The Daily Grind - Chapter 111 (Patreon)

Keeping up the pace.  One a week.  One a week, *forever*.

_____

The car screamed into the school zone with approximately zero regard for such petty things as ‘rules’ or ‘speed limits’.

James had several ranks in driving.  And he’d used them before, sure.  But he’d never *used* them.  Not like this; pushing his imbued skills and his physical ability to the absolute limits.  He had slipped into a state of total awareness, his hands guiding the vehicle through pinpoint turns, wheels screaming in protest as they wove through other cars, pedestrians, and sometimes trees.  The world flashed by outside, a blur that left Nate white-knuckled on the armrest and James baring his teeth as he processed the incoming information on pure magical instinct.

The high school loomed, approaching at eighty miles an hour.  James didn’t bother with the driveway, didn’t take the time to pull through the pack of busses lining up to leave.  Instead, he threaded the needle between two groups of students that were still unaware of the onrushing Subaru-shaped projectile, and launched his car over the sloped lawn that separated the road from the building itself.

His eyes had caught something, his hands had reacted before his brain really processed it.  But as his car bottomed out in the half-empty parking lot, bumper scraping against the asphalt, James didn’t slow.  He slammed on the gas again, pulling the hardest right turn possible, and impacted the man in the black suit and sunglasses who was currently trying to shove Lua’s unconscious body into the back seat of a car.

The man, James’ had just enough time to process as the sound of denting metal and crunching bone echoed, looked like an extra from Men In Black.  Bald, rectangular head. Clean shaven, vaguely tan skin.  Sunglasses that were currently flying off somewhere, along with an earpiece now flapping in the air along with his cheap suit jacket.  He windmilled through the air, before slamming into the pavement and sliding, rather than rolling, several dozen feet before nailing his head against the driver’s door of a parked car.

“Go!”  James screamed, slamming on the brakes and skidding the car to a halt at a right angle to the aisle, forty feet away.

The others didn’t hesitate.  Nate threw his door open so hard as he sprung out of the seat that it slammed back into place on the momentum.  But he wasn’t there to get hit; the stocky chef looking strangely out of place with the compact, deadly looking mechanism of the rifle held professionally against his shoulder, all while wearing a stained apron and white cap.  He advanced on the agent’s car in a low crouch, steps short and precise.

Simon and the elder didn’t have the same kind of training.  They scrambled out the rear doors, Simon with a pistol in hand, the camraconda with just his natural weapons, and charged the car with Nate anyway.  Circling around, trying to get a good angle on the other agent.

They didn’t need to bother.  The man stepped out from behind the vehicle, face furious beneath his sunglasses.  The second he saw Nate, he flicked a hand, and something changed.

“Freeze!”  Nate bellowed, voice commanding and clearly prepared to take no shit.  Around them, the students who were were starting to leave for the day took notice.  A few shouts sounded.

The man didn’t freeze.  James, stepping out of the car himself, saw that he was no longer just wearing a suit.  He had a glimmering copper and ivory bracer on his left arm, and his right leg was encased in a gleaming silver greave.  He also had his service pistol unholstered, and was firing at Nate.

The first shot went wide, probably because he’d just watched his partner get flattened by a beige metal brick, and was a little shaken.  The second one never came.

The agent froze in place, the elder locking his camera gaze onto the man, solidifying his grip on the pistol with the trigger half depressed.

“He said freeze.”  James hissed out as he stepped out of the car, sprinting over toward where they’d unceremoniously dropped Lua.

“Simon!  Check the other one!”  Nate snapped, and the younger man rushed to obey.  The whole time, he kept the rifle up and on the frozen agent, though he did sidestep out of the line of fire for the pistol.

James approached their car - a black sedan, *of course* - and circled around behind the elder, careful not to block his line of sight.  He was ten feet away when the agent started to move.

The bracer on the man’s arm suddenly sparked slightly, and James saw what looked like a latticework sphere flicker in the air around him.  And then, all of a sudden, the man was moving.  The gun fired twice, hitting nothing but parked cars, and then his head snapped toward James, the gun pivoting in his direction even as the platemail boot on his leg also started to spark in the afternoon air.  

James shot him.

