He found himself staring for a moment as Jaira racked the bolt on a Colt Carbine which she slung before mounting the pintel mounted .50 caliber machine gun. She caught his eye and grinned, “We’ve got a thousand rounds for this baby,” she worked the cocking lever, “Gonna make em count the shells!” he almost smiled at her enthusiasm in the face of suicide.

“This is Salvage to Sparta! Broken Arrow!” Steven was still the man on duty in the radio room. Brenan had been sitting next to him for the past two hours. But he had left to go to the bathroom minutes before the call had come in, static ate most of the message with only a few words coming through. “Salvage this is Sparta, please repeat your last transmission.”

Whoever it was, practically screamed, “Broken arrow you dumb bastard! Broken Arrow! Salvage returning under siege, need immediate reinforcements! Repeat: Broken Arrow!”

In his defense, Steven would later say all he heard was “… convoy returning…” and paid no further attention to the message, turning his attention back to the outdated copy of Time magazine he’d been perusing for the past few hours. The radio was silent when Brenan returned and since Steven had not moved, he thought nothing of it when Steven said, “Salvage is on its way home.”

In the comparative safety of the loading dock, Cameron gunned the engine they were off, “We’ll circle round front, and lay down cover fire. Get them on and get out of here!”

“Sounds good,” she replied as they raced through the open parking lot swung the corner hard, barreling down the street as they flanked their attackers. From the turret, the rattling of the humvee made it comparative difficult to aim, but nobody was expecting them, least of all their enemies. Jaira held the trigger down and erased three men from existence as Cameron adjusted his heading slightly, the edge of the front bumper catching another on the hip, sending him airborne.

Now aware that they had been outflanked, with easily a fifth of their number dead, the rest ducked in to cover behind whatever they could find as Jaira made liberal use of the machine gun to convince them. They came to a stop and Cameron clambered across the front seats bringing him out on the right side of the vehicle towards Natalie, “Natalie move!” he shouted.

The harsh edge in Cameron’s voice snapped her back to reality as she grabbed her rifle with her left hand and the headless corpse with her right and started to drag. Cameron added his own meager firepower to the bullet screen as the seconds turned to hours, Natalie finally bundled them both in to the vehicle, “Clear! Clear!”

Clambering in Cameron slammed his foot down on the accelerator and they were off once again, like a bat out of hell The heavy gun spat bullet out like a tree chipper, forcing the enemy to keep a respectable distance when it suddenly gave a dull, click. Jaira blinked uncertain if it was more surprise or confusion, it wasn’t jammed, its ammo was spent. The bullet caught her full in the chest as she snapped back like a broken twig, as she collapsed through the hatch, cradling her left side as pain radiated both up and down.

Coughing for air, she righted herself and gasped through the pain of at least a cracked rib, “Gun’s empty! Gun is fucking empty!” Cameron kept the accelerator floored as he suppressed his disbelief. There should have been a belt of a thousand rounds of disintegrating chain link ammo, per the checklist he had thrown to Steven. Cameron cursed the single word explanation of their major malfunction.

Jaira ran her hand carefully over her vest and extracted the flattened bullet, relieved that the vest had done its job. Grabbing a spare rifle she joined Natalie at the rear hatch, firing single shots and controlled bursts that allowed them to put a little more distance between them and their pursuers. Natalie snapped off half a clip of rapid single shots and blew one motorbike and its rider in to a building.

Cameron did his best to keep his attention off the firefight behind him, and gave his full attention to the fast approaching T junction, and glanced down at the speedometer. There was no way he could take the corner at their present speed. He didn’t have the luxury of slowing down either. But whatever he had been about to do, the decision was suddenly taken out of his hands: A bullet whipped through the open hatch, and Jaira swore she felt the heat from the shot as it sheared past the tip of Cameron’s ear. The best drivers might have been able to keep their focus on the road, and not end in an accident but Cameron was far from the best of drivers.

He winced as the bullet whipped by and punched through the glass windscreen. They swerved one way, and as Cameron over compensated, jerking too hard on the steering while. The vehicle jerked and then left the road to begin a spectacular forward flip, “Shit!” was the last thought that Cameron had as the vehicle spun through the air with the grace of a one winged angel, an impressive seven hundred and twenty degree flip before it crashed through the haphazardly arrayed chairs and tables and then ploughed through the floor to ceiling glass windows of a Starbucks.

Cameron was an atheist and now felt that he had proof that God, if he existed had created humans for his own entertainment. Cameron hoped that surviving “Satan’s personal car accident” would be amusement enough. The minute or two following the crash were a blur of tunnel vision with stairs and static swimming before everyone eyes. Somehow, they managed to pull themselves from the tangle wreck and find suitable cover behind it, haphazardly return fire, enough to convince their attackers that the threesome were far from out of the fight.

Return fire slammed in to the metal and plastic logo behind the counter, as Natalie pulled her mauled long barreled harbinger of doom from the ruined vehicle. The barrel still straight, she slapped home a fresh ten round clip and chambered a round. Using the flipped wreck as cover, she set the rifle level on its bipod. Another near miss hissed by her head but she held firm, and zeroed in upon the shooter. Her shot was slightly off target tearing through the right lung instead of the man’s heart, but it was enough to push their heads down.

Cameron regained some of his orientation, wishing for a couple of aspirins for his headache that as definitely going to get worse as he fell prone next to the sniper, “What’ve we got?”

“About a dozen of them with handguns and shotguns, a couple of semi-autos and two,” she paused as she made a correction to the count, “…one with a rifle.”

For the moment the Spartans held a strong defensive advantage as the running gun battle turned in to a pitched street fight. Looking over her shoulder, she noted the stairwell behind the counter that lead upstairs, a plan forming in her mind, Huddled behind the wreckage, Jaira shouted to her comrades, “Back up on the way! ETA seven minutes!”

