7.62 speaks louder than words
Flashing lights glittered on a slice of highway miles out over the curve of the metroplex, and sirens joined each other slowly. It had only been a few minutes since the first burst of gunfire. In the DC lot, the vehicles whirled around the building like scavengers circling a fresh corpse. They didn’t want their prey to know where they would strike next.
EP watched them on the screens while trying to break into their voice channels with Michael’s help. A war of movement and information had taken up the space given by the pause in the gun battle.
The team had changed positions as much as possible to keep the enemy from getting the drop on them. Sam had retreated under the mezzanine below Lindsey, who had shifted positions as much as she could around her defenses, and Philip had moved further east, closer to the office and out of line of sight from the broken ramp bay door. Only Luke stayed where he was. His ammo stash and protective pallets outweighed the benefit of any of the places he could have moved to, and none of them gave the same lines of sight.
The compromises the team had made in their prep were starting to show, and EP could only hope the enemy would take some time to identify and exploit them.
Two vehicles broke off the ring in the lot and sped towards the ramp at the south side of the DC.
“Multiple vehicles moving in on the south side, ramp bay door,” EP said.
A moment later, the bay door exploded in a flash.
“Got em.” Lindsey aimed at the cloud of dust and fluttering metal and cardboard with her finger pinning the trigger, waiting. The sound of the grenade had barely died in the rafters when the armored SUV roared through the bay door and sent a pallet of boxes and a mail cart flying with a soft, muffled boom that was beaten down swiftly by the rattle of the PKP.
Lindsey fanned her fire to compensate for the absence of tracers and sparks fluttered across the SUV as it crashed into another barrier pallet just inside the door. But this time, they caught it at an angle and started to slowly move it across the floor, even as their windows went white, and the air cracked apart around them.
Suddenly, like a cool breeze on a hot day, the windows went black and gave out, and the engine roared died to a faint idle.
It was a short-lived relief. A pickup shot through the bay door and slammed into the SUV. Immediately, its engine roared as it struggled to push the corpse filled SUV and barrier pallet out of the way. If they got clear, it and any vehicles in wait could drive into the forest of pallet racks in the center of the warehouse, where they could prepare their next move under cover.
So, fighting against an impending infestation, Lindsey locked her finger around the trigger. Shells pooled at her feet as she swept her iron sights over the truck, but despite the unrelenting fire of the PKP, the two vehicles squealed forward on shattered ride-flat tires, pushing the barrier block out of the way, shedding plexiglass and bullet fragments and even fuel and blood across the warehouse floor.
Suddenly, the truck disappeared behind the SUV, finally clear of the roadblock, and in the next instant, as Lindsey guided her iron sights in front of the SUVs hood, trying to lead the truck, a burst of muzzle flash bloomed over the top of the SUV.
The rounds fell like hail around Lindsey and cracked just past her in a percussive rhythm. Another light machinegun. Some phantom part of her told her it was probably an M249. The truck had stopped right behind the SUV, and other weapons joined in from behind the doubled cover.
In the deadly bee-swarm like wave of combined fire, instincts took over, and the gun jumped from target to target on its own, her body a servant to the will of the Spirit. She barely noticed an IR laser shoot out of the truck, prod her for a second, then switch off.
“Quadrant?” Luke hissed on the mic.
“Eleven,” EP told him.
They had mapped Luke’s fields of fire during the set up, finding paths of low resistance through the racks and moving pallets when needed to give him line of sight on the ramp bay door and other obvious entrances, then marked the targets with IR reflecting stickers.
“Roger, moving.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Let them get committed,” Michael said. He sounded like someone who had never even been shot at. Grooving guitar riffs came in with his voice and Celeste clinked ice in a glass somewhere close before the mic cut off. Lindsey, laying into the PKP the whole time as cracks and buzzes cursed at her head, wanted to scream, but she turned it into another controlled exhale and let the PKM make all the noise instead.
But, despite her well-placed shots, and the sudden twinkling out of a few of the flashing barrels, the enemy machine gunner held the trigger down like his barrel would last forever, and the double edge of her sound attuning earbuds was that she could hear every round impact the metal mezzanine, crack past her head, and thunk into the barrier pallet. It seemed they would never die. It felt, for a moment, like the PKP was shooting air.
There was a bright flash in her Nods as something exploded over the vehicles, turning all the windows white and stopping the fire dead. EP’s explosive drone.
