Truly the nd of the dead

  Luke brought his rattler up as the heavy armored window crept down. He kept mashing the button, but it stopped after dropping six inches.

  “What the fuck!”

  “They don’t go down all the—” Sam yelled. Luke was already out the door.

  The sedan speeding down the ter row erupted in muzzle fsh and gunshots. One of the passengers had opened up right through the windshield and the cruisers at the front of the store came alive in sparks and breaking gss. The sedan squealed to a stop inches from the sed cruiser and three men stepped out with rifles raised.

  They didn’t have the ce to do much else. Luke dropped two before they saw him and the st one mao roll one eye in the general dire of the SUV before his neck exploded.

  It was lightning fast. Until then, Gradie hadn’t truly uood what Michael meant that day in the clubhouse when he said “we move at the edge of what’s possible”, but in the one and a half seds it took Luke to put eight rounds into three men standing mostly cealed behind a vehicle fifty yards away, he realized what it meant to be a Hardworlder.

  Something moved in the smoking glitter-windowed sedan. The driver climbing over the seat towards the passenger side. Luke’s rattler hissed out some more suppressed sps and the movement stopped. There was about half a sed of silence, which to Gradie seemed might st forever, before the air cracked open again, this time from the sed sedan which had smmed into a space across the lot.

  “Get to the target!” Luke yelled. He dropped down and moved to cover behind a car, legs flying like a Russian dahe other sedan fshed and rippled. Bullets cracked in the air, sparked off the SUV and smacked the ajar door. Sam flinched backward.

  “Why is he out in the open!” EP yelled in the earbuds.

  Gradie scrambled into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed.

  “Drive!” He poio the main line of store fronts across the lot. Sam floored it and they barreled down the row as more rounds smacked into the SUV and dotted the windows in little white circles. Gradie gnced bad saw that Luke had taken the opportunity to pop up and fire. Anunman dropped dead behind the sed sedan before Sam turned hard to the left.

  “Stop!” Gradie yelled and Sam smmed on the breaks. He looked back at the muzzle fsh breaking out over the lot, some part of him screaming that flesh was real ah final, trying to get up the nerve.

  “Why the fuck are you giving orders?” Sam yelled sing her mirrors, all the more pissed off because she had listeo him. Gradie froze for a sed, then remembered his earbuds.

  “Luke, cover Me.”

  He saw Luke pop up again behind a different car and start firing, as if he had burrowed uhe lot. Gradie threw open the door and sprio the gss window. He heard the sliced-off edge of Sam’s shout as he ran and the crack of a round moving through the air somewhere behind him. He aimed the Five-seven at the gss and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. Another round cracked nearby and Sam guhe SUV's accelerator. He flicked the safety off and fired through the window at a bare se of floor tile. The fsh was massive and the window poured out in a spsh of white. He jumped through the frame before the gss settled.

  He slipped on the gss but rolled with it and tur into the scooby doo start of a sprint across the store. He ran in a low half crouch, dodging around racks of clothes and abandoned shopping carts.

  He cut right and ran towards the other side of the store, with the men's clothiion and fristers between him and the windows. The air cracked and gss kled on the linoleum somewhere as rounds zipped in through the front windows. Screams came from all around, but one of them stuck out. A guttural, mase scream from outside the front of the store. One of the cops had taken a hit.

  He got to the far wall of the store and followed it up to the front windows.

  “Moving up. Watch the crossfire,” he whispered

  “Watch your ass! I’m fug busy here!” Luke yelled babsp;

  A truck revved its engine i and accelerated down the ter row towards the cop cars parked out front. The windshield cracked and someone shot out of it from the passenger seat. Anunman fired out the back window and the cars around Luke (or the st pce Gradie had seen him) lost their windshields ged as their tires popped out.

  “I’m ing around, Johnny!” Sam yelled, and the massive engine roared out i like a dragon.

  Gradie moved as fast as he could in his low crouch toward the shattered front windows fag the cop cars. Two cops were crouched down behind their cruisers with their backs to him. Suddenly a straor soued from across the lot and they jumped up and started firing. The noise was so sudden and desperate that even with his earpieces muffling the gunshots to whispers, it turned his stomad spiked more adrenaline on his tongue. Half a sed ter their target swung into view, bck sudden shadows just outside the frames, spitting fire and screeg to a stop. Gradie dropped to the floor in a reflex, the self saving his life.

