Vs. Blackbeard and Sprinter

Finally, Black Beard took another half step forward and leaned in, the point of his chin roughly half a foot beyond the 6-gauge wire. Still too far away. But I was out of time. I dug my boots into the gravel underneath the snow and unleashed a savage right fist into the center of the fence. 6-gauge is as thick as a number 2 pencil, but over a ten-foot span it does have some give. And I have a hell of a punch. The fence wire exploded inward. With each inch the elastic force pushing back on my fist doubled. Did I have the power? Black Beard flinched, leapt back, but not before the 6-gauge riding my knuckles tapped the point of his bearded chin. He dropped like a sack of rice.

...

I was in.

No sooner had I hit the ground than a voice broke the silent night air.

“Hey! You! Freeze!” The sound of running footsteps. The new guy, dressed in the same black tactical gear and carrying the same HK416, loomed out of the darkness, sprinting straight at me.

“Help!” I said. “Get over here! He’s hurt!”

I was hoping Sprinter was a moron and would run right up to me. He didn’t. Instead he pulled up twenty feet away and leveled his HK at my center mass.

“Put your hands over your head and step away from the body!” he shouted. I held out my palms forward in front of me, not over my head.

“Put the gun down,” I said slowly.

“Put your hands on your *bleep* head!” shouted Sprinter. His breath was coming in quick bursts, causing the muzzle of his HK to waver back and forth. He hadn’t done this before. “I’m going to say it one more time,” I said, my voice very calm, as if I did this every day.

“Put the gun down. This is your final warning.”

“I have you dead to rights *bleep*!” said Sprinter. “Put your-“ I didn’t let him finish. I’d waited until the HK barrel wavered two inches to the right, then dropped to my knees, snapping my hands onto the unconscious body beside me, grabbing hold of each side of Black Beard’s kevlar body armor, and rolling left, pulling the body over the top of me. The first shots exploded into the night. Wide right, as I’d expected. I rolled once and came up onto my knees, yanking Black Beard’s body up in front of me. I now had two layers of Level 3 tactical armor and a human torso between me and the HK.

The HK416 uses a 5.56 x 45mm NATO cartridge, the same one used to kill Osama Bin Laden. By design, the 60-grain lead core tends to yaw inside soft tissue and fragment at the crimping groove. That makes it very good at shredding people’s guts, but very bad at penetrating all the way through an armored body.

Keeping my head ducked low behind Black Beard’s shoulder blades, I charged.

Sprinter fired the HK. One, two, three, four quick rounds. I felt two of them shudder into Black Beard’s center mass, maybe killing him. Neither penetrated all the way through. I lifted my head and peeked over Black Beard’s left shoulder. I was ten feet from Sprinter and closing fast. With a bellowing roar I shoved Black Beard’s body forward. As I’ve said, flinching is involuntary. Sprinter yelped and dodged to his right to avoid Black Beard’s flying body. He loosed another four rounds in my general direction. All flew wide. Two more sprinting steps and I leapt on top of him. We landed hard and I hammered three overhands into his face as fast as I could. Right. Left. Right. He was out after one, damn near dead after three. I grabbed his HK and tossed it over the far side of the fence.

Two down.

But twelve shots fired. The other four guards would be here fast.

I was reasonably fucked. Wide out in the open, with nowhere to hide. I probably should have kept the machine gun. The enormous warehouse loomed a hundred metres in the distance across an open expanse of gravel, lit up like a Christmas tree. The glaring orange sodium lamps decimated my night vision, making it impossible to see anything in the darkness to either side of the building.

...

Then, with a guttural roar, I powered to my feet, yanking Black Beard and Sprinter up with me. I now held two human shields, one alive, one dead, attached to each forearm via kevlar stitching and my vice-like grip.

Roaring unintelligibly, I set off at a dead sprint, straight toward the warehouse. My animal brain had dumped so much adrenaline into my thighs I felt faster than Usain Bolt. Automatic gunfire erupted from the darkness on both sides of the warehouse, exactly where I’d anticipated. Deltoids searing, I rotated my arms until Black Beard and Sprinter faced directly into the gunfire. Bullets pinged all around me, sending chips of gravel flying. Ninety yards from the warehouse, cutting across their line of sight, moving faster than a six-foot-ten behemoth carrying two grown men in full body armor should be able to move.

The warehouse loomed before me. Eighty yards away. Seventy. Sixty. Bullets pinged and thwacked all around me. They were spraying me with fire, but their inexperience was evident. They were panicking.

Sprinter picked that moment to wake up. His head jerked up and he peered around wildly, trying to find his bearings.

“WHAAAA?” he bellowed through his shattered jaw.

He kicked his legs, glanced down, found his feet dangling a foot off the ground. He craned his neck, glancing back over his shoulder with wide, terrified eyes. He saw me and started screaming.

“PUMEDOWWWWW!” he shrieked through his mangled jaw. I met his eyes and laughed maniacally. A fleck of gravel thwacked into Sprinter’s neck. He snapped his head around. For the first time, he realized we were being shot at.

“STAAAAAW!” he screamed, frantically waving his arms over his head. “STAAAAAAAAAAW!”

Amazingly, the gunfire ceased. I didn’t.

Thirty yards away. Twenty. I burst into the brightly lit patch of gravel beside the warehouse. My peripheral vision caught gunmen on both sides pivoting low around corners. Neither fired. They’d wait for me to stop so they could get a clean shot. Straight ahead was a single steel door. A lot depended on its strength.

“STAAAAWWWWWW!” screamed Sprinter, looking straight ahead at the rapidly approaching door. I didn’t stop. Instead I ducked my shoulders behind both forearms and rammed the steel door at twenty miles an hour with seven hundred pounds of armored flesh-and-bone.

The collision was immense. My skull slammed into something hard and my neck jarred and everything flashed black and then I was stumbling forward and falling, the bodies attached to each forearm cushioning the blow. Without hesitation, my adrenaline in overdrive, I loosed my arm from Black Beard and rolled to my back, pulling Sprinter over top of me. Using my heels, I scuttled backward across a concrete floor into complete darkness. I was in. The bright orange light pouring through the smashed doorway obliterated any view of the warehouse’s insides.
-Sledge vs. The Labyrinth, pg. 150-159