Gadot fell back, playing with her wrist as Jimmy and Kurt covered the corners in the rapidly clearing subway station. The area was more or less a long tiled hallway, one end with stairs going up to the street, with the other descending to the loading platform. It was a grimy area, with a vaguely unpleasant smell in the air and bits of garbage clustered around overfilled trash cans against the ticket booth at the far end. Two armed guards stepped forward as they approached the staircase at the far end, raising weapons. Jimmy and Kurt each gunned down the guard on their side, their sense of coordination growing stronger. Jimmy slid fresh shells into his Super 90 shotgun, moving slower than the others. Carrying two duffle bags and his new M60 was slowing him down considerably, as was his heavy armor.

  “I need the technical. To my location, street level, yes,” Gadot said into her phone before disconnecting and returning to their shared call. “I got us transport. Needed it a little earlier than I thought we would. Those Goons are really upset with us.” She moved past Kurt with a chuckle, leaning against a wall for cover as she glanced up the stairs before slipping around the corner and moving up towards the street.

  Dropping out his magazine of normal rounds, Kurt replaced it with a newly recharged magazine filled with +P ammo. “I can’t imagine why.” He shook his head and charged around the corner, moving up the staircase next to Gadot while Jimmy brought up the rear. As they approached the top of the stairs, Gadot dropped to her stomach and waved a hand frantically at Kurt to do the same.

  Crawling up the last few steps on his stomach with a slight grimace, Kurt peered over the lip of the final stair and took in the scene before them. The entire city seemed to be crawling with police NPCs. Cars and swat trucks streaked past with sirens blaring. As Kurt watched, a squad of GoonStorm troops took cover behind a cement planter and began trading fire with the police.

  “Now! Go for the lot to the left!” Gadot jumped up and sprinted towards the road, Kurt close behind her. Jimmy lagged behind, but gamely kept his head down and ran on. Kurt scanned the police action and noticed something that made his skin crawl. One of the officers was standing back between two parked swat vehicles with a large silver Desert Eagle handgun held at his side. He seemed to be searching the area. As Kurt opened his mouth to shout, the fake policeman turned and saw them, a wide smile forming on his features.

  “Gadot, get down!” he shouted, opening fire with his Glock and spraying the swat truck as the player ducked and ran. Gadot grunted, sliding into cover behind a civilian vehicle parked haphazardly on the sidewalk. The player opened fire, seven thunderous shots ringing out across the lot. The police NPCs and GoonStorm troops noticed the new commotion, and suddenly they were taking fire from three different angles as police vehicles pulled in behind them.

  Jimmy walked by while firing his shotgun, keeping the police player hiding between the swat vehicles. He bent low and helped Gadot to her feet, as she gasped at the flattened slug on her chest armor.

  “The Cadillac,” she managed to say while struggling into a run. The vehicle in question was now firmly behind police lines as a swat team filed out of a nearby truck. Jimmy didn’t hesitate, emptying his shotgun into them as they swarmed. He crouched low behind a park bench, flipping the gun over and performing his rapid quad-load reloading maneuver again as Gadot fired in bursts over the bench. They stayed low while the police returned fire before both standing and unleashing their weapons once more.

  Kurt, seeing that they had the NPCs under control, ran straight for the police player. He dove under the swat truck and shot the man in the foot. Being a player, his enemy simply took damage and darted away, running from the spray of bullets Kurt sent after him. As Kurt climbed out from under the truck, he watched in amazement as the player darted between two groups of police and took no fire from either of them. Turning back with a grin, the player shouted something to the police around him that Kurt couldn’t quite make out, while gesturing at him. Both groups of police NPCs turned and began a coordinated charge of his position.

