Heist Online

by Victor Deckard

  She stepped up to the door that led to the back of the bank. However, before she could lean into the doorway to return fire, another burst of machine gun fire erupted. This one came from the opposite direction. The bullets thudded against the body armor the girl was wearing. The impact sent her to the floor.

  “Dang it!”

  Seemed like while the first cop had been distracting us, the second one had entered the building through the main door.

  To the right of the vault door was another wall. I crawled along it and peeked around the corner into the office. On the other side of the room was the second door. The player who had just shot Allison stood in the doorframe, aiming his assault rifle in our direction. Right in front of him were coils of barbed wire and one of the traps Allison had set. Yet he must have noticed them because he was taking care not to step on the trap.

  I brought the M4A1 around the corner, pointed the assault rifle at the cop, and squeezed the trigger. However, he noticed me in time and leaped back, disappearing somewhere in the lobby.

  Since the wall between the office and the lobby was reinforced as well, there was no point in firing at it. So I unleashed another short burst of fire through the door to the lobby on the off chance that some of my bullets might hit the player.

  I then ceased fire and quickly rose from my crouch. I was about to run across the room toward the door to the lobby, but Flynn stopped me.

  “Striker, wait,” he said.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw him watching me. I also noticed that Allison had already crawled toward the medic bag to use it again.

  “You two stay here and deal with the first cop,” Flynn said. “I’ll take care of the second guy.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  “Yeah.”

  Flynn jogged to the corner of the wall and peeked around to make sure the second cop wasn’t aiming in this direction at the moment. He then quickly checked the feed from the surveillance cameras on his cell phone.

  “I don’t know where he is, but I’ll find him,” he said before dashing around the corner and jogging toward the door to the lobby.

  Allison had already healed herself by this point. She cast a glance at me and said, “Sorry, there’s only one charge left.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Let’s deal with the first cop.”

  She nodded and we stepped to the door to take up positions on either side of it. I thrust my head around the jamb and peeked through the doorway into the back of the bank. There were the stairs leading to the roof. To the left of the stairs was the corridor that ran toward the back door. The cop was nowhere to be seen.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. “Probably he––”

  A burst of fire erupted from somewhere. The clatter of the weapon being fired was closely followed by the sound of glass shattering.

  “He’s on the roof,” Allison shouted.

  I looked up and through the now broken roof window saw the cop standing on the roof and firing his machine gun down at me. The full metal jacket rounds struck the wall behind me. Plaster dust erupted from it. Luckily, none of the bullets hit me.

  Allison and I whipped our weapons up and unleashed two streams of fire. The player on the roof instantly dropped out of sight.

  “Did we hit him?” Allison asked.

  “Don’t know. Probably.”

  “We gotta make sure he’s dead.”

  As we got to our feet, I heard a sudden outburst of automatic fire coming from the lobby. Then Flynn’s voice came through my earpiece.

  “Dammit, he got me,” he said. “I’m downed, guys. Sorry, I let you down.”

  I looked at the girl and said, “I’m gonna help him. You go upstairs and finish the cop on the roof.”

  She nodded and burst into the back of the bank. As I ran across the office toward the lobby, I said, “Flynn, I’m coming for you.”

  “Be careful,” he whispered. “I don’t know where he is. He tossed a smoke grenade. I don’t see shit. Don’t know if he can see through the smoke. I’m trying to crawl into the teller room.”

  As I was nearing the door to the lobby, I saw coils of dense gray smoke wafting in through the doorway.

  I burst into the lobby and crouched. The smoke filled the whole room. Due to the clouds of smoke slowly floating in every direction, visibility was reduced to only a few feet.

  I started to walk toward where I assumed the teller room was.

  “Flynn, you still alive?” I whispered.

  The sound of echoing gunfire reached my ears from the left. One of the rounds hit me in the left shoulder, whirling me around and spinning me to the floor. I rolled on my back, whipped my assault rifle up, and unleashed a stream of fire.

  “Striker, I hear someone shooting nearby,” Flynn said. “Is that you?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. I wasn’t sure where the enemy was, so I swept the M4A1 back and forth hoping as hell that some of my bullets would hit the enemy.

  Suddenly, my assault rifle ran dry.

  “Striker, do you copy?” Flynn asked.

  The return fire ripped through the air toward my direction. I rolled to the right, the enemy’s bullets thudding into the exact spot where I had been a moment earlier.

  “Can’t talk, a little busy right now,” I shouted as I tried to reload the M4A1 as fast as I could.

  The rounds kept dancing all around me, bouncing off the floor and whizzing by my ears.

  “Okay,” Flynn said. “Have fun. Don’t want to impose or anything. I ain’t going somewhere anytime soon, so if you manage to find a minute for me, I’m in the teller room, lying on the floor, bleeding out.”

  At this moment, I wanted nothing more than to smother him.

  The enemy’s rounds kept zipping past me. I slammed a fresh mag into the well, worked the bolt, and brought the M4A1 up. I squinted into the swirling gray clouds, trying to pinpoint the player’s location. The outline of a human figure seemed to appear in the smoke right in front of me.

