Not Against Flesh and Blood (The DX Chronicles Book 1)

by Brian Cody

  “Do you use yours for intimidation too?” Bryen asked as he turned on the faucet.

  “Did you just say ‘too’?” Erik asked as he pulled a pair of goggles from his duffle bag. The murmur of rushing water diverted both Erik and David towards the sink, where Bryen bowed, let the stream pass over his head, and then drove the tips of his fingers into the applicant.

  “B-money”, David began, “I’m all for you keeping your hair clean, but we’re kind of_”—David gagged as Bryen reared up and looked into the mirror over the sink. The color of his short hair, once a jet black, had shifted into a pale white. David glanced to Erik and Erik looked back, their mouths ajar, while Bryen reached for the black towel on the rack beside his desk and rubbed his hair. He then reared up while wiping his hands on his towel, and turned as David and Erik swung their heads. Bryen’s hair, then, angled backwards in small, hook-like curves. “Nope!” David called, “Explain, Bryen!”

  “What?” Bryen humphed as he scratched his head. “Oh, so, the hair on my head sort of turned white in ninth grade.”

  “I wish my hair had turned white in ninth grade”, David grunted.

  “What kind of puberty did you go through?” Erik asked.

  “I dye it once a month”, Bryen replied as he grabbed his left eye. “It spikes naturally to an extent if I don’t comb it down, but after half of an inch, it just curls into black-people curls.”

  “That’s why you won’t fro it?” David asked.

  “That and cultural reasons”, Bryen replied.

  “A white afro?!” Erik blared. “That would be sick!”

  “Is hoodie and jeans okay?” Nate asked as he entered.

  “Seeing that you’ve somehow gotten away with it for three-plus years, sure”, Erik replied.

  “Well what is everyone else wearing?” Nate grunted as he looked to David, turned to Bryen, and leapt. “Do you live here, bro?!”

  “It’s just B-money”, David replied.

  “There’s something wrong with his hair”, Nate noted, while Bryen pulled out the second of his brown contacts.

  “Don’t worry, he’s froing it”, David replied.

  “I said the exact opposite”, Bryen grunted as he applied a pair of black leather gloves.

  “All right; are we ready?” Shawn asked as stepped behind Nate, his catcher’s mask resting atop his head and matching, in crimson tone, armored pieces around his torso and shins, while, tucked under his right was a bundled, white fold.

  “Is that a catcher’s outfit?” Erik asked.

  “Oh so much more”, Shawn replied as he stepped in, “Military-grade ceramic bulletproof to low calibre firearms.”

  “Why?” David grunted. “I threw you through a tree and you were barely scuffed. You’re probably already bulletproof.”

  “I still wouldn’t like the sensation of being shot”, Shawn replied.

  “Is that a table cloth?” Bryen asked as he tucked his shirt and tightened his belt.

  “What’s up with your hair?” Shawn asked.

  “Guys, I said lock the door.” Shawn looked back as Turrisi entered dressed in a bloated, blue tee shirt. He too wore blue jeans, with three rectangular bulges going up the outsides of his legs. On his hands were a pair of fingerless gloves, on his head were a black baseball hat, earplugs, and black sunglasses, while in his grasp was his blue duffle bag, equal in size to Erik’s, but with greater width and circular points jabbing from its sides.

  “What’s in your duffle bag?” David asked as Turrisi slammed the door.

  “Enough reprimands to expel me ten times over”, Turrisi remarked as he lowered his bag.

  “So drugs?” Nate suggested.

  “Not drugs, and is that all you’re wearing?” Turrisi asked.

  “All right guys, let’s head out”, David spoke as he started for the door.

  “What?!” Turrisi barked as he swatted David’s hand. “Are you insane? Us fully dressed walking down a populated hall?”

  “What then? Will we go out of the window, mom?” David scoffed.

  “That’s our best bet now”, Turrisi replied.

  “Wait, how are we getting there?” Shawn asked.

  “We’ll fly”, Erik suggested as he tightened his goggles over his eyes.

  “Yeah, but, where will we take off?” Shawn asked. “If we do it outside of the dorm, someone’s going to notice.”

