FORSAKEN: THE SYSTEMIC SERIES (23 page)

Another minute later, all of Jake’s soldier’s were at the defense of their tiny castle even though the first of the Three Families’ men had yet to fully reveal themselves.  But Jake and his men didn’t have to wait long.  The first wave of attackers soon swept out from behind the abandoned houses across the street from the pump station where they’d been sheltering while laying down a heavy amount of fire in hopes of softening up their target. 

Meanwhile, several pickup trucks and cars full of guys roared down the street from both directions.  One car, followed by a pickup truck rocketed towards the chain-link fence that surrounded the pump station.  As the lead car neared, it hit one of the pressure-sensitive explosive charges that Jake and his men had laid in the street.  The front of the car lifted upward as flames billowed from beneath it.  As it came back down, the front axle broke and the vehicle skidded to a stop.  The driver and guy in the passenger seat slumped dead while two other men stumbled from the backseat and fell in a daze out onto the pavement.

From upstairs Ava screamed, “Open up!” to the machine gunners on the second floor.  They sprayed the area around the car with fire, tearing the two survivors apart as they struggled to crawl behind their smoking and still flaming vehicle.

The pickup truck following them stopped about 15 yards behind the car’s smoke and flame-billowing carcass.  The driver angled it across the street’s center lines so that the men inside could shelter behind it while laying down fire at the pump station.

While this was going on, two pickup trucks approached from the opposite direction.  The first one hit another of Jake’s landmines with a right front tire.  The force from the ensuing blast pushed the pickup up onto its left two wheels and eventually sent it cascading over onto its side, spilling its contents of men that were riding in the back bed out onto the street.  One of Ava’s machine gunners swung around to make quick work of them.  The pickup behind it screeched its tires, breaking hard as it angled to a stop so it could provide cover from which its occupants could fight.  

Bullets being fired from the men behind the trucks began to ping off the pump station’s steel door and thud into its thick brick walls creating hundreds of little puff-clouds of dust as each bullet pock-marked the red-brick building.  Ava watched from the second floor.  Downstairs, Jake was yelling at the druggies as he walked around giving them little snorts of coke to get them psyched up for the fight.

Ava watched as dozens of men filtered between the houses across the street from the pump station.  She could also see an approaching SUV fitted with steel plates for additional protective armor.  It angled its way around the still-smoking car out front, and a second later, made a sharp right-hand turn, ramming the pump station’s front gate, and forcing it open.  Just as it entered the pump station grounds, it hit the final of Jake and Ava’s well-placed explosives.  The blast ripped several of the steel plates from the vehicle and stopped it in its tracks as it burst into flames.  Ava ran to the left side of the building to direct the fire of her machine gunner at the disabled SUV, but the action was unnecessary.  Both of her heavy machine gunners already had their fire trained on the SUV by the time she got there, and the addicts on the first floor had opened up through their firing portholes with a chaotic barrage as well.  The trapped occupants inside the stranded SUV had a decision to make – stay inside and be burned alive or try to escape and likely be mowed down.  As the doors opened and several men jumped out, it became obvious which they’d chosen.  Two of the men put up a feeble attempt at covering fire as the other two men attempted to make their retreat – but they failed miserably.  The wild fire that the addicts were laying down from the protection of the first floor, and the machinegun fire from the second floor, cut them down before any of them managed to fire off more than a few rounds.

Ava was somewhat surprised at how willing the men of the Three Families were to die and how poor their tactics had been thus far, but she had to remind herself, these were not trained professionals.  Like her own men, these were guys who tended to like guns, like to shoot things and blow stuff up, and who enjoyed violence.  While such characteristics were helpful in getting men to fight, they didn’t necessarily translate into good discipline and a well-trained, efficient, and cohesive fighting unit.  Most of these guys were thugs, and they acted – and fought – accordingly.  Ava wondered too, if some of these guys were drug addicts.  The Three Families very well could have chosen to employ tactics similar to her own in an effort to thin their ranks of some dead weight by deploying their dregs first to open up the station’s perimeter, while at the same time getting a read on how the pump station was defended before sending in their heavy hitters.

A similar type armored SUV was approaching from the right side of the street.  It didn’t make the same mistake as its counterpart; instead, it selected one side of the station’s perimeter fencing for its breakthrough.  In the process, it ripped a 30-foot gash in the fence, dragging the section along with a tangle of razor wire with it as it crashed through.  The location of the SUV was in a bad spot and Ava’s second-floor machine gunner on that side of the building was having difficulty getting a good angle on the vehicle.  She had Blondie covering that side of the building from the second floor too, but his fire alone wasn’t enough against the heavily armed men.  She stood in the second-floor lounge, looking at the television screen for the camera mounted on that side of the building.  She could see men jumping out of the SUV and taking cover around and behind it.  One man became entangled in the razor wire as he exited. Ava watched as he struggled to extract himself.  The razor-sharp blades slashed viciously at his legs, hands, arms, and finally as he tripped and fell to the ground, began to tear its way into his torso and face.  She winced and looked away from the man being sliced up like bologna and over to the other men around the vehicle.  She watched as one of the men took aim at the camera and fired. 

The screen she’d been watching went black.

Meanwhile, the men approaching from the houses across the street had made their way up to the vehicles lined up in front of the building and had taken cover behind and around them, adding fire to the intense barrage the pump station was already taking.  Suddenly Ava saw a flash of light from behind one of them, and moments later, an explosion rocked the front door.

She ran downstairs.  Jake was there along with Johnny Switchblade.  Smoke was billowing in from around the door, but it appeared to have held against the blast.

“I don’t think it’ll take another shot like that,” Switchblade yelled. 

“Get some of your men over here to cover the front door,” Jake called back.

