by Lou Cadle
Lightning struck again as Dev emerged, the lightning closer than before, and the whole street was clearly illuminated for that moment. No one was on the street, but Dev finally saw how wide the street was. Few trees lined it. A row of low bushes were not a lot of cover. But there was another box for utilities by the building they were aiming for, which was some cover. His mom and Jackson were already across the street, with pairs of men trailing them, aiming for that.
Dev tapped Sierra and pointed to their left. She turned and watched that direction, while he watched to the right. And good thing he did, for just as his mother was hunkering down behind the metal box, a man came around the corner, the glow of the end of a cigarette giving him away. Dev had no other choice. The rifle shot would alert the enemy, but the man would too if left alive. He fired.
The crack of the rifle was loud. The man fell, but Dev didn’t take even a moment to feel satisfaction at the accuracy of the shot. He saw that some of their men had frozen at the noise and yelled, “Go! Get to cover!”
Dev sprinted and said Sierra’s name. She fell into step just behind him as he made for the corner of the building. There was a wide driveway, and as the lightning stuck again, almost simultaneously with thunder, he could see it led to a large parking lot in the rear. He pounded down the driveway and heard Sierra on his heels.
To his left were dark windows. The room where they were talking was off a central hallway, at the front of the building, and the man they’d captured said no one was in any other room except maybe the men’s room.
A truck and a car were parked close to the building, near a rear door. “Truck,” he said to Sierra. “For cover.”
Gunfire erupted from the front of the building.
He and Sierra made it to the truck and ducked behind it. “Can you see with the goggles?”
“I can barely see, period. That lightning flash temporarily blinded me.”
“Leave them off then,” he said. “I’m okay.” Through his scope, there were no human forms. A crack of thunder was so loud, it drowned out his voice and the gunfire. A burst of air came, cool air, blowing hard across the open concrete. He could hear a can rattle along in its force. And then the skies opened up and rain came pouring down.
That was going to make it harder to see. But it would also make it harder to see them, and for now, the men inside might be engaged by the gunfire out front. “We need to make the building now.”
“And not get shot.”
“Move while the enemy is still surprised and disorganized.” He ran around the truck, going for the rear door. He waited for Sierra to catch up, and then grabbed the handle to the back door and pulled it. But it didn’t move. Locked. Damn, he should have thought about that.
“A window was open to the right,” Sierra whispered.
“Go for it,” he said.
She led him along the back wall of the building through a flower bed filled with what felt like dead flowers, crunching under his boots. There was a window, cracked open four inches, backed by Venetian blinds. “Noisy,” he said.
She handed him her rifle, reached up and grabbed the sill and pulled herself up. She rolled through the window, the blinds making a soft noise of rustling plastic, and then her hand appeared again, fingers outstretched, barely visible.
He put her rifle into it, and then pushed his through. A second later, he felt her take it. The rain was coming harder with every second, and his hair was already soaked and dripping rivulets of rain down his face. He jumped up and a second later slipped through the window.
Dev whipped his head so that the water sluiced off his hair, rubbed his face with his shoulder, and watched her open the room’s door an inch and peek through the opening. A slit of dim light was visible. Sierra was holding his rifle out. “Clear,” she said. “Ready?”
“One sec.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and took up the rifle, patting it dry against his shirt. “Go.” She opened the door all the way and disappeared. He was a second late to follow her, checking his grip on the rifle because he didn’t want his hands to slip at the wrong time.
The gunfire continued up front, but sporadically. From the sound of it, his people hadn’t breached the front door. All the enemy in here could still be alive, and there was no guarantee their prisoner had told them the truth about how many. He hated being in a strange territory and longed for his own woods and home, where familiarity gave him an advantage he’d not fully appreciated until right this second.
The light at the end of the hallway grew stronger as they inched forward. He clicked a signal at Sierra: shoot right. He’d check left, toward the rear of the building, but he didn’t think anyone would be in that direction. She slowed, waiting for him to catch up, and they went forward at the same pace, hugging tight to their own walls.
No one was visible from the end of the hall. Sierra turned her head, caught his gaze, nodded, and then stuck her head out, her rifle up and ready. He took a step forward and checked the left. A wider hallway went from the front to the back of the building, ending at the locked door they’d tried. No one was in sight. Across the hall and toward the front of the building, there were double glass doors leading to what had to be the correct room, a big meeting room, the trussed man had said.
He said to Sierra, “See anyone?”
“No, but—” Gunfire came from outside and was answered from that room. “That’s where they are.”
“Glass door,” he said.
“Think it’s bulletproof?”
“No idea,” he said. It was a government building, so it wasn’t impossible that it was hardened against terrorist attacks. It struck him that depending on whose perspective you took, he was the terrorist in this case. From his own perspective, the invaders were, like some coup had happened, and they were illegally holding a building he wanted to return to the control of the legitimate leaders of the town.
If there were any of them left alive. Probably not. You’d think if any of them were in jail, they’d have mentioned, “Hey, I’m the mayor,” or whatever.
“What do we do?” Sierra said, bringing him back to the moment and the problem at hand.
