Chapter Twenty-Six
“Down!” Moose hissed.
For once, Chalmers did what he was told. Of course, some of his compliance was the result of Moose’s off-hand wrapping itself around the nape of his neck and shoving him into a shambling, hunched run across the tiles of the market square.
Gunfire rattled from behind them, punctuated by the sound of rounds crackling against stone.
Jackson was already well ahead of Chalmers, sliding the last few steps to halt in the dubious shelter of the large fountain dominating the center of the square.
Chalmers glimpsed Moose aiming the fifteen-millimeter pistol he preferred back the way they’d come. Despite being aware it was coming, Chalmers still jumped as Moose’s weapon barked, then barked again.
Chalmers fled in a crouch that, within a few panicked strides, fetched him up next to Jackson in the lee of the fountain’s basin. Moose followed after, slow and precise with each shot, letting the big pistol fall back on target before squeezing off the next round as he marched in their wake.
He looked from the big shooter to his partner. Jackson’s light pistol, a local-made job he and Chalmers carried to better fit in, had appeared in his hand.
Chalmers pulled his own pistol, wishing he’d spent more time with it at the range.
“Fucking Vat! ‘Fangat won’t dare strike at us,’ he says!” Jackson snarled, firing at the men on the east side of the square. Men whose faces were painted in the gray-barred blue of the Fangat Brokerage.
At least no bystanders were going to get plugged. No one who did not absolutely have to be was out and about at noon on R’Bak during the Searing. Chalmers wouldn’t have been, either, if there hadn’t been a minor emergency at the arena. They’d been on their way home from putting out that fire when Moose had seen the armed men approaching. Which was, on reflection, probably part of the trap that had been laid for them.
Chalmers discarded thoughts of how the trap had been set up in favor of getting free of it. He looked around, assessing their situation. They were just over two blocks west of the Twin Stars offices. Things would be over long before any help could arrive from that quarter. The square was about thirty meters on a side, with the fountain sheltering them in the middle. The ambusher’s plan appeared to have been well timed to isolate the Lost Soldiers, but they appeared to have traded isolating their victims for allowing their prey access to cover. Unless… He glanced over the rim of the fountain. The men who had triggered the ambush were no longer advancing; they were now either trying to find cover along the edges of the square or already in it. Chalmers turned, put his back to the fountain, and looked up just as a pair of armed men rose from the roofline.
“Fuck! Six, high!” he shouted, raising his pistol. It was a long, shitty shot at this range, one Chalmers didn’t think he could make on a good day. He banged a couple rounds that way anyway, just to keep them honest.
One figure ducked, overbalanced, slid on the tile rooftop, and fell, arms windmilling. A brief, wordless scream was cut short when his head made its inevitable, heavy, wet crunch into hot stone tiles. The dead man’s gun hit the tiles stock-first an instant later. Something must have broken in the firing mechanism on impact, because the gun discharged uselessly into the white-hot sky.
“Nice!” Moose thumped down against the wall of the fountain next to him, reloading. “Keep ’em thinking about their skin, snake!”
Unsure why Moose was calling him a snake, Chalmers nodded and squeezed two more rounds at the remaining guy above them. He didn’t hit a damn thing. The ten-millimeter light pistols carried more rounds than the bigger fifteen-millimeter that Moose carried, but the barrel length of both weapons made for shit accuracy at this range.
Jackson’s pistol crack-cracked, hammering his eardrums. Wincing, a distracted Chalmers couldn’t help but grin as Moose moved. The big man looked a little ridiculous crab-walking below Chalmers’s extended arms and around Jackson’s back to take up a position opposite where he’d taken cover.
“When I pop up and fire, move to the plants over there, copy?” Moose’s shouted English was accompanied by a gesture of his free hand toward the narrow road that entered the west side of the square.
Chalmers looked and saw a big planter box about a third of the way between their present position and the road that let off the square. Part of a border for the nighttime seating area of a café in that side of the square, the plants rising from it had definitely seen better days.
“Copy!” the partners shouted.
Water splashed on Chalmers’s shoulder as bullets were swallowed in the basin behind him. He looked up to see the guy on the rooftop standing to get a better angle on the three Lost Soldiers below. Chalmers aimed, fired. The shooter flinched behind some ornamental stonework.
“Red!” Jackson shouted, dropping into full cover to reload.