  He must have detected me lying on the floor as well because we started to fire at each other simultaneously. Two of his bullets ripped into my chest, each taking 25 points from my Health. My short burst caught the player right into the face, the force of the impact propelling him backward. He went down with a thud, disappearing from sight in dense smoke.

  I leaped to my feet and walked forward, the M4A1 pointed at where the body of the player had to be lying. The player came into view only when I walked to within a couple of feet of him.

  He was alive but downed. Since he couldn’t get up, he was slowly crawling backward, trailing a crimson streak along the floor. When he saw me, his right hand went for the pistol in the holster on his right hip. I instantly put his head in my iron sights, curled my index finger around the trigger, and took up the slack.

  Yet the downed player was having a hard time drawing his pistol. His handgun wouldn’t slide out of its holster. Still, the player continued to try to draw his pistol. He might not know that a downed player not only couldn’t get to their feet but they also couldn’t use weapons.

  I put pressure on the trigger, snapping off a short burst of rounds that drilled into the player’s skull. He slumped to the floor, dead.

  Then I turned around and felt my way to the corridor that led to the teller room. Once I pushed the door open and walked inside, I saw Flynn lying on the floor in the pool of his blood.

  “You still alive?”

  “Barely,” he rasped. “I have a few more seconds before I bleed out to death.”

  I quickly reached down with my left hand. When Flynn took it, I pulled him to his feet.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “How many HP do you have?”

  “Only thirty percent,” he replied. “After you help a downed player get up, they has only thirty percent of their Health.”

  “There’s one charge left
in the medic bag,” I said. “You can use it to heal yourself.”

  “What about you?” He asked looking at my blood-covered clothes.

  I glanced at my user interface. Since the player in the lobby wounded me three times, with each bullet of his taking 25 points from my Health, I had only twenty-five points of my Health left.

  “Dang it,” I said. “One more bullet and I’m a dead man.”

  “Striker, listen,” Flynn said suddenly.

  I pricked up my ears for any sounds. However, it was all quiet.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I said.

  “Exactly. The drill stopped working.”

  Only then did I realize that the noise the drill had caused was gone now.

  “It must’ve finished,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We walked from the teller room, went along the corridor, and entered the lobby. By this time, the smoke had dispersed somewhat, improving the visibility. I saw that several hostages were still quietly lying on the floor.

  We returned to the vault only to find out that the vault door was still closed.

  “What the heck,” I muttered as we walked up to the drill. I glanced at the screen. It read 00min14sec. The timer was frozen for some reason.

  “Why has it stopped counting down?” I asked.

  Before Flynn could reply, we heard the sounds of footsteps behind us. We whirled around to see Allison walk in the room through the door. She looked disappointed.

  “Where have you been?” Flynn asked.

  “On the roof.”

  “Have you finished the last player?” I asked.

  “No,” the girl sighed. “Didn’t find him. He got away from me somehow.”

  “Seems like he outsmarted you somehow,” Flynn said as he walked up to the drill. “Cops can’t destroy drills, but they can cause them to stop working. While you were looking for him on the roof, he hid somewhere, then came here, and turned off the drill.”

  Flynn punched a button on one side of the drill and it started working again.

  “The door will open in less than ten seconds,” he said.

  “Good,” I replied. “So who’s gonna use the last––”

  I stopped talking when I saw that the medic bag had disappeared.

  “It’s gone!”

  Allison and Flynn looked at the table. The girl was astonished by the sight. Flynn, not so much.

  “The player who killed the drill must have used the medic bag as well,” he said.

  “Yeah, had to be him,” I said. “We wounded him at least one time.”

  Allison’s face darkened. She looked at me and asked, “Did you kill the player who downed Flynn?”

  “Yep.”

  “So there’s only one player alive now. I can go look for him while you secure the money.”

  “How’s your Health?”

  “I’m good,” she said. “Seventy-five HP. More than enough.”

  The drill finally stopped working. The huge door slowly swung open to reveal the bank vault. In the middle of the room were stacked bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

  “So can I go?” Allison asked. “Can’t wait to deal with that last bastard.”

  The girl hefted her powerful squad automatic weapon.

  “Negative,” I said. “Flynn has only thirty HP left and I have only twenty-five of that left. Moreover, the player we killed first might’ve revived already. So we had better stay together. Cover us while we secure the money.”

  I took Allison’s bag and stepped into the vault. Flynn who had entered it a minute earlier was already grabbing the bundles and tossing them into his bag. I slung the M4A1 over my right shoulder, dropped the Allison’s and my bags to the floor and joined in with securing the money.

  Allison stood near the open vault door, watching the feed from the cameras on her cell phone. She had the SAW hanging by a strap from her left shoulder, her left hand resting lightly on the weapon.

  It wasn’t long before we had all the money stowed away in the three bags. As I slung one bag over my left shoulder, I looked around the place. There were lots of deposit boxed lining the walls.

