🚀 go-pugleaf

Barfing Sheets Of Flame


The sporadic <brup...brup> sounds might have made less of an
impression were it not for the noise of shattering glass and
ricocheting bullets. Luc Vesper cursed the idiocy of the police
administration as he loaded another clip into the modified Imgram
and squinted through the haze of falling plaster for a target. The
Imgrams were notoriously inaccurate in standard issue, and their
accuracy dropped abysmally with the addition of the silencers which
had been added. Some idiot had insisted on making the silencers
standard issue using the logic that too much noisy gunfire was
likely to disturb whole neighbourhoods. "Whole neighbourhoods!"
cursed Vesper, "this whole fucking neighbourhood could suffer a
direct nuclear strike and it wouldn't cause a moment's concern to
the human scum who poured heroin into their veins.

<brup...brup> Vesper released a few bursts at the dark hallway more
in frustration than in hopes of hitting a target. "Maudit
arseholes!" Vesper shouted as a spray of buckshot ripped over his
head and tore a hole in the wall. This was another drug bust which
had gone wrong. Every drug bust seemed to go wrong these days. In
four days... no, make that five since the current nightmare had
already crossed midnight's threshold... in five days he'd been in
seven different gun battles. "And they call this a fucking
civilized country?" shouted Vesper whose only response was another
round of buckshot which raked the doorframe to his left.

His partner, the one who should have been backing him up was
nowhere to be seen... probably pissing his pants or puking his guts
out in some alley where he had run to avoid the conflict. In the
preceding seven weeks Vesper had lost three partners. For all he
knew his current partner might be lying somewhere within the
building with his skull opened and brains splattered across a wall
from a close encounter with a shotgun. <brup brup> Vesper released
another burst and rolled quickly to his right. He gambled and kept
his head up to watch the responding shotgun blast. There was
something almost elegant in the sheet of red flame which barfed
from his opponent's gun. The buckshot whined as it bounced from the
overturned steel desk which had been his former refuge.

He squeezed and held the trigger as his Imgram cut a wildly dancing
pattern of bullets at the origin of the shotgun blast which was
still ghosting in his retinae. A horrific scream emerged from his
target. Vesper fired another burst and was pleased to hear the
drumming of the target's boots as he spasmodically reacted to
another hit.

From the murky distance of the street Vesper heard the squealing
arrival of a backup unit... the unit that had been called nearly an
hour ago. "Merde, more assholes who'd just as likely shoot me as
the bad guys." Vesper laughed as he remembered another fucking
brilliant regulation... the one that said that undercover officers
should don fluorescent orange vests with "Police" spelled out in
bold letters in the event of an "officer needs assistance call".
Right, he could just imagine the skin searches and other probes
which his targets had conducted looking for a wire. He shook his
head sadly, remembering the second last gun battle. The only ones
wearing fucking fluorescent vests when the shit hit the fan were
the bad guys. Half of Vesper's squad was iced by the backup unit
before things could get sorted out.

"Homicide... I've got to get into Homicide," decided Vesper. At
least in homicide the bad guys didn't kill people as an
parenthetical sideline of doing business the way the druggies did.
He winced as an embedded piece of shrapnel from an earlier wound
dug into his thigh. "Yeah, Homicide's the ticket for sure. I'm too
old for this cowboy shit."

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Brought to you by the Shepherds of Grace and Danger, Ottawa, Canada.

           "We will breach no sheep before their time."