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An Unanticipated Gunfight

C.A. Hilson

"Bite the bullet."

~Unknown

Officer Joseph Shapiro: South District Industry and Wares Park, City of New Hampton, Praxis III

I fired twice. Two nine-millimeter rounds sailed toward one of the shooters, but I ducked back behind the dumpster before I could see if they hit. A combination of machine gun fire and bolts from an energy weapon peppered the other side of the plasteel container at my back. Did they think the bullets would go through the damn thing, or were they just firing wildly? A rogue bullet missed the dumpster and smashed into the cement floor of the alley, whining away in a wild ricochet that made me wince and quit wondering about the gangbangers' tactics, or lack thereof. I dropped the empty magazine from my service pistol and slammed one of my two backups in its place with a growl. Across the alley, my partner leaned around the boxes he was hiding behind and squeezed off a triplet of shots at the offenders.

I took a moment to grab my radio handset and snarl a query into it regarding the fact that our backup wasn't there yet.

"Stuck in traffic," the radio crackled back, "Hang tight."

My partner took his turn to yell at dispatch as I leaned around and took another shot, nailing one of the gangbangers in the chest but almost catching a bullet in my teeth for the trouble.

"Tell them to put on the lights and sounds and break away from the public airlanes. I'll deal with the damn paperwork myself if it gets them over here."

A city bus lumbered by through the airway overhead, louder than the rest of the traffic around it and, like its passengers and those of every other vehicle up there, blissfully unaware of how easily it could catch a stray round in one of its lifter drives and take them down to hell in a nightmare of flames. Dispatch should've been redirecting traffic around our location. Gunfights in low-rises like this had their own risks, but a public transportation casualty wasn't supposed to be one of them.

Bullets sprayed from behind us with the sound of a buzz saw, ridiculously high rate of fire with almost no accuracy. I ducked instinctively as I spun. My partner got shots off before I did. The gangbanger fell from the roof with a scream, plowing through forty feet of vacant air before the ground shut him up with a sharp thwack that might've turned my stomach under slightly different circumstances.

"Which one of us was he even aiming at?"

I gave my partner a nervous chuckle as I stared over the top of my gunsight, scanning the rooftops for any more danger. If the guy had been using an accurate weapon, we would've been hurting. More bullets tried fruitlessly to gore the dumpster behind me.

"Who knows, Charlie. Both? Neither?"

A round slammed into my back, throwing me forward and knocking the wind from my lungs. Charlie cursed and slung more lead, presumedly toward the shooter. I reeled for a moment, stunned by the impact. A solid blow, but my armor did its job.

"Dammit, dispatch," I almost crushed the radio in my grip, "we're boxed in, here. Get us some backup damn quick or you'll be rolling in a pair of busses instead."

"Working on it, Officer Shapiro. Hang tight."

"'Hang tight,' sure," Charlie mocked, "You alright, Joe?"

"Vest stopped it. It'll bruise. I'll live."

"More than the perp can say."

It wasn't funny, but I chuckled anyway, more to release a little stress than anything else. There was no humor in the sound. Death wasn't funny. Ever.

More movement directly above, not traffic this time. I raised my weapon and fired. Missed. The gangbanger proceeded to unload his own weapon in my general direction, almost directly overhead, but still missing me because he was holding the damn thing sideways like an idiot. I fired again, twice, as I dodged to the side. He fell backward onto the roof, out of view and hopefully incapacitated.

"I'm calling it," I growled, gripping my handset again.

"Dispatch, we're pulling out. Place is too hot, and I ain't getting fitted for a pine box today."

Charlie met my gaze and nodded agreement. I waved a hand at him.

"Go, I'll cover."

We'd been partners long enough that he didn't think about arguing. I leaned around as he ran, squeezing off four carefully measured rounds at one-second intervals before turning to run myself. Whoever had the energy weapon took a potshot, winging my shoulder, but adrenaline blocked out the burning pain of the hit. Charlie, some fifteen feet ahead of me, turned to take another shot, but caught a bullet in his right side as he turned. The hit knocked him to the ground. I lunged and grabbed the back of his vest, dragging him forward another thirty feet before yanking him with me behind the next decent cover. Surprise, surprise--another dumpster.

God, I hated alleyways.

"Dispatch, officer down. Roll an ambo to my location forthwith and get me my goddam backup!"

I sat Charlie up against the wall and lightly slapped the side of his face.

"Wake up, Charlie, come on..."

Dispatch rambled back excuses as my partner rewarded me with a moan.

"Wasn't sleepin' yet."

I tore off a strip of my uniform and pressed it against the wound. The constant gunfire lulled and stopped. Alarms began to sound in my head at that, but I ignored them.

"You're supposed to catch bullets with the vest, stupid. Here, hold this tight with your arm, there."

He lifted his arm anyway. The crash of a gunshot just behind my back sent me leaping out of my skin for an instant. I turned in time to see the 'banger go down as Charlie fired again.

