She’d have gotten hit on a lot more if it wasn’t for the fact that Little Dolly—whose metahuman abilities had manifested in the middle of the Invasion, like so many—was always packing. Never less than a pair of 9 millimeter pistols and a Mossberg slung on her back. Generally a lot more than that. She’d been a stripper in one of the Atlanta gentlemen’s clubs that was right on what was going to become one of the destruction corridors. When Nazi troopers came crashing through the place she’d somehow gotten her hands on the bouncer’s sawed-off and actually had done enough kinetic damage with it to allow the customers to escape. Once she got her hands on something more precise from a dead SWAT officer and found out about the joint weakness…
Her metapower was as an intuitive marksman. She never needed a scope, and she generally shot from the hip.
Granny Aiken was another WWII vet. She’d been Pretty Sally back in the day, and she threw things with her mind. Her body might be a good bit more frail now, but she made up for it with mental strength.
Corbie smirked at all of them. “So, I’ll go scout from above, Dolly’ll go in there and stun the blokes—”
Granny tsked, and Dolly scowled. Corbie rolled his eyes. “Blimey, you packin’ stun grenades or not, Doll?”
“Oh.” Dolly looked mollified. “Yeah, I am.”
“Bad idea,” Leader of the Pack said. He jerked a thumb at his dogs. “Let them. You make a hella big target in the air, birdbrain.”
“Boy has a point,” Granny agreed. Corbie made a face, but nodded.
They left their van at the edge of the corridor, and began working their way in. Bella was keeping mental track of the dogs, although it wasn’t as easy as it was with a human—animals were on a different “frequency” or something. Leader had told her that the dogs couldn’t exactly communicate directly with him as such; he could tell them what to do, and if they ran into something, they’d come back to him and by their behavior he could get a general idea of what they’d seen. Mostly.
Bella actually had the notion that he was telepathic with them, but telepathy scared him, so he consciously repressed what he was getting and reread it as behavior. Whatever worked.
“Don’t you usually work with Handsome Devil, Shakti and Einhorn?” Bella asked Corbie as they moved cautiously though the wreckage—admittedly with more caution for what they might fall over or have fall on them than for cover.
“Conrad’s havin’ a bad-luck day, Shakti’s makin’ sure it doesn’t go as far as havin’ a Nazi show up at the door, an’ Einhorn’s with another team.” He shrugged. “This lot isn’t a team so much as who answered the comm.”
He stopped, and frowned, holding up a finger in the age-old gesture for “listen.”
They’d been hearing distant gunfire for some time. Bella had gotten pretty used to distant gunfire by now. But…wait. This wasn’t just gunfire. It wasn’t even just the bursts of an AK-47 or something else on full auto.
This was…a lot.
That was when she picked up a burst of fear from all of Leader’s dogs, and they came dashing back so fast she didn’t even have time to say something.
They exchanged startled looks. “Lots of full autos,” Leader said slowly, as his dogs danced around him in a fandango of anxiety. “Grenade launchers. Bowser says a missile launcher, but I’m not sure I believe that—”
He was interrupted by an explosion. A big one.
“…or maybe I do.”
They exchanged glances again. Leader reached for his comm. “I’m calling in help.”
Bella slowly reached into her pocket, and pulled out the slightly larger and far less sleek and high-tech unit that Sovie had given her.
“So am I,” she said, and put the unit up to her mouth. “Gamayun, this is Bella Blue. I’m with an Echo team at what used to be the corner of Lee and Tate. We have a problem.”
***
John was just about finished installing Jadwiga’s cabinet when a small group of CCCPers caught his attention. They were running full-tilt down the corridor, coming from the barracks and heading to the garage, most likely. It wasn’t terribly unusual; whenever the nigh-prescient Gamayun spotted trouble brewing, a patrol was sent out or a group of already patrolling CCCPers were redirected to see what was going on. Less than ten minutes later, however, he was startled to hear the base’s klaxons go off. The Commissar had insisted on her personnel running a number of drills, even before the base was finished with its renovations. Fire drills, practice sessions for what to do in order to repel intruders, and the “all-hands” drill for when every able-bodied CCCPer was required to suit up and head out to deal with a threat. This specific alarm indicated that it was the lattermost, and that very fact gave John pause. Despite the CCCP being a ragtag, thrown-together lot, they were a capable bunch. What could possibly be so bad that it needed all of them to handle? Immediately an image of a renewed Nazi invasion thrust into the fore of his mind, and a cold, empty feeling gripped him. A rapid burst of something in Russian—in Gayamun’s voice—blatted out over the intercom. John was still haltingly learning Russian, but he did recognize two words: “Echo” and “Rebs.”
