Army of Devils at-8

by Dick Stivers

  “Now!”

  Lyons ran over the dead man’s back. Reengineered Colt pointed at the stairway housing, Lyons snatched up an AK from the roof. He glanced at the sights. The ComBloc weapon had the clip-on night sights in place.

  A muzzle flashed from the door. As slugs tore past his head, Lyons triggered a three-round burst. He did not slow in his rush. He saw movement and slammed it with the AK. As the form fell back, Lyons flicked his Colt’s fire selector up to single shot. He killed the gunman as the guy raised a shadowy autorifle.

  Gadgets checked Blancanales. His Puerto Rican partner pulled himself up.

  “Cover me!” Blancanales scanned the roof ahead of him for movement, then scrambled over the corpse.

  “This is crazy!” Gadgets said to no one. But he followed his partners.

  At the head of the stairway, Lyons emptied the captured AK into the chest of a punk on the landing below. Dropping the empty magazine, he searched through the tangle of dead punks in the stairway housing. He found a loaded Kalashnikov and an Uzi. Blancanales grabbed a bloody AK and snapped shots down the stairs.

  Gadgets ran up behind them. “Ironman, you gone crazy? I got two mags for my Beretta, and we’re going into a firefight?”

  “If they’ve got this many sentries…” Lyons passed the Uzi to Gadgets as the punks returned autofire “…they’ve got something important down below.”

  “Like an army,” Blancanales answered.

  “Something as important as us living through this?” Gadgets asked.

  Flipping over a dead punk, Lyons found a web belt hung with AK mag pouches. “Two magazines, plus whatever’s in the rifles. And this…” He held up one of two grenades he found in a pouch.

  Blancanales searched other corpses and came across a belt pouch with two Uzi mags. He passed the pouch to Gadgets. A burst of AK fire roared past him and feet hammered on the stairs.

  A wide-eyed, screaming punk sprinted up the stairs, his Kalashnikov flashing. Lyons stepped back, waited an instant, then fired two rounds from his own Kalashnikov point-blank into the screaming punk’s chest.

  Flesh and fragments of bone exploded from his back as the punk slammed sideways into the stucco of the stairwell housing. He did not fall.

  Staring around him, the punk saw Lyons and Blancanales. Screaming as he staggered forward, his face twisted with hatred, blood spraying from the two lung wounds, he swung his AK toward Blancanales.

  Lyons put the muzzle of his captured Kalashnikov under the chin of the punk and fired. Impact lifted the bleeding, mortally wounded teenager off his feet, the blast tearing away the side of his head. But still he did not fall.

  Screaming, his shattered jaw yawning, blood frothing from his mangled throat, the punk lurched forward again. Lyons grabbed the barrel of the punk’s AK and jerked him off balance.

  The punk staggered from the stairwell. Gadgets stepped up behind the punk and put his captured Uzi at the base of the punk’s skull. A burst severed the brain from the spinal cord.

  “Take his weapon,” Lyons told Gadgets.

  “This is insane! I’m not going down there! There could be a hundred of them!”

  Lyons jerked the cotter pin from the first grenade. A storm of autofire came from below, then more feet hammered the stairs. Berserk punks screamed with chemical rage. Lyons let the safety lever flip away, counted to four, then gave the grenade an underhand toss.

  Standing to the side of the roof door, he raised his AK. The first punk out the door took a through-and-through head wound from a ComBloc slug. Still screaming, he fell and kicked as his life spurted from his shattered skull.

  A second punk ran from the stairwell as the grenade exploded below. Though the stairs and landing shielded the punk’s body, steel fragments punched through the back of his head.

  As if he did not feel the wounds, the punk continued advancing, streams of blood fountaining from his skull. Blancanales aimed at the punk’s back and put a careful burst through the wounded punk’s heart. Still screaming, with a vast wound where his heart had been, the punk continued on to the end of the roof. He hurtled into space.

  From the stairwell they heard a bestial, inhuman sound. A sound like a dog’s growl, but broken with gasps and choking. They saw a hand clutching a Kalashnikov, then the third punk crawled from the stairwell.

  A hundred grenade fragments had shattered and ripped both legs. Dangling by only ligaments and a few strands of flesh, the legs flopped and twisted behind the punk. But obviously he did not feel the horrible wounds.

