Kirsty throws a clumsy jab at the other, aiming at his jaw but thudding into his eye. He staggers back and is screwing up his face in shock when a Grifter pulps it with a length of pipe. He drops, leaving blood spray and teeth in the air that drop to reveal Georgy just standing there. There’s nothing and no one between her and him yet he’s still glancing over his shoulder and looking smug. Kirsty launches at him.
She sidesteps two girls rolling on the floor as they flurry punches into each other and strides towards him as she sees what he was looking round at. Sprinting up the street towards her are Flame Warriors reinforcements. Twenty at least, every one with pharm-surplus stun batons or lengths of pipe. So much for a fair fight. So much for gang honor. So much for franchise rules.
She’s about to punch the back of Georgy’s head when he looks round and his smug grin turns to terror. “Now wait…” he says, throwing out an open palm that Kirsty grabs instinctively. She uses her momentum to twist his wrist, bringing his arm painfully up behind his back and dropping his head down to meet her rising knee.
The impact judders along her leg as his nose sprays snot and blood and she lets go so he staggers back. He brings both hands to his face and as they come away dripping, he pointlessly cups them to catch the ooze.
“You boke by doze!” he sneezes, blood showering the ground with every muffled syllable.
She steps off to one side, trying to work out how best to beat him down before the sprinting reinforcements stomp her into the road. “Yeah? I’m gonna boke more than your fucking doze, bitch,” she spits as he staggers and coughs and stoops. She grabs the collar of his cheap leather coat, hauls him upright and is throwing all her weight into a face punch when Georgy’s head explodes.
Just like that. She hears it, like a baseball bat on a pumpkin. She feels it, hot and wet spray on her skin. She sees it, one side of his face coming apart leaving rags of hair and skin and his greasy knit cap to tumbling in a mass of gray jelly. His head a misshapen tangle of flapping tissue, Georgy drops at her feet like his strings have been cut.
She stands stunned, her arm still drawn back for the punch, strong arms grab her waist and swing her off her feet. Twenty feet behind where she’d just been, a Grifter grunts and drops, writhing against the hammer blow that punches through his ballistic-weave jacket.
For a moment, carried towards the sidewalk in Kareem’s inescapable grip, Kirsty still doesn’t understand it. He’s running for the Bowlerama when a Flame Warrior in front cartwheels down, chunks of the her sneaker exploding in a crimson haze. But it still doesn’t register. She only understands when someone shouts it out… “Sniper!”
Just like that, the fight’s forgotten as people freeze mid-punch, mid-scream, mid-cower and Kareem’s the only one moving, hugging her to his chest and pounding towards the Bowlerama’s locked doors. Then she feels the impact through Kareem’s massive frame and, despite his armored jacket, he staggers two more steps before toppling forwards. She hits hard, his crashing weight on top of her, her head bouncing off the pavement.
If she blacks out, it’s only for a second, because suddenly there’s the chainsaw rattle of long, wild, spraygun bursts. She cranes up over Kareem’s shoulder and sees kids running everywhere. Eight or ten stand their ground to blaze away with their sprayguns and one in front of her is batted down by an invisible force.
She struggles and kicks and twists out from Kareem’s massive frame. He’s dead weight and it takes and age and when she eventually struggles out and stands up, she’s the only one on the street upright. Everyone who can get out has got out. Everyone else is either dead like headless Georgy or writhing on the asphalt.
She looks both ways and, for a moment, is pinned in place by the inescapable vastness of the street. She calculates her running speed against a sniper’s bullet and knows she’s already lost. She stares up at the apartment block at the end of the street, its frontage pocked by random spraygun hits, and wonders if she’ll see the gun flash that kills her.
For what’s probably just seconds but seems longer, she can’t move. Then a distant siren snaps her back and her legs get the message and she’s running, the promise of a bullet in the back making her skin squirm.
