Sally's Story (1.5-11): Carcass

youtu.be/nEbq05H_gaY

	“Where to now, Vince?”
	“Well… huh. You said they were coming from the harbor already?”
	“By truck, yes.”
	“No customs check either, that guy mentioned that… We could- nah, too dangerous.”
	“Vince?”
	“We could *try* and say we’re with customs but that’ll just get us too close, too exposed and probably, well…”
	“U-Understood.” Vincent rubbed his head, brow furrowed in concentration. Jumping back in surprise the two detectives ducked beneath their dashboard, a growling truck pulling past them and towards the broad sheet metal doors before them. Wheeling them open the first truck turned in, Vincent peering over the steering wheel as he watched it swing inside. The two watched it slip behind the closing garage door before Vince slapped the wheel.
	“Well… fuck it, we can get in closer. Leave it for the lawyers,” he laughed, scuttling out of the driver’s side door and out to the cold tarmac outside. Following him, silently snipping her door shut, Sally took up a spot behind him as they crept beside stacked, groaning containers. A singular corner light hung across the road separating the pair and the building, a mad dash across the asphalt pulling them to the edge of the door. Their scuffle across was muffled in the harsh screeching of the door, the truck wheeling out and back towards the harbor for another trip. Vincent popped his head out from the brick exterior to spy inside, eyes squinting for any sight of the building’s occupants.
	“Vincent-,” Sally started, a paff of black tar blasted from the ground as angry, jagged words spilled from inside the warehouse. The crack of a long gun sent a spinning, jacketed round spiralling into the ground at Vincent’s foot. Spiked down it shattered into a spray of debris peppering the cursing man’s calf, Sally yanking him upright as she pulled him away from the corner. Shoes and android tip-toes clacking on the pavement they retreated from the guttural yelling inside.
	“Vince c’mon,” Sally said, waving the man onward. “There’s the bar, remember?”
	“Sh-Shit, yeah!” Sprinting around the broad side of the warehouse they rounded to the small, adjacent business inside. The small brick outcrop, jutting into the street around it like an archaic redoubt, yanked the two detectives inside. Tumbling through the cheap wooden door they dove for cover, the bar emptied of its patrons as the alarm was raised on the premises. Pausing to breathe the two squared up the close, cheap outfit inside. Half-drank beers and hastily downed tumblers sat on a stained wood bar.
	“We should pop around, Vince,” Sally snipped, bright blue eyes dilated and alert. Pointing to a broad door at the bar’s opposite end she slipped through.
	“Sal, wait up!” Wincing he hobbled after her, coagulating blood sticking his fluted bellbottoms to his ankle. On the opposite end of the door a broad, well-lit warehouse spilled out before him. His partner deftly checked corner to corner, precious seconds spent sizing up ideal angles of fire and tactical scenarios. The tramp of boots and bark of voices had disappeared, their hidden opponents likely doing the same as they convened outside.
	“Vincent, c’mon! Ideal points of ingress are-” As she pointed out a small sheet door dense black boots sent it reeling off its hinges, smashing to the floor as the lights dropped. “Down!”
	“Shit, okay!” Six suited men emerged from the crumpled door, towering in their statuesque uniforms. Dense black vests swaddled their torsos as they spread across the broad floor, sweeping beams left and right from the mouths of their rifles.
	“Vincent go back around and call for back-up, now!” The man snapped to a stop mid run, a crater pecked into the concrete underneath him by a mid-caliber round. Ducking backwards he sheltered behind one of the massive pallets of assorted chemicals, drawing his service revolver from his inner pocket. His heart smashed in his chest, pupils widening in the abject dark of the shabby depot. A robot, ostensibly ‘his’ robot, was giving the orders. He couldn’t leave her alone for a myriad of reasons but without backup they were liable to be overwhelmed.
	“Got it,” he screamed, slipping backwards into the bar. Revolver in hand he escaped out to the waiting alleyway and dashed for his car, Sally holding the fort inside as the first shots rang out.

