Chemical Burn (38 page)
Authors: Quincy J. Allen
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary Fiction, #Dystopian
The other man, his face covered in blood and still stunned by the hail of bullets that had entered the wall right by his ear, never saw the butt of the rifle crash into his temple. His body hit the floor. Xen stepped back and looked at the man still doubled over in the elevator. Then he looked at the M-16 in his hands, suddenly aware that he held it. The burst he fired caught the guard directly in the chest.
Ears still ringing and completely deafened, Xen turned and ran for the opposite corner of the second floor.
“I’m okay,” Xen said, breathing heavily. “Three down in the elevator.”
O O O
I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard Xen’s voice. “Marsha, open an upper window for Mag,” I said calmly, but dread gripped my insides. A machine gun burst from somewhere below the two women sent ricochets bouncing throughout the upper structure. Then the garage door blocked my view, sealing me in. A standard-sized steel door stood to the right of the garage door, but I still had to get my evidence, kill DiMarco, and set the fuse.
“I’m hit,” Marsha said calmly but in a strained voice. “Rachel, you got that guy?”
O O O
Rachel had already moved down the stairs and made her way around the corner two flights below Marsha. She spotted the man with the M-16 and fired her Glock twice into his back.
She heard a sound behind her and ducked, spinning reflexively as a two foot crowbar crashed into the steel wall of the tower beside her. A big man crashed into her, slamming her into a thick steel support column holding up the outer walkways of the tower. Her Glock clattered down onto the steel grate flooring.
She gasped for air, but before she knew it, her elbow came down onto the man’s collarbone with a resounding
CRACK!
He howled in agony. Her hands dropped down to his hair, grabbing tight. She lifted his head and then brought his face down hard into an upcoming knee that crushed his face. She lifted his head again and brought it down into her other upcoming knee with a sick, wet crunch. She twisted hard, planting her feet, and heaved his limp body into the railing. His body slithered over the side, followed a few seconds later by dull thumps against steel piping.
O O O
I heard a body boom as it fell from the tower and hit the piping outside. I was terrified it might be one of the ladies. “Everyone check in,” I hissed.
“I’m good,” Xen whispered.
“Mostly good here,” Marsha said calmly, but I could tell she was in pain.
“Fine here,” Rachel said, gasping somewhat.
“Hey, there’s something behind the limo!” one of the guards yelled from atop the inner building in front of the limo.
“Everyone out. NOW.” I whispered urgently.
O O O
Xen triggered the detonator. A ten-foot arc of light flashed across the fence, accompanied by a loud bang that echoed throughout the facility. The detonation filament cut a hole in the fence, and the severed circle of chain linking collapsed to the ground.
An M-16 burst came over the radio when Xen shot out the back window directly above the dumpsters at the back of the office building. The rifle clicked, empty, so he threw it aside.
He pulled the Glock and dropped onto the steel lid of the dumpster with a massive
BOOM!
Jumping down, he hit the ground running and sprinted through the cut section of fence. He raced across the sand at full speed. The back door of the building slammed open behind him, and two men shouted for him to stop.
O O O
Rachel turned around to look at the man who had first swung at her. He’d exchanged the crowbar for Rachel’s Glock, and pointed it at the center of her chest. Fear clutched at her guts, and she tasted copper.
“That vest ain’t gonna help you much when I shoot you in the face,” he said as his arm rose.
The first triple-burst from Marsha’s Beretta hit him just forward of the elbow, slamming his arm downward and forcing the Glock to go off into Rachel’s side. The next triple-burst caught him in the lungs, heart and head as Marsha let the recoil lift the barrel.
Rachel bounced off the railing and hit the steel deck, clutching at her side and gasping for air. It felt like someone had hit her with a sledgehammer, and she couldn’t catch her breath.
Marsha came down the last few steps, limping as she stepped over the man she’d shot. Both women heard footsteps running up the stairs behind Marsha. She turned and fired another burst from the Beretta, and the rounds ricocheted off the steel railing. She heard a yelp from below, and a man screamed. She quickly stepped up to Rachel and did her best to help her up.
“Come on, baby, we have to go back up,” Marsha said. Rachel nodded and slowly got to her feet. Her breath slowly came back to her, but her whole side hurt. The two of them scrambled up the stairs. Marsha flipped the selector of her Beretta to full auto and emptied a clip down the stairs below. She heard men scrambling as she changed out the empty clip for a full one. They got to the top, and Marsha picked up Whisper. She set the barrel on the railing and scoped out the compound.
“Marsha,” Rachel said, pulling at her arm. “You heard him. We have to go.”
