Rose City Renegade

by DL Barbur

  Dalton pulled ahead of me. The crowd between us and the elevators was gone, leaving just us, Todd and his buddy. Todd was standing with one arm holding the elevator doors open, the other hand held a machine pistol outstretched. He dumped the magazine at me and Dalton in short staccato bursts. We both dove to the pavement. I heard rounds crack over head. Shooting full auto one-handed like that was a poor way to hit anything but I wasn’t willing to tempt fate.

  I risked a peek just in time to see the elevator doors slide closed. Dalton and I both got up and ran again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Little Bird lurching in the air. It looked like Jack was looking for a place to land over by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

  Dalton mashed down the elevator button and changed magazines in his carbine.

  “Are we doing this?” I asked. “As soon as those doors open, they’re going to unload on us.”

  “I have a plan,” Dalton said. “How many bangs do you have left?”

  I felt the pouches on the front of my vest. “Two.”

  “Perfect.”

  The elevator doors slid open and Dalton hopped inside. I followed before I realized he hadn’t told me the plan yet.

  The Washington Park MAX station was 259 feet under the parking lot. When the train line had been extended to the west, the transit company had bored a tunnel just under three miles long through the hill that was inconveniently in their way.

  Dalton pulled a smoke grenade off his vest.

  “I’m going to pop smoke as soon as the door opens,” he said. “You bang right and left. Get a bang in your left hand, pull the pin but don’t let up on the spoon. Then grab one in your right, and I’ll pull the pin for you. When the doors open we’ll button hook out the doors.”

  This was crazy, but I did it anyway. I pulled a flashbang out with my left hand and pulled the pin. I held the lever flush against the body of the grenade. As soon as I let it go, the three-second delay would start, and the grenade would go off, no matter what. I pulled the second grenade out with my right hand and Dalton pulled the pin. Then we posted on either side of the elevator door.

  “It’s been a pleasure serving with you,” Dalton said. The elevator slowed and Dalton pulled the pin on the smoke grenade. It sputtered and sparked, then the elevator car started to fill with purple smoke. Dalton held onto it for as long as he could, then it got too hot and he dropped it on the floor.

  The car stopped and the doors opened with a ding. Dalton kicked the smoke grenade out, then I let the two flashbangs fly, trying to expose as little of my body as I did so. I heard gunfire and the elevator wall opposite the door dimpled with impacts. The grenades cracked off within half a second of each other, and I was out of the elevator. I hooked around the opening, exiting on the same side I’d been standing on.

  The purple smoke was so dense I couldn’t see anything. I charged through the smoke, hearing more gunfire. The smoke started to get a little thinner and I could see light, and a vague figure with arms outstretched in front. I raised the carbine, getting the red dot on target, but holding my fire until I could take another couple of steps and positively identify my target.

  The smoke cleared slightly and I realized it was Todd. We fired at the same time.

  An impact drove the carbine back into my face. I felt like I’d been hit with a bat. I dropped to my butt. I couldn’t see and experienced a moment of vertigo. I wiped something wet out of my eye. Things were still blurry.

  I brought my carbine up and realized I couldn’t see through the optical sight mounted on top. I dropped it, letting it hang on its sling, and pulled my pistol out just in time to see Todd vanish down the rail tunnel.

  A big red spot of blood hit the ground in front of me and I realized I was bleeding. My head and neck hurt and I could barely see.

  I reached up and even through my gloves could feel a flap of dangling skin right over the bridge of my nose. At least now the blood was running down my nose instead of into my eyes.

  I checked my gear. The optical sight on my carbine was smashed. A bullet had hit it right in the base where it was mounted to the top of the gun’s receiver and drove it back into my face.

  The gun had backup metal sights, but they would only work if I ditched the optic. I pulled on the lever that would pop the optical sight off, but it was hopelessly jammed. Above us, the giant suction fans that kept the air flowing through the tunnel complex were starting to clear the purple smoke from the grenade.

  “Need some help, Dent.” I heard Dalton’s voice from behind me.

