Denver Overrun (Denver Burning Book 4) (3 page)

She hurried back inside and yelled at the others as she crossed the room again.

"Change of plans, people. We have to evacuate! Everyone grab a body and get them outside. Just drag them, and go!"

Cole whined as he struggled to his feet. "Sarge, we just got them in here!"

"The whole station is going up, Cole. Whoever we don't get out will burn!"

A few minutes later they were all outside again, clustering around the end of the building that wasn't on fire. One by one, the survivors of the massacre crept away through the streets to find what safety they could. Alicia watched them go, unable to offer a better alternative. Behind her the building burned, its column of smoke winding up through the sky to join others that were blowing from elsewhere in the city.

Cole and the two female staffers spoke quickly in low tones, and then he turned to address Alicia. "I'm sorry, Sergeant Hendrickson. I've got to get out of here and find my family. I'm going to take Jackie and Helen as far as Colburn. Good luck!"

Without waiting for further permission or advice, the three of them took off with Cole in the lead, pistol up and ready.

That left Alicia and Officer Andrews standing several yards away from a burning building and a row of dead bodies, arranged on the grass with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances.

There was no more shooting within earshot, but a crash signaled the collapse of part of their station's roof.

"What's the plan, Sarge?" Andrews asked, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his uniform's breast pocket to ward off the glare of the sun that was now sinking toward the horizon, half obscured by smoke. “I hope we’re not going to stand around here while the rest of the city burns.”

Alicia shook her head. “Of course not. Thanks for sticking with me, Andrews.” She considered the tall, graying officer for a moment. Her impression of him was as a capable, occasionally fierce, usually stand-offish policeman. He had been on the force for six years, coming over from a back-office risk analysis desk job at some big corporation. She had often wondered about his motivations for becoming a policeman, but whatever they were, he had graduated the academy with honors and had been an exemplary officer so far.  

He wasn't much for banter and avoided all office politics. But the only complaint she’d ever heard about him was for gruffness with a citizen that wasn’t cooperating. That was common for most of the officers on the force-- people these days seemed to have an axe to grind against anyone in a uniform, and Alicia’s community outreach efforts hadn’t been terribly successful lately.

All in all, she was glad to have Andrews with her on a day like this one. “We need to try to find some of our other officers,” she told him, “and link up with anyone else that’s battling this threat. Without radios, we’re blind until we band together. Where do you want to start looking?”

Andrews finished loading a spare magazine he had retrieved from a fallen officer and shoved it into his belt. “Want to try Ellsworth? I know we had a man or two down that way this morning, before we went dark. And even if we don’t find them, I'm sure we’ll run into something worth investigating.”

“Yeah, probably another firefight,” Alicia said with a sigh.

“I wish we had more ammo for Simmins’ rifle,” Andrews lamented. “I kept telling HQ to stock more firepower in the district stations, but they just thought I was being overzealous and militaristic. Simmins only had an AR because he used to be on the rapid response team and didn't turn it in when he transferred here. If we do get in another firefight, we’ll wish we had something more than our pistols.”

“This is what we signed up for,” Alicia said. “No use hanging around. Let’s go.”

They took off, jogging up the street to get clear of the smoke from the station fire, and then slowed down as they got into new territory. Alicia was shocked to find herself thinking of it that way: what had been a familiar street hours earlier was now unexplored ground from which danger might emerge without a moment's warning. It was as if the city had mutated suddenly from a sleeping giant into a nightmare beast.

They heard the distant pop of gunfire several more times, and they could see smoke from the plane crashes billowing into the air over the city. But in the immediate area nothing was stirring; either everyone had fled, gone into hiding, or they were... not moving, anyway.

"Andrews. How widespread do you think this could be?" Alicia asked as they moved northwest through the streets. "I mean, 9/11 involved a dozen actors with overseas support, right? Wherever these guys popped out from, there can't be more than a handful of them, right?"

Andrews shook his head. "There's no telling, Sergeant. But if there are enough of them that a team of gunmen were sent to assault our little district, then I'm betting that HQ was hit with a lot more. And if these guys have the capability to take down airliners along with the power grid..."

He left it there, but it was all Alicia needed to hear. The full weight of what was happening clarified what she knew she needed to do, and how far she might have to go. It was entirely possible that they were looking at the destruction of the whole city, possibly the region. It would take a long time to bounce back from this, even if they could regain control of the city in the next few days.  

How could this have happened? She was grateful that at least Jason and Sadie were out of town and she didn't need to worry about them as well. She shook her head, trying to focus her mind and stay on top of her game.

Rounding a corner, they cautiously surveyed a street that led toward the downtown area. What they saw wasn't pretty.

Smoke poured from a large hole in the roof of a building three blocks down. All traffic was stopped, cars abandoned, some with doors hanging open. In the foreground, three civilians were hiding behind a dumpster. Beyond them, four men were walking up the center of the street toward their hiding place, each carrying a weapon.

"This town is ours now!" one of the armed men yelled so that the civilians could hear. Alicia noticed that one of those huddled behind the dumpster wore a security guard's uniform. "You're gonna be sorry you ever messed with us," the thug taunted again, twirling a baseball bat in one hand. Another sported a red bandanna over his face, black cargo pants and vest, and the unmistakable wooden stock of an AK-47. Alicia remembered the getup from the firefight outside her station.

"We're going to stop those men," Alicia murmured to Andrews, who was close behind her, still out of sight behind the corner. "If I keep them covered, can you cuff them?"

Andrews' eyes grew wide. "Sergeant, two of them have long guns. And I only have one pair of cuffs anyway. How exactly are we going to stop them?"

Alicia glared at him. "By use of deadly force, Officer Andrews. If they won't surrender their weapons. Now come on!"

