Jonas Saul - The Kill

He covered his head with his hands. Gunshots popped off like firecrackers at a Canada Day celebration. Flashes of light interspersed with gunfire as the guards stood in their fortified positions and shot at whoever was attacking them.

Things quieted for a few seconds. Vincenzo patted himself down to look for wounds but found none. Moving blind in the total darkness, he flipped onto his back and listened. He detected movement to his left, about where that cocky bastard Phil had been. He closed his eyes and lifted his weapon. Listening as best he could, he moved his weapon toward the movement and fired.

A grunt told him he hit his mark. The thump of dead weight confirmed it.

He thrust himself forward with his feet, sliding along the hangar floor on his back, trying to get some room between him and the four chairs that circled the coffee table.

After another bout of heavy machine-gun fire from outside, Vincenzo made it to the outer wall, unscathed.

“You in there,” someone shouted on a bullhorn. “We have the hangar surrounded. Come out or we’ll storm the building. I repeat, you are surrounded. You have one minute to come out.”

Shit, shit, shit.

Someone grabbed him from behind. He couldn’t help himself as he shouted out.

“Shhh. Take this.”

A cold metal object landed in his palm.

“Put them on. You’ll see better.”

Vincenzo felt around the surface of the object in his hands and found the cloth backing strip. Goggles of some kind. He pulled the elastic-like cloth out and placed it on his head, the goggles over his eyes. Instantly, the blackened hangar came to light in a green haze.

“There’s a lot of men out there and we need everyone here to do their part,” the guard said.

“Their part?”

The guard with the M16 looked down at him. “Our orders were, if the meeting is interrupted for any reason, all enemies die. That includes the Gambino family members who are out there right now. The police had guaranteed we wouldn’t be interrupted.”

Gambino family?

“Why is the Gambino family attacking us? On second thought, why weren’t they invited?”

“Those are questions I can’t answer. I have no idea.”

Through the green lens, Vincenzo watched as the guard stood, aimed through a small hole in the corrugated metal wall and carefully aimed his weapon. Vincenzo searched the wall and found a similar hole. He stared out at the men lined up in pairs behind the cars and vans.

The guard beside him began firing. Boom, boom, boom. Just like that, men dropped one by one. A few lucky assholes ducked in time, but then the guard switched guns. Vincenzo saw that it was another elephant gun. As the guard fired, each round was like a cannon, and the vehicles were taking most of the hits.

A van exploded.

Vincenzo, blinded by the fireball, dropped to the floor and ripped off his goggles. After his eyes cleared, he placed the goggles back on and surveyed the hangar. Two other guards pumped bullet after bullet out of their respective holes in the walls. Three bodies were sprawled out on the floor by the coffee table.

The bosses of the other families are all dead. Holy shit!

The Fuccini family was the only surviving member of the peace accord, with the Gambino family making a major power play outside.

What the hell had happened? How did it get so bad, so fast? Now the four top crime families would be at war after all, and it was the Gambino’s who had started it.

He stopped the pity party, turned around and began firing his gun out through the hole in the wall. What a waste of bullets. He hit nothing and saw no one outside anymore.

He pulled his weapon back in. The guard three feet to his left was reloading.

Vincenzo aimed his weapon at the open area on the guard’s neck. He closed his eyes to avoid the blinding flash as he pulled the trigger. He opened his eyes again as the guard fell to his knees and then the ground, dark liquid shooting from his neck.

Vincenzo looked back at the two remaining guards. They still stared through their holes.

Good, fuck ’em.

He crawled over and unstrapped the hand cannon from the fallen guard and then chambered a round. With the resolve of a Fuccini family man, he stood, wiped the sweat off his forehead and aimed at the guard on his right, at least twenty feet away.

Vincenzo fired and then fired again, the recoil knocking him back a step each time.

The second shot wasn’t necessary. The first knocked into the man high in the chest area, throwing him at least five feet in the air before he fell, a clump of human waste.

Damn that recoil. Didn’t expect that.

He turned to the other guard who watched him now, his weapon leveled at Vincenzo.

“Don’t make me fire, Vinny,” the guard pleaded. “I have orders to keep you four safe. You are not the enemy. They are.” He pointed to the outside wall. “I will fire to save my life, but I don’t want to. Let’s walk out of here together.”

He needed to wipe sweat from his forehead again, but resisted, letting it slide down, tickling him as it went.

“Okay, you’re right. Let’s leave. Can you drive?” Vincenzo dropped his aim.

The guard lowered his weapon. “Yeah. I’ll drive.”

In that second, Vincenzo lifted his gun back in place and fired round after round into the guard. The man had no chance.

Alone inside the hangar, Vincenzo walked over to the guard and looked down at him as he gasped for breath. Blood pooled around the man’s mouth.

“Next time, don’t call me Vinny.”

He chambered a round, aimed at the guard’s face, and fired from one foot away. The man’s head exploded and disappeared in a wet mush of human skin and bone. Vincenzo looked back down at the body and the dent in the hangar floor where the head had been.

A shame. A fucking shame.

He headed for the only open door in the hangar. No one remained alive in the building and it didn’t sound like anyone was alive outside either. Not a single bullet had been fired outside or inside since he’d killed the guard who had given him the goggles. Nothing else came from the bullhorn. Only the crackling fire from the fully engulfed van.

As he neared the door, he removed the goggles and stepped up to the edge of the door frame. He dropped the guard’s gun. In all his thirty-eight years, he had never seen this many dead men. A major battle had taken place and he was the only man left standing. His father would be so proud. Not a scratch on him. That was what family bosses were made of.

The peace accord had been handed to him on a platter, he realized. Now, with all three crime bosses dead, and many Gambino family member’s bodies strewn about, their seconds would be named. Vincenzo’s father, and by extension, himself, would garner the respect due to an original family. The fact that Vincenzo would walk away from this carnage was enough to make him a hero. His name would go down in the mafia history books for years come.

Yeah, as long as there’s no asshole only half-dead, a gun in his hand, waiting for me to walk by.

He looked out and scanned the territory surrounding the hangar. Nothing moved.

“Okay, I surrender,” he shouted, in case anyone was alive to hear him. “I’m coming out.”

Vincenzo stepped into the open, his hands raised.

Two feet from the door and no one had taken a shot at him. No one popped a head up or said anything. He took a few more steps. Still nothing.

His stomach couldn’t handle the tension. At any moment, he was convinced that someone was going to sit up, like a fucking Jack-in-the-box, and fire a round into his eye.

But no one did.

The moon sat high, the fire crackled to his left, the insects of the night remained quiet, and no one shot at him.