Your shadow rising to meet you
The chainsaw roar, like metal teeth speed-eating hand grenades half a mile away, and the slap-cracking sound of the armor piercing finger sized rounds snapping through the air above had stopped suddenly as the SUV squealed into the corner of the L-shaped parking lot, next to a row of covered parking.
In a moment of relative silence, Gradie took in his surroundings, his mind ravenous for information, like some dying starving thing that knew, in this panicked raw open state, that the smallest sliver of ignorance could kill.
The lot opened up onto the main street to the west, where gunmen circled Celeste’s Beetle like a pack of frenzied dogs, and onto another angled side street to the north, where the bare concrete street was as untouched by the carnage as a cloud drifting by a mile overhead.
Across the side street, he could see the corner of a gas station parking lot, which he knew, his memory somehow intact enough after the machine gun fire to remind him, was a triangle-shaped slab of concrete on the edge of the whirl surrounding the construction zone, and was also occupied by a small German restaurant.
Sam had parked the SUV with its flank toward the intersection, rear bumper toward the bridge, and other flank facing the covered parking and the brick wall that backed it.
The two cars parked in the lot and the three oak trees spaced across the squarish grass lawn between the L lot and the intersection added some extra cover from the gunmen scampering around the Beetle. As far as positions go, it was almost a picnic.
As Gradie was conducting his topographical survey with his mouth hanging open, Luke opened the door while the SUV was still rocking from the brakes and stepped out into his element.
Muzzles flashed from all along the main street like cameras for his red-carpet premier. Low run, swift as an Olympian, shifting his shoulders from target to target like automated hydraulics, his rifle hissed in a staccato of doubles and triples so fast they sounded like automatic fire sliced into neat portions and given out to his enemies.
Two of the gunmen dropped before the rest got everything but their gun barrels behind cover and lay down a wave of rounds. He dropped down and moved around to the back of the SUV as rounds slammed into the side of it like a hailstorm. Gradie just watched, surprised he even had time to close the door behind him.
“You gonna get out there or what, killer?!” Sam Yelled at him, lifting her short AR and lowering the seat. After a quick slap of the window controls, she was shooting through a six-inch gap between the white polycarbonate and the door frame, and he was left feeling like the new guy on a job site.
A round smacked into the window and Sam made a squealing sound she managed to turn into a snarl by the end, and he snapped out of it.
He opened the door and shot out the safe side of the vehicle with his rifle raised, stomping toward the front bumper.
“Engaging!”
“Got you!” Luke responded, his voice heard only in the earbuds, his rifle a muffled restrained rhythm playing on the walls. Other sounds flooded in as Gradie anticipated exposing his head and shoulders past the windshield.
Rounds prodded the SUV and fell among the parked cars, cracked through the air and smacked against the brick wall backing the covered parking, the metal awning giving the sounds ghostly echoes. Someone in a car near the intersection was screaming, a thought-splitting shriek that rose and held like a machine had hijacked her vocal cords. More masculine yells came from the bridge where men motioned others out of the cars and to cover on the trail down below.
Somewhere, under the ground, in the air, just behind his ears or stuck below his jaw, another Gradie was freaking out, trying to explain to the only one who could hear him that this was insane, and death was final.
But Gradie dragged his feet across the concrete until he had cleared the windshield, and scanned for a target.
The beetle had one car in front of it and numerous others behind it. The first group of shooters had been joined by the survivors of the dirt bike cavalry. Muzzles flashed and heads moved behind the cars. He turned on the one closest to his red dot, moving it smoothly over the area below his target's chin, and in a spasm of instinct forged by months of range course runs shooting similar silhouettes, the trigger pulled itself three times.
Luke responded by instantly letting loose a rapid sustained burst and the gunmen across the street erupted with more flashes as if Gradie had kicked off an explosive chain reaction. His target dropped behind the car, either dead or very lucky. For a moment, Gradie waited for him to pop up again, until the other gunmen corrected their fire and rounds started glancing off the hood right next to him.
He fired the rest of his magazine in a blur, the memory of one moment dissolving into smoke and panic as the next instant crashed into him. That other him, who had spent all those hours on the range, running through force on force, took over. The Spirit could only watch, blind, hoping for the best.
Suddenly, he was empty, and muzzle flashes from far to his left sent more rounds glancing off the hood. The knowledge that he was empty had already fizzed out of his mind so he turned and clicked the trigger three times at the flashing fluttering figures.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Reload!” one of the Gradies said, and he dropped down behind the tire.
In the relative calm of cover, his senses caught up with him, along with the memory of who he had been shooting at.
“Shooters to the northeast, the restaurant!” he shouted as he pulled another magazine out. He froze with it in his hand and realized something was out of place. The hours practicing the reload at the range had somehow come up short. He stared at the magazine sticking out of the rifle next to his elbow like it had snuck up on him till he realized he had forgotten to eject it.
A round skipped under the SUV and rang on metal like a death bell.
“You hit Alan?” Luke said in his ear. His rifle never stopped, and the steady sounds seemed to scold Gradie.
Gradie finished the reload without breathing and released the slide catch.
“Reloaded!”
The word sounded awkwardly alone and he realized he hadn’t called out his reload when he went empty before, but had only thought it in his head. His shame made him move and again, his Self tried to reason with him, but his body rose up like some other third force was lifting it and he came up firing.