	“Heavens,” the little robot whispered to herself, the flutter of her pseudolung stilled as she reached into her own jacket pocket. Withdrawing her trim autoloader and rocking it into her hand, round chambered, she pieced the room together. From the initial entrance there were several large pallets throughout the sprawling warehouse, diverse arrangements of powdered and liquid chemicals stacked precariously around her. Steel benches, sterile and waiting for some clandestine chemistry student’s touch, lined the walls- useless for cover, but excellent evidence for later. Pushing out from cover she spied the first of the men. Wisps of red hair peeked from behind a thick ski mask, rich blue eyes locking with Sally’s own as the two leveled their guns at each other. Sally squeezed the trigger, the startled man opposite her miscalculating and shooting low of the bobbing pair of blue eyes in the dark. Bullet smashing on the ground Sally’s back was peppered harmlessly by the powdered cement, leaning right as she let a pair of pistol rounds rip clear into the man’s center of mass.
	“Fok,” the man screamed, collapsing backwards and to the side. The resounding punch to his chest shattered a trio of the small, hexagonal segments protecting his chest. Air forced from his lungs he fell supine, gasping and grabbing at his chest as Sally looped around.
	“Wessels, Vermaak, kop buiten,” an authoritative voice barked. The little nandroid ducked behind another pallet, a slew of rounds whizzing past as she slid into place behind cover. Two more rounds pinged across the steel drums inside, the spew of some precursor stinking the air and stinging Sally’s nose. She reflexively scooched away, turning back to the downed mercenary behind her who, levelling his gun from where he lay, locked eyes with her. Bringing her sidearm to bear once again she aimed through the darkness for the side of his torso, unobstructed by impenetrable ceramic. Keying up her shot she let a third round burrow itself into the man's chest cavity, a sickening cry following her as she picked up again.
	“Arno,” another voice howled as Sally raced around the perimeter, deftly rolling between the crates and dodging the pursuing beams of light. Pants soaked in the fuming liquid she slipped around and knelt, watching one of the men down the length of the building hunch over his fallen comrade. Exhaling, body cool, Sally let two more shots go. A pair of high-pressure nine millimetre rounds ripped through the air, whizzing through the coughing confusion and shouted orders before ripping through the thin undershirt of the hulking man hunched over his ginger partner. Piercing his skin and ripping through the intercostal muscle beneath it it bored its way, mushrooming, through to the spongy lung tissue deeper inside. The next round was less lucky, just high of its partner it smashed into the man’s rib and fragmented, peppering the already weeping lung with scraps of broken lead and scattered copper jacket.
	“Two down,” Sally whispered to herself, “two more.”

	Vincent tramped away from the alley, cursing himself as he hopped, one footed, and abandoned his painfully impractical raised shoes on the pavement. Sprinting around containers a shot pinged in the dark behind him, two more clanging off the crate to his right and illuminating the alley with sparks. Ducking around he brought his service revolver to bear, a thunderous trio of magnum rounds slugged down the alley and into the cracking chest of the first crumpling soldier. The second dived low and brought his rifle to bear at Vincent, a flurry of rounds forcing him back as he whipped a half-moon from his pocket. Dumping three more thirty-eight rounds into the trim, blued-steel service revolver in his hand he leant back out. The rush of a fourth round clipped the container above him and showered his bleeding cheek with shorn metal. Cursing he let two more rounds clip down the alleyway, the prone figure slumping forward with a vomitous, visceral gurgle.
	“Christ alive,” Vince panted, hobbling back down to check the first. Gasping for breath still Vincent kicked his rifle away, plastic scratched as it skittered over the rough ground. The other man was dead or near it, a sickening pool of crimson blood pooling around his head where some artery had been morbidly severed. “You’re coming with me, asshole.” Haunching the groaning man up by his shoulders Vince started the long drag back to his car, the conspicuous streetlight beside it painting it in a golden halo.
	Finally beside the merciful, brown doors Vince fumbled in the trunk and withdrew a pair of cuffs, the coughing man laid on his front. Vincent left him wheezing on the ground, cuffed, before popping the driver’s side door open. The frightful pop and crack of gunfire inside the building quickened Vince’s hands as he dialed up the police radio, the scanner crackling to life in his shivering hands. The whip crack of rounds overhead forced him low and into the small beneath the dashboard, safely behind the engine block. Grumbling, he hopped out and scrunched the mumbling detainee safely into the backseat before picking up the radio again.
	“All nearby units,” he panted, “this is Detective la Fontaine, Vice, at one LION INN in harborside, we’re 10-71 with multiple armed persons on the premises, one… one dead, another detained. I think four more…”
	A crackle across the line answered him, a tinny voice warbling in and out as he relayed the address and situation best he could. Police knowledge spilled out of his mental encyclopedia, codes for an ambulance and a coroner stabbed across the chattering radio for once the fighting was over and the area secured.
	“Code Three to all responding, this is urgent I- I gotta head back in-”
	“Like hell,” a voice returned. “Stay at that radio and guide us in Fontaine, no one here wants to get shot up.”
	“G-Got it,” Vince stuttered, the frigid September air spilling into the car and around the damp, crusting cloth stuck to his ankle. “C’mon Sal, be careful in there.” Reclining in his seat he heard the distant wail of approaching sirens, nodding to the absent chatter of the radio as he watched the building in front of him.

