That Son of a Bitch
Crash!
The sound of a window shattering came with the barricade going with it. Parking myself on the second floor on a hunch had been the right call. Not far off, I could hear people moving.
Judging by the footsteps, two of them… no, closer to three. Nothing useful coming in from the teammates downstairs. Safe to assume whoever was left was on the first floor.
If I jumped them now, I’d eat a pincer from both floors and die for it. Sitting here and waiting them out wasn’t an option either.
Like it or not, a fight was coming. The only real card I had left was an ambush. Taking three of them head-on was a stretch, and nothing cut their numbers down with less risk — and more effect — than hitting them before they knew I was there.
Ambush work is all about timing. Spring it when they can still answer and you might as well not have bothered. The window they would have the hardest time answering: they would almost certainly creep in slow, sweeping every corner.
An ambush itself isn’t complicated. You don’t need some grand operation. You come out of a place they never accounted for and you shoot. That’s an ambush.
Thump. Thump.
Footsteps.
I was in a small room that passed for a closet, or a changing room, depending on who you asked. The useful quirk was the diagonal doorway — you couldn’t read the whole interior in a single glance.
The footsteps stopped. They were going to clear it one pocket at a time, on the chance someone was hiding. As if to prove me right, a muzzle eased slowly through the entrance.
I was glued to the wall just beside the door, so they still hadn’t seen me. I waited the way a predator waits for the prey to step fully into range. The one in front came in with the rifle shouldered, checking every angle of the changing room.
Crack!
I smashed the gun down hard and ripped the knife off my belt in the same motion. Two seconds, at most, before they understood what was happening and tried to answer. More than enough. Far more.
Still trying to process it, their eyes rolled toward me. A beat late, they registered that someone was here and started to move—
Thuck!
The knife was already buried deep in the side of their neck.
“Kh—hk…!”
A look like they meant to scream that I was in here. With a blade that deep in the throat, a proper voice was never coming out of a windpipe full of blood.
One down, clean, no damage taken. No time to enjoy it. The second they saw the kill log, they’d know exactly where I was.
No lingering.
I pulled the sniper rifle off my back and burst out of the changing room. One of them was still sweeping the hall, checking every angle. Whether they hadn’t registered the teammate dying or just hadn’t looked this way yet, they never even glanced at me.
I put the scope on them.
Dropping both remaining at once was a fantasy in this spot. Bolt-action: one shot, then a cycle. They’d react first.
The one who had to die first was whoever looked most dangerous right now.
Bang!
A short report, and the head of the player walking the corridor punched clean through. A headshot — and from a sniper rifle, no less — so they went down without so much as a twitch of resistance. The grenade launcher they’d been carrying hit the floor with them.
Biggest threat gone. All that was left was to answer the last one cleanly.
Dadadadadada!
The survivor confirmed the teammate was dead and started dumping rounds like they’d lost their mind. Rushed fire, no real sight picture, grouping so ugly I almost wondered if they were shooting a shotgun.
I wasn’t about to stand there and eat garbage like that.
Ting!
I slipped the incoming rounds and worked the bolt. The spent casing rang off something and spun away. I shoved the bolt home and seated the next round.
“Fuck…! Is that even a person?”
What, did I look like a monster to them?
They’d been around the game long enough, at least. The reload was fast. They finished it in the sliver they thought was a gap and set up for the next burst, stance a little more settled than before.
Still nowhere near good enough to actually hit me. Reload speed was the only thing worth looking at. Or maybe wasting that much ammo was exactly why they’d gotten so quick at stuffing magazines.
Dadadadadada!
While I was thinking useless thoughts, another spray came hunting for my life. Center mass, upper body — easy to read what they were aiming at. I rolled my shoulders through it and let the rounds hiss past.
No reason to close. With a sniper, getting nearer only made the shot harder.
Fast reloads, though. Leave them like this and they’d be topped off and shooting again in a second.
Unless you catch something vital, people are surprisingly hard to put down.
I settled the rifle on them. A few rounds kissed past and took chips out of me, nothing fatal. This was exactly when you stayed calm. Spray-and-pray only hands the other person a window, and that’s just stupid.
One shot. It had to end on one shot.
Dadadada!
I watched the hail of bullets through the glass and eased the trigger.
Bang!
A heavy report, and a single round went the other way against that storm. It spun hard and true, no deviation at all, and punched out through the underside of his jaw.
I checked myself against that clean little score. No critical hits, but the chip damage had added up — the HP gauge was down by nearly half.
And as if that weren’t enough, something started moving below.
High odds they were coming up here. Even if they walked straight at me I wouldn’t have minded much, but a straight-up gunfight was a bad deal for me.
No helping it, then.
The noise was coming from the first-floor counter. They’d be getting ready to climb the spiral stair beside it.
I eased over to the railing. The fence meant to keep people from dropping to the first floor was solid enough. Wouldn’t have mattered much if it hadn’t been.
With that thought I wrapped the rope I’d staged ahead of time, set my feet, and swung over, planting both soles on the wall and locking into a reverse rappel.
My vision whipped, then inverted — ceiling becoming floor, floor becoming ceiling — and the empty teller window greeted me upside down.
About three seconds, all told.
Right after that, three armed hostiles came in sweeping every angle, smashing through the wall of the room across from the window I was aiming through and pushing toward the stairs. They piled through the roughly circular hole they’d cut and kept coming.
I dropped the outline of the lead man dead in the center of the crosshairs.
No hesitation in what came next.
Bang!
A shallow kick of recoil brushed my shoulder. His head opened on the first shot and he folded where he stood, the score popping with him.
Shooting inverted after so long sent the blood rushing to my head. I eased off the tension, turned through a full rotation, and landed on the first floor. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, the two who were left closed in and boxed me.
“Yeah. I’m dead.”
I’d more or less seen this coming. Half a health bar and a sniper rifle in a face-to-face was a fight I was never going to win. If I dragged it out I might have tagged them a little more, but I didn’t see the point.
The teammates still standing would handle the rest.
“Go on. Kill me.”
The words were barely out before a round went through my skull.
A lethal zone. Doesn’t matter how much HP you have left — one shot and you’re gone. The viewpoint jerked, and for a beat I got the angle of the player who’d killed me. A killcam. You get to watch exactly how you died.
On a normal day I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Least of all in a mode where you don’t even respawn. The killcam was even further down the list of things I cared about.
On a normal day.
I watched it without thinking. The gunshot, my character hitting the floor. Fine, up to there. What came next was more than enough to put shock and fury through me in the same breath.
The player who’d killed me started dropping into a squat and standing back up over my corpse, over and over, baiting me.
The chat rolling in only fed the anger.
Before I knew it, I was muttering to myself.