Without warning

by John Birmingham

  After three bursts, she took a quick peek to her left around the doorway to check her surroundings and see what she’d caught. – A civilian, on a bicycle, lying in the centre of the road, probably dead. Head shot. Shit.

  A small Fiat, faded blue paint, up on the footpath down near the railway tracks, smoke or steam pouring out from under the bonnet. One flat tyre.

  And birds – dead and dying birds everywhere.

  A woman in a bright floral headscarf, cowering in the doorway of an empty boarded-up shop, shielding what looked like a child with her body.

  Across the road from her, a dirty white van, parked at a slight angle in the gutter about fifty metres away, cabin door slid open. One leg hanging out of the interior, twitching. Windshield smashed, horn blaring.

  Three identified shooters there. All white males, dressed casually, armed with FAMAS G2 assault rifles. One behind the van – possible leg wound. One crouched behind another vehicle, a grey, ageing Volvo. The last man, running, aiming for a deeply recessed doorway fifty yards away.

  She snapped off two quick bursts at the figure heading for the doorway.

  G2 rounds crashed around her once more, pulverising the ancient red brickwork and forcing her to fire blind again. Caitlin emptied the rest of the Steyr magazines with much greater accuracy this time, however, having sighted her targets, then she turned back into the building and shoulder-charged the first door on the right. It gave way with a crack of splintered wood and she tumbled into the small sitting room, taking cover below the window ledge, crunching broken glass under foot.

  In one quicksilver motion, Caitlin slipped off her backpack and poured half a magazine of 9 mm hollow-point from the Glock through the smashed windowpane into the street outside, mostly aimed at the shooter behind the Volvo – the closest, easiest target. Chances of nailing him were low, but she could at least keep the fucker bottled up.

  Monique moaned loudly just outside the room, and glancing back over her shoulder, Caitlin saw her legs begin to scythe and kick in reaction to the burning pain that would now be making itself felt. Gut shot by a military assault rifle. There was gore and leakage everywhere. Caitlin knew the exact location of a couple of morphine syrettes in one of the bags, but to attend to Monique now would have meant ceding the initiative to their would-be killers.

  She opened her oversized hold-all and pulled out the artillery. The pistol-grip Benelli shotgun came first: customised 12-gauge, extended mag with a side-saddle shell carrier. Next was the deal closer, a specially cut-down Heckler amp; Koch UMP.45, with an extended box mag housing thirty rounds of.40-calibre Smith amp; Wesson goodness. She slung the HK over her shoulder. It was a large, excessive arsenal for just one young lady to haul around, but Caitlin Monroe very much adhered to her daddy’s rule that when it came to guns it was always better to have ‘em and not need ‘em than the other way around.

  She picked up the shotty, jacked a cartridge into the chamber, and poked the muzzle out through the shattered window. The Benelli was loaded with a buck ‘n’ ball combo that gave her a nice spread for quick and dirty area clearance, but still packed a nasty surprise in the form of one larger, molybdenum disulphide-coated brass slug at the centre of the load. Unlike softer malleable rounds, it was armour piercing and would slice through a car door or ballistic vest without bothering to slow down much.

  She methodically pumped half-a-dozen rounds of buck ‘n’ ball down-range, angling to do some damage to the men behind the vehicles, but occasionally raking a shot along the front of the building to shut down their partner in the recessed doorway. She briefly heard a few distressed cries and more shouting upstairs, and the hammering of feet on bare wooden boards, but then the uproar of her sustained gunfire drowned out everything else.

  I need to get a handle on this fucking mess, she thought. She was still firing blind, however, attempting to disrupt the flow of her opponents’ advance and hoping for a lucky hit.

