Somebody's Gonna Hurt Someone

Participants:

aude_icon.gif danko_icon.gif douglas_icon.gif elisabeth_icon.gif

khalid_icon.gif lola_icon.gif teo_icon.gif tuck_icon.gif

Scene Title Somebody's Gonna Hurt Someone
Synopsis An isolated stretch of Staten Island's abandoned coastline and a few unfortunate locals are forced to endure a rain of fire and body parts when Humanis First springs a Ferrymen trap and tries to turn it around on them before anyone has time to escape.
Date August 22, 2009

Staten Island: Docks

Photo Refrence


It's late, and it's dark. The sky is blotched a sickly shade of bruise brown and purple over Staten Island, host to an unpleasant haze of humidity that can't quite get up the energy to turn itself over into rain. Most anyone with any sense has long since hunkered down for the night along this stretch of coastline. Black water is broken by the irregular jut of docks long out into the sluggish churn of harbor water past barnacle encrusted supports. Most, if not all have fallen into some state of decay, leaving wood rot to jut snaggled against the moon's reflection where piers once were and are no longer.

Warehouses and smaller support structures common to the area loom quietly nearby — no longer in service. An abandoned crane is locked into an awkward lurch overhead, upper reaches barely visible through the cloy of low slung cloud cover. A few orange lamps still function here and there, bulbs crusted over and light gaunt with disrepair.

And then there's laughter. More of a guffaw, really, echo carrying hollow through the humidity past the sharper chuck-chunk of a pump action shotgun suffering at its owner's sloppy hand. An unspent shell goes clattering off between ten pairs of mismatched running shoes, boots, and — flip flops, apparently.

"Fuckin' — fuckin' thing…" muttered incoherently among the troop of black shapes stalled to retrieve the errant round, there's another smothered laugh and then a shove.

"The fuck are you doing, Dennis? This is fucking serious. This is serious shit."

"Fuck you."

"Both of you shut up."

Human. Is. First.

Staten Island is Tuck's home. It has been for a long time - before everything started to decay and fall into entropy. Before homes and businesses fell into piles of kipple. Once upon a time he wore a suit and had a nice house and saw his son after school. He hung macaroni pictures on the fridge and cooked casseroles. Never mind his job involved running money and shooting people for the Russian mob. It was suburban on the surface at least.

Tonight, he's down at the docks to do a shady deal. He stands near the coast, next to a rotted post with a buoy dangling off it, red floating circlet sagging, rope frayed. He smokes and looks out at the water, a small package tucked under one arm. In the low hanging fog, he can hear enough of voices bouncing off walls made by droplets of rain to know that he's not alone. But he is unconcerned.

Dirty deals go down on Staten every night. Gilbert's learned to mind his own damn business.

Sure, Lola Mayeux has plenty of money. Whatever money she doesn't have, she could take. In theory, she could afford a very swanky place in a nice little ethnic section of New York with regular paper deliveries, sunday church services, and babies.

But who wants that, really? These are Lola's people - give me your tired, your poor: those are the folks she feels most at home with. So she got a place on Staten, which is a bit rougher than her normal terrain, but she has every intention of adapting.

First rule of adaptation? Beer, bagles, and peanut butter. That is the recipie for an awesome Saturday night. And that's what she's carrying as she takes what she considers a short cut back to her nasty little apartment - humming as though she didn't have a care in the world. And why should she? She's got a six pack and carbs, what woman would not be thrilled?

The voices? Nah, they really don't bother her. She doesn't have a reason to care about them.

"Where th' hell you get that thing?"

"Your mom's house. Don't talk to me anymore."

The first voice belongs to a younger man, wearing flip flops. His only weapons consisting of a pipe wrench and a backpack carrying a lot of explosives. The man he's addressing however carries a large assault rifle, and looks much more 'serious' than the rest.

Different weapons are experimented with, examined and traded around as the mass of Humanis First bigots make their way toward the target. The man in the back seeming somewhat aloof from the whole chummy and enthusiastic experience.

Letting the rifle hang from his shoulder strap, Karl glances up at the other man a few heads in front of him. A look that says, 'I hate everyone.'

