Your shadow rising to meet you

  The saw roar, like metal teeth speed-eating hand grenades half a mile away, and the sp-crag sound of the armor pierg finger sized rounds snapping through the air above had stopped suddenly as the SUV squealed into the er of the L-shaped parking lot, o a row of covered parking.

  In a moment of retive silence, Gradie took in his surroundings, his mind ravenous for information, like some dying starving thing that knew, in this panicked raw open state, that the smallest sliver of ignorance could kill.

  The lot opened up onto the main street to the west, where gunmen circled Celeste’s Beetle like a pack of frenzied dogs, and onto anled side street to the north, where the bare crete street was as untouched by the age as a cloud drifting by a mile overhead.

  Across the side street, he could see the er of a gas station parking lot, which he knew, his memory somehow intaough after the mae gun fire to remind him, was a triangle-shaped sb of crete on the edge of the whirl surrounding the stru zone, and was also occupied by a small Germaaurant.

  Sam had parked the SUV with its fnk toward the interse, rear bumper toward the bridge, and other fnk fag the covered parking and the brick wall that backed it.

  The tarked i and the three oak trees spaced across the squarish grass wween the L lot and the interse added some extra cover from the gunmen scampering around the Beetle. As far as positions go, it was almost a piic.

  As Gradie was dug his topographical survey with his mouth hanging open, Luke opehe door while the SUV was still rog from the brakes and stepped out into his element.

  Muzzles fshed from all along the main street like cameras for his red-carpet premier. Low run, swift as an Olympian, shifting his shoulders from target tet like automated hydraulics, his rifle hissed in a staccato of doubles and triples so fast they sounded like automatic fire sliced into portions and given out to his enemies.

  Two of the gunmen dropped before the rest got everything but their gun barrels behind cover and y down a wave of rounds. He dropped down and moved around to the back of the SUV as rounds smmed into the side of it like a hailstradie just watched, surprised he even had time to close the door behind him.

  “You gon out there or what, killer?!” Sam Yelled at him, lifting her short AR and l the seat. After a quick sp of the window trols, she was shooting through a six-inch gap between the white polycarbonate and the door frame, and he was left feeling like the new guy on a job site.

  A round smacked into the window and Sam made a squealing sound she mao turn into a snarl by the end, and he snapped out of it.

  He opehe door and shot out the safe side of the vehicle with his rifle raised, stomping toward the front bumper.

  “Engaging!”

  “Got you!” Luke responded, his voice heard only in the earbuds, his rifle a muffled restrained rhythm pying on the walls. Other sounds flooded in as Gradie anticipated exposing his head and shoulders past the windshield.

  Rounds prodded the SUV and fell among the parked cars, cracked through the air and smacked against the brick wall bag the covered parking, the metal awning giving the sounds ghostly echoes. Someone in a ear the interse was screaming, a thought-splitting shriek that rose and held like a mae had hijacked her vocal cords. More mase yells came from the bridge where men motiohers out of the cars and to cover orail down below.

  Somewhere, uhe ground, in the air, just behind his ears or stuck below his jaw, anradie was freaking out, trying to expin to the only one who could hear him that this was insane, ah was final.

  But Gradie dragged his feet across the crete until he had cleared the windshield, and sed for a target.

  The beetle had one car in front of it and numerous others behind it. The first group of shooters had been joined by the survivors of the dirt bike cavalry. Muzzles fshed and heads moved behind the cars. He turned on the one closest to his red dot, moving it smoothly over the area below his target's , and in a spasm of instinct fed by months e course runs shooting simir silhouettes, the trigger pulled itself three times.

  Luke responded by instantly letting loose a rapid sustained burst and the gunmen across the street erupted with more fshes as if Gradie had kicked off an explosive rea. His target dropped behind the car, either dead or very lucky. For a moment, Gradie waited for him to pop up again, until the unmen corrected their fire and rounds started gng off the hht o him.

  He fired the rest of his magazine in a blur, the memory of one moment dissolving into smoke and panic as the instant crashed into him. That other him, who had spent all those hours on the range, running through for force, took over. The Spirit could only watch, blind, hoping for the best.

  Suddenly, he was empty, and muzzle fshes from far to his left sent more rounds gng off the hood. The knowledge that he was empty had already fizzed out of his mind so he turned and clicked the trigger three times at the fshing fluttering figures.

  “Reload!” one of the Gradies said, and he dropped down behind the tire.

  Iive calm of cover, his senses caught up with him, along with the memory of who he had been shooting at.

  “Shooters to the northeast, the restaurant!” he shouted as he pulled anazi. He froze with it in his hand and realized something was out of pce. The hours practig the reload at the range had somehow e up short. He stared at the magaziig out of the rifle o his elbow like it had snuck up on him till he realized he had fotten to eject it.

  A round skipped uhe SUV and rang oal like a death bell.

  “You hit An?” Luke said in his ear. His rifle opped, and the steady sounds seemed to scold Gradie.

  Gradie fihe reload without breathing and released the slide catch.

  “Reloaded!”

  The word sounded awkwardly alone and he realized he hadn’t called out his reload when he wey before, but had only thought it in his head. His shame made him move and again, his Self tried to reason with him, but his body rose up like some other third force was lifting it and he came up firing.

  There was a fresh body he restaurant and one of the gunmen behind the cars was screaming about something. Gradie only got off a few rounds before the two parked cars in front of him lost their windows in bursts of gss aracers tore through the lot like neon lightning. An instahe sound of the PKM bounced off the walls.