The Walther P38 was a marvel of German engineering.  It was cheap, durable, and continued to be useful in the modern era if you were interested in putting 9mm holes in people.  It was also a gun that James felt so comfortable with that he was pretty sure he could go target shooting while asleep.  That, mixed with his upgraded ‘Aim’, made missing a distant memory for him.

The first bullet caught the agent in the chest, just above the heart.  This caused the man to stagger slightly, and let out a rough grunt.  Then the agent’s bracer flashed again, and the second through eighth bullets slammed into a barrier of glittering golden light that suddenly started flaring into existence every time one of the shots was fired.

The man instantly froze when this happened, the elder camraconda not having looked away, even as his gaze had stopped having an effect.

Then *Nate* shot the man, and the .308 round burrowed through his throat in a spray of blood that held itself static in the air a second after emerging.

If only a few people had noticed the fight happening before, the crack of the rifle certainly demanded some more attention. Now that their skirmish had been going more than ten seconds, James was hearing screams and the sounds of panic from all around.

He ran past the downed agent to check on Lua, and was almost to the car when Simon slammed into its bumper, back first.  James spun in place, yelling a warning, and trying to ignore the cracking sound he’d heard when the kid had hit.  The other agent was up, on his feet, leg raised like he’d just delivered a roundhouse kick.  He *also* had a silver greave on, identical to the first agent.  Too, he had the same kind of bracer on his arm.

Nate threw himself sideways, hitting the ground in a way that was going to leave a dozen tiny scrapes across his bare arms as the agent started shooting at him.  He rolled sideways, grabbing a startled camraconda as he did so, and not stopping until the two of them were in a low crouch behind someone’s pickup truck.

Whoever owned that truck was going to have a hell of an insurance claim to make, as bullets continued to slam into it.  James, crouched behind the car just in front of the agency sedan, watched as the man in the suit just kept firing, over and over.  Every fifteen rounds or so, a flare of light showed from under his coat sleeve, and he’d just keep shooting.  It took about thirty seconds - what felt like a couple hundred shots - for James to catch a glimpse of the bracelet he was wearing.  A glance at the downed agent showed a similar bangle on his own wrist.

And the first agent *was* down now.  Lying with wide, empty eyes up toward the sky, in a pool of his own blood.  James would find time to be horrified and revolted later.  Right now…

“They’ve got shields!”  He yelled at Nate, who was braving return fire to try to force the agent into cover with a couple snapped off shots of his own.  The air-rippling crack of the rifle drowning out the snaps of the pistol.  “They block one thing at a time!  Elder, lock him down!”

James *felt* the sensation of attention being turned on him, and was already moving by the time the agent started shooting his way.  Bullets landing in perfectly grouped clusters where his head was a second ago, ruining yet another high schooler’s car.  James winced and flinched as bullets struck the asphalt around him, or ricocheted off other cars, his enhanced brain just barely keeping up with the fact that the angles were changing and he knew the agent was moving.  Running perpendicular to the fight, trying to get an angle on where they were all hiding.

A line of burning lanced its way across his leg, and he nearly toppled sideways as a trio of ricocheting bullets tore across his thigh.  James snarled, but stayed crouched, and waited for the moment.

Then the gunfire stopped.  Suddenly, and sharply, the air was silent.

“Now!”  James yelled, popping up and unloading the rest of his ammo on the frozen form of the agent.  His bullets just seemed to stagger the man, though, knocking him around but not injuring.  Even the ones that *very deliberately* hit him in the head.

Nate’s shots didn’t do that.  Nate’s bullets put big, problematic holes in the target.  In the *person*.  Sprays of human blood painting the parking lot a slightly darker shade, the smell of death taking over the air like a miasma.

“Clear!”  Nate shouted.

“Holy shit.”  James choked the words out. “Holy shit…” He was broken out of his combat shock by Nate slapping him on the shoulder.  “We just killed two people.”  James muttered.

“I killed two people.”  Nate said flatly.  “You helped.  Kinda surprised the car hit didn’t put the first fuck down, though.”  His voice was loud; a bit too loud.  He was speaking up to hear himself through the earplugs, and James was kinda grateful because he’d neglected ear protection entirely, and now felt like an idiot as the ringing in his ears intensified.

