by Dick Stivers
The corridor led through the old apartment buildings, passing from one building to the next, connecting offices and meeting rooms. Several doors opened onto it.
A form dashed from an office. Lyons raised his Atchisson, but Blancanales fired first, a blast of steel shot throwing the punk down. Lyons looked to Blancanales and raised a shock-stun grenade in his hand. Blancanales nodded. He braced his Atchisson to cover his partner.
Lyons ran forward, one shoulder against the wall, his eyes searching the doorways for any movement. At the first doorway, as the wounded punk tried to rise on shattered, blood-spurting legs, Lyons tossed the shock-stun inside.
With a growl, a wide-eyed punk stomped from the office, his M-16 spraying fire. Lyons stayed to the side and slammed his arm down on the weapon’s barrel and black plastic foregrip. Slugs from the M-16 killed the wounded punk on the floor, then the blastflash of the grenade threw the hyped-up homeboy across the corridor. Lyons snatched the pistol grip of his slung Atchisson and pointed the fourteen-inch barrel at the punk’s head. When the muzzle flashed, the head ceased to exist.
Looking into the office, Lyons saw a form thrashing in the clutter of spilled papers and books. The young black man wore a black jacket vivid with the gang logo, The Headhunters, and a severed head dripping blood. Glitter made the staring eyes of the head sparkle. The gang punk reached for a weapon.
Lyons stomped on the Headhunter’s hand, breaking the wrist under his heel. The punk snatched at a pistol with his left hand.
The heel of Lyons’s shoe came down again, this time on the punk’s solar plexus. Though the stomp propelled the air from the teenager’s lungs, he did not feel the pain. His hand closed around the pistol grip. Lyons kicked the pistol away.
Lyons put the muzzle of the Atchisson into the soft hollow of the punk’s throat, where his neck met his collarbones and chest. Lyons asked one question, “Where’s the woman?”
The Headhunter sucked down a breath and attacked Lyons, flailing at him with his broken hand and his good fist. Lyons pushed the muzzle into the punk’s throat. “Where’s the woman?”
Clawing at Lyons, the punk thrashed against the muzzle of the full-auto shotgun. Lurching from the floor, the punk grabbed at Lyons’s right hand gripping the Atchisson.
The blast sent the Headhunter into the void to forever hunt for his head.
The torso flopped and quivered on the floor as Lyons went to the door. He took another shock-stun from his battle armor’s pouches.
“They’re rushing…” Blancanales called out, the booming of his Atchisson cutting his words short.
A storm of autofire swept the corridor. Five-point-fifty-six-millimeter and 7.62 ComBloc slugs ricocheted and whined from the walls and floors as Blancanales sprayed the line of onrushing gang punks with his Atchisson.
The shock of a bullet impact knocked Blancanales back. Lyons saw his partner fall, once more called out, “Whitelight!”
Throwing the shock-stun grenade at the mob of punks, Lyons jerked another seven-round magazine from his bandolier. Holding his Atchisson in one hand, he shielded his left ear with his other hand and turned away.
The boom-flash silenced the autorifles for an instant. His head ringing, Lyons leaned from the protection of the doorway and emptied his Atchisson into the downed crowd of chemically hyped punks.
High-velocity steel exploded skulls, ripped away arms and feet. Lyons took cover again, dropped out the empty mag, jammed in the next. He flipped the fire selector up to semiauto and searched for targets.
A punk in a blood-splashed purple jacket rose to his knees. He swung a Kalashnikov to his shoulder as Lyons put fifty steel balls through his chest at 1400 feet per second.
Another Chicano clawed his way from under a dead comrade and pointed a .45 automatic. High-velocity steel ripped away his arm and head.
A wounded punk pushed himself up from the bloody floor. He lurched upright and swung a machete. Lyons set the Atchisson’s sight on the teenager’s forehead. Brains sprayed.
Lyons pulled another magazine out of his gear, then went to Blancanales’s side. The stocky Puerto Rican got to his feet. He looked to his battle armor. A bullet had torn through the Kevlar to punch through an Atchisson magazine. But the steel trauma plate had finally stopped the slug.