  Flynn spotted me studying them and said, “They are locked, Striker. We could’ve picked them open had we not blown the stealth. But now then the cops are on top of us, we better not risk our lives bothering with them.”

  “Okay. Let’s get outta here then.”

  I lifted Allison’s bag off the floor, Flynn slung his across his shoulders, and we left the vault. When we walked up to the girl, I handed her bag over to her, then gestured at her cell phone, and asked, “Have you located them?”

  “Affirmative,” she replied. “The two of them are standing in front of the main door.”

  “They must’ve decided just to wait for us to come out,” Flynn said. “Once we are out of the building, they’ll open up on us with everything they got.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s the third one?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” Allison replied. “Couldn’t find him. Probably he ain’t revived yet.”

  “So how do we get outta here?” Flynn asked.

  “We can take the back door or the side entrance,” Allison suggested.

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” Flynn said. “My car is on the other side of the street. Ditto for Striker’s. Your car is too far away from the bank as well. To get to them, we’d need to go past the cops anyway, so there’s no point in taking the back door or the side one.”

  “So what do we do then?” Allison inquired.

  Flynn looked at me. “It’s your call, Striker.”

  “We’re gonna go out the main door,” I said.

  “What? But they’re waiting for us there,” Allison.

  “I seemed to have thought of some sort of a plan.”

  “What’s that?”

  I told them what I had come up with.

  Flynn nodded approvingly. “That’s a good plan, Striker. I like it.”

  “Wow,” Allison uttered. “We’re really the bad guys, aren’t we?”

  We walked into the lobby and stopped. We still had a few hostages lying on the floor with their hands cuffed behind their backs.

  We looked at one another and nodded. We then pointed our guns at the NPCs and started shouting, “Get up! Everybody get up and run for that door! Fast! Fast!”

  The civilians jumped to their feet, made a break for the main door, and raced out into the street. Allison, Flynn, and I followed them on their heels.

  Once outside, the NPC started to run in different directions. The two cops didn’t immediately realize what was happening and opened fire on the crowd. Only when three of the civilians collapsed to the ground, our enemies held their fire. By this time, we had already crossed the street and were making for Flynn’s sedan as quickly as we can.

  “Don’t let them get away,” one of the cops, seemingly the leader, shouted.

  The other one opened up with his assault rifle. The NPCs had already scattered somewhat, but one of them got in the line of fire and dropped dead when a stray bullet drilled into her skull. The cop instantly disappeared. Seemed like he had killed three civilians in a row and had been punished for that. According to Flynn, he wouldn’t revive until after a few minutes.

  We reached Flynn’s car. He and I opened the front doors and threw our bags onto the back seat. Allison followed suit but instead of getting in the car, she turned around. There was only one cop behind us––the one who had killed the drill and depleted my medic bag.

  Now that the odds were three to one, he started to run away. Allison dropped to a knee, brought up her squad automatic weapon, and unleashed a devastating stream of fire. The first burst hit the player in the legs, mowing him down. As he tried to get up, Allison cut loose with another long burst of harassing fire, stitching the cop from the crotch to the neck, the impact sending the player on his back.

  “Got him,” Allison said proud
ly as she rose from her crouch.

  There was no sign of the third player. He either hadn’t revived yet or had hidden himself somewhere.

  The girl wanted to get to her car on the other side of the street, but Flynn stopped her.

  “No,” Flynn shouted to her. “We’re gonna get away outta here in my car.”

  “What about mine?”

  “We’ll return here after we’ve carried the money to the van.”

  He climbed in behind the steering wheel, I got in the front passenger seat, and Allison got in the back of the car. As soon as we slammed the doors close, Flynn pulled away from the curb with a screech of tires and barreled down the street away from the bank we had just robbed.

  We glanced back every now and then to check if there was a tail. Still, the third player didn’t show up. A few minutes later, after we got far away from the bank, all three of us got a message revealing the location where the van would be waiting for us.

  Although we could finally relax, we didn’t put our balaclavas off yet.

  “There ya go,” Flynn said.

  Allison expressed her emotions more openly.

  “We did it, guys,” she cried out happily. “We actually did it! Hooray!”

  “Yeah,” Flynn said as he guided the car through an intersection. “Good job, everyone. Although, technically, the job ain’t done yet. We need to get to the van first and then––”

  I caught a glimpse of a movement on our right and the next second a big black pickup truck smashed into the right side of our sedan. The force of the impact was so powerful that our vehicle went cartwheeling and ended up on its roof. Flynn and I went hanging upside down, suspended by our seat belts. Allison hadn’t been buckled in to begin with, so she tumbled down.

  Before we knew what was happening, three players––two guys and one girl––wearing skull design masks jumped out of the black pickup truck and jogged to our upturned sedan.

  “Don’t fucking move,” one of the players yelled at us. “Go for your bloody guns and you’re dead!”

  While the girl covered the three of us with what looked like a Kriss Vector, the other two players leaned in and dragged the three bags with money through the broken windows. Then the three of them got back in their black vehicle and tore off, leaving rubber marks on the asphalt.