“We should… we should go.”  James gasped for breath he hadn’t realized he was short on.  His hands vibrated on the grip of his gun.  “Fuck, there’s two more.  And there’s people watching us.  And running.”  He looked around at the parking lot.  “Shit.  We need to get Simon and Lua out of here.  And also…”  James holstered his gun, and took a series of long steps toward where a cluster of teachers and security officers were cautiously making their way toward him.  “FBI!”  He shouted, pulling his absolutely fake badge out of his pocket and holding it aloft.  “Fuck off!”

Nate raised his eyebrows at that.  He raised his eyebrows even further when one of the security staff said something to the group, and they *actually fucked off*, retreating to the safe distance of the school courtyard.  “No fucking way we’re the FBI.”  He muttered to himself.  Though it didn’t really matter, did it?  Right now, they held authority over the field by virtue of being the only ones alive and armed. He’d ask James later; right now, he was still on his guard, in a low profile near the tall frame of the pickup truck, rifle barrel kept steady, but pointed down at the ground.

There was a pause, and James listened around him, trying to catch any hint of incoming conflict, or the other two agents. 

Then Momo arrived.

She didn’t jump a lawn like James had chosen to. Instead, she wove through the line of busses, behind which students taking cover tried to wave her down.  Casually slipping past one of the braver security staff that was stopping traffic, she rolled over the curb, cut through two lines of parking lot, and slammed on the brakes with an awkwardly hard stomp as she came upon the site of the battle.

It had been under five minutes since the fighting started.

“What happened?!”  Momo screamed out her rolled down driver’s window, Frequency-Of-Sunlight coiled in the passenger seat next to her, equally wide-eyed as the two of them looked to James for answers.

“No time.  Get Simon into the car, get him to a hospital, now.”  James barked, pointing one arm out even as he was taking long loping steps to one of the downed agents.  “Sunny, keep him locked!  I think he broke something!  Take Lua too!”  He knelt by the dead man, and tried for a second to pull the bracer off, before deciding it was a waste of precious time.  “Here.”  He tossed the much easier to remove bracelet to Nate, slipping behind a van to grab the second bracelet off the other corpse.  “Ugh.”  He covered his mouth against the smell of blood and bile, but his anger was still simmering, and it kept him steady enough as he looted the body.  He didn’t even think of trying for the greaves.

“Mmuhh?”  The soft voice made James’ head snap up.  “What’s happening?”

“Lua.”  He rose up, slipping the bracelet onto his own wrist as he approached where Nate was settling the therapist back onto her own feet from where he’d been carrying her.  “Where are the kids?”  James asked sharply.

She shook her head, short brown hair rustling in the wind.  “They… oh god, I think they killed Alexis.”  Lua looked somehow worse after regaining consciousness.  “The others.  The others!  They ran!  They’ll go… north.  Toward the old quarry.  They have a spot up on the hill over it.  The agents were following them!”  Lua looked around, seeming to only just notice how heavily armed the man supporting her was.  “Wait, the men who hit me…”

“Don’t worry about that now.”  Momo said, stepping up and wedging a shoulder under Lua’s arm.  “We’re getting you two to the hospital.”  She said, as much bravery as she could get in her voice.  “James.”  The word was a knife in the air.  “Here.  I got it working.  The activation is a triangle of cigarette ash around it, and one strike to the base.  Don’t point it at anything you want intact.”  She awkwardly dug through the dozens of pockets in her longcoat until she found what she was looking for, and tossed a simple padlock to James.

The weight of it hurt his hand as he caught it.  He had a million questions.  None of them did he have time for now.  “Thanks.”  He said instead.  “Nate, ready?”

“No.”  The older man said, slamming the rear door of James’ car behind the elder before getting into the passenger seat himself, awkwardly trying to position the rifle in a way that he could easily use.  “Let’s go.”

James practically swung himself into the driver’s seat, not bothering to buckle up as he hit the gas.  In the back seat, the camraconda lurched backward, tumbling slightly into the trunk door.  “Old quarry.”  He muttered to himself.  “Okay, that’s a left, and then a straight shot.”  James took a shaky breath, before throwing his car in reverse, hooking a turn, and driving right back over the lawn he came in through.  “Where the fuck are the police?”  James demanded as he sped past clusters of students that were brave or stupid to have tried to hide behind cars or trees instead of just running.  

