Stop on the X, please
“Another squad moving in the lot!” EP yelled. “Heading towards the southeast offices!”
The MG3 erupted in metal-tearing roars and Luke yelled between the bursts.
“They gotta get in line!”
He poured lead at the two SUVs speeding past the center row that bisected the pallet racks. They sparked in the dark and vanished, but he kept firing blindly into the maze of cardboard and metal until he thought better of it and decided to save his ammo.
“Fuck! You got anything for these pieces of shit?” he yelled.
“Gonna try!” EP said.
EP guided another bomb drone toward the southeast corner of the DC. Some of the gunmen got out of the SUVs and piled into the truck bed while others scanned the air with their rifles. As she dropped the drone down out of the support struts, one gunman caught her drone in a beam of white light. She twisted the controls and slammed the descent, but the feed went dark as a stationary camera drone caught the muzzle flash.
“Shit!”
She closed the dead drones feed and switched to the stationary one that had caught its death. As the attackers who had broken in through the southeast offices linked up with the two SUVs, the pickup truck coasted along the wall towards the front entrance, gun barrels clawing out of the bed and windows.
“That truck’s moving down the east wall! Quadrant Five to Four!”
Luke pivoted the MG3 and burned brass and belt firing blindly into the pre-marked zone of cardboard and metal. For the first time in what felt like ages, EP saw something go right. The bullets cracked out of the boxes and splattered the gunman in and around the truck with ripping death. Some fell instantly while others scrambled to cover or shot wildly at nothing.
Trying to keep the momentum, she prepped another bomb drone and scanned the other feeds. Another vehicle sped out of formation in the back lot, and before she could find the words to call it, two other vehicles made for the south ramp again.
“Two more heading for the ramp, April!”
Suddenly, one of the Suburbans in the southeast corner squealed across the floor and flipped a bitch, heading back west. It took a hard fast turn down the center path between the towering pallet racks, right at Luke.
“Bitch really?!” He swiveled his gun again and squeezed the trigger like it was a trachea. Rounds sparked in the darkness as he walked the fire from the grill to the right tire.
There was a flash and a roar as a gunman atop the sunroof laid into an M249 and everything around Luke became cracking air and screaming ricochets and shattered barrier. At just under a hundred yards away, the two belt feds ripped the dead space between them into something heavy and bristling. It seemed to last forever, the muzzle flash of the 249 growing like some widening demonic eye as the SUV barreled towards him.
A breath later the PKP cracked the air open just over his head and his earbuds muffled everything down to his heartbeat. In almost the same moment, the tire he had been shooting at exploded, and for a measureless drawn out second the SUV sailed forward like a ghost and he thought it would never stop, but in a sudden jump, like time had caught up with itself, the SUV jerked to the right and slammed into a pallet rack with an all-metal crash. The rack collapsed in a heap as Luke broke through the windshield with a sustained burst, and it took a few seconds after that for him to realize a stray PKP round had taken out the M249 gunner long before the wheel went.
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“Joe! Left! Quadrants two-one!” EP screamed. It all clicked into place in his head, his situational awareness good enough, in this instance, to tell him he was fucked, but unable to do much else.
The truck hugging the east wall had accelerated in unison with the SUV and in an instant, it was pulling out from around the racks in front of the turnstiles, bristling with fresh barrels.
Luke pivoted his gun to his left like a boxer rolling with a punch, but it felt like moving through thick oil. He fought the urge to shoot until he had them in his sights, but right as the front bumper slid into his line of fire, there was a distinctive “chunk” and the conveyor belts exploded ten yards ahead of his face.
“Fuck!”
He went blind in a flash and his swear dissolved into a groan as the sudden sensations of gut punch, eardrum strike, and burning needles rolled over him. If he could feel that much with the adrenaline, he thought, almost detachedly, the real damage was probably far worse.
He unleashed a wave of fire into the pallet racks, the floor, the wall above the entrance, and, eventually, into the gunman in and around the truck, but the biggest effect of the burst was that the muzzle flash reflected off everything, telling him it wasn’t his real eyes that had been destroyed.
“My NODs are fucked!” he hissed, and with one quick swipe of his forearm, knocked the broken half tubes of plastic and glass up out of his face.
His bursts turned the truck to scrap, but the gunmen had quickly realized that was about all he was hitting. They started to fan out, moving out of cover, and each step they took without getting cut down made them more bold and more sure; This MG gunner was blind as a bat.
“Joe!” Lindsey shrieked and got halfway through changing positions before the gunman moved in for the kill. They were in a half-moon, with rifles raised when the gunfire clashed with the bursts of the MG3.
It was the slow steady fire of an Ultimax 100. Sam flicked on her IR beam and opened up from under the mezzanine, catching them completely off guard and dropping two before one had time to return fire with a FN MK46. She lay into the trigger and gave them the rest of the drum as rounds sparked off the mezzanine around her like fireworks hitting a chain link fence.
“Oh shit, sorry!” EP squealed, and one of her micro drones bathed the truck gunmen in white light.
“About god damned—” Luke lay into the gun and three men died instantly, but others opened fire from the deep woods of the pallet racks. The concentrated rifle fire rivaled the MG3 and Luke was once again in a world of splintering air and spitting death.
“Mother fuckers!
He returned fire, but this time with more conservative bursts. He could feel the belt getting shorter. Somewhere beyond the circle of white light, another belt fed opened up, this time using his own thinly packed quadrant against him, and one of his barrier pallets broke open in geysers of sand.
In one peripheral camera feeds, EP saw the other two SUVs from the back lot speed up the South ramp and into the DC.
“Joe, fall back!” she squealed, but Luke just laughed and kept firing. She mashed the mute button and screamed. On her camera feed, gunmen scampered down the rows of pallet racks, crawled through boxes and climbed over the racks like insects, evenly spread apart but advancing as a single force, looking for a line of sight on Luke. When they found one, he’d be in trouble, and she would once again be completely helpless and far away.
Lindsey was less disheartened.
“Quadrants four-five!” she screamed. “Let em fucking have it!” She unloaded into a section of the pallet racks and the PKP sent the gunmen scattering. Luke snapped to her target and the two of them once again caught the enemy in a wall of lead, though this time the devastation was diminished. At the very least, the gunmen slithering through the racks stopped dead still.
EP saw her chance to move in a bomb drone while the gunmen were suppressed. She flew it out of the top of the rack and hugged the ceiling. She was soaked in sweat, breathing erratically, and purely focused on piloting the drone, so she didn’t see another SUV speed across the lot and pull up to the truck office door.
Luckily, Michael was more alert.
“Gunmen in the truck office.”