Good. They’d be close by when the main event started.
He had reached his destination: an empty lot surrounded on all sides by other buildings and narrow alleys. In front of him was an old warehouse. It had once been the stronghold of a for-profit business downtown but was being converted by other businesses into condos.
Then, the man thought, the cycle of greed and exploitation would begin anew. Countless little deaths of shame and despair would tick past in this building, the very shelter the drones sought being used to drain them of their life force.
Unless he broke the machine.
His brain burned with anger. He had tamped it down while he planned, knowing it would not serve him as well as cool rationality. It was time to let it return.
He reached into the pack to pull out the sensitive components of the next firebomb and advanced into the dry bushes near the corner of the warehouse. He crouched and rapidly assembled the pieces, leaving the bomb there and ready to go off in two minutes. A shudder went through him—excitement almost as strong as the anger.
He stood and walked casually toward the building beyond the warehouse. It was also being converted to residences, though this one looked as if it had been completed.
Perfect.
He went to the front door and tried to pull it open. It was locked, which didn’t surprise him much.
He pulled out his M&P Shield, racked the slide, and fired four shots in a cross pattern around the periphery of the lock. The reports cracked loudly in the still night air, a wordless command: “Come and see.” Then he kicked the doors in the center. His foot dislodged the locking mechanism, and the doors cracked and swung apart.
As the man stepped into the structure, the sirens grew louder in conjunction with the sound of a car pulling into the empty lot he’d recently vacated.
Then the bomb went off.
A crackling roar louder than the report of his guns filled the night, followed by a whoosh of fire as the warehouse went up in flames. The cop car’s brakes squealed as the officers within struggled to stop the vehicle before it got too close to the blaze.
Deke smiled to himself. He strolled farther in, down the main central hallway of the building, and then heard people, awakened by the blast, starting to scream and call out from around him and above.
His grin widened. He raised his gun, ejected the partially depleted magazine to keep as a spare, and slapped in a new full one before heading up the stairs. It was time to meet the hostages.
Kera pulled out onto a busy street far faster than was wise or safe, and she swerved to dodge a car, hanging onto the handlebars with white knuckles and a lurch of her stomach as the motorist honked at her in sputtering rage.
“Sorry,” she muttered, not looking back. “We got an emergency here.”
Not long into her ride, the scanners lit up. An apartment building had exploded, shots had been fired, and then another building had gone up.
She had intended to take tonight off unless there was anything egregious, but this definitely qualified. Being closer to the second apartment building than the first, she made her way toward it on the double, doing a good twenty miles per hour over the speed limit and passing two more cars, then running a yellow light and earning another honk from the drivers on the cross street.
As she passed the intersection, the police band radio came alive once more with feverish reports on the developing situation.
“Attention all units, we’ve located the bomber. Possible hostage situation at...”
She was close. She whipped down a side street and her gaze caught on a sign indicating that there was a pedestrian overpass being built across the next street over. If it was possible to get across it, it would save her time, but she couldn’t tell from here, and she had no way of knowing what to expect.
“Fuck it.” She slowed and looped around, then wheeled Zee up the ramp and past the CLOSED signs barring the walkway.
When she reached the top, she realized she’d made a mistake. Probably. The overpass wasn’t even close to being finished. A thin beam of scaffolding stretched from the top of the ramp to a comparable one on the other side of the street, which lay a good fifteen or twenty feet below.
But turning around and taking the less-direct route would take too long. People were going to die while she fumbled around.
Kera’s mind conjured the luck and the slow-fall spells. She began speaking the chant while she channeled the higher powers toward helping her, accepting the slight decrease in stamina that came with the casting for the aid it would provide.
Then she gunned it.
The bike sped over the beam, which was mere inches wider than her tires. She stared straight ahead, never looking down, keeping her hands and arms braced in a single position, increasing rather than decreasing her speed.
Ohhhhh, shit! she exclaimed as the swirling sensation of vertigo tried to overwhelm her and pull her over the edge. Why the hell did I turn onto this ramp? Stupid, stupid, stupid!
But she didn’t wobble, and though the scaffolding groaned, she passed the midsection, and then the whole thing dropped away behind her. She rocketed onto the opposing ramp, jetted downward, and plowed through a couple of signs on her way back to the street.
Her face broke into a grin as her anxiety transformed into giddy elation. She wanted to stand on the seat of her motorcycle and dance. Her luck had held.
But the real challenge was still ahead.
Chapter Nineteen
Doug Lopez and Mia Angel pulled up at the city block where the terrorist incident was developing. If they hadn’t had the police band radio, they might still have been able to find the right place, solely based on the fire, smoke, sirens, and gunshots.
“Wow,” Doug marveled. “This is some serious shit, whatever it is. I’m counting, what, twelve police cars so far?”
Mia steered them into a lot halfway down the block. She wanted to get closer, but potentially blocking off emergency vehicles would be a bad idea.
