A door slammed behind Alexia. Suddenly, she was no longer standing in a tempest of bullets and shrapnel. She was instead in a small janitor's closet, just barely big enough for her and Damien to stand in.
As soon as Damien set her down, he jammed a broom against the door to bar it shut. They both stood in the cramped space, trying to catch their breath. The air was hot and heavy from their respirations as gunfire rang outside.
"You alright?" he asked her.
"Y-yeah, I'm fine…"
Alexia's nose was still leaking blood, but almost getting shot had thoroughly sobered her up. She was technically no stranger to death after the job that morning, but still, seeing all those people die in front of her had produced a wave of nausea. In that moment, it was pure adrenaline that was preventing her from dwelling on.
"Did you see Jess out there?" She looked up at Damien, hoping to find reassurance in him.
Damien shook his head. "She wasn't on the dance floor, was she?"
"No, I-I told her to watch my drink."
"Well, Jess is tough…tougher than a lot of guys in this crew, if I'm being honest," he said, with a far-off look in his eyes. "We'll find her, though. Don't worry."
Alexia nodded, anxiously swallowing the saliva in her throat. She'd seen how tough Jess was during the drug bust, when she'd braved gunfire from a dozen pissed-off Vagos and her ex-boyfriend. If anyone could get out of a situation like this, it would have to be Jess.
The muzzle flashes and twisted bodies on the dance floor were still fresh in Alexia's mind. She could still hear the bullets impacting flesh just feet in front of her, and she could see the perpetrators, masked and armored, wielding heavy machine guns.
"You saw it, right?" she asked Damien. "Those guys up at the front? They were all wearing skull masks and…and…"
Alexia trailed off when she noticed Damien's face. He, a top-ranking Skull, looked just as bewildered, shocked, and horrified as she was. This stunned her into silence – she realized that no assurance would be coming from him.
He appeared to be trying to set his feelings aside as he laid a firm hand on her shoulder.
"Listen," he said. "I don't know what the hell's going on out there, but what I need you to do is stay put for now. Once we get a window out there, I'll come back and get you."
"Damien, I can help-"
"Don't argue with me," he snapped. "This ain't the time, okay?"
Damien sighed, looking hard at Alexia. She looked back, her mouth set in a firm pout.
"Look, I've known your uncle for eight years now. I know how much he cares about you. Hell, most of us do - the guy's got a picture of you as a kid on his freakin' desk! So simply put, I have to get you outta here, for your sake, and for his."
"He does care about me." Alexia's eyes narrowed. "But I'm still a part of his crew. If everyone else is putting their asses on the line, then I will too."
"Alexia-"
"I'll go out there with this if I have to." Alexia drew the Hawk & Little from her purse. "I know it's not much, but it's all I have."
Damien considered her for a moment, scratching his beard. It was obvious from the unwavering glint in her eyes that she wasn't backing down, and that trying to convince her to stay put would end up wasting more time. His eyes moved down Alexia's much shorter frame until they met the silvery gun in her right hand.
"Wait, that's all you have?" he repeated. "So…you're telling me you killed three Roses with a semi-auto?"
Alexia nodded, her face firm.
Damien's gaze softened. "Well, shit, you didn't mention that. I assumed you'd had a Micro SMG or, y'know, something automatic."
"I've never shot an automatic," she admitted. "But I'm pretty good with handguns."
"That so?" Damien shot a wayward glance at the door. "Well, I don't know if you saw those guys with miniguns, but they had full body armor on – helmets, chest pieces, the whole nine yards. It's gonna take a lot of mags to bring them down, so…here, this is my sidearm. Why don't you try this out?"
Damien reached into the gun belt around his waist and pulled out a weapon from his attached holster. Alexia's eyes lit up as she took the gun. Unlike her own pistol, this one didn't have a hammer – it was striker-fired, meaning it had no manual safety. On the gun was printed the manufacturer, again Vom Feuer, and the cartridges it carried: 9x18mm, different from the 9x19 rounds her own pistol was chambered for. Next to this were words that sent a rush down Alexia's back:
'Full Auto'.
