Jerry felt two things hit him at the same time—immense regret over not heeding Braxton’s advice to be careful, and heavy machine gunfire blowing through his midsection. Though the bullets penetrating both his vest and the body it was meant to protect was as painful as a vaccination shot to the arm, the force knocked him backwards to the ground. The flares flew out of his hands, sizzling underneath the heavy rain.

  Blood flooded Jerry’s mouth. Just a few shots through the abdomen, he noted. I can work through that little distraction.

  Despite these injuries, Jerry still felt his legs and everything else below the belt. That was good news. This meant that nothing had hit or outright severed his spine, enabling him to still remain in the fight and avoid the lengthy, one week or so process of being able to walk again later. Jerry’s long-suffering body had long mastered the art of repairing simpler tissues within hours or even minutes, but lagged on anything involving his nervous system.

  Team Alzar and Cattor wasted no time suppressing the farmhouse’s machine gunner. Their tracer rounds tore into the window and its frame, whittling the already rickety building. But the machine gunner within the farmhouse still fired blindly, hitting the ground and the armored trucks. Bullets ricocheted in every possible direction.

  “I’m still alive,” Jerry muttered into his gas mask’s radio, “so If you can still hear me, Brax, I’m going to need you to ventilate the bastard that just ventilated my bowels. I think I rushed in a little too hard this time around.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” he hissed in response. “Machine gun fire shouldn’t be the thing that reminds you to slow down.”

  During the cacophonous exchange of gunfire between Team Alzar, Team Cattor, and the window machine gunner, there was the quieter, but unmistakable sound of a silenced rifle firing a single shot. The machine gunner ceased their fire in an instant.

  The rest of Team Alzar rushed towards Jerry’s supine body. They worked together to drag him like he was nothing but a sack of marshmallows back behind the hard cover the trucks provided.

  “Are you a fucking braindead moron?” Plamondon barked at Jerry. “Though you did an excellent job at using your own body as a way to draw fire and expose their machine gunner, you could’ve gotten yourself or my men killed for no good reason!”

  “That’s a rude way to say, ‘Thank you for not letting my men and I not get chewed up by some Grey Man goon with a machine gun,’” Jerry said. “Seriously, how the Vullen are the Grey Men getting their hands on that level of heat?”

  “Though I’m certain that somebody in your profession is aware of this,” Plamondon said, “the proliferation of not just small arms, but more dangerous weapons of war across the Mendakian Union has been a durable issue that’s been getting worse over the years.”

  Jerry briefly thought about all of the illegal weapons they found stashed away in Bradley’s apartment, and the one pulled on him that one fateful night. “I’m afraid I can’t disagree with that bleak assertion.”

  “But enough about how my homeland is violently rotting from the inside out. I know you’re Touched, but how the Vullen did you survive that? Those rounds went right through your vest and well, you, as well.”

  “I think the Taxman considers me poor company,” Jerry said. “Or maybe it’s the same way my issues with the bottle have increased my alcohol tolerance, my issues with people who want me dead have increased my bullet tolerance.”

  “Are you sure you can stay in the fight?” Plamondon asked. “We can leave you and the holes in your person with Team Cattor while we breach the building.”

  “What do you think? Jerry asked. “I came here to rescue a nice old woman I did dirty. At this rate, the only thing that will stop me from doing that is you or your men putting me in the dirt.”

  Plamondon huffed. “That’s the spirit. Not exactly the spirit I want or need right now, but the spirit nonetheless. Let’s get that ole gal and kick some ass, I suppose.”

  A medic from Team Cattor tended to Jerry’s gunshot wounds with long, moist sheets of pink-colored salamander-skin bandages—an advanced biotechnology sourced from the stem and skin cells of specially-bred salamanders capable of sealing, disinfecting, and anesthetizing even the most dire wounds. There wasn’t much the medic had left to do considering Jerry’s numerous wounds had already stopped bleeding and sealed themselves moments ago.

  Team Alzar left the cover of the trucks and rushed towards the farmhouse’s front, evenly spaced in the event another Grey Man had retaken the machine gun or one of them had more dirty tricks in mind.

  When Team Alzar arrived at the front door of the farmhouse, they positioned themselves near the door and prepared for the breach. One of the operators used a borescope to look underneath the door and look inside for enemies or traps. He finished the examination and told his comrades that they were in the clear.

  “The honor is yours,” Plamondon said to Jerry.

  “Yessir!”

  Though Jerry would’ve preferred more explosive means of entry, the suspected presence of explosives manufacturing and confirmed presence of one hostage called for more manual forms of breaching, which Jerry was more than glad to assist with.

  Jerry moved to the front of the door, where he took a few steps back, then lunged forward with one mighty kick. Wood crunched and the door’s lock went smashing inwards through the door frame.