Aude's got her hat, the hat that covers a good deal of her face from whatever exactly is going down tonight. A message that if she wants in on something, to get her ass down to such and such a place, pronto. Wear dark. Generally her contribution to the cause consisted of the evo tests - which was now obsolete since, great, they're public - and telling them what informations he gets concerning Humanis. Tonight though, she's tagged along behind Bill's goobers. She's been anticipating boob jokes and ass grabs, they just seem the type, since she's the only damned female there. But so far, they're behaved. Might have to do with the gun pulled in one guys face when his hand drifted. She looks down at the flip slops and rolls her eyes, opting to stick to the rear of the group.

Out across the water, abrupt as a sleeper's eye splitting open around the transition between asleep and awake, a single light comes on. It's several hundred yards off, picks out the corrugated rust-ribbed edges of the moving transport on which it's set in a thin sketch of bright white light. Square windows, a wind-scarred deck, rope whining gently between posts and hasps creaking old music.

She's a fishing boat, forty feet long, old and deep-bellied, long since retired from a career at higher seas that might have once been worth writing home about. There's a name written along the brackish green incline of her hull, Breanna Lou, in blocky yellow letters that look like they might have been chiselled out of cheese. She's crawling in to dock, it seems. It's the sort of thing that boats do around Fresh Kills Harbor, after all. A steady pace pushing out foam-ruffled water otherwise the color and seeming consistency of oil in front of her blunt nose.

A shadow the size of a man passes, briefly, over the round orb of floodlight.

Unmoving, a blacker shadow in the black night, a figure awaits the signal from the boat. Elisabeth was called to arms for this, and she took a position quite some time ago with a fabulous view of the dock and good egress routes. Now she merely watches.

"There's people here." The South represents in the form of a singularly distinct accent amidst bigots shuffling ever closer to the black-pitted face of a rust-streaked warehouse. Shattered windows caked thick with dust and assorted flavors of grime are unlit from the inside, but Jeff from Arkansas isn't intersted. He's gone still and is squinting at Tuck's shadowy figure further along the docks, scopeless rifle gripped nervously in his spidery hands.

"So kill them," comes a deeper voice from the back, voice endowed with the kind of resonant bass that comes with size and a barrel chest. He's in fatigues, assault rifle held casually in one hand with the muzzle pointed to the ground.

"No you — fff — this is mine fucknut." Further along there's squabbling over a backpack of C4, and before anyone has time to blink, a single brick of it goes sailing in through a broken window at the whim of a rough hand. The owner hunches; covers his ears.

Nothing happens.

"You gotta put a detonator in it — jesus christ, Chris."

"One of 'ems a lady." Back to Jeff again. He's still holding his rifle uncertainly ahead of a robust marine, crooked eyes shining black in his sunken head. The marine behind him grunts, and with a shaky surge of something like courage, Jeff raises his rifle, clicks off the safety, and takes aim.

Crack. A bullet snuffs neatly through a ruffle of Lola's hair gone stray in the wind and skips out across the water without ever touching flesh. Fortunately Jeff's got more bullets for that there gun. He's already drawing back the bolt for another go.

It's too bad that Tuck's face isn't visible from a distance away. At least among the denizens of Staten Island, he has a reputation of being one more valuable alive than as a bloated corpse floating face-down in the Hudson. But these boys probably aren't local, and it's dark and foggy besides.

The shortish man smokes casually as he stands and gazes out at the water. The shape of a boat isn't exactly unusual, but any movement around Staten is suspicious movement. His interest in the passing boat means he misses any possible hint of violence - even if there was any way to see the rise of a rifle from his position.

The sound of gunfire - even when echoed through the foggy coastal air, is a familiar sound to the pawnie. He takes little time in reaching into the fold of a light rain jacket and gripping his hand around the handle of a pistol. He moves fast, dropping behind a teetering pile of old tires. The package drops to the ground a few feet from him. "Fucking…fuck. Fuck!"

"Motherfuckah." Lola drawls in her own accent, deep south by from it's roots on up. Soon as she heard the gun's crack she was falling, but she felt the wizzing too. None the less, she heard thwap. Crack/Thwap. If you hear the thwap, that's a body falling. If you hear it, it means it wasn't you. "Hey! Watch what yer doin there, darlin!" She scolds the men with the guns. Of course, she'll leave the carbs behind. Beers? Not so much, and she wraps one arm around the six-pack as she haults herself to her feet, staying low as she zig-zags toward the incomming boat - and hopefully help.

