In response, the door slammed shut behind them with a strident retort, and a fusillade of rounds suddenly blasted the curtains. Pottery exploded on both sides of Thumbs, and he grunted loudly as the bullets hit his vest but did not penetrate.
“Trap!” barked Two Bears, returning fire with his chatter-gun, the hail of fire raking the living room and hallway.
“Jules Verne!” shouted Delphia, heading for the center of the room. He threw himself down on the floor, furious to see the others separate and go for cover behind tables and columns. Blasted civilians ... no, it was his fault. They didn’t know his coded battle phrases. If, and when, they got out alive, he’d teach them a few critical commands. But for now, it was yell the instructions out loud for the enemy to hear. Not his fave thing to do.
Thunderous gunfire raged non-stop for a solid minute as both sides sought for the advantage in the first few critical ticks. Ricochets zinged everywhere and more busted stuff
got smashed further. Moving and firing constantly, never
giving the attackers a stationary target, Delphia heard his Zeist glasses whine as the IE circuits adjusted to the lack of light. Suddenly, he saw the doss clear as day, although in black and white. The dozen or so ambushers were norms in denim and leather, mohawk do’s and go-gang tats. Typical street samurai. Except that they were hammering with Mossberg CMDT rapid-fires, the glowing red dots of the integrated laser sights bouncing all over the place. Not the usual sort of bangbang for a punkster.
Delphia savagely twisted the silencer off the Manhunter, and snapped off a fast series of shots at the overhead rafters thick with black shadows. There sounded a crack of old wood, and down hurtled a tremendous ceiling fan, its rotating blades slicing and smashing two of the opposition.
That’ll teach them to gang up, he thought bitterly. Just too bad there weren’t any more fans.
Thumbs was secure in a corner behind the barricade of a table, his SMG and Predator maintaining a steady response to the CMDTs. Ducking under the lasers, Two Bears was crawling through the bloody muck on the floor, heading for the kitchen to set up crossfire. Pointing with his left hand, Delphia slapped the Manhunter into his palm, fired, then swung over to his right and fired. It was a deliberate, showy move to shock the opposition.
But the punks showed no surprise at his abilities. None at all. Drek! Delphia thought. They weren’t expecting
some
body to show—they fragging expected us personally! Street gang, his hoop, these were corporate security goons. These zonies had been waiting for them to show. And that was extremely bad. Delphia wanted to warn the others, but how? How?
Suddenly the bull roar of a Vindicator came from the hallway as a woman in armor and a bobbing ponytail stepped into view from out of a closet. Furniture and junk simply disintegrated under the monstrous assault of her minigun, caseless rounds hosing about like a stream of water. Books jumped, shelves splintered, mirrors shattered, plaster came off the walls. It was a fusillade, a drekstorm from hell! Then she stopped firing and yelped in horror as her body lifted helplessly into the air.
It was Thumbs, Delphia, and Two Bears pumping rounds into her torso, seeking vulnerable joints until blood showed. She dropped the Vindicator and went limp. The others slowed their barrage at this slaughter, clearly unsure of how to proceed. Had they accidentally killed the leader? wondered Delphia, slamming in a fresh clip. That would be most satisfactory.
Then the first dead man’s head exploded for no discernible reason. Delphia noted the odd event with interest. What was that about?
* * *
Gotcha, thought Moonfeather as she pointed a finger at another norm whose weapon burst violently as if something was blocking the barrel solid. But his ballistic gloves saved his hands, and he pulled out a LightFire 70 pistol to continue banging away.
Annoyed, Moonfeather started to gather her mana for a really major spell when a fist of ice clutched her heart, cutting off her air. She stopped stone cold. There on the second level stood a man dressed oddly even for the sprawl: tight trousers, an open long coat, mink or some animal skin fedora hat, dreadlocks sticking out from underneath like hairy octopus tentacles, gold earrings, a big gold tooth. He was gesturing with a thick elaborately carved cane, dripping with beads and feathers and bones. A juju staff. His hairless chest was painted white and then covered with red symbols and runes. A small leather pouch on a twine necklace dangled about his neck. He was a hougan, and that was a voodoo soul bag.
