Everyone Dies in the End #21

Artemis

The bullets hissed by, tearing into the wall to his left, the noise of their impact drowned by the loud hammering of the automatic weapon. The shooter was a black man, firing from the opposite end of the hall, and as he watched, two more shooters joined him. He didn’t watch any more. He ordered his hand, which had frozen on the door, to push, and then the door was open.

Blam, blam. He flinched, then realized that the gun belonged to Susan. It was pointed down the hall. She didn’t look like someone who knew what she was doing, but their assailants ducked anyway. “Let’s go,” he shouted and grabbed her  free hand. Blam, she fired once more and a chunk of the suspended ceiling, no more than halfway down the hall, blew apart. He didn’t let her fire again.

Artemis pushed through the door and pulled her after him and nearly ran into three more, heavily tattooed gangers, brandishing evil-looking weapons. Frantically the three gangers raised their guns and Artemis reached for the 9mm pistol on his leg. It was an unequal contest. The gangers had only to lift their rifles, submachine guns, or whatever they were, and Artemis had to unholster his pistol, raise it, and fire. He didn’t even know if the safety was on. He didn’t need to.

Blam, blam, blam. Susan’s revolver sounded like a cannon in the confined, cinder-block walled stairwell. It was really, really obvious that she knew nothing about guns, she had made that clear in the dorm’s hall a heartbeat before, but then again, it didn’t take a world-class marksman to hit three-gangers crowded on a stairway six feet away.

The first two shots tore into the lead ganger, a lanky, heavily-tattooed man with two rings in his lower lip, exploding his chest. The third dug a fist size piece of cinder block from the wall. The lead ganger, or should I call him corpse now, thought Arty, was thrown into the two behind him, and the six arms and legs tumbled ten feet to the landing below.

Arty was no marksman either, but the gun was in his hand now, and his targets were stunned, slowly untangling themselves, and only 10-feet distant. He emptied the eight-round clip into the mass of bodies and the untangling stopped. There were shouts and footsteps from the just-exited hall, louder by the second.

“Go!” Susan screamed, her eyes darting frantically from the tangle of bodies below them to the door behind. She didn’t wait for a reply, running down the steps. Artemis shoved in a new clip and then followed, fighting the bile in his throat when the passed the scrum of flesh, blood and excrement at the landing. The hall door opened then, but a flurry of shots from Artemis’s pistol, wild as they were, hastened its closing, and then Artemis and Susan were a floor lower, and then a floor lower, and then a floor lower.

“Wait.”  They were on the fourth floor landing. She turned to him, wild-eyed. “Reload.” He was pulling a magazine from his pants. A face appeared two floors above. Susan fired, the boom-flash almost stunning. The bullet ricocheted off the bottom of the stairs above, and Artemis could swear he heard the low buzz of the bullet not an inch from his ear, but it didn’t matter. The face disappeared.  He snapped the magazine home and chambered a round.

“Move.”

She did, running down the stairs. Artemis was right behind her, and their breathing was loud on the cinder blocks, their steps louder. Louder still were their pursuers. One of them, unseen, fired a burst from their submachine gun, the bullets sparking in the dim stairwell ten feet above.

           And then Susan and Arty burst into the dorm’s lobby. They were stupid, Artemis knew that. If there had been more of Kill Dog’s gangers—he had no doubt who these gangers belonged to now—Arty and Susan would have been dead, but there weren’t, at least that was what he thought.