  The gunman behind the cars fired in unison, surely trying to take advantage of any effect the burst might have had. There was none. Grade had somehow got the idea that he was immuo bullets as long as he kept firing and Luke had actually moved up as the PKM was ying into the lot, and was now crouched behind one of the windowless cars a few yards in front of the SUV.

  “They’re trying to walk the fire to you on the radio, but you’re sed by the gas station,” EP warned. “Just don’t move up.”

  “Shit,” Luke said like he had dropped his keys, the mi his earbuds struggling to pick up his easy tone amidst the sounds of all hell breaking loose. He caught one of the gunmen in the face as he came up behind the crumpled car in front of the beetle and arterial spray nded on the windshield.

  Gradie felt a pang of jealousy for a few seds, then had a moment of etion as, shortly after pg the red dot over the neck of a man using the beetle for cover, he sent three rounds out in a tight group, the st of which tore off his targets jaw. The moment was cut short by a sharp, burnial something ripping his head apart.

  He dropped back behind the SUV and rolled ba his ass. He knew he was dead. The knowledge filled him with fear, and the fear gave life to that other him, as if the Self was a kind of fossil that only fear could revive. The Self, now flush with the pulsing energy of the fear, tackled the Spirit to the ground.

  You stupid fug piece of shit! You joined up with some god damned wanman you met online because you blew all your fug money on “bat” csses and tacticool bullshit! This is your only life! God damn you, get—

  Suddenly, the fear made him check his head. He patted sliaded hair and sweat soaked forehead, and found nothing. No gaping wound, no slick flowing blood, not even a scrape. Then he found it, a k of lead wedged into the side of his ballistigsses. Lucky ricochet. He hadn’t eve it. It had been the sight of the sparks and the sound of it skipping off the hood that had sent him flying backward. A mispced reflex.

  “Ans Down!” Sam yelled. Gradie heard her start firing out of the SUV.

  What? I ’t go down. I’m not even here. I’m floating around the Allworld. I’m projeg from a pce this world ’t even tain.

  The thought gave him relief, and something close to ce. He rolled bato his feet and loaded a fresh mag.

  “I’m up!” he yelled. Sam looked at him through the windshield as he came up, her face morphing from panic to disbelief to something else, before she jerked her head back towards the enemy and started spraying shells ihe .

  ****

  EP had put Celeste’s mi a separate room so that the operators wouldn’t get distracted by her shrieking. The new PKM gunner was less accurate than the one she had killed, but made up for it in other, crueler ways.

  He had been peppering the Beetle with bursts, mostly around the front end, and even shot off the side mirrors. Celeste screamed every time. The other shooters warned him to watch his fire almost stantly, some almost catg a ricochet, and EP could read in his shot patterns a rising frustration and a seething bloodlust, as if he eaking to her in gunfire.

  “Going for the MG,” Lindsey said on the line, a cold statement of fact. EP pulled up a drone she had set to track her motorcycle and watched her fly down from the northwest. She had been far ahead down a side street when the shooting started and was outside the bat zone. EP hoped it would give her the edge.

  “Watch for an opening,” Philip said.

  “No time,” she said ftly.

  She came down the road along the stru site at about a hundred mph. The half-built ramp passed overhead tht, all bare steel and wide t Vs, desperately trying to meet itself aassive gaps, like a great dragon she was destio fight. Its head was a clod of greehe earth rose up aed crete sbs and plywood-sided steel girders down its spihere were men on top of the earthen head, in or around a white truck that, fittingly, itting fire.

  Her Ducati Multistrada roared under her as she guhe throttle. She visualized ing up the side of the dirt slope, far outside the fan of the mae gun, surprising the gun-deaf men up top, and swung her Galil around on its sling and y it on her chest. As she slowed and turned onto the dirt lot alongside the ramp, one of the men up top turned on her.

  “April!” EP shouted, uselessly. Lindsey zig-zagged rapidly as he opened fire, still hoping for a ce, maybe if he let out all thirty rounds before she got too close, to take it down. Instead, he stopped firing and moved his gun in a horrifyingly familiar way; A minute movement that, despite the distance of a hundred yards, made her body rea its own.

  “Shit!” She tapped the brakes and pulled the bike into a tight right turn that had her almost scraping against the ground. She heard the telltale ‘k’ of the m203 being fired a huimes in her head before it finally unched, silently, an exploded about thirty yards behind her.

  “Lucky, so lucky,” she thought in a calming, fident tone, and visualized her skin, every inch of it, pletely unscathed by the shrapnel. Half a heartbeat ter, after the boom had bounced off the underside of the bridge and the shrapnel had kicked up dirt around her, she felt it was true.

  A fsh on the slope. Anunman joined his friend.

  “Break off! Right! Uhe arch!” EP yelled.

  Liurned uhe t and steel at the st sed, like the bike had a mind of its own and wanted revenge. Rounds sang off the crete aal and cracked in the air, then it all came ba echoes as the gunfire bounced back from the far slopes.

  “I’ll e back around!” she promised, more to herself than anyone else.

  “You hit?” EP asked.

  “Just my pride.” She swerved behind a mound of fill dirt as a round smacked into the side of it and kicked up an infuriating little cloud.

  When the guarts, could you believe it t hurt you? ime, a professional takes matters, and an HK417, into his own hands. episode, Captain.