Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  A few yards before the edge of the wall the man tied the sleeve of Simkins’ white shirt around the barrel of the M4 to break up the rigid line of the muzzle and then draped the remains of the shirt over his head like a Monk’s cowl. He crouched down beneath the sightline of the wall and pulled the walkie-talkie from his jacket pocket. “I’m in position,” he muttered. There was an instant of static and then he heard the tour guide give a no-nonsense abrupt confirmation.

  There was uneven heaped snow along the railing and the man was careful not to disturb it. He was grateful for the broken line. From the ground the lip of the roof would appear irregular, making it easier for him to remain concealed.

  Sky lighting himself was a risk he was prepared to take. Normally he might have stepped back from the lip of the wall and fired down into the parking lot from the concealment of a shadow – but there were no shadows. He hoped the white shirt and the uneven broken line of snow along the wall’s ridge would be enough to conceal his movements from observant eyes.

  He slid the camouflaged muzzle of the weapon carefully through the snow like he was thrusting it into a prepared loophole, and risked a peek below him.

  The gruesomely scarred man he had seen standing on the stage at the prisoner auction was now in the parking lot with more than a dozen men grouped around him in a semi circle. They were knotted behind the back of one of the trucks, and the man was gesturing at them with curt slashes of his arms through the air. It wasn’t a long shot – maybe one-hundred-and-fifty yards. No more than two hundred. The M4 rifle had been developed by the U.S. Army for close quarter situations but it was a versatile weapon, and effectively lethal at three times the shooting distance.

  The man lifted the rifle with the stock rested firmly on the wall and cuddled the butt of the M4 tightly into his shoulder. He sighted the rifle speculatively, aiming for the center of the deformed and scarred forehead. He drew a breath, let half of it hiss back out through his nose and held the rest. His finger took up the tension on the trigger… and then he let himself relax, let his grip go loose, and carefully he set the weapon aside.

  “No,” he let out the rest of the breath in his lungs, torn by the temptation of the easy shot. “Not yet. Not until they open fire and there is no other choice.”

  * * *

  Gideon Silver folded his arms across his chest and stared at the dark edifice of the Museum as if, by the sheer power of his will, he could bring the entire building collapsing to its foundations. Around him his men were muttering with the nerved edginess of those who might soon stare their own death in the face. They told each other brittle jokes and smoked the last of their cigarettes. Some of the gang members stared into the empty space, disconnected and fidgeting incessantly with their weapons. Others huddled with their heads close together talking darkly with the creeping fear upon them.

  Gideon remained removed from it all. He stood alone and resolute on the back of the truck, his presence Napoleonic and arrogant. He watched the sun rising, and when at last it sat free from the horizon line and the shadows of the new morning were long across the snow, he decided it was time to impose his will on the world.

  “Mr. Chong.”

  “Sir?”

  “Go across to the Museum. Tell them they have five more minutes to comply with my demands. Or else…”

  Chong nodded his head and handed his weapon to one of the other men. He walked unarmed to the middle of the road. He had his hands held at the level of his shoulders, palms up.

  “Your time is up,” he stood and called loudly. “We want the two fugitives. If they are not brought to me within the next five minutes we will attack the museum.”

  He waited motionless in the oppressive silence for long seconds, his eyes fixed on the closed door, expecting to see it swing open at any moment. He was holding his breath. His skin crawled. He felt like he was being watched and the sensation chilled him.

  Nothing happened. Chong waited in the deserted roadway for sixty seconds and then turned and walked back to the parking lot. Beneath his heavy jacket his shoulders felt tensed and knotted, expecting to feel the heavy punch of a shot in the broad of his back.

  The menacing sensation of being watched followed him all the way to the truck and he could not shake it off. He looked up into the back of the vehicle and gave a helpless shrug.

  Gideon ran the tip of his tongue across the melted scarred flesh of his lips. “They don’t think we’re serious,” he said with a sigh. “We need to convince them. I think it’s time I announced my presence, Mr. Chong.”

  * * *

  For long tense minutes after the stranger had declared the final demand there hung an eerie silence. From the rooftop overlooking the parking lot the man sighted down the muzzle of the M4, idly changing target every few seconds; holding the sight on the center of a man’s chest and then swinging to another. He could see movement at the back of one of the vehicles – a cluster of several gunmen – and he curiously swung the barrel onto one of them and concentrated. It was a man who was kneeling in the back of the vehicle and he was handing something to the others.

  Then the horror and shock of dreadful realization struck, and the world became filled with frantic chaos and alarm.

  The man snatched at the walkie-talkie in his jacket pocket and crushed his thumb down on the switch.

  “RPG! RPG!” he cried into the speaker. “Get away from the fucking door!”

  He threw the walkie-talkie down and drew the butt of the M4 tight into his shoulder. There were three gang members in a knot at the back of the truck, and for a long moment he couldn’t see which one carried the deadly weapon. Then, suddenly, one of the gang members broke from the group, running forward with the tube of the rocket launcher on his shoulder.

  The bandit sprinted to the edge of the road and then dropped onto one knee.