  The briefest of lulls drew her attention upwards again, to the sounds of renewed panic. Caitlin let loose out of the window with another four shells from the shotgun and then ran, reloading, clearing the ruined sitting room and bouncing off the slimy, plastered wall of the apartment’s main corridor. She leapt over Monique, who was writhing and crying pitiably – ‘Hold on, baby,’ the American muttered, ‘these fuckers are gonna regret getting out of bed today,’ before speeding towards the staircase, slipping the shotgun over her shoulder and bringing the Heckler amp; Koch into play.

  Bounding up the stairs she swung around at the first level and raced for the front of the building. An open door led onto a small bedroom just ahead and she rushed in, grateful to find there was no baby in the cot that was pushed up against one wall. She thumbed the selector on the machine-gun to full auto. One of the reasons she liked the H amp;K was its relatively low rate of fire, a modest 600 rounds per minute, which, in the hands of an expert operator, made the burst mode all but superfluous.

  Caitlin looked out the window with a black widow’s smile. Two of the three shooters were crossing the road, giving her a clear line of fire. ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Much obliged.’

  The operatives both squeezed off covering fire at the groundfloor position she’d just left as they crossed the Route d’Asnieres. The dense, rapid crack of their FAMAS rifles was painfully loud. They edged forward, right into her sights.

  Her movements were quick and machine-like. One sharp pull on the trigger shattered the bedroom window, and as the two men instinctively looked up, she nailed the pair of them with short auto bursts, aiming for the centre mass and letting the muzzle drift upwards to punch a couple of rounds into each of their skulls.

  The first man simply looked surprised, his eyebrows raised comically and mouth a perfect ‘O’ shape before five rounds stitched him up from the sternum to the forehead. His head all but disintegrated. The second attacker was fast, well trained – but doomed. He managed to lift his muzzle up a few inches, and even squeezed off one misdirected round, before Caitlin nailed him in the same way. A fan of blood and brain matter painted the side of the car next to which he died.

  One more. There’s one more, at least, she screamed silently at herself.

  She didn’t pause, instead leaning back from the exposed position and holding the gun forward, angled down, to let rip at the guy who had been sheltering in the doorway. There was no direct line of sight, but Caitlin fired from memory, confident she could at least keep him pinned down. A woman was screaming nearby, and downstairs she could hear Monique’s guttural cries of pain becoming more ragged and intense, more animalistic in their abandonment.

  ‘Shitfire!’ spat Caitlin.

  She took half a second to scan her immediate surroundings and plug them into a larger mental map of the world outside. A triangular block, typical of the streets of Paris, was her battlefield. Time to slip backasswards.

  Setting off at a sprint, she exited the room and charged down the first-floor corridor – a dank, evil-smelling space. She headed away from Monique, away from the cries of the tenement’s occupants, moving as fast as possible for the rear of the building. A closed wooden door loomed ahead of her, and she went straight through it, shoulder-charging the old frame, which disintegrated in a storm of splinters and dust. A faraway part of her mind thought, Termites.

  She’d been expecting either a small storeroom or a water closet. It was the latter, as filthy and unkempt as the rest of the place, but she didn’t care. A sash-window, grey and completely opaque with grime, opened onto a rear courtyard below. The pulley ropes were broken and hung uselessly, one of them trailing its frayed end through a petrified blob of toothpaste. Caitlin ignored it, safed and shouldered her weapons, and hauled herself awkwardly through the window.

  It was a straight drop into the muddy courtyard, with no shed or ledge to step on. She levered herself out, and hung down as far as possible; then she pushed out and dropped. Her knees folded up under her, just as she had been trained to do by the good folks at th
e US Army Airborne School at Fort Benning.

  There was nothing elegant about the move, which ended with her rolling in the wet earth. The submachine-gun squelched underneath her, digging painfully into her ribs, but she mostly kept the Benelli out of the muck, and with no time to check and clean the guns, she chose that as her primary. Pulling out more shells from the side saddle, she finished reloading on the run towards the small wooden fence that separated the courtyard from the property behind.