  The six man team flooded into the home’s ample foyer through the breached door. Jerry used his catcaller’s holographic projector to pull up the floor-plans that were downloaded earlier to it.

  He and the others were in the ratty, dust-choked foyer of the farmhouse. To the right was a living room full of old, abandoned furniture and nothing else. To the left was a parlor full of even more old, abandoned furniture and also nothing else. But in front of Jerry and others was a staircase before a kitchen, which was, surprisingly, full of old, abandoned furniture and nothing else yet again. There was easy, obstructed access to the basement in the kitchen, but Plamondon wanted to investigate the makeshift machine gun nest on the second floor.

  It took less than four steps for Team Alzar towards the stairs for the enemy within the farmhouse to show themselves. From the hallway of the parlor on the left and the hallway of the living room on the right, two Grey Men emerged. They wore plate carriers over distressed grey robes and had painted their faces striking shades of black and white. What was even more striking about them were the automatic rifles they were split seconds from firing at Jerry and the rest of Team Alzar—which they never had a chance to do.

  Jerry and the rest of Team Alzar shot first. Several deafening, tinnitus-inducing bursts of gunfire filled the foyer of the farmhouse. The same way the Grey Men emerged from the hallways at the same, exact time, so did they fall at the same, exact time to the floor in great, conjoined blasts of wall-painting gore.

  Though it was well beyond being necessary, Jerry and one of the operators on Team Alzar rushed towards the corpses to police their bloodied weapons. Once the other operators of Team Alzar checked the first floor to make sure it was clear, Plamondon did something quite shocking with the corpses of the Grey Men leaking blood and other unidentifiable fluids. He produced his pistol. Jerry looked away in mild disgust and shock, but heard him shoot them in their heads—four times, two for each dead Grey Man.

  “May I ask why you did that?” Jerry asked, unnerved by the sheer overkill surrounding him. “I know there was no hope for these two bastards and this might sound quite funny coming from somebody like me, but that felt…illegal?”

  Plamondon holstered his pistol. “Nothing illegal about it, Genovesi. It's actually becoming standard operating procedure for Exorcist Division units across the Mendakian Union. If we shoot somebody and deem them beyond aid, you have to obliterate the brain. Supernatural researchers smarter and better paid than me said there might be a causal connection between physical survival of the brain and post-mortem Touched appearances, and I don’t disagree with that theory.”

  “Why so?”

  “Remember those supernatural researchers I just brought up? They have also noticed an alarming spike of post-mortem Touched appearing days or even hours after their deaths.”

  Jerry thought about the death and mysterious disappearance of Bradley Birdshit, then frowned. “Grim as it sounds to say aloud, I wished that the whole procedure of popping heads existed long before I came here.”

  “Scared that Sandaux kid might come for you?”

  Jerry’s eyes went wide with shock. “You know about that whole clusterfuck?”

  “Of course I do. Just about everybody in my line of work does.” Jerry had a feeling Plamondon was smirking behind the faceplate of his Panthera combat suit. “We Exorcist Division operators love talking to one another about our ops, great, good, bad, or downright disastrous, and are often privy to top-secret information many Triple I Division field agents such as yourself aren’t. Our slogan isn’t ‘Where there is smoke, we extinguish the fire’ just to look cool and sound tough. So trust me when I say there is a lot of smoke involving that formerly deceased Bradley kid.”

  “This conversation about looming threats is starting to put me off my game,” Jerry said. “Can we worry about the immediate threats around us instead?”

  “No problem.”

  Team Alzar went to the second floor of the farm house. They slowly went from room to room, finding nothing save for evidence of desperate human habitation and one of the former inhabitants, dead as the air around him.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  In the room that was turned into a makeshift machine gun nest, one of the Grey Men was rendered supine by Braxton’s single bullet delivered to the center of his forehead. Many have claimed that when the deceased are seen, they often have peaceful, almost serene expressions when they have long left their physical shells for the Eternal Arcadia or the many other similar places. This Grey Man was not one of them. In addition to the pile of mushy brains cradling the back of his skull, there was blood leaking from his nostrils and while his wide, glassy eyes stared at nothing in particular.

  Jerry had a feeling his man felt his feet getting cold before Braxton put a hot one in his forehead and sent him to the frosty, frigid depths of Vullen—or at least he hoped this was so for daring to shoot him with a machine gun.

  “It looks like we’re all clear up here,” Plamondon said, “which means that Charles and his poor mother can be found in only one place now.”

  Jerry nodded. “With some time to really think about what needs to happen next, I feel like this night might end on a real bad note soon.”

  “You strike me as a man who usually puts action before thinking, so I will interpret your sudden pessimism as an advance warning of sorts,” Plamondon said. “But hesitation now will only lead to failure.”