  On the rooftop time seemed to slow down into a series of split-second fragments as the man followed the bandit’s jinking path forward. When he suddenly halted and went down in the snow, the man drew a deep breath and tightened the pressure of his finger on the trigger.

  He could clearly see the stranger’s face, his lips pared back into a snarl and his teeth showing. He had long black hair and a scruffy beard streaked with wiry grey strands. He was overweight, the buttons of his top stretched, and the tail of his shirt hanging loose from his trousers so that the pale bulge of his guts showed overhanging his belt.

  The man hesitated for an instant – and then hit the bandit in the chest, aiming for the point of the V at the collar of his shirt. The bullet struck the stranger in the throat, the sound of the shot rang impossibly loud and echoing off the low sullen clouds. The bandit went over onto his back. The RPG fell from his hands. He scrabbled in the snow for a moment, clutching at the gush of blood that spilled from the wound. His legs were kicking in the ground. It took a few seconds for him to die.

  Another gang member ran forward at a doubled-over crouch. He scooped up the RPG, flung it up onto his shoulder, and dropped down into the snow beside his dead partner, all in one fluid movement. The man swung the M4 and re-sighted from the rooftop. He fired off a snap shot that buried itself in the ice at the bandit’s feet. He aimed and fired again, this time with more patience and deliberation. The shot struck the bandit in the shoulder. He recoiled, pushed sideways by the pain and impact; he lurched and swayed, staggering to keep his kneeling balance. The wounded arm hung loose from the blood-covered sleeve of his coat, but still the bandit held the rocket launcher steady on his broad shoulder and struggled to get a sighter on the doorway. The man fired again, aiming for a headshot. He missed. The bullet fluttered the air before the bandit’s face. The man fired a fourth time, and saw the last shot smack into the bandit’s elbow. But as he started to fall, the bandit’s finger reflexively tightened on the trigger mechanism and fired off a rocket.

  The rocket raced towards the Museum, riding a pluming white tail of smoke. The sound was a menacing ‘whoosh!’. The rocket struck the museum wall te
n yards wide of the exit door and exploded into the building’s façade in a shuddering detonation of brickwork and dust and smoke and sound.

  For long seconds the world went hauntingly quiet and still. The thunder strike of the explosion seemed to press down on them all with a kind of reverberating concussion. When the smoke and dust at last cleared, it revealed a hole the size of a dining table, torn into the bricks.

  A clamor of gunfire suddenly tore the fragile silence apart.

  The Museum’s exit door swung open. From the doorway, edged behind cover, Bill and Walter Penn opened fire, spraying the parking lot, traversing their weapons to shred the air with bullets. The RPG firer was hit and killed, and a line of bullets stitched across the side panels of one truck. One of the bandits clutched at his arm and spun in a teetering circle, his weapon falling from his hands. He went down on his back into the snow and then scrambled desperately to get behind the shelter of one of the parked trucks. The gang members returned a hail of fire, the stuttering bark of their automatic weapons like the sound of ripping canvas. The doorframe pockmarked into craters, and tiny fragmented chips of brickwork erupted into little bursts of orange dust.

  Bill caught one of the gunmen running in the open and he knocked him down with three shots, each one striking the charging figure in the chest. He had been sprinting diagonally, across the road towards the shattered and undefended hole in the wall. The man’s body flailed and his arms flung like he was attached to the strings of a puppeteer. The bullets plucked little pink smoke-like puffs of blood out through the man’s back. He was dead before he hit the tarmac. The rifle flew from his lifeless hand and skittered across the blacktop.

  Gideon Silver stayed crouched and hiding behind the cover of the truck’s cab, watching the battle play out through the tinted glass of the windshield. He sensed already that the attack was stifled – the accuracy of the fire from within the Museum had taken the urgent zeal from his men’s faces and filled them with panic that bordered on fear. He had relied on the RPG. Now the weapon was lying in the no-man’s zone near the side of the road, utterly useless. Gideon knew he needed to re-take the initiative. If he could not breach the Museum’s doors his men would soon lose their resolve and the already faltering attack would fail. He was shaking, his breath coming fast and deeply. Beneath the long coat his shirt was soaked with his sweat. Suddenly something wild and fanatical and desperate filled his eyes.

  “Chong!” he shouted above the deafening retort of a shotgun blast from one of his men. “Take a truck and ram the doors.”

  Chong was returning fire into the open doorway of the museum, kneeling behind the cover of a vehicle’s fender and firing short accurate bursts into the darkened gloom. He looked up into Gideon Silver’s face, bewildered.

  “The front doors!” Gideon gestured angrily. “Take a truck and a couple of men. Ram them. Smash them in.”

  Chong nodded. He was relieved to be temporarily out of the gunfight. They were taking fire from the doorway and from somewhere on the roof. He threw himself in behind the driver’s seat of the nearest truck and the engine roared in fury. Two gang members clambered aboard, heads down low for shelter in the bed of the truck. Chong reversed in a skid of slushy snow and mud, and then the big tires bit into the gravel and it shuddered and lunged across the broken ground, fishtailed on the slippery road, and then surged around the corner of the building.

  Up on the roof the man saw the truck reversing and fired.