Switchblade hustled off to collect a couple addicts that he lined up behind sandbag barriers they’d created in the hallway just inside the front door.

Ava hustled back upstairs to her gunners.  Just as she made it to the top of the stairs, there was another intense explosion.  As she entered the lounge area in which she had been just moments before, and ran across to the right side of the building, she saw that the area had been obliterated.  The window at which her machine gunner had been stationed was now just a gapping hole.  Pieces of her gunner were strewn around the room.  She saw his torso lying on the center of the floor.  The machinegun lay near where the window used to be.  She dashed inside the room.  Bullets were zipping off the bricks outside and some were plugging themselves into the room’s plaster walls.  She dove onto the floor, grabbed the machinegun, and slithered back to the room’s entry doorway.  From her position, she could see more pickup trucks with mounted machineguns pulling up outside.  She guessed that it was the second wave of the assault.  They just had to hold out a bit longer.  Things were going pretty much as she had expected.  She had guessed that the families would send in a light attack force first to probe for weaknesses and feel out where the heaviest defensive firepower was positioned.  Once they had those areas pinpointed, they would start focusing on them as they just had by taking out her machine gunner.  She figured that once they felt they’d softened the place up enough, they’d bring in their third wave and really start letting them have it, finishing them off quickly.  This was what she was counting on and was why she had held off on bringing all their forces to bear right at the beginning of the fight.

With the arrival of the pickups, she figured that it was close to time for the final assault.  She knew that they were risking being overrun if they waited too long.  A rocket propelled grenade exploded near where she’d stationed Blondie in the next room over.  She couldn’t see the damage but she could feel its impact from the shudder that ran through the building after the grenade hit.  She had no idea whether Blondie was okay or not and didn’t have time to check.  Another grenade hit downstairs a second later, knocking the building’s thick steel entry door off its hinges.  Ava could hear Johnny Switchblade and Jake shouting and then the men they had covering the front entrance open fire.  

It was time to open up the rooftop.

Ava dropped the heavy machinegun she was carrying and dashed up the stairs to where the Kill King and her third heavy machine gunner were crouched waiting behind their sandbag emplacements.  “
FIRE!
” she yelled.

The machine gunner let loose with a sickening barrage that immediately ripped through three men who were making a dash for the front entrance.  Meanwhile, the Kill King started doing some damage of his own.  First he took out the guy with the grenade launcher.  He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched.  A bullet ripped through the guy’s head, dropping him to the ground, and along with him, the launcher.  The King didn’t like to aim for the chest if at all possible due to many of the Families’ men wearing body armor.  He preferred a sure shot to the head whenever he could get it.

One of the grenade launcher guy’s buddies scrambled from behind the cover of a nearby vehicle to try to recover the weapon.  Just as he reached it, the Kill King took him out with a single shot too.  Then the King turned his attention to the SUV inside the pump station perimeter which presented the most immediate danger to the building being overrun.  With nearly a 360 degree view around the building, the King could pretty much have his choice of targets as long as they weren’t too close to the side of the structure.  But he had to act quickly before the attackers got a read on his position or before they got inside the pump station itself.  Bullets were already starting to pound into his defensive sandbags, and he could feel the heat of the attack turning towards him and the gunner laying down heavy fire beside him.                           

Through the SUV’s passenger-side window, he could see the head of one of the attackers crouched behind its open door.  He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched.  The SUV window shattered and the head disappeared from sight.  A second later, a body tumbled out from behind the door and lay motionless on the ground.

The King angled his rifle’s scope slightly to the right.  He couldn’t see another head anywhere, but underneath the driver’s side door he saw a knee planted in the ground as one of the defenders crouched for cover.  He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched.  His bullet ripped into the exposed knee.  A second later, a man sprawled out into the open from behind the door, writhing in pain.  Realizing that he was in danger, the man immediately began scrambling back to the cover of the SUV, but it was too late.  The King squeezed the trigger again, sending a round into the middle of the man’s neck, killing him instantly.

Suddenly an explosion erupted just below the King.  A grenade round had hit the building just below his position.  The heat from the blast rolled upward, burning his face, and the smoke temporarily blinded his one and only eye as he ducked for cover behind his sandbag emplacement.  He looked over beside him.  The machine gunner was staring at him with lifeless eyes, a hole in the side of his face.

King blinked hard and fished from his pocket a clean cloth he carried with him at all times to wipe his eye.  As he recovered his vision, he saw someone next to him push the body of the gunner aside and start firing the machinegun. 

It was Ava.

“Didn’t expect to see you here!” he yelled over the machinegun’s chatter, putting his rifle’s scope back to his eye.

“You know where that round came from?” Ava yelled, pausing her fire just long enough for King to yell back to her, “No!”

“Give me cover and I’ll find him though!” the King called.

Ava swept the vehicles in the street with gunfire, momentarily quelling the amount of return fire they were taking and giving the King the chance he needed to locate his target.

While he’d been focused on the SUV, someone had retrieved the grenade launcher from the dead man he’d dispatched just a minute earlier.  The guy was taking cover behind the first car that had been destroyed by one of Jake’s land mines.  The Kill King zeroed in on the man just as he stood to fire another round.  He drew a breath, held it, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched as a flash issued from the grenade launcher at the exact instant he fired his own shot. 

The man with the grenade launcher dropped to the ground, dead.  At the same time, there was a deafening explosion as the Kill King’s rifle was ripped from his hands.  Instantaneously, he was on his back and buried under sandbags.  There was grit in his mouth, his nose, his ears, and his eye.  He gasped for breath, choking on the dust and debris.  The weight of the dirt and sand in the bags momentarily pinned him in place and he struggled to free himself.