Blancanales gave Lyons a thumbs-up. But when he tried to reload his Atchisson, he found the lower receiver deformed by a bullet. A ComBloc slug had punched through the magazine well and smashed the interior mechanisms.
Another gang surged into the corridor. Lyons raised his Atchisson and rushed them, firing from the hip, every blast from the 12-gauge assault shotgun slamming a crazed punk back.
Slinging the inoperative Atchisson over his shoulder, Blancanales grabbed a blood-slick Kalashnikov from the floor. He went to Lyons’s side, firing two— and three-shot bursts into the shoulder-to-shoulder mass of teenage monsters.
Lyons’s weapon went empty. He knelt on one knee to reload. He dropped out the spent magazine and jammed in the next. But the magazine did not snap into the weapon. Lyons pushed it but felt no snap that would indicate correct seating. Pulling out the mag, he saw flesh and a bit of bone fouling the top 12-gauge shell.
As Lyons struggled to clean the fouled magazine and reload the Atchisson, Blancanales saw one punk charge ahead, a machete raised high. Snap-sighting on the rabid teenager’s chest, Blancanales fired. A single round staggered the punk, but he did not fall. The Kalashnikov rifle empty, Blancanales saw the punk continuing forward, the machete still raised high.
Blancanales took the captured Kalashnikov by the barrel and rushed the oncoming punk. With all his strength, Blancanales swung the rifle.
The blow crushed the punk’s skull. But the spot-welds joining the cheap pot-metal components of the ComBloc weapon broke. Left with only the Kalashnikov’s barrel in his hands, Blancanales looked for another weapon as a second punk came at them with a revolver flashing.
A .38 slug ripped past his ear as Blancanales grabbed a machete from the corridor’s gore-splashed floor. Then Lyons’s Atchisson boomed. The punk with the pistol fell. But the wall of drug-crazed blood-lusting human animals did not stop.
“Down!” Gadgets screamed to his partners.
Falling to their faces in the blood, Lyons and Blancanales heard the M-203 grenade launcher fire.
The first two punks lurched as a blast of twenty-seven double-ought balls slammed into them. But the low-velocity projectiles from a 40mm buckshot round did not stop them. Blood spurting from their faces and chests, their comrades pushing the dying punks forward, they continued on.
Lyons fired his Atchisson as a continuous line of 9mm slugs ripped into the mob. Gadgets fired an Uzi in each hand, holding the triggers back, brass raining around him. Finally, the Israeli submachine guns went silent.
From his prone position, Lyons saw an M-16 rising. He did not aim. He fired wild, saw blood spray the ceiling. Then his weapon’s action locked back.
Punks still came. Blancanales rose to one knee. He had picked up a machete. He slashed with it. A punk’s hand and pistol hit the wall. Another pointed a shotgun and fired, but the blast went into the back of the one-handed punk.
Intestines exploded. Blancanales pushed the dying punk aside and hacked again and again as the shotgunner pumped the Remington’s slide.
The arms and shotgun fell. The maimed punk thrashed at Blancanales with the stumps of his arms. Then Lyons shoved his partner aside and put the muzzle of the fourteen-inch barrel of the Atchisson under the screaming gang boy’s chin.
Blast flipped the corpse backward. Lyons semiautoed blasts into another running punk, then killed the crawling wounded.
Blood-soaked, flesh glistening on their battle armor, the three men of Able Team remained alive in the corridor of slaughter.
Gadgets splashed through the blood to his partners. The reloaded Uzis swung from his shoulders.
He gripped the M-16/M-203. Eyes wide with horror, his breath coming in panic pants, Gad
gets kept repeating, “This is heavy, this is heavy, I mean, I came to the party late, and I don’t know about this scene. Definitely number one thousand. Maybe one million.”
“If they rush us again,” Blancanales told Lyons, “we are overrun.”
Lyons slammed another magazine into his Atchisson. “We haven’t found Flor.”
They heard footsteps and the firing of shotguns and pistols. Lyons looked to his partners.