  Leaving the enemy player to his retreat, Kurt ran back towards his friends. As he ran around the bodies of the police NPCs in the street, collapsing into dust, he took in their new vehicle. An armored black 2014 Cadillac Escalade SUV was parked at the curb, its dark tinted windows reflecting the scene of chaos behind Kurt as he approached. There were two bulbous hatches on top of the roof, one over the passenger seat in front, and one over the rear compartment. Jimmy slung his shotgun and opened the back end, removing a long metal pin and heaving the door from its mounts. He opened an interior armored door and removed that one as well, setting it aside before climbing into the rear compartment.

  “You guys? I don’t mean to excite anyone, but there’s a really cool machine gun back here.” Jimmy’s happiness was palpable, even over the coms. Kurt jumped into the front passenger seat, taking a few calming breaths as the armored door sealed behind him and drowned out the sounds of the battle. Gadot got behind the wheel and started the engine with a simple push button before pulling open her top to inspect the bullet she had taken earlier.

  Plucking it from the armor with her fingers, she scowled and dropped it at Kurt’s feet. “Fifty cal hurts. Friend of yours?”

  “Pretty sure it’s the guy in the Dodge Demon from last night.” Kurt reloaded his Glock, noticing with some satisfaction that his special magazines were close to being fully recharged. “He seems immune to cops somehow.”

  Jimmy laughed in his ear. “Disguise players suck. Ain’t that right, Mr. Kurtis?”

  “Don’t you have a machine gun to play with or something?” Kurt scowled in annoyance, pulling up his minimap to look at the sheer number of police indicators. They were at a five bar heat level, and dozens of police icons were closing on their position. As Kurt looked, two different helicopter icons appeared at the edge of the map, tiny whirling blades making right for them. “We should leave, maybe.”

  Gadot raised her eyebrows at a notification on her wrist, glancing at the map Kurt threw up on the windshield and setting her UMP 45 down between her seat and the center console. She put the truck into drive and pressed both gas and brake pedals to the floor. “You guys should have a privacy request. Make sure you deny it.”

  “The hell is that?” Kurt pulled up his notifications, swiping through several skill notices. He found it quickly enough, a bright red bar across the top of the notification drawing his attention.

  ‘Another Player has recorded video footage of you in The Life of Crime. Your face is pixelated by default. Would you like to provide permission to display your character’s face?’ Kurt thumbed the ‘no’ button and discarded the message. Turning in his seat, Kurt looked through the armored glass separator at Jimmy in the rear compartment. He was braced in a seated position, legs extended out towards the open back of the truck, with a double barreled thirty-caliber Browning machine gun mount’s grip in his hands. He turned and lifted his mask to show Kurt and Gadot his giant smile.

  “It must be my birthday. Let’s go put down some Goons!” Jimmy cocked both machine gun barrels and swiveled the gun to aim at the GoonStorm troops they had seen on exiting the subway. Gadot released the brake and slid the back of the SUV around, giving Jimmy the shot he needed.

  What was left of the GoonStorm group and police NPCs went down in a hail of gunfire as Gadot drove away. She was immediately forced to jump the SUV up onto the sidewalk, driving past a blockade of police vehicles. One of the cruisers reversed and bounced up onto the curb in an attempt to block them.

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  “Brace!” Gadot shouted an instant before slamming into the car’s back end, sending it spinning part way out into the road. A small fleet of black Dodge Chargers entered the road in front of them, causing Gadot to swerve the SUV around the nearest corner. As she floored the accelerator, more black Chargers swerved into place in front of them. “Alright, boys, I need you out of your hatches and keeping these bulls off us.” She spoke calmly as she slid the SUV around another corner, the police force scrambling to keep up.

  “I mean, I’m down.” Jimmy punctuated his sentence with a burst of fire from the Brownings. “But I just don’t think my shotgun is going to be much help, and I’m more than a little ashamed to admit I don’t carry any .556 on me. Just put more of them behind us.”

  Gadot swiped at her wrist, glancing between it and the road while ignoring her annoyance at Jimmy’s remark. “Open the long compartment to your . . . left?”