  I spun around on my butt, not trusting my balance. Dalton was propped against a set of elevator doors, sitting in a pool of blood. A dozen yards past him, I saw Todd’s companion lying in a puddle of blood and skull fragments.

  Dalton looked pale and was struggling to wrap a tourniquet around his right thigh. I fought to my feet and made myself stumble over. I felt woozy and off balance.

  The bullet had entered Dalton’s thigh midway between his hip and knee. The entrance was a neat little hole, but the exit was huge and ragged. I saw a splinter of bone poking out and grimaced. The blood flow was heavy, but not spurting out like an arterial hit. I helped him secure the tourniquet and wrapped a pair of combat dressings around it as tight as I could.

  “Fuck,” he said. “I did six tours and it’s an asshole in my own country that aces me?”

  “We need to get you to a medic,” I said. I wondered if I could pick him up and put him in the elevator.

  Dalton keyed his radio, then shook his head.

  “I got nothing.”

  I knew it wouldn’t work, but I tried mine too. I mashed down on the transmit button and was rewarded only with a harsh beeping sound that told me radio wasn’t communicating with the network.

  “Me either,” I said.

  “You need to get your ass down that tunnel and finish Todd,” Dalton said.

  “I can’t leave you.”

  He pushed me in the chest.

  “Go. The only thing that will make this worth it is if you smoke that asshole. He took everything from me, and now I can’t even walk. Get your ass down there. There will be a bunch of cops down here in a few minutes. I’m not going to bleed to death in that time.”

  I looked at Dalton’s leg. The bandages hadn’t soaked through. He lay back and with a moan pushed his foot up against the wall, so his leg was elevated above his heart.

  “Ok.” I stood. I was less dizzy but I still felt unsteady. A big drop of blood fell of the tip off my nose and splatted on the ground, but it was nothing compared to Dalton’s wound. I was having trouble breathing through my nose and realized it was probably broken. Again.

  “Good hunting,” he said, and then, feeling like I was doing something wrong, I ran for the tunnel.

  There were two parallel tunnels, one for the eastbound trains, one for the westbound. I went over to where Todd had vanished into the darkness. A narrow walkway ran along the side of each tunnel, vanishing into blackness. There was a pile of shell casings in front of the entrance, and a splash of blood.

  Running down the tunnel, with the lights of the platform behind me, I’d be silhouetted, and an easy target for anyone lying in wait. I realized my fear of dying was gradually being replaced with a mild curiosity about how it was going to happen.

  There was a paltry little waist-high gate blocking access to the walkway. The walkway along the side of the tunnel was a couple of feet wide. I wasn’t going to have to worry about getting smashed by a train as it went by, but it was an awfully narrow space to be charging into gunfire.

  At first, there was plenty of light spilling into the tunnel from the platform. As I moved forward I saw drops of blood about the size of a quarter every few feet. There was a dark shape on the concrete in the middle of the walkway and as I crept closer I saw it was a Heckler and Koch machine pistol. I examined it briefly and saw the bolt was locked back on an empty magazine. Apparently, Todd had emptied it, and lacking any more ammo, had abandoned it in the tunnel
.

  I didn’t have any use for it, so I left it. I figured whichever guy I was chasing was likely to have a pistol, so I shouldn’t get too confident, but it was nice to know there was no more machine gun fire in my immediate future. I had my own pistol in my hand, and the useless carbine slung across my back. I realized, too late, that I should have taken Dalton’s carbine. I didn’t want to go back now.

  The farther I got from the platform, the darker it became. So far there hadn’t been anything on the walkway that would trip me, but I couldn’t just stumble around in complete darkness. I couldn’t remember the exact number, but I remembered the tunnel was something like three miles long, with the station more or less in the center, so I had a mile and a half of creeping around in the dark.

  There was a powerful light clipped under my pistol, and another flashlight in a pocket of my vest, but turning either on would be a big invitation to getting shot. In the pocket of my jeans, I found my car keys. I hadn’t driven my personal vehicle in what felt like forever, but I still habitually stuffed my keys in my pocket. Clipped on my key ring was a miniature red LED flashlight.

