Truly the land of the dead
Luke brought his rattler up as the heavy armored window crept down. He kept mashing the button, but it stopped after dropping six inches.
“What the fuck!”
“They don’t go down all the—” Sam yelled. Luke was already out the door.
The sedan speeding down the center row erupted in muzzle flash and gunshots. One of the passengers had opened up right through the windshield and the cruisers at the front of the store came alive in sparks and breaking glass. The sedan squealed to a stop inches from the second cruiser and three men stepped out with rifles raised.
They didn’t have the chance to do much else. Luke dropped two before they saw him and the last one managed to roll one eye in the general direction of the SUV before his neck exploded.
It was lightning fast. Until then, Gradie hadn’t truly understood what Michael meant that day in the clubhouse when he said “we move at the edge of what’s possible”, but in the one and a half seconds it took Luke to put eight rounds into three men standing mostly concealed behind a vehicle fifty yards away, he realized what it meant to be a Hardworlder.
Something moved in the smoking glitter-windowed sedan. The driver climbing over the seat towards the passenger side. Luke’s rattler hissed out some more suppressed slaps and the movement stopped. There was about half a second of silence, which to Gradie seemed might last forever, before the air cracked open again, this time from the second sedan which had slammed into a space across the lot.
“Get to the target!” Luke yelled. He dropped down and moved to cover behind a car, legs flying like a Russian dancer. The other sedan flashed and rippled. Bullets cracked in the air, sparked off the SUV and smacked the ajar door. Sam flinched backward.
“Why is he out in the open!” EP yelled in the earbuds.
Gradie scrambled into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed.
“Drive!” He pointed to the main line of store fronts across the lot. Sam floored it and they barreled down the row as more rounds smacked into the SUV and dotted the windows in little white circles. Gradie glanced back and saw that Luke had taken the opportunity to pop up and fire. Another gunman dropped dead behind the second sedan before Sam turned hard to the left.
“Stop!” Gradie yelled and Sam slammed on the breaks. He looked back at the muzzle flash breaking out over the lot, some part of him screaming that flesh was real and death final, trying to get up the nerve.
“Why the fuck are you giving orders?” Sam yelled scanning her mirrors, all the more pissed off because she had listened to him. Gradie froze for a second, then remembered his earbuds.
“Luke, cover Me.”
He saw Luke pop up again behind a different car and start firing, as if he had burrowed under the lot. Gradie threw open the door and sprinted to the glass window. He heard the sliced-off edge of Sam’s shout as he ran and the crack of a round moving through the air somewhere behind him. He aimed the Five-seven at the glass and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Another round cracked nearby and Sam gunned the SUV's accelerator. He flicked the safety off and fired through the window at a bare section of floor tile. The flash was massive and the window poured out in a splash of white. He jumped through the frame before the glass settled.
He slipped on the glass but rolled with it and turned it into the scooby doo start of a sprint across the store. He ran in a low half crouch, dodging around racks of clothes and abandoned shopping carts.
He cut right and ran towards the other side of the store, with the men's clothing section and front registers between him and the windows. The air cracked and glass crinkled on the linoleum somewhere as rounds zipped in through the front windows. Screams came from all around, but one of them stuck out. A guttural, masculine scream from outside the front of the store. One of the cops had taken a hit.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
He got to the far wall of the store and followed it up to the front windows.
“Moving up. Watch the crossfire,” he whispered
“Watch your ass! I’m fucking busy here!” Luke yelled back.
A truck revved its engine in the lot and accelerated down the center row towards the cop cars parked out front. The windshield cracked and someone shot out of it from the passenger seat. Another gunman fired out the back window and the cars around Luke (or the last place Gradie had seen him) lost their windshields or sagged as their tires popped out.
“I’m coming around, Johnny!” Sam yelled, and the massive engine roared out in the lot like a dragon.
Gradie moved as fast as he could in his low crouch toward the shattered front windows facing the cop cars. Two cops were crouched down behind their cruisers with their backs to him. Suddenly a strange motor sound erupted from across the lot and they jumped up and started firing. The noise was so sudden and desperate that even with his earpieces muffling the gunshots to whispers, it turned his stomach and spiked more adrenaline on his tongue. Half a second later their target swung into view, black sudden shadows just outside the frames, spitting fire and screeching to a stop. Gradie dropped to the floor in a reflex, the self saving his life.
