by Anthology
That may have been the plan, but the Meat Junkies quickly raised objections. Pouring into the disputed area on Thomas Street, they formed up on Dexter on the other side of the monorail line. Their foot soldiers were arrayed behind two heavily armored trucks and a phalanx of riders. From what I could see, they outnumbered us, but their weaponry could not match ours. This mixed group of Humans and Grunges was, nevertheless, not about to give up their turf without a nasty battle.
A loudspeaker mounted on one of the trucks spewed a guttural curse that could only have come from the throat of an Ork. "Dandelion wine gonna run in the streets if you Ancients ain't cleared out in a minute."
In response, we remounted our bikes. Wasp turned to shake his head at Sting. "No, you and your team stand down. It was your wish. You stay on your feet and watch our asses."
"But!"
"No buts, Sting. It was your call. Now live with it." Wasp dropped onto his Harley's seat and raised his right hand. He let it fall, and like an electrical switch, it jolted power through the Ancients. Motorcycles screaming like captive beasts, the Ancients surged into battle.
The Meat Junkies likewise charged forward. As the two lines closed, one Ancient sighted a LAAW rocket in on the lead truck. It burned a fiery course through the night, but missed its target.
The missile struck a bike and scattered it into flaming debris, but did nothing to slow the onrushing war wagon. Sparks glanced from the truck's armored front as Ancients sought to stop it with small arms fire. The truck merely shrugged off their bullets as if they were raindrops spattering off the back of a rhino.
The first truck blasted into and through the Ancient line, plastering one bike and rider like a bug on its front grill. Another bike exploded as a wheel rolled over its teardrop gas tank, and that set the truck's tires blazing. Ancients scattered from in front of the truck, then turned their weapons against it, stitching holes across the vehicle's poorly armored aft section.
The truck's mate never even made it to the Ancients' line.
Wasp slung his bike around and laid it down as gently as he could. His hands upraised, golden energy surrounded them with a magical nimbus. A sorcerous bolt of energy shot from his hands to skewer the armor plate on the driver's side of the cab. A second later, as the truck began to drift, a LAAW rocket struck it in the off-side wheel-well, blowing flaming rubber chunks all over Dexter. The truck's fender dug into the street, then the whole war-wagon pitched up in a somersault with a half twist. It came down hard, flattening its back before the gas tank exploded and sent up a column of flame taller than the surrounding buildings.
Sting turned her attention to the first truck as the Meat Junkies in it boiled out, guns spitting bullets as fast as the shooters could feed them magazines. Many of the Junkies hit the ground and didn't get up, but enough had Kevlar-lined clothes to keep them in the fray beyond the first couple of exchanges.
Sting's HK227 submachine gun steadily lipped flame. Instead of burning bullets with careless abandon, Sting picked her shots with deadly accuracy. When the passenger door opened on the cab, an Ork started to swing down, but jerked to a stop as three red holes opened in his chest. He slumped to the ground.
Midway down Dexter, the Ancients scythed through the Meat Junkie line. Bikes tangled as the two forces met head-on. Men and metal careened madly through the air as more than one Meat Junkie slid his bike into the Ancients. Like Cossacks driving their warhorses through peasant hordes, Ancients vaulted their bikes up over their foes, crushing Meat Junkies beneath them. Some Ancients did not survive the Kamikaze tactics, but the gaps opened in the Meat Junkie lines grinned back at us like a jack-o' lantern's smile.
Wasp pumped magical assault after magical assault into the Meat Junkie forces. The fireballs lit grunges into votive candles, while more magic darts savaged junkie bikers. Two other magickers joined Wasp in using magic to augment our physical weapons, but his tactical and strategic strikes were the most telling. He alone kept the small groups of Meat Junkies scattered and unable to mount a counteroffensive.
A heavy hand at my back pushed me forward, stumbling. I ducked and rolled, coming up with my Ingram ready to shoot whoever had touched me, but I kept my finger off the trigger. Tiny reeled back, twin holes ripped through his right shoulder, then tipped back over his own bike.
Concrete chips and lead splatter stung my face and hands as I leaped back behind my own bike. The shots had come from an upstairs window in the building across the way, and looking up, I caught a glimpse of a leather-faced grunge ducking back from the window. "Sting, up there! Ork sniper."
She gave me a wild smile.
"Waiting for a hunting license? Go get him."
I kicked Pearl. "Come with me."
"Me?" Pearl snorted. "In your dreams, Greenie."
Sting turned on him. "Go with him, Pearl. We'll cover you."
I snagged my pack from my bike and looped one strap over my left shoulder. "On three?"
Sting nodded. "One, two, three, go!"
