(A/N) Hey guys, very sorry about the delay between this update and the last one. We've lost a few of our writers lately, and that's why I would like to take this opportunity to inform you that we're currently looking for new X-Ray and Vav writers, so if you're interested please PM me and I'll message you some further details. We're also currently looking for applications for Agent Texas in our Red vs Blue fic – Phase Two: Betrayal – and if you're interested in going for that part, head on over to our forum and fill out the necessary application forms. Now, I'm gonna leave you be to enjoy this chapter in peace, it's been a long time coming.
Enjoy!
Chapter Twenty-Five – Biker Bat-tle
Dr Gavin Free / Vav
Written by NicKenny
"I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them." ― Edward Verrall Lucas
"Something's wrong," X-Ray suddenly remarked, looking down upon the city next to Vav as, in the distance, the harsh wails of police sirens filled the night sky.
"When isn't it?" his partner sighed, already vaulting over the edge of the building, just as X-Ray did the same, both tucking and rolling as they made contact with the meshed floor of the fire escape a storey beneath them, using their momentum to spring off that too, before coming into contact with the wall of the building across from them.
Pushing off from this wall, the two spread their capes out wide behind them, using the fabric's sudden rigidity to glide to the ground several storeys beneath them, landing next to their twin motorbikes, Dirk Dirk and Grisham.
X-Ray clambered onto Dirk Dirk, smiling as he looked down at the name etched into the dark green bike's side, before looking over to Vav. "We really shouldn't be allowed to name things, should we?" he asked, with a wry smile.
Vav just laughed and revved his bike's throttle, shaking his head as he did so. "God no! I mean, look what happens when we do! The licence plate for Michael's Prius is still 'H1D4L60', for crying out loud!"
They sped off, making their way towards the source of the far-off sirens, when suddenly a series of muffled booms echoed throughout the night, and Vav underwent a flashback to his years in the British Army, his brain registering the sound of multiple IEDs not unlike those used during his tour in Iraq, and he swore under his breath.
"Fuck, guess we know where the sirens are headed!" X-Ray yelled over to him as they changed course, but Vav only shook his head angrily, praying that no one had been hurt in those explosions. Another Community attack, he noted sourly. Only they would be stupid enough to attack the city, with both of us nearby.
As they swerved onto one of the city's main streets, Vav was momentarily taken aback by how filled with traffic it was, due to the advanced hour. The work shifts had finished hours ago for the majority of the city, and this traffic was not just unusual, it was unheard of.
"We're going to have to get off this street!" he shouted over to X-Ray, realising that the police must have shut off the street at a further point. "The explosions must have happened at the prison, it's the only place big enough in that direction to warrant a full street shutdown!"
The other half of the duo nodded in response, and gestured to large alleyway to the right a hundred yards ahead of them, which should, if Vav knew this city at all, take them on to another street, which should, hopefully, be clearer.
They weaved their way through the traffic and sped down the alley, only to slow down slightly as dozens of headlights suddenly lit up at the other end, and the heroes glanced over at one another, suddenly uneasy. The glare of these lights blinded them for a moment, and it wasn't until the noise of dozens of engines revving did the two realise what was happening. The lights began to grow closer, and the noise louder, until Vav could make out a series of figures perched on choppers, driving towards them, with – and this baffled him for a second – baseball bats in their free hands.
His phone suddenly began to vibrate, and Vav cursed inwardly, knowing that J-Roll was probably trying to get in touch with them. Unfortunately for both of them, Vav didn't have time for phone calls with an armed biker gang bearing down on his ass, and he ignored it, focusing instead on the distance between himself, X-Ray and the bikers, tensing his leg muscles in preparation.
When only a few metres separated the two groups, he sprang into action, literally springing out of the seat of his bike, using the enhanced strength of his legs to fly over the attackers, whose eyes followed him, mouths agape, as his bike passed by. Smiling to himself, he tucked his legs into his chest and rolled, before uncurling just as he landed back on his bike, smiling smugly over at X-Ray, as they burst out onto the street. His partner, who had simply blasted the tires of the man closest to him, the then out-of-control bike, taking down everyone in front of him in a chaotic mix of broken bones and twisted metal, punctured by the screams of the downed men, rolled his eyes in exasperation.
"Now that was just showing off," X-Ray muttered, his tone filled with scorn but this was betrayed by the smile tugging at his lips. However, before the two could continue this conversation, the men that Vav had passed by had since turned around and where now making their way towards the heroes. Then, from both ends of the street that they had just burst onto, more headlights lit up, reinforcements for the biker gang making themselves known, and the heroes cursed internally.
