacks to that, of course. Twice he slipped and fell, when his foot skidded on something wet—and, in one case, horridly squishy. But who could say? In that sort of melee, the falls might even have saved his life, when bullets passed through space he no longer occupied.
His one clear memory was that of an enemy soldier rising from the street, as he neared the last corner before the barracks. The man had probably slipped and fallen himself. He must have fired his gun and hadn’t had time to reload—or he simply panicked. He came up screeching, thrusting his arquebus forward as if it were a spear and catching Tom in the stomach. If the weapon had been a spear, the blade would have sunk into him at least six inches. As it was, the gun barrel just knocked some of the wind out of him and left a nasty bruise.