Forged From Ash - Book #7 of the Skinners Series

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  I was there as a private contractor. Apart from flipping grief to the feds, my job was to point out the mugs trying to sneak in to pull a job this fine afternoon and be on hand to lend any assistance if necessary. My eagle eye and list of contacts in low places got me a lot of this kind of work. Considering how quiet it had been since we’d arrived, today’s consultant job was shaping up to be a pretty sweet gig.

  “I don’t know,” I mused. “Hamer’s been stepping on a lot of toes by making his fugitive hunt a private war against the Barrow gang.”

  Still ogling the photograph, Marty said, “He’s nailed just about everyone else who’s ever ridden with Bonnie and Clyde, but he ain’t gotten close to them two since that botched ambush in Louisiana.”

  “I still don’t get why you and most every man with a newspaper subscription thinks Bonnie is the best thing since sliced bread.” Letting go of the paper, I added, “You’re just hot for her because she struts around with a gun. That broad’s crazy.”

  “Sure, Jake. It’s just the gun in her hand that catches my attention. She may be crazy, but she’s still a dish.”

  I’d only seen one picture of Bonnie Parker where she hadn’t been holding a gun. It was taken at the start of her and Clyde Barrow’s spree by a reporter who’d found himself in the right spot at the right time to catch them driving away from a gas station outside of Dallas. Bonnie was leaning out the window of their getaway car, screaming at someone out of frame. She’d seemed scared and excited at the same time. As a soldier who still heard rumblings from the Great War in my sleep, I knew that feeling all too well. In the most recent picture, she was holding one of the newer model Browning machineguns propped against her hip. The fear was gone and in its place was a new level of excitement; a spark that dared anyone within range of its glow to come and try to snuff it out. Back in the early days of the war, those Brownings were usually mounted to trucks or on bipods. They sure as hell couldn’t be hefted by the likes of a skinny girl from Texas, no matter how bad her attitude was.

  After the first breach in the barriers between our dimension and other alien ones, things got weird. The Germans referred to that barrier and whatever was on the other side of it as the Etwasviel, which roughly translated to other world. The US Science Division called it the Altersphere. Much catchier, if you ask me. Anyway, it took a few years for the weirdness to make it onto the battlefield, and after the Kaiser started using contraptions that had been sucked from another dimension against us, our boys got a hold of a few toys of their own. Some of the goodies that dropped through the first vortexes on American soil were powered by sources our science boys hadn’t even dreamed of. Others were weapons or attachments that only needed some tinkering before they could be slapped onto guns we’d already been using. As the war raged on, new weapons were built based on Altersphere machinery. Guns got smaller and more powerful. Bullets started punching through tanks as easily as they went through tissue paper. Tanks got better armor and started floating on magnetic fields. I don’t know all the nitty-gritty details of how it all worked. I was just a soldier trained to blow things up, and from this soldier’s point of view, lots of things blew up in some real weird ways.

  The Browning in Bonnie’s hands wasn’t ready to fire. I could tell as much because the slide wasn’t glowing. She and her boyfriend Clyde just loved to show off with their new toys. That was another reason she didn’t trip my trigger. I never liked show-offs.

  Marty shook his head and let his eyes wander up and down that newspaper as if it was a pinup magazine. “She’s a naughty little girl,” he said in a voice that damn near oozed from his mouth. “I like ‘em naughty.”

  Before the shudder could work all the way through my body, I heard the distinctly hollow thump of a handheld mortar. I’d only fired one of those things on a few occasions but had been on the receiving end of those shells more times than I cared to recall. It was one of the first weapons to roll out of German factories to blend pre-war stock with gizmos that had dropped through the Altersphere. Reflexively, my brain ticked through the motions of calculating the shell’s trajectory, but even without the hissing cry of miniaturized ordinance sailing through the air, I knew it had been fired from the building on Central Street between Third and Pearl. Me and all the cops twiddling their thumbs less than half a block away were there to watch that same building until something happened. Unfortunately, the something that happened was the explosive demise of the nearest patrol car.

  “Holy hell!” Marty shouted as he dove toward me.

  Despite his flaws, I’d always found something to like about the thick-headed galoot. I found another one when he knocked me down to clear a path for a wave of hot shrapnel flying toward the row of cars we’d been leaning against. I’d been prepared to jump aside on my own, but Marty caught hold of me and took us both to the pavement.

  The mortar hit a car at the farthest end of the row closest to the Fifth Ohio Bank & Federal Reserve. Since that was the building we were all there to watch, the eyes of every man in the vicinity were pointed in that direction. Well, almost every eye. My two baby browns were busy searching for the young lady who I’d thought had been the object of Marty’s inappropriate attention not too long ago. I spotted her as she pressed against the wall of an attorney’s office after having been hit by a wave of hot air rolling in from the explosion. She was shaken but ok.