  Shaking his head, Kurt reached up and turned the handle on his hatch, shoving upward as he stood. Wind whipped at him and he had to brace his feet in place to keep from being thrown around, but he was able to aim and fire at the back of a nearby Charger. A bullet pinged off the roof next to him, and he flinched and looked skyward as he flinched. A police helicopter was following their path through the buildings, a balaclava-clad sniper in a harness dangling from the side door.

  Reloading, Kurt turned in time to see a large black Chevrolet Suburban about to hit them. Gadot’s shout of “brace” didn’t even register, as he held onto the bars surrounding his hatch. Instead of the impact he had been expecting, the Cadillac lurched, sliding to a rapid stop and allowing the Suburban to hurtle past them into a nearby Charger.

  “Woah, Gadot . . . is this what I think it is?” Jimmy’s hatch popped open behind him and Kurt turned to see a long, army green tube extend from it. It had two black plastic handles on the bottom and a boxy-looking scope attached to the side.

  “One Carl Gustav recoilless rifle.” Gadot spoke calmly, her focus on the road and swarming police force around them. “Save a few rounds for the tank, we’re going after them right now. Roadblocks only, please.”

  “Well find me some roadblocks, then! Naw, I’m shootin’ down this chopper.” Jimmy sounded excited, and Kurt couldn’t help but smile in spite of their situation. He turned back to spray a Charger at their side with 9mm rounds. It swerved as the rounds blew fragments of windshield into the air. Gadot drove them back towards the bank, to Kurt’s distress. He dropped back down into his seat, reloading his gun as he checked the map.

  “You’re driving us back into the hornets’ nest. You know that, right?” He took a couple of steadying breaths.

  “We didn’t come here to just rob these guys. We came to make a point.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, gripping the steering wheel harder. “Brace!”

  A black Suburban slammed into their back end, and the Escalade fishtailed. Jimmy dropped down from his hatch, one hand firmly gripping the recoilless rifle as it became stuck in the hatch above him. He stretched out, reaching for a handle of the Brownings and holding down the firing trigger as the Suburban rammed them again. The gun bucked wildly, a burst of rounds spraying the road and Suburban behind them. A wheel erupted in a puff of white smoke and the Suburban swerved before beginning a series of violent flips, while the Escalade spun in a circle.

  Gadot eased off the gas, letting the wheel slide against the heel of her hand for a moment before clamping down on it and flooring the accelerator again, sending them streaking down a nearby alley. Jimmy climbed awkwardly out of his hatch again, a death grip on the recoilless rifle.

  “Okay, fire one!” He shouldered the gun and sighted briefly on the police helicopter following them. A projectile streaked from the front of the tube, a thin trail of white smoke following it as Jimmy cheered. An instant before it struck the helicopter, it blossomed apart into several tiny bombs and exploded. The air around the helicopter erupted, a series of small explosions shredding the cockpit and engines.

  Jimmy reloaded the recoilless rifle as the helicopter lazily spiraled into a nearby building and exploded, raining glass and debris all over the road as they drove underneath.

  Kurt braced himself as the Cadillac swung around a corner and hurtled towards a police roadblock. Several cruisers were parked in a row, directly braced by four large, armored swat vehicles. A shell from the recoilless shot out in front of the Escalade, bursting in the air before it hit the roadblock and spread explosions all along the road. Gadot pulled the mask from her face and grinned at Kurt before whispering into her coms, “Guess what Kurt? Brace.”

  They hit the ruin of the police blockade and blasted through it, sending charred and flaming wreckage skidding off the road in either direction while Jimmy slapped the roof and shouted his approval. He slid back into the rear compartment, reloading the recoilless rifle once more before getting comfortable at the machineguns. The bulk of the police force chasing them was in ruins, and as Kurt scanned the map he watched their heat notification ping up again.

  A six bar heat level apparently came with heavy air support, and Kurt watched four new helicopter icons appear on the outskirts of the map. “Oh good, more of those.”

