Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.”

  Mulcahy took his four Agents north. Every member of the militia had a phone: these were taken off of the network with a tug and a thought. There was a guard stationed along the way: he was poking at his useless phone up until the moment Mulcahy crushed his nose and flipped him into an unconscious heap of camouflage clothing. An Agent with a bundle of zip ties lashed the man’s hands together, then twisted his thumbs until they popped out of the sockets.

  “In the great hour of destiny they stand,”

  The catering truck arrived at the loading dock. An FBI agent in a night-black tactical suit shot a couple of tear gas canisters into the building, easy as pie.

  But Nicholson was moving; all of the militia men were moving! Something was wrong. The phones! someone thought, and someone else agreed—when all the phones went down at once, the militia knew the raid was on. Faster, the Agents agreed, and pressed forward.

  “Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.”

  Ami rounded the corner and began painting the militia members with less-lethal bullets loaded with pepper spray. Less-lethal weapons weren’t non-lethal weapons; every shot had to be well-aimed for safety’s sake, and a second round fired in case the first bullet didn’t release its payload on impact. Ami and the others were fast, but the process was slow. The hostages were pulled away from their sleepy community, woken from uneasy dreams to be held in front of the militia men as human shields. Above, Wyatt began firing, shooting men in camouflage with explosive rounds of pepper spray, the steady prap!-prap!-prap! of high-pressure air lost in the din below.

  Avery, awake—her high child’s voice cut through the sound of gunshots as she called for her parents.

  “Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win…”

  The FBI had reached the south room. Gas canisters flew; the smell of tear gas and pepper spray soared up to the roof and into the morning sky.

  Avery—coughing, held close and covered by the woman with the core of copper.

  Rachel highlighted the little girl in her scans, a soft green shape amid the hostages and militia men, and Josh’s team on the catwalks leapt from covering Ami’s team to offense. Josh was a whirlwind: two shots, prap!-prap! and another, prap!-prap! as he broke through the militia’s cover, grabbed the girl, and ran.

  The woman with the core of copper screamed for Avery.

  “Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.”

  Ami took three shots to the chest.

  Her body armor ate the rounds and spat them out, but she still went down. Wyatt changed targets and took out the man who shot her—prap!-prap!—but the man behind him was still coming, gun aimed right between Ami’s brown eyes—

  —Wyatt’s gun clicked on empty and he went to reload with machinelike efficiency—

  —and Rachel broke cover to fire at Ami’s assailant. No weak praps!-praps! from her gun, oh no. She had the only active service weapon, and was firing solid brass bullets with the traditional bang!-bang! of serious gunfire. Two shots went into the right arm of Ami’s assailant, and it fell apart into so much useless meat.

  “Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin…”

  The militia men were panicking; their lizard brains turned them towards the new noise in the room. Rachel and Wyatt rolled back from the edge as semi-automatic rounds chipped their snipers’ nest apart. Wyatt was silent as the roof gave way beneath him; Rachel lunged, caught him by his arm, but still they both fell.

  “They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.”

  Becca’s core of smooth green jade flashed in Rachel’s mind as she reached out…out… The support pillar was a chunky thing, with steel limbs shooting off like the branches on a tree. Her fingertips grabbed one of these, and she twisted with all of her strength, whipping Wyatt towards the pillar. He wrapped an arm around a branch and returned the favor, pulling Rachel into the limbs of the pillar behind him.

  They scrambled down, almost in freefall. Bullets ripped past them. Wyatt took a shot in his leg and fell again, and this time she couldn’t stop it. She let go of the pillar and fell after him: they were fifteen feet from the ground, and they landed hard.

  Gunfire all around her. There was more to the poem, but she needed to drop the perspective link and start moving—“Phil!” she cried.

  “Go, I’ve got this,” said the slip of silverlight in her mind, and Phil pushed calm, control back at her. She grabbed at these emotions and wrapped them around her, as she severed herself from the perspective link and let her own senses come back online.