  Clawing at the asphalt of the roof, he looked around for the attackers. Blancanales dispatched him to darkness with a burst to the back of his head.

  The autofire from below slacked off. Absolutely astounded by what he had seen, Gadgets stared down at the finally dead teenager. Then the ex-Green Beret turned to Lyons.

  “I’m not going down there. I don’t care what the fuck you say, Lyons. Call down an airstrike, call for tanks, call for the Marines, but I’m not going down there!”

  Blancanales changed mags on his captured AK. “Second the motion. Motion carried. We retreat. Period. Follow me.”

  “All right, all right,” Lyons finally agreed. He took his hand-radio from his belt. “I need my Atchisson, anyway. Flor,” he said into his hand-radio, “we got some heavy action here. We need our weapons.”

  In the alley behind the apartments, skidding tires answered his call.

  “Now that’s a quick response,” Gadgets commented.

  “Go!” Lyons shouted to his partners. “I’ll cover.”

  Gadgets and Blancanales, both holding captured autoweapons, dashed to the corpse spanning the wire. They jumped through the gap, then took positions to cover Lyons.

  Sporadic autofire came from the stairwell. Lyons held his fire. He stuck a finger through the ring of the second grenade, then stopped.

  He reached into the stairwell housing and grabbed one of the dead punks. He jerked the corpse out of the doorway, then slammed the door closed. He pushed the corpse against the door to hold it closed.

  He devised a booby trap. He jerked the pin from the grenade and put the grenade between the corpse holding the door closed and the door itself. When the punks shoved the door open, the grenade would explode, maiming or killing the nearest pursuers, perhaps killing a few on the stairs.

  Lyons grinned sardonically at a thought. Can’t chase if they got no legs.

  “Ironman!” Gadgets called out. “Move it! Flor says there’s action in the alley.”

  The boom of a .45 spurred Lyons. A loaded AK in each hand, he ran for the corpse-bridge through the razor wire. The .45 boomed twice again. Autofire from an M-16 answered. A final shot from Flor’s Detonics .45 silenced the Colt rifle.

  Hurtling the gap, steel razors slashing one leg, Lyons passed Blancanales and Gadgets. He ran to the edge of the roof and looked down.

  The rented Ford spun rubber, fishtailing through the alley. The car lurched as it thumped over a corpse, then raced away. Autofire — this time from a Kalashnikov — popped from the doorways beneath Lyons. The glass of the Ford’s rear windshield shattered.

  Skidding around the corner, the Ford disappeared from his sight. He jerked his hand-radio from his belt. Gadgets’s shout stopped him.

  “She’s around the corner. Waiting for us. So let’s move it!”

  The grenade booby trap exploded. Lyons followed Gadgets and Blancanales over the roofs.

  Hearing the screams of the berserk punks, Lyons looked back. He saw a horror.

  A punk pursued them. Lurching from side to side, moving oddly, the punk seemed to be only four feet tall. Then Lyons realized what he saw. The punk had lost both legs at the knees. Yet he did not fall. The punk continued forward, running on the stumps of his legs, an autorifle gripped in his hands.

  Lyons carefully lined up the Kalashnikov’s night-sight dots on the maimed, drug-enraged monster and shot the top of its head away.

  Others came. Shrieking and screaming, they t
ried to thrash through the razor wire. The steel points slashed them but they did not notice. One of the punks found the gap and called out to the others.

  Lyons fired again. He saw the guy’s head explode. Then Lyons sprinted after his partners.

  Gadgets covered the roof with his Uzi as Blancanales went down the fire escape. Lyons looked at the 9mm submachine gun in Gadgets’s hands and shook his head.

  “Forget that little popgun. Just go. I’ll do what lean.”

  With a quick salute, Gadgets followed Blancanales. Lyons turned to the advancing gang. He took cover behind a fan housing. Easing the Kalashnikov’s fire-selector lever to semiautomatic, he lined up the AK’s glowing dots on the screaming mouth of a punk. The 7.62mm ComBloc slug punched through the mouth to explode the brain-stem. The punk dropped instantly.

  Lyons methodically executed the next three punks. The drug gave them superhuman strength and rage but made them stupid. They did not take cover or advance in fire-teams. They only rushed at Lyons. And he killed them.