Lindsey exhaled, and her senses caught up with her as the tunnel vision subsided for a moment. She glanced at the empty links hanging off the gun, the 25 round segments at her feet, and realized it had only been about twenty seconds since the SUV came in the bay door.
“April, that laser tagged you,” Michael said. “Probably got you on some kind of overlay map.”
Lindsey stepped to the left and repositioned herself. Not much else she could do.
EP watched as two more vehicles that had been making a feinting charge at the north ramp made sharp squealing turns and headed for the south ramp, where her drone had just gone off over the two vehicles.
“Two more on that ramp, April.”
“Alright Joe,” Michael said. “Get into it, but hold your fire.”
“Fucking A.”
Luke had barrier pallets arranged around him in a staggered star for multiple positions. EP watched him gather his gun by the belt and bipod, step backwards, take a half-moon Kali-esque sweeping step with his other leg, and pivot into his new position like a dancer with a 80 year old Machine gun platform as a partner. It was, given the surroundings, unexpectedly graceful, and in three seconds he was set up in his new position like he had been there for hours.
As if on cue, the two vehicles roared in the bay door, bumper to bumper.
“Now,” Michael said, but his words were cut off by the MG3. He could have saved his breath. Luke opened up the moment he heard the engine roar echo off the ceiling.
The painfully laid plans of the two forces collided with each other in seconds.
The first vehicle, another truck, stopped dead behind the bombed-out truck and SUV, and another machine gunner opened up from the back window. From of all things, the hacked web cam on the mail desk PC, EP saw that the gunner was prone in the back seat facing the driver’s side, surrounded by plates and sandbags, and had pressed the barrel of his FN MK48 lMG in 7.62 up to the glass and either let the first burst drill a hole in the armored glass, or used a hole that had just been drilled out in the lot. Either way, he doused himself in brass and links and sprayed the general area of Lindsey’s position with red tracers.
The second vehicle turned hard and drove past the first until it was screened from Lindsey by the massive pallet racks. As it rocked on its brakes, five men, two with LMGs, got out and got into position to engage the PKP. On one of her hidden, micro mic drones, EP could hear someone yelling at the truck gunner, helping him correct his fire.
It was a strange feeling of pleasure that washed over EP, like landing a combo or something in a game, seeing the second vehicle tagged on her fire-map, right in the center of one of Luke’s quadrants.
“Joe fire on quad ten now!” Her voice broke into a girlish squeal, but she didn’t care. Luke laughed into the mic, pivoted slightly, and poured the most beautiful chainsaw burst she had ever heard into the men positioned behind the second vehicle.
They had parked at an angle for maximum protection against the PKP, but had wrongly assumed Luke’s MG3 was unable to reach them through all the cover at the center of the warehouse.
And it cost them dearly. The rounds skipped off the hood, the ground, the side of the vehicle, sparked wildly off the pallet rack frames, lighting up the bullet’s paths in EPs aerial view, and in a second three of the gunmen were just odd-looking piles on the ground, their loads of ammo, guns, and armor nothing more than useless things for bullets to tear to pieces. EP laughed with tears in her eyes.
But the truck gunner still fired, and the last two men on the vehicle behind the pallet racks figured out where the death was and got to cover, picked up the two belt feds, and laid into it. They knew they couldn’t hit Luke, so Lindsey got the full brunt of it.
“Mother fuckers!”
EP, her joy soured into panic, queued up one of her last bomb drones. The team’s MGs went off unwaveringly, until Michael’s cool, calm, and strangely murderous voice came over the line.
“Talk it out guys.”
Luke and Lindsey laughed into the noise, though for Lindsey it was more like a gasp, and then started talking.
The PKP went wild for two seconds, then died, and the MG3 picked it up without a gap, then two seconds later it was back to the PKP, and soon they had the rhythm.
EP called out the quadrants most needing a little tlc, or where the enemy was under cover, or where the fire was just short of the mark, and it became like some kind of lethal team exercise.
After about ten seconds of uninterrupted fire, the momentum shifted, and the fire from the attackers died down.
Again, comically, the relief was as short lived as its ending was brutal.
Two heavy-riding Suburbans sped up the ramp and into the warehouse. SAWs and rifles bloomed out of the windows and over the roof, and the survivors around the other vehicles resumed their fire on cue.
“Shit!” Lindsey laid into the trigger as the two vehicles sped by, but half a second later they were behind the forest of pallet racks, and a breath later the truck squealed away after them. She sent rounds down range the whole time, but it hadn’t been enough.
Now she was going to have to play fucking peek-a-boo.