by Logan Jacobs
I didn’t have to wait very long. The basement was full of the bastards.
A Skalle goon popped up right in front of me and tried to swipe my gun out of the way. I went with the force of the blow and put my shoulder into him, pushing the goon up against the wall of the basement. His, or her, I couldn't really tell in the gloom and dirt, air rushed out of their lungs in a blast of stale cigarette stained breath. They tried to struggle to get the gun from my grip by holding it down toward the ground. Suddenly, their foot popped in my sights and without hesitation, I pulled the trigger twice. The 147 grain jacketed hollow point 9mm bullet left the barrel of my gun at around twelve hundred feet per second and smashed into the Skalle Furia’s foot at probably around eleven hundred nine hundred and ninety-nine point nine feet per second. One second there was a roughly size twelve combat booted foot on the ground, and the next there was day old road kill. The Skalle screamed in incredible pain and let go of my gun. Bad news for him, I brought it up perpendicularly to my chest and fired it dry into his chest. Good news for him, his foot no longer hurt.
‘Cause he was fucking dead.
My thumb depressed the extended mag release with a mind of its own and I flicked the empty mag out of the gun while at the same time my left hand grabbed a new mag from a pouch at my hip and swept it up into the flared mag well. I released the lock and smiled when I felt the familiar THUNK of the slide slamming home.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as my combat awareness screamed at me to drop to the ground. Like an obedient child, I listened and fell to one knee while I spun to face what was coming up behind me.
Bullets tore chunks of old stone from the basement wall where my torso had been just a second before. I aimed at the thick tongues of muzzle flash from ten feet away and pulled my trigger with controlled triple taps to either side of the flash. There was a loud groan and then the machine gun fell to the ground, a dead Skalle still clutching it.
“Havak!” Har’Gitay called out from the base of the stairs. Several dead or severely maimed Skalle Furia lay at her feet. “You done playing patty cake over there? I want out of this fucking basement. Let’s go!”
“Sorry, Captain,” I said as I holstered the Combat Master and pulled my CA-415 up from the sling to change mags. If we were headed up against a slew of Skalle Furia, I wanted to be locked and loaded.
“Marc,” Har’Gitay said as she changed mags on her VEPR, slung it across her back, and then pulled her H&K MP7 up to fill her hands. “Call me Olivia for the rest of this little excursion, okay. I’m not a police Captain here.”
“Sure thing, Olivia,” I replied with a little satisfied grin. I pulled my radio from where it was attached to the strap of my JPC and brushed some dirt and grime from it. I also noticed that my earpiece had come out during the first round of fighting in the basement. I put it back in my ear. “Team Havak? You copy?”
“Jesus, Marc,” PoLarr’s voice came into my ear. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“No clue,” I replied. “Some kind of explosion. Olivia and I are going to have to fight our way up and out. How’s it out there?”
“We’ve mopped up most of the remainders,” PoLarr answered. I assumed as the only person on the team with a military background that she’d assumed command. “A few took off into the sewer. Aurora is chasing them down. She was hungry.”
“Copy that,” I said with a shrug she couldn’t see.
“Marc, what’s your sit-rep?” Thomas’ voice broke into the radio, full of the confidence of someone used to commanding situations that have just gone completely FUBAR.
“In the basement, sir,” I said without even realizing I’d done it. “Cut off from the sewer, so Captain Har’Gitay and I are going to have to fight our way up.”
“Yeah you are, son,” Thomas replied. I didn’t think he realized he’d said what he’d said either. “Strike Squad is still trying to rescue Commando Jaubert. The fighting is pretty pitched up here. If I could spare some men I would, but there were exponentially more Skalle Furia here than we were led to believe.”
“Copy, that, sir,” I replied. “I’ll see if I or one of my team can keep one alive. I don’t think this was just a simple safe house. They were prepared to blow the whole thing.”
“I concur, ah, fuck!” He yelled as I heard machine gun fire. “Good luck, Marc. See you in a few.”
“PoLarr,” I said into the radio. “You, Tempest, and Nova see if you can get street side. Hey, where is Chaz?”