  They arrived back at the bank, and Kurt took in the destruction left by GoonStorm. The pristine corporate parking area outside the bank was mostly crushed to rubble, dotted with blackened scorch marks and the husks of burnt-out vehicles. No bodies were obvious, but several piles of armor, helmets, and weapons marked the demise of GoonStorm players. The tank’s tread tracks led off down a nearby side street, more destroyed vehicles dotting its path.

  Narrowing her eyes and smiling, Gadot drove them around the corner to follow the trail of destruction. “Let’s go tank hunting.” A squad of three black Chargers came up behind them, spreading out to box them in. Jimmy took out each one with a quick controlled burst of gunfire to the windshields, carefully placed so as not to kill the NPCs within. As Gadot followed the trail of destruction, it became clear that the tank was heading towards the freeway, moving out of the Downtown Cluster.

  “Alright, Jimmy, time to stop shooting the bulls.” Gadot leaned forward and expanded the map on the windshield.

  Kurt turned, concern evident on his features as he addressed her. “Forgive my questioning of your methods, but that sounds like a terrible thing to do.”

  “Yeah, plus I don’t wanna.” Jimmy turned in his seat and peered through the dark window.

  Gadot smiled and nodded. “It’s a very bad thing, but not for us. The Goons are running, trying to take the freeway to their base since they can’t lose the bulls in that sledgehammer they’re driving. If they take out enough of the NPCs then they can slip into the base in that window and get away clean. We are not going to let that happen.”

  She checked the rearview, turning down a side street to intersect a main road. Cutting across a squad of black Chargers, Gadot cut the wheel and sent them into a slide between the vehicles, before flooring the accelerator and sending them hurtling towards another group of police. Glancing up through the windshield, Gadot nodded when she saw one of the helicopters bank to follow them. She braked hard, bouncing the SUV up onto the curb of a park and blasting through benches in her way as she cut across the grassy area.

  With a healthy force of police NPCs in tow, Gadot cut back onto the main road, moving towards the freeway. She weaved between oncoming police cruisers and Chargers, using the bulk of the Escalade to ram them out of the way as needed. The Escalade barreled down the onramp to the freeway with a hoard of police in tow.

  Slipping between civilian vehicles with practiced ease, Gadot swiped at the map, moving it forward along the freeway until she found what she was looking for. “There. Maybe two miles ahead of us.” A cluster of black dots surrounded a larger black dot, with a trail of flashing police dots on the road ahead of them. Swiping the map over to Kurt’s side, Gadot checked the rearview mirror and slowed the Escalade, not wanting to get too far ahead of the police force following them.

  “Are you sure I can’t shoot any of these cops?” Jimmy sounded genuinely dejected. Kurt looked back at his friend. He was hunched over the Brownings, idly rolling a shell from the recoilless rifle around on the truck bed.

  “Don’t play with that, it’s explosive!” Kurt banged on the glass when Jimmy began tossing the shell end over end, catching it one handed.

  The surroundings began to change as they exited the city. Grassy hills dotted with expensive-looking homes spread out across the countryside before them, the massive twelve lane freeway was a river cutting through the upscale residential neighborhood. Remembering he had looted a new weapon and hadn’t had a chance to really inspect it, Kurt scanned his Glock again.

  Glock Model 17 Full Auto

  Pistol. Sidearm. Weapon drops upon death only if equipped in the Primary/Secondary slot.

  Caliber: 9mm

  Rate of Fire: 1300 rounds per minute.

  Capacity: 17 Round Magazine

  WARNING!

  Item has not been unlocked. Can only be equipped in Primary/Secondary slot. No modifications may be applied.

  Kurt re-read the warning, making a face. He deduced that he was allowed to use items he had not unlocked but losing them would mean they were simply gone. The inability to add modifications also curbed his ideas to get some extended magazines. With a shrug, he turned his attention back to the road.