Free Web NovelChapter 12: Okay, So Far So Good...
[Alright... Let’s do this!] fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
I raised the 1301, settled the sight picture on the camera covering the gate, exhaled halfway, and pressed the trigger.
-Dich-!
The camera was shattered the very next second, leaving only some wiring hanging on the wall.
[Damn, that was quiet...] while I chuckled at how the sound of the shell hitting the concrete and the gun chambering was louder than the shot itself.
I moved immediately to the right of the gate, pressing my left shoulder against the wall beside it and bringing the shotgun up, muzzle high, and breathing through my nose in a four-count rhythm, holding the awareness running at full radius.
My heart was hitting the inside of my chest at a pace that I was not going to be able to think my way out of.
Three years in the apocalypse had prepared me for a lot of things. Running. Hiding. Small engagements when I had no choice.
But not this. Not walking up guns blazing to a functioning criminal operation. The part of my brain that had kept me alive for three years was straight up screeching, and the ignoring took physical effort.
I focused on the spatial awareness, feeling everything within 10 meters, waiting...
And I didn’t have to wait long. Two minutes in, two presences walked inside the radius, both moving toward the gate from inside the courtyard.
"... the damn camera again... Third time this month."
A pause before the other guy spoke. "You heard what’s going on out there? My cousin called me, said people are going mental all over the city. Looting and shit... Police can’t handle it."
"Sound like my kind of party," A key rattled. "Let’s check the perimeter, and we’ll ask the boss to let us out for a bit."
And the very next moment, the gate slid open, just wide enough for the first man to step through.
The moment his shoulder cleared the frame, I pressed the trigger.
-Dich-!
The top of his head separated from the back of his skull in a shower of blood, brain, and bone.
The momentum from his walk sent him tumbling through the gate before his body fell face-first.
While the second man behind him had one second to process what he was looking at before the second shot took him in the chest, dead center.
-Dich-!
The impact folded him backward, and before he could even fall properly-
-Dich-!
The second shot caught him in the face, obliterating it as he fell.
My eyes fell to the suppressor, and it was glowing red hot at the limits of its suppression.
-Ding!
{Two Humans Killed. 400 Credits Received.}
[Mute those,] I thought, stepping over the body and through the gate, shotgun’s muzzle sweeping across the courtyard.
The courtyard was wide, with grey paving stones, with the back face of the four-story building ahead of me, its ground-floor windows covered by black curtains, having no visible movement through any of them.
The basement’s entrance was a wide shutter roughly in the center of the courtyard.
And on the right side of the building, mounted at the corner where the back wall met the side wall, a camera pointed directly at me from above the metal door leading in.
-Vrroooom-!
The alarm started the very next second everywhere at once.
[Perfect...] I thought.
Every armed person in that building was now converging around the back courtyard, meaning no one would bother with the basement where Kara probably was.
I put a shot through the camera and started the quad reload immediately, pulling four shells directly from inventory into my palm in perfect grip, fingers finding the feed lip of the tube by instinct before thumb cycling each one home in under two seconds while I moved toward the metal door on the left.
The second I was done with the reload, I pulled out two C4, throwing the first one at the metal door.
The other one, I threw in an overhand arc towards the right side of the courtyard, past the basement shutters, to cover my flank.
Then I ran further left, fast, into the alley that led to the front courtyard, pulling the AR out of the inventory.
Raising it, I waited, unblinking, and within a few seconds, four men came around the corner at a jog from the front courtyard, pistols out but not raised.
And I wasn’t going to give them the time to.
-Tish-!
I put the first round through the lead man’s throat.
His legs kept going for two steps before giving out, while the rest of him stopped, and I was already moving to the second.
-Tish-!-Tish-!-Tish-!
Missed the first two, but landed the third one on the jaw, and the exit wound took most of the left side of his face in a burst of blood and bone.
The third one got two in the chest, the rounds blasting through his body. And just as I aimed at the fourth one-
-Thard-!-Thard-!
He got his pistol up and took two wild shots, barely missing me by inches, and before he could take his third-
-Tish-! -Tish-! -Tish-! -Tish-! -Tish-!-Tish-!
I shot him six times, each round punching through him in a shower of flesh from his back. His pistol fell before him, discharging at impact on the ground, before he too fell on his back.
I hadn’t even taken a breath of relief from those two shots missing me by inches, before Awareness caught people on that metal door, 5 of them at least.
The detonator appeared in my hand before I could finish thinking this through and-
-BOOOM-!-BOOOM-!
Both charges went simultaneously, rocking the ground beneath my feet.
The pressure came through the wall beside me in a flat, hard wave that stumbled me a step.
Dust and debris erupted into the alley in a rain of fragments; even the alarm inside the building faltered for two seconds before coming back on.
[Let’s see what I caught... Let’s see how long that lasts.]
I moved around the corner and looked at the damage.
The first charge had taken the back entrance door off its frame entirely and collapsed the corridor behind it, along with the nearest room on the left side, opening to the outside through a ragged hole that was three meters across, rebar bent outward, plaster and concrete dust still falling.
Six bodies lay where the door once was, torn apart, ranging from medium-rare to well done.
The second charge caught the group that had been moving through the courtyard from the right side of the building. If I hadn’t thrown that second charge there, they would’ve flanked me by now.
I counted what I could, finding five men, or the components of five men, distributed across a seven-meter radius.
I checked Tikki.
Ears flat, eyes as wide as they went, all four sets of claws through the jacket and the shirt before going into my skin. His head moved left and right, processing everything at once.
[Okay, so far so good...] I breathed, unzipping the jacket and pulling the rig out into the open before stripping the partial AR mag and seating in a fresh one.
Switching to the 1301, I moved to the breach in the right wall and stepped through into what was left of the corridor over the dead bodies of a naked man and a woman half-buried in the rubble.
And the moment I did, the smell of burnt plastic, concrete, and burnt meat hit simultaneously.
Every armed person in this building knew exactly where I was, just the way I wanted.
Which meant nobody was thinking about the basement yet. Nobody was thinking about doing anything to Kara.
But I knew it was only a matter of time before someone thought about securing hostages in case this was a SWAT raid.