"An AP Pistol…"
Damien nodded. "It might be automatic, but it's got a pretty light recoil. Don't let that fool you though. This puppy's got some serious stopping power."
"Yeah. Looks like you welded a suppressor on here, too?" She pointed to the gun's muzzle.
"I'm an assassin for the Skulls," he explained. "Stealth is kinda what I do. It's kinda nice though, because having that adds a little weight to the front."
"Which reduces the recoil," she finished for him, looking down the sights. "And it's gas-operated, so you've got both the expanding gas in the chamber and gravity to steady your aim. Plus, there's a select-fire switch here – I don't think it has a semi-auto mode, but you can shoot in three-round bursts, right?"
"Y-yeah, that's…"
Damien looked dumbstruck by the smooth, confident flow of Alexia's words as she talked about this gun she'd never fired before. But Alexia herself didn't notice this; she was too busy unloading the gun's extended mag and ensuring she had a full clip. She would have thirty-six whole rounds before having to reload – that was even more than Jess's Micro SMG could carry, and the AP Pistol was also far more accurate.
She reinserted the magazine and racked the slide back, cycling the gun's action. The sharp clack of metal flung her back to the reality of the broom closet, and she looked at the floor, her cheeks a burning red.
"Uhm…Sorry, I get kind of carried away with guns. Feel free to shut me up if I do that again."
"Sure." Damien smiled a bit. "But if we get outta here, maybe we could meet up sometime and talk guns then. If you want to, that is."
"I-I…"
Alexia's heart surged in her chest. For the first time in her life, she'd been asked by a guy to meet up – maybe not on a 'date' per se, but to an intimate, one-on-one meeting where she could discuss guns to her heart's content. The prospect of this filled her nerves with an excited buzz, muted only by the fresh sights of death and destruction outside.
She realized how close she was standing to Damien. The heat of his breath tickling her face suddenly felt rather lewd – she took a half-step back and cleared her throat, trying to control the rush of emotions she was feeling.
"I'd like that a lot."
Alexia smiled and tried to compose herself as she took another spare magazine of 9x18 ammo from Damien, which gave her seventy-two rounds in total. She stored the extra ammo in her purse, right next to the semi-auto she could use if she ran out of bullets.
Gunfire was still raging outside the door. Alexia noticed the black body armor sitting on Damien's shoulders and covering his torso. As Damien drew the Advanced Rifle from his back, he seemed to recognize that Alexia had no such protection against bullets.
"You just stay behind me," he said. "Use me as cover, and just move when I tell you to. Simple enough?"
"Yeah. Let's do this."
Her words were confident, but her tone was unsteady, and fear crept into her voice. She'd seen what those miniguns had done to people on the dance floor, and she didn't want to become a twisted, mangled corpse.
But she had to go out there. She had to try and survive, even if the odds seemed impossible.
She backed up against the wall as Damien cracked open the closet door, inviting a rush of hot, smoky air inside. Damien immediately began firing his Advanced Rifle. Once the coast was clear, he bolted from the closet and out to the bar area, allowing Alexia to move up. She put her back to the closet wall and peered out at the battlefield.
It was too dark outside the closet for her to visualize any potential targets. The club was illuminated by muzzle flashes and lights mounted on the barrels of machine guns. Bodies littered the blood-streaked ground, Black Skulls and Bahama Mamas employees alike, some of which were missing limbs. The only bright side (if she could call it that) was that all she heard were the sharp, pounding staccatos of assault rifles. She couldn't hear the constant drone of miniguns anymore, suggesting they may have run out of ammo.
The few surviving Skulls had regrouped in the bar area. Some of them were ushering Damien over, providing covering fire so he could navigate through the maze of bodies. Eventually, he signaled over to Alexia, and she scampered across the floor, keeping her head down and trying to ignore the bile rising up in her throat. The air reeked of sulfur and freshly-spilled blood, and it was so loud that it was impossible for her to think. Bodies were littered across the floor and packed tightly into the booths where she'd seen people snorting powder, too high out of their minds to defend themselves.
But she preferred not to think about the horrible way her crewmates had just died, torn to pieces by miniguns. With adrenaline screaming through her body, she practically sprinted across the battlefield as the Skulls covered her and Damien's egress.
