by Justin Bell
The air inside the parking garage was thick and bitter with spent smoke, the walking already made dangerous by scattered spent shell casings. White light screamed into the garage, illuminating the floor and ceiling as bullets pounded another concrete railing just as Max dove over it and took cover behind it. Near the darkened shadows, where the fallen bodies of four Ironclad gunmen lay, Greer lumbered around another support column, raising his pistol and firing wildly. He didn’t hit anyone and without a support hand to steady his weapon, the bullets whined and careened off the walls several feet away from his intended targets. Snarling at himself he swung back around behind the support, bracing for return gunfire, though none came.
“Grab some cover, Becky!” Angel shouted, coming up on her right, his AR-15 firing its steady single-fire song. She let him grab her arm and start to drag her away, though she broke off momentarily to bring her weapon around to her left and fire at two approaching operatives, who scattered away.
“There are too many of them!” Fields shouted. “We need to spread out. If they flank this garage and move in, we’ll be sitting ducks!” Turning her head, she pointed at Greer. “Clancy, there’s a fire exit just behind you over there. Head on out, come around the front corner, see if you can get a better angle!”
Greer nodded and pulled back into the shadows, letting the darkness swallow him as he ran to the alternate exit.
“Angel, I need you to follow him out that door, but break left and work around the other side.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You won’t be. You could be saving all of our lives!” A bullet whined off the support column to their right, a smack of lead on stone chased by a petering echo. “Just GO!”
Angel pinched his lips closed, but pulled back, turned and hurled himself at the door as the floor behind him exploded with gunfire stitching lazy holes along its rough surface.
Rebecca turned back toward the narrow separation between the ceiling and the concrete barrier ringing the edge of the parking garage. Her eyes widened, and she felt a brisk, sharp chill race over her skin. The back door of one of the vans was open, and a man leaped out, carrying a large weapon in both hands. With her work in the FBI, she’d only been exposed to the bare minimum of military armament, but she knew an M32A1 multi-shot grenade launcher when she saw one. It was black brushed metal with a ridged barrel and massive round cylinder pressed between a front tactical grip and the trigger mechanism.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Rhonda! Get out of here!”
Rhonda glanced at Fields, not able to see what she was seeing, but sensing the urgency in her voice, then looked over toward Winnie and Max. “You two, scatter! Head out the north entrance!” she shouted, waving at another door on the far end of the first level garage. She turned and spotted Brad. “You, too! Move out that way, try to work your way around!”
“Mom we’re not ditching!” Max bent over and grabbed the duffel bag at his feet, trying to see if he could dig up some more ammunition.
“Go now!” Rhonda screamed.
Outside, she heard the dull whumps, a series of muffled impacts that drew her head around. Before she could even rationalize what was happening, a black sphere whistled into the empty space of the garage, trailed by a whirling stream of smoke. The sphere hit the floor with a plunk, rolled, then detonated, a slamming blast, deafening within the tight confines of the basement level of the parking garage. Blinding white burst from the source of the explosion, chased by smoke and the loudest sound Rhonda had ever heard. She could feel the concussive force slam her in the chest, knocking her backwards.
“Mom!” Winnie screamed.
Max spun toward the sound, staggering from the shock wave, though not knocked down. A second sphere tumbled end over end, clearing the basement level and just arcing over the concrete railing separating the passage ways. It exploded, the thundering crash knocking Phil and Max off their feet, flooding the entire empty space with a choking smoke and painful light.
Winnie and Brad turned and darted to the exit nearest them, Winnie looking back over her shoulder. Smoke obscured their vision, filling all the empty space in the garage. Winnie barely made out the prone forms of Fields, her mom and dad, and Max on the floor.
“Max! Dad! Mom!” Winnie shrieked, each name a higher and more strained pitch.
“Keep going!” Brad screamed, pushing into Winnie, shoving her through the exit door, out onto the grass.