“Let’s try to shoot out the glass from here.”
“Giving up the element of surprise,” she said.
“Can’t think of anything else to do. We can’t walk up to it. They’ll see us, and that’s not how I want to find out if the glass is bulletproof or not.”
“All right,” she said, stepping out into the hallway and raising her rifle. “Ready?”
“One sec,” he said, and he dried his hands again. They weren’t wet with rain this time. They were sweating. He was at least as worried for Sierra as he was for himself. She was so beautiful standing there, her hair dampened by the rain, curling around her face, her height seeming greater by the power of her focus and intensity. She nearly glowed with that force. “Don’t get hurt,” he said, and he’d never meant the words more.
“Ready?” she said again, not turning to look at him. She was intent on the glass doors.
As he should be. He raised his rifle and aimed at a bit of printing on the door, the letter “e,” and took a breath. He let it half out as she said, “Set. Now!”
He fired, and the “e” disappeared in a fury of cracks through the glass. He fired again. The second time he fired, the glass exploded inward.
His hearing was momentarily shocked, but as it came back, he heard shouting in there. He kept his rifle up and his focus on the door. A flash was all he saw, and then three rounds hit the hall wall.
Sierra sprinted for the far wall of the wide hallway and pressed herself against it. Dev threw himself back to where she’d been in this side hall, pressing himself tight and staying back a foot. The door wasn’t visible from here, and so they couldn’t hit him unless a lucky shot penetrated straight through two walls and found him.
Sierra fired a shot across the broken door and it hit the wall by the front door.
“Friendly fire,” he reminded her.
His mom was out there somewhere.
“Right,” she said. “Now what?”
A bunch of shots sounded at once from outside, from the front of the building. He should move now if he was going to, but he hadn’t seen any better spot to go than where he was. Every time he heard gunfire, it made his head hurt a fraction more.
“How do we advance?” Sierra said.
Truth was, he had no idea if they could. He wished they had found some tear gas in the jail. That would sure make this easier.
“If we can just hold them,” he said. “Eventually, our side will get here.”
“That could be an hour or more,” she said. “We don’t have ammunition enough to last an hour.”
“We can retreat to the jail.”
The answering gunfire from inside the building had died down. At least they didn’t seem to have another grenade launcher—or a bazooka, or a fully automatic rifle—in there. That was lucky, and it was important to know. They were on a level playing field, except the men in the room had a better defensive setup. “Name some guerilla techniques to assailing a fortress,” he said.
“Uh, leapfrogging,” she said. “You go first.”
“No,” he said, knowing she was just teasing. “What else?”
“Surprise. Misdirection. Hit and run.” She furrowed her brow. “That’d be good but I can’t hit from here.”
“What else?”
“Sabotage their weapons. Traps like Punji sticks.”
Dev couldn’t see how any of those could apply. “I’m going to check something. Fire a shot every minute or so, okay? If it’s safe, move a few feet every time so they don’t know how many of us there are.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. Then he sprinted across the wide hall and toward the back of the building. He opened the first side door he came to. A supply closet. The next door led to stairs. Hmm. Maybe?
Sierra too? Or just him? He hissed at Sierra. She turned to look at him. He pointed up, and then at himself. She nodded, getting it. The last he saw of her, she stepped out and took an oblique shot at the broken glass doors.
Dev took the steps slowly, favoring quiet over speed. But he didn’t have all the time in the world. The jailed men with only two dozen rounds and weeks of frustration were going to run out quickly, and only his mom and Jackson would still be firing. The batons would be of no use against bullets. It was up to him to change the balance of the stand-off.
The hallway up here was dark, so he went back to using his scope. Nothing, nothing, no glow to the left or right. He made his way through one room, out a door opposite. The hallways seemed to be set up differently up here. There was a maze of small offices and narrow hallways. The room he had just left opened to two halls. The second one only had one exit. He wove through them, making for the front corner of the building. The defensive fire coming from the building helped guide him. He finally opened a door that gave him a view of a bank of windows, green rectangles of reflected light seen through his scope. And then a weapon fired from directly under him.
Now the question was, could he shoot through the floor? What was an office building like this made of? Were there thin spots? Vents?
Though if he could successfully shoot through the floor, they could shoot through the ceiling in response. So maybe not the best idea. Should he get out a light and hunt for a vent or vulnerable spot? No, not yet.
He backtracked to the hall and heard a voice, then another voice shush it. It was coming from the wrong direction. Not the room below where they’d been meeting, but down the hallway, up here. He was glad now he hadn’t used a light.
More voices. Climbing in the windows, maybe?
He found a cross hall that led to the side of the building, and he heard rain pounding. A window at the end of the hall had been left open, probably for ventilation. And there were voices outside. His men from the jail? Or the enemy? The possibility of death by friendly fire came home to him.
He realized he was no longer hearing the generator. They must have shut it off.
Then he heard a clatter of metal. He approached the window on tiptoe. Once there, he eased it open another few inches, looking to either side as he did so, not sticking his head out until he knew more about what and who was out there. He couldn’t see anything from back here, but he heard the word, “Climb.” And then a metallic sound again. Footsteps.
