Alicia took a few shots with her own gun, mainly calculated to hit the side of the dumpster or ricochet into the alleyway. Then she grabbed the man next to her and gave him a push toward the station’s open doorway. She barked out orders at the other civilians and staffers as she moved. “Get inside! Everybody, inside, now! Go, go, go!”
Instead of following them to the building, however, Alicia did something that probably looked incredibly brave to those around her, but was actually an act of unthinking anger. The attackers had superior firepower and her men were losing their lives because they were trying to fight rifles with pistols. Simmins had had the right idea, and Alicia wanted his rifle.
She ran into the open, ducked to grab at the AR-15, and dove back toward the building clutching it tightly to her body. Then she stood up by the corner of the building, checked the weapon, and aimed it around the corner.
Drawing a bead on the dark shapes of the gunmen across the street, she began firing. She had trained with the AR a number of times, but was more comfortable with her revolver. The rifle barked and leapt in her hands, wildly until she steadied it, slipping her hand on to the vertical foregrip. Then she zeroed in and concentrated on pouring some lead into the street where the shooters were taking cover. They quickly backed off, surprised by the sudden outpouring of rifle fire.
Andrews ran to the building, and Cole jogged over as well while Alicia kept the terrorists’ heads down. Her magazine emptied, Alicia turned and the three of them entered the station to take cover with the civilians, some of whom had dragged the wounded with them. At least five bodies were left on the lawn and sidewalk outside, but there was little that could be done for them while the shooters remained active.
As they clustered into the dark station, rifle fire again crescendoed outside. The attackers were either making an angry display, or trying to pierce the walls of the station. Fortunately most of the outer wall facing the street was brick, and only two shots came through, shattering a window and plunking into the floor inside.
“Everybody stay down,” Alicia called out. “We’re safe in here for the moment.”
Andrews peered cautiously out through the lower corner of another window. “Dannor is still over there… I think he’s trying to get away down the side street. There he goes. I hope he makes it.”
Alicia looked around at the huddled group. Besides Andrews, she had three staffers, one armed and two little better than frightened children at this point. Carlisle, the dispatcher on duty, had gone outside to see what the shooting was all about, and was now lying out there dead. Alicia had nearly tripped over his body as she rushed inside.
There were two young men from the crowd outside, the middle-aged man she had first pushed inside, and a woman wearing high heels, of all things. Alicia marveled that her ankles weren't broken after the mad dash to safety. Everyone else had presumably either sprinted away from the area, or were lying outside, incapacitated. The only major injury among those in the building was a man bleeding from the neck. His buddy had removed his own shirt to staunch and put pressure on the wound, but it was soaking through and the victim's eyes were shut.
The rifle fire stopped, and they all waited for a breathless thirty seconds. Andrews crept around to the doorway to keep watch in that direction.
"That sounded like a lot more than three or four guns," Cole said. The staffer had until that afternoon been a quiet, heavyset man who filed records and managed IT for the station's systems. Now he was a desperate, scared man in a fight for his life, and his adrenaline-tinged voice shook under the strain. "Is this an armed invasion of the country?"
Alicia decided to put a stop to that at once. "No! Those guys are either criminals or terrorists. Both, I suppose." She had to take a long breath to keep her own voice from shaking. "But rest assured, everyone. Our emergency response forces will get a handle on this very soon."
One of the young men spoke, leaning against the wall in the hallway with his knees drawn up in front of him. He was wearing a hoodie and jeans, and sported a goatee. "But you're the police, lady! If you guys are getting shot up... who's going to rescue us?"
There was a moment of awful silence. Alicia muttered back, "We're not the only ones." She looked up at the broken window, where they could all see blue sky outside. "We can't be the only ones. There are others out there, and when they get control of their areas, they'll converge on our station. We're going to be fine." But the knowledge that she had officers lying on the ground outside who were not fine shook her to the core.
She had dealt with two officer-down situations in her time as sergeant. One was a vicious attack by a drug-fueled criminal. Fortunately, in that case backup arrived quickly and the officer was out of the hospital within a few days. He had since retired. The other had been an officer from another district who was pursuing a suspect and was shot and killed in Alicia's district. It had been a sad day, but hadn't impacted her very much personally.
This was different. She knew the men that were lying out there. She had met their families. She knew she had to do something for them, even if it was too late. She couldn't stop trying, or she'd be betraying the trust everyone had placed in her.
"Officer Andrews, will you go out there with me and try to bring more people inside?"
Andrews gazed back at her in the dim light. "Sergeant, I checked as we came in. There's nobody left alive. Either they got to safety, or they're..."
"I know. But we can't leave them out there. And there might be one or two we can still save, if we can get them in here. Come on." Alicia got up and went back to the doorway, cautiously opening it to look outside. Andrews and Cole came with her.
Peering around the corner, they saw no more attackers. The street was abandoned, although they could hear gunshots echoing farther off in the city, probably several blocks away. "Okay... let's see if we can pull a few of these people inside," she said.
Weapons ready, they moved cautiously out into the yard again, keeping low and staying behind hard cover. Alicia had to get down on her belly and crawl to stay protected behind a landscaping berm.
