“K chortu!”
I poked my PPSh out from behind the wall of the alleyway and opened up without even trying to aim. I had no idea if I hit anything, but I heard bullets striking metal. That could be the wall, for all I knew. I didn’t have the luxury of checking to find out, but then, I didn’t have the motivation, either. I ran, dragging my foot behind me. I had two cyborgs for company.
Dammit—this was luxury, huh? A guy could weep at the clack-clack-clacking footsteps!
“Don’t get so upset!” I called. “It was just a shutka <joke>!”
“If that was a joke, then you’re gonna think what we’re about to do to you is fuckin’ hilarious!”
Yikes. Scary. When I heard the voice mixed with static, I just shrugged and took the next turn, following the wall of the apartment block. Whereupon…
“…Huh?”
Apparently, I’d made a full circuit. I locked eyes with the Adidas-wearing errand boy. My hand moved instinctively.
“Just be glad I’m not the madam!” I said. If I were, he would have ended up with a lot more than just a broken jaw.
It was worth a precious moment of my time. The guy stumbled backward, not even able to scream; I gave him a good kick and lunged for the next corner.
“Davai, davai, davai, davai…!”
The breath I heaved out from under my balaclava got sucked right back into my nostrils. It made me think of that government ad about brushing your teeth, and I chuckled.
I could still laugh—that was good. I might not have any leeway here, but at least I still had it in me to pretend like I did.
Even the fact that I could hear their footsteps was proof of my good fortune. It meant those guys weren’t moving faster than the speed of sound. Maybe they couldn’t. Electromagnetic waves or pure capacity or something.
If they weren’t going to do it, though, it meant they were underestimating me. Or maybe they were hopped up.
The guy firing the Gyrojet pistol was probably the latter.
The earsplitting explosion and the sound of concrete chipping away made me put a little extra spring in my step as I tried to make some more distance.
“Argh… Dammit, my foot hurts…”
Pain or no pain, though, I was alive, so I was grateful for that much. I thanked Ivan from the bottom of my heart. You couldn’t take out a cyborg with a frag grenade—and other ways of trying would have been even worse. So I guess I could count myself lucky that only two cyborgs had come after me.
Even better: They were charging straight ahead, the faster guy in front.
“Idti ko mne <Come and get me>!” I growled. I stepped away from the apartment that we’d been circling and fired my PPSh into the middle of the street.
One thing I’d learned as a Janitor was that bullets didn’t just go bouncing around like idiots. When they grazed a wall or armor, they sort of went rolling along the surface—so the very center was a safe place.
“Ghhgh?! Dammit, back me up here!”
“Jackass! You want backup, then pick up the pace. You’re in the way!”
Meanwhile, my opponents were big, hulking brutes, so in the narrow alleyway, only the guy in front could fire. As long as the guy in back, who’d taken a few bullets and wasn’t moving so fast, didn’t see fit to push past him, he couldn’t shoot me.
Not so much because he was afraid of friendly fire, but because he was afraid of what would happen after he had opened fire and killed me.
Anyway, thanks to that, we were even on the number of guns, if nothing else. I tried not to think about the other factors.
“Grraaahhh!”
The guy in front decided to charge me and let his armor do the talking. I was toast.
Whoever said big guys are idiots didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I wasn’t fast enough on the draw to hit anything vital. Or maybe I just wasn’t skilled enough. Maybe. I squeezed the trigger on my PPSh.
“Bah! This isn’t funny! How much do you think I spent on this ammunition?!”
The bullets came out of the muzzle like water from a hose, but they bounced off his armor like I was throwing beans at him. Gotta respect MIL-SPEC quality—it let him shrug off even the piercing power of my Tokarev rounds.
I guess that’s just another way of saying you get what you pay for—but apparently the guy behind him hadn’t paid as much.
“Arrgh!” he cried, and I saw him go down in a shower of sparks. One of the bullets must have caught a chink in his armor. He must not have had the protection of the unscientific being—or maybe mne povezlo <I got lucky>.
It didn’t make my situation much better. I was still staring down the barrel of a VAG-73.
“Koshmar!” I shouted, and tumbled. If I was still alive, it was only because I’d chosen an alleyway narrow enough that the guy couldn’t move as fast as he would have liked.
It wasn’t the best place for a full cyborg to take a swing at me. If he connected, I could only wish to end up like that errand boy.
From what I’d heard, the effective range of a Gyrojet pistol was real finicky. Too far, and it wouldn’t work; too close, same problem. Which is why the round that hit me didn’t pierce my armor plating. Or maybe Barbara was counting Janitors among her protectees today. Yeah, that could be it.
Whatever it was, my fall twisted my ankle even worse, and my body armor came off—but that was it.