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The tree line was forty meters away when the first round cracked past my head.
I threw myself sideways, hit the dirt, and heard Cole yelling something I couldn't parse. The wounded were still out in the open. Leah was dragging one of them by the jacket, face twisted with effort, and the rest of the group scattered like birds.
"Cover!" I shouted. "Get to the trees!"
Another burst. Dirt kicked up ten feet to my left. The armored car was still rolling forward, slow and methodical, turret swiveling. They weren't trying to kill us yet. They were herding us.
I pushed up onto one knee, brought the rifle to my shoulder, and put two rounds into the windshield. The glass spiderwebbed but didn't break. Bulletproof. Of course it was.
"Cross!" Leah's voice, raw with panic. "We can't move him—"
I didn't look back. I fired three more rounds at the turret mount, trying to force the gunner to duck, then bolted for the trees. Cole was already there, crouched behind a trunk, weapon up. His hands were shaking.
"Suppressing fire," I snapped. "Don't aim. Just make noise."
He nodded and started shooting. The sound was thin, pathetic, but it bought us five seconds. Leah hauled the wounded man into the brush, his leg trailing blood, and two others stumbled in after her.
The armored car stopped. The turret went quiet.
I pressed my back against a tree, breathing hard, and counted heads. Nine. We were missing three.
"Where's—"
"They ran north," Cole said. His voice cracked. "I saw them go."
North was open ground. No cover for half a klick. If Red Hammer wanted them, they were already dead.
I forced the thought down and focused. The engine was still idling. They weren't chasing. That meant they were calling it in, waiting for backup, or both.
"We move now," I said. "Deep as we can get before they bring dogs."
Leah looked up from the wounded man, her hands slick with blood. "He's losing too much. I need to—"
"You need to walk." I kept my voice flat. "Or he dies here."
Her jaw tightened, but she didn't argue. She tore a strip from her jacket, wrapped it around the leg wound, and tied it off hard enough to make the guy scream. Then she stood.
"Cole, take point," I said. "Stay off the trails. If you see wire, stop."
He blinked. "Wire?"
"Tripwire. Mines. This whole sector's been contested for three years. Assume everything's rigged."
His face went pale, but he nodded and started moving. The rest of the group followed, two of them carrying the wounded man between them. I stayed at the back, rifle up, watching the tree line behind us.
The armored car didn't follow.
That should've been good news. It wasn't. It meant they knew we couldn't get far.
---
We walked for two hours. The forest thickened, the ground turned soft and uneven, and the light filtering through the canopy went from gray to almost black. Twice, Cole stopped and pointed at something on the ground—rusted wire, a wooden stake, a patch of dirt that looked too flat. Each time, we went around.
The third time, he didn't stop. He just stepped forward, and I heard the click.
Everyone froze.
Cole's boot was pressing down on something metal, half-buried in the leaves. His face had gone white. He was holding his breath.
"Don't move," I said.
I walked up slowly, crouched next to him, and brushed the leaves away. It was a pressure plate. Old Soviet design, probably scavenged from a depot and re-armed. The kind that took about eight pounds to trigger and detonated the second you lifted your foot.
"Cross," Cole whispered. His voice was shaking. "What do I—"
"Nothing. You do nothing." I straightened and looked around. The ground here was a mess. Boot prints, shell casings, a burnt-out oil drum twenty meters to the left. We'd walked into someone's old kill zone.
Leah was staring at me. "Can you disarm it?"
"Not without tools." I scanned the area again, slower this time. There were more plates. I could see the edges of two, maybe three, scattered in a rough arc ahead of us. We'd gotten lucky. If we'd come through five meters to the right, half the group would be gone.
"So what do we do?" Leah's voice was tight.
I looked at Cole. He was still frozen, eyes locked on mine, waiting.
"You're going to walk forward," I said. "Slowly. Keep your weight on that foot until I tell you to move."
