Since there was only the one main entry at the front of the pump station, in an effort to avoid being trapped inside the building, Ava had several of the men knock a “bug out” hole in the building’s rear exterior wall. The bricks were then replaced so that the weakened point would be unnoticeable to the unsuspecting eye and clasps were drilled into the bricks on either side of the hole where a large steel plate could be slid. This would provide a secured escape hatch that only required the steel plate to be removed from the inside wall and the bricks pushed outward allowing those inside to escape to the waiting vehicles out back. And in a worst-case scenario, one of the Strykers could be backed up to the pump station wall allowing direct access to its armored safety through the escape hatch.
After all this was done, there was little else to do but to wait and to worry. Ava had heard that the Three Families reportedly had a nearly 300-man combined regular security force between them that they could bolster to well over 500 should the situation call for it.
Considering that she and Jake had about two dozen men – including the junkies – Ava definitely didn’t consider the odds in their favor. Even with the armor and all their defensive preparations, things were looking bleak in Ava’s eyes, but not in Jakes. He marched around, sucking a bottle of tequila, chest out, barking orders – the little general. He seemed to be reveling in his position and enjoyed watching all the preparations being made.
As darkness descended upon their fortress, Jake settled down to watch out the window and drink from his second bottle of tequila of the day. Meanwhile, Ava quietly slipped away unnoticed by anyone except Johnny Switchblade who was on guard duty at the front door, and he knew better than to ask questions. She needed to take care of something before the shooting started, and she didn’t trust anyone else to do it.
Ava was tough, but she didn’t consider herself particularly athletic. On this particular trip though, she literally ran the brief distance from the pump station to Brownie and Blondie’s house. Upon arriving, she took a minute to catch her breath and peek inside the garage. She saw their covered vehicle and knew that they were back from their mission. She quickly took another couple deep breaths, wiped the sweat from her brow, walked over, and knocked on the back door.
Moments later, Blondie answered.
“Hey,” he greeted her with a big grin. “Good to see you.” Then he frowned, “You haven’t seen Bushy have you?” he asked.
She pushed past him and down the stairs to the basement. He followed close behind.
Brownie was there lounging on the sofa. “Howdy,” he waved. “We got the…”
“Listen,” Ava interrupted. “I don’t have much time. The Three Families are preparing to attack the pump station. The attack could come at any time. Jake wants you to help with the defense. I covered for you and said you were at one of the brothels, so that’s where he thinks you’ve been. So if he mentions it, just play along.” She took a deep breath, her lungs still oxygen-starved from the run. “You get the information I needed?” she switched topics once she’d recovered.
“Yeah,” said Brownie, standing and grabbing an envelope from a nearby table. “It’s all right here,” he handed it to her.
“Good,” she said, folding the envelope in half and sliding it into her back pocket. “Now here’s what I need you to do. You need to go find Bushy.”
“Now?” Blondie said, looking at her tiredly. “We just got back,” he moaned. “It was a fuck of a long drive.”
She handed him a baggie of white powder. “Here’s a little pick-me-up,” she said.
He looked at it. “Not much,” he said, sounding dejected.
“Enough, but not too much,” Ava said. “Anyway, find Bushy…he’s probably at the gas station I sent him to work at, here’s the address,” she handed Blondie a slip of paper. “You still have the direction’s I gave you to get down south?”
They nodded that they did.
“Tell Bushy to find a vehicle, follow those directions back down there and link up with my contacts,” Ava went on. “I know it’s short notice, and he’ll probably have to steal a car and some gas.” She fished an envelope out of her pocket and gave it to Blondie. “Give him this. It’s a letter of introduction like I gave you two. My people there will take good care of him until I arrive.” She wanted to add, “If I arrive,” but didn’t want to give the men any reason to doubt her. “Once you’re done, beat it back to the pump station as quick as you can. And remember, you’ve been at one of the Z Family brothels if anyone asks.” She paused, taking another deep breath as she eyed the two men. “You got all that?”
They nodded. “Got it,” said Blondie. “Find Bushy and send him south with the letter of introduction. Then beat it back to you and Jake at the pump station. And we’ve been at one of the Z Family brothels. Right?”
“Yes,” said Ava. “Just remember, you guys get this done, and there will be rewards down the road,” she smiled at them. “BIG rewards.”
“Alright,” Blondie shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
“Okay, I’ve gotta go,” Ava said. “And so do you.”
And with that, she hustled back upstairs and made her way quickly back to the pump station. She stopped running about 100 yards from the building to allow her enough time to compose herself.
Upon reentering the station, Jake was standing there waiting for her.
“Where the fuck did you go!” he yelled angrily.
“Christ, I need to get out of this fucking dungeon once in a while,” she said defensively. “I wanted a smoke so I decided to take a walk. I get tired of being locked away in here.”
“Jesus, I don’t know about you,” he shook his head and then looked over at Johnny who stared on passively. “Women! Are you fucking stupid or what? All those explosives we put out today, the families waiting to attack us at any minute, and you decide you want to go for a walk. I fuckin’ swear; if you weren’t so fuckin’ smart, sometimes I’d think you were fuckin’ stupid.” He walked up behind her. “I don’t want to have to worry about you getting your pretty little ass blown off because you’ve wandered outside like an idiot. From now on, you don’t leave this place without telling me first. You got that?”