A couple of Skulls took Alexia's hands and yanked her into a makeshift barricade. Overturned tables, booths, and and bar stools had been set up in a corner of the nightclub as about fifteen or twenty Skulls desperately fended off their attackers.
"LEXI!"
Alexia looked to her left and saw Jess. Her face was smeared with soot and streaks of blood, but she was alive. As soon as she got close, Jess took Alexia's hand and held it tight.
"Oh, thank fuck, Lexi, I thought you were a goner!"
"Not yet!" Alexia shouted back. "I came to help you guys!"
"Oh, we need you, girlfriend! Get in cover next to me!"
Alexia squeezed in next to Jess, who was crouched behind an overturned table. Jess fired her Micro SMG at the dance floor, through which Alexia noticed more attackers flooding in. However, these weren't the skull-masked enemies she'd seen earlier. These were much more familiar targets, clad in red bomber jackets.
"FUCKIN' ROSES!" Jess shouted.
"Any other survivors?!" Damien asked her.
"Not that I've seen!" Jess panted, ducking down so she could reload her gun. "Oh, it's bad, D! They keep sending dudes in through the front!"
"We radioed into the compound! Backup should get here soon!" shouted Reese. He had a bleeding bullet wound in his right arm, but this didn't stop him from firing his own assault rifle. "Hey, kid! If you really killed three Roses, now's the time to prove it!"
Alexia's breaths steadied as she looked down at the AP Pistol. At that moment, to say she wasn't scared would have been a blatant lie. This was only her second time being shot at, and she was absolutely terrified as bullets whizzed just inches above her head, striking pieces of the barricade and sending wood splinters sailing through the air.
She wasn't sure if it was residual booze left in her system or her survival instinct kicking in, but regardless, she felt her breaths start to slow as she focused on the gun's weight pressing into her hand. In that moment, she was determined to walk out of that nightclub in one piece.
Jess reloaded her Micro SMG and sprang out of cover, and Alexia followed her, shooting a three-round burst at the attacking Roses. Like she'd expected, the recoil was a sharp pop-pop-pop against the inside of her right hand. However, it was nothing compared to some of the rifles and shotguns she'd hunted with, and thanks to the added weight of Damien's mods, it also didn't have much muzzle climb.
It didn't take long for her to adjust to this gun. She broke cover again, this time hitting one of the assailants in the chest. As he fell backward, she hit another Rose in the side of his neck, severing his jugular.
Alexia was stone-faced as she switched to full auto. She could debate the morality of what she was doing later. At that moment, her only objective was survival.
All of the air escaped her lungs in a conscious breath. She was having trouble filtering out the pure chaos of her surroundings, so she couldn't enter The Zone. What she could do was remember all that her uncle had taught her about shooting a handgun.
Focus on the front sight, Lex, he'd instructed her all those years ago.
It was good advice. Focusing solely on the target had caused her accuracy to suffer, but keeping her focus on the front sight, while keeping the target in her periphery, struck a good balance between a clear sight picture and pinpoint accuracy.
With all the bullets flying overhead, she didn't have a lot of time to line up her shots. But with an automatic weapon, she had a much greater chance of hitting something even if her aim was bad. She rose out of cover again, this time hitting an attacking gangster in the forehead. Alexia blinked at the exact moment a geyser of blood and skull fragments issued from the man's head, like her brain was trying to protect her from seeing it and overprocessing things.
"How many of these fuckers are there?!" shouted one of the Skulls behind Alexia.
"Keep pressure on 'em!" yelled Damien. "We'll get through this!"
The Roses at the front were thinning out. If they could kill a few more, Alexia reasoned, the Skulls may have a large enough window to evacuate.
"HOLY FUCK, MAN, LOOK OUT!"
A loud whoosh sounded from behind Alexia. She looked just in time to see part of the barricade fly over her head.
She shielded her face from the airborne shrapnel. Her ears were filled with a high-pitched ringing as the heat blast made her stumble backwards. Peering through the black smoke, she saw it: one of the Roses, decked out in a full suit of ballistic armor. He'd dropped the minigun by this point – whether the gun had gotten too hot or had run out of ammo, Alexia didn't know. What she did know was that he was approaching the Skulls, a rocket launcher mounted on his left shoulder.