  I held the gun in my right hand and my key ring in my left. As I crept forward, I squeezed the little light on in bursts and random intervals. The concrete under foot was light colored so the drops of blood showed up black under the red light.

  I saw a dim blue light up ahead. I crept up to it and realized I was looking into a video camera. There was a yellow box with “Emergency Phone” written on the side. There was a door here. I pulled on it. At first, it didn’t want to open but I gave it a hard tug and it finally gave with a squeal of hinges. I blipped the light under my pistol for a fraction of a second and saw a narrow, empty passage with another door at the other end. Apparently, there were cross passages connecting the two tunnels. That made sense.

  I shut the door and turned back to the train tunnel. I blipped the light under my pistol again, turning it on for only a fraction of a second, then sidestepping as far as I could without falling onto the track. I didn’t see anybody or collect a bullet in the face, so apparently my quarry wasn’t close.

  Still, I felt like a sitting duck as I opened the call box and picked up the phone. There was a single button in the box, so I pressed it. I heard a long beeping tone in the earpiece, then silence. I was just about to give up when someone answered.

  “Operations. You need to get out of our tunnel.” He sounded like he was chewing on a sandwich as he talked.

  “This is Special Agent Dent Miller of the Joint Interagency Task Force. I’m chasing an armed suspect in the east half of the tunnel.”

  He didn’t say anything and except for the heavy breathing, I would have thought he’d hung up.

  “Uhhhh… I have to talk to my supervisor. Stay on the line.”

  I left the phone dangling and moved on. I didn’t have time for TriMet to get its shit in one sock. They’d probably had to hold a board meeting or something to decide what to do. Instead, I kept moving down the tunnel, balancing the need to hurry, with a need to not walk into a bullet.

  I moved forward at a jog. My head throbbed in time to my feet pounding on the pavement. I passed two more of the side passages, with their cameras and call boxes.

  The drops of blood on the concrete in front of me were getting bigger, and closer together. Now they were half the size of my palm and spaced less than a stride apart. I debated whether to slow down. With any luck, Todd would either die or pass out, and I’d find his body here on the platform. I could decide then whether to put a bullet in his limp form or not.

  I felt the train coming before I heard it. At first, it was a gentle breeze, barely perceptible on my cheeks, then a real wind, enough to ruffle my hair. Probably, I should have heard it sooner, but my ears were ringing thanks to the gunfire and explosions. I finally heard it about the same time as I saw the light. The tunnel here had a very subtle curve to my left and the headlight played on the wall, then came straight at me.

  My eyes, adapted to the dim light of the tunnel, shut down in the bright light. I squinted and hugged the wall as the train bore down on me. I knew as long as I stayed close to the wall of the tunnel, there was no way the train could hurt me, but as the bore of the tunnel quickly filled with hundreds of tons of metal going fifty miles an hour, my lizard brain was screaming I was about to get smashed.

  The inside of the train was lit up. Most of the passengers didn’t see me, but one woman did a double take as the train flashed past.

  It was terribly loud, which was why I didn’t hear the gunshots. My first clue I was being shot at was when a chunk of concrete flew off the wall and smacked into my shoulder. I thought something had flown off the train, then another one smacked me square in the center of the chest, like a hard punch, and I realized what was going on.

  The train was past me, quick as it had come, and I dove off the platform and onto the tracks. I didn’t have far to go. The platform was only at waist level above the tracks. I didn’t exactly stick the landing. I was grateful for the hard plates in my vest as I hit the train track with my back.

  I replayed what had happened. Apparently, Todd had been lying in wait for me, and when I was illuminated by the lights of the train had started shooting.

  I fingered the hole in the front of my vest. If I’d been wearing a soft vest, like the one patrol cops wear under their uniforms, I would be hurting. The hard plates I was wearing were rated against rifle fire.

  Damn, I thought. That’s twice.

  I rolled up onto my haunches but didn’t stand up. I stayed there in a low squat, rather than stick my head out above the level of the platform.