Before John could properly react, he saw Soviet Bear’s head poking into the doorway. “Davay, comrade! We are to be rocking the Casbah!”
John stood up, perplexed. “The hell are you talkin’ about, Pavel? What’s goin’ on?” Bear sometimes mangled his English terribly, mispronouncing phrases or butchering euphemisms.
Bear stepped fully into the doorway, his submachine gun in hand. “It is American for kicking donkeys or something, da? Bah! Never mind. Davay! Mount up!” Without another word, he trotted away, his clunky metal feet stomping through the hallway.
Before John could react to that, Upyr ran towards him from the other direction, laden with two AK-47s and her shotgun. She stopped just long enough to toss one AK and a magazine carrier to him before following in Bear’s wake. “This is not being nonlethal, Chonny,” she called over her shoulder. “They are having missile launcher.” She sped off, and from her direction, he reckoned she was heading for the garage. Evidently, in her case, leather pants, jacket and armored pads counted as being “suited up.”
John slung the rifle and the magazine carrier over his shoulder, running out of the room and down to the locker room next door. A number of other CCCPers were already there, changing into their patrol uniforms and body armor. John quickly unlocked his locker and changed with practiced precision. Less than a minute later, he was being shuffled and shoved into one of the CCCP’s pool of vans; a couple of others, Untermensch and Red Saviour included, had already revved up motorcycles and were preparing to ride escort. Inside of his van were a few that he already knew; Bear and Upyr, along with the American psionicist Mamona. The other two were Russians: Perun, one of the veterans and an electricity-based meta; and then Zmey in his hydrocephalic flame-producing helmet. Everyone in the van was silent, checking their firearms and gear except for Bear, who was chanting a garbled version of “We Will Rock You.”
Finally, as Mamona, who was driving, gunned the engine, Upyr leaned forward and stared into Bear’s face and said something in Russian. Whatever it was, Pavel looked stunned and stopped. Upyr settled back with a smile on her pale face.
John leaned forward, satisfied after function-checking his rifle. “What’d ya say to him?”
“That I would be giving him shotgun enema if he did not cease with the racket music. Then Unter would to be doing buckshot extraction.”
He smirked. “You’re a mean one.”
With a lurch and a grinding of gears, the van started forward out of the garage. Several very bumpy minutes later, the van screeched to a halt. Mamona called over her shoulder for everyone to pile out. John jumped down onto broken cinderblocks, the remains of a building demolished in the Nazi attack. He could clearly hear what sounded like all of the gunfire in the world going off in the distance. A block away, at most. The rest of the riders had piled out when Perun, his shaggy white hair blowing in
the humid breeze, spoke up. “We are on foot from this point, tovarischii. There is a squad of Echo immediately to our southeast; they are being pinned down by an unknown number of Rebs in an abandoned building. A patrol is on scene, and requested backup. Due to the amount of firepower,” he said, his words punctuated by a large explosion, “that the Rebs are using, we are weapons free. Lethal force if necessary, tovarischii.” With a curt nod, he sprinted off towards the gunfire. The rest of the squad followed him, keeping a few meters between each of them.
Their comms crackled to life. “…spasibo, Gamayun. CCCP, Belladonna Blue, here. Mamona, Johnny, I’m with the Echo squad. I’ll be doing this in Russian and Murkan for your benefit.” A brief sentence in Russian followed. “Follow your leader, guys, I gave him the route for the safe corridor in to as close as you can get to us.”
After a short run, with John behind Bear in their lineup in order to keep their rear secure, they arrived at their destination. Red Saviour and the rest of the CCCP, save for the squad on site with Bella, were assembled near a corner. Red Saviour was busy talking urgently with Mojiotok when she noticed John’s squad arrive. “Comrades, gather. Blue girl managed to get out, rest of squad is pinned down. Echo was being called also, but all of their personnel are otherwise engaged.” She shook her head. “Am not liking sound of this, but this is being on our back turf, so we will be taking standard urban advance to building across from the one we are here behind. Perun—you take squad and provide covering fire for our advance to cover. Once we are in place, we will cover Echo retreat to our position. Then we unite and make the frontal assault.”
