Suicide Squad: The Genesis Sanction

Intermede: Jolie Rouge

EXCERPT FROM ARGUS INCIDENT FILE

Colonel Flag and Director Waller were en route to The White House at 1100 hours at the time of the attack. Captain [REDACTED] had been personally dispatched by the Commander in Chief to transport them on Air Force X. Captain [REDACTED] was killed instantaneously upon initial contact. The exact cause of death, at the time of this report, is unknown. The ARGUS coroner's report tentatively cites blunt force trauma as being the manner of death.

Flag whipped his forearm out of the sling and jammed each brawny arm into the sides of the cabin's hallway, keeping himself in place as the huge metal craft screamed crazily downwards in the wind, trailing smoke over the Potomac. Waller clung onto the table for dear life, dangling nearly twenty feet above Flag, teeth gritted as she struggled in vain to hook her ankle onto one of the now-horizontal chairs.

Flag glanced out the windows just long enough to see the river - bisected with a concrete bridge - coming up to greet them as the plane leveled out, slowing their momentum. By the time his gaze had whipped back up, Waller had lost her grip. He groaned and shoved up into the air, slamming into her as his body, remaining still in relation to the craft, intersected with her descending one, and he grabbed on, shielded her body with his own. They fell through the center of the airplane, through the now-vertical hallway, towards the cockpit, and the plane crashed.

Like something out of a cartoon, Air Force X continued traveling as it hit the concrete structure, slowing each passing second. The bridge collapsed inward, into the shape of a V, rubble spilling onto the craft. Cars rained helplessly onto the wreck, some of them careening into the river.

Flag and Waller kept going on the trajectory they had been on as the plane's momentum died. What had been, luckily enough, a direct shot out of the shattered windshield and into the river, turned into a hard landing as the enormous craft slowly sloped down into normalcy. Waller slammed against the pilot's console and fell to the carpeted floor in a shower of sparks and a shout that was more shocked than pained. Flag clipped his shoulder on the dashboard, flipping feet over head, before his heel caught the lip of the empty windshield and he was suddenly torn back the other way, sailing out of the front of the vessel and landing front-first on the nose of the plane as it finally straightened in the bobbing river.

Sirens wailed vaguely in the distance. Flag rose up with a tight-chested groan, tailored suit rumpled and streaked, and stared, awestruck, at the concaved bridge and the parking lot's worth of cars piled up on the body of Air Force X, owners scrambling out and to safety, or diving frantically into the river. There was a clink. Flag's first instinct was to look up. No rubble was falling from the sloped and crushed edges of the concrete bridge. Then he looked down at the metal under his feet.

He dove back through the windshield as the second shot came. There was a new burst of noise and it instantly sounded like there was a hailstorm outside, with all kinds of spinks and panks and the occasional ptoing echoing tinnily on the plane's bulletproof exterior. Flag saw a civilian's head disappear into maroon mist before the window spiraled into a web of cracks. Waller scrambled upwards, the momentary panic of lost control written all over her scraped and cut face.

The gunfire was deafening, so Flag didn't bother telling Waller they couldn't stay in the plane. He fumbled in his inside jacket pocket, rattled some pills out of a bottle, dry swallowed, and sprang into action. He tore down the length of the plane, going to the bodyguard-designated seat, and reached underneath. He came back up with a flak jacket instead of the standard life jacket and tossed the vest to Waller.

As she struggled into it, Flag kicked away the false top of the bolted-down table Waller had been clinging onto earlier, when everything was 90 degrees off center. He scooped up a white plastic box about the size of an eighty dollar lego set from inside it and flinched as one of the supposedly bulletproof windows burst inwards.