"Left or right?" Vav asked, torn by a moment of indecision as he sized up the three groups, having immediately discarded the way that they had already come through.
"How about we split up?" X-Ray replied, his brow furrowed. "You go left, and I'll take the right, we'll shake them off, and regroup at the prison?"
Without answering, Vav kicked the throttle, and Grisham sprang towards the group of bikers on his left. The gang, taken aback by the heroes' charge towards them, seemed to linger for a moment, before picking up their own speed as a group, bats in hand, and when Vav got within a dozen yards of them he leant back slightly, smiling as he felt the world slow down around him.
The closest biker swung his bat at Vav chest, but Vav, seeing the attack coming at him at a crawl, merely stretched out his hand and, with his unnatural strength, yanked it from the biker's grasp, and the brief struggle pulled the biker from his seat onto the ground, his motorcycle now riderless as it skidded across the street.
Vav twirled the bat in his hand, before smashing it into the skull of his next attacker, then leant back on his seat to avoid the reach of another biker. Another came towards him, bat at the ready, but Vav blocked it with his own, and his attacker's bat shattered beneath the force of his deflection, and the shock caused him to lose control of his own bike, crashing it into one of his compatriot's.
Passing through the group with ease, Vav accelerated, determined to put some distance between himself and what remained of the group, but they recovered swiftly, the slightly depleted numbers following hot on his trail. He looked at the slightly worn aluminium bat in his hand and shook his head in wonder. Why on earth did they go with these, instead of guns? he wondered to himself, before tossing it over his shoulder, rewarded with an immediate scream and crash as the bat bounced off the street and got caught between the rims of a pursuer's wheel.
He glanced back over his shoulder, counting eight remaining bikers, before passing through a tight space between a Fiesta and coupé, grinning as two of the bikers slammed into the cars on either side of the gap, their brief yells lost to the night. Six left.
He pulled onto a new street, which ran adjacent to part of Achievement City's monorail line, looking up to see the 46A speed up as it pulled out of Kerplunk station. He grinned and sped up, pulling alongside the train before spotting a half filled skip down the street in front of him, at the edge of a separated section of the street, currently being relayed. Grisham rolled up in, leaping up the rubble into the air, and Vav could see the looks of incredulity on each of the faces of the pursuing biker gang as he passed over the train, flipping them the bird just before he disappeared from sight.
He landed heavily on the other side of the road, counting underneath his breath until he heard a brief lull in the roar of the biker's respective engines, swiftly followed by six brief screams and sickening crashing sounds, as the bikers either hit the train, the sides of the skip, or, in the case of one of them, actually made the jump, only to lose control of their bike in the transit, crash-landing with a sickening thud.
Vav turned, and drove up to the biker who had made the jump, calmly putting Grisham into park and stepping off the bike with a deliberate step. The man lay groaning on the ground, his left knee having been reversed, and his right elbow pointing out at a rather unnatural angle, blood pouring from a cut to his head. Vav quelled his urges to help the man, the surgeon within him already working out how many stiches would be required, and how the various broken bones would need to be set.
He looked down at the man for a second, his head tilted, before stamping down hard on his left ankle, beneath the man's busted knee, and was rewarded with a agonised scream. Vav reached down and lifted the man up by the collar of his torn and blood-stained leather jacket, making a mental note of the name of the biker gang – The Blazes – stitched onto the back.
"Now, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way," he said, reassuringly, to his once-attacker, now-injured-dead-weight. "You can tell me who paid you to attack myself and my friend, or I can shatter the few remaining unbroken bones in your body. How many do you think there are?"
The man groaned, blood dripping from his chin, and shook his head with a wince. "I-I'll tell you whatever it is you want to know!" he cried, trembling in Vav's grasp.
"Then answer my question. Who sent you?"
The man shuddered. "I-I don't know! He...he wore a mask, a balaclava, wh-whenever he met with us."
Vav tutted and leant in closer, his grip tightening to the point of physical pain on the man's shoulders. "You expect me to believe that?"
"It's the truth!" the biker squawked, weeping now. "He gave us two-hundred thousand dollars up f-front, with a f-further two-hundred and fifty to come if we took you out, and…and three hundred if we took out X-Ray."
Vav frowned at this, aware of the insult in the man's claims. "What?" he asked coolly, not allowing himself to get mad at this little detail, reasoning that it didn't matter, though in his heart, he knew that it did. "You were paid more to take out X-Ray than me?"
The biker nodded. "We didn't ask why, we just took his money and went. All we knew was that he wanted you out of the picture while he and his men got up to something. The one with the beard winked at me as I left, called me 'Dead meat'."
So Bullet-Beard was in on this too? Vav mused. Definitely the work of the Community. Better find X-Ray as soon as possible, and sort out whatever's been going on at the prison.
