Now that I knew what they were?
The gloves were off. Literally, in my case.
Along with the basic knowledge I’d pulled from that soldier’s mind had come some more useful nuggets—namely, his understanding of the troop deployments in the local area. I had the basic sketch of patrol routes, of where they were concentrating rescue efforts in their coordination with the civilian authorities.
If you know where your enemy is and isn’t, you can avoid contact with them until you're ready.
And I … was about to get really ready. With some major league contact.
I crossed two streets to get away from where I’d killed the Russkie merc, only one of which was a patrol route. I’d stopped off a block away and scoured an apartment building that had been evacuated, changing my clothes and picking up a knee-length coat that probably looked a little out of place in summer, but it hid my gun belt and rifle in its depths, and I added a hat to change the shape of my head, then slipped out into the third street west of my little ambush.
The crowds were a little heavier here, and I kept my head down, easing through them. A few people were walking around with obvious injuries, blood rushing out of gashes on their faces, refugees from the streets closer to the disaster. They’d been pushed back from the crisis zone by the soldiers, and now they milled around, some rescue tents nearby filled with doctors and medical personnel providing first aid, local cops doing their best to triage the situation, cutting through the crowds in search of the most seriously wounded.
Others were clustered in groups, talking, trying to make sense of what had happened here. I wished them good luck with that. Dropping the tower had been the senseless act of a violent personality with zero compunction about hurting people to achieve a goal. It churned my guts, because while I occasionally had a lack of compunction about hurting people, it was always because they’d hurt others to deserve it.
Like Krall. Krall had hurt and killed people, and now I was going to hurt and kill Krall. How much hurting happened before the kill … well, I was flexible on that.
I worked my way through the crowd slowly, doing my best not to draw any attention. I wasn’t the most inconspicuous figure, with my weird hat and overcoat, but in the middle of a disaster zone, I was hardly the most noteworthy. People were screaming everywhere, hysterical from their own wounds or from losing someone, being separated from loved ones, or simple shock.
A girl with a hat and an overcoat making her way calmly through the crowd, head down?
I blended in.
About a block later I finally laid eyes on my objective, sweeping a calm gaze over my target.
The military HQ for this sector. A temporary encampment, situated in the parking lot of a retail store, I saw a couple of command trailers, a few bivouacs, and about a dozen military trucks and Humvees, all ringed by a bevy of soldiers who were way too distracted by their own conversations and the crowds to be effective perimeter guards.
In fairness to them, this was probably a unique situation for most of them. Maybe they’d been deployed in a national guard emergency-like function in their native armies before they’d started selling their souls and trigger fingers for hire. But those days would have been long past, and now they watched the civilian population in front of them with a curiosity bordering on contempt, laughing at the occasional plea from an injured person and pointing them back down the street to the nearest civilian medical tent.
Lookiloos lined the street, crowds thronged the center of it. They would probably make way for a military convoy or a truck, but nothing was moving in the immediate area. My guess was that there was a central road open for the ambulances and military traffic, and this wasn’t it. This was where they’d chosen to put the response HQ, the nominal place where they had planned to coordinate their manhunt for me.
You know … before it had been called off on account of my death.
I kept my head down as I cut against the crowd, whose attention was still on the wreckage behind me. There was a calm, somewhat still quality this far out from the disaster zone, a sort of quiet awe from the spectators, most of whom were uninvolved in the scene. Other than flecks of dust on some dark clothing, for the most part the people I saw here were almost certainly well clear of the scene of the tower fall.
Some had probably come to help.
Some had come to watch.
None had come looking for me. Which was fortunate, because I was right here.
I slowed as I approached the perimeter of soldiers around the HQ. They were just off the main road, the civilian traffic passing in front of them as they stood back, guarding the parking lot but not very attentively. It only took me a few seconds and a quick count of the active defenders to decide on a plan.
Here, I was operating from a truth I’d gleaned in my brain picking of the merc. A quick scan of the camp revealed the thing I was looking for, prompting me to smile for the first time since …
Well, since I’d killed that Russian merc. I guess I was finding some reasons to smile now.
I stepped up on the curb, leaving the street and closing on the perimeter of soldiers ringed around the temporary HQ. If I’d had Harry’s powers, I might have been able to stealth this, slipping between them without worrying about getting caught. He could have timed it so that he would have caught them all looking the other way. Harry was subtle like that; the scalpel in our relationship.
Me? I wasn’t the hammer. Hammers were positively muted compared to me. No, nor a pistol, nor a shotgun, not even a machine gun. Those were too quiet.
I was the Mother of All Bombs, the MOAB that would detonate and send every soul within reach scrambling for cover. If they didn't get vaporized instantly by sheer proximity to my badassitude.
I angled toward the nearest soldier, head down, trying to make it look like I was just coming up to ask him a question. I lulled him, kept my hands visible on my approach, and said, quietly, in English, “Pardon me, sir …”
“Da?” he asked, defaulting to his native Russian before switching to broken English. “What you want?”
“Do you have a moment to discuss our lordess and savioress, Sienna Nealon?” I asked, looking up at him with a purely evil smile.