I sprinted forward, then cut left as the sniper reappeared in the window. A fusillade chewed up the window casing and the bricks around it, forcing him back quickly. Though the sniper could not have gotten more than a brief look at the scene below, I had no doubt he knew we were coming after him. Pearl matched my speed as we hit the sidewalk, but I stopped and let him vault up the brownstone's stairs all by his lonesome. When no gunfire materialized to cut him down, I ran up and entered the foyer two steps behind him.
What might once have been a fine, single-family dwelling was now divided and subdivided into so many living units that it was more like a kennel than an apartment house. It reeked of urine, gunpowder, and decay; faded paint flaked off the walls like dead flesh. A fresh stream of blood running from the doorway to a body at the base of the stairs pointed out the final resting place of one of the Meat Junkies in the truck.
I ran to crouch by his body, then scanned up the stairs to the first landing. I gave Pearl an "all-clear" nod that sent him sprinting up to where the second flight began. He signaled me to come up, but I hesitated a second to be sure the grunge at my feet was truly dead. Pulling off his mask of rat-skin and chicken-flesh, I felt for a carotid pulse and found none.
Reaching Pearl's side, I motioned for him to head up to the next landing. He balked and insisted I go. I slipped my right arm through the pack's strap, firmly anchoring it to my back. Peering into the Ingram's open bolt, I saw bullets ready to be fired and cautiously mounted the stairs.
Sweat started at my temples and rolled relentlessly down my cheeks as, step by step, I headed up. Unlike the first flight, these stairs opened onto a corridor that led back the length of the building. Any of the ramshackle doors could pop open, disgorging a whole gang of Meat Junkies. Making it worse was the fact that I had to divide my concentration between what might lurk above and wondering whether Pearl was about to shoot me in the back. It did nothing to bolster my confidence.
I bobbed my head up above floor level, then ducked down again as quickly as I could. I had seen nothing to suggest a trap, but the gunfire and explosions from outside provided enough competition that it was hard to be certain I had not missed something. I took another quick look, then took two more steps.
Again I saw nothing.
I had just turned to wave Pearl forward when the bullet hit me in the backpack. The impact tossed me across the stairway and bounced me off the railing on the far side. I hit hard and rebounded out of control. I dropped my Ingram, which clattered its way back down the stairs, me tumbling after it.
Clomping steps rushed toward me and the salty taste of blood made me panic. Adrenaline coursed through my body like lightning through a computer. Though my last somersault landed me flat on my back on the landing, I knew immediately what I had to do to avoid death.
My fist closed on the Ingram as the grunge appeared at the top of the stairs. Shoving the gun in his direction, I tightened down on the trigger. I made no attempt to fight the recoil, but just let it drag th
e gun upward. The bullets first tore into the stairs less than two meters below him, then sliced him open from groin to forehead.
Pearl looked over at me. "Blood in your mouth, not good. He must have gotten you bad."
"Dolt!" I spat and rose to a kneeling position. "The case was designed to protect what it contains from bullets and bombs. Kissing the rail put blood in my mouth." I ejected the Ingram's empty magazine and slapped a new one home. "Go!"
Seeing that my slow movements had gotten me shot, Pearl apparently decided that speed was the only way to outwit the Orks in the building. This worked beautifully for traversing my stairs again and then the next flight. but on the landing between the second and third floors, Pearl found himself trapped by the Ork sniper.
Pearl yelled for me to help him, but I hesitated. I'd seen the happy look on his face when he thought the Ork downstairs had mortally wounded me. If I let the sniper kill him, what would I lose but a watchdog? Then I thought a bit more. I would also lose my bait.
From my position on the lower stairwell, I determined that the Ork had to be just inside the doorway of the apartment to the left of the stairs. With Pearl's shrieks of terror echoing in my ears, I retreated and shot the lock from that apartment's mate on the floor below.
Darting inside, I saw a woman and her two, wide-eyed gutterkin children huddled on the floor. I motioned them to silence.
I answered the next burst of fire from above with one of my own.
The Ingram's bullets tunneled up through plasterboard and plywood, covering the ceiling with powder burns. I heard a thump from above, then ducked back out of the doorway before the blood raining down could touch me.
I sprinted up past a cringing Pearl and secured the third floor. I stepped over the Ork's body, then stooped to pick up his AK-97 assault rifle. Crossing to the window the sniper had used, I shrugged off my pack and studied the situation below. While doing so, I unbuckled the flap on my pack.
The fortunes of war had shifted more in the Ancients' favor. The Meat Junkies, reinforced by two more war wagons, had managed to pull two or three groups of their people together behind a makeshift barricade. The Ancients concentrated their fire and magic on that formation, confident that the Meat Junkies would pull out once they could regroup.
Pearl drifted toward the window but I pulled him back from it.
"Idiot, get down. Do you want to get shot?"
"No."
"Good. Now, go get me the sniper's body. Strip off his ammo harness and give me the AK mags."
