It can happen like that
The sedan must have taken a right turn behind the gas station and made a quick u turn in the small lot between the station and the little self-serve automatic car wash in the back. They had their rear bumper backed up to the dumpster, so any would be good Samaritans couldn’t read the plate from the street, and everyone but the driver was standing with their door ajar, aiming between the jam and the frame, when Viper pulled around into the alley.
The sound of the glass breaking, of the rounds cracking through the air and ringing on the frame, Spatula screaming a guttural animal noise, Gutterslug’s groan that became agonal breathing in an instant, and finally the crashing crushing noise of the vehicle swerving into the wooden fence and crashing halfway into someone’s backyard before slamming to a crunching stop into a thick oak that had grown up the fence, all these noises were far louder than the gunfire.
The guard team had short-barreled rifles with thick suppressors on the end. Half of them probably firing subs. The noise was thus dampened and bounced around by the walls and alley, ending up nearly unidentifiable as gunfire. Probably buy them a few minutes before the cops got called. Huh. Defense don’t want to deal with the law either.
Luke thought all this as he dropped down to the floorboard, which he started to do the moment the front bumper of the sedan peeked out around the wall as they came down the alley. The memory of that first job gave him no illusions about his chances at returning fire. Still, it felt like it took ages for him to hit the floor, and most of the team was dead by the time he did.
There was a still moment of silence. Then, he heard the voice clear as day.
“Check them.”
Luke looked around frantically, then spotted Spatulas head hanging above him. The guy had actually been wearing his seat belt. Luke reached up, got a good handful of brain matter and other gore off the seat, and splattered it on the side of his head then closed his eyes three quarters of the way.
He heard footsteps on the concrete and remembered something else. A fragment of training. He took his phone out of his pocket and slid it across the carpet.
Just in time. The passenger side center door opened at his feet. Dimly, through hazy lashes, he saw a Carhart jacket and jeans, face mask and ballistic glasses, ball cap, suppressed MCX with nothing but irons. He also saw his Glock, bounced out of the seat pouch, inches from his hand in a pool of gore. Somehow, he stopped himself from reaching for it right there, and played the corpse real well.
“Shit. Toss me a faraday bag!”
Luke ventured to open his eyes a milimeter more. The SUV had crashed at an angle, and he couldn’t quite see the Mercedes, but he had line of sight on two gunmen, probably each standing next to a door. One tossed something overhand as he stepped up, then checked both ways down the alley. Carhart guy caught it and flicked it open. A thick bag just big enough for a laptop. He stuffed Luke’s phone in it and snapped it closed, all with one hand without taking his other finger off the trigger, then shoved it inside his jacket and got both hands on his rifle again.
“Snagged a phone. Let’s go!” He aimed both ways down the alley, then booked it back towards the car. The other two gunmen covered him, then disappeared from Luke’s view and he heard car doors slam.
That was his cue.
He reached up and grabbed the door handle behind him, eased it open, and slinked out, planting his feet behind the tire. He heard the Mercedes roll over gravel or glass, and knew the driver and copilot would be checking down the alley one last time before they pulled out. In their mind, the SUV was already cleared.
He accepted that he was probably about to get gunned down for no good reason, and sprinted out around the back end of the SUV.
The car had moved about four feet and straightened up a bit. Sure enough, the driver and passenger had their heads swiveled either direction down the alley. It seemed like it took them years to notice him, and in that time he realized he had absolutely no plan of action. He was running at an armored car with a pistol, and all of his enemies were inside.
“Fuck it. Nothing to lose. Let’s just play it by ear.”
Time slowed, and all Lukes smiled. The adrenaline had made it feel slow motion at the time, the repeated replays in his realm had committed it all to deeply textured memory, and the extractor rendered it slowly, savoring and studying every detail.
The driver saw him first. Hands went down to his lap. Yelled something. Copilot looked over, put one hand up on the driver’s chest without looking away from Luke, their eyes locked, Luke smiled, and felt a bit of brain matter bounce off his face from the impact of his sprinting stride. He was already clear of the SUV, almost to the front of the sedan. He considered running to the driver’s side, an instinct caused by the driver’s scared expression, screaming vulnerability, until he heard the passenger door crack open.
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A slight pivot in his stride. The Berretta gliding up through the air. The copilot, to his credit, sliding up out of the seat and behind the door as fast as pressurized steam, and the suppressor moving between the door and frame just as fast.
Luke fired off one round at it, and the flash and the noise made him realize just how quiet the other gunfire had been. 9mm Gold Dot casing flying through the air, catching the sun. Sudden white-grey smear on the suppressor, a hole in the center, sparks on the door, the copilot flinching, just a millisecond, before shouldering back into his stance and bringing the rifle into position, aimed right at Luke, head height.
