He was just planning to head for his tent when he heard his name being called.

“Harris, Harris!”

He looked around and private with the radio waved at him.

“There are problems on the left flank. The Captain’s sending a car. Grab your gear.”

‘Righto.” He yelled back.

Andrew grabbed his pack and quickly shoved his few toiletries and such into it, plus his spare uniform that had turned up three days before. He’d hardly finished packing when he heard the sound of a vehicle traveling fast, and a green-painted ute came racing down the road and screeched to a halt barely a meter from him.

“Harris?” The driver asked.

“That’s me.”

“Hop in.” The driver said.

Andrew jumped in the front next to the driver, who took off like a bat out of hell, doing a screeching U-turn throwing up a cloud of dust, and racing back up the road that he’d just come down. It didn’t take that long to get into the town, or at least the edges of it, but when they got to the roundabout, instead of turning right, they went straight across. The driver must have sensed Andrew’s unspoken question.

“They’ve got around the left flank entirely and are threatening to break through into our rear.” He offered by way of explanation as they began wandering through the edge of the suburban area.

At first, there had been a road they could follow that ran roughly in the right direction, but before long, they started having to drive along dirt tracks and semi-suburban streets that didn’t necessarily go in quite the direction they wanted in order to make progress. The driver got on the radio at one point to find out exactly where he was needed and then turned rather more east than north. The road they were following ran almost due east and ran along the side of the hill at a slightly higher elevation than what they had been on, and he could see burning buildings and the occasional explosion ahead in the direction they were traveling.

The road swung around to the north, but the driver did a hard right that took them to a roundabout where a detachment of troops was frantically digging in along the line of a canal or stormwater channel. A couple of the troops waved over, and the driver pulled up.

“Got the mentalist from the right flank here.”

“Beauty.” One of the men said with a Corporal’s insignia. “The bastards are pushing down this road after taking the bridge over the river. They’ve got a couple of them mentalists with them since the Captain got injured, we haven’t been able to stop ’em.”

“Are you talking about Captain Greaves?”

“Yeah. She got hit early on when she was battling one of their mentalists. We got him, but she got carted off by the medics. Sergeant Hollister is down at the city center doing what he can to stop their mentalist down there. The Captain got patched up, but she hardly got back to the front lines when another one of their mentalists did something, and she went down like a sack of potatoes. We managed to get her out still alive, but we’ve been pushed back steadily ever since. Part of their army is pushing west from the quarry while the rest is trying to push into town along Gisborne road. We were holding them at the bridge up until half an hour ago when another one of their mentalists turned up, and we just couldn’t stand.”