“He is bad,” thought Moonfeather. “Voodoo is bad.”
She raised both hands to deflect a swirling wave of something from the hougan. In a perfect circle, everything around her roiled from the impacts of invisible bees, knives, needles, whatever form of mana darts he was throwing at her. Didn’t matter. Screaming a short song for Cat, she raked her nails through the empty air, and the enemy mage stumbled back with deep bloody fiirrows slicing open his handsome face and chest. Shocked but defiant he still stood there. Drek!
The hougan recovered, his eyes going solid black as the pupils totally expanded. He was scanning her aura, looking for weaknesses. With a cry, he shoved his staff forward and a fireball rumbled down from the balcony toward her, filling the doss with blinding light. Moonfeather hissed at the thing and gestured. The fireball burst apart over his own people, two of them screaming as they hit the floor, rolling about to extinguish the flames covering their bodies before their handguns cooked off.
The balcony under Dredlocks began to sag, then leveled
itself with a groan. Moonfeather slapped a stim patch to her thigh, going frizzy as to what was happening here, but then the stims hit and she jerked back to reality, spitting and radiating fury. She sacrificed the power held in a ring and a bracelet, and the doss got icy cold, the dripping blood frozen solid, and then the air got even colder. Age lines creasing on his slashed face, his breath fogging, the hougan screamed unpronouncable words at his stick and a broken chair hurled across the doss like an upholstered meteor. Every muscle painfully weak, Moonfeather forced herself to duck underneath the deadly bludgeon, just barely keeping her head intact.
She triggered her Beretta non-stop, but only two rounds hit the hougan on the armored coat as he shoved himself loose from the fallen balcony. The impact seemed to refresh him, and just as he began to laugh at her pitiful attack, the wooden railing in front of him detonated. The blast nearly knocked the staff from his grip and covered his bare chest with bloody splinters. Immediately, the hougan fell to the floor.
Feeling terribly nauseous, Moonfeather knew she could no longer fight. She grabbed a crystal hanging around her neck and spoke a few words. The invisibility spell locked into her oldest and most cherished fetish activated and she could breathe. She could only wait now.
* * *
His neck bloody from a graze from across his throat, Thumbs aimed his big chattering SMG at anything moving. Firing to the right, Delphia caught a motion off to the other side and jerked out his left arm. The VPR2 shifted the Manhunter to the other hand in a nano. It boomed once, and a norm in combat armor was blown off her boots to crash over a table and hit the floor upside-down.
Dropping the spent clip, Delphia dove over a smashed table to land behind a ripped couch, and slapped in another clip, wishing he’d taken a grenade from the Elite. This was a Scarlet Ribbon, a three-on-three formation with the corpse a diversion. The door the key in, and no way out. To even try was death. It was a beautiful trap, and they were in serious drek. He chided himself angrily, but the dwarf wanted a soft penetration first. Smiles and flowers. Howdy, neighbor! So much for fragging subtlety.
Another dead man’s head exploded, brains and blood spraying everywhere in a grisly rain.
Wiping gray matter off his face, Thumbs dropped his exhausted SMG and charged at a pile of debris, slashing through the stuff with his forearm blades. Whoever was on the other side screamed and stumbled into view minus an arm at the shoulder. Grabbing the man’s dropped Mossberg, Thumbs started firing again as a new punkster arose behind him swinging a laser axe. He strained to swing the CMDT around to meet the sizzling blade when the leatherboy jerked back, a hole in his head gushing blood.
From the kitchen, safely behind the fridge, Two Bears put another burst of the silenced Crusader into the ganger and tried again for the Vindicator minigun lying so tempting in the middle of the bloody carnage. Then he also spied a deck lying amid the papers and body parts. An antique Fuchi 2. It had been stepped on, or shot, and was busted wide, but decks meant data, so he tucked the relic under an arm and moved on, firing controlled bursts as he went.
The air above the combatants shimmered and buzzed from whatever the two shamans were doing to each other. Then a thundering rainbow filled the doss as the stained glass window shattered into a million knives, the shards swirling madly about, slicing everything and everybody into ribbons. Some punksters screamed as they were disassembled and the balcony torn to pieces amid spraying blood.