  Team Alzar made their way from the second floor of the farmhouse towards the kitchen, where the only access to the basement could be found. All that stood before them, Charles, his mother, and whatever heinous business the now deceased Grey Men were cooking up in the basement was a single door. The operator who used his borescope on the front door worked his technical expertise on the basement door. He finished his task and said entry would be safe. Jerry was once again given the honors of kicking the locked door open.

  Team Alzar crept down two flights of stairs before they arrived in the basement. The area was in an even worse state than the interior of the farmhouse. Its few rooms were covered in dust, thick cobwebs, and filled with musty, stagnant air. The built-in chemical sensors of the Exorcist Division Operators’ Panthera combat suits flashed red warning signs on the front of their faceplates, telling them to avoid creating explosions. This was quite the conundrum considering Jerry and the men around him were carrying rifles and several devices of the explosive sort, but they continued searching the basement for Charles and his mother.

  After not much of an intensive search, Team Alzar came upon what had to be the target room. Its door frame was draped in thick plastic sheeting that barely allowed the lights within the room to shine through it. One of the operators pushed through it, followed by Jerry and the other members of Team Alzar.

  To the left of the team was Madeline Adnot, seated on the raw concrete of the basement floor. She looked frailer than before, utterly petrified with fear, and had hollow, swollen, and red-rimmed eyes that appeared to have cried all the tears they could cry. The pitiful sight of the poor woman inflamed Jerry’s simmering rage to such an uncontrollable degree, his hands made his rifle shake.

  To the right of Team Alzar was the primary quarry of the night—Charles Adnot. He was in a similar frailer, hollowed-eyed state of his mother, but less from trauma, and more from the shock of a man on the run who had finally been cornered and caught. Much like a fallen king sitting on his broken throne, Charles was on top of a pile of shattered furniture and various bombmaking materials. He had a detonator taped to his right hand while he held a revolver in his left hand, casually playing with the metal cylinder like the gun was a toy instead of a death-dealing device.

  “I don’t know what kind of lunatic bullshit you have planned with either of those things in your hands,” Jerry said, “but you need to realize tonight ends with either you in a bodybag or immediately surrendering.”

  Charles shook his head. “No, there’s a third choice.”

  “Enlighten us,” Plamondon asked. “Enlighten all of us.”

  “See this?” Charles raised the detonator aloft, causing Jerry and the operators of the team to take a collective step back while their rifles were still aimed towards him. “This is no normal detonator, if anybody is wondering. It’s a dead man’s switch I engineered myself. I can manually activate it, but If my pulse stops, the pile of explosives beneath me will go off and kill everybody in this room.”

  “So this is your genius plan?” Jerry asked. “Sounds more like suicidal desperation instead of anything substantial, son.”

  Charles nodded. “I have known the risks of joining the Grey Men for a long time. I’m not scared to die.”

  “My friend,” Jerry hissed, “when you joined the Grey Men, you joined a nihilistic death cult that would eventually ruin everything decent in your life.”

  “That’s a terrible mischaracterization of the Grey Men’s mission. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised that a federal agent of the Mendakian Union has been so thoroughly brainwashed to hate himself, his nation, his people, and his race with such vigor. Seriously, who taught you how to hate yourself that much?”

  “I’m a proud southern Nuragian, you dumb, bombmaking bastard,” Jerry said. “Not only does your racist, Grey Man babbling mean nothing to me, it means I’m near the bottom of the barrel in your eyes.”

  “That is a lower, but still acceptable race to the Grey Men,” Charles said. “Better to be near the bottom of the barrel than it is to be the mud beneath it, no?”

  “I’m not entertaining a debate concerning my humanity to a man who beat his wife I should’ve shot dead five minutes ago.”

  “Then what are you going to do if you’re not willing to talk to me?” Charles asked. “There doesn’t seem like there is much that any of us can do without mutually destroying the other party.”

  “He has us there.” Jerry sucked his teeth before looking towards Plamondon. “What exactly are we going to do?”

  “I’m going to be honest here,” he said. “I have no idea. We’re at one bastard of an impasse here.”

  “Could your suits survive an explosion at this distance?” Jerry asked.

  “More than likely,” Plamondon said. “Panthera combat suits have exceptional survivability when it comes to shrapnel and explosions, but there’s no way Madeline Adnot or you would survive.”

  “Shit,” Jerry said.

  “Shit, indeed,” Plamondon said.

  “Any Touched we could get into the basement to help us out here?” Jerry asked.

  “There is Villason,” Lieutenant Plamondon said. “He’s on Team Cattor, and could fuse Charle’s fingers around the dead man’s switch with a single touch, but there’s a large chance Charles here would react poorly to that. But there’s not a chance in Vullen I’m bringing anymore of my men into this death trap.”

  “Then what do we do?” Jerry asked, growing frustrated. “You or I have gotta have something, Plamondon.”

  “I don’t know!” he hissed.

