Chapter 5 The Scent of Death, Cordite, And Blood #3
Movement in my peripheral vision catches my attention—Lorenzo sprinting across the parking lot as rounds chew up blacktop at his heels.
He reaches the relative cover of the rear of Club Sin, dropping to a knee and ripping off a series of bursts intended more to suppress than to kill, although he does drop at least one tango.
He's in motion again almost immediately, sprinting hard for the doorway.
He grunts in pain as he nears the SUV a few feet away from the one I'm taking cover behind, stumbling and tripping into a tuck-and-roll, skidding to a halt on his back and then scrambling behind the wheel, gasping raggedly.
"Motherfucker," he pants in English. "They shot me in the ass." This is in Portuguese.
"Show me."
"I'm fine. Grazed it. Not to worry." His nose is bleeding and his shirt is cut at his belly, a thin red line slicing across his navel.
"And that?" I say, jutting my chin at him.
"He was well fucking hidden," he answers, pauses to pop up and fire off a burst. "I stumbled over him, literally. Ended up a hand-to-hand fight, and he had a knife."
"You won, clearly."
He grins. "Please, meu amor. I was winning knife fights before I had fuzz on my lip ."
I know for a fact he isn't kidding or exaggerating.
Growing up a street rat in the violent favelas of Rio, his life was one of violence from the time he could walk.
We spoke of these things at length in the brief, beautiful delirium of teenage love, whispering to each other in stolen moments, sharing dreams and nightmares and histories with the wide-eyed wonder of youthful, wild, hormone-fueled desperation.
We take turns popping up and firing, dropping down and reloading, but the numbers are against us, and no matter how many we drop, they keep progressing closer to us, pouring withering suppressive fire at us as they make their rush. I hear a shout from above—a sound of wounded male rage.
"Who's hit?" I demand over the line.
"Toro," comes the reply. "My arm. No es anda. I am alright."
"Sounded bad," I answer.
"I do not enjoy being shot," comes his answer.
“Pussy.” Fonz says, “It's my favorite fuckin' thing."
"Because you are a strange little man."
"Enough chatter," I snap.
"They are getting very close," Toro says. "You should fall back to the door or you will be overwhelmed."
Lorenzo pops up and fires, drops back down. "He's right," he says to me. “Fall back. I'll cover."
My instinct is to argue that he should go first, but I swallow it—now is not the time to bicker.
I sprint for the door, yank it open—rounds bite into the wall inches from my face, spraying me with stinging flecks.
I slip down a few steps and drop prone with my rifle barrel on the top step.
I fire beneath the SUVs, and at least one man falls, gripping his ankle.
I lock eyes with him for a moment, and then my next burst erases his face.
"Go!" I snap. "Now!"
Lorenzo creeps backward, firing, blindly trusting me to stop him from toppling down the stairs. He has a bloody red line creasing his ass horizontally across the middle. I stop him with a hand on his back when he reaches the lip of the stairs.
"You have a second ass crack," I say as he slips down beside me.
"Don't tell the others," he mutters back. "They will give me some stupid nickname like Double Crack or Two Butts."
I cackle at this, and he glances at me with an odd expression.
"What's that look for?" I ask.
He snipes a tango as he passes between two SUVs, and then we both have to worm down further as return fire snaps over our heads. "You. You have smiled and laughed in the last hour." He grins at me, and then pops up to crack off a burst. "I like it."
I frown at him. "It isn't so strange." I take his place as he ducks down a few steps; the number of leg pairs still milling beyond the rings of SUVs is concerning. I key my mic. "How many are left, topside?" I ask.
"Perhaps twenty," Taj says. A pause, and then his voice, frantic. "Flashbang! Take cover!"
Lorenzo and I both scramble down the steps and away from the opening—just in time, too, as a cylindrical device clatters to the top step, rolls, wobbles at the edge, bounces, bounces, and then—
BANG!
Even with my eyes shut and my fingers plugging my ears, I'm disoriented and blinking and my ears are ringing. A hand yanks me backward with such unexpected force that both feet leave the ground; I’m airborne for a heartbeat and then my ass hits the floor with enough of an impact that the breath is jarred out of my lungs.
I blink away the rotating, flashing, coruscating lights to see Fonz on one knee in front of me, rifle at his shoulder, firing burst after burst up the stairwell.
Bullet holes pock the floor where I'd been had Fonz not yanked me backward.