  He shouted into the walkie-talkie. “One truck, three men, inbound at the front doors!” he cried. “Get ready!” Then he broke from his position and ran across to the opposite side of the roof, just in time to see the truck swing onto a narrow road in a shower of loose gravel and come into line with the front doors. The man stayed on his feet and threw the M4 up to his shoulder. The truck was a couple of hundred yards away. He could see the two men in the bed of the vehicle clearly now. They were firing wildly at the building as the truck swayed and slid. The big gnarled tires screeched in a blue feather of rubber and hurled the vehicle forward, gaining speed quickly, the sound of its snarling engine reaching a crescendo as the driver crunched up through the gears.

  The man saw the driver’s face hunched over the steering wheel, his complexion jaundiced yellow between a black moustache and beard. The driver’s skin shone, glistening with sweat. The man fought to control his breathing and sighted down the length of the M4’s barrel.

  The man aimed for the windshield, and fired. The glass shattered into a million jagged little opaque pieces but the glass stayed together within the frame of the windshield. The truck veered, teetered precariously onto two wheels for an instant, and then hit the curb and righted itself. In the bed of the truck one of the gunmen swayed and flailed his arms for a handhold and a spray of wild fire tore away into the morning, only just missing the man where he stood on the rooftop.

  The man emptied the rest of the carbine’s magazine into the windshield and then reloaded, snatching for a fresh magazine with his left hand from out of his jacket pocket. It took a few seconds, but by then it didn’t matter.

  The truck swerved away from the sudden hail of bullets and went careening across a raised garden bed, out of control. The front of the vehicle slammed viciously into a low concrete wall just outside the museum’s entrance at fifty miles an hour. The wall disintegrated in an explosion of dust. The impact crumpled the front of the truck and stopped it dead, and as the man watched, grim-faced, the shattered windshield flew outward, and behind it was hurled the driver, catapulted brutally over the hood of the vehicle, his body sailing through the air, turning and tumbling as it went. The driver landed hard on his back, his face torn to shreds and embedded with shards of the glass. The front doors of the truck burst open and the back tray reared up on impact. One of the bandits standing in the bed of the truck was thrown up onto the roof of the cabin and the other was hurled clear, as if unsaddled from a bucking horse. He landed hard on the blacktop, head-first and then his body crumpled in a soggy mush, his arms hanging at impossible angles.

  For a few seconds there was just heavy silence. The ruined wreckage of the truck sat skewed across the road, amidst a settling cloud of dust and dirt. Then, from below him, the man saw Colleen McGraw appear from beneath the Museum’s awning into the morning’s watery light. She had her M4 tucked firmly into her shoulder; her shape crouched and tensed, taking brisk purposeful steps, traversing the weapon to follow the movement of her head. She paused over the body of the dead driver and nudged the figure with her foot. The body lay heavy and inert. She stooped, pressed a hand under the man’s jaw and then moved on, towards the crumpled figure of the bandit who had been hurled from the back of the truck. Again she paused and kicked at the corpse.

  The man watched with professional approval. McGraw was thorough, cautious and deliberate. She had just stooped over the second figure when suddenly the man saw a mirage of shadowy movement away to his left. His eyes went back to the truck and focused on the man who was lying slumped over the crumpled cabin. He was laying face down, one arm flung forward and the other hanging, concealed.

  Had he moved?

  The man focused all his attention on the figure and then suddenly the body seemed to come to life, turning and raising his arm all in one jerking motion. He was holding a pistol, swinging his arm up to aim at Colleen McGraw.

  “Gun! Gun! Gun!” the man cried into the walkie-talkie in his palm. He threw up his weapon and searched for the man in his sights.

  Colleen McGraw reacted instinctively, dropping lower onto both knees and swiveling her upper torso with a movement that was reflexive. As her head turned and she saw the man in the bed of the truck, she opened fire. The burst of bullets caught the man full in the chest, driving him backwards, pinning him against the metalwork of the truck’s cabin while his body shook and shuddered and jumped. The gun in his hand fell from his fingers and then slowly he slumped forward, dead, leaving behind a thick glistening smear of his blood across the truck’s cabi
n.

  McGraw went forward with renewed caution, weapon still raised and ready to fire. She got to the side tray of the truck, paused, and then stared closely at the body. After a few seconds she turned, threw back her head and lifted her eyes to where the man was standing like a silent sentinel on the rooftop. She flung up a casual salute of gratitude. The man gave a short wave of acknowledgement, and then went sprinting back across the building’s rooftop, drawn by a sudden intense burst of ominous gunfire coming from the direction of the parking lot.

  When the man reached the rooftop wall overlooking the Museum’s exit door, the first thing he saw where two more bodies lying broken and crumpled on the blacktop. They were dead gang members, both of them lying face down on the road. The first was lying with one of his arms stretched out as though he might be scrabbling his fingers into the tarmac to claw himself forward. The other man laid facing back towards the parking lot, as if he had run into a solid wall of gunfire from Bill and Walter Penn and turned back for cover. The road glistened red around both of the bodies.

  There was another withering fusillade of fire from the parking lot and then suddenly the speaker on the walkie-talkie crackled to life. The voice was tinny and disjointed, but racked with pain.