Denver Overrun (Denver Burning Book 4) (2 page)

She threw down the hose and ran to the building entrance, scanning her badge to open the door. She clattered down the darkened hallway in search of the extinguisher she knew was kept on this side of the building. She had walked past it a million times, but couldn’t for the life of her remember the exact location of it now.

She was still looking when Andrews pulled the door open and called after her. “Sergeant, there’s more shooting out here! You need to come, quick!”

Alicia finally spotted the extinguisher and, ignoring Andrews, yanked it hard enough to rip it from the wall, fasteners and all. Her district office was the lifeblood of the police force in this part of Denver, and she refused to lose it while she was still breathing.

She ran back outside and waved Andrews toward the noise coming from the other end of the station grounds. “I’ll put out the fire, you go help the others!”

He was already running. She could hear more shots ringing out, both the crack-crack of rifles and the blam-blam of her officers’ pistols. She hoped Dannor and Simmins were handling the shooter across the street without getting themselves killed. They were seasoned officers, but she couldn't tell exactly how much firepower they were up against now.

She pulled off the protective ring and aimed the extinguisher at the roof, hoping it would spray far enough to reach the flames. It did, barely; the white foam shot out and quickly coated the part of the roof she could reach, dampening the flames from the Molotov’s accelerant. There were still several burning patches, but they weren't fierce and would probably die down on their own. The sustained gunfire coming from the far side of the station demanded her attention now.

She dropped the extinguisher and ran in the direction Andrews had gone, keeping her weapon ready but aimed safely at the ground. When she got back around to the side where her officers had been, she became momentarily disoriented by what she saw.

One officer in blue was running through a haze of smoke from the roof fire and all the shooting; it took her a moment to recognize Andrews. Another man was firing from a position behind two parked cars to her left, a staffer named Cole. Several others were lying on the ground bleeding. A handful of citizens were still dodging left and right, trying to find a way out of the crossfire. Some clustered around fallen victims, weeping and cursing loudly.

One man cowered behind a low cinder-block wall and waved at her in frantic warning. “They’re shooting us all! Do something!”

She crouched behind the wall next to the man, trying to gauge threats and take stock of the situation. She cursed herself for leaving the scene, even for a moment to deal with the fire. It was the wrong decision. Now she had multiple officers down and they were in a very bad position.

Andrews was just ahead of her now, at the corner of a wrought-iron fence. He turned his head long enough to report before scanning for targets again. “There are three shooters, maybe four. Simmins is down. I think Dannor is pinned in that doorway across the street. They’re just taking potshots at anybody that moves!”

Alicia could see two dark shapes aiming around the corner of the brick building across the street. Another, this one with a red bandanna over his face, was peeking over the top of a steel dumpster several yards away from the other two. Where the fourth might be, she couldn’t tell.

Simmins lay several yards from her position, face down and unmoving. It looked like he had been gunned down trying to dash toward the building. The AR-15 rifle he had collected from his patrol car was lying next to him.

“We have to get these people inside,” she shouted to Andrews. “Let’s provide covering fire and try to move everyone we can into the station.”

Andrews nodded. The powerless station wasn’t an ideal place to hole up, but it would be much better than staying in the open and getting shot to pieces by their unknown assailants. He spread the word to Cole, the armed staffer that was hiding in the parking lot, and they simultaneously stood and started shooting at the gunmen across the street.

Alicia took a few shots with her own gun, mainly calculated to hit the side of the dumpster or ricochet into the alleyway. Then she grabbed the man next to her and gave him a push toward the station’s open doorway. She barked out orders at the other civilians and staffers as she moved. “Get inside! Everybody, inside, now! Go, go, go!”

Instead of following them to the building, however, Alicia did something that probably looked incredibly brave to those around her, but was actually an act of unthinking anger. The attackers had superior firepower and her men were losing their lives because they were trying to fight rifles with pistols. Simmins had had the right idea, and Alicia wanted his rifle.

She ran into the open, ducked to grab at the AR-15, and dove back toward the building clutching it tightly to her body. Then she stood up by the corner of the building, checked the weapon, and aimed it around the corner.

Drawing a bead on the dark shapes of the gunmen across the street, she began firing. She had trained with the AR a number of times, but was more comfortable with her revolver. The rifle barked and leapt in her hands, wildly until she steadied it, slipping her hand on to the vertical foregrip. Then she zeroed in and concentrated on pouring some lead into the street where the shooters were taking cover. They quickly backed off, surprised by the sudden outpouring of rifle fire.

Andrews ran to the building, and Cole jogged over as well while Alicia kept the terrorists’ heads down. Her magazine emptied, Alicia turned and the three of them entered the station to take cover with the civilians, some of whom had dragged the wounded with them. At least five bodies were left on the lawn and sidewalk outside, but there was little that could be done for them while the shooters remained active.

As they clustered into the dark station, rifle fire again crescendoed outside. The attackers were either making an angry display, or trying to pierce the walls of the station. Fortunately most of the outer wall facing the street was brick, and only two shots came through, shattering a window and plunking into the floor inside.

“Everybody stay down,” Alicia called out. “We’re safe in here for the moment.”

Andrews peered cautiously out through the lower corner of another window. “Dannor is still over there… I think he’s trying to get away down the side street. There he goes. I hope he makes it.”

Alicia looked around at the huddled group. Besides Andrews, she had three staffers, one armed and two little better than frightened children at this point. Carlisle, the dispatcher on duty, had gone outside to see what the shooting was all about, and was now lying out there dead. Alicia had nearly tripped over his body as she rushed inside.