  Although the cops had been surprised by the first explosion, none of them scattered. “Someone’s coming out!” shouted the lowest ranking police officer on the street in what had to have been the most unnecessary announcement of the year.

  A squat man stood in one of the bank’s three doorways wearing a fierce snarl and a rumpled suit that was two sizes too big, probably to conceal the weapons he’d brought into the bank. His short stature and wild eyes struck me as vaguely familiar and, true to form for any little man with a chip on his shoulder, one big gun wasn’t enough. The mortar rifle was a knock-off model that he could have bought from any number of dealers in Cincinnati or any other town big enough to have back alleys. It looked like a sawed-off shotgun with a drum clamped to its belly. The rifle in his left hand was shorter with a flared barrel.

  “You all right, Jake?” Marty asked.

  “Will be as soon as you stop crushing me.”

  He placed a palm on my chest that felt more like a medium-rare steak, climbed to his feet and then grabbed my suspenders to lift me up. “You’re packing, right?”

  “Do you gotta ask?” I reached beneath my cheap suit jacket for the holster strapped under my left arm. My .38 wheel gun was still right where it belonged. The piece wasn’t as fancy as some of the newer models, but it did accept nearly every kind of modified ammunition and felt damn good in my hand. Having been given all of two minutes’ notice after being chosen for bank watch duty, I’d loaded it with metal-boring rounds along with some standard slugs.

  A few cops fired toward the bank now that a target had presented itself. The gunman hadn’t moved from his spot, which told me the coat he wore had to have been made from the same reinforced stuff issued to infantry during the latter years of the war. Raising both weapons, the squat man shouted, “Here’s another one for ya!”

  “Oh, no,” I whispered under my breath.

  A second thump came from the mortar rifle, followed by a hiss and an explosion that was much louder than the first. That shell hit the side of a building behind us and just above the row of cop cars, sending a deafening roar down the street after slamming against several layers of American-made steel. As everyone ducked, I stuck my head up like an idiot. I just had to get another look at the armed man who was now strutting away from the bank. As soon as he stepped from the shadow cast by another building and into the sunlight, I could tell he wasn’t the fellow I’d dreaded seeing. Still, any bank robber carrying altered heavy artillery in each hand wasn’t exactly a welcome sight. The second weapon in the robber’s possession had the wide, flared barrel of a rifle designed to fire gas canisters. As so
on as he leveled it at the cops, I shouted, “Gas!”

  Not all the cops had gas masks, but the ones without them lowered their faces to cover their mouths and noses with their hands. Probably responding to my voice, the heavily armed runt shifted his aim toward me and sent a projectile through the air. I raised my .38, sighted along its barrel and fired when my gut told me it was time. Those instincts, along with plenty of training and a healthy dose of desperation, served me well. My round hit the gas canister in mid-air, causing it to explode in a cloud of noxious orange fumes midway between the bank and the officers in front of it. The gas ignited as soon as it hit the air, sending a fireball outward to scorch a bunch of windows, upward to lick against some roof ledges and down to blacken the tops of all those cars parked along the street. Since we were on the lower periphery of the blast, the cops and I only needed to cover our faces and hunker down for a second or two. Once the heat dispersed I fired again, aiming for the weapon that had spat the canister into the air. My bullet grazed along the weapon, peeled away a few scraps of metal from its side and sent them flying into the robber’s face.

  The armed man let out a pained cry and dropped to one knee while tossing the damaged weapon like a hot rock. Cops swarmed from the second cluster of cars parked on Third Street, so he fired a wild shot at them with the mortar gun. The entire area had been cleared of pedestrians, and the cloud of gas from the canister I’d hit was drifting down to fog his aim. His next mortar sailed high to chip several dozen bricks and shatter a bunch of windows on the front of an office building across the street. As the bank robber swung his mortar toward the closest group of cops closing in on him, a barrage of gunfire from police-issue pistols pounded against the layers of armor stitched into his coat. The incoming rounds may not have been fatal, but the impacts knocked him down quicker than a KO punch from a prizefighter.

  After the echo of those shots rolled down the street, things got real quiet. I looked over to Marty, who was trading hand signals with some of the uniformed officers closer to the front of the bank. A few of the younger cops were getting twitchy but stayed put. They didn’t have to wait long before the doors to the bank were kicked open by the fallen runt’s pals. Now things were gonna get real interesting.

  AVAILABLE NOW WHEREVER E-BOOKS ARE SOLD

  A Note from Crossroad Press

  We hope you enjoyed this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any errors, please contact us at publisher@crossroadpress.com and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.

  If you’d like to be notified of new Crossroad Press titles when they are published, please send an email to publisher@crossroadpress.com and ask to be added to our mailing list.

  If you have a moment, the author would appreciate you taking the time to leave a review for this book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, or any other online site that permits book reviews. These reviews help books to be more easily noticed.

  Thank you for your assistance and your support of the authors published by Crossroad Press.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE