The Damned Summer (The Ruin Trilogy) (16 page)

"I'll give you a ride," Spider had
replied. "I wanna show you something anyway."

Acid climbed up her throat as her fragile
plan already started to fall apart. "I still got a hangover, baby,"
she said. "I just wanted to walk and get some air, your bike will just
make my head hurt more."

"Just a short ride, and I'll drive slow,
promise."

She looked down, pulling her hands through
her long brown hair, stressing out.

"It'll be over before you know it, and
then I'll take you wherever you wanna go, no questions or anything."

She looked at him now, starting to get
scared. He never said shit like this.

He chuckled, grabbing her hand. "C'mon,
it'll be fun."

He dragged her out to his bike like a
frightened little girl, but he was true to his word. He stopped so she could
grab a pack of smokes and then drove up a couple blocks, parking under a
bridge. They could see the club house from where they sat, it was about three
city blocks away and considerably  downhill from the road they sat on.

They sat on his bike, looking down at their
hangout, smoking cigarettes and passing a flask of whiskey back and forth,
saying nothing.

A giant stop watch kept clicking in Margie's
head as they sat there, burning time.

"What are we doing?" she finally
gathered up the courage to ask, finishing the third cigarette in a row.

"Almost there, baby," he took
another swig. "Just a couple more minutes.

Ten minutes later, a SWAT team came out of
nowhere, storming into the club house. Gunfire started going off like a combat
zone.

"Oh my God!" Margie whispered.

"God ain't got nothin' to do with this
baby. He don't get his hands this dirty anymore."

"What are we going to do?"

He turned back, looking her in the eye.
"What are you going to do? Cause there is no we anymore, sweetheart."

Her view suddenly changed to inside the
clubhouse, as if she was watching a TV screen of the SWAT team as they busted
through the door, swarming in like ants. The room was already starting to cloud
up from the two tear gas grenades that had been thrown through each window on
either side of the room.

"Everybody on the floor, NOW!" The
lead cop demanded, moving his M-16 slowly around the room, ready to kill
scumbag bikers. Four more cops had already entered the room behind him, with
more and more coming through the doorway.

The clubhouse was pretty empty. A group of
biker chicks sat  at one table on the right side of the room and Pogo sitting
all by his lonesome in the corner on the left side. A half empty bottle of Dead
Ace Whiskey and a draft beer sat on his table. Two Props and one Berry stood at
the bar, drinking.

Fizz stood behind the bar, his hand already
holding the sawed off double barrel shotgun in one hand, below the bar, out of
sight for the moment. He had grabbed it as soon as the windows had been broken
from the grenades. He was surprisingly fast for such a big guy, swinging the
shotgun up, shooting both barrels into the lead cop, who flew back five feet,
hitting the wall with a thump.

The cop's bulletproof vest had taken most of
the shotgun blast, put the top of the shot hit him in the throat, ripping
through his gas mask and opening his carotid artery. He slowly slid to the
floor as blood filled his lungs and covered his black uniform. Before he hit
the ground, two of his fellow officers fired at Fizz's center mass, shredding
his heart to ribbons with at least a dozen bullets.

The three bikers on the other side of the bar
were sprayed with Fizz's blood. The two closest to the kill were the Props, and
they were covered with a significant amount of gore, while the farthest away
was the Berry, who barely got any of the mess on him.

"Hands up!" yelled one of the
officers, his rifle still smoking as he pointed it at the still living bikers.
Two more officers just coming through the door moved up and trained their
rifles on the the outlaws as well.

The Berry's hands shot towards the sky like
rockets. The Props' hands went towards the handguns under their vests as they
started swearing at the officers. The four officers peppered the the bikers
with bullets, making the bar look like a long term victim of termites as the
bikers did a brief, macabre dance of death and then fell to the floor. Blood
flowed across the floor like a maroon oil slick.

Pogo, still hiding in the corner, pulled his
brand new .44 magnum that he had just bought last week after seeing a movie
where some Hollywood bad-ass was slinging it around like he actually knew how
to kill people.
Just as the cops turned his way he got the first shot
off, hitting one of them right in the eye lens of his gas mask, going right
through the lens, his eye, then his head, and continuing through the back of
his helmet. Pogo would have been quite happy with the power of his new hand
cannon, if one of the other officers wouldn't have quickly returned fire,
putting a bullet from his M-16 into his right eye. That bullet also went right
through Pogo's brain and out the back of his skull.

Beans was also behind the bar. Luckily for
him, he had been crouched down, looking in one of the lower compartments of the
bar for a bottle of Dead Ace Whiskey that he swore he saw last week.

As soon as the door was kicked open, Beans
pulled his Walther PPK pistol from the holster under his arm with his right
hand and his Ka-Bar knife from its sheath on his belt with his left hand. Both
had been weapons he used in the tunnels, and he carried them at all times now,
along with the pliers in his back pocket. Once Beans had weapons in both hands,
Fizz had let loose with the shotgun, and then quickly dropped right after.

"So much for standing up,"
Beans thought to himself as he saw the big
man crumple to the floor. Crawling to the end of the bar, he slowly peeked
around it, hearing two more shots go off, which would have made a normal man
flinch, Beans didn't even blink. He could see a cop pointing his rifle at a
biker chick who was on her knees, the rest of the women were already on their
bellies. He was yelling that she get the rest of the way down. She replied by
screeching something about Pogo and then spitting on his gas mask. He shot her
straight between the eyes. Gray tear gas was making everything in front of the
bar smoky and dim.

Beans raised his PPK, aiming it at the cop's
helmet, when another cop walked around the bar from the other side. Beans
looked upward as the cop looked down, their eyes meet at the exact same time.