“Here they come…”
13
As black-and-white units screeched to tire-smoking stops in front of the apartments, Detective Bill Towers assembled the police officers into improvised fire-teams. Though the department had issued additional shotguns to the units patrolling the city, not every officer had one of the riot weapons.
Towers took Lyons’s warning seriously. If that ex-cop said the men needed shotguns and automatic weapons, Towers knew Lyons meant it.
An incident immediately proved Lyons’s warning true.
As Towers sent a two-man unit to the side street with an order to seal off the side exits and the alley, the officer behind the steering wheel called out, “Behind you!”
Turning, Towers saw a teenager in jeans, sneakers and a gang jacket run from the front door of the ground floor LAYAC offices. The teenager held a machete high as he sprinted for Towers, screaming hate jargon, “Die, you white genocidal Nazi running dog!”
“Halt or I’ll fire!” Towers shouted out as he pulled his .38 pistol loaded with department-approved solid-point ammunition. “Halt…”
The command did not stop the punk. Towers sighted over the four-inch barrel of his Smith & Wesson and double-actioned six slugs into the punk’s chest.
The slugs did not stop the youth. Blood spurting from his chest, he crossed the sidewalk and street in a few steps. He swung the machete at Towers. Towers sidestepped.
As the machete skipped off the sheet metal of the black-and-white, the officer in the driver’s seat fired his service revolver point-blank into the gut of the punk. Slugs exited the punk’s back and broke the plate-glass windows of the LAYAC offices.
But the punk did not fall. Retreating from the bloody teenage psychopath, Towers pulled the backup pistol he carried — in violation of department regulations — in a holster at the small of his back: a Colt Commander. Loaded with hollowpoints — again in violation of department policy — the large-caliber autopistol went on line with the punk’s chest as he rushed to kill Towers.
Towers snapped two shots. The first hollowpoint slammed the punk back, exploding through his chest to destroy his heart and the knot of arteries between the lungs. The second slug went high and struck the dying punk in the nose. His head exploded with the shock-force of the impact.
Even when the medically dead zombie finally fell, the legs and arms continued to thrash, the machete still gripped in its right fist, the metal of the blade clanking and sparking on the asphalt as if the punk’s arm had a nervous system independent of the destroyed brain.
Towers stared down at the thrashing corpse, astounded. Officers from other cars ran to the corpse. The driver of the squad car announced in a shaky voice, “Holy shit! You saw it. Towers put six through the chest. I put another four through its gut. And it still took two forty-fives to put it down!”
“Everyone with a shotgun over here!” Towers yelled, assembling officers.
As they gathered, Towers continued directing black-and-white units to surround the apartments. Inside, the battle continued. Directing his men, Towers heard the hammering of autofire, the booming of shotguns inside the buildings. He addressed the officers around him. “There’re three men fighting in there. The crazies captured an officer and those three men went in to save the officer. We’re going in to help. Everyone got their pockets full of ammo?”
“We shoot to kill?” an officer called out. “Do we try to arrest them?”
“This is war!” Towers shouted back. “Look at that one in the street and tell me if you’re going to read them their rights!”
The group rushed into the battle.
*
Monitoring the police communications on their scanner, reporter Mark Lannon and his technicians sped to the battle at the LAYAC offices. When the sound man driving the van saw the flashing lights of the police cars blocking the avenue, he swerved onto a side street.
“I’ll circle around and try the alley,” the sound man told Lannon.
“Do it. Get past those pigs. We’ll put this on the morning news. Smear those Nazi pigs.”
They wove through the side streets, down one street, then two right turns, finally approaching on a tree-darkened street where no police squad cars parked. Lannon directed his crew with whispers. “Get the equipment together. We’re going to sneak in there. If they see us, they’ll pull some pigshit jive about the scene of a crime or whatever. Once we got the pictures, they can only subpoena the tapes.”
“Right on!” the cameraman agreed.
After checking their video gear and sound-recording equipment, the three newsmen slipped into the shadows. They heard intermittent gunfire as they neared the alley behind the LAYAC buildings.
Headlights swept from the avenue. The three counterculture activists hurried into the darkness beside a trash dumpster. When Lannon saw two uniformed officers setting out flares to halt all traffic, he said to his cameraman, “Get some tape of that!”