“Something like that,” she added, “and it sounds like the SWAT team and the Fire Department are on their way. My God, what the hell happened?”
They’d heard the gist of it on the radio, of course, but the cops weren’t bothering to waste time on the cosmetic details or speculations as to who, how, or why—the questions that made for a good news story.
The scene was, frankly, jaw-dropping. With the lights, the sirens, the gunshots, and the roar of the flames, it looked like something out of a movie.
“So,” Doug asked as he grabbed the camera and checked its battery, “do you think Motorcycle Man will show up? If he does, this might well be the news event of the year. The climax of the movie version, maybe, or at least the documentary.”
“Who knows?” Mia waved a hand, pretending to be annoyed by the question, but Doug could tell that he’d piqued her interest. “Figuring out if anyone’s dead yet is a more pressing concern. And who were the perpetrators? Some kind of terrorist incident, but we don’t know anything more than that. Was it religiously motivated? Politically motivated? Or just some asshole with a couple screws loose who felt like shooting people and blowing things up for the hell of it?”
“Oh,” Doug reassured her, “after the smoke clears and they bag up the bodies, I’m sure those answers will start coming to light.”
Mia snorted. “You sound like a civilian. Making that shit come to light is our job.”
“Riiiiiight,” he drawled.
She knew better than to think his flippant tone was a sign of disrespect. The hellish scene before them was not encouraging, and one of the main ways you survived a job like this was black humor and lots of it.
The bomb had been set off in an old warehouse that was being converted into condos, and the blaze had engulfed most of it. Worse, it was starting to spread to the lower levels of the adjacent building, another housing complex that was already completed—and inhabited.
Both reporters double-checked their press badges as they approached t
he line of cops who had formed in a semicircle around the occupied building behind their parked cars and a set of makeshift barricades. A siren indicated that the fire truck was near.
“Hi,” Mia began. “We’re reporters with–”
A cop turned and barked, “Get down! We have an active shooter!”
Doug and Mia knew what that meant, though it had been awhile. They instantly dropped to their knees, then their bellies.
Doug sighed. “Crap. Nothing in life is ever easy.”
Before either could ask the police for further information, another squad car pulled up in front of the others, while the officers behind the barricade line yelled at the driver to pull it safely behind them.
Just then, a series of gunshots rang out from the top floor of the inhabited building.
“Holy living fuck!” one of the officers yelled.
A muzzle flash blazed from one of the high windows, and five or six bullets thudded into the newly arrived car. Its windshield shattered, and the driver shifted into reverse and slammed on the gas, taking the vehicle half a block back before coming to a stop. Other officers ran to the car to check and see if the people within were okay.
As Doug and Mia gawked, a cop in front of them said, “Rifle. Definitely not a handgun. This guy, if we can assume there’s only one, is armed to the teeth. Where the hell is SWAT?”
Mia whispered to her partner, “Are you getting this?”
“Yeah, of course.” He rolled over and rose to a kneeling position a few feet farther from the action. “I started recording as soon as we walked over.”
The woman let out a long breath of relief. “Thank God. I thought we missed that.”
A SWAT van was next to pull up in the rear of the large courtyard-like lot, followed by the LAFD. Since the blaze was spreading, the firefighters didn’t have the luxury of hanging back at a safe distance.
Doug groaned. “Oh, no.”
Another volley of rifle fire split the air, and sparks leapt from the front of the big red truck.
“Didn’t someone warn them?” a cop shouted. “Goddammit.”
The fire truck reversed and approached the building from a different side, hanging back as much as they could as the men within piled out and began readying their hose. They clearly hoped they could blast their jets of water far enough to quench the inferno.
Worse, it looked like one of them had been hit in the shoulder. Two officers rushed to help him, shouting that someone needed to radio for a helicopter to keep an eye on things at this rate.
It occurred to Doug that the cops hadn’t tried shooting back yet. “Are there hostages?” he called.
Without looking at him, the officer who’d identified the gunfire as rifle shots grumbled, “Yes. SWAT will deal with it. Just stay down. The last thing we need is more people bleeding out.”
“Doug.” Mia poked his arm and jerked her head.
The special weapons & tactics guys were piling out of their van, assessing the situation and preparing to place snipers in nearby buildings. One of them went to talk to the firefighters to determine when it might be safe to storm the building, if it became necessary. Mia and Doug couldn’t hear what they were saying over the sirens and the crackle of the flames, but it was clear from the looks on their faces and the many wildly gesticulating people that there wasn’t a solid plan.
“Hell,” Mia commented, “Motorcycle Man might need to show up, the way things are going.”
Doug managed a dry smirk. “Told you.”
Kera turned onto a side street and slammed on the brakes. About three-quarters of a block away was ground zero. The sight of burning buildings was disturbingly familiar to her at this point, as were the sounds of chaos and the flashing lights of police cars.
