FIREWALL: Playing With Fire

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

The three of them approached a scared staff member, Charley watched attentively.

"Get up!" Terrorist Two exclaimed, the staff member couldn't get up faster, "grab the bags with the money in it. We want you to walk out of the hole, turn right and place them in the van parked close to the bank. Then come back. If you run away, we'll kill all the hostages."

Everyone gasped, Terrorist Two chuckled, "not really. Maybe just two or three."

The staff member, with a 'Lara' nametag, struggled to carry all of the bags at once with her small frame, but she hobbled out. And just through the ever-growing police presence, the hostages could hear the van boot slam shut and she hurried back inside, everybody sighed as relief washed over them.

"Ok, let's make something really clear. No body follows us. If you want to stay alive, then you should listen to that. Everybody lives if everyone listens to that, do we have an understanding?" Terrorist One explained as they approached the hole.

There was a murmur of understanding, a lot of people nodded, Charley kept still, keeping a very close eye on everything that the terrorists were doing.

"Come out with your hands in the air, the bank is now surrounded. There is no where to run." Came a voice on a megaphone from the streets, the police have finally arrived.

"It's show time!" Terrorist Three exclaimed.

All three of them flicked a small switch located over the heart and something started to whir. Charley realised that their armour made the whirring. All of a sudden, from the tubing and certain holes in the terrorists' armoured gauntlets, balls of flames engulfed the gauntlets and the terrorist's forearms. A lot of people gasped at the sight.

The terrorists laughed, Charley could swear that she heard one of them say, "this actually works! Can't believe they managed to get this to work." Which got her brain to start to over-think the implications of the claim. She realised that they had left through the hole and saw that the hostages started to crawl up to the windows and the hole to see what was happening.

The terrorists had approached the middle of the road, watching the police cars that surrounded both ends of the road. They took a look at their armour, now working in full-force.

"Let's make a way through." Terrorist One said to the other two, and Terrorist Two and Three started to walk down the back end of the road while Terrorist One watched the front end.

Almost at the same time, they activated their armours' power and used it to create fireballs and flung it at the police cars, as the police tried to find some cover from the chaos. Police cars flew and landed upside down, just as quickly as it started, it ended. Only now, there was at least one way out.

"This is a warning to the American government! Do not anger us!" Terrorist One yelled at the top of his lungs, "we know of your plans, and we are not afraid to fight back!" With that, Terrorist One flung a fireball at a news helicopter, who tried to swerve out of the way, but was not fast enough. The fireball hit the tail and the helicopter spun out of control, out of view. The hostages could hear the explosion when it landed though.

Terrorist One laughed and turned off his armour. He quickly took off most of the chest components so that he could get into the getaway van. The other two terrorists did the same and they made a U-turn and sped out of view. Charley realised that she was going to lose them if she didn't act quickly enough, but she noticed movement at the corner of her vision.

She turned and noticed the grey-haired man that she bumped into earlier today. She paused, before she decided to hide from him. The grey-haired man was checking the wreckage, maybe to find out the status of the authorities, if any were injured or dead, before heading into a black van and raced to follow the terrorists.

Charley jumped out through the hole and noticed a civilian's car who left the scene in a hurry, leaving the car keys in the ignition. She quickly got in and managed to tail the black van the grey-haired man was in.

Charley realised that there must be something more than just a simple terrorist attack happening right now, as the terrorist claimed that the government is planning something. Also, the block that she bumped into the grey-haired man earlier today, was a route that she always used when she walked or jogged, yet this was the first time she had ever seen him. It felt like it was more than just a coincidence that a mysterious man appeared on the same day that the terrorist attack occurred and then at the scene where the terrorists attacked.

She took out her phone and fumbled to turn on the video recording program and tried to juggle the tasks at hand, following the black van and the terrorist van while filming the whole thing on her phone.

She managed to catch up to be able to record the black van and saw that they were trying to get closer to the terrorists' van. But the terrorists were not making it easy for them, shooting at them. Charley realised the black van was getting shot when a bullet rebounded off the driver-side side-view mirror, smashing the mirror, Charley swerved a bit when she jumped to the side, away from the small explosion of car parts.

Suddenly, the grey-haired man crawled out of the van and jumped on the roof. The black van sped up so that it was closer to the terrorists' van and when it was close enough, the grey-haired man jumped across and landed heavily on the top of the terrorists' van.

The black van then swerved into a side road, presumably to cut off the terrorists' van later on up the road, but Charley decided to follow the grey-haired man and the terrorists' van.

At first the man struggled to hang on and still be able to dodge the shots from the terrorists but when there was a moment of silence from the terrorists and the man was stable enough, Charley gasped in horror as the man's arms were engulfed in flames that appeared out of nowhere. Charley noted the similarity between what the man is doing right now and the armour that the terrorists were wearing and she watched, mouth agape, when the man slammed his arm into the roof of the van and started to peel it off bare-handed.

The terrorists' van started to swerve out of control, and Charley quickly stopped the recording, luckily she had set up a system where videos recorded on her phone are automatically uploaded into her personal network at home.

All of a sudden, a black van slammed into the back of her vehicle and she lost control of it, as it swerved straight into a telephone pole and everything went black.