She nodded, giving him her cutest little smile, “Jake…” she said eyeing him sweetly, “…you worried about me?”
“Aw fuck,” he said, embarrassed. “Don’t pull that shit in front of Johnny here.” He wacked her on the ass, his hand smacking hard against her taut behind so that it echoed through the pump station’s hallways. Then he pushed her ahead of him, “You just get that sweet little ass back upstairs where it belongs.”
After she was gone, Jake turned back around and walked over to where Johnny Switchblade sat in a folding chair near the door, his booted feet propped up on a small wood table. He was fiddling with one of his knives.
Jake violently kicked Switchblade’s feet off the table. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he spat.
“What do you mean, boss?” Johnny looked at him, surprised.
“Don’t you ever let her walk outside by herself again without letting me know first. You got that?”
“Yes, boss,” Johnny said, eyeing him but staying seated.
“You’d better,” Jake said, turning around and stalking back upstairs.
Johnny watched him go with a steely-eyed glare. He took his knife and jammed it down hard, blade first, into the wood tabletop where it stuck fast.
* * *
The next day passed uneventfully. Brownie and Blondie arrived in the afternoon. Jake was pissed at them and gave them a verbal thrashing, but they stuck to Ava and Mad Dog’s story about spending the last few days in a brothel, so Jake quickly got over it. He needed every warm body he could get, so he looked the other way. He ended up assigning the two men to Ava to help out on the defense of the second floor. She positioned one on each side of the building in rooms near where she’d set up her heavy machineguns.
The first shots from the Three Families
were fired the next morning at dawn. The families likely thought this the best time for an attack in hopes of catching Jake’s men half asleep, half drunk or both. And in fact, some of them were, but that didn’t mean they weren’t ready for a fight. Within seconds, almost all of them were up, ready, and returning fire. And the ones who weren’t were quickly roused by a rampaging Jake who stormed through the pump station, shouting and administering swift kicks to sluggish asses.
Another minute later, all of Jake’s soldier’s were at the defense of their tiny castle even though the first of the Three Families’ men had yet to fully reveal themselves. But Jake and his men didn’t have to wait long. The first wave of attackers soon swept out from behind the abandoned houses across the street from the pump station where they’d been sheltering while laying down a heavy amount of fire in hopes of softening up their target.
Meanwhile, several pickup trucks and cars full of guys roared down the street from both directions. One car, followed by a pickup truck rocketed toward the chain-link fence that surrounded the pump station. As the lead car neared, it hit one of the pressure-sensitive explosive charges that Jake and his men had laid in the street. The front of the car lifted upward as flames billowed from beneath it. As it came back down, the front axle broke and the vehicle skidded to a stop. The driver and guy in the passenger seat slumped dead while two other men stumbled from the backseat and fell in a daze out onto the pavement.
From upstairs Ava screamed, “Open up!” to the machine gunners on the second floor. They sprayed the area around the car with fire, tearing the two survivors apart as they struggled to crawl behind their smoking and still flaming vehicle.
The pickup truck following them stopped about 15 yards behind the car’s smoke and flame-billowing carcass. The driver angled it across the street’s center lines so that the men inside could shelter behind it while laying down fire at the pump station.
While this was going on, two pickup trucks approached from the opposite direction. The first one hit another of Jake’s landmines with a right front tire. The force from the ensuing blast pushed the pickup up onto its left two wheels and eventually sent it cascading over onto its side, spilling its contents of men that were riding in the back bed out onto the street. One of Ava’s machine gunners swung around to make quick work of them. The pickup behind it screeched its tires, breaking hard as it angled to a stop so that it could provide cover for its occupants.
Bullets being fired from the men behind the trucks began to ping off the pump station’s steel door and thud into its thick brick walls creating hundreds of little puff-clouds of dust as each bullet pock-marked the red-brick building. Ava watched from the second floor. Downstairs, Jake was yelling at the druggies as he walked around giving them little snorts of coke to get them psyched up for the fight.
Ava watched as dozens of men filtered between the houses across the street from the pump station. She could also see an approaching SUV fitted with steel plates for additional protective armor. It angled its way around the still-smoking car out front, and a second later, made a sharp right-hand turn, ramming the pump station’s front gate, and forcing it open. Just as it entered the pump station grounds, it hit Jake and Ava’s final well-placed explosive. The blast ripped several of the steel plates from the vehicle and stopped it in its tracks as it burst into flames. Ava ran to the left side of the building to direct the fire of her machine gunner at the disabled SUV, but the action was unnecessary. Both of her heavy machine gunners already had their fire trained on the SUV by the time she got there, and the addicts on the first floor had opened up through their firing portholes with a chaotic barrage. The trapped occupants inside the stranded SUV had a decision to make – stay inside and be burned alive or try to escape and likely be mowed down. As the doors opened and several men jumped out, it became obvious which they’d chosen. Two of the men put up a feeble attempt at covering fire as the other two men attempted to make their retreat – but they failed miserably. The wild fire that the addicts were laying down from the protection of the first floor, and the machinegun fire from the second floor, cut them down before any of them managed to fire off more than a few rounds.
