John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

And then a low, dark blue sedan came cruising slowly by, heading the opposite way. The men in the car were probably Chunkies: they each had the gang’s bull’s eye tattoo. Wolfe muttered, “Get ready to vault that fence on the right, Seline, if we need to…”

The sedan got about ten yards past and then did a sudden screeching U-turn. The windows rolled down on the two nearest side windows and the muzzles of guns emerged.

“Vault it, Seline!” Wolfe shouted as he drew the .45 from his waist band and fired at the car, letting his instincts guide his aim. He squeezed off two rounds, and the bullets smashed through the windshield. He saw the driver rock back in his seat, hit, the car swerving. The bullets fired from the side windows went wild with the car’s swerving, and then Wolfe turned, vaulted the fence. Seline was crouched down, waiting for him by the front porch.

A piebald pit bull came snarling from the front door—someone had let it out to attack the intruders into their yard. Wolfe raised his gun to shoot it but Seline shouted, “No!”

She snatched up a coiled garden hose and she threw the coil of hose over the pit bull’s head so the dog was tangled, confused. It struggled to free itself and she led the way to the back of the house.

“Come on!” she yelled.

Wolfe and Seline ran into the back yard. Bullets cracked over their heads from somewhere in the street. They climbed another force, tumbled over, landed on their feet side by side.

“I can’t shoot a pit bull that’s coming at me?” Wolfe asked, as they crossed through the neatly kept-up yard.

“No! I love dogs! Don’t you shoot any dogs, Mick! He’s been trained to attack people!”

“And I’m trained to shoot at something trained to attack me! That was a pit bull!” Wolfe laughed breathlessly at carrying on an argument while they ran.

“Tough! I dealt with it!” she puffed.

“You did, I got to admit! Glad I didn’t have to kill the poor brute.”

They came to a boarded-over house, fenceless, and beyond it was the cross street.

Wolfe ran ahead, looking for the Chunkies, didn’t see them. Maybe they were thinking better of just rushing in on him. Gangs have some pecking order, some hierarchy, but they aren’t as structured as military units and that led to confusing and dissent in “the ranks”—which was a damned good thing, right now, for him and Seline, Wolfe reflected, as he led the way across the street.

“There… I think that’s it two houses down!” Wolfe said, pointing. “That’s the address!”

“That house with the huge white satellite antenna out front? Really? That obvious? ”

“That’s one of those old satellite antennas, from back in the day, for television,” Wolfe said, as they strode quickly along the sidewalk. “No one knows it’s been retrofitted for this… They think it’s just old junk…”

They hurried to the rear of the house, and up the back porch steps. A piece of paper was taped to the screen door. On the paper someone had penciled a simple outline of a wolf. The drawing of the wolf meaning Wolfe, probably. Under the wolf outline was an arrow pointing downward.

Near the arrow was scribbled one word, a kind of signature: Blank.

“Looks like a message from Blank,” Wolfe said. He tore it off, turned it over. Nothing on the other side.

They went through the unlocked back doors, and looked around the kitchen. The house was empty; there were no appliances, no furnishings. The floors were neatly swept. There was a door standing open on the left. It led to a wooden stairway to a basement. The arrow had been pointing downward. Wolfe, go downward.

Wolfe drew the gun—for all he knew the Chunkies were waiting to jump him down there. He switched on the basement light and led Seline down the steps. There was an ordinary concrete basement, smelling of dust and mold, and a single naked overhead bulb. The basement contained a desk in a farther corner, and on the desk was a computer, turned on.

On the monitor screen was one word: Upload.

Wires ran from the back of the computer to its power source and to the front of the house—to the old, retrofitted satellite dish.

“What a relief to see that computer waiting for us,” Seline said.

She crossed to the desk, taking off the backpack. She drew the laptop out, set it up on the desk beside the computer, and powered it up. When it had booted, she found the jacks and plugged them in. She used the passwords and clicked to begin the upload…

The upload was going pretty quickly. Should take ninety seconds.

But as it was happening a car was pulling up outside. And another. Another after that, too, all three of them stopping with an urgent squeal of tires…

“They must’ve seen us going into the back yard,” Wolfe said, as he went to look through a screened air vent in the concrete wall.

He could see a Chunkie standing on the sidewalk, a Mack 10 in hand.

Men were walking past the vent, toward the back of the house. The computer was still uploading…

Voices. Whispers from outside. Footsteps. The click of a cocking gun.

The computer was still uploading…

“We’ve been getting boxed in a lot today,” Wolfe whispered calmly. “It’s a popular trend, boxing us in.”

“They got to be in there!” someone said, outside. “We got to rush ’em and shoot any motherfuckers we find!”

The computer was…

Done.

“It’s uploaded,” she said breathlessly.

“That’s good.” Privately he was thinking, But it’ll be a shame to die here anyway…

“It looks like it’s completely up and going out onto SystemLeaks,” Seline said, bending over the desk. “And from there—everyplace else.”

“Cool. I hope Verrick chokes on it.”

Wolfe walked over to the stairs, and prepared to defend Seline as best he could. He drew the .45…

“You got that .44?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Better get it ready…”

Gunfire sounded—but from the front of the house.

Seline went to the vent and looked through. “They’re… in a fight. With one another! No… I think that’s a different bunch of gangsters! I saw your friend, Shuggie!”

Wolfe ran to the vent, and looked—he could make out Shuggie crouching behind a car, firing across the hood with the Desert Eagle. The huge handgun lifted a Chunkie off his feet and spun him around before he fell, stone cold dead, on the sidewalk.

“Yeah man,” Wolfe chuckled. “ De Oppresso Liber!”

It didn’t take long. No more than three minutes of firefight, the Chunkies taking all the casualties. The surviving Chunkies took off, some of them driving away, the others, unable to get to their cars without being shot, running off between houses.

Wolfe and Seline walked upstairs and out front, hands in the air, just to defuse anyone trigger happy. “Shuggie!”

The Black Viceroys captain was standing by a rebuilt Army-green Plymouth Duster, reloading his Desert Eagle. He glanced up at Wolfe and Seline.

“Let ’em through, they’re okay!” Shuggie called, as other Viceroys—some Wolfe didn’t know—turned to stare.

“Put your hands down,” Shuggie said, tossing the massive handgun on the front seat of his Duster.

“Nice ride,” Wolfe said. “You cherry it up yourself?”

“Fuck no, man, who’s got time for that. I paid to have it done by the best.”

Seline was looking at the dead men on the street. “The cops are gonna see all this…”

“Nah,” Wolfe said. He was feeling pretty good. A Delta Force brother had come to his rescue and he and Seline had successfully uploaded the files. Verrick must have smoke coming out of his ears about now. “Remember, the cops got the area blocked off.”