“I’ll do my best to baffle their brains, but there’s a lot of them, and it’s at a distance,” Bella said, repeating it in Russian. “So don’t count too much on it. They’re mostly not good marksmen, but they have grenade launchers and at least one shoulder-fired missile launcher. You know what they say about ‘close only counts’—and these ain’t horseshoes.”
With that, Natalya spoke in rapid-fire Russian to Perun. He pointed at John, Bear, and Zmey. “Take position to lay down suppressive fire for the Commissar’s squad, comrades.” Without another word, Perun ducked around the corner. It felt as if every hair on John’s body stood up on end a half second before the old veteran began sending hundred-yard-long bolts of electricity across to the building where the Rebs were holed up. John crouched low and took up a prone position about five yards from Perun. Unslinging his rifle and charging it with a fresh round, he took aim. Bear and Zmey did the same, keeping an adequate amount of space between them.
The Commissar sounded out the command. “Now!” John, Bear, and Zmey all poured small arms fire into the building in measured bursts—well, Bear fired with abandon from his PPSh, laughing raucously—while Perun loosed a flurry of electrical bursts. Red Saviour and her squad of CCCPers dashed to a building across from their position, making sure they weren’t clumped together. The return fire from the Rebs was sporadic, thanks to the amount of lead that was being shot into their cover. A handful of heartbeats later, the Commissar and her squad were in position. She gave a command over the comms, and the CCCPers’ positions exploded into a hail of fire again; more covering fire for the Echo patrol and CCCP squad pinned down by the Rebs. John could see that they had been crouched behind an overturned van and some rubble; one of the Echo metas had been invisibly uprooting huge chunks of rubble to intercept the Rebs’ weapons’ fire, chucking away each piece as it crumbled under the hail of bullets and explosives.
Both the Echo folks and the CCCP squad with them made a break for Saviour’s position; very few of the Rebs dared to poke their heads out to try to take potshots under the combined fire from the Commissar’s and Perun’s squads. A few of the rescued were looking bloodied, but no one was incapacitated, so there was that much to be thankful for. With all of their forces regrouped, it took about a minute for Saviour to communicate with the Echo and CCCP personnel that had been under fire; once she was done, she signaled to Perun. “On my mark, comrades, fire and advance by bounds. We are to be assaulting the building. Perun’s squad will be the lead element, and will take the first floor. We shall take the second.”
Bella was already making her rounds of the wounded, as was Sovie. Between the two of them, it wasn’t more than a few minutes before the injured were back in fighting form, injuries closed, if not healed. John hadn’t seen a meta-medic in action before. Truth to tell, it kind of made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. People shouldn’t be able to do that. Amped up on adrenaline, John had one of the moments of surreal clarity that some people experienced as a combat stress reaction; he wondered whether the world would be a better or worse place without metahumans.
Before he could ponder it any more, Perun shouted, “Now!” John brought himself up into a kneeling position, firing at all of the windows of the building in front of him. He fired until the magazine for his rifle went dry, and then reloaded it with a fresh one. Finally, after several other CCCPers had rushed past him, it was his turn to make the dash to the building. The stuff you heard and saw in movies about zigzagging when you’re under fire was complete BS; he ran in a straight line, and hard, for the front wall of the building. Thanks to his enhancements, he crossed the distance in an instant, slamming into the wall, shoulder first, with enough force to crack the brick. He was at the end of the “stack,” the line his squad had made on the wall. The Commissar’s stack was opposite them; without a word, one of the CCCPers from her squad kicked in the door. Several flashbangs and fragmentation grenades were thrown inside of the doorway, their explosions barely muffled by the walls. The team was inside in an instant, with Chug leading the way as a stumpy shield; lots of gunfire and the varied sounds of metahuman powers being used rang out from inside.
Perun used a hand signal to indicate that it was his squad’s turn. They all streamed through the doorway, following his lead. John caught sight of several Rebs’ bodies in his peripheral vision as he followed Upyr, who was in front of him. They assaulted towards the stairway, guns trained upwards. The too-loud crackle and boom of Perun’s electricity echoed, along with more rifle fire from the rest of the squad. Since John was rear security for this portion, he kept his attention split between following the others and making sure that there weren’t any hidden Reb stragglers popping out to cause them trouble.