She goes for the corner of the Bowlerama and makes it, windmilling her arms to stay upright as she sprints round. Down to the end of the block and she’s still okay. She flinches at fresh chatters of gunfire in front of her but these are low and rumbling and being carried across the District. She hears more, closer and off to her left, then an explosion far away. She keeps running as the Reverend’s defense of Grifter turf sends tracer fire flashing skywards and then, without planning it or thinking why, she’s back to the safest place she can think of. She’s kicked open the front double door and pounded across the lobby and up the stairs before she even realizes where she’s been heading.
She’s run home.
Sunday 09 March
10:45 pm
THE LAST BOSTOV building in Denver was a circus. There was nowhere left to hit so Bostov knew Crash The Pad were coming and so did the newsfeeds and so did hundreds of locals wanting to get ringside seats to a genuine mercwar firefight. At first light, Hemblen had watched the whole scene through binoculars from a rooftop, told his guys cut power and water to the building and postponed the assault until nighttime.
Twelve hours later, the crowds had thinned, the newsfeed crews were bored and Hemblen was get it over with. Counting himself and the replacements sent from Toronto, Crash The Pad was twenty six strong. Under the glare of camera lights, they pounded across the entry plaza while Aurora Bor defenders poured on enough fire to cancel out three. As they pulled the deactivating pins out of their rifles and turned away, small arms fire smashed into their armor and spent rounds tumbled into the crowds. Streaming white clouds of delaminating armor, the retiring mercwarriors took cover alongside the panicked crowds. Hemblen pushed on with his guys as Bostov employees pushed burning filing cabinets out of the upper windows, each one bombing into the plaza while Crash The Pad dodged sparks and hard-copy embers.
They advanced the way three weeks of engagements had taught them to advance. Everyone carried extra cassettes now, snug on extra pockets velcroed to their chest and thigh armor. Most carried two, three, even four times the usual FlashBang load too, toting taped bundles in pouches fixed to their back armor. They moved in groups of two or three now, everyone firing whenever one of them fired, everyone mindful that Aurora Bor were doing the same. Every corner they came to, Crash The Pad capped off wholes cassettes of fire. Every time they saw a vending machine or an access panel, they thumbed their live-fire override and ripped it. Better to pay the damage afterwards than walk past a remotely-detonated mine.
They hunkered in stairwells as fragmentation grenades came bouncing down. They took automatic fire through walls and doors then burst into rooms where weapons lay one one side and smug Bostov employees lay face down on the other. Stamping on their hands as they plasticuffed them didn’t take the bitter taste out of Hemblen’s mouth.
An hour after they’d entered, the remaining four Aurora Bor ran into a top floor washroom and Hemblen called a halt as Crash The Pad stacked down the wall outside. “Anyone got three or more hits left?” he asked. No one had. “Fuck it then. FlashBangs, pass them down the line…” Twenty eight explosions later, with the tiles falling from the wall and the corridor full of smoke, Aurora Bor threw their rifles out then crawled out, vomiting and deafened, their armor strobes barely cutting through the gloom. As Perry the Union rep called action over, everyone’s rifle bolts snapped back and locked.
That was it, game over. Hemblen pulled the straps on his M-81 tight so it lay across his front armor. Despite the weight of it and the extra ammo and the stinking bulk of his sweat-stained armor, he felt a load lifting off his shoulders. Bostov had been purged from the Denver Hub. It was done. No more running into corridors rigged with explosives. No more of Aurora Bor’s dirty tricks. No more of his guys dying over a product launch.
> He reached up and unclipped one side of his faceshield, savoring the air on his wet face. He took a breath and held it and, for a moment, felt good about things. But then the whole building shook under his feet. The noises came a moment later as a wall of compressed air pressed up the stairwell and glass and furniture started to crash down onto the newsfeed crews and spectators in the plaza below.
Hemblen clipped his faceshield back on and pounded down the stairs with Maz O’Toole close behind. On the tenth, they ran into a solid wall of plaster dust that rolled up towards them like a volcanic event. On the ninth, four choking, sobbing civilians blundered into them, shirts and jackets burned off their backs revealing blackened flesh hanging in bloody strips. The eighth floor was gone, just gray dust and office furniture kindling. No color apart from crimson wet lumps plastered to shrapnel-chewed walls.