  Jerry inhaled and exhaled, steeling himself for what he assumed to be potentially suicidal choice of action. “I have an idea. It’s not a good idea, but the best I have so far.”

  “Whatever that idea is, remember you do not have my permission to fire on Charles.”

  “Forgive me for this,” he said to everybody in the basement, including himself, “but I can’t abide by that order.”

  “What do you fucking mean you can’t—”

  Jerry held his breath, aimed the best he could, and shot Charles in the neck with his rifle. His distant and borderline deluded goal was to give Charles quadriplegia so he couldn’t activate the detonator, then mechanically stimulating his heart to allow the Exorcist Division operators to extract Madeline Adnot from the basement.

  Somehow, some way, Jerry’s scheme worked. Not only did his shot instantly cripple Charles and render him unconscious, a surreal amount of blood only reserved for the special effects of absurd horror movies drained out of the massive wound to his neck. The thick cord of blood struck the floor with the audibility and force of a broken faucet. Charles unconsciously leaned to the left on his throne of explosives, and began to die at a pace where the rest of his short life was now being measured in seconds.

  Madeline Adnot screamed until her voice went raw, reminding Jerry that even if he was probably saving her life, he was no hero. Justified or not, what Jerry just did to Charles in front of her was the sort of action that made mothers forge deals with demons to gain their revenge even if their children were lost causes.

  “WHAT THE FUCK!” Plamondon shouted at Jerry. “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST DO!?”

  Jerry ignored him. He rushed over to Charles’ limp and rapidly exsanguinating body, then injected his bloodstained chest with a syringe of combat stimulants. Jerry had no idea if the stims would actually help or make the inevitable explosion come faster, but his latest best idea was burned up seconds ago. Jerry pumped and pushed away at Charles’ chest to keep his heart going the best he could.

  “Trying to save that woman’s life,” Jerry said, his voice clipped and honed to a razor’s edge with combat anxiety and acute dread. “Grab her and go.”

  “You don’t tell my men and I what to do, you little—”

  “Lieutenant Victor Plamondon, shut the fuck up and get her out of her,” Jerry yelled back. “NOW.”

  Plamondon glared at Jerry in the way some men did before they were about to hit somebody, but did nothing of the sort. He collected his men and a weeping Madeline Adnot before tearing out of the basement.

  Throughout his life, Jerry had found himself in many situations so uniquely fucked-up, they were awe-inspiring. But desperately switching between performing CPR on a dying man he had shot in the neck and dragging his body through some dirty, abandoned basement to avoid the worst of the blast radius of explosives linked to said dying man's fading pulse definitely had to be up there. The stress and exertion of it all caused Jerry to break into a rare sweat.

  “Jerry,” Braxton said over the radio in his gas mask. “Lieutenant Plamondon just told me what happened down there. What the Vullen did you do now?”

  “I’m going to give you a classic Genovesian answer,” Jerry said, wheezing while struggling to carry Charles’ deadweight up the stairs. Jerry occasionally slipped in Charles’ blood or misstepped, slowing his progress. “I did the best I could. I did the best I fucking could, Brax.”

  “You shot him in the neck without being authorized to shoot.”

  “I know, twelvedamnit! Yeah, I took a worthwhile risk that broke some rules, but I saved somebody who needed to be saved. That’s all that matters in the end.”

  “I’m not having this back and forth with you right now,” Braxton said. “Just get the Vullen out of there as soon as possible.”

  “I’m working on it,” Jerry moaned, “but this bloodless bastard is heavy as sin. I thought people were supposed to get lighter when half of the blood in their body falls out of their fucking neck.”

  “Stop talking and get out of there.”

  Jerry obliged by getting Charles and himself out of the basement. The macabre exercise routine forced him past his physical limit, so he left Charles in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Some moments later, he staggered out of the farmhouse, wheezing and coughing like a dog slowly dying in the summer heat.

  Once he was outside of the farmhouse, he tried to keep running to escape the blast radius, but simply couldn’t. Jerry tripped and collapsed on the ground, half-delirious with exhaustion. Still, he crawled forward, moaning and dry-heaving.

  Jerry told himself that all needed was just a little more effort, and he would be fine to fight another day.

  But his little more simply wasn’t enough.

  Jerry glanced backwards and couldn't believe what he witnessed. The farmhouse came apart like a bomb big enough to kill the world. The ground trembled. The massive explosion sent a storm of glass, wood, stone, and metal in every direction. Even worse, a section of the farmhouse’s roof ascended into the air, flying in a small parabola that went directly towards Jerry.

  He screamed in terror and attempted to uselessly shield his face with his arms, but the flying section of the roof was too merciless and mighty when paired with gravity.

  It smashed into Jerry and crushed him into the ground like a flyswatter crushing a gnat, replacing his consciousness with overbearing blackness.