“He got hit with some falling debris,” Tempest replied. “His little fail-safe thing teleported him back to Area Fifty-One I think. At least that’s what he mumbled before he bamfed out of here.”
“Okay, well, see if you can rendezvous with Strike Team and help them out,” I said. “Olivia and I are about to go kick some ass.”
“It’s Olivia now, huh, Havak,” Nova said into the radio. “About time. Welcome to Team Havak, Captain. Don’t let Marc have all the fun.”
“Don’t worry, Nova,” Har’Gitay said with a grin as she wiped dirt from her brow and flicked the safety off on her MP7. “I won’t.”
“How you wanna play this?” I asked her as we approached the stairs. Heading up toward an unknown force from a tactically less advantageous position was not ideal.
“Hmm,” Olivia said as she thought about it. She grabbed a bit of fallen rock and tossed it up the staircase to the first landing. As soon as it hit, bullets peppered the landing like a swarm of pissed off wasps. “They’re trying to figure out what is going on. I give us about ten seconds before they toss a shit ton of grenades, and we’re turned into shredded beef.”
“Yeah, kind of what I was thinking,” I confirmed. “Remind to yell at O’Donnell for not giving us any grenades of our own.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you had to punish her,” Olivia smirked. “But tell her she has to get in line. I’m up next. You know, if we get out of this alive.”
“Well, shit,” I grinned back. “That’s a hell of a motivator. Load the VEPR with the bolo mag and follow my lead.”
Olivia changed mags on the semi-auto shotgun as I took a position on the left side of the stairwell, just outside the field of vision of anyone above us. I motioned for her to fire the devastating bolo shots into the underside of the landing. She nodded that she understood. I put the CA-415 to my shoulder and let it roar on full auto. My rounds dug into the wall and stairs just below the landing. The Skalle positioned there returned fire. Once my gun was dry, I nodded for Olivia to open up.
She aimed and pulled the trigger as fast as she could. The lead and razor wire bolo round tore into the floor of the landing and turned it into so much kindling. While she did that I quickly changed mags again on my rifle and began to run up the stairs.
Screams floated into the stairwell as the bolo shots tore up feet, shins, and a few crotches. A couple of the Skalle’s bottom halves fell through the large holes that Olivia had opened up with the VEPR.
I bounded up to the landing and opened fire. The poor Skalle who had seconds ago thought they were going to be shooting fish in a barrel didn’t have time to register that they had just become the fish. I heard the sharp stutter of Olivia’s MP7 from below me as I let loose with several controlled bursts from my rifle. The Skalle Furia in front of me danced and jerked as if they were kernels of popcorn in a pan of hot oil.
“Clear!” I shouted down to Olivia once I was certain the last of the Skalle on the landing wouldn’t be doing anyone any harm ever again. We needed to keep our momentum going. I did a quick glance at the mangled bodies littered on the landing to see if they had anything that could be of use. Two of them had several grenades attached to their web belts. I took two and handed two others to Olivia as she bounded up the last few steps.
“Any idea what is what?” Olivia asked as she took the grenades.
“Nope,” I said and shrugged. I pulled the pins on my two and without another thought tossed them up the last stairway into what I
assumed was the first floor of the old hotel. Olivia put her two on her belt and then took her MP7 in a two-handed combat pose.
A second later there were two, bright, flashes followed by two very loud BANGS.
“Flash-Bangs, nice,” Olivia mentioned as an afterthought as we ran up the stairs and threw ourselves into the small lobby of the old hotel.
There were about ten Skalle Furia scattered about the room, guns held loosely in stunned hands. Near the front desk of the hotel, two more of the black-clad, skull masked terrorists huddled over a computer. One held his ears which looked to be leaking a dull, mustard yellow blood while the other frantically tried to disconnect it from a small satellite dish that had been set up on the counter.
“Olivia!” I yelled as we breached the room. “We need to get that computer!”
The angry rip of her MP7 was all the answer I needed.