  Red, she realized. We’re drowning in red.

  Pain red, panic red, the reds spun into the yellows of bone-deep fear. She had Wyatt’s gun with its less-lethal rounds and was crouched over him like a cat guarding her kill, firing those almost useless pepper spray balls—prap!-prap!-prap!—at anyone holding a real gun.

  Wyatt’s leg was bad; blood was beginning to soak through the knees of her pants. But Ami was there; the assassin had recovered from the shock of taking three shots to her chest. She ripped the gun from Rachel’s hands, and started laying cover fire. The psychopath was cutting through his own pants leg; Rachel ripped off her belt and cinched it high around his thigh. An instant to scan him with the diagnostic autoscript—“They missed the artery,” she told him, and saw some blue relief through his pain—and she started running.

  She had dropped her service weapon on the roof: she had nothing but her fists and her feet, and she used these on the first militia man she found. He was bleeding when she was done with him, and she took his assault rifle; she flipped this around and waded into the fray, swinging it like a club which was the stupidest thing she could ever do with a loaded weapon and she knew that and she was so fucking mad she couldn’t just kill these assholes and be done with it!

  And then it was over.

  Not completely over: there were still a couple of militia men standing, shouting, calling attention to themselves until the prap!-prap! of the less-lethal rounds took them down. But the battle itself was done, and Rachel felt herself giggling in relief.

  “Status report.” Josh’s voice, all business. She poked the giggles back down and replied, “I’m uninjured, Wyatt got hit in the leg. Needs a medic.”

  “Sending one over. I need your doctor’s eyes.”

  “Right.” She handed her weapon to the nearest FBI agent and shuffled her way towards Josh. Say what you wanted about Chinese manufacturing standards, but NORINCO made good clubs.

  Her ankle was in bad shape. She wasn’t sure if it had been the fall or the fight, but it was making small screaming noises with each step.

  She was within arm’s length of collapsing on top of Josh when Mulcahy pinged her. “Rachel?”

  “…sec,” she said aloud to Josh. “What’s up?” she asked Mulcahy.

  A pause, then Mulcahy’s reply: “We have a situation over here.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Hope Blackwell had seen better days.

  Admittedly, Hope being who she was and all, if she had been having a better week, she’d have probably thought that having a gun pressed against her head made for a pretty good day. But she had been in a constant state of battle since Sunday, and Nicholson had managed to drug her senseless when he realized OACET had begun their raid. She was barely able to keep her eyes open—fighting back was not an option.

  Nicholson was holding her in front of him as a human shield. As Hope was close to going full rag doll, Nicholson had compensated by propping her up against the window of her office prison. A thick smear of blood from Hope’s cheek blurred much of the view from the ground. All that could be seen of the two was the dark outline of Hope’s hair.

  “Shit,” Rachel said aloud.

  “Is Hope playing possum?” Mulcahy asked, doing his best to keep his own fear chained down. “I don’t think she is, but—”

  “No,” Rachel replied. Hope’s conversational colors were trying to lock on furious re
ds, but every time they got close, her concentration spiraled sideways. The woman was tripping balls. “She’s completely out of it.”

  “What options do you see?”

  Rachel ran the numbers for the worst-case scenario: an armed sovereign citizen with a hostage, backed into a corner by law enforcement. By now, he had realized OACET had lied to him about the deadline, and had played him for a fool. Nicholson was vividly red in pure hate. There were also…what were those odd-shaped boxes?

  “Did Phil say anything about explosives?” she asked.

  “Yes. Small charges, just big enough to take out the office. They’ve been disarmed,” Mulcahy replied, before adding, “Nicholson already tried to set them off.”

  Her heart gave a little jump; she and explosives did not play well together. “Great. So he’s actively suicidal.”

  “Yes.”

  Worst-worst-case scenario, then.

  Options… Her service weapon with its solid metal rounds was up on the roof—no trick shooting to win the day. There was pretty much only one way to win this. …and shit.

