Becoming lethal at the breaking point
Luke stepped to the side and glared back over his shoulder past the cover pallet behind him.
In the flickering ghostly light, the window to the truck office was a solid black box, until something flashed and rounds cracked into his cover.
“Shit!” He stepped back to cover and lifted his MG to bring it around, and as if on cue, the gunmen in front of him opened fire from around the truck and pallet racks, crossfire be damned.
It was a bad spot. He had positioned the cover pallets to prevent two forces from engaging him from either side at the same time, but if the guys in the truck office moved up, or if they had also brought a grenade launcher…
The PKP and the Ultimax tore open the air around the truck gunmen, ripping cardboard and windshield, and everything else the rounds touched to warped shreds, but the enemy didn’t let up. They had smelled blood, and the hatred of machine gunners was a powerful thing. This could easily be lights out.
Ok. Time to get creative.
He held the trigger on the MG3 with one hand and it jumped wildly, firing at nothing but empty air and dark warehouse, but a few of the men dropped their heads. With his other hand, he snatched the GM94 out of his bag and leaned around the cover pallet. Rounds struck inches from his face, spraying him with sand and plastic, as he used the soft muzzle flash as a guide and fired the launcher at the truck office.
The 43mm thermobaric grenade flashed in the dark and outlined the forms of some very dead men. The sound was like a meteor hitting the roof and he felt the blast in his teeth.
“Jesus!” Lindsey screamed.
Luke tasted blood in his smile as he dropped the launcher and spun back to the MG3 and lined up his sights on the illuminated gunmen around the truck. One of them fired in the air and EP’s flashlight drone went out and they were covered in darkness again.
Too little too late boys. He lay into the solid darkness with the MG3, keeping the ghostly memory of their bright forms in his rattling, fragmenting mind.
“Keep em pinned down!” some squeaky little Russian-ish voice said in his ear, but before the bolt had cycled again, he forgot he ever heard it.
EP had the bomb drone right over the gunmen around the truck and one finger on the switch when it got caught in an IR cone and the feed went dead.
“God dammit!”
She queued another bomb drone up and scanned the cameras again. The two vehicles in the south had moved into the maze of pallet racks.
“Call quadrants on those vehicles and link me the bomb drone,” Michael said, calm as ever. Some of her feeds went out as the new arrivals located her drones in the top rafters, and she thanked herself from an hour ago for thinking to hide some micro drones in the lights. Still, it felt like being blinded. She took a deep breath and was trying to comfort herself by imagining Michael sitting right behind her on his computer, waging the same war she was, when something exploded over Philip.
Philip hated the relative quiet in his little slice of the darkness, and the waiting. The rest of the warehouse sounded like it was coming apart at the welds. Gunfire and explosions skipped across the thin ceiling and rained down on him like taunts.
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As if in answer to his silent prayer, just above his sights, a fresh squad melted out of the back offices through the door and broken floor-to-ceiling windows.
He held his fire. He saw in their movements an easy confidence, a smooth advance of the kind that only came from a familiar unspoken communication. They utilized practiced methods without conforming to them, and stepped together like streams forming into a river, then flowed out again to cover every crevice of their new space.
These were veterans. And despite all his prep, they were too fast for him.
Before he could make his move, two IR beams flicked across the mezzanine and converged on him. An instant later, an M203 exploded on the ceiling and sprayed him with fragments.
“Shit!” He rolled back firing, cursing himself the whole way down.
“Alan get the fuck down!” Michael shouted in his ears. He found the button inside his mag pouch and waited. Tragically, his ears were ringing from the blast force to his head, making his high-sensitivity earbuds useless. His only sign that automatic fire was tearing open the dead air above his head was the way it sparked angrily off the metal around him. He had no way of knowing how close they were.
“Zoey,” he whispered,
“I got it.” Michael said, his voice muffled. A moment later Philip felt the explosion shake the mezzanine. He had set a charge next to the staircase, but had planned on being able to see them approaching. Another fuck up.
He rolled up with his gun ready and let out a burst at the first body he saw. When the reflected muzzle flash faded, nothing else moved. The shaped charge had done its work. They must have assumed him throwing grenades meant there were no other explosive traps in the area. Unfortunately for them, he knew how to shield his shit.
He exhaled in relief and felt a razor-sharp pain. He took his hand off the foregrip and felt around with his pinky, the only finger removed from his gloves, and felt the wet flowing blood on his shoulder, his stomach, and in two places on his right thigh. He stopped looking for blood and got to work slapping on quickclot.
The line cracked on, muffling the echoes of gunfire even further, and Michael spoke like he was planning a drive-thru shift.
“Max, move to April and engage. Kate, empty that mag and move to Alan.”
Philip scoffed then stopped breathing and listened. He was right below the gaping hole in the roof blown open by the M203. He stayed quiet until he was sure of what he was hearing.
Son of a bitch. Not again.
“Hey Zoey, you watching the skies?!”
The three machine guns talked steadily as the maze of pallet racks crackled with fire and grenades went off wildly. The attackers had fallen back behind the truck, slinked away into the forest of pallet racks, withering under the team’s fire, but now firing from concealment, drawing out bursts of twenty rounds that often hit nothing but empty warehouse.
Sam moved from position to position, firing sustained bursts and then disappearing behind the boxes or pillars when she was shot at, taking full advantage of her mobility to offset Luke and Lindsey’s static but more lethal positions.
EP’s flash drones fanned the area with blazing floodlights while evading fire, trying to distract the gunmen that were slowly picking apart her network of camera drones, blinding her further. A small victory, Michael had already guided the last bomb drone to a cluster of four, and one of them was still screaming.
It was a battle of light and darkness, fire and smoke, sound and silence. The sprinklers had gone off in places and puddles reflected the chaos in little windows of inverted gunfire. The men moving through the pallet racks towards Luke had paused their push, but EP felt it was in preparation of a charge, and not out of hesitance.
Luke’s ammo got down to the last ten rounds, and after a final, taunting burst, he made a hand signal and started to reload. Lindsey and Sam opened up with doubled intensity as he set the lead round in a 250-round belt into the tray, and he wished they had just held their fire. The enemy smelled what was up, and bullets fell on him like hail blown sideways.
“Quadrant nine!” EP yelled. Lindsey fired through the racks and Sam emptied a magazine into a slab of cardboard a gunman had dropped behind.
Sam’s burst cut off suddenly, and she remembered Michael’s command.
“Cover me!” she yelled. Just in time, Luke came up and let the MG3 go wild, and the gunmen went quiet again.
She sprinted under the mezzanine to the Grom leaned on a pillar. She revved the motorcycle and pealed out through the shelves towards Gradie, the infrared headlight throwing shadows of phantom gunmen on the boxes everywhere she looked.
Luke couldn’t be sure if he was dead yet, if it all wasn’t just some echo of his Self’s last moments replaying in the ghostworlds. That happened sometimes. The MG3 went off on its own, moved on its own. He felt he was not involved. But was anything but afraid. Some distant part of himself noted a sound at the edge of hearing, in the silence between the MG3 bursts, that made him feel all this would soon be coming to an end.