Gavin smashed the Bradley through some kind of stainless-steel-shrouded conveyor belt, and a section went skidding across the work floor with a tortured groan of metal. The destroyed conveyor was empty, and the dispensers and racks of the flanking machines stood silent and bare. Their metal panels gleamed with spots of reflected fluorescent light.
I threw open the top hatch and climbed halfway out, ready to help suppress fire with flame of my own. I could smell metal, machine oil and some other chemical stink as I searched for targets to suppress. The Bradley’s rear hydraulic ramp descended with a whine.
A dark elf stood near one of the canning machines and pallets of cardboard. His rifle barrel swung toward me. I thrust out my hand, calling on my fire magic and directing the extremely flammable vapor I’d summoned in a psychic-controlled flow toward the elf, less than a second before I sparked flame and watched my fire race along the vapor column toward him.
He shrieked and hurled himself out of the way of the fire stream an instant before it incinerated the stacks of unfolded cardboard boxes. He half-scooted, half-crawled behind the cover of the canning machine, screaming Elvish words. The room flared with yellow-orange firelight as the cardboard on the pallets burned.
Rafe leapt off the ramp edge before it had dropped halfway. He’d shifted into his werewolf form, an intimidating hybrid of wolf and man, his slavering wolf jaws too full of teeth, complete with blazing yellow eyes and long claws. Behind him came Sarge, our muscle-bound demon sporting a huge fucking gun, skin the color of an eggplant and looking like a stuntman who’d wandered away from a Terminator movie. His red pupils glowed like laser pointers, and his irises were as black as the barrel of a M4 carbine at midnight. Mia Tanaka brought up the rear, a slim shape in blue and yellow summoner robes wrinkled beneath her Kevlar vest, one dark strand of hair hanging out of her black helmet with a goddamn daisy painted on the front. A dozen ferret-like creatures with glowing red eyes flanked her and filled the air with high-pitched squeaking.
Assault team deployed. Time to kick ass.
One of the dark elves popped out from behind a file cabinet and opened fire with some kind of bullpup rifle, maybe a SAR 21 or QBZ-95. Rafe leapt toward him, taking the bullets without slowing. He howled with glee a moment before falling on the dark elf.
“Hey, wait, arrest that guy!” I shouted.
“Too late,” Sarge informed me. The sounds of Rafe’s bad table manners echoed through the office. The other dark elf who’d dodged my fire stream now sprayed bullets at us as he retreated. Sarge dropped him with a single headshot.
I saw the last dark elf and I froze, my breath catching in my throat. He was wrapped in a vest covered with explosives, standing in front of two spill-containment caddies with 55-gallon drums of acetone inside. About a million and a half red diamond flammable stickers were pasted everywhere, and because nobody on SWAT had bothered to inform me the place had hazardous materials stored inside, I’d just lit a merry cardboard bonfire.
Oh shit.
“
Nuru heren huo!
” the dark elf screamed, holding his hand over a classic red-button detonator switch.
“Everybody out!” I yelled. “Fall back!”
I slammed the hatch down. Sarge, Rafe and Mai and a hundred terrified demon ferrets piled into the back of the Bradley. The ramp came up, the hydraulics whining in a halfhearted machine scream.
“Get us out of here!” Through the Commander’s Independent Viewer, I could see the dark elf threatening us with the detonator, his thumb over the switch. We couldn’t light him up because of the flammable material. If he was determined to suicide himself, none of us could stop him. Few individuals scored as high on the bat-shit-crazy scale as a creature that strapped itself with explosives.
The engine rumbled and whined as Gavin reversed out of the hole in the wall, treads spitting chunks of concrete and plaster. He clipped the shattered edge of the hole and more of the wall came clattering down on the chassis with dull thuds. I clung to the metal support bar as we jounced around. My muscles trembled with all the adrenaline sizzling in my veins. Smoke curled out of the hole we’d blasted, and the inside glowed orange and yellow, making me think of a Jack-o’-lantern with a bullet hole in its forehead.
