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13
“What do you hear, Blackout?” Raptor said, making a loop over the mall roof.
“I’ve got nothing on any band within half a mile of the place, Boss,” the sniper replied. He was set up in a parking deck fifty yards across a parking lot from one of the mall’s main entrances, covering the doors with his rifle.
“All quiet over here, too,” Lone Star said from the opposite side of the building. He was reporting from quite a bit further away, hidden in a blind built from a U-Haul with the back door slightly raised. The truck was on a freeway overpass half a mile from the mall, pulled off to the side of the road with its blinkers on. Lone Star’s view was obstructed as traffic passed, but there was no vantage point that gave him a better view and the elevation he needed.
“Anything on your side, Breaker?” Raptor asked over the comm.
“Rooftop seems clear, Raptor.”
“My end of the mall is empty, too. Except for a bunch of jailbait teenagers and a couple of zit factory boys working in the video game store. Nobody that looks like a threat, either to the mall or anyone’s virginity.” Viper’s laconic drawl cut through the air, bringing a smile to Raptor’s face.
“I think I got something,” Tank said. “Raptor, give me a flyby on a blue SUV moving toward the east entrance. It’s hauling some ass through the parking lot. Going way faster than it should.”
“On it.” Raptor banked hard and with the flex of her ankles, increased the thrust on her jets. The tiny propulsion unit strapped to her back when she was in the field, giving her about three hours of normal flight time thanks to its high-density solid semi-solid gel fuel. That, coupled with the wings built into her prosthetics, gave her the ability to stay aloft for half a day if she glided whenever she could and conserved fuel. But now she went into full burn, jamming on as much speed as her tech would allow.
She spotted the SUV in question seconds after she cleared the mall roof. It was an early 2000s Expedition – big, heavy, and more than able to tear through the flimsy metal bollards the mall had “protecting” the doors.
“That’s a definite bogey, Tank. Can you get to it?” Raptor asked.
“Negative,” the big man replied. “I’m all the way across the parking lot.”
“Go ahead and get after it,” she said. “There might be a second vehicle.”
“10-4,” Tank said. Raptor heard the sound of a heavy engine turn over, and Tank was underway. The SUV was fast approaching the mall now, far too close for Raptor to stop it. She altered course, pointing her face skyward in a giant loop-de-loop and coming back down, straight for the roof.
“Breaker, follow me in!” She yelled, then fired a three-shot burst with her MP-5 into a skylight. The glass shattered half a second before the SUV crashed through the mall doors, and Raptor dove through into the pandemonium.
She spread her wings and dropped to the deck right in front of the van, training her submachine gun on the windshield of the Expedition as it rolled to a stop in front of her. She heard a solid THUD behind her as Breaker landed, the hydraulics built into the heavy gunner’s legs taking most of the impact. He unlimbered his custom drum-fed shotgun and chambered a round. The semi-automatic 12-gauge could spit three slugs per second, and the three-inch hunks of lead turned anything they hit to paste.
“Come out of the vehicle with your hands up!” Raptor shouted. “We are federal agents, and your shit is over.”
“Don’t shoot!” came a voice from inside the SUV. “It was an accident. Our accelerator stuck and the brakes went out!”
Raptor and Breaker shared a dubious look. “Then come out with your hands up, and we will escort you from the vehicle,” she repeated.
“Okay, we’re coming out!” Called a man’s voice. “Don’t shoot!”
The two front doors opened, and a pair of men stepped out into the mall, staying behind the doors with their hands down out of view.
“Let me see your hands!” Raptor shouted.
“No problem,” the driver said, smiling at her. He was a white guy, blond, with a thin beard and black-rimmed glasses. He raised his right hand above the door frame in a friendly wave. Then his left came around the corner holding a black pistol with an extended magazine, and he opened fire. Bullets spat from the fully automatic TEC-9 machine pistol, and Raptor took off straight up into the air.
“Take cover!” She shouted to Breaker, who was already moving left to get a better vantage point on the passenger. The rear doors of the Expedition flung open at that point, and three other men spilled out into the mall, all brandishing guns and opening fire on the nearby shoppers.
Breaker’s shotgun barked five times in half as many seconds, and the red-haired man behind the passenger door dropped before he ever got a shot off. The flimsy sheet metal was no match for three-inch slugs fired from a tactical shotgun, and the car’s door looked more like Swiss cheese than an automobile part as the man dropped, dead.
Raptor cut loose with another burst from her MP-5, putting two 9mm rounds in the driver’s forehead, in the lethal triangle right above his eyebrows. He went down like his strings were cut, and she switched targets, looking for the men from the back seat. Her eyes locked on one running for the anchor department store entrance, and she poured on the jets to catch him. He almost got away, but Raptor dropped out of the sky right in front of him, let the submachine gun fall to its sling against her chest, and sliced his throat open with the talons of her right hand as he brought his Uzi up to draw a bead on her. He fell backward in a rapidly growing pool of his own blood, his throat and carotid arteries a savaged mess.
