Page 24 of Double Shot
“Not for long,” I said, and slid the last shell into the gun and pumped it into the chamber. “It’s a shame we can’t run music through the comm.”
“Are you fucking nuts!” Lach grunted.
“What are they doing?” I heard Sadie demand.
“I can,” Grant said. “What do you think we are? Noobs and savages?”
“Lay me down a beat, something heavy.”
“I’ll lay you down something fat,” Grant said, and a few seconds later the channel was flooded with a throbbing base beat. It was the battle theme from theVolcano Dungeon. It was perfect. I was free, Lach was back and Poppet was here. Well, hopefully not too close to here, but close enough. I took a deep breath – spend gunpowder, blood, piss. I was back in the game.
I had suspected they were alive, but now I knew they were, and it was time to pay back some debts that had been racked up since we took that last job. The shotgun spoke, its voice thunder. A man fell, some of his features reduced to red gore. I moved position, and the big gun spoke again. The body armor the man was wearing took most of the hit, but still knocked him to the ground.
His struggle ended when I bashed him in the face with the heavy stock of the gun.
“Helo inbound, helo inbound,” I heard Lach on the line. The stroke of the rotors had meshed almost flawlessly with the sound of the music, and I let it carry me. I flanked the men who had Lach pinned down and pumped rounds through the Benelli as fast as I could. It was carnage. It was also taxing, and I could feel the sheen of sweat on my brow and knew that my endurance was nothing like it had been before.
I almost stumbled when I reached the wall. Before the surviving house guards could respond to that, they were cut to ribbons. Lach was up and advancing. Then there we were, side by side. “How long has it been since we were both in the field?” he asked.
“Too long, it would seem,” I said. There were no more rounds left in the shotgun, so I dropped it in the grass. I would use the FAMAS from here on. The helo was getting dramatically closer. The sound was unfamiliar. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a Blackhawk or any other American helo. I gestured toward the main building. Kaijin would be in there, and I wanted to put a few dozen rounds through her. I wanted to hurt her.
She had spent six months making herself the focus of my hatred, the scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong in the last half a year.
I saw her for a moment. She came out of the main building with four or five of her closest. The helo cleared the tree line and revealed itself to be a EuroCopter Panther, and a well-armed one. The door gunner leaned out and sprayed the field where we were with his large machine gun. Avoiding his aim was easy enough, it wasn’t a precision weapon. It was a devastating one, getting clipped by a round from it could easily be life ending.
The wounded men of the estate took the worst of it. They didn’t know who we were, so they were just shooting everyone. I grabbed cover and braced myself as a stream of lead shredded into everything around us. The low stone wall that had previously sheltered Lach now protected us from the opposite direction. The helo stopped shooting as it rotated and touched down in the grass.
Kaijin and her retinue were boarding the craft and for a moment, she met my furious gaze. I raised the rifle and emptied the entire magazine in an entirely too short buzzsaw of bullets. I was certain some struck the helo, and aside from a few people who were dragged in through the door, they left no one behind.
Lach fired several rounds with his AK. Where I had fired in a moment of passion and wasted my ammo, he took calm and cool aim and clustered his rounds into the engine of the helo. It powered up and lifted into the air, and as quick as it had come, it was gone.
But it was trailing a cloud of black smoke from the engine he had pock-marked with old Soviet ammo. “Good shooting,” I said, and clapped him on the shoulder.
“The car is the opposite direction. Why did we go this way?” he shouted over the fading roar of the helo.
“Because she was this way, and I was going to shoot her,” I said.
“Who?” he asked.
“Gwendolyn Kaijin, mate. The things that bitch did to me, I’ll kill her with my bare hands if I get the chance.”
“We’ll kill her,” he said. “And all the rest of them. They fucked with the wrong people.”
“I checked the radio, there are all sorts of people speaking really fast and angry-like. We should probably get out of here,” Grant said. Lach nodded in agreement.
“We only came here to get you. Revenge can wait,” he said with a degree of calm and cool that I found surprising. The hug from him earlier was almost the same as a full-on emotional meltdown from a normal person; sobbing and blubbering on the floor. He had been shaken. Fuck all,Iwas bloody shaken.
The two of us fell back, tracing a path that Lach seemed to know, clearing several low walls, and then vaulting a fence. The estate was out in the rural part of the country, so it was a two-lane road, and parked close by, concealed by the boughs of old trees, there was Sadie and a skinny guy with long braided black hair.
Sadie.
If I could run, I would have.
My legs were trembling, and the stump of my bad leg was throbbing furiously. It was going to be bruised as bloody hell after this, but I didn’t care. I limped toward her as fast as I could.
“Get in the car, I’m driving,” Lach said. No one was going to argue. “Grant, you get shotgun. Give him the rifle, mate.” Grant looked worried but there was no room for argument. We quickly threw ourselves into the seats, and Lach didn’t even wait for the doors to be closed before pulling away. As soon as the last door was shut, he put the hammer down, and the big German sedan revealed its secret weapon, a massive 500 horsepower motor, and one of the best non-F1 drivers in the world behind the wheel.
The tires screeched in protest, and Sadie squawked as we took the first hard turn. The country roads were narrow, and few were straight, so he was limited to hard technical driving, and had few opportunities to unleash the power lurking under the hood of the car.