  “The train tracks—the woods by them”, Erik replied. “We’ll run down there and then take off; it’s secluded.”

  “But can we all fly?” David asked as he looked around.

  “No”, Bryen and Turrisi replied.

  “Sort of”, Nate added, “it’s more like high-speed transportation; it’s really hard for me to change general trajectory while midair.”

  “So then three of us can, and three can’t?” Erik replied.

  “That’s not what I said”, Nate muttered.

  “Not it!” Shawn called.

  “All right, I’ll carry B and Turrisi”, David spoke as he reached for the window. “Garcia, get Nate; let’s just go!”

  “Should we maybe have changed when we got to the train tracks?” Bryen asked, halting David before he could open the window.

  David looked back, scanning the group and watching Erik’s eyes spin from side to side. Counting off every mistake I’ve made by now… “Garcia, don’t say it.”

  “I’m keeping my mouth shut”, Erik replied.

  “Okay, if ever there were a time to be stealthy, it would be now.” He turned for the window.

  Within the first minute, David, Turrisi, Nate, and Bryen hopped out of the window, but, before Erik and Shawn could follow, they were signaled to stop and then to hide. While Bryen closed the window and took cover, with Turrisi, Nate, and David, behind a lane of shrubberies, Erik and Shawn knelt and watched a group of students amble past. Unnoticed, as they supposed, or perhaps ignored, they opened the window and crept out in the following thirty seconds. The sextet then jogged alongside of their dorm, came to the intersection between that dorm and two others, and turned left. After descending a flight of stairs, they jogged between two dorms and a small game of Ultimate to their right; yet, as they looked to the two teams of four along the grassy lane beside Dorm 8, they found themselves without notice, or perhaps ignored.

  “Are we usually this aloof too?” David mumbled as they descended another flight of stairs leading to the one-way road.

  “Because of the Larpers”, Bryen stated as he ran behind David.

  “The what?” Shawn grunted as they knelt beside two bushes along the road and watched a campus police cruiser meander past.

  “Live Action Role Players”, Erik replied as they jogged across the road, crossed the parked cars on the road’s shoulder, and then came to the tree line. “They dress up in sometimes-elaborate costumes and have mock-battles”, he explained as they jogged down a forested hill, sidestepping and stumbling to evade trees and bumps.

  “There’s a group of them on Dorm 25, near the intramural field, so we’re probably nothing too extraordinary”, Bryen noted.

  “Okay then”, David finished as he stopped at the bottom of that hill and looked to an arboreal span, which thinned out beside the train tracks. “All right, are we ready?”

  “Ready”, Turrisi replied as he switched his duffle bag to his left arm.

  “Anyone watching?” Erik asked.

  “We’re clear”, Bryen replied as he scanned the trees above them.

  “Sweet, let’s do this!” David proclaimed.

  Commotion from the forest went unnoticed for the first few seconds after the six’s descent. However, the sounds from beyond campus’s western perimeter—the sirens and hums of passing vehicles—were usurped, for a moment, by a chorus of gales and the churn of flames. No flames were sighted and no gales were felt, and, save for the sways of the treetops lining the tracks and then the ephemeral line of grey smoke arching into the sky, nothing appeared that could have been noticed or ignored.


  ***

  “Clear!”

  Amidst the clangor of loosed rounds and retaliated blasts, the first garbage truck’s driver spun to take cover behind its tire and looked back to one of the gunmen waving beside the cargo container. He then spun to the second and third garbage trucks, where two of the loaders stood behind the closing doors and waved. He nodded, raised his hand, and stood. The riflemen lowered their arms. Backing from the corners and junctions of that shielding formation, they crept back to the center of their three vehicles and then scattered, entering different trucks from which they had rode. The first truck’s driver, then standing along the third truck’s running board, looked to the other two drivers, raised his rifle skyward, counted to three, and fired. As he loosed that peal, the two drivers started their engines. He looked to his truck and fired once more, and the center-left passenger of his vehicle turned the ignition. He lowered his rifle and boarded, with the closing of his door sounding down the road as a muffled clap.

  “They’ve stopped shooting; hold your fire!”

