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me.
    Bullets zip past, snapping the air with supersonic cracks, ricocheting off rocks and earth. I’m almost to the edge of the field – almost to the woods. My hands are sweaty, making it difficult to keep my grip on the saddle horn.
    I grit my teeth and tough it out.
    We reach the edge of the field. Katana stumbles just enough to throw my balance off. My grip slips and I hit the ground with a thud, rolling over and over in a tangle of arms and legs. The wind goes out of my lungs as two more grenades blast the field. I tumble into the bushes.
    “Cover, cover, cover!! Come on!” Uriah yells.
    Somehow, he has ended up next to me.
    Figures
.
    I jump to my feet, unslinging my rifle, sighting muzzle flashes. Going through the motions of battle. After all, I am a sniper. This is what I do best. In a way, it is almost like being outside of myself – mechanically but expertly reacting to an attack with fluid, instinctive actions.
    Mach and Katana are stamping the ground, stomping and snorting, rolling the whites of their eyes. Poor guys. I know the feeling. Firefights are no fun. Yet they don’t run away. They stick with us. Amazing! They’ve been trained well.
    The militiamen that have made it to cover stay concealed beneath bushes and behind trees, hitting the field with shots. I lie on my stomach, sweat and blood dripping down my forehead. I look through the optics of my rifle, searching the fields for shapes. There is nothing. Only muzzle flashes. I see one and snap a quick shot. A short yelp of pain follows.
    “What are we dealing with here?” Uriah says. He has to shout to be heard above the sound of the gunshots and grenades. “Omega?”
    “I don’t think so!” I sweep the field once more with my scope. “This isn’t their style.”
    More likely than not, we’ve run across rogue militia.
    This could be
worse
than Omega. Rogue militiamen and vandals aren’t organized into military units. They’re made up of brutal gang remnants – without rules and regulations. Without a code of honor.
    Not that
Omega
has a code of honor, but still.
    You get my point.
    A militiawoman – Sarah - is shot in the chest a few yards away from me. Her heart stops beating the second the bullet punctures her ribcage. She locks eyes with me for a split second, tossing a magazine in my direction. I crouch and roll, grabbing it. She is dead. I hold her final contribution to the fight in my hand, jamming it into my gun, reloading.
    I shoot toward the enemy in the waving grass, returning fire methodically. Shoot three times, change my position, shoot one time, change my position…keep moving. Constant movement keeps me from becoming a target myself.
    You’re looking for the invisible enemy
, Chris would say.
You’re a sniper. You’re one of the few people in this world that can find them. Look for irregularity. One element that’s off
.
    I settle and study the grass field through my scope again. There’s a small patch of tall grass that has been smashed. By animals? By people? I don’t know.
    The grass is a clue
, Chris whispers in my head.
It’s telling you something
.
    I sweep downward, at the bottom of the field. Just a few feet away from the smashed grass, there is a tiny – miniscule – black line in the dirt. I zero in on it. It’s an irregularity. The one element that I’m searching for.
    I carefully aim and squeeze the trigger. My shot is clean. It hits the line, and just as I thought, my optics picks up a spray of blood in the air. I move to the left and settle again.
    “Aim low,” I tell Uriah. “They’re hiding in some kind of trench.”
    “Good eye, Cassidy!”
    He spreads the word. I find only one more hostile target and I don’t hesitate to take it out. Ten excruciatingly long minutes drag by. The horses are beside themselves with the noise from the gunfire. Then, suddenly, at minute eleven…it stops. There is no return fire from the trench, and I order my men to hold their fire. We don’t want to waste