Chapter 8

Voice, I'd like to revise some of our weapons. It seems to me that we have too many options. It seems to me that the kind of weapons we carry can be cut back to my one shotgun and the rest can be PIATs. For my shotgun, I would like to stay with the single explosive round and the incendiary shot. Lately, that's all that I use.

I'd like for the PIATs to have the explosive round, the air burst fragmentation round, and the piss pot. We don't need the flamethrowers for anything but the nets, and I'll bet that an explosive round followed by a piss pot would do them in.

We had some sort of chicken dish for supper tonight. Beth said that it was pseudo-Chinese, whatever that is, but it sure was good, as all the meals are. We danced to Kay Kyser tonight, with some special solos by Ish Kabibble.

The night in the sack was the beginning of a serious attempt to make Beth pregnant, but we had fun doing it. Ah, me, if only all work could be this pleasant!

The next morning, we went full bore, not just a quickie. I don't know if it makes any difference what a guy does when he fucks, because the physical result is always the same. But it does seem to make a difference to women, so I happily go along with it for Beth's sake. I LIKE being married!

After breakfast, I explain to the men what we have in the way of new weapons. The PIATs are so easy to use that nobody complains about a lack of training. All they have to do is to select semi- or full-automatic and which kind of round they want to fire. Then it's an aim and shoot thing pretty much like the M1, only easier.

My shotgun has the choices I asked for, with the addition of the piss pot. I didn't complain, mostly because I thought it was a good idea.

Sgt. James Haggerty, these weapons all have an increased range, but we are still working on improving on that. I suggest that you test them for range and accuracy with all types of rounds before you go very far today.

That was a good idea. When we got a safe distance from the cave, I asked Sam, the one with the most experience with the PIAT to see what he could do for range and accuracy. Wow, this was an improvement! He was deadly accurate at 150 yards, and plenty good enough at 400 yards with all the round-types. The other guys gave it a try and found that they were not quite as accurate, but close enough to count.

My shotgun could throw the explosive round or the piss pot round 200 yards with superb accuracy and out to 500 yards with accuracy that was good enough for now. The shot was not so long ranged, 100 and 300 yards, but it should meet our needs. We were all very happy with the result.

Our first target for the day was another Antlion pit, though we could not be sure that it was occupied by an Antlion. This pit was at least 20% larger than the one that claimed Harley, so we were very careful. At a guess, if this was an Antlion, it should be a good 60 feet long.

Sam was the functioning assistant squad leader, based on his familiarity with the PIAT and the fact that the other men trusted him not to get them into serious trouble. Sam fired a standard explosive round into the center of the pit, and a truly giant Antlion showed itself. We could see some blood on its back from the explosive round, so I had Sam fire a piss pot at it. Some of the liquid must have splashed into the wound because the Antlion went into a sort of spasmodic dance and collapsed in less than 30 seconds. Aha! Now we had a weapon to be reckoned with! We felt that we could now knock down any monster we had seen so far with this weapon combination, and we were back to our cocky mood.

I guess that I should have expected trouble after the elation over the Antlion's demise. We had only gone half a mile when we encountered 12 King Kongs. They saw us about the time we saw them, and they charged without a moment's hesitation. We all started shooting at them at extreme range with the explosive rounds. At this point, we didn't bother with the piss pot, since it depended on the skin already being broken. The King Kongs were moving very fast, so we were down to 150 yards range when we finally killed the last one. The PIATs on automatic fire were damned effective weapons!

That little fight was a stroll in the park with our new weapons. I could hardly wait to see what they would do with other creatures.

Our next objective was another of the ubiquitous caves. I hoped that this one held a Medusa because I wanted to try an experiment. Sure enough, there it was, but it was the biggest damned Medusa that we had seen to date. It was a little larger than I expected, so I sent Chester up to try his luck. I was afraid that he was feeling left out again, so I wanted to make sure that he felt as important as everybody else.

Anyway, the experiment I had in mind was to see if shooting a Medusa only with a piss pot would be enough to kill it. It had so many eyes and mouths that could get splashed that I thought that it was worth a try. Chester stayed well out of reach and fired a piss pot right at the center of the Medusa's cluster of snake-like tentacles. The noise sequence was THUNK-CRACK-ROAR! It all happened about that quick. Whatever that stuff was in the piss pot, it did in the Medusa about that quick. The roar was not even finished before the creature appeared to be dead.

Well, with these never-emptying weapons, there was no need to conserve ammunition, but it was still comforting to know that we did have a one-shot weapon if we needed it.

We looked around, but did not find anything else hiding in the cave, so we left for the next objective. Almost immediately, Joe shouted, "STUKAS!" This time I wanted to find out just how effective the fragmentation rounds from the PIAT were as ack-ack. The monsters were still pretty far away, but I had the men give it a try. Damn! The fuses must have had some sort of sensor that caused them to detonate when they were within about 30 feet of the target. The combination of the close explosion and fragments knocked the Stukas right out of the sky. We had to fire at least 20 rounds for each hit scored, but that was quite acceptable for ack-ack, particularly at long range. In fact, I think that it was spectacularly good shooting! I needed to tell Voice about that discovery right away.