Rebecca started to pick herself up, pushing up on hands and knees, her eyes flashed to Phil and Rhonda, then to an approaching horde of Ironclad soldiers. She struggled to eject her magazine and slammed a full one home, lifting the weapon to her shoulder, raising up on wobbling knees. Her ears rang, a constant, disorienting buzz rattling around inside her skull. She was the only one still upright and tactically equipped soldiers were pouring into the basement level, automatic weapons raised and ready.
The odds weren’t good.
She hesitated just long enough for Ironclad gunmen to come up on her blind side, and bring their weapons down in a swift, angled strike, clubbing her in the back of her head, knocking her to the concrete. Her temple smacked the floor, bursting bright pink starbursts in her eyes, then she swam in a deep ocean of pitch black.
***
“Move, Winnie, move!” shouted Brad, pressing his hand against her back and urging her across the grass toward the side street.
“Dad, Mom and Max are in there!” she nearly screamed, her ears still resonating with the thundering blast of grenade detonations. She looked back over her shoulder and could see smoke spilling out from the bottom level parking garage as tactically equipped operatives continued pouring over the grass and swarming the garage.
“Two more over there!” came a shout, and she turned in the other direction. Two Ironclad soldiers had them spotted as they ran across the road. Brad gave Winnie an extra shove, spinning with his Ruger in hand, and opened fire on the approaching soldiers, but they only hesitated, not falling as he had hoped. Winnie followed his lead with her Beretta, firing three times, and this time one of the men did go sprawling, but the second moved in, lifting his AR-15 and opening fire.
Brad ducked and moved left with Winnie cutting right, hitting the sidewalk across the road and dashing for the alleys which cut through surrounding buildings. They’d taken the north exit from the parking garage and angled around the Ironclad offices, burying themselves inside a thick grouping of brick buildings to the northeast of the Ironclad campus.
“Move into those alleys!” shouted Green as someone helped him to his feet, pale smoke swirling around him and stinging his eyes. He pointed off to where Winnie and Brad had separated, each one deviating their course slightly, running toward other buildings.
“They won’t leave the others, will they?” one of the men asked.
“What does it look like they’re doing?” Karl demanded. “Go find them and take them out!”
Over on the opposite side of the building, Greer shuffled against the parking garage wall, keeping his knees bent and his own pistol hanging loose at his hip. His head ached and his nostrils stung with the surrounding smoke, but he pushed through, trying not to think about what was going on inside.
“Greer! Hold up!” Angel shouted from his spot on the grass. When the grenades had detonated, the door behind him had been partially opened and the shock wave had thrown him roughly to the ground, hitting shoulder first, his AR-15 scattering away over the lawn. Greer was a good five yards away and made no motion toward him as if he hadn’t even heard his voice.
Angel shook his head, scrambling to his feet and crawled over, scooping the AR-15 from where he’d dropped it.
“Don’t do it!” came a shout from around the front, Angel torquing his head to the right and seeing uniformed gunmen marching toward him and Clancy Greer. Greer leaned against the wall of the parking garage and lifted his pistol, firing twice, and one of the lead gunmen stumbled and pitched forward into the ground. Two others rounded the cor
ner and bore down on the one-armed man, slamming him in the temple with the butt of a rifle while a second moved in and drilled him in the stomach with his own weapon, both working together and taking Greer down to the ground. He grunted in pain as they twisted his intact arm up around behind him and slammed him to the rough grass, shoulder first, his damaged arm bunching up underneath him.
Angel heard Greer screaming as he bolted left toward some nearby buildings, veering around the edge of the garage as gunfire barreled behind him and smacked out chunks of brick just to his left. He pressed his spine to the brick wall of the garage as more gunfire rattled off, spitting up chunks of grass and dirt to his right and knocking the wall apart. He swung around, bringing up the AR into a firing position and belted off a quick series of shots, then pulled back as return fire slammed toward him. A low, thrumming still echoed in the back of his ears, his head spinning slightly with the concussion of the grenades.
