I am in Rio with Sonya and Franks.
I hit send. Thought about it a second, because this next bit was complicated, so I just wrote, Going with Stricken to stop big event in Amazon.
A few seconds later, I got a message back from Julie. Are you a prisoner?
Kinda. Shrug emoji.
Tracking your position. We’ll come help. It will take a while. Be careful. And then Julie sent me a heart.
“Awww. Cute,” said the succubus who was watching over my shoulder.
“Buzz off,” I told Lana while I typed, Casualties?
A few. Julie responded. You can’t worry about that right now though.
I took a deep breath. She was right. There wasn’t anything I could do for them anyway. There was some comfort in knowing that if it had been someone on our team, she would have told me. MHI were my people, but my team that I constantly risked my life with was closer than family. Did you kill the last Drek? I hit send.
The little bubbles popped up to show that Julie was typing something.
“Ambush!” Curtis shouted.
I looked up just in time to see something streaking toward our lead SUV. The engine block exploded. The shredded vehicle swerved hard to the side, crashing into a building made of scrap lumber and cinderblocks. It stopped with most of its back end blocking half the road. Smoke billowed into the street. The other drivers hit their brakes.
The visibility was bad. Our attackers had probably smashed most of the lights in prep, but I could see gun barrels being hung out of doorways and windows. There were a bunch of loud pops as bullets hit our car. The armored glass fractured into weird shapes but didn’t break. There was a man running across a rooftop carrying a long tube with a bulbous end.
“RPG. Four o’clock high.”
“Go. Drive!” Curtis ordered.
Except the second car had stopped and was totally blocking the way forward. Our driver threw it in reverse and stomped on the gas. A split second later our front window was washed in fire and dirt as the warhead hit where we’d just been.
Our trunk monkey was shouting something in Portuguese, but the warning was too late, as we slammed our rear end into the container truck that had just pulled out behind us. It was a sudden and violent stop. I think I might’ve gotten whiplash. I looked back to see that a big chunk of broken metal had punched through our back window and nailed the machine-gunner in the face. He was holding his eye and screaming. Everybody else was yelling at our driver in English and Portuguese. He put it in drive, but our tires spun uselessly. Our bumper was stuck.
Trucks had boxed us in on both sides. We were sitting ducks. They must have set up on more than one route to wait for us. Their bullets were bouncing off our armor for now but those rocket-propelled grenades would rip us apart. Our only hope was to hit back. I had a perfectly good precision rifle sitting between my knees and no way to use it. “We’ve got to fight!”
The merc to my left reacted too slow. But Lana opened her door and jumped out. Instead of running for cover she leapt straight up, and with two wing beats had launched herself into the sky. The wings weren’t just for show.
I crawled out and hid behind the heavy door. If I’d had any doubt that the truck driver who had pulled out behind us was some innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time, those doubts vanished as he stuck a subgun out his window and launched a hail of bullets into our roof. I shouldered Cazador and fired twice. Holes appeared in his door and he flopped from view.
There was a lot of gunfire. I picked out the muzzle flashes across the street and started shooting. I went as fast as I could. Put the reticle on one, fire, swing to the next, fire, swing to the next, fire. I didn’t know if I was hitting anyone. We were sitting ducks, outnumbered, surrounded, and basically fucked.
Except suddenly fire arced across the sky above us. I thought it was a flamethrower at first, but it was the succubus’ whip. She was spinning, slicing fire across the favela in a widening circle. When her whip hit flesh, it sliced smoking chunks of bodies. When it hit wood it set the surrounding structures on fire. She hadn’t been exaggerating about getting some fighting upgrades!
Our ambushers turned their guns upward, forcing Lana to dive out of sight, but that momentary distraction had probably saved our ass. The men in Stricken’s vehicle had bailed out and were shooting back too. They’d been trained to fight through an ambush.
Men rushed out of the burning buildings on both sides. Bright weapon-mounted flashlights illuminated our convoy. I concentrated on the ones who were on my side of the car, because there was nothing between me and their bullets besides the door I was crouching behind, and shot at the lights.
One of my targets spun around, illuminating his friends. They were all dressed the same. Not in wacky cultist garb, or even normal clothing so that they could blend in with the populace, but rather they were all in the same black uniform, like some kind of police or military unit.
Oh shit.
It didn’t matter who they were as much as the fact they were trying to kill us. They weren’t interested in taking prisoners. There was a terrible snap as a really big bullet zipped through our front window. Our driver popped like a blood-filled water balloon.
“They’ve got a fifty!” Curtis shouted.
Another huge bullet hit our grill and ripped through our engine block. Antifreeze sprayed out of the hole. The next shot obliterated our battery.
But I’d spotted that big flash