“But I can bag a few more,” Marsha said confidently, despite a bullet in her leg.
“We have to go,” Rachel said in a calm but commanding tone.
Marsha’s face went from stern to one of defeat. Her shoulders slumped slightly, and she hefted Whisper off of the railing.
“That’s it, Rachel,” I whispered over the comm. “Call Yvgenny as soon as you get back. He can get a doctor for Marsha. Don’t worry, I got this.
Trust me
.”
“I do,” Rachel said, sounding more confident than she probably felt. The two women stepped up to the door. Rachel lifted the sign covering the palm reader, ran through the combination, pushed the door open, and lowered the sign again. She helped Marsha through and then closed the door behind her.
O O O
Xen saw the shadow of his body in front of him as one of the men trained a flashlight on his back. He ran harder, pushing himself to the limit, trying to at least make the cover of the ridgeline. The scream of a bullet zipped by his waist, the crack of the gun shot coming right on top of it. Another scream-crack of a bullet went by him. He was almost there, another thirty feet to the ridge. Xen’s left leg lifted up from underneath him, breaking his stride, and the crack of the gunshot that brought him down filled his ears. The Glock went flying out of his hand into the darkness, and hot pain screamed through his thigh as he spun and dropped into the sand.
Xen rolled on his back and scooted backwards up the hill away from the men now walking towards him, wincing with each move as his leg bled. The two guards approached slowly. One guard held a flashlight that blazed in Xen’s eyes. The other held an M-16 casually across his belly.
***
Crap in a Hand Basket
I quickly scanned what little of the lab I could see from behind the limo, which wasn’t much, and I heard the four men on the roof of the lab, fanning out. No Smoking and Flammable signs were set on almost everything, and I flashed back to what Xen had told me about the volatility of damn near every container in the building. I briefly considered charging the four guys with the machine guns, but the odds were one of two things would happen.
Option one was that one of about a hundred bullets would hit that sweet spot in the middle of my skull, and I wouldn’t get to kiss Rachel again. The other option was that one of the bullets would ricochet into something flammable and we’d all go up together, in which case I wouldn’t get to kiss Rachel again.
I rejected both options as unacceptable. If I absolutely, positively had to pick one of the two, I’d go for the second option, because I
really,
really
wanted to kill DiMarco, but I wasn’t close to making that kind of decision … yet.
Looking down, I noticed that everything sat on heavy-duty steel grates, with a concrete sub-floor about six inches beneath my feet. A panel of light switches lay to my right just this side of the standard door. One length of conduit ran up from the panel, over the garage door and straight into an electrical panel on the far wall behind about thirty more drums marked flammable. A series of other conduits shot straight up the wall and spread out to all of the lights in the ceiling on this side of the building. There was also a panel to open the garage door next to the light switches. I heard a car door open behind me and peeked quickly around the driver’s side of the limo. Four more men with machine guns walked out of the inner lab building. I saw a giant bank vault to the left of the lab and concluded that’s where they keep the raw coke and meth. A plan popped into my head, and I had to move now.
I opened myself to the darkness and let Jalin take hold. Putting my hand around the vlain, I smiled as it spun up. I reached into a pocket and grabbed a flash-bang just as the driver figured out that the engine was still running. The driver put it in gear with a
CLUNK
of the transmission …
presumably reverse
, I thought. I pressed the buttons on either side of the ball and tossed it over the car.
Three things happened at once: the flash-bang went off, blinding the shooters; I darted to the right, raising the vlain; and the engine revved crashing the limo into the reinforced garage door and stalling it out. Three machine guns opened fire at the area near the back of the limo where I had been, the bullets bouncing easily off of the heavily armored car.
Men shouted to cease fire and something about explosions and stupid fuckers. That’s when I slashed the vlain through each of the conduits above the light panel. The front half of the building went into darkness, and I dashed behind the blue, plastic 55-gallon drums stacked in the corner. The driver tried to fire up the limo, but it wouldn’t start. I heard a window open on the limo.
“Stop shooting and use your fucking tasers, you morons!” Gino screamed from inside the car. “You want to kill us all?” The driver tried to start the limo again and failed. They all slung their rifles and pulled tasers from their belts.
I took the stiletto blade of the vlain and slowly pressed it into the side of one of the drums about two inches above the steel grate flooring. It slid in slowly, the hyper-vibrating blade easily working its way through the plastic. I wiggled it around to create a bigger opening. The semi-sweet fumes filled my nostrils. I worked faster, punching holes in seven more drums. I heard men moving in the darkness. I peered through a gap in the barrels. Three of the four men on top of the building moved towards the stairs near the vault, and the four from the lab spread out around the drums where I hid.