The grenades. Rebecca had been pretty close behind him, what had the grenades done to her? Was she laying there right now, bleeding out? Had they taken her captive or put her out of her misery?
“Go go go!” shouted Karl Green from the front of the garage and another soldier emerged from behind one of the vans carrying an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon. It was a beast, a handheld heavy machine gun capable of firing a sustained rate of 100 rounds per minute, or as fast as 800 rounds per minute, though that risked overheating. The soldier made for the front corner of the parking garage, curving around from where Greer was pinned to the grass, one of the soldiers kneeling on his back, pressed between his shoulder blades.
“He’s taking cover by the northeast corner!” barked the soldier, pointing toward the edge of the garage. The operative with the SAW ducked low, charging forward and lifting the large weapon to his shoulder. He drew up and swiveled, firing the 249, an exploding chatter of 5.56 millimeter rounds.
“Dios mio!” Angel shouted, breaking left, the concrete corner exploding in a shower of thick shards and bursting smoke. Jerking away he charged forward, running along the backside of the garage, hoping to make the next corner before the gunmen with the 249 came around. His heart rammed as he bounded forward, running harder than he remembered ever running before, not wanting to get a firsthand look at what happened to a human body when the SAW hit a direct target.
Green stood by the vans near the front of the parking garage, wiping sweat and soot from his bald head, his narrow eyes glaring into the garage where thick, billowing curtains of smoke crawled out, obscuring his view of what was inside.
“They’ve scattered, sir!” one of the gunmen said, coming up on his left. “The boy, the girl, and the other man.”
“I want them killed. Drag them down and execute every last one of them!” Green snarled, his mouth twisted in a scowl of rage.
“Sir?” a second man in tactical gear said, approaching him. He had a small handheld radio which he extended toward Green, a thick coil of cable connecting the device to a receiver on his tactical vest. “Urgent communication straight from the top.”
Karl narrowed his eyes as he took the radio. “This is Green.”
His chin tensed and firmed as he listened to the voice on the other end. The man with the radio could see his jaw clench and hear the soft grind of angry teeth pressing together.
“I have them at my mercy,” Green said in a low whisper. He listened for a few more moments. “Understood. Yes. I said I understood.”
He nodded one last time as he released the call button on the receiver and shoved it back toward the commando who had given it to him.
“I want them all found,” he snarled. “Find them and bring them to me.”
Chapter 9
Janus Hogarth had spent eight years in the United States Army before Karl Green had approached him to join up with Ironclad. He’d always envisioned re-upping at the end of his first two deployments and continuing on as long as the Army would have him. His parents seemed to be happy he was out of the house, he had no girlfriend or wife, and life in rural Tennessee wasn’t offering him much. Flying around the world with the opportunity to bust caps at some dirtbags? Seemed like a good way to live the next twenty years or so.
He was good at his job, a heavy machine gunner for the 4th Infantry Division, and he’d spent the majority of his formative years in the Army as a support gunner in Afghanistan and other hot spots throughout the middle east. He’d even gotten a sniff from the Army Rangers, but ultimately had decided not to go through their rigorous selection process. It had seemed too much like work.
Green had flown to his home outside Chattanooga and wowed him with promises of cash and excitement. A month later he left his spot with 4th Infantry, signing a lucrative freelance contract with Ironclad. For the most part, in the years since, Ironclad had been good to him.
So, when nuclear detonations shattered the nation’s infrastructure and brought his beloved America to its metaphorical knees, he’d agreed to continue working with Ironclad. He still had no family, he had no job, and besides sitting on his porch and drinking himself into a stupor, there wasn’t a lot more that life offered him. Ironclad gave him purpose. Green had reached out to him again, promising that he’d be helping to rebuild the nation’s security platform, one of the pioneers in a new generation of America’s domestic military machine. Hogarth barely even had to think about it; he signed right up and was in Chicago forty-eight hours later.
This was the first time he questioned what Ironclad’s true motives were. Seeing many of his friends and comrades charging from the black vans and opening fire on women and children made him do a double take, even when those women and children started shooting back. How was mowing down American citizens helping to rebuild the country’s security?