"Why?"
I looked at him. "If you want us to win this little battle, do it."
He set about his grisly task as I popped open the case. Its stainless steel exterior showed a dented hole from where the bullet had hit, but the kevlar lining had caught the slug before it could damage my rifle or me. I pulled the rifle body from the foam pocket securing it, checked it quickly for any problems, then reached for the barrel.
As I screwed the SM-3's barrel to the body of the rifle, I caught my first glimpse of a massive ork goading the Meat Junkies on to great acts of heroics. Seeing him brandishing twin Uzis, the plan Wasp had not allowed me to share again flashed to mind. The trucks were just over 300 meters away, an easy shot with this gun and scope.
Down below, Tiny was up and moving again. He lumbered forward, his AK-97 smoking as he stabbed it into the face of a Meat Junkie and pulled the trigger. Yet even as he voiced a cry of triumph, I saw another Meat Junkie let slip the leash of a Barghest. Its unnerving yelp made Tiny hesitate, and in that moment of weakness, the infernal canine leaped for him, fangs bared and eyes as red as the fires of hell.
My brain instantly calculated the odds that I could bring the beast down before it killed Tiny, and the calculation said he would die. If he did not it was because, moving from the shadows, Sting intercepted the Barghest. The curved blades protruding from the back of her right hand sliced clean through the nightmare-hound. It slewed around and tried to snap at her just as its two halves were flying a meter or more apart.
"I got the ork, Greenie." His ammo harness landed at my feet. "What do I do with him?"
I nodded to the wall on the other side of the window. "Just stand him up there."
"But he's dead. He'll fall down."
"So hold him up."
Snapping the rifle's bipod into place, I looked up at the dead grunge Pearl was supporting. "Too bad you did not choose a more secure position from which to snipe, my friend. Right idea, wrong address, I believe they say." I pulled the collapsible stock into position and locked it down, then mounted the scope.
The flanking attack, led by Sting and Tiny, nibbled away at a junkie position, centimeter by centimeter. A junkie stuck the muzzle of a gun out and tightened down on the trigger. As his random fire punched a line of holes across Sting's chest, the Elf went down. I feared the worst for Wasp's rival, then I saw her roll to her feet and dive back behind cover. A second or two later, she was moving forward, albeit slower than before. The kevlar lining of her leather jacket must have saved her life.
The battle was by no means over and I wanted to make my contribution to the war effort.
"What are you doing?"
I slapped a magazine of.655 caliber bullets into the sniper rifle and rested the bipod on the lip of the window. "That's the Meat Junkie leader down there. If I take him down, they are done."
"Wiz, Greenie." Pearl murmured reverently.
I smiled. One gunshot and the gang would be leaderless. One gunshot and my position within the Ancients would be assured.
"Subdue the arrogant," I recalled the High Lord quoting Virgil as he exiled me for attempting to overthrow him. I settled the cross hairs on my target. I took up the slack in the trigger. "Subdue the arrogant, I shall," I breathed, stroking the trigger.
Pearl's jaw dropped. "What you did do, you… "
I swung the sniper rifle around and jerked the trigger. Pearl smashed flat back against the wall at the center of a gory sunburst, then flopped forward onto his slack-jawed face.
The ork started sliding toward me. I filled my left hand with the Ingram and triggered a full magazine, blasting him out through the window. His body slowly arced over and landed headfirst on the steps, then rolled to the sidewalk. Stunned, Ancients looked up to me and then off toward the center of the battlefield.
The first 900-grain bullet had taken Wasp in the bridge of the nose and blown what passed for his brains out through a gaping exit wound. The Ancients' magical assault stopped abruptly and the fighting slowed as if Wasp alone had powered it with his sorcery.
I appeared in the window and brandished the sniper rifle. "You want a sniper, Meat Junkies?" I screamed like a madman! "I give you a sniper!"
My first two shots reached the Meat Junkies' stunned leader before he could even think to find cover. The first clipped him in the left bicep, whipping him around, with only his jacket keeping the severed limb anywhere close to his body. The next bullet punched into his right hip, coring him from flank to flank. The force of the second shot tossed him like a doll and he rolled to a stop in the gutter.
The Meat Junkies, leaderless and confused, crumbled and retreated. Sting shouted sharp commands, directing Ancient outriders to chase the Junkies from our territory. From my position, I played guardian angel for her, picking off stragglers who wanted to make their mark by killing her. By battle's end, the Ancients knew who their new leader was and I approved of their selection.
For the time being, anyway.
Before the High Lord cast me out of Tir Tairngire for treason, he asked if I had anything to say in my defense. "Better to reign in hell, than to serve in heav'n," I quoted Milton. And reign I shall, one way or another, in this hell of the Sprawl.
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