"Cole, stay here and watch," she ordered. "Tell us if you see anything moving, any gunmen."
"I see somebody moving in that second-floor window," Cole reported immediately, pointing at the building across the street. "But I don't see a gun... it looks like a woman. Probably just an office worker."
Alicia army-crawled to the nearest body on the lawn, wondering if she was about to hear the crack of the rifles again and feel the impact of a bullet. But none came, and she grew bolder with each passing second. Finally she got up and pulled the fallen man's arm up and over her back, stooping to heave him up with her leg muscles. It was the body of the man who had been shouting threats when the crowd first gathered.
Struggling back toward the building, she saw that Andrews was hauling a dead civilian by his feet. There were no gunshots.
They came back out and retrieved six more bodies. It was ugly work, and Alicia had blood all over her uniform by the time they were finished. One woman, a civilian, was still breathing but unconscious. Those inside tried to revive and stabilize her, but she had already bled out and when Alicia came back with her last body, the woman lay dead. Alicia let her burden slip to the floor and then sat down heavily herself for a moment's respite.
"Is it safe to go out now?" the young man in the hoodie asked her, looking up from the man shot in the neck, who they had also failed to save. "Can we get out of here without getting shot at?"
Alicia pursed her lips and frowned. She took a minute to answer, fighting against the stress that clouded her mind. She was sweating, panting from the exertion of lifting bodies heavier than her own on her back, and she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach from the sight of so much blood and death. Her entire world was crashing down around her. It was as if all her training, all her promotions and decorations, had been a cruel joke and were, in the end, worthless.
She sighed. "You'll be safer if you stay here. We do
n't know what's going on out there yet. This street seems to have quieted down, but there are still--"
One of her staffers, a woman that had wandered deeper into the darkened building, came hurrying back. "I smell smoke! There's smoke coming into the far side of the building!"
The others all realized they could smell it too. The lingering smoke had not been at the forefront of their minds during the shootout, but it was growing noticeably thicker now, and it wasn't just gunsmoke.
Alicia jumped up again, feeling her thighs burn. She hadn't had to work this hard since becoming sergeant and holding down a desk, and her morning exercise bike routine was apparently not intense enough. She walked quickly through the room, stumbling past a chair and knocking over a trash can in the darkness.
She didn't have to go far to smell the thick, choking smoke filtering down from the roof. Looking out through the glass door on the far side of the room, she could see a gray haze settling down toward the ground.
Where had she left the fire extinguisher? She crossed the room and exited the building, already hearing the crackle of flames and taking in the alarming smell of a serious burn, so thick she could hardly get a breath and had to cough.
Outside, the roar of the fire drowned out everything else, and one look up at the roof told her a fire extinguisher would do little good. The flames had grown across this half of the building and were reaching up six feet in some places.
She hurried back inside and yelled at the others as she crossed the room again.
"Change of plans, people. We have to evacuate! Everyone grab a body and get them outside. Just drag them, and go!"
Cole whined as he struggled to his feet. "Sarge, we just got them in here!"
"The whole station is going up, Cole. Whoever we don't get out will burn!"
A few minutes later they were all outside again, clustering around the end of the building that wasn't on fire. One by one, the survivors of the massacre crept away through the streets to find what safety they could. Alicia watched them go, unable to offer a better alternative. Behind her the building burned, its column of smoke winding up through the sky to join others that were blowing from elsewhere in the city.
Cole and the two female staffers spoke quickly in low tones, and then he turned to address Alicia. "I'm sorry, Sergeant Hendrickson. I've got to get out of here and find my family. I'm going to take Jackie and Helen as far as Colburn. Good luck!"
Without waiting for further permission or advice, the three of them took off with Cole in the lead, pistol up and ready.
That left Alicia and Officer Andrews standing several yards away from a burning building and a row of dead bodies, arranged on the grass with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances.
There was no more shooting within earshot, but a crash signaled the collapse of part of their station's roof.
"What's the plan, Sarge?" Andrews asked, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his uniform's breast pocket to ward off the glare of the sun that was now sinking toward the horizon, half obscured by smoke. “I hope we’re not going to stand around here while the rest of the city burns.”
Alicia shook her head. “Of course not. Thanks for sticking with me, Andrews.” She considered the tall, graying officer for a moment. Her impression of him was as a capable, occasionally fierce, usually stand-offish policeman. He had been on the force for six years, coming over from a back-office risk analysis desk job at some big corporation. She had often wondered about his motivations for becoming a policeman, but whatever they were, he had graduated the academy with honors and had been an exemplary officer so far.
He wasn't much for banter and avoided all office politics. But the only complaint she’d ever heard about him was for gruffness with a citizen that wasn’t cooperating. That was common for most of the officers on the force-- people these days seemed to have an axe to grind against anyone in a uniform, and Alicia’s community outreach efforts hadn’t been terribly successful lately.
All in all, she was glad to have Andrews with her on a day like this one. “We need to try to find some of our other officers,” she told him, “and link up with anyone else that’s battling this threat. Without radios, we’re blind until we band together. Where do you want to start looking?”