My CA-415 was up in front of me at the high ready, slightly cantered to the left as I moved into the room, and began to acquire targets. It was a very strange sensation having the Ar’Gwyn try to mingle and do the tango with the newly acquired Urban Combat mod. Ar’Gwyn was like Kung-Fu, but with guns instead of your fists and feet. It ebbed, it flowed like water. If it met resistance, it found another way. The Urban Combat mod was rigid, precise, practiced. My body felt like it wanted to fight itself, but I let my muscles just move of their own volition. I could only imagine I looked like a ballet dancer trying to pop and lock… only with a fully automatic rifle spitting blazing death all around.
I’d just taken out a Skalle Furia by blowing his arm from his torso when it felt like I was hit by a two-ton truck the size of a fly in the center of my back. I flew forward and stumbled. It was all I could do to struggle through having all the wind knocked out of me, but I’d been at this long enough to force the voice in my head that screamed that I was suffocating down, and let my combat instincts continue to guide my actions. The force of the hit knocked the rifle from my grip, and it fell on its sling at my side. I couldn’t get to my Combat Master around the bit rifle so I pulled my compact Glock 26 from the holster at the small of my back with my left hand as I spun to face where the kick had come from.
A Skalle Furia stood not five feet away, a big ass fucking Taurus Raging Hunter .44 magnum held in his shaking hands. He’d clearly not been expecting the kick of the massive revolver because it looked like the recoil had thrown the gun up into his skull mask. A big chunk of the mask had been torn loose so that I could make out his mottled purple skin underneath. He struggled to get the hand cannon back up to bear. I didn’t give him the chance. My left hand snaked out, full of the little compact Glock, and I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him right where his mask had been broken. His head snapped back, and the revolver began to tumble to the ground.
Acting on pure instinct I holstered the Glock as fast I’d skinned it, and dove forward with outstretched hands. The Raging Hunter tumbled end over end and then fell into my hand as if I’d used the motherfucking force. As soon as my fingers wrapped around the molded rubber grip, I rolled and came up onto one knee. The massive pistol bucked in my hand, a blazing bronco of brutal violence.
A Skalle Furia unlucky enough to get into my sights was nearly cut in half by the power of the bullet. Clearly, he didn’t have a life-saving JPC protecting either his front or his back. I made a mental note to thank O’Donnell once we got back. I fired the big gun dry. Each shot taking down another Skalle.
As the smoke and chaos began to clear I saw Olivia wrapped up in a hand to hand grapple with one of the terrorists. I was going to rush to her aid, but before I could she spun the goon around in some weird alien judo move and then flipped him over her hip while still keeping a grip on his wrist. I heard the loud POP of his shoulder coming out of joint even over the screaming. Oliva didn’t stop there, however, she wrapped her leg in the useless arm and yanked on it while she drove her foot into the Skalle Furia’s neck. There was a final crunch, and then she let the limp arm fall to the ground. She didn’t see another of the space terrorists as he darted from an alcove and raised his rifle to fire on her.
I didn’t have time to reload the hand cannon or switch to any of my other weapons so I reared back and hurtled the massive gun as if it were a tomahawk, or, more aptly, like it was one of my sorely missed SVAs.
The matte black, nearly three and a half-pound, gun spun end over end until it cracked the sneaky Skalle Furia coming up on Olivia’s six square in the face.
Green blood spurted out from under the skull mask as the goon stumbled backward. In the time it took the gun to fly through the air I’d cleared my rifle and pulled the Combat Master from its holster. When Olivia heard the smack of the pistol as it hit the Skalle Furia in the face she spun as fast as a coiled rattler and pulled her little Kimber K6 .357 magnum.
We fired at the same time, and our slugs tore into the broken faced goon with devastating force. He jerked and spasmed as softball-sized chunks of his flesh flew out of his back and shoulders and sprayed the wall behind him like a gore filled Jackson Pollock.
When the cacophony of our dual gunfire ceased we both realized that most of the bad guys in the lobby were dead. All except the one Skalle by the front desk. He stuffed the computer into a backpack, slung the backpack over his shoulder, fired off a few wild shots from a Scorpion machine pistol and took off down a narrow corridor.