	“Two left,” Sally repeated, scampering around another towering set of drums. The floor writhed underneath the chemical slick that Sally and the last two mercenaries bobbed and rolled through, shots chasing after the weary nandroid and clipping her in the back. Her own high-quality protective plates slid and flexed as she moved, bristling past each other where the grit of smashed ceramic found its way inside and through their sheath of aramid fibers. Wincing at the grinding, frictional discomfort Sally raised her pistol again. In a dash across the floor to flank her one of the mercenaries had slipped on the expanding mess consuming the warehouse floor. Her eyes wide in the dark, the flickering sweep of the man’s flashlight running up the wall and ceiling as he fell, Sally lined up another shot. The dense chemical haze filling the air choked and stuck in her lung as she haggardly expelled the building, frictional heat inside her. The man crumpled to the ground, a bullet lodged fatally in his aorta as he expired on the ground on the concrete floor.
Panting in the still-thickening smog in the building Sally slipped around another of the large, punctured drums. The spill across the floor mixed and emulsified with the foot-stirred spill of blood gathered on the floor, streaks of sickeningly bright blood darkening and eroding in the oleaginous sludge sticking to her planted feet. Vapor condensed from the cold air inside her lungs, sticking and solidifying in the gossamer plastic folds of her pseudolung, the expelled heat dripping it, waxlike, deeper inside her machinery. Sally shook her foggying head as she swung her sidearm left and right, scanning the walls and corners for her last quarry.
	“Here, robot,” a grim voice called out into the darkness. “I’ll come peacefully.” Swinging out of the darkness towards the garage door-side of the building Sally spied the man, standing idly beneath the fallen beam of his flashlight. Lying on the ground was his balaklava, the rumpled cloth soaking up the sickening slime around it. Grey eyes and a short crop of white hair stared back at Sally from the darkness, the pitted, pale scar tissue of a man who’d spent years doing this work- campaigns across the breadth of the world between Congo and the Cape, and now some far removed island of civilization a continent away from home.
	“Sir, I want you to drop your weapon, and put your hands in the air. Then-” A metallic flip in his left hand cut her words short. A miniscule flip lighter twinkled at his side, a star of yellow flame dancing in the humid, foetid currents swirling in the air. His rifle hung low in his right hand, the barrel anxiously low to the ground.
	“You are not in any position to make demands,” he snapped through his choppy accent. “You let me go, say five men died here.”
	“And where will you go, soaking like that and with an illegal firearm?”
	“There are others of us, around. Not so easy to get rid of us when we have a job.”
	“You certainly didn’t do well by your ‘others’,” she sneered. He nodded in quiet admission, eyes just glancing at the still-warbling flame at his side.
	“But it always helps to have more back-up, no?”
	“It does, actually,” Sally sniffed, holding her gun steady on his frame. The wail of sirens outside grew closer, doubtlessly swerving and curving through forest of containers towards the building. “Which is why I suggest-”
	“Which is why we’re done here.” His right hand wheeled the rifle up, a squeeze of its trigger sending a whirling, supersonic round square towards the frozen detective. Sally blinked, the miniscule click of her eye shutters correcting once again for the darkness, hands swinging just a smidgen to send two more rounds square for the man’s neck. Tearing through the exposed, rippling muscle and through, he froze in pre-morbid shock, eyes wide as his hand dropped the lighter. His hands scrabbled uselessly towards his neck, Sally piled backwards as the round smashed through the already powdered plate covering her left chest. The round tumbled and splintered, blasting through Sally’s left shoulder joint and rendering the limp arm useless, the sleeve half-torn away where the round’s remnants were ejected towards the opposite wall. The mercenary lay writhing on the ground, the lighter landing in the infernal mixture before it roared to life, the stench of spilt blood and sulfurous gun discharge drowned in the hellish eruption of flame inside the building.