Cameron stuck his head up to steal a split second glance and pulled his head back twice as quick, bullets and buckshot raining down upon their over, “They’ve got two strong points out there, and its only a matter of time before they leapfrog and overrun us!”

Natalie stared at the stairwell for a moment, “I can’t get a clear shot from down here. I’m taking the high ground.” She called, slinging her rifle.

Cameron tossed her one of his quartet of handguns, “On your mark.”

She snapped off the safety, “Covering fire!” bullets flew from the few weapons the Spartans had as Natalie dashed for the stairwell, enemy fire chasing her until she vanished from sight. Bullets continued to rip through the stairs even after she was clear, the thunk of round after round impacting on the stairs echoed to her. Napoleon had said it best that “quantity had a quality all of its own,” and their motorcycle riding foes seemed to have adopted that maxim as their own.

Clambering the stairs, she swung back and lashed out, the strength of the door’s lock unable to compensate for the flimsy nature of the door itself as the door disintegrated beneath her kick. The apartment was more of a storeroom than an actual apartment and the layer of dust, inches thick in places when coupled with the dangling cobwebs made it clear that the apartment had been abandoned, probably since before Armageddon. Gunfire echoed from below as she moved from window to window until she found one that overlooked the street and gave a decent field of fire. Opening the window she braced her rifle upon the windowsill and began to hunt.

A target presented himself as he stood, shouting and urging his comrades to close the distance between them and the ruined coffee shop. It was easy to spit his head between the crosshairs, especially since he was less than fifty feet away. Her sights set she inhaled a slow breath, waiting until she heard her own heartbeat. Her finger curled around the trigger and she gave it an affectionate squeeze that tightened smoothly in to a pull. There was an audible crack followed a nanosecond later by the saurian roar as her bullet left the barrel and ripped through the man’s shoulder, separating his arm from the rest of him like a discarded cigarette butt. Smirking in satisfaction, she dropped from her window and slid along the floor to another and began hunting again.

Behind the wreckage, Cameron dropped his own carbine, a look of disgust marring his features. The rifle had jammed on the last clip of 5.56mm ammunition. From the motley assortment of weapons in the humvee, he pulled a shotgun and sprayed a cloud of death in to the street, hoping that the bikers would stay at a distance as long as the Spartans continued to shoot back. He shook his head to clear his eyes of the blood that trickled in from his temple.

The cut on Cameron’s face continued to bleed, probably from the scalpel sharp glass of the humvee’s view screen when they crashed. It looked as if he was weeping blood from one eye as hot brass and steel pinged off the tiled floor, making the ground underfoot treacherous territory. Two or three of the bikers had fallen prey to Natalie's sharp shooting but it would be a matter of time before the bikers made a decisive push and ended it all. The radio crackled with a message, lost over the orchestra of battle – Cameron just hoped it was good news

A bullet sparked off a windowsill and Natalie dove to the floor. She’d felt the heat of that particular bullet. But her strategy had worked, wave after wave of gunfire pounding the brick wall and wooden window frames, fragments of shattered glass raining down on her. She found her radio, “Archangel pinned down! I’m done here!”

Cameron growled as their cover began to disintegrate beneath the hail of bullets, “Let’s hope they don’t have any grenades with them,” he thought darkly. To think that once upon a time he needed a Caramel Macchiato to start his day. One of the bullets hissed by, causing him to duck as it nearly punched through his ear. He patted his ear to make sure it was still there and gave off a hiccup of laughter.

There was somebody out there with an Uzi or compact machine pistol that defied the concept of having of a “limited ammo capacity” as whoever held it had yet to pause to reload. Cameron tried to stand, wobbled and fell back to one knee: Blood loss was taking its toll and tunnel vision had set in, the edges of what he could see black and grey around the edges. Blood sprayed as he shook his, braced himself and jerked his head forward with surprising suddenness to head butt the ruined humvee.

Fresh pain lanced through his already throbbing skull, but it did the trick, as color flooded back in to his vision. He blinked. Somewhere during that few moments, Natalie had made it downstairs, crawling until she was back behind the ruined humvee, “Two groups: Three or four behind the minivan on the left and five behind the car on the right.” Turning to face him, she gasped. Blood had soaked most of the left side of his face, neck and also the shirt and vest, “What the hell happened?”

Cameron edged round the side of their cover and drew back as a hailstorm of bullets flew towards him, “The biker idiots shooting at us happened.” Cameron was being Cameron, playing the hard-ass and ignoring anyone’s concern with his wellbeing. He edged round again, taking advantage of a lull in the gunfire to send a few rounds of his own back at them, “We need to end this,” he growled; as Jaira tore open the mostly intact medical kit from the humvee’s interior. He hissed as Jaira slapped on the bandages, but it would do no good to complain when Jaira’s irritation and maternal instinct surfaced together, “Ideas anybody?”

“Wait for the cavalry and keep you from bleeding to death,” she snapped, “especially since you’re going to bleed to death before they kill us!” He chuckled as he reloaded the shotgun and she slapped him on the back of the head, “You have a death wish or something? No heroics!”

He ignored the not so subtle reminder of his own rules, as he had the habit of doing when the lives of others were at stake, “When I give the word, give me suppressing fire,” he pumped the shotgun, slotting the first shell in to the chamber, “You two ready?”

“No,” came the reply, “But your not giving us much of a choice,” replied Jaira.

Natalie was certain that something stupid, or borderline insane was about to happen. The question in her mind was what “What happened to rule number two?” she asked.

“Rule number three: I make the rules, so I can break the rules,” he replied, “Covering fire!” As he dashed in to the street, the bikers blinked for a moment, and then ducked as a wave of gunfire punished both of the enemy strong points, forcing them in to cover.