Goddamned fucking drones!

Mason had activated the audio enhancement function on his helmet and had first heard it ten seconds ago — a whirring buzz growing louder like a deerfly zeroing in on his head. He’d set the helmet’s visual acuity spectrum to both night vision and thermal and the drone now hovering just below the treetops directly in front of him appeared as a floating black hexagon surrounded by a dim yellow aura.

Cursing his hubris — Well, what did you think? Clarence’d just you let walk right in and shoot him in the head? — he turned his attention back to the house’s porch. He suspected that Clarence was sitting on the rocking chair beside the front door, though he hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of him owing to the man standing in front of the chair with his back to Mason. He was as big as the ass end of an elephant and was wearing the same black leather cut with The Sons Of Adam’s insignia as everyone else in view. His hands and prodigious arms were gesticulating wildly as if he was telling a story of some great import to whoever it was lounging in the rocking chair — must have been about an all-you-can-eat buffet, the way the man was carrying on. His outline was fuzzed by the thermal aura of orange surrounding him, as were the figures of the nine other men milling about the front yard. All of those were drinking heartily from plastic cups and stomping their feet in harmony along with the duelling fiddlers weaving amongst them, the accompanying whoops of mirth and laughter enticing their bows to ever greater speeds.

Mason had just hunkered down behind a toppled birch tree so he could get a look-see at who, or what, stood between him and Clarence. As a precautionary measure, he’d set aside the C8 so he could retrieve the sonic disruptor from his belt. Its primary selling point was that it emitted a highly compressed sound wave that caused immediate disorientation, and sometimes blackouts, at a distance of fifteen metres, but Mason had brought it along mainly with its canine setting in mind. The ad copy had promised it would effectively deter any dog within a fifty-metre radius. While he couldn’t see any within view, he wasn’t taking any chances, not after what had happened with the Doberman Brimsby had shot.

If he did manage to snipe Clarence, as was his intent, he’d given himself even odds that he’d be able to make it back to his truck a few steps ahead of the posse that, no doubt, would be hot on his heels, but he’d never be able to outrun a Doberman. So he’d retrieved the sonic disruptor and was just setting it to canine deterrence when he heard the drone closing in.