Of course, she'll waste one beer, pulling out the full thing and pitching it toward the cussing men - at one in particular. It's more meant as an angry gesture, but really she isn't dedicated to it, the zig-zagging toward cover is more important. Then gain? She doesn't relaly have to concentrate much anyway.

"I hate everything." It's actually said by Karl this time. Karl is also dressed in fatigues and is more marine looking than the rest of these misfits. Bringing two fingers through his stubble, he glances at Jeff giving an agitated look. "Aim before you pull the trigger, faggot." He throws up a hand in annoyance as the woman who they missed is actually yelling back at them. "Oh fuck me. You're gonna draw a crowd you inbred jackass." Karl growls at Jeff.

Flip flop boy with the pipe wrench is making his way a little closer to Aude, despite the gunshots going off. "My name's Kevin, by the way. I have a trust fund and a huge—" A glance back at angry marine Karl. "Boat." His hand slowly goes up to rest on Aude's shoulder. "What's your name, again?"

"Tink" Aude's the party pooper. Sorta. "I'm sure you have a huge boat to compensate for your small dick. I'm not here to exchange numbers and get laid. I'm here to see exactly what you the other side of the fence does. Maybe you should be the one shooting instead of actually walking around in beach wear?" Breast = getting hit on. Great. "Or is your aim with a gun as good as it with the toilet bowl?"

Breanna Lou comes closer, wading ponderously, clumsily through harbor, like a small old lady picking her way through the bright chlorinated medium of her water ballet class. Slows as she does so, adjusting her angle only tentatively to begin to bring herself up broadside parallel to the ramshackle stretch of the dock. There is something speculative about her gait, now, as if perhaps someone had seen something through the dull glass of portals.

A muzzle-flash, a flailing redhead, bagels. It's still a distance of yet, ad which of these things can truly be regarded as out-of-place on Staten Island, anyway?

The gap diminishes further. One hundred and fifty yards snarls and grinds through motor blades, splinters and shortens down to eighty, the oblique angle of boat and dock shrinking rapidly. Another light comes on. Both combine to flatten the boat out to inscrutable silhouette-black, while simultaneously apply their wan, watery-oatmeal illumination to the strip of concrete dock, the small, sometimes-fatigued figures squirreling back and forth across it. Something's wrong here. Not what you'd think. Over an audiokinetic's shoulder radio, and through the mind's ear of a technopath much further afield, there's a muttered, monosyllabic complaint. Oh well.

Teodoro pulls a switch.

Metal flickers in the dark: canisters clanging down across chapped pavement, skipping end over end. "What the fuck?" This inimitably articulate query goes up from the fore of the Humanis First! lineup— followed, abruptly by a sharp command everybody shut the fuck up, forget the titties. Someone with a Brooklyn accent, shoving a hand into the air, as if the punctuation of gesture could possibly lend him authority over this rabble of varying colors and patchwork origins. It takes more than patriotic bigotry to forge a unified front, apparently.

Abruptly, there's a popping. A rattle. Sudden powder flares up from the operatives' boots and hiss up into the air, spreading tendriled roostertails that blot out light, scraping cheeks, and cloud voices, and a faint stink of sulfur diminished by the earlier discharge of other weapons. Someone shouts: "Teargas!" It isn't teargas, though that particular revelation waits, pending the instant that one of the gents in the back, a few feet in front of Aude, takes the first shot. Abruptly, the very air they breathe catches fire. Explodes.

One's first instinct is to throw one's arms up, and it does nothing.

She's listening to their conversation, picking up names and such as they walk. NOt really expecting to hear anything all that useful, frankly. And it's not that hard, Elisabeth just has to be careful about how loud she wants to hear it. Their voices, to her, are clearly audible chatting, muted just a bit so that when things start exploding she doesn't go deaf. There's a faint smirk at the voice who responds "Tink" — it amuses her…. but it also makes her brows tug together a bit. It's familiar. Maybe? Maybe not. Elisabeth isn't honestly sure, and not like she can see that far in the dark.