Past the first landing, the team lined up outside of the first door. Perun had positioned himself opposite the team on the doorway. With a plasma-charged fist, Bear knocked the door off of its hinges, stepping aside so that the rest of the team could enter. More gunfire, and John was stuck outside keeping security. Someone inside, it sounded like Mamona, called out, “Clear!” Since John had been at the rear of the team, it was his turn to be at the front of the stack. There was only one more door on this floor; this was the one at the front of the building, facing the street where the Echo team had been pinned down. Bear made his way to the other side of the door, nodding to John; again, he keyed his gauntlets to allow plasma to flow from the conduits connected to his heart and into his fists. The door shattered, and John was through the entrance. A Reb was immediately in front of him, turning to swing some sort of rifle; John dropped him with two shots to the center of mass and one shot to his head before immediately turning right to clear the corner. The rest of his squad followed behind him, gunning down the remaining Rebs in the room in less than a second.
John shouted, “Clear!” echoing his comrades as they did the same.
The comm came to life again. Russian first, then English. “Comrades, regroup downstairs. Have not found grenade and missile launcher.” Perun motioned for his team to exit the room. The squad jogged down the stairs, meeting up with Saviour and her group of CCCPers. Among them were the first squad along with the Echo patrol; Bella was in the process of grabbing one of them for another of her treatments. It looked as if they’d had more of a fight than John’s group; a couple had been winged, all of them were sporting cuts and bruises from shrapnel. One
of the CCCPers was limping from a bullet right through the thigh—the hole was visible in his trousers, but there was no bleeding now. Bella arched an eyebrow at John. “Gotta liberate us some nanoweave pants for you lot.”
Before Natalya could raise a complaint, two Rebs burst from a storage closet, running as fast as they could for the back door. They shouldered their way through it, busting the door wide open. John couldn’t get a bead on them with his rifle before they were outside, but he did notice that one of them was carrying the unaccounted-for “rocket launcher.” It was an RPG-7, he guessed; widely available on the black market if you had the cash.
“Davay, davay! After them!” The Commissar propelled herself out through the door on a plume of her own strange metahuman energy. The congregation of CCCPers and Echo ran after her, a jostle of firearms and gear harnesses. They came out into another destruction corridor; the building the Rebs had holed up in had apparently been right on the edge. The two fleeing Rebs were almost across the entire expanse, as wide as a football field. John’s group was about to give chase when they almost simultaneously noticed what was wrong with the scene.
On the other side of the destruction corridor were close to two hundred jeering, armed, and very angry Rebs, led by Rebel Yell himself.
***
Holy Hell. It was all that John could think as he slung his rifle, shifting it behind his back and out of the way of his hands. The CCCPers had spread out and formed a line, everyone preparing in their own way. This was an ambush, and they’d taken the bait. There were less than thirty CCCPers and Echo, and at the very least two hundred Rebs; they were all armed with shotguns, pipes, chains, and knives. This was insane; the Rebs had a small army, and they were ready and willing to kill. The smart thing to do would’ve been to retreat under covering fire, and take the gang out at a distance, with rifles while behind cover. But none of the CCCPers ever got the chance to voice that option.
Rebel Yell strode out from the middle of the ranks of the jeering and shouting Rebs. His chest was puffed out and his chin was up; he was savoring every moment of this. Finally, he spoke, his voice carrying over the noise his compatriots were making. “You commies wanted a war? Well, you got a war!” The last word was deafening; John felt his equilibrium nearly go as he stumbled backwards, flailing to stay standing, the same as the rest of his friends and team. It was almost as an afterthought that he noticed that the building they had just left began to collapse, brought down by Yell’s voice alone. This is going to suck. A lot. John didn’t like to play fair; when it came to fighting, he cheated if he could. Life-and-death situations never had the luxury of allowing you to hold back; it was literally you or the other guy. Because of that, he absolutely hated fighting other metahumans. They could be as unpredictable as he could be, since there was a laundry list of abilities that any single meta could possess, with some of them being blatant and others insidious.
World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Page 29