Then he turned to his sound recordist. “Get all the noise and shooting. Maybe we can loop and dub it later on, make it sound like World War III.”
A furious exchange of fire somewhere inside the building startled them. The sound man turned on his deck and held out a microphone to the sound of the firefight. “Won’t need to overdub that…”
Another set of headlights flashed, this time in the alley. Lannon saw a lowered Chevy boulevard cruiser turn from one of the garages. He slapped the shoulders of his technicians. “There’s some of the LAYAC brothers. We’ll do an interview with them. Get some real shit on the pigs.”
Stepping from the concealing shadows, Lannon waved his arms for the Chevy to stop. His technicians took their places in the alley. The cameraman switched on his sungun spotlight, the sound recordist extended a long microphone.
“Hey, comrades!” Lannon called out. “What’s happening in there? We’re from K-Marx. What’s the truth?”
The Chevy stopped. Going to the driver’s window, Lannon leaned in. What he saw sent him quickly staggering back.
A gang punk with a demented grin waved a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun at him. The punk lowered his aim and fired.
At a distance of ten feet, the spray of birdshot destroyed Mark Lannon’s legs. In a tangle of shattered bones and muscle sinew, Lannon sat on the alley’s asphalt. He watched as the Chevy’s doors flew open. Punks crowded from the doors, machetes and pistols and automatic rifles in their hands.
Dropping his video gear, the cameraman ran. A burst of AK fire killed him. The sound man put up his hands in surrender. Several punks advanced on him while the others went to Lannon.
“I’m with you, I’m a comrade in struggle,” the sound man pleaded, tears running down his bushy beard. “Here’s my Communist Party card. I’m with you. I’ll show you my card, I’m a paid-up member of the…”
As he reached for his wallet, a punk stepped forward and chopped off the sound man’s arm with a machete. The sound man’s face contorted with a scream that only rattled in his throat.
Machetes and pistols and point-blank gunfire dismembered the Communist sound man.
Mark Lannon suffered longer. With his white skin, stylish hair and neatly trimmed mustache, the reporter personified the typical bourgeois white man to the drug-enraged crowd of young black and Chicano gang boys.
Machetes flashed in the dark alley. First, the punks cut away Lannon’s shattered legs. Then his fingers and hands. As the white man’s screams echoed in the filthy corridor behind the buildings, the punks methodically reduced him to a flopping torso with a screaming head.
Cross fire of shotguns and department-approved .38 pistols drove the street gang back to their vehicle. Bleeding, their throats filling with blood even as they screamed defiance at the officers, the punks attempted to escape in their supercharged Chevy.
Officers fired shotguns and rifles into the engine, point-blank into the driver’s head, then at the rear tires. The Chevy careered across the side street and into a tree.
Flames exploded. Orange light from the rising flames lighted the alley. Then the officers found the dead cameraman and the butchered sound recordist.
A wailing cry lead them to the thing lying in blood and a clutter of human parts. Only when they saw the arms and legs did the officers realize the flopping, bleeding meat had been a human being.
After another few seconds of pain and blind, silent anguish, Mark Lannon, the K-Marx man of the people, The Voice of Socialist Truth, finally went silent.
*
Storming through the offices and hallways of the LAYAC complex, Towers and his men killed everything that moved. There seemed to be no end to the punks in the building. They came from doorways, they came down the stairs, they rose from the heaps of dead to fight again. This was the crucial battle.
Towers rushed through one doorway and fell flat, expecting autofire. But he heard only the gunfire in the other rooms. Scrambling over the floor, he scanned the large room.
Black Nationalist posters plastered one wall. The three other walls had been painted stark white. He could not understand the purpose of the white walls until he saw the projection ports.
The room had been a theater with multiple projectors. Marks on the wall indicated mountings for now-gone speakers for a total-surround sound system. Wires and cables dangled from conduits around the walls.
His examination of the theater was interrupted by firing outside the door. Bracing his Colt Commander in both hands, Towers waited for a gang to appear. He heard a voice call out, “Police! Freeze, whoever you are!”
“We’re on your side!”