“Got him!” shouted Moonfeather.
Jerking a look, Thumbs gave a bellow of victory over the burping of his CMDT while heading for the exit.
“NO!” screamed Delphia, when a pile of trash erupted and he found himself face to face with a razorboy who’d been digging a tunnel through to him. Sons of slitches were buried like land mines in the wreckage. The guy was in patent leathers, garishly painted, dripping with chrome, but he wore it like a costume, not reg clothes. Razor spurs jutted from both hands like cactus thorns, and he was packing a netgun. Not a kill, but a capture-them-alive weapon. Both moved to aim and fired. Delphia won. But as the man doubled over, a woman behind him fired a burst from her Mossberg and Delphia was hit in the arm, stomach, thigh from the stream of high-velocity lead. He went down firing in return.
Off amid the reeking destruction, another deader’s head exploded.
Forgoing the Vindicator, Two Bears dashed headlong from the kitchen, skirting the riddled wall and reaching the
hallway door. Yanking it open, he stopped with a jerk, the
elegantly wrapped handle of a wakazashi, the formal Japanese short sword, sticking out of his belly. Blood was pumping everywhere. His blood.
The Crusader dropped from the dwarf’s hands as the troll in the hallway shoved the blade upward, gutting him like a fish. With a shuddering sigh, Two Bears keeled over to the filthy floor. Katana and wakazashi in both hands, the troll samurai administered the death stroke and moved into the doss with chipped speed.
Blowing off the face of his newest attacker, Delphia was staggering for the door when a blurry image moved into the peripheral field of his sunglasses. He fired blindly without turning. The blur stopped, and dropped.
“Now!” screamed Moonfeather, her body seeming to appear out of nothing. At the same time a shimmering barrier of crackling electricity formed a curved wall between them and the remaining attackers. Stumbling outside as best they could, the three had just cleared the doorway when the hallway was filled with light and the building shook as if drop-kicked by a god.
“Green means high-explosive,” Thumbs said with a grin, not a scratch on him.
“
Hai,
I noticed,” wheezed Delphia, holding his bleeding leg. He’d been hit with a mixed clip of rounds, the tracer splattered on his hip not setting his clothes on fire because he’d paid extra for protection against that. The next was a dumdum that had hit his gut like an express train. Ballistic cloth stopped full penetration, but that kinetic force had to go somewhere. And the fragging third and fourth had been an AP round that went through his suit and him too. Couldn’t get a slap patch on until he dropped his pants, and this was not the place for that.
“I gotcha,"
omae
said Thumbs, sliding a massive arm around the smaller norm. “We’re gone.”
“What about—” questioned the now visible Moonfeather, starting toward the still form of the dwarf sprawled on the floor. There was something in his hands. A deck. She raced to snatch it.
“Leave him, he’s dead,” gasped Delphia, fumbling to reload his gun with one hand, just in case more were outside waiting for them. His fingers refused to obey and he dropped a full clip as they stumbled down the stairs. Nobody bothered to pick it up.
And nobody attempted to hinder their departure. The lobby was as empty as before, and when they reached the street, the Elite was at the curb, Silver at the wheel, Seco in hand. Both doors sprung open as they approached, and the runners stumbled in like drunken tourists lunging for the last taxi in Overtown.
“Duck!” shouted Silver as she tossed something globular and striped green over the roof with her left hand. Bullets pinged off the light armor of the Elite, one side window cracking from the deflection of a heavier round. She peeled away ticks before a deafening blast shoved the vehicle off at an angle and the front of the Dorsey Park dossplex disappeared in smoke and flame.
Sirens were sounding in the distance as Silver wheeled wildly into traffic, dodging bikers, pedestrians, and other cars in a pinball game of slam and rebound. Horns filled the night-time darkness with a cacophony of noise.
Delphia lay pale and bloody on the back seat. Moonfeather slit off his pants and placed trauma patches on every wound. Awkwardly, Thumbs fumbled to operate a PocketDoc, a device he’d never used before. Silver kept the headlights off to reduce targetability, and the battered black Toyota Elite disappeared into the northbound traffic of the Miami sprawl.