cascade | kotlc

13. Combat: Wildfire

- J. R.

All four of them stared at the two pulsing dots, one marking the helicopter and one marking the limo carrying the high-ranking member.

June was driving, and Faye called shotgun. Linh and Marella were bickering in the back row, their guns occasionally clashing with each other's.

"Thirty seconds," June murmured, her feet propped on the gas pedal.

"Wait, what's the plan anyway?" Marella called from the backseat. "What shazam did Princess Prettypants provide you with?"

"Some suicidal shit," Faye grumbled. "Basically normal for us."

"What is that supposed to mean exactly?"

"Oh, you know. You'll figure it out. Don't worry, no one's died yet on any of our missions. Though we don't have a particularly reliable sample size."

"That's not very- AGHHH!"

June gunned the pedal as the limo veered into view, and their car shot forward, wrenching everyone back into their seats as she spun the wheel. Their car skidded sideways before it fully rammed into the limo and it went flying offroad.

"So that's the plan!" Marella yelled, her blonde hair bouncing over the seats. "Who the fuck came up with that? Princess Prettypants?"

"Yep," June agreed. "And now let's try to not die."

She swerved the car backward, slamming the pedal again as the people behind them pulled out their guns and began to fire. Bullets peppered their hopefully bulletproof windshield.

"Guns!" she ordered, and Linh and Marella pulled out their guns and shoved them out the side windows. Faye drew her Ace of Spades as their engine roared and took off down the road.

More clattering of bullets and magazines rang out behind them, and Linh held down the trigger. Her assault rifle fired away and the car behind them exploded into watery shrapnel as June drifted down a corner.

"Why do you always get the rapid firing gun?" Marella complained, cocking her shotgun and pulling the barrel out their speeding vehicle. "I want the rapid firing gun!"

She toggled the safety and propped the shotgun over the windowsill.

Lightning flickered along Faye's card. "Please don't blow their car up into us!" she yelled. "Blow their car up into them!"

"How the hell do I figure out what's gonna happen when I fire?"

"I don't know!" Faye tore at her hair, busting through her window and taking aim with her card. "Shoot something!"

"That's not very helpful!"

Fire flickered along the pump of the shotgun, matching the vividly bright orange paint, and Marella grunted and squeezed the trigger.

The gun whistled as it propelled the explosive buckshot from the barrel, and the ammo sliced through the air with an earsplitting whine before it made contact with the first car behind them and erupted into a cloud of flame.

Heat singed June's arms as she barely yanked their car out of range of the explosion, and the mass of swirling fire swallowed the metal hull, eating up the black-painted metal scraps in a mess of cinders. The wheels seized as the car slammed into the mountainside and collapsed into a pile of burning slag and set the grass aflame.

"On second thought, maybe don't fire that at all here!" Faye screamed as a wall of spiraling fire licked up the mountain, blasting the air with its opulent heat. Linh kept gunning away, and as her bullets smashed into the armada behind them and another car weaved into the flame and promptly flared up in ashes.