"Walk forward?" His voice cracked. "That's—"
"Only way out. If you try to step back, the pressure shifts and it blows. If you stay here, your leg gives out in ten minutes and it blows. So you walk."
He swallowed hard. "What if there's another one?"
"Then I'll tell you where to step."
Leah started to say something, but I cut her off with a look. This wasn't a debate. We didn't have time.
"Everyone else, stay exactly where you are," I said. "Don't move until I say."
I stepped past Cole, moving carefully, eyes on the ground. The dirt here was loose, disturbed. Someone had buried these in a hurry, probably during a retreat. That meant shallow placement, visible seams. I could work with that.
"Okay," I said. "Lift your foot. Slow."
Cole shifted his weight forward, onto his front leg, and started to lift the back foot off the plate. I saw his knee tremble.
"Steady," I said.
His boot came up. The plate stayed down.
No click. No detonation.
Cole let out a breath that sounded like a sob and took another step forward, almost stumbling. I grabbed his arm and steadied him.
"Eyes open," I said. "We're not clear yet."
I led him forward, one step at a time, picking a path between the plates. It took fifteen minutes to move thirty meters. By the time we reached solid ground, my shoulders were cramping and Cole looked like he was about to pass out.
"Bring them through," I called back to Leah. "Single file. Step exactly where I stepped."
She nodded and started guiding the others. The wounded man was barely conscious now, his head lolling against the shoulder of the guy carrying him. I watched them come through, counting steps, checking the ground.
When the last one cleared the minefield, I let myself breathe.
"Keep moving," I said. "We're not stopping until dark."
Cole looked at me, his face still pale, and opened his mouth like he wanted to say something. Then he just nodded and started walking.
---
We found the depot two hours before sunset.
It wasn't marked on any map I'd seen, but the signs were obvious once you knew what to look for. Concrete foundation half-buried in the hillside. Rusted rebar poking out of the dirt. A drainage pipe big enough to crawl through, partially collapsed.
"Old supply cache," I said. "Pre-war, maybe earlier."
Leah looked skeptical. "How do you know?"
"Because I've seen a hundred of them." I crouched next to the pipe and shone my light inside. The beam caught metal, stacked crates, a tarp pulled over something heavy. "Militia groups used to stash gear in places like this. Most of them got raided or forgotten."
"Or rigged," Cole said quietly.
I glanced at him. He was standing a few feet back, arms crossed, still rattled from the minefield.
"Yeah," I said. "Or rigged. Stay here."
I crawled into the pipe. The air inside was damp and smelled like rust and old grease. The crates were stamped with Cyrillic lettering, the tarp was rotting, and the metal underneath was an old M2 Browning, disassembled and wrapped in oilcloth.
I pulled the tarp back further. Ammunition cans. Medical supplies. A crate of MREs, half of them expired. It wasn't much, but it was more than we had.
I backed out of the pipe and stood. "It's clear. Start moving the supplies."
Leah didn't move. She was staring at something past my shoulder, her face frozen.
I turned.
Smoke. Black and thick, rising in a column about six klicks north. Too much for a campfire. Too concentrated for a brush burn.
That was a village.
Cole stepped forward, his face pale, eyes locked on the smoke.
"That's—" His voice broke. "That's where I'm from."
He started walking toward it, not running, just walking, like he was in a trance. I caught his arm and pulled him back.
"Don't," I said.
He tried to jerk free. "My sister's there. My—"
"If she's there, she's already gone." I kept my voice flat, hard. "You go now, you die too."
His eyes were wet. He looked at me like I'd just shot him.
"We have to—"
"We don't have to do anything," I said. "We have nine people, twelve bullets, and no radio. We go there, we're dead. That's the math."
Leah was watching us, her face unreadable.
Cole pulled free and stepped back. His hands were shaking. He looked at the smoke again, then at me.
"You said you'd get us out," he said quietly.
I didn't answer.
He turned and walked into the trees, toward the smoke, his rifle slung over his shoulder.
I let him go.