She dragged Zee into a darkened nook in a nearby alley and left him there. Zipping in on her bike would make her presence too obvious, and people would guess who she was if she showed up at another burning apartment building. She kept the helmet on, though, for protection, to obscure her identity, and because the relayed radio continued to provide her with important info.
She listened to it as she jogged toward the blazing structures. Her feeling of alarm and the need for haste increased.
The terrorist had taken hostages—no one was sure how many, but it was estimated at least four people across two or three families—and was holding them on the top floor. Worse, since the fire had spread, all of the buildings would soon be engulfed by the blaze. The fire department was trying to quench it, but the perpetrator kept firing at any first responders who tried to intervene.
And so far, the shots had been disturbingly accurate. This person was trained.
Kera ran. She wanted to charge straight ahead, taking the shortest and fastest route, but she couldn’t. Even if she cast a muddling or cloaking spell on herself, she’d be seen, which would cause multiple problems. The police would likely try to stop her. The terrorist might start shooting hostages. Any number of people, including her, might be killed needlessly.
The back way it is, then. Without any way to scope the place out, she’d just have to hope there was a clear path.
Keeping to the shadows to the best of her ability, she took a detour, jogging the long way around and then swerving back toward the new condo complex, where her target lay. It seemed to take an agonizingly long time, but she made it without being spotted.
Kera scanned the building. It was three stories tall, and there was a landing on the second floor for a fire escape. Ironically, it hadn’t been installed.
She took a deep breath and recalled the spells of levitation, speed, and strength, combining the incantations and the necessary channeling, and a storm of sensations hit her all at once.
Here went nothing. She jumped straight up.
At first she feared she’d overdone it as she rocketed up through the air. She could picture herself sailing past the landing and over the top of the building into the visual range of the cops on the other side. A helicopter was approaching too, and shining a spotlight down on the grounds.
The thought was amusing, which seemed inappropriate at this precise moment.
At the last instant, however, Kera caught the rail of her destination, and the uncanny strength in her arms broke the momentum of the leap. She swung herself over the rail and landed with light feet in front of a door that opened with surprising ease.
The second floor seemed a counterintuitive maze to her, despite the building not being overly large. Adrenaline was clearly affecting her ability to think straight, and she couldn’t see a clear and obvious passage to the third floor.
Outside, the police were using a megaphone to relay a sequence of messages. It was hard to understand them, but they seemed to be trying to negotiate for the release of the hostages. Kera silently thanked them for providing a distraction as she crept forward.
Then came the cracks of another five gunshots.
Kera winced as her tinnitus came back with a vengeance, but the direction from which the sounds had come gave her a better idea of where to go. Blundering through the floor, which still wasn’t done being renovated or rebuilt, she found a staircase leading up to the top.
Out the windows, she could see flames crackling, and the heat was intense. White jets of water sprayed toward them from the fire truck, but they couldn’t get close enough to neutralize the blaze at its source without coming into range of the hostage-taker.
Kera paused as her plan coalesced in her head.
“This had better fucking work,” she murmured. Her arms waved and contorted, and she spoke an eldritch series of words that seemed to resonate within the stairwell.
Then she vanished, absorbed into the air itself. As she advanced up the steps and then down the hall toward her destination, she felt as though she was growing bigger.
Deke looked at the five people in front of him: a childless couple in their late twenties or thereabouts, a small fortyish woman with her son, who was about twelve, and an older man who seemed to
be a widower. They’d been among the first to move into the new building, and now they were his hostages.
He wanted to reassure them that their pain would be temporary. Indeed, that would be a gift compared to the life of exploitation the world had planned for them.
But their fear was part of the plan.
They were in a small lobby-type common area on the third and topmost floor of the building. There was a large window off to the side, but Deke had positioned himself away from it so he couldn’t be seen or more importantly, shot through it.
He’d ordered the five inhabitants to stand where they could be seen, however, so the cops would appreciate the gravity of the situation.
Even if they tried to guess his position using thermal imagery and shoot him through the wall with a high-powered rifle, they’d have to get the angle just right or risk hitting the civilians. He also adjusted where he stood every thirty seconds or so to prevent them from getting a good bead on him.
He preferred redundancies in his plans.
He’d also kept the police on their toes by emptying a couple magazines’ worth of 5.56 NATO rounds at them from one of his rifles. He was nowhere close to being out of ammo. The authorities had, if anything, been more docile than he’d expected.
The man looked his hostages over. They were tired, scared, and confused, though the young man’s jaw was trembling with anger. He might be trouble.
“Okay,” the gunman inquired, waving his pistol, “who’s going to be my—”
The younger guy rushed him. Having expected something like this, Deke raised his M&P and shot the attacker in the stomach, which caused him to stagger and his eyes to bulge. As the other four screamed and covered their ears, Deke shot the man a second time in the knee. He wailed horribly and toppled to the floor, bleeding.
How To Be A Badass Witch: Book Two Page 15