They panted and stared until the crackle of small arms fire below them was answered by the slower, heavier blasts of M-81 rifles. On the seventh, next to the empty frames of a shattered glass frontage, they found Genevieve Leclerc standing over two face-down figures while Tom Pepper bounced a third between a wall and his armored knuckles.
“Fuckers were fixing to rappel down,” Pepper ranted as his victim fell coughing to the floor to spit blood and teeth over plain black carry-alls full of rope coils. “The one who started shooting back, Leclerc shouldered right out the window. He’s down there on the plaza.”
Genevieve Leclerc held her M-81 steady with one hand while she unclipped her faceshield with the other, working dry lips and hawking dusty phlegm onto one of the prisoners. “This one had a detonator in his back pocket… it ain’t hard to put two and two together, is it?”
Hemblen turned as his Jaime Calderon and Perry the Union rep came into the room. “Were any of our guys on that floor, Jaime?” asked Hemblen.
“I think Ben and Kate and Andy Martins were definitely up there when it blew,” said Calderon, “and I still can’t raise Eric on comms. Plus maybe four Aurora Bor who’d ringed out and any civilians who were just laying low.”
“Survivors?”
“Doubtful. There’s armor on the plaza but it’s all scattered about, so…”
Hemblen nodded and knew what to do. He bent to pick up an abandoned assault rifle. “So I’ll finish off up here. The rest of you, clear everyone out of the building then regroup down in the lobby.”
Crash The Pad hesitated, exchanging glances. “You too Perry,” he said, nodding to the Union rep. “I’ll see you down there.”
“Maybe we should go down together, Hem…” Perry’s voice trembled.
“You know the rules, Perry. You stay down or you go down.” Hemblen slid the bolt back enough to expose a brass round in the chamber.
“Maybe during a firefight,” said Perry, “but not after…”
“My guys are scattered in pieces on the plaza,” said Hemblen. “You really think this firefight’s over yet? Now get going…”
As the others left, Hemblen turned to the three prisoners as they stood and dusted themselves down. Hemblen motioned them to move over to the wall with the assault rifle. “You’ve got a couple of minutes guys. Take a drink if you want. Smoke them if you got them.”
“I quit already,” said one. “Those things’ll kill you.” Then he grinned, bloody gaps where Pepper knocked his teeth out.
When it was done and even Perry could truthfully report that he’d heard nothing more than crackling bursts from Bostov assault rifles, Hemblen lit a filing cabinet full of hard-copy files and pushed it over the bodies, feeding the flames with a couple of foam-filled chairs that belched oily black smoke. A couple of floors down, he found drums of floor polish in a janitor’s cabinet and fired those up too. By the time he reached the lobby, he was walking against a steady breeze as the fires above him sucked air through the stairwells.
“What about earning not burning?” asked Calderon, his head cocked to the growing roar of the flames.
“Fuck it,” said Hemblen, wanting nothing more than to get away from here. “We lose our bonuses on this one. I’m done.”
Calderon shrugged. “We’ve taken Denver, Hem. We’re all done.”
“No, I mean I’m done with this shit. You or O’Toole can have Chalk One, I’m out of this.”
Calderon shook his head. “No way man, we need you. Crash The Pad’s got to…”
Hemblen turned and started walking. “Crash The Pad will do fine without me. Now let’s get out before the whole building comes down on us…”
Thursday 13 March
02:49 pm
SHE’S INTO HER apartment before she wonders why Tim wasn’t guarding the lobby and by then she already knows why because he’s hogtied on her floor with silver duct tape over his mouth and blood and vomit crusted round his nostrils. He stares up at her, heart-breakingly defeated.
She turns to face three of them. She’s got sweat and Georgy’s brains running down her face and Kareem’s blood soaking her jacket. They’ve got pale blue hooded paper suits, elasticated overshoes, surgical gloves. One’s mumbling into a comms mic on a headset, one’s pointing a spraygun with an oversized suppressor down at Tim. The third, the one aiming at her, speaks.
“Just so you know, there’s no point in trying to talk your way out of this. We’re just the clean team. Whatever you’ve done, I don’t care. Whoever you’ve pissed off sent us to make you go away. Understand?”