  Now what? I thought.

  I didn’t have to worry about getting electrocuted. The train drew its power from an overhead line, so I could step on the rails without worrying about getting fried. I supposed another train would come, but I would have enough warning to chin up onto the walkway if that happened. Besides they were usually at least fifteen minutes apart. This would be over one way or another by then.

  I couldn’t see much down there. I strained my ears to hear anything. I hoped for some noise, the scuff of a shoe, jangle of keys, something that would tell me where he was. Todd probably wasn’t that stupid though. I felt a burst of fear that came from being outclassed. Todd was a former Delta guy, way out of my league, and I wondered if I was about to die.

  He was also bleeding, and probably in some amount of pain. If there had been more blood on the walkway, I’d have been tempted to just try to wait him out, but there was a chance it would take him hours to bleed out, and he’d have plenty of time to reconfigure a bandage.

  The shots had come from the east, towards the mouth of the tunnel. What had he done after shooting? Had he hauled ass and run? Had he stayed put? Or was he now creeping up the walkway towards me?

  Slowly, and as quietly as possible, I moved over towards the walkway, and pressed up against it, still in my squat. My thighs were killing me, and I knew I couldn’t hold this position for much longer. He’d have to be practically on top of me to see me. There was still a big purple splotch in the center of my vision thanks to the train headlight. Inwardly I cursed myself for making such a hambone mistake.

  I tried to think of something clever. I was out of flashbangs, not that I would want to detonate one in the confined space of the tunnel. I had one smoke grenade left. That wouldn’t do me any good. The goal was to see more, not less. I had several magazines for my smashed rifle, a couple for my pistol, some flex cuffs, a push dagger on my belt, and a folding knife in my pocket.

  I had some chemical lights, little plastic tubes that would light up if I broke a vial inside and shook them to mix two chemicals together. I eased one out of its pouch, thinking maybe I could snap it and throw it up on the walkway, then move up the tracks before I got shot. If I could get a couple of them up there, I might be able to bracket him with light.

  That plan sucked. I was acutely aware that sooner or later, my luck was going to
run out if I kept pushing shitty plans.

  Right as I was getting ready to snap the light and throw it, I heard a soft, scuffling sound. What was it? Was it a shoe sole on concrete? Or was it a rat? Did the tunnel even have rats?

  I was pretty sure it wasn’t my imagination. Sound was funny down here in the tunnel, and my abused ears didn’t make it any easier, but I was fairly convinced I’d just heard the scuff of a shoe on the platform right over my head.

  Now what? If he was on to me, all he’d have to do is lean over the platform and put a bullet in the top of my head. To further complicate things, I was still squatting, and my thighs burned. I needed to shift positions soon or I was going to fall flat on my ass. I was already worried that when I tried to stand my legs would give out.

  I didn’t snap the chemlight, but I threw it off in the dark, down the tracks. I heard another scuff from above, and the slightest intake of breath. He was right above me.

  I pivoted as I stood, and turned on the light clipped to my pistol. There he was. In stark relief in the harsh brightness, I saw Todd. I had a scant half-second to take in the blood soaking the bottom part of his white shirt and the pistol in his hand before I started squeezing the trigger. He was looking down the tracks, his pistol pressed out in front of him when I planted the front sight on his side and let loose.

  He pivoted towards me, bringing his gun around, as I triggered three fast rounds into him, pausing between shots only to get a glimpse of my front sight before pressing the trigger again. Pistol bullets rarely drop somebody instantly, which was why I was shooting fast, but I was surprised to see no reaction from him. In that peculiar slow motion of a gunfight, I clearly saw the muzzle of his gun swinging towards my head. I tripped off two more shots, quicker this time, not even stopping to find my sight after the first one.

  People frequently get shot in the hand in gunfights. They have a weapon pressed out in front of them, and bullets tend to go where people look. As I recovered from recoil from the second shot, I saw the pistol drop from a hand hit by one of my bullets. Instead of giving up, he lowered his head and charged me.