There was a fresh body near the restaurant and one of the gunmen behind the cars was screaming about something. Gradie only got off a few rounds before the two parked cars in front of him lost their windows in bursts of glass and red tracers tore through the lot like neon lightning. An instant later the sound of the PKM bounced off the walls.
The gunman behind the cars fired in unison, surely trying to take advantage of any effect the burst might have had. There was none. Grade had somehow got the idea that he was immune to bullets as long as he kept firing and Luke had actually moved up as the PKM was laying into the lot, and was now crouched behind one of the windowless cars a few yards in front of the SUV.
“They’re trying to walk the fire to you on the radio, but you’re screened by the gas station,” EP warned. “Just don’t move up.”
“Shit,” Luke said like he had dropped his keys, the mic in his earbuds struggling to pick up his easy tone amidst the sounds of all hell breaking loose. He caught one of the gunmen in the face as he came up behind the crumpled car in front of the beetle and arterial spray landed on the windshield.
Gradie felt a pang of jealousy for a few seconds, then had a moment of elation as, shortly after placing the red dot over the neck of a man using the beetle for cover, he sent three rounds out in a tight group, the last of which tore off his targets jaw. The moment was cut short by a sharp, burning metal something ripping his head apart.
He dropped back behind the SUV and rolled back on his ass. He knew he was dead. The knowledge filled him with fear, and the fear gave life to that other him, as if the Self was a kind of fossil that only fear could revive. The Self, now flush with the pulsing energy of the fear, tackled the Spirit to the ground.
You stupid fucking piece of shit! You joined up with some god damned wanna-be hitman you met online because you blew all your fucking money on “combat” classes and tacticool bullshit! This is your only life! God damn you, get—
Suddenly, the fear made him check his head. He patted slick pomaded hair and sweat soaked forehead, and found nothing. No gaping wound, no slick flowing blood, not even a scrape. Then he found it, a chunk of lead wedged into the side of his ballistic sunglasses. Lucky ricochet. He hadn’t even felt it. It had been the sight of the sparks and the sound of it skipping off the hood that had sent him flying backward. A misplaced reflex.
“Alans Down!” Sam yelled. Gradie heard her start firing out of the SUV.
What? I can’t go down. I’m not even here. I’m floating around the Allworld. I’m projecting from a place this world can’t even contain.
The thought gave him relief, and something close to courage. He rolled back onto his feet and loaded a fresh mag.
“I’m up!” he yelled. Sam looked at him through the windshield as he came up, her face morphing from panic to disbelief to something else, before she jerked her head back towards the enemy and started spraying shells inside the cabin.
****
EP had put Celeste’s mic in a separate room so that the operators wouldn’t get distracted by her shrieking. The new PKM gunner was less accurate than the one she had killed, but made up for it in other, crueler ways.
He had been peppering the Beetle with bursts, mostly around the front end, and even shot off the side mirrors. Celeste screamed every time. The other shooters warned him to watch his fire almost constantly, some almost catching a ricochet, and EP could read in his shot patterns a rising frustration and a seething bloodlust, as if he was speaking to her in gunfire.
“Going for the MG,” Lindsey said on the line, a cold statement of fact. EP pulled up a drone she had set to track her motorcycle and watched her fly down from the northwest. She had been far ahead down a side street when the shooting started and was outside the combat zone. EP hoped it would give her the edge.
“Watch for an opening,” Philip said.
“No time,” she said flatly.
She came down the road along the construction site at about a hundred mph. The half-built ramp passed overhead to her right, all bare steel and wide cement Vs, desperately trying to meet itself across massive gaps, like a great dragon she was destined to fight. Its head was a clod of green where the earth rose up and ejected concrete slabs and plywood-sided steel girders down its spine. There were men on top of the earthen head, in or around a white truck that, fittingly, was spitting fire.
Her Ducati Multistrada roared under her as she gunned the throttle. She visualized coming up the side of the dirt slope, far outside the fan of the machine gun, surprising the gun-deaf men up top, and swung her Galil around on its sling and lay it on her chest. As she slowed and turned onto the dirt lot alongside the ramp, one of the men up top turned on her.
“April!” EP shouted, uselessly. Lindsey zig-zagged rapidly as he opened fire, still hoping for a chance, maybe if he let out all thirty rounds before she got too close, to take it down. Instead, he stopped firing and moved his gun in a horrifyingly familiar way; A minute movement that, despite the distance of a hundred yards, made her body react on its own.
“Shit!” She tapped the brakes and pulled the bike into a tight right turn that had her almost scraping against the ground. She heard the telltale ‘chunk’ of the m203 being fired a hundred times in her head before it finally launched, silently, an exploded about thirty yards behind her.
“Lucky, so lucky,” she thought in a calming, confident tone, and visualized her skin, every inch of it, completely unscathed by the shrapnel. Half a heartbeat later, after the boom had bounced off the underside of the bridge and the shrapnel had kicked up dirt around her, she felt it was true.
A flash on the slope. Another gunman joined his friend.
“Break off! Right! Under the arch!” EP yelled.
Lindsey turned under the cement and steel at the last second, like the bike had a mind of its own and wanted revenge. Rounds sang off the concrete and metal and cracked in the air, then it all came back in echoes as the gunfire bounced back from the far slopes.
“I’ll come back around!” she promised, more to herself than anyone else.
“You hit?” EP asked.
“Just my pride.” She swerved behind a mound of fill dirt as a round smacked into the side of it and kicked up an infuriating little cloud.