Almost immediately after forcing the grating up and over, the front bumper of a minivan smacked into the side of my head, briefly knocking me unconscious, and back into the rising rain water. I heard the squeal of brakes in dire need of replacement as the van stopped directly above me. “Ouch.” Doors opened and a group exited the van, talking excitedly amongst themselves. They reeked of cordite.
“Did you hear something?” one of the men asked. He received no reply. I was about to crawl back through the tunnels to my hole under the bridge and nurse my split skull when I heard that same voice wonder: “where did that burned bitch go?”
My head is fine. I did not just suffer a massive concussion, likely followed by cerebral swelling, edema, multiple hemotomas, and death. Besides, head trauma builds character. Once I finish here, I imagine I’ll need all the character building I can get. I chambered a few guns and climbed out.
I crawled out of the space between the van and curbside, leaving behind about a pound of flesh, and quickly caught up to the group as they approached the front door of the brownstone that was my target. I did my best to act like I belonged with them and for a second it seemed to work. As one of them unlocked the door, I sized up the edifice.
Once upon a time, it might have been an office or public works center. It was huge. Especially in comparison with the slums that surrounded it. Now it was the center of a vast and ever-expanding cancer— it was the home of the local heroin kingpin. All of which normally wouldn’t mean a thing to me; I could relate to drug users better than most because they too sometimes shared the same voices and perspectives on reality which I held. But she was involved with them. Deeply.
She just stared at me for at least a minute. It felt like an eternity. I had landed softly on the gravel behind her and lifted her out of the water by the scruff of her neck like a puppy. Neither of us knew how to begin. So she punched me. Twice. A practiced and unexpected right to the jaw, quickly followed by a left to my gut that left me doubled over and retching. I stumbled to the ground and started giggling between gasps for air. I liked her a lot already.
“Wha-what the fuck! Who the hell are you?!” one of the dealers asked, finally taking notice of me as his buddy opened the front door. I smiled in an attempt to be reassuring and gave him the thumbs up. “Damn, that was stupid.” Jerkoff kindly informed me. The rest of the crew finally noticed me and reached for their weapons. It appeared that they were of the shoot-first-ask-questions-never school of thought.
“Oh well, it looks like I will be going through the front door after all.” I was only a couple of steps away anyhow. I pulled the pin on the flashbang, dropped it at their feet, and rolled away with my eyes shut and my fingers jammed in my ears. For some inexplicable reason, the explosion sounded like rubber on steel. A supernovae proceeded to do its thing inside my poor mangled, disassociative brain.
The next lucid thing I know, my perspective goes haywire and I’m watching myself rise into a crouch shooting from my hip. Four shots in rapid succession. I still had plenty of bullets left, but that was all I needed. The four men went down, probably not even knowing they were dead yet. I walked past their corpses and opened the reinforced security door the rest of the way and stepped inside.
---HK_Newbie