"Thank you for your cooperation," he replied, before dropping the biker to the ground, smiling as he walked away from the man's yells.
"Hey, I need a hospital, goddammit!" the biker exclaimed, writing in pain on the asphalt. Vav ignored him, tapping a button on the side of his glove that would record his current whereabouts and email them to the ACPD, letting them know where to apprehend the bikers.
He clambered back onto Grisham, speeding off towards the prison, passing by a police car on his route, which had been presumably spared by the ACPD to pick up his bikers. Strange, that they would be able to spare anyone for a bag-and-tag, if anything major really was going on in the prison. He pulled up a few streets away, sending X-Ray his location before settling back in his seat, impatient and concerned, drumming his fingers off his biceps.
His eyes widened slightly as a tiny bright purple car drove by, not able to resist smiling to himself in amusement, and caught sight of the driver, who took his breath away. Blonde, pale, stunning despite a shining black eye, her eyes drifted over and met his own for the briefest of seconds, before her car suddenly accelerated and disappeared into the city, leaving Vav confused, and strangely empty, his heart thumping in his chest.
Who on earth was that?
The noise of a motorcycle engine shook him from his thoughts, and he looked up, wary, in case it was another biker, but grinned in relief as X-Ray and Dirk Dirk made their way down the street, pulling up next to him.
"You get on okay?" he asked, pushing the blonde girl and the purple mini-car from his thoughts, and X-Ray nodded back to him.
"Lost them in the Obsidi-N Plaza," he replied, somewhat breathless. "Dozens of those bastards kept showing up. Don't know how many I had to take down in the end. You?"
"Oh, you know me," Vav replied somewhat vaguely, aware that he had a significantly lower amount of pursuers, but determined to keep this a secret from X-Ray. "Dealt with them as they came at me. Couple of them crashed into the 46A. Imagine that delays on that line are through the roof!"
The two drove in silence through the few remaining streets between them and the prison, the police blockade parting without a word to let them through, and they shot each other a worried look as they passed through streets pockmarked with bullets, CS gas lingering in Vav's enhanced nostrils, the occasional pool of blood denoting where an officer or prisoner had fallen.
Ryan's golems filled the last block around the prison, swarming over the asphalt, and the heroes were forced to dismount in order to make their way through. When they arrived, dozens of SWAT teams were moving groups of prisoners into armoured vans, clearly moving them to another location.
The heroes' presence barely caused a stir, almost unnoticed amid the wailing of police sirens, ambulances and fire trucks, and a sense of finality lay about the place. "Looks like we missed the party," Vav noted, nudging his partner.
"You sure did," uttered a surly voice behind them, and the heroes turned to see a sweat-stained Agent Burns standing behind them, his clothes scorched and his right arm in a sling, a testament to the fight that had evidently ended at this point. "Some masked nutjob set the prisoners loose and armed them; we had to take back the prison from them a yard at a time. We lost some good officers today. We needed you."
Without another word, he turned and left, and somehow this hurt a hell of lot more than his usual angry outbursts, as waves of guilt crashed over the pair, aware that they could have made it sooner, that they could have done more, that they were, at least in part, at fault for some of the deaths Burns spoke of.
"Ignore him," Agent Heyman advised, walking up from behind an ambulance, smiling slightly, though he, too, bore signs of the battle that had just occurred. "Iron-Ryan and his golems really saved the day here, not even sure that there was much for you guys to do. What happened though, I couldn't get through to you at all?"
The duo looked over at each other for a second, before Vav gave Joel a short account of the day's events, including his brief interrogation of the biker. The agent's smile swiftly faded as he heard that Bullet-Beard had been involved, and turned to a frown when Vav gave out his opinion that this masked man was another one of the Community's leaders, along with the Corpirate.
"So the Community strikes again," he murmured, when Vav had finished recounting his tale. "And yet again, we have nothing to show for it." He turned swiftly and punched the side of the ambulance, before swearing and holding his knuckles, barely managing to repress a scream.
"At least you two didn't get all the action, today," he added when his hand had finally stopped throbbing, smiling slightly. "Ryan had to drag this blonde girl off me. She was pretty damn cute, you know, other than being a convicted felon, though the black eye I gave her might've spoiled her looks a bit. Still looking through reports trying to find her, though it seems like she just disappeared during the reclamation of the prison. Worried that we might have a jailbreak to report."
Vav had begun to pale the second Joel brought up the pretty blonde girl, and when he mentioned the black eye and the fact that she was still missing, he began to tremble with impatience, unable to contain himself any longer.
"Yeah," he said, smiling glumly. "I think I might've seen her."