“They take longer to respond than you might think.  Especially when you’re not sticking around to cause collateral damage.”  Nate informed him.  James spared the man a glance; he was fiddling with the bracelet on his wrist, and didn’t seem to *care* at what they’d just done.  “Huh.  Weird.  Okay, got it.”  He did something, and James felt a twisting in the air of the car.  “Maybe don’t do it while you’re driving, but you might want to bring up the bracelet’s abilities.”

“It’s what?”  James asked.  That was a mistake.  Apparently just thinking about it was enough to do the trick.  And the words dove into his field of vision, almost making him veer off the road.

[Bind Firearm - 3- 88 / 300 - 128:14:3:18 (1)

Cluster Shot - 54 - 16,794 / 100,000 - 18:12 (44)

Munitions Dump - 23 - 1,002 / 2,000 - 10:01 (103)]

Nate whistled.  “Okay, I’m not that good at math, but I think this guy dumped a few hundred thousand rounds into the world.  What’s that thing you keep saying about fucking entropy?”

“That’s not… what…”  James started to say, and then trailed off.  “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve got jitters.”  Nate said calmly, pointing at where James’ hands were vibrating on the steering wheel.  “Happens to everyone after a fight.  You need a distraction.”

“I’ve been in fights before.”

“Yeah?”  Nate didn’t really ask, just raised his eyebrows, already knowing he didn’t believe James.  “Like that one?  Where you hit a human with a car hard enough to pancake most people?”  The chef shook his head.  “No, you’ve never shot at anyone.  Never been shot at, either.”

“I’ve been shot at by mainframes.”  James replied, feeling strangely defensive.  “Hurt less though.”

“You hit?”  Nate sharply looked over and scanned over James’ body.

“In the leg.  I’m fine.  I clot faster than most people.”

“Of course you fucking do.”  Nate muttered.  “So, what’s up with the magic gun bracelet?”

“No idea.”  James said, latching onto the conversational life raft with a sigh.  “The name’s are descriptive, which is unusual.  One of the numbers is…” he watched his readout out of the corner of his eye as he drove through a winding side street surrounded by trees that were just starting to recover from winter.  “..Yeah, definitely a countdown.  The rest could be anything, though I’ll be the x-out-of-x is uses.  Dunno if it’s going down or up though.  Hey, do you smoke?”  James asked out of nowhere

“Up.”  Nate said.  “At least, it did when I binded my gun.  And yes.”

“Bonded.”  James replied reflexively.  “Or ‘bound’.”  He flicked his eyes to the rear view mirror, and caught the camera lens of the elder in the back seat.  “That’s called perfect past tense; there’s four types of past tense, and they’re all stupid.”  James informed the camraconda, who had been curious about everything *except* a language lesson.

James wanted to say something else.  Wanted to tell the elder thank you, or that he was sorry.  Wanted to say he didn’t understand what was happening, or why.  Wanted to scream, to cry, to throw up, to ask why those men were killers, to demand to know why he’d had to kill them in turn.  Instead, he did what he always did.

Made a joke.  Wore dry wit like armor.

Or, in this case, armed himself.  “I normally don’t say this, but I need you to smoke in my car.”  James told Nate, pulling out the ashtray that he kept loose change in, and dumping the coins to the floor, and handing the plastic container to Nate.  The man just shrugged, and pulled out a cigarette, happy to oblige.  “I’m opening the window, though.”  James dryly commented.

It took a couple minutes of the car rolling along in silence, before Nate stubbed out his smoke, and spoke.  “Hey.”  Nate said gruffly.  “Car coming up.”  He pointed, and James looked.

They were approaching the traffic light at the intersection of the main road.  The building on top of what used to be a stone quarry would be ahead, on the right, with a hilltop park overlooking it.  Right in front of them was another car, parked at the light.  A minivan, and not important.

But just in front of it, a black sedan had pulled off to the side of the road.

And out of that car, from the passenger door, a man in a suit had stepped up to the curb and was politely talking to a pair of nervous looking teenagers.

“I am not ready for this.”  James said, his voice shaking.