The breath left Alexia's lungs again, and this time it was accompanied by the warm, encroaching blackness of the void.
I can't hear…
The ringing blocked out the noise of the chaos around her, and she was finally able to concentrate. At that moment, her focus was on the Rose with the RPG, who was moving backwards through the endless void while reloading his weapon.
By this point, the man's armor was far from pristine. The chestpiece and knee pads were littered with bullet holes, as was his ballistic helmet. He'd been taking shots from the other Skulls for several minutes by this point.
Alexia raised her AP Pistol again. From her knowledge about this gun, she knew what the 'AP' in its name stood for, and it wasn't 'Automatic Pistol'.
'AP' stood for 'Armor-Piercing'. While the 9x18 ammo she was using wasn't the most powerful, the gun propelled these rounds at such a high velocity that it was able to pierce through most low-level body armor.
With time slowed to a crawl by The Zone, she was able to anticipate his movement. She'd done it a million times while hunting: an animal was often moving around in the grasslands, trying not to get eaten by predators, so she'd needed to know how to hit a target that was in motion.
The man was pretty close, only about ten yards away. She lined up her sights over where she expected the enemy gangster to be when she pulled the trigger, then fired in a protracted burst towards that position. By the time her bullets reached him, the gangster had reloaded his weapon, but he didn't have to aim it. All of Alexia's bullets entered the man's chest, piercing through the last shreds of ballistic weave. The RPG clattered to the ground as he stumbled backwards, falling behind the remnants of the bar Alexia had been sitting at.
As her surroundings came back, Alexia blinked. A bright light was coming from where the RPG had fallen. She still couldn't hear very well, but she quickly recognized what had happened and dove to the floor.
She felt the intense blast of heat as the errant rocket hit the ceiling. Flaming chunks of debris rained down on her and the other surviving Skulls, who covered in what was left of their wooden barricade.
The ringing was cranked up to eleven – Alexia's head felt like it had been packed with fiberglass. She heard the muffled voices of her crewmates, frantic and disorganized as they picked surviving members up off the floor. Jess took Alexia's hand to steady her as she stumbled to her feet.
"Is everyone okay?!" Jess's voice sounded muffled, like she was talking from another room.
"Yeah, I think so!" a Skull shouted back. "Barricades took the brunt of it!"
"The ceiling, too!" Damien pointed up. "Shit, we've gotta go before this shit spreads!"
Damien was referring to a sheet of flames, feeding off the insulation in the ceiling. Skulls immediately began climbing over their barricade, shooting at any Roses that remained alive.
Alexia hiked up her dress as she scrambled over an upturned table. She was one of the last Skulls to make it to the main entrance, where she could hear even more gunfire just outside. The flames were practically chasing her out as she scrambled over the bodies of fallen gangsters, Skulls and Roses alike.
"HELP! PLEASE, I'M TRAPPED!"
Alexia stopped in her tracks. She could feel the heat of the fire as she turned around and looked back towards the bar, where she saw two girls lying in the ground. One of them was motionless and soaked in blood, clearly dead, while the other was trying to wriggle from under a roof beam that had fallen, pinning one of her legs underneath.
The breath left Alexia's lungs. She recognized the still-living girl, clad in a black bikini, as the bartender that had served her and Jess.
"ANYONE!" she called, her voice hoarse. "OH MY GOD, SAVE ME, PLEASE!"
Tears were streaming down the bartender's face as the burning hot flames encircled her. Alexia could guess the girl and her coworker had been hiding behind the bar, trying to avoid the gunfire.
Alexia looked to her left. The front door was maybe five feet away. She knew how much the others would hate her if she turned back to help this stranger. And despite her killing a few Roses, it may further fuel the perception that she was soft around the edges.
But the more she listened to the girl's desperate pleas for help, the less she cared about the stupidity of running into a burning building. The bartender had done nothing to deserve being burned alive, just like Noël hadn't deserved to die in a smoldering car.
