Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

Crackers veered in from the roadway sidewalk, slid on the oblique through the wide entrance in the brick wall which the customers pulled into as they edged their way to the payment booths and the vacuum station up ahead.

Close enough to make eye contact now, Mick nodded through his dark lenses at Crackers as the other man unbuttoned his coat with his left hand, slipped his right hand through the slashed pocket to grip the cocked-and-not-locked MP5, a dandy little subgun from Heckler und Koch that had delighted the spec ops boys for three decades now, and Mick said, “Fast and total. He’s good, don’t forget. Okay, peanut gallery, let’s rock.”

He stood, his jacket already unbuttoned, and with a smile and a nod to the phantom fellow who’d just finished drying his car, he beelined to the Galaxy, circled behind it, shivered to shrug the cloaking of the coat over his own German dandy gun, felt his hand grip it expertly-he shot well enough to fire one-handed-and raised it to discover his target had spun and was a split second ahead of him on the action curve.

Ray shot him five times in the chest.

That gunfire ignited screams, panic, crazed evacuation, a whole festival of human behavior at the furthest extreme of escape frenzy. People blew every which way, some to the wall to clumsy attempts to climb over it, some back toward the glass building as if it offered cover, some racing into the mouth of the torrential downpour that was currently frothing up an Escalade in the tunnel. For a brief moment, that perfect world of equality so longed for in some imaginations actually existed on earth as Salvadoran illegal and Baltimore hedge fund manager and energy executive’s well-turned-out wife and Sid the cabbie fled outward with equal passion, though never quite ruthless disregard for the other. The good behavior and fundamental politeness of the typical Baltimorean was in play on the war field as much as the adrenaline-powered survival instinct.

Crackers was not concerned with surviving, however, but with killing. He had that rare gift of natural aggression that made him a god in battle, funnily unfunny with his buddies, and a nasty prick everywhere else. He just believed: if you weren’t war, you weren’t nothing. He rotated right, seeing Mick go down, looking for his target who was clearly among the abandoned cars gleaming and dripping in the sun. Bracing the gun against his shoulder via its stubby, compacted telescoping stock, he fired a short burst into the cars, seeing glass spider-web and metal puncture and dust and water fly, while the gun roared, the spent shells cascading free in a brass-glinting spurt like flung pebbles across a lake. Great special effects but to no seeming result.

His urge was to run to Mick, but he saw that Mick had spun, low-crawled out, and was now rising on this side of the Galaxy, reacquiring his German machine pistol, though moving stiffly from the bruising hits on his Kevlar.

“Converge, converge!” Mick was screaming. “Z, get your ass in here, goddamnit, and come over the wall on him, he is hot, live, and still moving.”

Saying that, Mick raised the subgun above his head, angled it down, and squirted a long burst into the space where he thought the sniper Cruz should be, mostly tearing up dust and asphalt debris from the deck. Then he rammed through a superfast mag change, tossing the empty box-God, was Mick smooth!-seating the new one, throwing the bolt, and began to move through the corridors between the now bullet-dinged automobiles. At the same time, Z had arrived, slalomed off the road and up to the other side of the brick wall, only with a pistol though, and he too hunted for the sniper. They had him three on one, with no place to go… but where the fuck was he?

It’s better to be lucky than smart, rich than poor, smart than dumb, but in a gunfight, best of all is to be smart and skinny. That was Ray, who had gone to earth after putting the five hard ones into the big guy from nine feet and slithered across the ground to, er, nowhere, and then, being quite agile, actually wiggle-waggled sideways under the dripping-wet pickup truck next to him. He came up in another aisle between cars, rolled, and popped up like a Whack-a-Mole game in a Toyland, two hands on the gun, oriented, as it turned out, slightly toward the oncomer, not the original assaulter.

In the naturally firm isosceles, triangles within triangles for structural solidarity, his hunched, tensed muscles controlling the pistol between his crushing grip, Ray shot that guy twice, high left-side chest, knocking him back and off stride, even as he was now catching on to the concept of body armor not in words but in an image that decoded instantly into all he needed to know. He felt things in the air nearby and cranked down, realizing that the other shooter, seeing him fire, had vectored on to him instantly and put a burst into him, but that between the two of them, unseen in the intense focus of advanced extreme pathological war-fighting Zeitgeist, neither had realized that the cab of a Honda Civic lay between them and so while that burst chewed the crap out of the windows, splintering, shivering, fragmenting them, the passage through two glass barriers also skewed the bullets mightily and they rushed off at one remove from their target. By the time that shooter realized and came around for an unimpeded shot, Ray was to ground again, crawling like a muskrat under the cars.

“Can you get a shot?” Mick yelled at Z, who had two-handed support of his SIG over the top of the wall.

“That way, that way,” screamed Z, sliding northward down the wall, craning his eyes through his AirRages for a glimpse of something to shoot, but seeing nothing.

Bogier looked back to Crackers, who, though he’d never gone down, had been staggered and briefly stunned by the two bolts that had cracked into his body armor and would leave him bruised blue and purple for a month and a half.

“Close, close, close,” yelled Bogier as he himself darted between cars, not quite having figured out that Cruz’s tactical improvisation was to move under the cars, not between them, and that he was skinny enough to do it. It didn’t occur to him to lean down and spray-paint the entire 180 to his front under the cars and thereby hit the guy if only once or twice.

There was a frozen moment. Bogier and Crackers, guns loose and fluid in their hands, faces sweaty and bug eyed with concentration, moved stealthily through the fleet of parked, shot-to-shit cars, spurting ahead now and then to unzip a blind spot, while from the other side of the wall, with his SIG like the mighty Excaliber, Z too hunted but also covered them.

A siren heated up, then another.

Then Crackers went down.

Ray froze. He was trapped. He was on his back under a Chevy cab, this fucking thing turned out too low to get quite all the way under and he knew that he needed to make a strong, wretchedly awkward maneuver to get himself out the way he’d come in. And he couldn’t cover anything to his left, under his feet, or above his head. But he heard the faintest scuffle of tread to ground, and saw a Danner-booted foot just a few inches from his head. Without much thought, he shot it.

He heard the scream, saw the blood fly, and in a second, a man was lying next to him, almost parallel, not three feet away. It was Dodge City, only horizontal, under cars, with cool modern black guns, as the guy, seeing him, eyes bulging with fear or excitement, tried to wedge his MP under the car for the shot, while Ray had to twist, pivot on his shoulder, and bring the gun to bear in a new quadrant. Intimate, nasty, graceless, only speed mattered, and- crak! spurt of muzzle flash, jerk of recoil, drama of slide rocking back and forth in supertime, leap of spent shell-Ray got his shot off just a split second sooner and shot the man in the throat, causing him to jerk and vomit blood, then shot him higher in the face, just below the eye, hammering a black hole into it and imposing terminal stillness on the body.