There were two young men from the crowd outside, the middle-aged man she had first pushed inside, and a woman wearing high heels, of all things. Alicia marveled that her ankles weren't broken after the mad dash to safety. Everyone else had presumably either sprinted away from the area, or were lying outside, incapacitated. The only major injury among those in the building was a man bleeding from the neck. His buddy had removed his own shirt to staunch and put pressure on the wound, but it was soaking through and the victim's eyes were shut.

The rifle fire stopped, and they all waited for a breathless thirty seconds. Andrews crept around to the doorway to keep watch in that direction.

"That sounded like a lot more than three or four guns," Cole said. The staffer had until that afternoon been a quiet, heavyset man who filed records and managed IT for the station's systems. Now he was a desperate, scared man in a fight for his life, and his adrenaline-tinged voice shook under the strain. "Is this an armed invasion of the country?"

Alicia decided to put a stop to that at once. "No! Those guys are either criminals or terrorists. Both, I suppose." She had to take a long breath to keep her own voice from shaking. "But rest assured, everyone. Our emergency response forces will get a handle on this very soon."

One of the young men spoke, leaning against the wall in the hallway with his knees drawn up in front of him. He was wearing a hoodie and jeans, and sported a goatee. "But you're the police, lady! If you guys are getting shot up... who's going to rescue us?"

There was a moment of awful silence. Alicia muttered back, "We're not the only ones." She looked up at the broken window, where they could all see blue sky outside. "We can't be the only ones. There are others out there, and when they get control of their areas, they'll converge on our station. We're going to be fine." But the knowledge that she had officers lying on the ground outside who were not fine shook her to the core.

She had dealt with two officer-down situations in her time as sergeant. One was a vicious attack by a drug-fueled criminal. Fortunately, in that case backup arrived quickly and the officer was out of the hospital within a few days. He had since retired. The other had been an officer from another district who was pursuing a suspect and was shot and killed in Alicia's district. It had been a sad day, but hadn't impacted her very much personally.

This was different. She knew the men that were lying out there. She had met their families. She knew she had to do something for them, even if it was too late. She couldn't stop trying, or she'd be betraying the trust everyone had placed in her.

"Officer Andrews, will you go out there with me and try to bring more people inside?"

Andrews gazed back at her in the dim light. "Sergeant, I checked as we came in. There's nobody left alive. Either they got to safety, or they're..."

"I know. But we can't leave them out there. And there might be one or two we can still save, if we can get them in here. Come on." Alicia got up and went back to the doorway, cautiously opening it to look outside. Andrews and Cole came with her.

Peering around the corner, they saw no more attackers. The street was abandoned, although they could hear gunshots echoing farther off in the city, probably several blocks away. "Okay... let's see if we can pull a few of these people inside," she said.

Weapons ready, they moved cautiously out into the yard again, keeping low and staying behind hard cover. Alicia had to get down on her belly and crawl to stay protected behind a landscaping berm.

"Cole, stay here and watch," she ordered. "Tell us if you see anything moving, any gunmen."

"I see somebody moving in that second-floor window," Cole reported immediately, pointing at the building across the street. "But I don't see a gun... it looks like a woman. Probably just an office worker."

Alicia army-crawled to the nearest body on the lawn, wondering if she was about to hear the crack of the rifles again and feel the impact of a bullet. But none came, and she grew bolder with each passing second. Finally she got up and pulled the fallen man's arm up and over her back, stooping to heave him up with her leg muscles. It was the body of the man who had been shouting threats when the crowd first gathered.

Struggling back toward the building, she saw that Andrews was hauling a dead civilian by his feet. There were no gunshots.

They came back out and retrieved six more bodies. It was ugly work, and Alicia had blood all over her uniform by the time they were finished. One woman, a civilian, was still breathing but unconscious. Those inside tried to revive and stabilize her, but she had already bled out and when Alicia came back with her last body, the woman lay dead. Alicia let her burden slip to the floor and then sat down heavily herself for a moment's respite.

"Is it safe to go out now?" the young man in the hoodie asked her, looking up from the man shot in the neck, who they had also failed to save. "Can we get out of here without getting shot at?"

Alicia pursed her lips and frowned. She took a minute to answer, fighting against the stress that clouded her mind. She was sweating, panting from the exertion of lifting bodies heavier than her own on her back, and she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach from the sight of so much blood and death. Her entire world was crashing down around her. It was as if all her training, all her promotions and decorations, had been a cruel joke and were, in the end, worthless.  

She sighed. "You'll be safer if you stay here. We don't know what's going on out there yet. This street seems to have quieted down, but there are still--"

One of her staffers, a woman that had wandered deeper into the darkened building, came hurrying back. "I smell smoke! There's smoke coming into the far side of the building!"

The others all realized they could smell it too. The lingering smoke had not been at the forefront of their minds during the shootout, but it was growing noticeably thicker now, and it wasn't just gunsmoke.

Alicia jumped up again, feeling her thighs burn. She hadn't had to work this hard since becoming sergeant and holding down a desk, and her morning exercise bike routine was apparently not intense enough. She walked quickly through the room, stumbling past a chair and knocking over a trash can in the darkness.

She didn't have to go far to smell the thick, choking smoke filtering down from the roof. Looking out through the glass door on the far side of the room, she could see a gray haze settling down toward the ground.

Where had she left the fire extinguisher? She crossed the room and exited the building, already hearing the crackle of flames and taking in the alarming smell of a serious burn, so thick she could hardly get a breath and had to cough.

Outside, the roar of the fire drowned out everything else, and one look up at the roof told her a fire extinguisher would do little good. The flames had grown across this half of the building and were reaching up six feet in some places.