The explosion tore the world with a
ka-whump
that rocked the Bradley with a powerful shock wave. Shrapnel pinged off the armor. A roiling cloud of black smoke swept toward us with a fireball at its heart and then surged over us. I heard someone cussing over the com and realized it was me. Larger chunks of debris came crashing down, hitting topside with resounding metal
clongs
and
clangs
as if wrenches had started to rain from the heavens instead of frogs.
Gavin kept backing up, and seconds later we were free of the smoke cloud. He continued reversing out of the parking lot as fast as the Bradley would go. He accidentally backed over a parked Geo Metro and it crumpled like a soda can beneath a boot heel. Spectators cheered from behind the distant police barricades.
“FISHDO,” I said over the com. A very utilitarian acronym meaning
Fuck It, Shit Happens Drive On
.
“FISHDO, copy,” Gavin answered.
He finally stopped near the southern police perimeter which sealed off the street. My ears were still ringing from the explosion, and I could feel the tightness across my chest, the tremble of my muscles as reaction set in.
“Everybody all right?” I called out.
One by one, everybody checked in, including Tiffany, who sounded beside herself with relief, almost sobbing over the mike. Things must’ve looked bad from the air.
I switched radio frequencies. “SWAT, this is Zero Dog One. Targets neutralized. Send in the hose jockeys, over.”
“Neutralized?” some guy’s voice came back over the headset, sparking with either outrage or jealousy. “You fucking nuked that place.”
I keyed off without responding. Some people loved to wallow in the melodrama.
Patrolmen moved the barriers and let police cars through to escort the advancing fire trucks. The place burned with a furious intensity, sending up a huge twisting column of black smoke. The firefighters swarmed around, within minutes dumping streams of water onto the flames.
We hung around the Bradley and watched the festivities, waiting for a liaison from the mayor’s office to sign off on the contract work order and take our carbon copies. Gavin sat on the Bradley’s front end as he sipped an energy drink and chewed a candy bar. Tiffany wrapped herself in her wings and stared over the top of them at the fire with wide, unblinking cat’s eyes. Rafe had shifted back to human form and strutted around naked, showing off all his tattoos.
“Rafe,” I said, “get some clothes on.”
“What if my destined mate walks past? She won’t recognize me if I hide the wang.”
Sarge eyed him. “I suggest you do as the captain asks. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to strip down and shame your earthworm.”
“You guys are disgusting,” Tiffany said, but I noticed she cast a surreptitious glance at Rafe’s bare ass.
Hanzo walked over from the other side of the Bradley, having escaped his gunner position. He gripped a smoking piece of metal in one gloved hand, his black ninja pajamas and white face streaked with ashes. The hilt and grip of a katana poked up over his shoulder with the sheath strapped to his back over the red cross identifying him as a medic. This certainly qualified as a violation of the Geneva Convention rule about medics not being used in an offensive capacity.
Our
reality-challenged medic believed he was the reincarnated soul of a 14th-century ninja from the Iga Province during the Kamakura period.
“Captain,” Hanzo said. “My sword cries to me its vengeance is appeased. Those dark elves died like warriors. Like snow throwing itself from the clouds to perish upon the mountains. I have a haiku I’d like to read—”
I held up a hand. “Hanzo. Don’t.” Between haiku and naked werewolves, my head threatened to explode. Honestly, I could see the countdown in my mind’s eye. An egg timer on a bundle of dynamite, ticking away. “Can we please
try
and appear professional? At least until we get paid?”
“Look, Captain.” Mia pointed across the street. A ferret had curled itself up on her shoulder. The rest she’d sent back to the dimension they’d come from. “The TV people.”
Sure enough, news cameras and crew had lined up along the barricades, busy filming the still-naked Rafe. Rafe grinned and began to run through his selection of Mr. Universe poses.
Blessed Bitch of the Apocalypse, redeem us all with fire. Things couldn’t get worse.