  “What’ve you got?” he asked, the complex colors of hope kindling near his heart as he felt her plan come together.

  “When are his thirty-seven hours up?”

  “About three hours from now. What are you thinking?”

  “That he needs to be reminded that OACET’s word is gold, and we’re the only ones involved in this mess who haven’t lied to him.”

  Rachel limped forward.

  It was still dark within the warehouse. The pre-dawn light was beginning to seep in through the windows, and the place was a very deep shade of blue. Anybody else might say it felt like walking along the bottom of the ocean. Not her, though. She knew the ocean was made of light, and the occasional shark.

  Nicholson’s colors whipped towards her as she walked to the bottom of the wire staircase. Okay, she told herself. I’m wrong. There’re sharks here, too, and this one’s a spoiled brat. Time to bleed in the water.

  “Howdy!” she called out. “Remember me? I’m the OACET Agent who works with the MPD? Got your man Ethan Fischer thrown out of the meeting, and then got him killed?”

  The reds twisted across themselves as some Southwestern turquoise appeared in his colors, blue-green threads that didn’t seem to know where they belonged.

  “Bet everything’s gone to hell since he left,” she said. “Bet you’ve been giving a lot of thought to how he manipulated you, twisted things around… Turning you into the fall guy for a lot of really despicable shit.” She made it to the bottom of the staircase. One foot placed on the first step… Nope. Her bad ankle was most definitely done. “You wanna crack that door so we can talk? Your thirty-seven hours are almost up!”

  Rachel leaned against the railing and waited.

  The door opened. Not a lot, but enough for air and swear words to pass through. “I want to talk to Mulcahy.”

  “You’re talking to me. You lost your chance to deal with him when you failed to comply with his terms.”

  “He lied!” Red anger, spliced through with yellow-white panic. “He told us we’d have thirty-seven hours!”

  “Thirty-seven hours before he razed this building to the ground,” Rachel corrected him. She turned her back to him and sat on the stairs. “Thirty-seven hours where he gave you a choice to have some control over your own future. At what point did we lie to you? We gave you almost a day and a half to walk out of here and surrender. This is as close to the last minute as we could come without endangering the hostages.”

  Yellow curiosity appeared. Not a lot, but enough to work with.

  “Honestly, what did you expect?” she asked. “Your army and ours to meet on the battlefield at high noon to exchange harsh language? Mulcahy said that if you wouldn’t surrender, he’d tear this place down around you. Has he done that yet? No. Will he? Absolutely. You’ve still got a choice in how this plays out.

  “Well,” she added, “you would have, if it weren’t for that ticking bomb you’re holding.”

  Nicholson glanced at his gun.

  “No, dumbass,” Rachel snapped. “The woman? You would’ve had more than two hours to negotiate, but you had to go and drug her, didn’t you? If we don’t resolve this before Blackwell wakes up, she’s going to murder you, and there’s nothing we can do to stop her.

  “Oh,” she added, “by the way, if you kill her, Mulcahy will burn down this building with you and your men in it. She’s what’s keeping y’all alive right now, so even if you don’t value your own life, think about theirs.”

  Rachel pointed across the room, to where the militia men that Mulcahy’s team had taken down were kneeling in their handcuffs. They were staring up at the office, sickly yellow terror ripping their conversational colors apart; she doubted Mulcahy had told them the bombs had been disarmed.

  “Want to talk this over like grownups?” she asked. “Time’s running out. If you want to save your men and this building, we have to work fast.”

  (She was getting a little nervous about Hope, to be honest. Whatever drug Nicholson had given her was being metabolized at rocket speed, and those furious reds were about to lock themselves down. Rachel figured she had another three minutes at the most before Hope woke up enough to fight back, and God help whoever was in her way when that happened. Nicholson would probably shoot her in justifiable self-defense.)

  The door opened a little wider.

  “How about this,” Rachel said. “I come up there, I tie Blackwell up. Then you have two hostages again.”

  “No!” Nicholson cried. “She’s Houdini! She can escape anything!”