  At the police’s disheveled formation, within a mass of scattered vehicles, shattered glass, and bloodied forms, an officer focused on the tinnitus drenching his ears and listened to the street’s drawing silence. Rearing up before the foremost squad car, he looked to the dozen other officers still holding firearms. “SWAT Team?” he mouthed.

  “ETA three minutes”, was murmured in reply.

  “Great”, the officer murmured. Holding his breath, he raised his brow past his vehicle’s shattered window. He looked past the glass-covered interior of the cruiser as his tinnitus was slighted and replaced by a growl, and he glanced to the road, the old skid marks, and then the silhouette, once creeping, that accelerated towards them with front-loader outstretched. “Move!” He jumped aside as the first truck impacted with goring speed. The officers scattered as their formation was plowed, lunging over their vehicles, shooting at the garbage truck’s adamantine windows, and running for cover along surrounding buildings as the second and third trucks dredged past.

  Unimpeded then, the three garbage trucks moved with their cargo. Just after three-quarters of a mile, the first truck turned leftward and eastward, the second continued straight and northwesterly, and the third turned left to head southerly, and, with as much clandestinity as their entrance, vanished from that scene; yet, failed to evade notice.

  Diving, David moved towards the road. Levelling, he soared over a fifteen-story rooftop’s far side with Turrisi in his right and Bryen in his left, and, thrusting his legs, he slowed to a glide and then dropped onto the concrete. Still sliding by his momentum, he converted his flight to a jog, releasing Bryen, who staggered and bowed behind him, and Turrisi, who slid and held his duffle bag along his chest. As David stopped, thrust his hood over his head, and walked to the rooftop’s ledge, Shawn dove, hovered ten feet over the roof, and landed. As Shawn reared up and looked about, a roar sounded behind and above him. Shawn looked skyward at a momentary pop of flames and stepped aside as Erik slammed onto the roof and slid past. As Erik stopped and reared up, Shawn nodded but then humphed.

  “Yo, Garcia”, Shawn called as Erik adjusted his goggles, “where’s_?” A sharp gasp and a heavy clap echoed behind Shawn and reverberated below his feet, driving him to spin to Nate tumbling and jouncing along the rooftop. “Yo!” Shawn gasped while stepping to Nate, “you okay, Nate?”

  “I can’t believe you just frickin’ dropped me!” Nate bellowed as he lunged to his feet.

  “What did I say!?” Erik howled as he stepped to David, Bryen, and Turrisi. “I said if you kept complaining about the turbulence, I’d frickin’ drop you!”

  “You were shaking fifty times a second, guy. I’m not gonna sit back and take it!” Nate retorted as he stomped after Erik, while Shawn, then shaking his head, followed.

  “If you don’t like the ride, don’t book the flight”, Erik replied.

  “I’ll just use my lightning from now on”, Nate groaned as he stomped to the ledge. “Well, how’s it look over here? Do we need to punch people? I kind of want to punch some people after being dropped_” Nate looked down, and his throat locked. He looked around. “Or whatever”, he murmured while crossing his arms.

  “…Yeah”, David uttered as he turned to Erik, while the flashes of EMTs, then arriving, bounced off of the surrounding buildings, and while the cries of the injured carried one hundred yards from the police’s upheaved formation. Below that rooftop sat the cargo truck, its back doors still open, and the corpses of its operators outstretched along the sidewalk. Across from those bodies and etched along the road were the skid-marks dotting the commencement of the garbage trucks’ flight.

  “This is pretty bad”, Shawn muttered as he adjusted his catcher’s mask.

  That’s…a big understatement”, Turrisi spoke. As he lowered his bag, they stepped back from the ledge and shifted into a loose circle. “LPD was outgunned; the guys who did this had military-strength hardware and a good plan. The cargo is gone, and with the SWAT team now arriving, it might be ten minutes before the police can form a strong pursuit.”

  “Garcia?” David asked.

  Erik looked to the road, his hands on his hips and his left leg tapping. “Turrisi’s right—the police are outgunned; they’ll lose track of the trucks and, more than likely, the National Guard will be called in. That could take an additional thirty minutes. By then, the trucks will have moved into the surrounding counties. There’s enough backwoods out here to hide a small army.” He turned to David. “Thirty minutes is too long.”