Andrews finished loading a spare magazine he had retrieved from a fallen officer and shoved it into his belt. “Want to try Ellsworth? I know we had a man or two down that way this morning, before we went dark. And even if we don’t find them, I'm sure we’ll run into something worth investigating.”
“Yeah, probably another firefight,” Alicia said with a sigh.
“I wish we had more ammo for Simmins’ rifle,” Andrews lamented. “I kept telling HQ to stock more firepower in the district stations, but they just thought I was being overzealous and militaristic. Simmins only had an AR because he used to be on the rapid response team and didn't turn it in when he transferred here. If we do get in another firefight, we’ll wish we had something more than our pistols.”
“This is what we signed up for,” Alicia said. “No use hanging around. Let’s go.”
They took off, jogging up the street to get clear of the smoke from the station fire, and then slowed down as they got into new territory. Alicia was shocked to find herself thinking of it that way: what had been a familiar street hours earlier was now unexplored ground from which danger might emerge without a moment's warning. It was as if the city had mutated suddenly from a sleeping giant into a nightmare beast.
They heard the distant pop of gunfire several more times, and they could see smoke from the plane crashes billowing into the air over the city. But in the immediate area nothing was stirring; either everyone had fled, gone into hiding, or they were... not moving, anyway.
"Andrews. How widespread do you think this could be?" Alicia asked as they moved northwest through the streets. "I mean, 9/11 involved a dozen actors with overseas support, right? Wherever these guys popped out from, there can't be more than a handful of them, right?"
Andrews shook his head. "There's no telling, Sergeant. But if there are enough of them that a team of gunmen were sent to assault our little district, then I'm betting that HQ was hit with a lot more. And if these guys have the capability to take down airliners along with the power grid..."
He left it there, but it was all Alicia needed to hear. The full weight of what was happening clarified what she knew she needed to do, and how far she might have to go. It was entirely possible that they were looking at the destruction of the whole city, possibly the region. It would take a long time to bounce back from this, even if they could regain control of the city in the next few days.
How could this have happened? She was grateful that at least Jason and Sadie were out of town and she didn't need to worry about them as well. She shook her head, trying to focus her mind and stay on top of her game.
Rounding a corner, they cautiously surveyed a street that led toward the downtown area. What they saw wasn't pretty.
Smoke poured from a large hole in the roof of a building three blocks down. All traffic was stopped, cars abandoned, some with doors hanging open. In the foreground, three civilians were hiding behind a dumpster. Beyond them, four men were walking up the center of the street toward their hiding place, each carrying a weapon.
"This town is ours now!" one of the armed men yelled so that the civilians could hear. Alicia noticed that one of those huddled behind the dumpster wore a security guard's uniform. "You're gonna be sorry you ever messed with us," the thug taunted again, twirling a baseball bat in one hand. Another sported a red bandanna over his face, black cargo pants and vest, and the unmistakable wooden stock of an AK-47. Alicia remembered the getup from the firefight outside her station.
"We're going to stop those men," Alicia murmured to Andrews, who was close behind her, still out of sight behind the corner. "If I keep them covered, can you cuff them?"
Andrews' eyes grew wide. "Sergeant, two of them have long guns. And I only have one pair of
cuffs anyway. How exactly are we going to stop them?"
Alicia glared at him. "By use of deadly force, Officer Andrews. If they won't surrender their weapons. Now come on!"
She led the way, running out into the street and acting a lot more bravely than she felt. Her revolver was up and ready, and she heard Andrews' boots on the pavement behind her.
"Freeze! Put your weapons down, hands on the back of your heads!" she shouted.
Two of the men hesitated at the sight of the armed, prepared police confronting them. But the one with the rifle whirled sideways and ducked into an alleyway. The other, the burly bat-wielder, came on. He sped up, taking short running steps to close with Alicia, and raised his bat to strike. She could see an angry but slightly absent look in his eyes. Probably jacked up on PCP, she thought. This wouldn't be easy.
It all happened in an instant. Andrews, once more quicker than his sergeant to use his weapon, fired three times, hitting the man in the torso with all three. He could hardly miss at this range, and the man was a large target. Alicia saw the impacts and bloodstains spreading on the man's light shirt, but still he came on. Andrews fired again, and again, but the man didn't go down. Alicia had been covering the other two, but was now forced to act to bring down the attacker.
She swiveled and fired. Her instinctive aim was centered well, but a little high. It took the man in the throat, and her second shot hit him somewhere she couldn't quite see but which produced a lot of blood that spattered the pavement behind. He fell dead at her feet.
As she was recoiling and trying to mentally accept the reality that she had just killed someone for the first time, Andrews approached the other two miscreants. One dropped his knife and held the palms of his hands out. The other carefully put his shotgun on the ground in front of him and said, "Whoa, whoa! Okay, man!"
Suddenly the one who had dropped his knife reached behind him and produced a small gun from the back of his waistband. Andrews saw it and fired three more times, dropping the man to the asphalt.
Denver Overrun (Denver Burning Book 4) Page 2