“Shit!” I yelled. “We need to get him!”
“Go!” Olivia yelled as the lobby elevator opened and four more Skalle Furia, fists full of full-auto retribution, burst into the room.
“What about them?” I asked as I brought my Combat Master up and emptied the mag at the newcomers.
“I got it,” Olivia reassured me with a sneer as her H&K rattled off certain death. “We need whatever is on that computer.”
I gave her the briefest of nods then sprinted down the corridor after the fleeing backpack wearing Skalle Furia.
Bullets nipped at my heels as I disappeared into the dark hotel hallway.
The Skalle Furia messenger, as I had dubbed in my head, was about forty feet ahead of me and hauling ass as if his life depended on it. Because, well, frankly it did.
He cut left and slammed through the door of one of the hotel rooms. By the time I reached the doorway, I saw him launch himself out of the window. I knew we were on the first floor but as I ran over to the now shattered window, I realized that this hotel was built on a large hill, the top of which was the famous Sacre Coeur church. The Messenger had crashed into the second-floor window of a nearby building.
“Ah, fuck it,” I said to myself. I unhooked my CA-415 from its sling on my JPC and let it fall to the well-worn carpet. If it was a foot race we were going to be on, I’d have to hope the Combat Master would be enough because the heavy, unwieldy gun would slow me down. I took a few steps back and then sprinted at the window. At the last second, I pulled my legs up and through the shattered glass out into the void.
I sailed across the ten-foot gap between buildings as gravity did its thing and took me ten feet as well. My aim had been on point, and I went through the same window as my prey.
As luck would have it, I landed on the twin mattress situated in the center of the small hotel room, bounced off it and came up running into the hallway of another rundown Paris hotel.
My prey was now only ten feet ahead of me and limping badly. He must not have judged the jump right. Or, he just wasn’t as fucking badass as I was. Didn’t matter to me either way, because his ass was going down.
He pointed the Scorpion machine pistol at me and sprayed the hallway. I had to jump into a dive roll to avoid getting torn to pieces. When I came out of the roll, my Combat Master had magically appeared in my right hand and I returned fire.
I really didn’t expect to hit the asshole, just scare him enough to stop shooting at me. One lucky round managed to ping off the side of the Scorpion, and it went clattering down the hallway.
The Skalle Messenger panicked and put on a new burs
t of speed. He bolted for a window at the end of the long hotel hallway and jumped through it.
“Oh, fucking christ, really,” I mumbled as I followed him.
This time I was much more careful as I leaped through the window, my Parkour mod firing on all cylinders. The irony of using my Parkour mod in the city that invented Parkour was not lost on me as I hit the ground and went into a roll and then right up onto my feet again.
The streets of Montmartre were busy with pedestrian traffic, and I knew I couldn’t risk a shot at the Skalle Furia ten feet in front of me. I was just going to have to catch him.
Instead of going downhill, as I’d hoped, the asshole decided to run up, toward the towering, white basilica of the famous Sacre Coeur church.
I sprinted after him, weaving in and around all the many tourists trying to retrace the steps of the intrepid professor, Robert Langdon.
The crowds slowed us both down but as we reached the many steps that led down from the gorgeous Byzantine spires of the church, I got close enough and was finally able to tackle the asshole.
We tumbled down the many steps, arms and legs akimbo until we finally came to rest at the bottom. I was dizzy as hell, bruised and dazed as fuck but the Skalle Furia still tried to get up and run.
He almost made it too, until an alabaster wraith appeared from nowhere, wrapped her legs around his waist, and brought him to the ground.
“Stay still, sugar,” Aurora Starfall drawled as she licked her lips. “I don’t like fast food.”
Chapter Six
“Nothing you do will make me talk, you Crucible scum,” the fuschia skinned Skalle Furia alien spat at us from the chair he was handcuffed to in a sub-basement of Area Fifty-One.
“He’s right,” Olivia confirmed. She stood next to me in the tiny room behind a two-way-mirror. “His race is particularly impervious to physical torture and most forms of chemical persuasion.”