“Bind your gun.”  Nate told him, firmly.  “We’ve got this.”

From behind him, James felt the elder’s snoot bump into his shoulder.  He took as deep a breath as he could, trying to quiet the screaming voice inside him.  It had been one thing, to ambush the first agents.  They’d been in the process of hurting one of his people, and James had been *furious*.  But now that fury was spent, leaving only a quiet uncertainty that he’d done the right thing.

But here, they’d come up on them at exactly the right time again.  Mysterious government agents, accosting some kids whos main crime was knowing something weird.  Also sort of blocking traffic.

James felt that spark of anger reignite, if not to the same blaze as before.

“Nate, hit the car.  Elder, with me on the sidewalk.”  James felt his voice come out cold.  He kept one hand on the wheel while he pulled his pistol out of his holster, and sent a mental command to the bracelet on his wrist.  ‘Bind weapon? Please?’ He thought at it, hoping he’d hit the mark.

There was a rush of power, and a flare of copper light, and James knew it had worked.

He pulled up behind the van, carefully adding himself to the flow of normal traffic.  Everything was normal, everything was fine.  There was *absolutely no reason* for the agents to suspect there was about to be a huge problem.

James waited for the light to turn green, edged forward just enough that they were near parallel to the sedan.  He could see the faces of the two kids now, as they pressed their backs up against the brick wall that separated the sidewalk from the residential gardens behind it, fear painted on their features.  The agent, clearly ordering them into the car, one hand on his gun in a casual display of authoritative violence.

The anger was back now.

The car behind James honked, once, as he came to a stop.  The agent on the street, and probably the one behind the black tinted window, both looked over.  And that was all it took to blow the ambush.

It was too little, too late, for the agency goons.

Nate started firing *through* James’ passenger window.  The first shot blew a hole through the window, the second collapsed what was left into safely broken shards.  Then he just opened up, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger, practically unable to miss with his line of fire lined up to the driver’s window of the other car.

James himself burst out of the driver’s seat, keeping himself low to the side of his car as he circled around the rear, gun in one hand and ashtray in the other.  Through the trunk window, the elder had gotten a good look at the agent streetside, but that would only last a second or two if they had shields like the first ones.  So he moved fast, taking one a few rapid steps to cover the ground, and pop up in a firing position.  He barely had time to acknowledge the flare of golden light from the driver’s seat as Nate’s bullets were deflected.

He needed to end this quickly, he realized.  So he tried something new, and pulsed another order to the bracelet.  ‘One cluster shot, please.’ James asked it nicely as he lined up his gun on the agent, noting that the kids had barely had time to cover their ears and duck since the shooting had started.

The Walther erupted in his hands.  He’d pulled the trigger once, and three bullets had fired.  James had accelerated perception, enhanced aim, and what amounted to twenty years of shooting experience, and he didn’t fully *understand* what had just occurred.  His Aim told him that he’d just fired three times, all of them exactly on target.  *Exactly*.  His Skill, likewise, adapted to this instantly, instructing him where to put those shots to maximize hit rate.  But neither off those things helped him figure out how the bullets had actually *done that*.

They all hit the agent in the back.  And whatever they were enhanced with, whether it was armored suit coats, or empowered physiques, it didn’t seem set to stand up to that kind of shot.

The first bullet impacted, flattened, and dropped to the ground.  The second one bore a slight hole into the man, leaving a trickle of blood.  The third got through, and started to do real, actual, human-killing damage.

James didn’t know any of that.  He just lined up shots and took them.  And by the time his brain caught up to the fact that the agent had taken wounds, he’d emptied his magazine on cluster shots in largely the same spot on the man’s back.  The agent - whatever his number was - never had a chance to get his shield up.  He was locked down by the elder one second, and dead to James’ gun the next.

The suit dropped.  James stood up to be seen by the high schoolers.  “Get in the car!”  He yelled, bellowing to be heard over the crack of Nate’s gun.  “Come on!”

One of them, the taller kid with the curly hair, jolted into action, pulling his friend along in his wake.  As they tried to cross between the cars, though, James realized that the gunfire he was hearing was *two* weapons.  The agent in the car was shooting back; and when the kids entered his firing arc, he switched to targeting one of them.

