Devon Ford - The Fall

His last memory on earth was someone pausing long enough to relieve him of his twelve-thousand-dollar watch before he took his last bubbling breath, and died.

A fire broke out, unnaturally quickly, in the back seat of the car he had been aiming to spend the remainder of the crisis in, set off by a muted explosion. Jake didn’t see it, but he heard it as he tried desperately to get innocent people off the street and into cover. He thought he’d already seen some crazy shit today, but his nightmare was only just beginning to unfold.

Cal and the rest of the guests of the Waldorf were called to a meeting in the large restaurant. Sebastian told all the assembled guests what he knew, reiterated that they had onsite security, and told them that the plan was to hold tight until everything was back to normal.

Questions fired at him, but Cal didn’t hear them. He turned to Louise, who regarded him quizzically.

“Why the hell aren’t y’all more concerned about this situation, Cal?” she asked him seriously, using her individual way of employing far more words than were necessary for the sentence she spoke. His almost satisfied smile annoyed her when he answered.

“After everything I’ve survived today, I’m just happy you’re safe and we’re holed up somewhere nice,” he told her. She shot him a tense look and turned away.

“Excuse me? Mr. Sebastian, sir?” she called out as she held her hand aloft. Sebastian heard the sweet, honey-like voice cut through the din of questions, and nodded to her to continue.

“Mind if I ask what the authorities say about all this?” she asked, provoking a rolling mumble of agreement amongst the other guests.

Sebastian held his hands up for quiet so he could answer the question. He had no intention of bullshitting them.

“There is no word from the authorities as yet,” he told them, raising his hands higher to hush the response, “and you all know the cell phone and land lines are out of service. So is the city power grid but we have backup power to last another couple of days.” His next line was cut off, as the sound of smashing glass echoed from the reception area. Cal and Louise were sat toward the back of the group closest to reception, and Cal thought that he heard the butcher’s sound of meat being tenderized, followed by the sound of something heavy hitting the deck.

Before anyone could react, three armed men rounded the ornate archway into the restaurant and brandished their weapons.

“Okay bitches, none of you assholes move,” declared the evident leader, a head shorter than his thugs and with an accent that told Cal he was trying hard to be American by very recent way of Eastern Europe. He remembered being told that the Polish gangs were as prevalent as the famous mobsters and mafia groups which were the stuff of film legends. Real organized crime was less Hollywood, and far more frightening in real life.

“We are going to be wanting your jewels and your cash,” he said, taking the lit cigarette from his mouth, and dropping it onto the expensive carpet, “and don’t any of you motherfuckers try anything… heroic. ” He smiled, clearly impressed with himself for his mastery of the English language.

Cal and Louise looked to each other. Between them they probably had less than fifty dollars and no jewels to speak of. Certainly not the kind of Omega, Breitling and Cartier watches the other guests were reluctantly slipping from their shaking wrists and trying to hide, along with the diamonds hanging from the ears of the women Cal, and he was certain the gang, could see. He had been told, interestingly by someone he worked with who had never visited New York or even the States, that he should always keep his ‘robbery money’ to hand. He hadn’t bothered, on the basis that he thought the guy was full of shit, but now he saw the sense in having something tangible to hand to ward off anything like this.

He stole a glance at the leather-jacketed, gold-chain-wearing goons who were starting to work the room. The only guns he saw were sawed-off shotguns which he knew were devastatingly brutal up close but merely frightening—okay, very frightening—at any kind of distance. Tucked in the waistband of the smaller man who had given the orders was the black plastic and chrome butt of a semi-auto pistol which Cal didn’t recognize. Not that he needed to; a gun was a gun, and he didn’t have one.

Jake ducked his head back out of cover to snatch a glance at the building where the gunfire came from. He saw the ground floor communal door open, and a dark figure burst from it before turning left and running.

“Gun!” he said to himself instinctively, as though he were working with backup who needed that prevalent information. A second shape popped up from between the cars having thrown an incendiary grenade into the open window of a long, black car, and followed the other.

“NYPD!” Jake screamed as he broke cover, Glock raised and held out in front of him in two hands.

The response was not what he was expecting, even though he wasn’t sure they would just surrender to him. As one, both shapes turned and dropped low, popping up in a different place and unleashing hell. He didn’t so much hear the gunfire as feel the stinging air pulse around him as the bullets cracked past.

Suppressed weapons , he thought to himself, subsonic rounds .

This intelligence update didn’t help him, as he was facing two well-armed suspects both firing automatic weapons when all he had was three mags for his service weapons and two for the smaller piece tucked in the rig under his left armpit. He dropped and rolled, taking cover behind the engine block of an abandoned cab before rising to his knee and looking for a target. They were gone, and all around him the street erupted in more chaos as the fire grew behind him and people’s screams pierced the night. He thought that someone behind him may have been hit because the screams from that direction swelled in pitch and intensity, but his priority was the shooters.

A massive part of his training had been dedicated to this. An active shooter scenario was something that was practiced and trained to law enforcement across most of the world. He remembered, vividly, being made to sit through the footage from Mumbai where a guy with an AK and a thousand rounds of 7.62 had run riot like a one-man army until he was put down. The damage a single man or woman could do with an automatic weapon was incredible, even worse in places like the UK where most cops relied on pepper spray and a stern talking to rather than firearms. Now he was faced with an active shooter situation, without backup, and he was outgunned by not one but both shooters.

He had sworn an oath, and he couldn’t allow himself to hide or run away.

The problem with the war on terror in any setting, be that war or in a scenario like Jake found himself, was that of rules. Jake had to justify every pull of his trigger, and he was identifiable by his uniform. His enemy, on the other hand, wore no uniform and abided by no rules that anyone knew of. They could kill, could murder, with impunity whereas he might walk straight by an enemy combatant and not even realize. When facing those limitations and those kinds of odds, the Western world was already losing the fight.

Except now he had a clear view of his quarry as they sprinted north. He followed, unthinkingly, only this time he didn’t announce his presence and wait to be fired on first to justify his actions. As far as he was concerned, he had already given them fair warning of who he was, and anyone in NYC who didn’t fully comprehend that firing an automatic weapon at an officer of the NYPD would result in lethal force being used against them was just plain tired of living. Or prepared for martyrdom, he thought more worryingly.