  The muted rattling cough of the FAMAS reached her, adding urgency to her flight. But as she stood, a wave of disorientation swept over her and threatened to steal her balance. Caitlin took one precious second to stand perfectly still, draw in a fresh breath and attempt to centre herself, to gain some measure of control over her traitorous body. Then there was nothing for it but to forge on, leaning forward into the vertigo that had seized her and biting down a rising tide of bile that was trying to erupt upwards out of her stomach.

  She leapt over the wooden fence, catching her jeans and almost crashing down in a heap on the other side as she lost her footing on a dead pigeon. Her momentum was enough to carry her forward, however, and she brought the shotgun around, flicked off the safety and jacked a round into the chamber.

  In front of her now was the rear door of a building that faced onto the Rue du Bac d’Asnieres, the other side of the elongated triangular block formed by its convergence with the similarly named route – from her point of view, the quiet, uncontested side. The van was at the apex of the triangle, flat tyres and all. An empty bakery stood before her, if she recalled correctly. This just might work…

  The small frosted window embedded in the door was covered with a wire grill, but there were no other obvious security measures. No wires, no cams, no back-to-base relays that she could spot. Her head was still spinning and her balance was off, but the door was a stationary target. She drove a powerful side kick into it, just inches below the rusted key lock. It gave way with a report like a gunshot and she hurried inside as the sound of more automatic fire drifted over the roof line from the street behind her.

  She entered a storeroom, mostly empty, with just two large paper bags of flour lying on the concrete floor. Rats had chewed both of them open. A doorway led through to the baking room, where big commercial ovens stood cold and unattended, presumably for want of supplies. Or perhaps the boulanger, more closely attuned to the city’s increasingly serious hunger, had already taken his family and left.

  Caitlin didn’t give a shit. She found the door she was looking for – the shop’s front door – punched through it, and emerged into the flat dismal light that leached through the thick blanket of toxic clouds now overhead. Rain started to spatter down again, burning her eyes and exposed skin. A black crow, seemingly unaffected by the pollution, picked at the carcass of a squirrel in the gutter just in front of her. She swore at her lack of goggles, a pair of which lay in the bag she’d left with Monique.

  The assassin was caught unawares by the strength of her feelings for the girl. They were not comrades, more allies of convenience, thrown together only because of the extreme circumstances of the last week. And she had never allowed herself to grow attached to a target or an asset, but nor had she ever been diagnosed with a brain tumour or woken up to discover her whole world had vanished like a dream. As she ignored the increasingly difficult symptoms of her illness and pushed herself to the limits of endurance, Caitlin tried to convince herself she was simply worried, quite reasonably, at losing the vital support of a key asset.

  A rising, ungovernable anger threatened to overwhelm her as she remembered her last sighting of Monique, jackknifed in pain, bleeding out onto the filthy floor of the old tenement. The girl was a ditz, but she had stuck by Caitlin when, really, she would have been better off lighting out on her own. If nothing else, the American owed her a settlement with whoever had shot her.

  There were a dozen or more people milling about nervously on this street, flinching at the gunfire. Seeing her approaching, a young man called out a warning – ‘Attention, elle a une arme! - and they scattered like birds startled from a tree. Caitlin ran five doors down the street, back towards the hairpin corner around which she’d walked with Monique a lifetime ago. When she judged herself far enough along, she diverted in through the open garage doors of an auto repair business, yelling that she was the police and warning everyone to get down. ‘Tout le monde, planquez vouz! She heard more cries of alarm and noted two figures in coveralls cowering out of her way, but ignored them.

  This building sat on the point formed by the meeting of the two roadways, so it had no back courtyard. The only open ground it boasted was a triangular concrete apron at the apex of the two streets, which appeared to be used as a parking bay for the business. It was possible to cut right across the workshop and emerge, hopefully, behind the white van and the last shooter. She quickly weaved her way through, dodging around a couple of pits over which sat a new Honda Accord and an ancient Trabant. A pair of double doors, identical to the ones she’d come through from the Rue du Bac, stood ajar, opening onto the wider thoroughfare of the Route d’Asnieres. She could just make out the rear of the van, splattered with blood, and an outstretched hand, lifeless on the sidewalk.

