Ride well, shoot straight, and speak the truth

  Luke sprinted down an alley between two sheet metal and brick buildings, old auto shops turned office space for new moartups. It felt wrong, relying oo check his ers, like running hrough a hostile jungle, but he had to move fast.

  He paused in a gravel lot betweewo clusters of buildings and hugged the er wall.

  “Use that dumpster to get on the roof,” EP said before his feet had settled. He nodded a yes mam, as if she could see him, and bolted up the dumpster against the building in the northwest er of the lot.

  “Stay low when you get up there and don’t move up too much,” EP said. “The west half of the building is higher. You’ll have some cover.”

  He got up on the roof and sure enough, the other half of the building was about four feet higher than the roof he was on. Directly to the southwest, across a half-built wide road and the east er of the stru site, the truck with the PKM sat idly on the unfinished ramp. It looked too calm, too mundane, just a pickup truck with some guys squatted around it, to be the cause of all the hell he had witnessed over the past few mihen the muzzle fshed, and the familiar hateful crad roar bounced off the lot behind him a moment ter.

  “Fuck’s he shooting at?” It had only been a short burst, maybe as little as three rounds.

  “The Beetle,” EP said. “Risking a kill out of desperation. You got a shot?”

  “Yep.”

  “One sec, Max—”

  “On your mark, dude,” Philip said, voice like a racked slide.

  In the brief pause between lining up the sight and pulling the trigger, he regretted that he wasn’t allowed to use the M240 anymore. If ever there was a time for it, this was it. He and Philip had pleaded their case, that every single round that job had goly where they wahem too, but big Mike had just ughed.

  “If that were true, why did you both end up dead before the target?”

  The man had a point, so here he was, trying to fight a PKM with a six-inch barrel.

  Oh well. He braced his rifle on the edge of the higher roof and pced his dot just to the left of the muzzle fsh. He fired three shots before Philip’s 417 joined in with mildly suppressed barks from somewhere across the main road.

  “Moving!” Lindsey said suddenly in his ears. In the background, he heard her bike scream.

  A stream of yellow tracers shot over his head, but he kept hammering away at the truck bed until it erupted in fshes and a hail of rounds aracers skipped off the roof in front of him and cracked past his face so close he could feel the heat.

  “Shit!”

  He dropped down as the crete fked off all around him and pressed his forehead to the roof. Suddenly, the bullets stopped, but the PKM kept screaming at something.

  He came up and saw guwinkling on the distant hill like fireworks, and Lindsey’s bike went silent.

  ****

  Lindsey had shot out from behind the fill dirt the instant Luke and Philip started firing oruck. She weaved uhe shadowy weblike frame of the ramp’s skeleton at almost 80 mph. She had visualized her path tless times while waiting in silence, and now it was fwless. She braked and drifted into the right turn out from uhe ramp, then hu and came right for the dirt slope.

  Red tracers were streaming out of the back of the truck towards the north side of the road and two gunmen, one crouched down in the bed and one on the ground beside the truck, were firing away in the same dire. This time, her noticed her as she accelerated towards the slopih and grass below them.

  In the few seds she had, climbing the slope, now uo see the truck unmen, she pushed an oute onto the Hardworlds, felt them give and bend, themself around her, and propel her smoothly up the side of the ramp without so much as a bump. Then the feeling vanished, and it was like nothing had happe all, and the world was once again solid and sterile.

  But as she cleared the top, she saw the two gunmen firing desperately, pletely oblivious to her existence. She ked the throttle and the gunman on the ground tur the sound and fired just over her left shoulder. She leao the right and smmed her bike into him before he could correct his fire a him flying into the truck.

  The bike bouo a stop and she snatched her ACE off her chest as the gunman crouched iruck bed turowards her. He might have beat her to the draw, but Luke or Philip caught him with a single round through the base of the skull aumbled over.

  She put two rounds through the face of the gunman she had hit with her bike as he cwed for his rifle. More rounds from Luke or Philip cracked through the air and the PKM let out a sustained saw roar. She fired into the side of the truck bed, hoping to sile food.

  “Sandbags!” EP yelled in her ear. She hopped off the bike and the truck’s windows exploded towards her as someone shot through the cab. She dropped down into a croud stepped up to the tire as bullets ripped through the doors, then stepped and pivoted in front of the engine. She put five rounds through his ned jaw as he came around the passenger side firing. Before he had hit the ground she was aiming through the windshield at the truck bed, her senses alertio a sudden movement.

  She didn’t eve a round off before everything exploded.

