twelfth instalment

Run and Gun

Saunders and the others broke into a light jog as they left the lobby after having heard from Anara. They knew they had to get to the others quickly, but the thought of a large group of the cultists was an unnerving one. Until now, they had only seen one or two, with the exception of the one sacrifice incident, and the hope that there were only a few scattered batches of the bastards was shot to hell by a medium sized gathering outside their encampment. They took up a delta formation again, Grayson leading, Saunders on the right, and Johansson on the left. They took a different route back hoping to flank the cultists from the back side, going by the back of the hospital first. As they rounded a small outcrop of the building, a garish sight met their eyes. The man that Grayson had seen from the hospital lay spread eagle on the ground, his hands and feet nailed into the concrete with a few nails each, and his intestines lay strewn about his corpse, his neck was sliced all the way through to the bone, a line etched in the concrete where the blade had struck it. His face held such an awful mask of pain and agony that it left little doubt as to when the things had killed him. Saunders paused briefly and bent down to check his pockets, and came up with an empty clip for a fifty caliber Desert Eagle; the gun itself however was nowhere to be found, nor was the fire axe the man had been using.
They picked up the pace, cutting through a park, the metal frames of a playground bent over and singed, chains hanging loosely down to where the wood seats had been on an old swing set. They were soon coming down a side street that got them to the street that cut in just above the building they had made camp in. Coming to a crouch behind a burned out delivery truck that was lying on its side in an intersection, Saunders slowly stuck his head around the side of the truck to assess this situation. The numbers of cultists outside had swelled since they last heard from Anara and Saunders picked out almost forty figures slowly picking their way through the street towards the doorway to the building. Anara had dropped her rate of fire, only firing when she could get a clean kill, two shots a burst, no more. He ducked back behind the truck and turned to Grayson and Johansson. “Ok, it looks like there’s some nice cover to our right, another burned out car; Grayson, you’re going to go that way and open fire from there, no silencer, it’d be best if our first shots got their attention; I’m going to take up a spot a little off the side of this truck to our left and try and pick off those that take cover from your shots; Johansson, since all you’ve got is that SPAS and a pistol, we’ll cover you and try and draw their attention while you sneak up towards the doorway. I want you to get up to Anara ASAP and give her some covering fire with your M60, Hernandez is in no shape to use that thing, and she’s doing pretty well with her P90. Alright, Grayson, get over there and start up the fight, we’ll wait for your shot before we go.”
They broke, and Grayson began making his way to the burnt out car. It sat on its axils and he quietly pried a door open and crawled into the back seat, he flicked on the IR beam and aimed his UMP45 at a cultist standing atop a burned out cab. The bullet took it in the head and it flipped backwards off the cab, thudding to the ground as the cultists around it spun to assess the new threat. Two more were dropped, and several of the others began to charge towards Grayson, but were quickly brought down by Saunders first salvo. The cultists started to take cover behind cars and in the building across from the encampment, the arrival of more enemies making them fall back and reassess their attacks. Johansson used the opportunity to sprint almost twenty yards to a spot by a hole in the building; he looked backwards briefly, and then went in to go upstairs to join Anara and Hernandez.
The things were responding quickly to the new threat, quicker then Saunders’ would have liked or thought possible, they were actively taking cover from his line of fire and slowly working their way closer to Grayson and himself. He counted a good thirty cultists now in the area immediately outside their second floor hideout, and he guessed that it was only a matter of time until even more showed up, if there were anymore within earshot. He ducked behind the back edge of the truck as he stopped to reload his M4, and as he looked up he saw four or five sets of eyes, turned glowing with reflected light seen through his night vision, duck behind a series of cars across the intersection from them. They had been flanked. He slowly toggled his throat mic. “Grayson, we’ve got a few behind us, we need to get out of here quick.” Grayson’s voice whispered back “Alright, got any plans?” “Yeah, I got one, but it’s risky.” “Not as risky as letting ourselves get surrounded by an unknown quantity.” “Agreed, Johansson, are you and Anara doing ok?” Anara’s voice cut in “Sir, Johansson just got here, he’s loading up the M60, give him just a second then we can give you covering fire.” “Alright,” Saunders said “Grayson, soon as they give us the word, get a flashbang on the hood of that car, so it’s high enough they can’t hide easily from it, and I’ll throw a frag across the intersection, then we make a dash for some better cover closer to that hole. Good?” “Yes sir.”Saunders was counting on the blinding white light and thunderous boom to scare and disorient the cultists, and he wasn’t let down. As the rumble faded and the ringing lessened, he shouted for Grayson to charge with him and, as the grenade he’d thrown across the intersection exploded, they launched from cover to see a street filled with reeling figures. As they moved quickly towards more cover, Saunders towards a downed mailbox near the hole in the wall, and Grayson to a rolled over sedan on the opposite side, they mowed down as many cultists as they could with controlled three-shot bursts, dropping a half dozen each, as they ran out of ammo in their clips the started dead sprinting for the cover and the opportunity to reload to thunderous applause from light machinegun fire from the second story. They stopped briefly in their new cover to reload, and, after a few more rounds were fired off, Grayson went through the hole as Saunders brought up the rear, as he ducked through backwards Johansson stepped up the fire, spraying at the cultists hiding places while Anara snapped off single shots at the hunkered down forms.