  Snapping the magazine out of his second captured AK — the autorifle had no night sights — he shoved the magazine in his coat pocket. He slung the AK with night sights over his shoulder and ran to the ladder.

  Without any attempt at silence, Lyons descended. He called out to his partners. “On my way down!”

  A truck engine revved. Gears shifted. Lyons looked down as a five-ton truck marked LAYAC Farm Fresh Produce came from a garage. The truck gained speed. An autorifle extended from the passenger-side window, spraying fire wildly at the alley’s shadows. Blancanales and Gadgets returned fire.

  The truck swerved and bumped onto the side street where Flor waited. Lyons heard more autofire. Then the sound of the truck’s engine faded.

  Continuing to the alley, Lyons ran to where Flor waited. With Blancanales and Gadgets only a few steps behind him, Lyons jerked open the Ford’s passenger front door.

  “That truck, we got to…”

  But no one waited in the driver’s seat. Lyons looked into the front seat, called out, “Where’s Flor?” Panic rose in his throat.

  He scanned the street. He saw a door close. The muzzle of a Kalashnikov smashed through a window and fire flashed. Even as he returned fire, Lyons screamed out, “There! They took her in there!”

  Fear and reason left Lyons’s mind.

  12

  As the truck hurtled through the streets of East Los Angeles, Abdul Shabaka plotted his next move. The LAYAC produce truck carried all his audiovisual equipment and his entire library of hate films that documented the history of white crimes against blacks and Indians and other non-whites. The film projectors, stereos, audio mixers and video machines would help establish another indoctrination center for young psychopaths and criminals in another city, away from here.

  First, he and his squad of personal bodyguards would take shelter in the warehouse he had rented the year before. He’d never put his faith in the LAYAC organization. He only trusted himself. Therefore he had prepared for the day when LAYAC collapsed. He had rented the warehouse, he had modified the building to provide security and defense and had hidden weapons and ammunition inside the building.

  But more important, he had a longdistance radio at the warehouse.

  With the radio, he would transmit new instructions to his men driving north through Mexico.

  Their truck carried another shipment of the drug. Not the few grams Shabaka had left with the gangs in the LAYAC offices, but hundreds of kilos of the chemical.

  One kilo of the “crazy dust” created one hundred addicted Warriors of Allah and maintained their need for a month.

  One hundred kilos of “crazy dust” created ten thousand fearless, relentless Warriors of Allah who would follow any order, commit any act ordered by their commander, Abdul Shabaka, the Modern Prophet and Leader of the Jihad against the American pigs.

  Any crime, any atrocity, any horror.

  Ten thousand warriors who knew no fear, who fought despite any wound, who killed without questions, who killed the blue-eyed pigs without mercy.

  Ten thousand Warriors of Allah who would lay waste the cities of the white pigs.

  *

  Sirens approached. The scanner on the front seat of the rented Ford monitored the radio chaos of the approaching squad cars.

  Blancanales radioed Detective Towers. “They’ve got Flor. We’re going into the LAYAC offices to get her back.”

  Lyons interrupted his partner with a shout into the radio. “Warn all those cops on the way, pistols aren’t enough. Shotguns and automatic weapons only.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Towers responded. “What’s happening there? I thought you were going in quiet.”

  “Too late for that!” Blancanales barked. “You heard the warning, compadre. And tell the other police. Use shotguns and aim for the head. Over.”

  Lyons slapsealed the Velcro closures of his Kevlar-and-steel trauma-plate battle armor, then buckled on a bandolier of box magazines for his Atchisson. He took up the Atchisson with the fourteen-inch barrel.

  Due to the good fortune of the police academy demonstration that morning, the Ford’s trunk contained two Atchisson assault shotguns. Blancanales would carry the second full-auto shotgun.

  “Got no bandolier for you, Pol,” Lyons told Blancanales. “Dump all these extra mags in your pouches.”

  Blancanales suited up fast. “What are the loads? Double-ought? Jungle mix?”

  “Ask Konzaki. He put them all together for the show at the academy. Whatever the loads are, they’ll kill punks. Here’s the Crowd-killing Device. Gadgets! Ready to go?”