"You're s'posed to watch your damn back, stupid."

He laughed. Blood tinted his teeth.

"They're following us."

I hoisted him up with my left arm, gripping my gun in my right. He understood and wrapped an arm around my shoulder for support. A bad idea, but we couldn't sit there, we were far too exposed, and backup clearly wasn't coming.

A stray thought gripped my attention for an instant, commanding me to pause.

"Why aren't they running away?"

I decided it didn't matter. The fact was that they weren't, and that they were chasing us.

"Let's go."

We started a painful fast-walk, ducked into the next side alley, and made for the doors at the end. That's the biggest problem with low-rises: more back alleys than streets these days. This building probably wouldn't be connected with the others on the inside. Probably. At the very least, we could hunker there and not have to worry about death from above while we waited for backup.

"If these guys had been expecting a fight," Charlie wheezed, "We'd be toasted."

Without answering the uncomfortably true statement with the less comfortable thought that we might be toasted anyway, I tried the door, found it locked, and pointed my gun at it with a growl of frustration.

"Alright, copper, drop the weapon."

I froze.

"You deaf? I said drop it, man."

In case I still didn't get the point, the gangbanger primed his submachinegun behind me with an unmistakable sound. Holding my pistol out to the side, I let it slide from my hand until I just held the end of the grips between my thumb and forefinger before tossing it to the ground. We turned, slowly, laboriously, with most of Charlie's weight resting on me.

Sirens wailed, far away, drowned by the buzz of adrenaline. Dispatch babbled something over the radio. The 'banger jerked his bullet hose at us emphatically.

"The heat's on, so you're hostages now. Hands up."

I held up my right hand. Charlie continued to grip his side with one hand while holding onto me with the other. The banger cut the distance between us down to ten feet and pointed his weapon at my face--holding it one-handed and sideways, of course, but that wouldn't matter at such a short range.

"Both hands, cop."

"I'm--"

"I said, both hands!"

I complied, and Charlie crumpled slowly to the ground, bleeding.

"Man, make him stand up."

I did my best to stay calm, using the soft, level, soothing voice they'd taught me in advanced training.

"He can't, he's been shot."

The voice did nothing to cool the perp's temper.

"I said to make the mother stand up, fool!"

The gangbanger stepped too close, pointed his weapon just a nudge too far away from myself and my partner as he reached out to yank Charlie up--an unforgiveable mistake. I lunged, managing to get a hold of the firearm and wrestle him over it. He yanked it from my grip, but accidentally slung it away. I punched, a forceful, left-handed jab, and the armored knuckles of my glove connected with his gut. He reeled, but returned a blow to the side of my head as he did, staggering me.

"Dammit!"

The world spun for half a second, but the sound of an energy blade extending brought it back to sharp focus just in time for me to awkwardly sidestep his untrained strike. I caught a blow shallowly across my left arm instead of deep into the gut. His next punch threw me to the ground, but my wildly grabbing hands found his hoodie and dragged him down with me. My head hit the pavement. My hands fell. Everything blurred briefly as he scrambled onto his knees on top of me and raised the machete-sized weapon up for a stabbing blow. For an instant, the glowing purple blade was a steel sword, and the 'banger's inane profanities became purposeful Latin. Instinct clenched my gut, sending energy rippling through my right arm as I swung, open-palmed, with an actual, animalistic snarl. Talons flashed, there and gone, slicing cleanly into his cheek. Four deep lines welled dark blood. He screamed, a lowlife criminal again, and I backhanded him with my right fist, knocking him off of me.

He got to his feet slightly after I got to mine, yelled, and swung the blade with wide, fearful eyes. I dodged, he missed. Another unexpected blast from my partner's handgun tore a bleeding hole through the gangbanger's abdomen. He turned and tried to run, meeting a wall of armored SWAT as they came around the corner. Panicked, he swung for a head. Another, larger bullet ended his swing before it could do more than score a shallow, smoking cut into heavy plasteel armor, and he fell, dead. Adrenaline ebbed sharply in the face of relief, dropping me to my knees. My partner moaned as he was lifted and carried toward safety. Armored hands coaxed me up and after him. The chopping roar of heavy-duty lifter drives pounded off of the close walls and into my skull, the overwhelming din of salvation. The alleyway blurred. My head began to throb.

They loaded Charlie into an ambulance, but shoved me into a sitting position on the bumper of another rather than let me follow him. Paramedics asked me questions about my wounds. I told them I didn't know. The sound of weapon fire intensified briefly, but the heavy SWAT gunship hammered high-density rounds through walls with a noise like ripping nano-weave and crashing thunder, thoroughly ending the engagement in a matter of seconds.

Amazing how quickly the arrival of backup can finish a firefight.

Flurries of snow began to drift down through the acrid, sulfurous fumes of burnt smokeless powder. I let my head fall backward and stared at the sky, ignoring the poking and prodding of the paramedics as they tore away armor to bandage cuts and burns. Ignoring the one that remarked how I'd nearly lost an arm twice in a single engagement. Ignoring the pointed reminder that neither my insurance nor my police officer's salary would cover regrowing a limb, and that even modern reattachment procedures were still iffy at best.