She led the way, running out into the street and acting a lot more bravely than she felt. Her revolver was up and ready, and she heard Andrews' boots on the pavement behind her.

"Freeze! Put your weapons down, hands on the back of your heads!" she shouted.

Two of the men hesitated at the sight of the armed, prepared police confronting them. But the one with the rifle whirled sideways and ducked into an alleyway. The other, the burly bat-wielder, came on. He sped up, taking short running steps to close with Alicia, and raised his bat to strike. She could see an angry but slightly absent look in his eyes. Probably jacked up on PCP, she thought. This wouldn't be easy.

It all happened in an instant. Andrews, once more quicker than his sergeant to use his weapon, fired three times, hitting the man in the torso with all three. He could hardly miss at this range, and the man was a large target. Alicia saw the impacts and bloodstains spreading on the man's light shirt, but still he came on. Andrews fired again, and again, but the man didn't go down. Alicia had been covering the other two, but was now forced to act to bring down the attacker.

She swiveled and fired. Her instinctive aim was centered well, but a little high. It took the man in the throat, and her second shot hit him somewhere she couldn't quite see but which produced a lot of blood that spattered the pavement behind. He fell dead at her feet.

As she was recoiling and trying to mentally accept the reality that she had just killed someone for the first time, Andrews approached the other two miscreants. One dropped his knife and held the palms of his hands out. The other carefully put his shotgun on the ground in front of him and said, "Whoa, whoa! Okay, man!"

Suddenly the one who had dropped his knife reached behind him and produced a small gun from the back of his waistband. Andrews saw it and fired three more times, dropping the man to the asphalt.

"Don't shoot!" the last remaining thug cried out. "Don't kill me!" He was younger than the others, really no more than a fresh-faced teen underneath a layer of thin stubble. His white t-shirt was stained red in places. Behind them, Alicia saw the civilians leave their hiding place behind the dumpster and run for their lives.

"I've got him covered," Alicia told Andrews, and her tall fellow officer holstered his gun to pull out his cuffs. He slammed the young man roughly against the roof of a car that was sitting nearby with its windows down. Forcing the thug's arms behind his back, he tightened one handcuff around the man's wrist, then opened the car door and looped the other cuff through the open window and onto the other wrist, locking the man to the car at an uncomfortable angle.

"Ow, hey man, get me off of here!" the thug complained, but Andrews' grim answer was to draw his pistol again.

"I'm going to give you one chance, kid," he said, channeling Clint Eastwood. Alicia had never seen her officer this fierce, but the adrenaline still surging through her veins only made her want to join him. "What is all this?" Andrews continued, shoving his weapon into the thug's face. "What's going down today, and who put you up to it?"

The young man struggled and glared at Officer Andrews, spitting on the sidewalk. "Screw you, man. You're all gonna be dead by nightfall, I don't have to answer to you."

Alicia walked over and rammed her revolver's barrel into the guy's ribs with an angry scream. "You do unless you want to stay cuffed to this car all night!"

"Come on!" Andrews yelled into the guy's face. "What do you know about these attacks? Who's behind them, what's the plan?"

"I don't know who's behind it," the thug protested, cowed by the aggressive officers. "Nobody knows. We're taking down the city, man! It's already done. Denver's never coming back like it was."

Andrews backed away for a moment, looking at Alicia. The look in his eyes mirrored her own horror at having their fears confirmed. The damage was city-wide and would be nearly impossible to reverse without getting power back online.

A smug look came over the young anarchist's face. "You two are dead meat. And I'll tell you something else. If you wanna--"

Suddenly the thug's head jerked backward and a spray of blood hit the car behind him. He sagged down, hanging at a painful angle from the car door he was cuffed to, but it didn't matter if his arms broke. He was very dead.

Andrews pushed Alicia around the hood of the car and they dove to the ground. Another shot rang out and pinged off the car's side. "Stay behind the engine block!" Andrews told her. He turned and looked up through the car's windows, spotting the shooter. It was the man with the red bandanna, shooting down at them with his AK from the roof of the building across the street.

He must have climbed a fire escape in the alley, Alicia thought. It showed that he, at least, was dedicated to the fight. That was a bad sign. Whoever these guys were, they had planned the attack carefully, they were committed to success, and they were local. Or at least they were Americans; all of the terrorists Alicia had seen so far had been white men speaking without foreign accents.

Three more shots sank into the car’s metal hood. One shattered the windshield. The shooter was taking his time, edging his shots closer and closer to where the two officers lay, trying to tuck their legs in close to the solid protection the tires and engine offered.

“That way,” Andrews said, pointing to an alley directly opposite the one through which the gunman had escaped. It was about five yards away at the intersection of two tall brick buildings. The distance seemed impossibly far to Alicia as she flinched from another gunshot impacting the car. Thank goodness it was an older model Chevy with some heft to it, and not one of the tiny plastic cars that had flooded the city in recent years.

Andrews reached his pistol up and popped off a series of shots directed at the roof across the street. Alicia lunged to her feet and ran for the alley, trying to zig-zag but finding it difficult because of her momentum. She did hear another rifle shot, but made it to the safety of the alleyway without getting hit. Then she turned and aimed her own gun across the street to give Andrews cover.

She fired once and saw the dark shape of the gunman duck down behind some brickwork atop the building he had chosen for his sniper’s nest. Then her revolver clicked on empty, and she realized in a panic that she hadn’t even thought to keep track of her shooting since the ordeal had begun. Andrews was already up and running, and fortunately reached the alley before the shooter came up again.

They both turned and hurried down the alley, going all the way through to the next street over from the scene of their battle. Before leaving the alley, they stopped to catch their breath, steady their nerves, and reload.