Raptor heard the BOOM of Breaker’s shotgun again, then three more quick shots. She leapt into the air, firing her jets to gain altitude, and looked back at her partner. She saw Breaker’s head poking up a hair above the edge of a large planter where he’d taken cover. Scanning the crowd for the surviving gunman, Raptor saw nothing to indicate where he went. “Where’s the last one, Breaker?” She said into her comm.
“I do not have eyes on him,” Breaker said, standing up, his shotgun at the ready.
“Keep the door secured,” Raptor said. “I’m taking the second level.” She swung over to the mall’s upper level, eyes scanning the crowd for the missing target. “Viper, do you have him on the security cameras?”
“Negative, Raptor. I never saw the last guy. It’s like he vanished as soon as he stepped out of the van.” The hacker’s words made something in Raptor’s memory tickle, like she’d seen something important and couldn’t call it up. What was it?
“He’s in the—“ Gunshots erupted from the game store seconds before she yelled “video game shop,” as Raptor remembered seeing the bright blue polo the man wore. It was identical to the uniform of the TechWorld employees, letting him blend in until she and Breaker focused elsewhere.
Raptor whirled around, bringing her MP-5 up and aiming herself like an arrow to the small game shop in the corner of the mall. The white tile in front of the store was already running red as customers’ blood soaked it. “Do you have him, Breaker?”
“Negative,” the big man snapped back. “I can’t get a shot through the hostages.”
Raptor got a good look into the store and saw what he meant. There was a solid wall of customers lined up in the front of the store, all of them looking scared out of their minds. She flared her wings and dropped to stand on the planter Breaker had taken cover behind.
“Okay, pal,” she called out. “You know there’s only two ways you leave here today—in handcuffs, or in a bag. What’s it going to be?”
“I’m walking out that big fucking hole we made in the door, bitch. It’s just a question of how many of these idiots are breathing when I do.” Came the shouted response. She still had no visual on the shooter, and with two dozen or more people crammed into the store thanks to the van crashing into the mall, she had no chance of taking him down without casualties.
“If all those people are still breathing when you come out with your hands up, I’ll make sure you live to see trial. If you hurt anybody else, I guarantee you won’t.”
“Your negotiations suck, lady,” the gunman laughed. “You can’t afford to let any of these folks die. Not with all those cell phone cameras out there.”
Raptor looked around, seeing dozens of civilians standing in the danger zone, every one of them holding their phone up in front of their face. “What the fuck are you people doing?” She shouted. “This is a dangerous situation. Get the fuck out of here!”
“Fuck you, fascist,” a trim man with a full beard and shaggy brown hair yelled back at her. “You just want us to go away so you can assassinate this citizen.”
“It’s not assassination if it keeps all those people alive,” Raptor shouted at the man.
“Yo, don’t engage, boss. He’s just there to stir the shit.” Lone Star’s words over the comm cut through the noise around her, and Raptor focused on the man’s steady voice. “I am on the roof. I do not have a clear shot, but his head is bobbing in and out of my field. Keep him talking and he’ll stand still. Then I can end this.”
“Got it, Lone Star,” Raptor whispered. She turned back to the store, raising her voice. “Okay, you’re right. I don’t want anyone else to die. Not even you. So let’s talk about this. What do you want?”
“We want the government to cease their human experiments on our military. We want our men and women who serve to be treated like heroes, not like lab rats. We want all documentation on the cyborg programs to be destroyed, and all the existing abominations to be destroyed.”
“I guess you mean me,” Raptor said.
“Yeah, I mean—“ The man’s words were cut off as his head exploded. Half a second later, the crack of Lone Star’s sniper rifle echoed through the mall, as glass from the skylight rained down on Raptor.
“Tango Down,” Lone Star said as the gunman fell. At that distance, there was barely enough brain activity left for neurons to fire after the bullet shattered his skull and sprayed brains all over the used Playstation games on the wall of the store.
But barely enough wasn’t the same as none, and the gunman’s right hand clenched as he went down, firing a burst from his TEC-9 machine pistol point blank into the back and skull of the two teenage employees standing in front of his as a human shield. Raptor saw the two boys go down, their faces shredded as bullets flew through the back of their heads, and she shouted “NO!” as they fell. But her words were for naught. All three, the gunman and the two innocent teens, were dead before they hit the ground.
“Shit!” Lone Star swore. “I swear to God I put the bullet in the triangle,” he said over comm, referring to the instant kill zone that cut off all motor activity instantly.
“Guys,” Tank called in from his van outside.
“Not now, Tank,” Raptor said.
“Oh yeah, Raptor. Now. We got a problem. Those weren’t the only bad guys.”