  While the truck had e charging down the ter row, anroup had swooped in on ATVs from behind the strip of shops to the left and hopped the curb before the cops had time to see them.

  It was quid awful, even though Gradie could only see half of it with his face pressed to the linoleum.

  The two ATVs came screaming up the sidewalk from the left, two riders each, and the passengers half standing on the back fired short-barreled ARs and Dracos in full auto. Rounds sparked off the crete, scraped paint off the cruisers in long spears, and disappeared oddly into the blue-biforms. It was like an old aovie. No bloore at all. Just muzzle fsh and sparks and falling bodies. One cop, at the far end of the group, mao throw himself behind his car screaming, but the rest died quietly. The passengers ran dry before the drivers hit the brakes, but that hadn’t been ao the shooting. The drivers drew pistols out of chest holsters just as soon as the ATVs rocked to a stop and mag dumped into the men falling in front of them.

  In another odd silehe gunmen sat calmly droppiy mags and grabbing at ammo pouches as the truck moved dow.

  Gradie watched them for half a sed before he remembered something.

  “Oh.”

  He said it out loud as he got up. One of the gunmen looked over at him through the empty window frame and cwed at his mag pouch. It didn’t matter. Gradie had never holstered his pistol.

  The Five-seven has a lot of three things and almost none of a fourth; Muzzle fsh, noise, ammo (twenty in a magazihanks Belgium), and recoil. Gradie put five rounds into the two riders of one of the ATVs before they realized he existed. The fsh was amazing, reflected in the windows of the cruisers and all the million little pieces of gss scattered everywhere. The other two gunmen grabbed their magazines as Gradie turhe pistol ohe driver never had a ce, seemingly having fotten which side he had put his pistol magazines on. The backseat shooter would have just about gotten his magazine home and had the bolt dropped by the time Gradie got done shooting the driver out from under him, but something magical happened.

  He froze, made a face like Gradie was casting spells a it like that while Gradie put three shots around his belt, just below his pte carrier. The st two shots through his face cleared the expression away, but Gradie felt afterward that if he were to go over to the body and wipe all the blood and gore off the face, it would still be looking at him like he had fessed to being a vampire.

  “Huh,” Gradie said to no one as the bodies colpsed. He heard the shuffling sound of the cop that had gone around the other side of the car, then remembered the truck. Rather, the truck reminded him of its preses passengers opened fire at him through the windows of the police cruiser.

  “Shit!” He dropped down ft on the ground as the air cracked and screamed above him. A bag of caramel pot knocked off one of the impulse-buy raear the register about five yards away, ahought that this is what it must sound like to be inside a bag as its being microwaved.

  Suddenly, anun hissed into the air from the west side of the lot and rounds cracked outside the window.

  “Watch the crossfire.” Lindsey’s voice came through the earpieces clear as an asmr video and Gradie looked stupidly around for her.

  “Sure thing miss.” Luke’s gun joined Lindsey’s with his distinctive bursts of “semi-auto so fast it's almost full auto” fire and Gradie y there, leisurely loading a new magazine, and enjoying the he metal sounds of rounds striking the vehicles. The barely audible kling of the gss. The very satisfying screams and thuds as the gunmehemselves gunned down.

  It gave Gradie a pause to piece together the flow of the shootout in his head, a habit he had picked up reviewing his training torture sessions with Philip.

  Lindsey must have sped down the alley behind the store. By the time she got set up, Gradie and Luke had already killed a few of them and the shooters were too eo notice her lean around the er of the building, probably using that small set of t stairs Gradie had noted as they drove up, and she dropped three of them before the gunfire finished boung off the walls. The moment the rest of them pivoted to her, Luke popped up in the background like a gag and now they were just ing up.

  Gradie slid the mostly empty mag into his pocket and the guopped. Sirens echoed in the distance, and someone nearby yelled into a radio.

  Its hat simple, darling. ime, Fleeing the Se, and scrapping some pns. episode, Joyride.