His eyes widened, his hands were on his rifle. He started to raise it—
I caught it and stepped sideways; I’d picked the farthest man out in the perimeter line, the one with no one on his left. The soldier next down the way from him caught the movement of our scuffle, his cry, and started to raise his own gun—
But not in time. I whipped the soldier’s rifle around in perfect line with the next soldier and the dumbass’s failure to follow good trigger discipline did my work for me, blasting his buddy into kingdom come with a round of fire that stitched the poor bastard from gut to throat. He keeled over in a spasm, blood spurting from the line we’d just made in him.
I brought my elbow around and shattered the jaw of my foe, taking away his weapon as he staggered back. With it already mostly aimed, I blasted the next two guys in line as they tried to bring their guns around to deal with me. I was hip-firing, something I’d practiced to the point where I was almost as good as if I’d had it up to my shoulder, at least at this range, which was about thirty feet.
That done, I ran a couple more rounds into the guy I’d been grappling with as I broke into a run past him. No point in leaving him behind to recover, so I emptied his brains into the parking lot as I went past, then chucked the near-empty rifle and pulled my own as I shed the overcoat.
I kept the hat on, though. Because it was jaunty.
Someone behind me opened up with their AK-74 as I reached the cover of their parked vehicles. I dodged behind an army truck. A soldier stuck his head out the driver’s side window, wondering what was going on and I lit him up with my stolen AK. Crimson splattered his windshield as he tipped back in, and I broke into a run through the alley between his truck and the one next to it, keeping a careful watch for trouble ahead.
Whe
n I reached the end of the truck, I looked left, then right. There were more trucks parked ahead, about a ten-foot margin between the ones I’d just run past and the next row. No one was visible down the aisles, and soldiers were starting to shout behind me. To my left, about four vehicles down, the Humvees were lined up.
I smiled again. I’d find what I was looking for front and center there. Now I just needed to make a clean sweep of the vehicles here in order to make sure that when all hell broke loose in the next couple minutes, this wasn’t a direction they could flank me from.
Easy peasy.
I walked past the gas valve on the nearest truck and pulled a grenade from my stolen utility belt as I did so. Pulling the pin, I jammed it in the fuel filler and let it rest there, then broke into a run, counting as I hauled ass away.
One …
Two …
Three …
Shouts behind me. Soldiers in pursuit had found the dead guy in the truck cab.
Four …
Man, they sounded mad. They were still after me, too, running now, caution lost in their mad dash to catch me.
Five!
The grenade went off, still wedged in the filler of the truck. It wasn’t much of an explosion, at least not by itself. Grenades don’t go off in real life like they do in the movies; it’s not all flames and pyrotechnics designed to look awesome on camera. Grenades, in real life, are designed to explode with force, not fire, and to take the metal shell wrapped around the core explosive and turn it into about a thousand pieces of shrapnel, which are then driven outward by the strength of the boom (technical term) into the fleshy parts of anyone around it.
So it’s less about the boom and more about turning the people in range into pincushions for the shrapnel.
Unless, of course, you were to add something really explosive to the situation, such as, say, the diesel fuel tank of an army truck.
That explosion … well …
That sucker went off like something out of the movies.
I ignored the whump that threatened to drive me to my knees, moving steadily toward my planned objective. I was already partially behind cover anyway, having hooked around the rear of the last army truck in the line as it went off. The grenade boom was pretty loud, but the afterboom of the fuel tanks cooking off and launching the truck into the air was way, way worse. A wave of heat washed over me that even the vehicles between us couldn’t stave off, and by the time I reached the Humvee I’d been going for, it was pretty clear that the mess I’d just made …
Well … it was going to be a mess for a long time.
A big, flaming mess that extended across about twelve army trucks and thirty meters or so of open ground where the diesel had spread when the truck had launched off the ground.
Chaos, thy name is Sienna.
And I was just getting started.
The camp was coming alive now that I’d blown this section of it halfway to hell. To my right, a retail store’s brick front provided a nice block against a flanking attack. It merged into the building behind it, no entries or exits for a few floors, just a mural wall with some nice spray paint design work.
My rear was secure for the moment. The raging inferno to my left meant unless they had a Gavrikov, I was safe from that direction—again, for a short time.
But a short time was all I planned to stay here.
I leapt up on the Humvee in front of me, climbing onto the roof and sliding easily into the turret on top. I checked to make sure there wasn’t someone in the interior; there wasn’t, and nor was anyone hanging out in the Humvees around me.
Popping back up out of the turret in the middle of the Humvee’s roof, I smiled once more.
Because now … it was time to party.
Not all Humvees have turrets, but when they do, they almost always have something nice and bounteous on them. A lot of times it’s the M2 Browning, affectionately known as “Ma Deuce.” Those are pretty common. A fifty-caliber machine gun that had been around since World War I and could spray 500 rounds per minute of bullets the size of my thumb.