“Hey, do you guys smell that?” one of the men asked, but it was exactly too late for all of them.
I moved, nothing more than another shadowy blur in the darkness, stepping up to the first guard. I grabbed the hand with the taser and slashed up with the vlain from crotch to throat, opening him up. I stepped to the left, putting the disemboweled guard between me and my next victim. He gurgled as his mouth filled with blood, and the next man in line pivoted and fired the taser. I let go as the taser shot into the gurgling man’s back. His body stiffened, blood spurting in a fountain from his gaping chest and coating me in slick crimson.
Fast as a cobra, I reversed direction, stepping around the upright corpse and bringing the vlain down across the second man’s wrist. The hand came free, and I hit him in the chest with a hard palm strike, shoving him backwards into the next man in line. They tumbled down together in a heap, and the handless man screamed. I leapt to the right towards the drums as the fourth man’s taser went off. The prongs shot by me and ricocheted harmlessly off the curved side of a drum.
I placed my foot on the side of a barrel and pushed up hard, lifting off the ground and coming down with a diagonal swipe across the fourth guard’s chest from shoulder to abdomen. I saw the third man untangling himself from the handless one, so I spun to my left, bent down and punched him hard three times in the forehead. The spikes tore through his skull into his brain, pressing deeper with each blow, and then the untangling stopped.
I looked up and took stock of the situation. Three of the remaining four men were on the steps, one at the top, one in the middle and one on the bottom, and all of them scanning the shadowy corner of the building blindly for a target. The fourth man stood by himself on top of the lab, highlighted by lights at the back of the building.
I pulled another flash-bang out of my pocket. I’d be safe from a fire as long as it didn’t bounce back down near the floor. Priming it, I closed my eyes and tossed. With a
BANG!
it blinded the man on top of the building and the one at the top of the stairs. I dashed across the floor towards the stairs.
The imbecile had turned to see what had exploded, and the stiletto of my vlain entered silently into the back of his head, protruding out through his mouth. I wrenched it out with a gruesome twist, grabbed his lifeless body, pivoted, and pushed away from him as a taser barked. The man on the middle of the stairs stepped back in fear, but I was already moving up the far steps towards the blinded man on top. For a brief moment the lights at the back of the warehouse outlined my camouflaged body.
A taser I hadn’t accounted for sounded off behind me as I reached the top of the stairs, the vlain raised to kill the man in front of me. I felt the prongs sink into my back, and my body went rigid as electricity coursed across my hypersensitive nervous system. My momentum carried me past the man I’d intended to kill.
Reaching the end of the taser cables, the prongs ripped out of my back as I fell over the side of the building, losing consciousness.
“I GOT HIM! I GOT THE SON-OF-A-BITCH!” Gino’s driver shouted from the open car door.
The man on top of the lab looked down at my shadowy, motionless form. “What the fuck is that?” he said, looking down at a mottled, nearly transparent outline.
O O O
Xen stared at the men before him, standing a short distance from the crest of the hill. The flashlight shone at his feet, so he could almost make out their faces. His heart pounded, his head spun, and his leg below his right butt cheek throbbed with pain. The thought occurred to him that people always say their lives flash before their eyes when they’re about to die. All he could think about was how much his ass hurt.
“Thought you were gonna make it, didn’t you?” the guy with the flashlight said in a whiny voice. “Too bad my buddy here is a crack shot.”
The man with the rifle smiled wickedly as the barrel of the M-16 drifted towards Xen.
Xen stared at the gunman, eye-to-eye, not willing to show any fear. His stoic face turned to one of surprise as the man’s eyes exploded outward, and the left side of his skull came apart, splattering his friends head and shoulder with blood and brains. The guy with the flashlight turned his face directly into the round that blew out the back of his skull. A figure with night vision goggles and a desert Ghillie suit came out of the darkness and stood above Xen, staring down at him for a few seconds.
“Here, put this on it,” the woman said with a familiar accent, dropping a combat bandage into his lap. Her voice was muffled, but Xen swore he recognized it.
A low growling rumble rose out of the darkness behind the shooter who spun quickly. She raised the rifle, her head swiveling to find what had made the sound.
Xen recognized it immediately. “Don’t shoot! Please!” he shouted. The rifle lowered, and the shooter turned to him. “She’s with us, I swear … Mag, come on over here.”
Mag, looking like a cougar, came slinking out of the darkness and took a position between Xen and the shooter, growling.
“It’s okay,” the shooter said. A gloved hand reached up and lifted the night-goggles and Ghillie suit so Xen could see her face.
Xen could only stare.
***