  In his battle armor and weapons, Gadgets looked like a walking gun shop. He carried his Uzi and the Uzi he had captured on the roof. He also carried Blancanales’s M-16/M-203 hybrid over-and-under assault rifle and grenade launcher. A bandolier of 40mm grenades crossed bandoliers of thirty-round Uzi magazines. He hurried to select grenades from the suitcases he and Blancanales had brought from Stony Man.

  “White light shock-stun, right? But no frag or phosphorous?” he said.

  “Damn right!” Lyons told him. “Don’t want to waste Flor. You ready to go?”

  “Here, take these.” Gadgets pushed the antiterrorist grenades on Lyons. Designed to blind and stun airline hijackers without killing passengers, the grenades produced a blinding flash and deafening blast but no shrapnel.

  Lyons jammed the grenades in his armor’s pouches. He jerked back his Atchisson’s actuator to feed the first 12-gauge round. “Time to go! She’s in there…”

  “She’s been in there two minutes,” Gadgets said, glancing at his watch. “If she’s dead, she’s dead. But if we go in there before we’re ready, we’re dead, too.”

  “I’m ready now!”

  Lyons left the cover of the Ford. A form leaned from a first-floor window to aim an AK. Firing the Atchisson from his hip as he ran, Lyons sprayed the window with a three-blast burst of number two and double-ought steel shot, the high-velocity projectiles raking the window from side to side. The AK gunner’s left hand and face disintegrated as the window exploded inward.

  Lyons sprinted to the window. Pulling a shock-stun grenade from a thigh pocket, he lobbed it in.

  Blancanales ran to the building and waited with Lyons — both men covering their ears — for the few heartbeats until the grenade’s fuse triggered the white flash.

  The deafening boom fractured the air. Kicking through the door, Lyons held his Atchisson ready.

  In the pale blue light from the side street, he saw a tangle of bodies on the floor. Broken plaster, books, spilled papers covered the semiconscious wounded. He did not see Flor.

  Moving fast, Lyons kicked punks over, checking each of them. Blancanales stood in the doorway, his riot-length Atchisson covering the office and the inner door. Lyons pointed to the inner door, shouted, “Whitelight!”

  Blancanales aimed at the doorknob and lock. A single round from the 12-gauge removed the entire assembly. Fire fro
m an AK answered. A shock-stun grenade in his hand, Lyons pointed at the center of the door. Blancanales aimed again. Two blasts opened a hole six inches by twelve inches.

  Gunners on the other side of the door sprayed wild automatic fire. Lyons let the safety lever flip from the shock-stun, waited to the count of four, then snapped the grenade through the hole in the door.

  The blast threw the door across the office. Lyons dodged through the doorway. In the swirling plaster dust, he saw a Chicano sprawled against the wall with a Kalashnikov in his hands. Lyons kicked the Chicano’s throat. Through the leather and neoprene of his shoe, he felt the cartilage crush.

  Blancanales saw movement on the office floor. A hand lifted an AK by the pistol grip. Whipping around the twenty-inch barrel of his Atchisson, Blancanales jerked the trigger.

  Unfamiliar with the assault shotgun, Blancanales inadvertently advanced the fire selector to full-auto as he triggered the blast. The shotgun roared with a burst of point-blank fire.

  Andrzej Konzaki, the Stony Man weaponsmith, had loaded that magazine to impress the onlookers of the police academy demonstration with the destructive firepower of the assault weapon. The magazine alternated jungle mix — number two and double-ought steel shot — with slugs. Fired at point-blank distance into a human body, the four rounds, two of steel shot and two of one-ounce slugs, exploded the torso and head, tore through the dying punk in a storm of projectiles to strike the linoleum-and-concrete-slab floor of the office, and finally ricocheted, spraying high-velocity steel and lead fragments in all directions.

  Gore splashed the office. Konzaki’s weapon and ammunition succeeded in highly impressing Rosario Blancanales, ex-Green Beret and veteran of several wars. For a moment he stared at the mass of glistening meat and blood that had been a body. He had never seen an infantry weapon — other than a grenade launcher or a LAAW rocket — create such mayhem. He dropped out the empty magazine and jammed in another.

  In the corridor, Lyons kicked over gasping, bleeding gang boys. One had a Kalashnikov, another an M-16, a third a .38 pistol. Lyons went flat against the wall and peered through the dust that grayed the corridor.