Ava was somewhat surprised at how willing the men of the Three Families were to die and how poor their tactics had been thus far, but she had to remind herself, these were not trained professionals. Like her own men, these were guys who tended to like guns, like to shoot things and blow stuff up, and who enjoyed violence. While such characteristics were helpful in getting men to fight, they didn’t necessarily translate into good discipline and a well-trained, efficient, and cohesive fighting unit. Most of these guys were thugs, and they acted – and fought – accordingly. Ava wondered too, if some of these guys were drug addicts. The Three Families very well could have chosen to employ tactics similar to her own in an effort to thin their ranks of some dead weight by deploying their dregs first to open up the station’s perimeter, while at the same time getting a read on how the pump station was defended before sending in their heavy hitters.
A similar type armored SUV was approaching from the right side of the street. It didn’t make the same mistake as its counterpart; instead, it selected one side of the station’s perimeter fencing for its breakthrough. In the process, it ripped a 30-foot gash in the fence, dragging the section along with a tangle of razor wire with it as it crashed through. The location of the SUV was in a bad spot and Ava’s second-floor machine gunner on that side of the building was having difficulty getting a good angle on the vehicle. She had Blondie covering that side of the building from the second floor too, but his fire alone wasn’t enough against the heavily armed men. She stood in the second-floor lounge, looking at the television screen for the camera mounted on that side of the building. She could see men jumping out of the SUV and taking cover around and behind it. One man became entangled in the razor wire as he exited. Ava watched as he struggled to extract himself. The razor-sharp blades slashed viciously at his legs, hands, arms, and finally as he tripped and fell to the ground, began to tear its way into his torso and face. She winced and looked away from the man being sliced up like bologna and over to the other men around the vehicle. She watched as one of the men took aim at the camera and fired.
The screen she’d been watching went black.
Meanwhile, the men approaching from the houses across the street had made their way up to the vehicles lined up in front of the building and had taken cover behind and around them, adding fire to the intense barrage the pump station was already taking. Suddenly Ava saw a flash of light from behind one of them, and seconds later, an explosion rocked the front door.
She ran downstairs. Jake was there along with Johnny Switchblade. Smoke was billowing in from around the door, but it appeared to have held against the blast.
“I don’t think it’ll take another shot like that,” Switchblade yelled.
“Get some of your men over here to cover the front door,” Jake called back.
Switchblade hustled off to collect a couple addicts that he lined up behind sandbag barriers in the hallway just inside the front door.
Ava hustled back upstairs to her gunners. Just as she made it to the top of the stairs, there was another intense explosion. As she entered the lounge area where she’d been just moments before, and ran across to the right side of the building, she saw that the area had been obliterated. The window where her machine gunner had been stationed was now just a gapping hole. Pieces of her gunner were strewn around the room. She saw his torso lying on the center of the floor. The machinegun lay near where the window used to be. She dashed inside the room. Bullets were zipping off the bricks outside and some were plugging themselves into the room’s plaster walls. She dove onto the floor, grabbed the machinegun, and slithered back to the room’s entry doorway. From her position, she could see more pickup trucks with mounted machineguns pulling up outside. She guessed that it was the second wave of the assault. They just had to hold out a bit longer. Things were going pretty mu
ch as she had expected. She had guessed that the families would send in a light attack force first to probe for weaknesses and feel out where the heaviest defensive firepower was positioned. Once they had those areas pinpointed, they would start focusing on them as they just had by taking out her machine gunner. She figured that once they felt they’d softened the place up enough, they’d bring in their third wave and really start letting them have it, finishing them off quickly. This was what she was counting on and was why she had held off on bringing all their forces to bear right at the beginning of the fight.
With the arrival of the pickups, she figured that it was close to time for the final assault. She knew that they were risking being overrun if they waited too long. A rocket propelled grenade exploded near where she’d stationed Blondie in the next room. She couldn’t see the damage but she could feel its impact from the shudder that ran through the building after the grenade hit. She had no idea whether Blondie was okay or not and didn’t have time to check. Another grenade hit downstairs a second later, knocking the building’s thick steel entry door off its hinges. Ava could hear Johnny Switchblade and Jake shouting and then the men they had covering the front entrance open fire.
It was time to open up the rooftop.
Ava dropped the heavy machinegun she was carrying and dashed up the stairs to where the Kill King and her third heavy machine gunner were crouched waiting behind their sandbag emplacements. “FIRE!” she yelled.
The machine gunner let loose with a sickening barrage that immediately ripped through three men who were making a dash for the front entrance. Meanwhile, the Kill King started doing some damage of his own. First he took out the guy with the grenade launcher. He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched. A bullet ripped through the guy’s head, dropping him to the ground, and along with him, the launcher. The King didn’t like to aim for the chest if at all possible due to many of the Families’ men wearing body armor. He preferred a sure shot to the head whenever he could get it.
The Systemic Series - Box Set Page 76