In the zone.

The concrete above me shone purple for a few seconds as the large walkers pared off the top of another building. An earthshaking rumble followed, felt viscerally as I sat huddled in the gutter with my two remaining squadmates. I hugged my carbine, more of an ornament than something that could actually hurt any of those metal monstrosities. The only effective weapon I had was lying under the street ahead of me, around fifty kilos of high explosives stuck on the ceiling of the industrial tunnels. It was propped up there by a metal cabinet, a plastic crate, and some legs of a chair I broke off, in order to shape the charge into a pyramid, base facing upwards.

Some of the less experienced sappers I was told had just piled their explosives on the ground, which more or less only collapsed the street which the robots easily climbed out of. Still, after getting hit by several IEDs attempting to push past the dense concrete and steel maze, the big ones had wizened up and begun systematically carving a path through the buildings instead. The man-portable missiles that had been fired from up on towers and from the sides of smokestacks had also contributed to the fact there were no structures left standing taller than five stories, at least within the range of those beam weapons.

A hiss and a rush of air followed a large explosion a few blocks down, where the robots were content on lobbing missiles to clear their path. They had a fierce initial barrage, an -like rain of dozens of missiles that saturated rear areas of the industrial park, where reinforcements had been streaming in. I had been crouched on top of a building with the other five members of my squad as I watched the winged black rods fly past and grow in size, before detonating in a wave of thunder and flames all across the roads and fields. When I looked behind me, I could see nothing but four large craters and blackened dirt where the temporary command post had been, and the main road in from the city had been obliterated.

The front of a light armor column of five APCs and several companies of mobile infantry in canvas-covered trucks had turned into four charred husks of the light armored vehicles, another one filled with holes which the surviving crew bailed out of, and several troop transports that had been filled with shrapnel. It was fortunate they arrived a dozen seconds late due to the rushed nature of the mobilization, otherwise, the initial barrage of the robots would’ve wiped out a few hundred soldiers instead. The APCs as it would turn out, were almost completely useless, given how every single weapon the machines used went through solid objects like they didn’t exist.

Peeking my head out the gutter entrance onto the street, I took a look around. I had moved my entire squad underground after a railgun shot pierced through several buildings and to hit us on the roof we were scouting from, obliterating two people instantly and perforating a third. She didn’t survive. They must have had a way to see us in the open, and quite clearly, given the precisely aimed shot, so I gave the call and we scrambled beneath the ground like our quadrupedal ancestors.

According to the map, we had ended up in the area of the zone, facing the farmland areas where one of the walkers had apparently arrived from. The main fighting was occurring along a corridor down the middle, where the two cylinders had landed. Frantic phone calls from the workers in the recently expanded factory zone fleeing towards the city reported a constant flurry of activity around the pods, disgorging a seemingly endless amount of materiel. The machines had ignored the civilians and instead been ferrying the vast quantities of large, greyish cubes to the outskirts of the factory zone, which they had fortified in under an hour into a fortress with solid, concrete embankments and sentry posts. From there, they would periodically fire their weapons to clear out more of their corridor through the buildings, which they were almost through, given the radio reports I picked up with a 1-way military antenna receiver I had extended out the gutter.

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“All units in the area of the industrial zone, be advised we have a walker class with a large number of escorts coming in your direction from the farms, ETA 20 to 30 minutes. “

Well shit, another one was coming, and directly towards us. When I herded what was left of my squad over to this corner of the factories, it was to be as far from the main battle as possible, and possibly catch them unaware if they tried to rush past in a wide flank. Now we were going to be in the thick of it, and against a fresh walker with its horde.

“I’m going to blow a hole down into the old aqueduct. Give me all the HE grenades we have left, they’re completely worthless against the robots anyways.” I told the other two lizards left in my squad.

They handed over four each; the brass trusting us sappers with far more explosives than the grunts. I hugged them against my plate carrier as I carefully navigated the red-lit tunnel, looking for a specific set of stairs. Setting the grenades gently on the floor, I unfolded a crinkled map I pulled out from one of my chest pockets. I angled the sheet towards one of the lights on the wall to read as best as I could, tracing my claw from the circled area I came from along the tiny numbers and letters marking individual access points between the levels. The one I had underlined matched the white, stenciled marks on the wall.

I dropped down into the black muck of the actual sewer, probably getting foot cancer from the concentrated industrial runoff in the process. Using the butt of my carbine as a shovel, I displaced the thick muck as best as I could from the seam where the walkway and the bottom of the sewer met. I set the gun back up top and started unscrewing each grenade from its throw handle, setting the threaded hole sitting upwards as I lined up the disassembled grenades, tossing the handles behind me.

After getting through all 11 grenades (I had taken one apart earlier to set up the IED), I took out clippers and det cord from my depleted explosives pack. I poked a hole in the plastic seal of each grenade head and daisy-chained them together with cut lengths of the explosive cord, capping each with a glob of plastic explosive from a brick I had saved until now. I gently sat the entire shebang into the area I dug, making sure the explosives were packed as close to the wall as possible. The prongs of a wired detonator were stuck as firmly as I could manage into the putty at the end of a grenade, and I pulled some slack from the wire spool so as to not accidentally yank out the wire as I climbed back up.

I slung my carbine back over my shoulder, the muck rubbing against my trousers as I slowly crouched and unspooled wire until one of my squadmates tapped me on my shoulder to let me know I was by the gutter. I ducked back into the concrete alcove and nodded to both of my squadmates, who hunkered down close to the walls. With a twist of the safety and two clacks, a resounding boom echoed down the tunnel, and I peeked my head out to see a successfully blown hole at the side of the sewer, leading down into darkness. We now had a way to leave the factory zone now that wasn’t suicidally running across the open fields. One of my squadmates waved us to go ahead, but the other two of us insisted on staying.

We still had a mission to accomplish.