Chalmers shot again at the man above, turned on his shoulder, and, not even bothering to aim, sent a few rounds in the general direction of the men on the far side of the square.
“Up!” Jackson shouted, shooting again as Chalmers’s slide racked back and stayed there.
“Red!” Chalmers yelled, fumbling for the magazine next to his holster.
“Go! Go! Go!” Moose said in nearly the same instant, rising from his position and resuming his almost metronomic fire.
Someone screamed at the other end of the square.
Jackson popped a few off at the man on the roof and started toward the dubious safety of the planter.
“Fuck!” Chalmers gasped, staggering to his feet. He stumbled along in Jackson’s wake, trying to jam the fresh magazine home in his weapon and screaming silently at the device, wondering why the fuck it wouldn’t succumb to the desperate power of his need. Belatedly realizing he wasn’t using the Beretta he’d trained on for years, he finally found the magazine release a finger’s breadth up from where it should be. He dumped the spent mag with a metallic clatter and slapped the fresh one home. He was just looking up when something slewed him around by his belt and tossed him into the cover of the planter box.
“Scratch one,” Moose growled as another scream sounded.
Chalmers looked up, saw Moose standing over him, firing again. The man had somehow seen Chalmers was out of it, dragged him back and pushed him to cover, all without losing track of—or missing—his target.
Jackson was shooting back the way they’d come, too. “One mag left.”
“One here,” Moose said. “And then my holdout.”
“I’ve got…the one in my gun,” Chalmers said, watching the roofline. The Lost Soldiers had moved closer to that side of the square. With any luck, it would force the shooter up there to stand and expose more of himself to get an angle on them.
“Cover me,” Moose said, taking a knee to reload.
Chalmers turned and, seeing movement, cracked a few shots at a man charging toward the fountain they’d abandoned. The guy went down with an angry cry, though Chalmers didn’t think he’d scored a hit. He wasn’t happy with that result. The charging man meant that group was advancing again. Probably because the rooftop men had failed to put rounds in Chalmers and friends and end the fight.
Chalmers’s shots must have gotten the attention of the man’s companions, because the desiccated growths rising from the planter above it started shivering as bullets whickered through dried-out fronds and whacked into trunks. Pottery shattered as bullets clattered into, and through, the far side of the planter.
Chalmers cowered lower behind the planter and gave a silent but fervent prayer of thanks for the potter, the gardener, and every other person who might have played a part in causing the planter to be here, protecting his sinner’s carcass in this moment of peril. He turned, wide-eyed, to tell Moose the good news, but he’d dropped so low that Moose’s pistol, held at his own knee, was at his eye level for what happened next.
Moose’s huge hand finished seating a fresh magazine and let the slide forward into battery. Looking up from the gun and hands, Chalmers saw the big veteran wasn’t looking his way. Instead, Moose was looking up over one round shoulder. He followed the line of Moose’s gaze and saw the rooftop shooter come into view again.
The man leaned out to draw a bead on Chalmers.
Everything slowed down. He blinked, tried to raise his own gun. It was heavier than worlds, and dragged against Chalmers’s every effort to bring it into line.
Chalmers watched in slow motion as, still on one knee, still looking up at the shooter over his shoulder, Moose calmly pushed his pistol under his free arm and, muzzle barely protruding from beneath the armpit, pulled the trigger. The pistol barked, hot brass tinkling off the planter to sizzle painfully against Chalmers’s cheek.
The man on the rooftop stood straight, a red strain spreading from the center of his torso. He fell, only to end up hanging by the scarf he wore as the thick fabric caught on something. His blood didn’t so much drip as click, almost entirely dry before it hit the seared ground.
Moose snorted. “Never in a million years.”
Late, Chalmers’s own pistol barked, bullets sparking against the wall beside the swinging body.
Time seemed to unlock, wind out faster and faster, almost to normal speed again. Jackson was shooting again, the sound driving more pain into his skull.
Moose yanked Chalmers to his feet, pushed him toward the road again. The deeper bark of his pistol sounded a few more times as the partners staggered into the shade of the buildings framing the road off the square.
“Keep going,” Moose panted. “They’re done, for now.”
They crossed the few blocks in a paranoid, blurred, sweaty rush. It was only when he cramped up in the relative shelter of the office that Chalmers realized not a one of them had complained about the heat since the shooting started.