  Rachel winced. Damn it all, Hope, she thought. I knew that trick of yours would backfire!

  “All right, here’s what we can do,” she said, as she stood and hopped up the first stair, all slow and clumsy, the decaying iron railing wobbling under her hands. “You can exchange me for her.”

  Hop.

  “Put her outside the office, take me inside, and lock the door.”

  Hop.

  “When she comes to, she’s nowhere near you. You’re safe.”

  Hop.

  “I’m OACET Administration,” she said. “You’ve seen me during every part of this shitshow. I’m more valuable to OACET than somebody’s wife.”

  Hop.

  “Stay where you are!” Nicholson shouted.

  “Dude, you no longer have the luxury of time!” Rachel didn’t bother to hide her frustration. “If you don’t get Blackwell out of there, you are done, do you hear me? She will kill you, and if she doesn’t, Mulcahy will, and destroy this whole factory along with you!

  “C’mon,” she said, as she put her dignity aside and crawled up the last few stairs to the landing. “I can’t freakin’ walk. Move her outside, take me in her place, and then we can start negotiations again. Hurry!”

  Orange confusion wrapped around yellow fear. These snapped into place like a taut string; the door opened, and Hope Blackwell’s semi-conscious body was nudged outside. Rachel reached over and grabbed her, and hauled Hope into her lap so the metal of the landing didn’t slice up Hope’s skin. Hope twitched as Rachel touched her, and Rachel wondered if this was when Hope woke up and began to slaughter everyone in range, which was at this moment a woman with a bummed-up ankle—

  “Get inside!” Nicholson was crouched on the floor, using glass walls and the thin metal of filing cabinets as his bunker.

  “I met someone yesterday,” Rachel said, as she lifted Hope from her lap and gently set her on the landing. “Didn’t catch his last name, but I think you know him? Ahren, at Sugar Camp Christmas Trees?

  “You should have spent more time with him.” She grabbed the railing and pretended to use it to haul herself to her feet, as she scanned along the length of it… There. A weak spot in the metal. Very weak, crumbling from fractures and rust. “Or at least listened to him. If he were here, I’d be worried. That guy has his act together.”

  Hop.

  She grabb
ed the glass door and yanked it open; Nicholson glared up at her in reds. “You don’t worry me at all.”

  Taking his gun away from him was one of the easiest things she’d ever done. He was so low to the ground that all she had to was step on it with her gimpy foot and kick, and it went sailing off of the landing. It hurt, but not nearly as much as what was to come.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Now for the hard part—Nicholson had to go down. In flames.

  Or, lacking the availability of fire, headfirst from a decent height.

  Yup, this was going to hurt.

  But maybe that was okay. Yeah, that was fine. Good, even. She was long overdue for heavy penance.

  She retreated and stuck her butt against the weak part of the railing. “C’mon,” she taunted him. “Come out here. Nobody’s going to shoot you. We just want to have an adult discussion.”

  Nicholson retreated behind the door again.

  “Coward!” she snapped. “Ahren would have the balls to talk! To stand up to a cop!”

  Nicholson’s colors rioted. The mingled blues and blacks she had come to associate with death were still heavy on his mind, but now those colors lanced forward, pointing directly at her heart.

  The glass door opened so quickly that it slammed against the stair buttress and cracked.

  “Nobody move,” she said through the coms. “He’s going to try and jump me…suicide-by-cop. He’s got a knife and I’ll disarm him when he jumps. Stand down—do not shoot. Repeat: do not shoot. Confirm?”

  “Confirmed,” came an echo of OACET; the FBI agents got the message through their earpieces, and their professional blues strengthened.

  “You’re under arrest,” she said. She was weary, suddenly, bone-weary and ready to sleep for a month or more. A lengthy stay in a hospital bed was beginning to sound like a viable alternative to standing here and arguing with this manchild. “For assault, kidnapping, and…and we’ll start with those, because I’m tired and I want to get this over with.”