A black SUV zoomed past the barriers and slid to a stop near us with a serenade of chirping tires. The door flew open and out came four men, all in suits, all looking like veteran bureaucrats of the file-cabinet wars and cubical trenches. Two of them had digital cameras and began taking pictures. I recognized the guy who power walked over to us. Norville Ford. He had a piece of paper in his hand and jerked it around like a conductor who’d consumed far too much caffeine.
“You blew up that plant!” Norville yelled. “The jobs! The tax revenue lost!” He looked at Rafe and his voice screeched with the dulcet harmonies of a rake on a chalkboard. “And that’s indecent exposure!”
What the hell had I been thinking when I’d said things couldn’t get worse? God must hate me more than I’d suspected. I cleared my throat and tried on my shiniest smile. “Hi there, Norville—”
Norville locked in on me and didn’t just invade my personal space—no, he blitzkrieged right into my face. His eyes were wild, outraged, and he screamed intermixed gibberish about the fire and naked Rafe. A bit of his spittle landed on my cheek.
I took a deep breath and leaned toward him, which he hadn’t expected. He drew back and his rapid-fire word assault died off.
“SWAT called
us
in,” I told him. “At no time were we warned that the elves had strapped
explosives
to their bodies and were standing next to
flammable
materials. It makes a difference, you know, in how we approach a problem.” I leaned in even closer, doing my shark-grin thing, and pointed my finger in his face. “
They
blew the place up. We didn’t. No good guys got hurt.”
“Of course not,” he snapped. “That’s why we sent
you
instead of SWAT. If you inept circus freaks got hurt, nobody would care. I didn’t want city employees in danger. Imagine the lawsuits.” He looked back at the fire and his fingers twitched. “But you weren’t supposed to burn it down!”
I held up the contract copies. “Speaking of which, can you sign this? We still need to be paid.”
His face flushed red. Then purple. Part of me wondered if he’d spontaneously combust in front of the TV cameras. Then he went very, very still. I didn’t like the cold smile that curled on his lips like a dying worm. Didn’t like it at all.
“We’re going to have to deduct damages from the fees owed you.” He glanced at the burning building, and then swept a hand around at all the cops and firefighters. “You may even have to reimburse the city for all this.” His grin grew positively Grinch-esque. “Union employees on overtime.”
“Dammit! You can’t—”
“Oh I assure you I very much
can
. And, Ms. Walker, the city’s contract with the Zero Dog Mercenaries is
terminated
as of
now
for flagrant and willful breach and destruction of significant Portland cultural and economic landmarks. I think you’ll find a clause in section J, paragraph three that deals with just such an eventuality.”
Oh shit. We could not afford to lose this client—our only current client, steady revenue stream and paycheck source for the foreseeable cloudy-gray Oregon future.
Norville took a moment to revel in the panic he must’ve seen in my eyes. Then he turned and marched back to the SUV, followed by his scurrying, paper-shoveling lackeys. I watched them drive off and somehow resisted the urge to light their tires on fire. Burning bridges. I was all about that, thank you very much.
“What now, Captain?” Mai asked. I glanced back and found everyone staring at me. All those eyes. Waiting for me to make things right.
I forced a grin on my face even though my facial muscles felt like plastic. “I’m thirsty. Let’s go get some beers.” General cheers erupted all around, even if they sounded a trifle forced. “And, Rafe, put some clothes on, dammit.”
I climbed onto the Bradley and scrambled up the turret to the top hatch, my heart thudding dully. We weren’t getting paid. We’d probably end up
owing
money. Our expenses had spiraled out of control in the last few weeks. Our single biggest and currently only client had just metaphorically torn up our contract and pissed on it for good measure. No wonder the acid in my stomach felt as if it sloshed around like dirty water in a mop bucket.
We rolled out past the police barriers. A crowd of people pushed up against the barricades, taking pictures with their cell phones and pointing. All the news channels had shown up, KATU, KOIN, KGW, and they tracked us with their cameras. I smiled and did my beauty-queen wave from atop the turret as they filmed. Probably looked dramatic against the backdrop of the burning building.
I’d started to drop back inside the turret and shut the hatch when I saw him, and for a moment all my newfound money troubles blinked away into nothing.