But Luke hadn’t been head height for over a quarter of a second. He had already started his next move, dropped down, half sliding half bear crawling over the last yard of concrete to bring himself around the front of the car, and there was his target, plain as day, close enough to see how he had tied his laces.
Luke put a round through the top of his foot, one through the ankle, one through the shin, then bounced up and commenced move two.
He swung around the passenger door and started firing. His first round caught the falling copilot in the neck. The second got him in the head. The third almost blew the drivers forearm apart, leaving blood and gore and a clenched fist on the steering wheel. The fourth smacked into the window behind him, but the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth all met flesh; shoulder, neck, jaw, and brain.
Something shifted in his peripherals, that foggy area outside his tunnelvision. The three passengers in the backseat. The far passenger threw the center rider down in the seat and put himself between Luke and the VIP. Two things happened simultaneously, forcing Luke’s hand, and ultimately, doomed them.
The far passenger opened up with his short AR, and the guy in the near, passenger side back seat opened the door and began to get out.
Luke grabbed the inside passenger door frame with his left hand and swung his entire body weight into the back door as it opened. Not only did he get clear of the doorway as a burst of fire cracked out through the passenger seat, ripping the headrest to shreds and ricocheting off the passenger door window, but Luke also shattered the escaping gunmans arm with the door, slammed his head in the frame, and felt the crunch of bone vibrate through the door right into his shoulder. His smile widened.
Using the sudden impact as a bounce, he swung himself back into the passenger door frame as the back door he had just used as a human mouse trap went white from the desperate fire of the guard inside. The moment his berretta cleared the t-post, he opened fire. The first round went wide, bouncing off the inside of the back windshield, but Luke easily corrected his fire. From his position, he was able to use the swinging back door as a kind of transparent bullet resistant shield, and despite the white circles, he could see clear enough to line up his next shots.
Luke’s Beretta, which was pushed so far into the car that the shell casings bounced off the closed sunroof, was under half a foot away from backseat-guard’s head. The guard took two through the face before door guy was finished crumpling.
But crumpling aint dying. Before Luke could even think about aiming at the target, door guy shot up to his feet and brough his rifle around.
With a thunk that, give then status of his eardrums, Luke may have imagined, the suppressor struck the top of the car door. Lukes arms went to work like pistons. His left hand shot out and grabbed the suppressor in a vice grip, while the other pumped the Beretta back up to his chest, so that the last two rounds in his 92x were fired from right under door guy’s chin. The bullets caught door guy in the front teeth and eyeball, and the rounds expanded somewhere in his brain and blasted out the back of his head. He hit his chin on the door frame on the way down, and the slide on Luke’s Beretta locked back, smoking.
Silence. Ringing. Wet dripping noises. Gunsmoke and iron mixed with dumpster fumes. He stood there, his grin trying to rip his mouth off his face, until he saw something move in the back seat.
The target, struggling to push the dead weight of 250 pounds of guard, plates, and gear off of him. Luke reached under his holster, pulled his spare mag out and reloaded his pistol. As the guy struggled, he reached in the passenger side and dropped the seat forward.
“I got it,” Luke said, and pulled the dead man by the belt down off of the target and to the floorboards.
The target was a twenty something guy with a weird little twirly moustache and eyes like a shocked rabbit. The extractor blurred his face, but up there Luke would never forget it. Down there Luke laughed at him, and the poor bastard tried to work some words out.
“Wait. So what—”
That was it. Luke put five rounds through his face and emptied the rest into his torso for good measure. Some of the rounds zipped off into the seats and he realized the guy had been wearing a chest plate under his soft armor.
More silence. More ringing.
Luke stood up and looked around. It felt like no one even knew he existed. Cars kept going by on the road. There were no sirens, and he wondered for a moment why the cops hadn’t showed up yet, till he realized it had only been about twenty seconds since he started shooting.
Slowly, methodically, he got to work. He dropped his pistol on the seat. He closed the doors. He dragged the driver out of the seat and left two on the concrete outside and didn’t even look at the other two corpses in the back seat as he put it in drive, and left the lot at 15mph.
It was the greatest drive of his life. Not even the adrenal dump could bring him down. In half an hour, he was flying down the George Bush turnpike, a swarm of glittering lights behind him, helicopter overhead, screaming at the top of his lungs with all the windows down and the big blue Texas sky flying by, like an endless plasma ocean full of white cotton clouds for icebergs. He let them catch him on a mixmaster, a hundred feet up in the air, a single concrete branch ready to break off into the sky. He shot one of the short-barreled Ars at a cloud, and the cops cut him down in an instant. He died looking at that big magical sky, so that when he dropped back into the Allcity, he was falling backwards towards the ground, with big cloudcrafts and cloud towers floating by overhead.