While the truck had come charging down the center row, another group had swooped in on ATVs from behind the strip of shops to the left and hopped the curb before the cops had time to see them.
It was quick and awful, even though Gradie could only see half of it with his face pressed to the linoleum.
The two ATVs came screaming up the sidewalk from the left, two riders each, and the passengers half standing on the back fired short-barreled ARs and Dracos in full auto. Rounds sparked off the concrete, scraped paint off the cruisers in long spears, and disappeared oddly into the blue-black uniforms. It was like an old action movie. No blood or gore at all. Just muzzle flash and sparks and falling bodies. One cop, at the far end of the group, managed to throw himself behind his car screaming, but the rest died quietly. The passengers ran dry before the drivers hit the brakes, but that hadn’t been an end to the shooting. The drivers drew pistols out of chest holsters just as soon as the ATVs rocked to a stop and mag dumped into the men falling in front of them.
In another odd silence, the gunmen sat calmly dropping empty mags and grabbing at ammo pouches as the truck moved down the lot.
Gradie watched them for half a second before he remembered something.
“Oh.”
He said it out loud as he got up. One of the gunmen looked over at him through the empty window frame and clawed at his mag pouch. It didn’t matter. Gradie had never holstered his pistol.
The Five-seven has a lot of three things and almost none of a fourth; Muzzle flash, noise, ammo (twenty in a magazine, thanks Belgium), and recoil. Gradie put five rounds into the two riders of one of the ATVs before they realized he existed. The flash was amazing, reflected in the windows of the cruisers and all the million little pieces of glass scattered everywhere. The other two gunmen grabbed their magazines as Gradie turned the pistol on them. The driver never had a chance, seemingly having forgotten which side he had put his pistol magazines on. The backseat shooter would have just about gotten his magazine home and had the bolt dropped by the time Gradie got done shooting the driver out from under him, but something magical happened.
He froze, made a face like Gradie was casting spells and kept it like that while Gradie put three shots around his belt, just below his plate carrier. The last two shots through his face cleared the expression away, but Gradie felt afterward that if he were to go over to the body and wipe all the blood and gore off the face, it would still be looking at him like he had confessed to being a vampire.
“Huh,” Gradie said to no one as the bodies collapsed. He heard the shuffling sound of the cop that had gone around the other side of the car, then remembered the truck. Rather, the truck reminded him of its presence. Its passengers opened fire at him through the windows of the police cruiser.
“Shit!” He dropped down flat on the ground as the air cracked and screamed above him. A bag of caramel popcorn got knocked off one of the impulse-buy racks near the register about five yards away, and he thought that this is what it must sound like to be inside a bag as its being microwaved.
Suddenly, another gun hissed into the air from the west side of the lot and rounds cracked outside the window.
“Watch the crossfire.” Lindsey’s voice came through the earpieces clear as an asmr video and Gradie looked stupidly around for her.
“Sure thing miss.” Luke’s gun joined Lindsey’s with his distinctive bursts of “semi-auto so fast it's almost full auto” fire and Gradie lay there, leisurely loading a new magazine, and enjoying the noise. The metal sounds of rounds striking the vehicles. The barely audible crinkling of the glass. The very satisfying screams and thuds as the gunmen were themselves gunned down.
It gave Gradie a pause to piece together the flow of the shootout in his head, a habit he had picked up reviewing his training torture sessions with Philip.
Lindsey must have sped down the alley behind the store. By the time she got set up, Gradie and Luke had already killed a few of them and the shooters were too engaged to notice her lean around the corner of the building, probably using that small set of cement stairs Gradie had noted as they drove up, and she dropped three of them before the gunfire finished bouncing off the walls. The moment the rest of them pivoted to her, Luke popped up in the background like a gag and now they were just cleaning up.
Gradie slid the mostly empty mag into his pocket and the gunfire stopped. Sirens echoed in the distance, and someone nearby yelled into a radio.