As the cop started to lower his rifle towards
Beans, the tunnel rat shot up like a rattlesnake, stabbing his Ka-Bar to the
hilt in the cop's throat. As the cop dropped his M-16 and started gurgling,
Beans leaned to the right, shooting the cop that just killed the chick twice in
the chest. The cop's vest stopped the bullets, but they still hurt like hell,
knocking him back against the wall and then dropping him to a knee as he
clenched his chest.

The knifed cop's knees started to buckle as
Beans rotated around him, intending to use him as a bulletproof shield, but he
was quickly discovering that was harder than he had anticipated. For starters
the dead cop was about a foot taller than Beans and over one hundred pounds
heavier, thus making it very hard to keep the large body up with one hand,
while he tried to shoot at the cops with his other.

Everything was moving at light speed during
all this, so while Beans was coming to the conclusion he was going to have to
let his shield fall, it started slumping downward regardless of his efforts.
During this time Beans was also aiming at the next cop he saw, who was aiming
at him as well.

Having no choice, Beans let the body fall,
but he fell with it, firing at the cop as he went down with the body shield.
The cop Beans was aiming at returned fire, along with three of his fellow
officers.

Beans got three shots off, the first scraping
the paint off the side of the cop's helmet as it buzzed by, the second hitting
him on the right side of his jaw and the third went into the left cheek, right
below his eye.

The cop that Beans hit got two shots off with
his M-16. The first shot hit Beans in the shoulder, the second buzzed by about
an inch too high.

The other three cops managed to hit Beans in
the wrist, shattering the bone, two more bullets ripped through his forearm and
one hit his bicep, clipping the bone as it raged past. The last bullet licked
past his head, slicing off a large hunk of his ear.

Of the three cops standing, one went to his
wounded comrade, one moved towards the door leading into the back room and one
moved up to Beans. Four more cops came through the front door and made their
way to the next closed door behind the first cop.

Beans' eyes burned with rage and pain as he
glared back at the cop looking down at him, his rifle trained on his head. The
cop looked him over, noticing the PPK had fallen well out of the bikers reach,
even though he was in no shape to make a move for it even if it was. The cop
saw what was left of the tattoo on Beans arm.

"No wonder," the cop said with a
smirk. "You tunnel rats always were shit-bird crazy." He put two
rounds into Beans' head.

Five more SWAT officers moved into the room
from outside.

"Blue team go to the closed door and
prepare to hit it," said the cop that had just shot Beans. "Rudd and
Pearcy," he pointed to two of the cops that had been first through the
door. "Secure the women." He pointed to two others that had been some
of the first to enter the bar. "Johnson and Blotzer, guard the door after
we go through, in case any bikers manage to circle behind us." Walking up
to the closed door he reloaded his rifle, as did all the others who had shot.

Once Beans' killer's weapon was ready and he
was close to the door, he gave the command to kick it and go.

The eleven officers busted the door and moved
into the large room, spreading out as they checked the corners and the insides
of the vehicles not yet chopped. A lone biker was in the back corner of the
room, using a loud sandblaster on something. His back was to them and he seemed
oblivious to their presence.

The lead cop pointed to five of his men and
pointed them to the mezzanine, they quickly moved up the steps to check the
small room. He pointed at the other three to follow him to the lone biker.

Once they were within six feet of the biker
they stopped, rifles aimed at his back. After yelling three times to get his
attention, the lead cop gave up trying to be heard over the sandblaster the
biker was using to get the paint off of a gas tank from a motorcycle. Grabbing
a wrench off the nearby workbench, he chucked it at the biker, harder than what
was necessary.

The biker turned the blaster off. "What
the fu---" Paint started to say as he turned and saw who had just hit him
in the back. "Oh shit," he replied from behind the plastic face shield
he was wearing. A M-16 was about two inches from the face shield, pointing
directly at his nose. 

She was back on the hill, beside Spider,
listening to the gunfire. Her voice was gone, all she could think of was the
bullets flying down in the club. How everyone she knew down there was dying
right now.

"I told you I'd take you wherever you
wanted to go, no questions, no hassles. Just name it."

"You would let me go?"

"Yeah, for now anyways," he nodded.
"You pretty much served your usefulness for now. Franky was the one that I
wanted to have stick around, you were just a tool in the plan."

"What?" things just kept making
less and less sense.

Spider let out a sigh. "It's obvious
he's not going to come back for you, so I got no reason to keep you around as
bait." He shook his head. "It always amazes me, even the best laid
plans can fall to pieces just because one dipshit mortal changes their mind
about something. C'mon, let's get you on that train."

He kicked the bike on and took off, taking
her straight to the train station.

She climbed off the bike, numb from head to
toe, unable to truly believe she was escaping him. That he was just letting her
leave.

"Run on home Margie," Spider
smiled.

She turned from him, walking away, afraid to
look back, afraid he would be right behind her, about to grab her and drag her
back to the massacre at the club house.

"I'll be seeing you around honey!"
He yelled out to her as she escaped down the stairways to the underground
station.

The dream jerked her awake. Looking over she
could see Jake sleeping in a nearby death chair.

She resisted the urge to slap him upside the
head, telling him that healthy people had no business sitting in that chair,
and to show some respect for the dying.

"The stupidity of youth,"
she thought to herself, thinking not only of
her son now, but herself at his age. A lone tear traveled down her face.

It was a busy morning at Joe's Cup, so Drew
didn't see much of Jenny, since she waited tables and he was stuck at the grill
in the back. The passing of time slowly wore off the queasy stomach from the
hangover, which was replaced with the oh so familiar Jenny butterflies.