Sucking in a breath, I make my feet and assess. Lorenzo is tucked against a bedroom door, pressed as flat as he can get, wincing as he blinks and shakes his head to clear the effects of the flashbang.
A barrage of rounds pepper down the stairs, chew up the doorframe next to Lorenzo's ear, divot the floor between Fonz's knees. Throwing himself backward, Fonz hits the floor on his back as another flurry of bullets craters the floor where he'd been.
He fires up the stairs from his back, and I hear a gurgling cry, thumping, and then a bleeding body topples to a stop at the base of the stairs.
"Them bitches almost had my number," Fonz mutters, eying the floor where he'd been.
For a moment, all is deafeningly silent.
And then…
A clatter of something hard bouncing off a stair, another. The something is small and round…
"GRENADE!" Fonz shouts, twisting to his hands and knees and lurching into a scrambling run.
Lorenzo is moving, too, a blur of shocking speed. His arm slams into my middle, just when I'd finally regained my breath from the last time, and I’m airborne once again, this time carried in Lorenzo’s arm, ass up and belly down like a toddler having a tantrum being carried out of a restaurant.
He throws me bodily around the corner of the hallway's end where it opens into the common area and then his body is surrounding mine, a hot solid envelope of masculine brawn sheltering me from the explosion.
The detonation shudders the walls and floor, rattles the droptiles of the ceiling, sending several of them fluttering to the floor. Shards and shrapnel whizz through the air and pepper the walls and floor and ceiling.
Silence, abrupt and total, except for the ringing in my ears I fear will be permanent.
Lorenzo staggers to his feet and hauls me to mine; I hold on to his arm as I struggle to catch my breath yet again, coughing as acrid smoke billows. Emergency lights flash. Electricity arcs and sparks in the ceiling over the blast site, blue-white light obscured by smoke.
Shadows move in the swirling smoke, lit in strobe effect by the sparking of electricity and flashing emergency lights.
"Contact!" Lorenzo shouts, rifle crashing to his shoulder and jerking as he fires into the eddying smoke.
Coughing, gasping, wheezing, I drop to a knee beside and behind him, aiming high. Between bursts, I hear a low groan.
"Fonz?" I call. "Report!"
"It ain’t great, boss-lady," he grunts, his voice tight with pain. "Shrapnel to the leg."
"Gym," I snap. "Now."
"I can fight, boss. Just gotta tie this bitch down."
"Gym—now!” I shout, and then devolve into hacking as smoke fills my lungs all over again.
"Fuck," I hear him growl. "Hurts like a motherfucker." A moment later, he grunts again. "Oooh, nice, I’m bleedin' like a stuck pig. Very cool, love that for me. Yeah—gym. Gym sounds good. Pretty ladies to play doctor for me. And away…we…go!”
Lorenzo pauses and glances at me as he reloads. "He is always like that?"
"Yes," I answer. “Wildly inappropriate humor is his default setting for every situation."
"We heard an explosion," Toro says across the radio. "Report, por favor."
"Grenade," I answer. "Fonz took shrapnel to the leg but he's mobile."
"Mobile may be a bit of a stretch. Don't ask me to run any hundred-yard dashes," Fonz says over the radio. "But I ain't gonna die—owFUCK, woman, Jesus. No, tighter. FUCK!"
Lorenzo’s rifle chatters beside me again, and I add mine to the fray as more shapes glide through the smoke.
The scent of death, cordite, and blood is rife and thick and pungent.
Our rifles fall silent when no more shapes appear in the eddying, arc-lit pall of smoke.
"Moving," Lorenzo says.
I put my hand on his shoulder and follow him forward. Grit crunches under my feet. My toe hits something soft yet solid—a body. I glance down; sightless eyes stare at nothing. I slip in a pool of blood, and Lorenzo's hand flashes out to catch me, steady me. Another body. Another.
"Parking lot is clear," Toro says.
Moving slowly and cautiously in a crouch, barrel sweeping side to side, Lorenzo precedes me through the haze, stepping over rubble and bodies. They're piled at the base of the stairs.
"Jesus Cristo," Lorenzo mutters. "What a clusterfuck." He peers up the stairwell, but there isn't much to see: the explosion partially caved in the stairwell. "Clear down here," he says.
"We will have to exit through the club," I say. "Rendezvous at the SUVs ASAP. We need to get out of here in case there's a second wave."