Up a fire escape? The image came to him of a metal set of stairs attached to the outside of the building. He hadn’t noticed one on his way around the building, but he wouldn’t have necessarily, right? Not looking up, and so used to seeing them in town, they faded into the background for him. “Take out as many as you can,” hissed a voice.
Another voice said, “He’s too high. He can’t hear you. Let’s circle round. Whoever these bastards are, we’ll get ‘em. Go on down.”
So they weren’t just sitting there and taking it, defending their building from the meeting room. They were trying something more daring.
Then Dev would have to be daring too. He pushed himself out of the window and turned to the direction of the metallic footsteps. A shape was moving above him on metal stairs, up toward the top of the building. Another thirty seconds and he’d be out of range, and Dev’s mom would be in danger as he fired from a higher position. Dev leaned out farther, twisted, and brought the rifle up to an awkward firing position. But it was the shot he had. And he had to take it fast before the men below him saw him or the man above disappeared.
He made himself take a half-second to aim carefully, finding the glow of human warmth through the scope, bisected by dark patches of the metal stairs. And then he pulled the trigger.
The shot pinged off metal. The man froze, and Dev moved his aim just a fraction and fired again. Then stone cracked by his elbow and exploded in tiny shards that struck him even as he registered the shot from below. He held his position and fired a third time, hearing not the sound of his bullet striking metal but something softer. His rifle jumped in his hands as a round fired from below struck the barrel of it.
He wriggled backward until the weight of his body dragged him down from the window. A three-shot burst was followed by the sound of breaking glass, and a shower of glass rained down on him. He ducked his head and closed his eyes.
The last of the glass tumbled onto him. He shook his head without opening his eyes. Glass tinkled as it fell off him and onto the floor. He put his hand down to push himself back from the window and the pile of glass, and a piece of broken glass sliced painfully into the heel of his hand.
Stupid. He managed to push himself along with only his feet, skating along on the seat of his pants, and made it another few feet away from the window. Gingerly, he put his uninjured hand down. A few little pieces of glass were on the floor. With the edge of his hand, he brushed them away, and he managed not to drive any glass into that hand when he put it down.
He pushed himself up to his knees and stood. More glass fell from his hair. His hand with the glass in it hurt. He really wished for light now. He moved down the hall to the first doorway, leaned his rifle against the doorjamb, and tested his hurt hand with his unhurt one. There was a piece of glass still in there about three inches long, thin. His mother would probably yell at him for doing this, but he got a grip on it with his other fingers and yanked it out. Ow. Son of a gun, that hurt. He held the hand up and could feel blood dripping down his wrist. Gotta be something in my pack to deal with that, right? He touched his rifle, reassuring himself it hadn’t moved, and then shrugged off his pack and rooted blindly in it. Ha. There. Duct tape. That’d do. Might regret it in a few hours when he ripped it off, but it would stop the bleeding, which he couldn’t see but could feel and smell, a metallic scent that hit him in some nervous animal part of his brain.
He started the duct tape with his teeth, held the end between two fingers of his uninjured hand—his non-dominant hand, unfortunately—and wiped his blood on his jeans. Then quick as he could, workin
g in the dark, he slapped the tape onto his injured hand. But it slipped. Too bloody. Okay, we need a plan B. He wiped his bloody hand again, both sides, took hold of the slippery tape end and gripped it between two of his fingers on the injured hand. Then he was able to unwrap more tape, and he slung it over his hand, and over again, and over a third time. It was something of a snarl at first, but he finally had it sticking in places. Once that was done, he was able to slow down and be more careful with a couple winds of tape. The second wind, it stuck to itself solidly, so he made the next wind tighter, and a final wind tighter still.
He checked the bandage to make sure it wasn’t going to shift, and then bit the tape at the roll and tore it in two. The roll went back in his pack. He used the bandaged hand to finger-comb his hair to get the rest of the glass off him. Pack back on, rifle over his shoulder, and he was ready to move.
For the whole time he’d been bandaging himself, he hadn’t heard the men outside below him, neither their voices nor their weapons. But that might mean they were still trying to flank his mom’s group. So he went to the room with the front windows, and tried to open one of them. He couldn’t find the lock. Time was of the essence, so he took his rifle, his cut hand hurting badly as he touched it to the hot barrel, and he slammed the butt against the window, once, twice. It broke out.
Gunfire came from his people. He sat on the floor and yelled, “It’s Dev, it’s Dev. Don’t shoot!”
The bullets stopped. But he wasn’t taking the chance of sticking his head up there. He yelled from where he was, “Watch it! They’re flanking you to your right!”
Then he heard bullets firing below him, up into their ceiling. Good time to leave. He ran for the hallway and kept running, not stopping until he hit the interior stairway again. He went slowly down the stairs, feeling a wave of tiredness. Normal after a surge of adrenaline. His head was pounding again, not the low-level headache he’d had most of the day since he’d woken, but a rush of sharp pain. He touched his left temple, but he really wanted to sit down and massage his head. No. Don’t leave Sierra alone for any longer.