  The FAMAS roared again, a long guttural snarl of fully automatic fire, none of it directed at her. Nonetheless, her heart lurched forward. She saw smoke and a muzzle flash light up the darkened cave of the tenement entrance where the last shooter had holed up – the doorway of the building in which Monique lay, disintegrated as the bullets struck.

  Clearing burst, she thought. Right where she’s lying.

  Caitlin took a second to check the shotgun and finish racking shells into the magazine. It was good to go, as near as she could tell. After she reloaded her Glock with a full mag, she stopped to think for a moment. What if there were more of them? There had to be more… Her eyes scanned the windows and rooftops, into stopped cars, taking in the few people still crazy enough to be on the street.

  ‘Nothing for it,’ she told herself. ‘Surprise is everything.’

  The shooters lying on the footpath and roadway in front of her were dead. She hurried past the van, covering the man whose legs protruded from the rear cabin, but he too was gone. Bled out. The last known gunman was inside the building, just out of her sight.

  She sped up, crouching to drop below the line of the windowsill as she reached the front door. Shotgun up, trigger on a half-pull, she took in the sight of Monique lying as still as a fallen log in the dark pool of her own fluids. Her head was a shattered mess of blood, gristle and grey matter. She was identifiable only because of the stupid little protest badges she still wore on her old jacket. Fury boiled over inside Caitlin’s head.

  Oh, you filthy cocksucker. You and I will most certainly have a reckoning here directly.

  Bloody footprints led away up the stairs and she heard the creak of a footfall overhead. Oh yes, Caitlin thought, pointing her shotgun at the ceiling. We’ll have that reckoning right now.

  She pulled the trigger two, three, four times without giving a second thought to any collateral damage. Not a thought about the families who lived in the building or the crib she had fired beside. Each blast gouged giant plumes of plaster dust and atomised floorboard, which erupted and dropped down, coating the two women like a snowfall. She was rewarded with a strangled cry and a brief, uncontrolled snarl of gunfire, before a dead weight dropped to the floor above.

  She looked over her shoulder, out the door behind her, still wary that someone else might show up. But there was no one in sight.

  Taking off at speed again, she rushed up the stairs for the second time that morning. A round in the chamber, the Benelli’s muzzle described tight little arcs, as she aimed where she expected to find the body.

  He was lying face down and still moving, but barely so. The last shooter, she hoped. Struck three times, once in the femoral artery, to judge by the rivers of rich, almost purple, lifeblood flowing out of him and
onto the tacky brown carpet. He’d dropped the assault rifle in his dying spasm and Caitlin used her boot to kick it away, never once taking her aim off the back of his head.

  She heard a door open somewhere and yelled out again: ‘Police. Revenez, maintenant!’

  The door slammed shut. A child screamed endlessly elsewhere in the building.

  Cautiously approaching the downed man, Caitlin kept her eyes on all of his hands and feet, aware that even now he might lash out at her. In his position, if at all possible, she would have. But a thick, glutinous, gargling sound told her he was on the way out. She shouldered the Benelli again, where it clanked against the barrel of the Heckler amp; Koch. Her pistol replaced the long guns and she dropped a knee right into the small of the man’s back, jamming the Glock up against the base of his ear. A pellet had torn off a bite-sized chunk and she ground the gun sight into the bleeding wound for emphasis. He groaned pitiably, but there was very little fight left in him.

  ‘You don’t have long, Pepe Le Pew. We both know that,’ she snarled, addressing the killer in French. ‘But I could make the last few minutes of your miserable fucking life feel like an eternity’ To drive the point home, she shifted her balance to focus her weight onto a rib that was protruding from an ugly chest wound. A weak, liquid groan escaped from the man beneath her as she felt a nub of bone dig into her knee.