He smiles as she gapes and pants. The comms guys says “Still no word from Baker’s sniper team,” but her guy doesn’t take his eyes off her.
“Baker’s team missed her,” he says. “They’ll be packing up and running back to the Citadel. We’ll have to sort everything out, same as usual.”
As her breathing slows, she starts thinking again. Hot from the run, mad from the fight, she flatly accepts she’s dead. She puts that aside and the adrenaline rush ignited by the fist fight sets her mind racing how she’s going to take this jerk with her.
“Now before you start bleating ‘why me,’” he says, “you do know why we’re here, don’t you?”
She nods and breathes through her nose to slow her heart rate.
“Specifically, you were told not to wait and you didn’t.”
Nod. If she goes for her pistol, each one of those sprayguns will unload a hundred tiny rounds into her as she fumbles the draw.
“Yet you’ve been uplinking to traffic cams, downloading hospital records and been nothing but trouble for our man Georgy Carmonte.”
She nods again. She decides she’ll feint a groin kick then, as he blocks low and takes his aim off her, she’ll jam her thumb nail through his eyeball.
“Georgy was our little gift to you to draw you into Baker’s killzone,” he says. “Did you two kids get even?”
“Didn’t have time to,” she says, slow and deliberate. “Your sniper team suck. Baker blew Georgy’s head off.”
“Really?” he seems amused. “Well, he’s one less loose end to worry about, which makes you the last. I’m going to count backwards from thirty and that’s how long you have to surrender your Slate, all backup files and any samples you may have hidden. If you don’t, if you resist, if we so much as suspect you’re holding out on us… we’ll start shooting by your hands and feet and move inwards. Think about that.”
He starts counting down. She flexes her hand. She focuses on his eye. She thinks about her thumb pushing into the back of his socket.
DO NOT MOVE…
The words appear in glowing red capitals in the middle of the room. She blinks and looks round and they lurch through the air then vanish. She looks back at the man with the spraygun. “Twenty five,” says the man in the paper suit, like he hasn’t noticed giant letters floating round the room. “Twenty four…”
STAND STILL…
YOU ARE ON CUE VIEW…
“Twenty one, twenty…”
BLINK IF YOU UNDERSTAND…
Garplex Cue-View – the gadget people use in business meetings and to give wedding s
peeches. She looks past countdown man to the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows beyond and sees it – a little black box stuck to the glass on the outside. Inside it, a video chip is tracking her eye, guiding the scanning laser that’s writing the words someone is saying directly onto her optic nerve. When she stands still, she can see messages no one else can see. She blinks twice.
OKAY…
“…nineteen, eighteen…”
ON ROOF…
“seventeen, sixteen…”
WINDOW EXTREME LEFT…
“Think very hard, Miss Powell. In fifteen seconds time, we blow your hand away with spraygun fire.”
…RIGGED TO EXPLODE
“Just fifteen seconds…”
DUCK IN FIVE…
“Fourteen…”
FOUR…
“Thirteen…”
THREE…
She prays she won’t die alone.
TWO…
“Eleven…”
The glowing red letters slips from her vision center as she drops to the floor, covering her face as the startled men in paper suits react and raise their sprayguns.
She hears a brief noise, the first beat of an explosion, then the scorching blast of air presses her skull so hard that sound is replaced by unimaginable pain. The room whites out as curtains billow and Kirsty’s precious apartment fills with glass and shattered wooden window frame.
She’s blown back against her breakfast bar, hitting hard as the curtains reach flashpoint and the countdown man’s plain paper suit tears and splatters with blood. All she hears is the distressed whine of her own brain.
Tim’s guard turns to the window and a magnesium-white blast tears through his body and backlights his final scream as it explodes her microwave oven. His paper suits bursts into flames as his knees buckle.
She hears now, muffled gunfire. She feels its concussion too, hard slaps on her body as the comms guy fires on the move, spraying the whole apartment until a meaty chunk tears from his shoulder and he tumbles awkwardly behind the couch.
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