  “We pursue”, David replied as he looked down the road.

  “Going by the amount of space in the cargo truck’s container, one of the garbage trucks is a dud”, Erik began. “It lessens their chances of all of them being caught. More than likely, that truck will take the longest of the three routes.”

  “They could be a few miles apart by now. Going after them—one by one—will take too long”, David replied. “We’ll split up.”

  “Agreed”, Erik replied.

  “Sounds like a plan”, Shawn remarked.

  “All right”, David began. “Since only half of us can fly, it works out—there’ll be three teams of two, with one flier per team. As best as you can, have your phones in constant connection with the other person, and don’t let the other person out of your immediate line of sight.”

  “All right, the teams”, Erik spoke.

  “Yeah, right”, David replied. He looked to Turrisi, turned to Nate, spun from Nate, and looked to Bryen. “I’ll go with_” He raised his hand to point, but Turrisi stepped before it.

  “I’ll go with you, Dave. You have the least amount of experience”, Turrisi spoke.

  “You have the least amount of experience”, David murmured. “Okay, so Shawn and Garcia, you have Klinge and B-money.”

  “Nope”, Nate muttered as he looked to Erik. “Shawn_”

  “I got B-money”, Shawn called as he reached for Bryen, against which Bryen stepped back.

  “Dang it”, Erik and Nate mouthed.

  “Fine, I have the first truck”, Erik spoke.

  “Second!” Shawn barked.

  “I don’t really think this is a competition, but sure, I have the third one”, David replied. “Unless you’re being shot at, or dying, or something else, send a mass text every ten minutes with updates. Yeah?”

  “Let’s do it up”, Shawn replied. “Where we meeting at?”

  “The dorm?” Nate suggested.

  “Or back here”, Turrisi reasoned. “This could be our rendezvous unless crap really has hit the fan, and we’re all wanted by the FBI or fleeing a contaminated city.”

  “We’ll play by ear then”, Shawn grunted.

  “What if we dropped the negativity?” David asked while adjusting his shorts. “Come on, guys; someone say a prayer.”

  “Father God, I don’t want to get shot; be with my friends as well”, Shawn spoke while stepping to the opposite ledge.

  “You
’re so considerate, Shawn”, Erik scoffed. “You coming, Nate?”

  “Right behind you”, Nate groaned.

  “Great”, David humphed as he stood in the center of the roof. “Turrisi”, David called, “are you about ready to_?” David silenced as Turrisi pulled two Glocks from his duffle bag, held them in his left, grabbed his shirt with his right, and removed it to reveal the Kevlar vest covering his torso and the second blue shirt underneath. “Whoa”, David muttered as Turrisi slid both guns into holsters along his vest.

  “Like I said”, Turrisi began as he closed the duffle bag and jogged to David, “enough reps to get me expelled ten times over.”

  “What else do you have in there?” David asked.

  “Don’t worry about it; we’re wasting time”, Turrisi replied.

  “All right, boys, let’s do this!” Shawn proclaimed as he outstretched his hand towards Bryen.

  “Go!” Erik exclaimed.

  David, Shawn, and Erik knelt, and Turrisi, Bryen, and Nate grabbed them by the hands, the arms, or the shoulders. In a simultaneous and earsplitting rush, those six skyrocketed from view, a tail of flames being the only remainder of their presence and itself vanishing from notice moments after.

  ***

  “We have three hours to rendezvous in Bedford County”, one of the gunmen exclaimed as he sat in the center-left seat of the first garbage truck, his right clutching a radio, and his left holding a rifle, “if we take any longer”, he began, his words halting as the truck swerved off of one road and onto another. “If we take any longer, the police will have the opportunity to outflank us—remember that.” He lowered the radio to the side of the seat and squeezed it between his hip and the side of the third gunman sharing the passenger seat with the fourth.

  “We need to find another vehicle”, the driver uttered as he swerved his truck into the opposite lane and jerked it leftward. “We’re not carrying anything, so we need to ditch this as soon as possible.”

  “Wait for us to get to city limits”, the far passenger replied as he held the door with his right. “Every second we’re in this city is another second for us to potentially get caught.”