“They’re terrorists, Janus! Terrorists!” Green shouted. “They want to bring this great nation down!”
“That kid is like twelve!” Janus shouted back.
“Oh you never saw any kid soldiers in Iraq? Never saw any teenage suicide bombers? America is a different place now, Hogarth, we need to step up to the plate. Are you gonna step up, boy?”
“Yes, sir!” Hogarth replied.
“You’ve got a target on the northeast side, son, go get ‘im!”
So Janus Hogarth had grabbed the M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon and given chase. At least the guy he was chasing down was a full-grown man, not some teenage kid, and he moved fast. Hogarth stood his place for a moment, adjusting his aim and firing again as his target dodged back behind the corner of the first level of the parking garage. The heavy machine gunner took a few cautious steps forward, examining the structure. The grass hill sloped upward, partially burying the first level of the parking structure, with the narrow opening of the second structure looming over the lawn about eight feet above. One of the pieces of guardrail was smashed free and dangling, a victim of a careless driver trying to park, Janus had decided. His 249 felt like an extension of his arms though it was heavy and warm in the afternoon sun and the barrel drifted down slightly as he began moving sideways around the northeast corner of the garage. He’d seen the guy dodge past this area not five minutes ago, and he leveled his weapon again, charging forward, slamming his shoulder into the thick wall of the garage, pushing his back against it, taking cover in case his target was watching him with that AR-15 he’d been firing.
Drawing in a breath, Hogarth counted a steady one… two… three and swung around the corner, his weapon swinging back and forth as he scanned the empty stretch of grass behind the garage. Nobody was there.
“What the?” Hogarth asked himself, shifting right to look out at the road, then straight forward, back out at the empty stretch. His target had only come through here a few moments ago; Hogarth didn’t think he’d had time to slip away, had he?
He stepped forward again, moving across the ground, cradling the M-249 in two hands. He heard a low shuffle of foot scraping stone and swung around to look behind him, but nobody was there. No one in front, no one to the right,
not even behind him. That left only one option.
The machine gunner stepped back and looked up, but moments too late. Angel threw himself from the second level of the parking garage, vaulting through the gap separating the concrete railing from the ceiling above. Hogarth’s mouth twisted, and he began bringing his weapon around, but Angel was on top of him too quickly, coming down on him with 210 pounds of humanity. Hogarth slammed backwards, his weapon flying from his hands as Angel struck him and pinned him to the ground, sandwiching him between the unkempt grass and Angel’s bulky frame. Breath shot from pursed lips as he felt ribs snapping and the whole left side of his body going suddenly numb. Angel curled and rolled off of him but swung up on his feet and moved to grab the SAW. Janus tried to roll over and reach for it, but he couldn’t move, the left side of his body feeling like a lump of carved stone, and Angel swept the weapon up, cocked it like a baseball bat, then swung it down, crashing the butt of the weapon into Janus Hogarth’s left temple.
The Ironclad soldier lay there still as Angel swung his weapon back around, holding it in a ready position and started making his way back toward the other corner of the parking garage.
***
Gunfire popped repeatedly in the still afternoon air, the road at Brad’s feet blasting up into clumped sprays of broken asphalt. He ducked his head as he charged forward, running at an increasing pace. He could almost see the approaching soldiers behind him, their assault rifles shouldered and firing. Brad could see Winnie off to his right, swallowed by buildings, and he purposefully angled left, heading more toward the Ironclad offices, trying to draw their pursuers away. Bullets smacked the brick building to his left and he turned briefly with his Ruger, opening fire on the men chasing him. Drawing the weapon back toward him, he turned and ran deeper into the gathered structures, weaving into a narrow alley between two side buildings. The sun was blocked out by the two-story structures, casting a deep and wide shadow on the dark pavement and Brad continued running forward, ignoring the screaming in his lungs, hoping to disappear within the growing shadows.