Before she knew it, Alexia was running back towards the bar, high-stepping in her heels. When she reached the bartender, she immediately began gripping the wooden beam, trying to pull it off of her. There was a small space at the bottom she could squeeze her fingers into, but no matter how much she strained and pulled, the beam remained firmly in place on top of the girl's ankle.
Alexia stumbled backwards, sweat dripping down her face, her makeup running in black rivers down her sooted cheeks.
"I can't wriggle my foot out!" the bartender pleaded, sobbing. "You've got to do something, please!"
"Hold on!" Alexia looked around the bar area for anything she could use as a tool. There was no way she was lifting that beam by herself.
Finally she spotted something. There was a small hand truck, probably used for lugging boxes of alcohol from storage to the front of the house. As far as Alexia was concerned though, the hand truck was leverage.
She pried the hand truck off the wall and wheeled it over, then wedged it underneath the wooden beam next to the bartender's foot. Using all her strength, Alexia pushed down on the handles. As the hand truck tilted backwards, the bartender began pulling and twisting her leg until, finally, her foot popped free, the ankle burned and swollen underneath.
Alexia stood back, panting for breath as the bartender sprang up and hugged her.
"Oh my God, thank you! Thank you!"
Alexia tensed as her face was pushed into the girl's almost-naked breasts. She awkwardly patted her on the back a couple of times, hoping this would get the bartender to release her.
As they stood there hugging, Alexia heard a loud rumble, like rocks tumbling down a huge mountainside. They both watched as a crack formed in the ceiling, right in front of the main entrance. This crack trembled and widened before it opened into a chasm, which chunks of metal and drywall tumbled out of. Their way out was now blocked.
The bartender descended into screaming, watery hysterics. Alexia couldn't really blame her: she'd just watched several of her coworkers die in grizzly fashion right in front of her. The only reason Alexia wasn't breaking down herself was because she didn't know or recognize any of the deceased Skulls.
Regardless, she knew time was essential if they wanted to escape. She grabbed the bartender's shoulders.
"I need you to stay with me, okay?" Alexia tried to sound calm. "This place have a fire exit?"
The bartender sniffled, wiping some of the soot from her face. "Th-there's one at the back, across the…"
She looked back at the dance floor, and Alexia looked with her. Bodies were piled back there, four or five deep, at least a hundred of them in various states of intactness. The floor was practically ankle-deep in blood.
The ceiling shook again, and more debris rained down on the girls. Alexia took the bartender's hand and held it tight.
"I'll lead the way," she said quickly. "Just stay focused on me, and don't look at the bodies. You think you can do that?"
The bartender nodded. A grateful smile appeared on her face, and for a moment, Alexia forgot all about what the other Skulls would think about her helping this girl. In that moment, her primary objective was to help this young woman escape with her life.
Alexia led the bartender out from behind the counter and up the two ruined steps to the dance floor. She had her AP Pistol drawn, just in case any Roses were still alive. But both she and the bartender had difficulty traversing the smoky charnel house that was now the Bahama Mamas dance floor. Most of the bodies were packed together in the corners, but the amount of blood they'd produced made the floor like an ice rink. The bartender and Alexia, both of whom were wearing heels, were constantly crashing to the floor as they slipped and skidded toward the red neon signs that read 'EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY'.
Black smoke was churning into the dance floor from the bar, making both of the girls cough and gag. The sign was just barely visible up ahead, maybe fifteen feet away, hidden by a second bar at the rear of the dance floor. The space had been so packed with people earlier that Alexia hadn't noticed.
"Come on!" Alexia yelled. "We're almost outta here!"
The bartender was hardly coherent by this point, soaked in blood and viscera from the dance floor. Again, Alexia couldn't blame her, but she knew they didn't have a lot of time before the building collapsed on top of them.
Alexia was about to take her hand when the floor started shaking again. The girls were quickly thrown off-balance; Alexia fell to the ground hard, the AP Pistol flying out of her hand.
"Fuck…" She scrambled to try and get up when she heard the familiar cracking sound from the ceiling. A strobe light fixture, mounted right above her, was shaken loose and was put into a freefall.
Alexia's adrenaline was depleted. She couldn't react fast enough. The best she could do was to put her hands up, trying in vain to shield herself, before her world faded to black.