Out of the Black - Lee Doty [102]
"Crap!" More pulling. The door sprung open at last, but the killer had left a shin in the way, which led to yet another passionate permutation of the four-word, sixteen-letter vocabulary. Ping hoped that last part meant 'mom's having sex', but he didn't think so. Eww.
Ping was always amused when he ran across what his great-grandma had called a potty mouth, though he had no idea what a 'potty' was. This really wasn't too often in the modern world. Even in the filthy circles of his old hell as a vice cop, he'd only run across a handful of people who regularly swore. There just weren't that many people left in the well-educated world who were willing to sound this dissociatively stupid, no matter how black their hearts or how dirty their hands.
It was going to be a shame to kill this guy. It would be like killing e of the last buffaloes, the last wild turkey, the loneliest dodo...
The barrel of the killer's weapon slammed into Ping's left shoulder, twisting him to the right until he was stopped by his seatbelt, face toward the passenger seat with his back to the endangered species.
"I know you're sexually awake!" The killer shouted. If only he knew how wrong he was- Ping was going to have to kill this guy before he blew his cover by laughing. "Wake up and sexually die, cop!"
The double explosion vibrated Ping's barrel-bruised left shoulder and put a compound hole through the back of Roy's nice jacket. When he'd been driven sideways, his right hand had crossed his chest, coming to rest on the grip of the pistol holstered, pointing backwards, under his left arm. His finger slid into the trigger guard, lock tone muffled by the surrounding holster, clothes and flesh, and further covered by the poorly assembled profanity. The two shots were followed by the thud of a job well done on the ground outside the door.
He turned back toward the door. He unholstered the weapon and covered the empty doorway where the swearing, rifle-clubbing, barrel-prodder had once stood. Ping clumsily piled out of the car, coming to a rest crouching with his back against the doorjamb.
Before him was a corpse with matching holes in throat and chest and an assault gun still clutched in one out-flung hand. Ping grabbed the weapon, briefly inspected it: 3mm full auto compact assault gun with 72 rounds remaining, according to the display above the trigger guard... locked.
Rigor mortis hadn't set in, but Ping's efforts to wrest the lock ring off the dead killer's finger were vain. With his left hand, he pulled the tip of the ringed finger. With his right, he pressed the barrel of his pistol against the base of the finger, winced...
"NO!" Rae yelled as a delayed third shot came from the car. Hope drained out through the exclamation, leaving her burnt hollow. That shot sounded like an execution.
The woman covering the car behind the microvan's door whirled about, rifle tracking toward Rae- just in time to meet two volleys of dispersing fletchettes from Rae's weapon. The woman with the rifle bounced off the door behind her before landing in a heap amid the shards of glass from the shattered window.
Rae didn't stop. She raced to the microvan with the speed of Amped desperation. She leaped onto its protruding rear fender, then onto the roof. As she appeared over the top of the microvan, the driver of the SUV opened fire.
The snapping hiss of a burst of maybe five rounds filled the air around her. She altered her trajectory to the right with a hard push of her left foot on the roof of the van. As she left the airspace above the microvan, she returned fire, hitting her target in the legs. Correcting as she sailed through the air, her second shot hit him in the head and torso as he doubled over.
Then she was on the ground. She touched down effortlessly, feet melding with