The air bit in my lungs, a good deal more frigid than it had been a moment prior, so I released it, slowly, to float upward lazily as a puff of lung-warmed steam. In a matter of hours, the snow would cover up all of the blood and bodies in a deceptively pristine blanket of white.

Winter on this planet had a way of hitting suddenly and hiding away unpleasant secrets.

The paramedics left me after a few more minutes of fussing, and a detective called my name, asking for my weapon. I told him it was still on the ground in the alley. He nodded with a soft grunt.

"You're relieved of duty for the remainder of the day, Officer Shapiro," he said, "Chief's orders. Go home."

I nodded vaguely and began to walk over to my patrol cruiser, but I must have wobbled a bit as I walked.

"Hey, maybe you shouldn't be driving right now."

I looked back at the detective and faintly recognized him, as the haze of shock finally began to fade away. I half-smiled, but it fell quickly, a frail mask. Lost and adrift, like myself. Not like he would've ever given a smile in return anyway.

"Let me give you a ride, Joe."

I caught a brief flash of pity in his eyes, but I suppressed my swelling indignation. Now was not the time to be an ass.

I nodded.

"Thanks, Riley."

Further out into the wide avenue of the street proper, uniformed officers struggled to keep back a growing crowd of rubbernecking onlookers, a grim reminder that the firefight had happened dangerously close to a residential and business area, densely packed with frighteningly delicate innocents.

A long, slow shrug sent the thought reluctantly away, and I sighed as I settled into the backseat of the detective's unmarked cruiser. Significantly nicer than a patrol cruiser's backseat, this had been a civilian model before the force had modified it. The lifter drives whirred to life, pushing the vehicle gently off the ground with a little jolt. Technology like that was the reason why low-rises had more alleys than streets. Not a lot of ground vehicles anymore. The airways were usually more convenient than streets anyway. Except for right now. During rush hour. When traffic was absolutely horrific.

"Amazing," I thought, as Detective Riley pulled up and joined the flow of traffic, having to flash his lights and sounds in order to convince anyone to let him merge in, "how they can keep a rich enough person alive forever and send people out to terraform new planets, but they can't figure out how to fix rush-hour traffic."

"The hell happened to your glove, Shapiro?"

Riley's partner stared with a quirked eyebrow at the shredded piece of protective equipment barely clinging to my right hand. I glanced down and pulled it off as nonchalantly as I could through a sudden pulse of panic, praying that it wasn't as obvious as I thought.

"Guy came at me with a laser knife," I shrugged, resisting the urge to inspect the tattered bits of nano-weave fabric still connecting a few armor plates together, "I got lucky, and the armor did its job."

"Looks more like it exploded," Riley mused before giving a silent jump of the shoulders that, in a less tired and world-weary man, might have become a dry laugh.

"Gear does some weird stuff around plasma blades. Expands and tears and burns. You got lucky alright. I've seen those things turn armor into shrapnel."

I let out a nervous chuckle, pulling off my other glove and stuffing both into a pocket.

"Yeah, real lucky."

Leaning forward so that my head was up between theirs, I drummed my fingers for a moment.

"To the hospital, then?"

"Nope. Chief says you go home, Shapiro, so home you go. Paramedics said Lewis will be fine; he'll just be laid up for a few days."

Riley didn't bother an attempt at a reassuring smile. The harsh lines of his face wouldn't have let him wear the expression even if he did try. His partner attempted to replace the gesture with a little levity instead.

"He's a grown-ass man who can survive ten whole minutes without his partner, Shapiro."

I huffed and leaned back into the seat again, exhausted, knowing they weren't going to budge. It'd take hours to get to the hospital through the traffic anyway, and by then, he'd be in surgery. Or, he could already be out, but he'd be doped up and unconscious. In any case, there really wasn't any point in trying to get there.

"Whatever you say, detectives."

I could practically hear them rolling their eyes, but at least I'd distracted them from the glove. I hated being treated special, but I hated the idea of being found out even more. My gaze returned to the traffic outside of the window, and the city beyond it, riding the wings of a long, slow sigh. A sense of grim presentiment churned low and soft in my stomach, brewing like fermented trouble in the background. I'd have loved to ignore it, but I knew that would've been stupid.

Besides, way things were going politically over on some of the core worlds... Hell... the way things were going right here, something was bound to erupt pretty soon, whether I was found out or not. It was pointless to curse that one careless moron, especially when I'd nearly lost myself less that an hour before, but I cursed him anyway. We'd had problems before--I knew that better than most, but now...

A church steeple flashed by the window at a torturously slow rate, holding my gaze in an uncannily iron grip. I shook my head and sighed again when it was finally out of sight.

"I'm way too sober," I thought, "for this damned much foreboding."

My gut churned on anyway.

~~~

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