Slightly less common, especially when you got outside the realm of the US military, was the beauty in front of me. Known as the Mk 19, it didn’t look all that different—to the untrained eye—from any other crew-served machine gun. A boxy assembly with two handles on the back, the barrel jutting out front and a big box for ammo hung off the side. Why, if you didn’t know any better, you might even assume that it was a pretty standard shooty shooty bang bang gun.
But it was sooooooooo much more.
Because the Mk 19 …
Was a 40-millimeter belt-fed grenade launcher.
And it came with the bonus of a couple of giant metal flak shields to either side of the barrel to provide cover for the shooter in case someone decided to fire back. They wouldn’t stop everything, but they’d hinder anyone who was shooting a rifle at me.
My smile was a thing of ugly horror, I was sure, suddenly thankful there was no one around to witness my glee as I brought the grenade launcher sight picture around and aimed at the army HQ in front of me. People were starting to flood out, a knot of them bunching up as they came out into the harsh light of day to find their camp in flames.
I adjusted my aim, dropping the sight on the army officer in front—his name was Arkadi and he’d come over from the Russian army at some point, after a long and horrific career that dated back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I felt my smile do nothing but grow as I squeezed the trigger …
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Dave Kory
“Holy shit.”
The picture had gone live again after a brief interval, some flashing scenes showing … crowds. Streets. Bredoccia in all its chaotic glory, with people fleeing the disaster and watching the disaster and just generally living in the aftermath. The view had flipped a few times before a particularly eagle-eyed Holly had pointed to a figure in a coat, with a hat, moving through the crowd:
“That’s her.”
There had been some argument, sure, but that had ended when Sienna Nealon had pulled her coat off and wiped out a few guards from the Revelen army just as cool as you please. Then she’d blown up a truck and huddled in a Humvee turret before finally …
Well …
Blowing everything the eff up.
The view was pretty solid, the camera mounted on a wall not twenty feet from her, the picture clearly zoomed to show her face as she let loose on the army camp in front of her with …
“Wow,” someone breathed. “That’s not a normal machine gun.” There was no sound to go with the picture, either fortunately or not.
“It’s a 40mm grenade launcher,” Mike Darnell said, because of course he would know something like this. When Dave shot him a look, Mike gave him an unapologetic one back. “I was embedded for a while with Big Red One in Iraq. They ran with these.”
“She’s wiping out the whole freaking Revelen army,” Holly breathed, watching this … massacre unfold in front of them. The whole damned camp was exploding as Sienna poured on fire.
“She’s clearly psychotic,” Dave said, feeling a sudden need to look away. “I mean … my God.” He focused his attention on Caden. “Get that kill counter up on the main page, now. And somebody take the feed of this, go slow-mo, whatever you have to—make up numbers if you can’t figure it out. I want it live yesterday, and ticking up as she does …” He waved at the screen, where she was still just … unloading on people. “… This.”
“If I may …” Mike said, peering at the screen. “I don’t think these are regular Revelen army soldiers.” He took a few strides up to the screen. “Someone pause?” Someone did, and he pointed at a soldier who, in spite of standing upright, caught in the frame at a flat run, was already dead because there was a grenade freeze-framed about ten feet behind him. “Look at their weapons.” He pointed at the rifles. Nobody spoke. “These are Russian army issue AK-74s. I looked it up, and the Revelen army uses German-made—”
“Who
cares where these guys come from?” Dave asked, finally just losing the last thread of patience he had for this blame-shifting bullshit. “She’s wiping them out, man. Like they’re cockroaches.”
“I think they’re mercs,” Mike said. “Former Russian Army, by my guess, but … mercs. Soldiers-for-hire. Brought their own guns.”
“And that makes them less human?” Dave just stared him down.
“Russian mercs kill for money,” Mike said, “so … yeah. I’d consider them less human than most people.”
“Whatever,” Dave said, feeling a little grey in the face, unwilling to have this argument. His phone beeped, and he looked down at it.
IT’S TIME TO PLAY!
“Excuse me for a minute,” he said, turning his back on the TV as someone resumed the livestream. Dave didn’t see the grenade hit its target, didn’t want to, really. He just took his phone and headed for the bathroom, not wanting to watch Sienna Nealon wage her own personal war halfway around the world.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
Sienna
I was singing the music from “Ride of the Valkyries” at the top of my lungs, and I couldn’t hear a damned thing over the grenade launcher running in my hands and the explosions I was ripping across the Revelen army camp. The recoil was a little intense, the noise even more so, but honestly …
I was having the time of my life. It was a beautiful thing, watching every shot blow shit up.
An army Humvee came skidding around the corner around a burning bivouac, and I caught it with a volley along the side and sent it crashing into a light pole, in flames, before walking my fire back to one of the army trailers I felt hadn’t absorbed enough in the way of damage yet. It still had a couple spots where the metal panels hadn’t completely bowed out from grenades blowing off on the inside, and by God, that just wasn’t acceptable. “Not on my watch!” I shouted to deaf ears—mine—as I launched about six more grenades in through the trailer’s sides. It distorted comically with the force of each detonation in the confined space, definitely killing anyone who was inside.
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