The shorter kid’s arm jerked, then his leg, a spray of red painting the friend hauling him along.  James screamed something incoherent, and popped up over the back of his own car to spray bullets down at the black sedan.  It didn’t take much effort at all to get the bracelet to reload him whenever he got low, and he did his best to cover the kids.  But the car was armored, and the agent inside, wherever he was, didn’t even bother to rotate his shield away from Nate’s more powerful .308 shots.  James’ bullets just bounced off, doing little more than scratching the paint.  He jerked himself back down as bullets raked his own vehicle, leaning out and grabbing the kid’s hand to pull the two of them into cover.  “Elder!”  He yelled, yanking open the rear driver’s side door.  “Stabilize!”

The snake slithered out, and both kid’s eyes went *wide*.  Though it wasn’t like they could get *more* afraid now than they were before. The one who’d been shot looked like he was going into shock, and he was losing a lot of blood.  Something had to be done.

So, the camraconda looked down at him, and he froze.  His bodily functions along with his freedom of movement simply put on pause.  James knew from experience that he could still think, and he hoped that the kid didn’t keep feeling pain.  But this was the best they could do for now.

“Alright.”  He muttered, scooping up the ashtray from where he’d set it by his rear wheel.  “No more fucking around.”  James said, as if they had been to begin with.

He circled to the rear of the car, and fished the padlock out of his coat.  Set it on the pavement, with the lock facing toward the agent’s car.  There was still no sign of the man inside, and James had a flash of fear as he realized the car itself might be enchanted or shielded.  But Nate was at least keeping whatever problem there might be suppressed; an endless stream of bullets showing off exactly how dangerous the bracelets were, even though they kept flaring off the projected shield.

Carefully dumping out Nate’s cigarette ashes, James traced a triangle around the lock, point toward the enemy car.  And then, without hesitation, slapped the heel of his palm down on the line facing himself.

The lock popped open, and the air rippled.  The thin tree on the side of the road before the car was hit first, and James’ eyes went wide as its budding leaves burst into life, a wave of green.  That then, quickly, turned red, and then brown, and then withered and died.  Then again, and again.  A rapid wave of aging that washed over the innocent plant, a decade in an instant.

Then the car.  He didn’t know what the mechanism here was, but the car looked like it had been abandoned in a scrapyard.  The hubcaps, then the tires, vanished, leaving the car up on bricks.  The windows were smashed in, though that took a while.  A door went missing.  Paint wore away and metal rusted.  From the driver’s seat, there was a *blaze* of golden light as time itself was held at bay.

Then it was over.

From inside of the car, there was silence.  Even Nate stopped shooting for a second.  Then the driver’s door opened, and a man staggered out; his shield had done only so much.

He was wearing a faded, threadbare suit, full of holes.  His hair was thin, his skin palid and slightly wrinkled.  He looked around in confusion, but his eyes weren’t dead or empty.  The only accessories on him were the bracer and silver greave the other agents had worn, though they seemed as pristine as ever.  And without the sunglasses, James could see the emotions in his eyes, and he was *angry*.  It was a form of anger that he’d seen a lot in his life, though never to this degree. The madness of someone with authority, who had run into someone telling them *no*.

The aged agent locked eyes with James, and snarled.  Raised his handgun.

Nate shot him through the eye, and he dropped, gore painting the remains of his vehicle.

“Get in the fucking car!”  Nate yelled.

Sound rushed back to James’ sense.  There were cars around them; some driving past on the other side of the road, sometimes slowing down to see what was going on.  Some behind them, honking; some behind them and closer, desperately trying to pull U-turns and *running*.  The now-omnipresent sense of sirens in the distance.  Yells.  Cries.

“Get in the car.”  James tried to say as kindly as he could to the two kids.  “The elder will keep your friend from bleeding out.  We’ve got to get somewhere safe.  Please.”  He met their wide eyes, trying to broadcast to them how important this was, how honest he was being.

It was a minor miracle, but they listened.  The elder let the injured kid up just long enough to get them all into the back seat.  And then, doors slammed, seatbelts clicked, weapons were checked and stored, and the pedal went down on the gas.

James drove.  Fled.  Exfiltrated.  Ran.

They’d won.

It didn’t feel like it.