  The PKM gunner, now half standing in the bed, held the trigger down and swept the cab like he was trying to cut it in half. Lindsey got off two rounds amidst the cye of gss, bullets and tracers before dropping down to the ground below the bumper. He unleashed a geyser of supersonic metal into the engine block that ripped the hood and grill to shreds as Lindsey slithered uhe engine, grateful the truck was lifted.

  The shooting stopped abruptly, and the truck bobbed above her. For a brief sweet sed, she expected to see him hit the ground face first, taken out by another well-pced shot from Luke or Philip.

  Instead, two boots ched into the gravel tht. Her Ace was wedged between her chest and the ground, so she reached for her pistol, but the boots moved down toward the front of the truck. She could either try to get a shot from here, which would be an act of tortion in itself, or risk getting out into the open.

  His boots kept on g, and she decided dying under some god damned suburban cowboy’s extended cab obile wouldn’t be worth the trouble!

  She shimmied out to the right as the guepped around the truck screaming like a demon.

  “God dammit, I 't see him!” Philip hissed in her ear. She grabbed a fist full of dirt as she cwed herself out from uhe truck, dimly aware of a steady stream of blood flowing out from the bed somewhere ahead of her and a small taunting voi her head reminding her how she had thought it was hirious when Philip had been forced to crawl under fire o job. The boots ched somewhere down past her feet like something out of a horror movie.

  She rolled out onto her back as he stepped one boot around the passenger side of the engine. Her Ace io her chest awkwardly and she knew in a nano-sed that she would never get it up in time. She watched in slow motion as the PKM’s smoking barrel came out from behind the trud her right hand, already down at her hip, came up with her Walther before her mind realized what it was doing. The gunman's head popped up and snarled and the PKM’s barrel exploded in a fsh of fire.

  Her first shot got him right through the neck, and in the slow-motion pace of it all, she waited ay for the PKM to stht there, but its fire only intensified as he brought the barrel around. Her sed shot took off his ear, and the PKM barrel kept swinging towards her like aioner’s fming sword.

  A stray round caught him right uhe jawbone and exploded out below his eye, and suddenly his face was hanging half off his head. Still, the PKM fired away, now manned by an undead horror.

  One part of her screamed while another put three rounds of 9mm through his face. The grouo her erupted and a red tracer skipped off over her head and bounced off the side of the truck harmlessly. It was still rolling through the air when the guopped and the faceless gunner colpsed to the ground, and Lindsey watched it tumble like it was a sign from God.

  “Got him!” Philip growled, and Lindsey, despite everything else, felt a pang of disappoihat the face-removing headshot had been his.

  “April!” Luke screamed in her ear. A sed ter, rounds pelted the bed of the truck.

  “Hold fire!” EP yelled. “She’s fine! MG is down! Move!”

  “All right, Kate, Get Joe and move to Ashley,” Michael said, calm as the ice-chilled soda he was surely sipping, miles away.

  Liood up, holstered her pistol and shook the dirt off her ACE. There was a brief moment of calm before EP shouted at her again.

  “More shooters ing over the bridge!”

  EP’s drone had picked up an SUV and a hatchback sedan moving across the massive empty parking lot across the river and tagged it with a warning while Lindsey was dang with the MG. Now, EP watched them fly uhe bridge and whip around the loop onto the road.

  “How long does it take the cops to set up a god damned roadblock?” Philip said.

  Lindsey looked out and saw the two vehicles, small angry things at this distance, swerving around other cars on the bridge. The cop cars still sat there, riddled with holes from the…

  She let her Ace hang on its sling as she sprio the dead gunman and snatched the PKM off the ground. She ran to the back of the truck while fanning out the ammo belt. The empty links dragged on the ground and there was only about a foot of brass boung oher side. The front vehicle, an SUV, was almost to the end of the bridge whe down on one knee, shouldered the gun, a off the rest of the belt.

  It was a strange kind of justice, being oher end of the firestorm of red tracers and angry 7.62x54, the SUV ing across the bridge now pying the role of Sam and the gang from under five minutes ago, swerving to the right to avoid the fire, only now the SUV was unarmored, and the belt was frustratingly short. She made it t. The first tracer gnced off the street ahead of it, but she walked the rest of the fire up and put every god damned round in the belt into the engine blod driver's side.

  The sound of the belt hitting the ground was the saddest thing she had heard all day.

  “Reloading!” She set the PKM down and climbed into the truck bed for more ammo. The blood was an inch deep, and the two bodies y crumpled among brass and spes. She grabbed a hundred-round box from the row stacked on the side and hopped back down.

  In a fight like this, killing the enemy is only half the hassle. ime, how do you get out of something like this unsee episode, Ghosts and Smoke.