And there is the signal. Elisabeth stops listening to the goons' chatter and closes her eyes at the sound of the clanging, not wanting to be looking through a scope when the inevitable happens. The flare of light, the 'FWOOM!' of the air igniting…. those things she hears with only her normal ears, ducked down behind the retaining wall of the roofline. After the initial flare, the dark shadow that is Elisabeth's form, prone on the roof, pops its head up and takes a look around — the first order of business is making sure she's still alone up here, and then she turns her attention down toward the inferno that has begun on the dock itself. She takes aim, looking for her targets.

The boat's getting closer. Somewhere in the shadows not far from where Tuck's taken up hiding, there's a muted splash off the rocky shore: ominous in its slithering quiet and the silky lap of filthy water over what might have been movement.

Back at the farm warehouse, a pair of halfway responsible bruisers are hustling to plug detonators into ludicrous quantities of C4.

Clink-tinkle-clink goes the first casing cast warm out've Jeff's rifle, as wooden and lanky as he is. The next round he thumbs into the open chamber jams part way in — he jiggles the bolt, wrinkles his nose. Jiggles it again. When he looks up to mark Lola's progress, it's in the nick of time to duck past the dead on sling of her beer coming in hot for his head. It clobbers the guy behind him in the face with a sick whud instead, which is timely given that he was all up on his way to applying his sidearm to her gangsta style. The blocky marine at Jeff's shoulder chuckles lowly to himself and hefts his own rifle up onto his shoulder to take aim in beerface's stead.

SUDDENLY: CANISTERS.

Attention diverted, he swings the assault rifle down after the clonk clonk clank of canisters skittering around through disorganized feet, and before he can so much as gruff out a rabid, "N—" the air he was going to warn with is on fire. In his lungs.

The blast is massive. Shockwaves rock through rib cages and resonate through organs with all the quiet grace of a derailed locomotive, blowing some people back and others apart at the seams. The legless torso of Groper Guy rams Aude to the ground, contorted face still screaming in a ember wreathed frame of sizzling hair and blackened flesh even as he shields her from the ungodly heat scalding through his own spine. Disembodied fingers simmer and pop like sausages across dank concrete stained orange by the reflection of a fireball rolling slowly over itself overhead.

A hefty body in all black levers itself hard into Tuck behind his shield of tires, canvasy fatigues smoldering at the shoulders, head streaked black with blood. He doesn't seem to realize there's already someone in the cover he's taking. "Fuck. Fuck. KARL." Where the fuck is Karl?

Possibly in the water, where a few semi-live bodies are flailing dimly against drowning wherever they've landed. One's already begging for help in a cracked wheeze, pipe flagging uselessly against the water at his side.

Holy fucking shit. There's mayhem and chaos, and Aude goes from upright and staring at the cannister that just dropped from nowhere to… air on fire, flip flop's flip flops - and feet - are somewhere else and not attached to his body and the rest of him is on top of her. Protecting her, strangely from the worst of everything though she's holding her breath and covering her face while trying to make sense of up and down. What the hell. Holy shit. This was not what she thought would be happening when she said she'd come. Not in the least. For now, the officer is curling up under kevin to stay protected. Thank god for being small.

Tuck remains squatted down by the pile of tires, gun a cold, reassuring weight in his hand. He is still for a moment, then hears a strange sound, then shouting. He takes a moment to peer up over the top of the tire-shelter, just in time for the canisters to ignite and belch flame outward. "Holy…fucking…" And then he drops to his knees, hand to his head. He feels the shockwave hitting his chest, rattling his ribcage and heart. For a moment, he has no breath and has to gasp in sharply to fill his lungs.
Just when he's steeling himself and preparing to get the fuck out of dodge, he's sideswiped by a body from nowhere. Instinctively, the pawnie raises his weapon and points it squarely at the man's forehead.

Despite his reputation as being something of a wry, colourful character who seems quite harmless, the hand that holds the gun is rock steady. His lips are held taut in a thin line and he looks at the panicked man. "What the fuck is going down here, muchacho?"

The blast sends some people flying off their feet. While others are messes of blood. Karl is not among the bodies trying to scrap to their feet on the shore. Karl is the one laying on the ground, gathering his bearings just a few feet from a woman. On her zig-zag path, the shee concussive force overturned Lola, sending her abruptly to the ground.

When the dust settles she'll find herself staring at a large man in fatigues, trying to get to his feet. Karl lets out a loud groan, not yet registering Jordan. "B-boat! And.." His rifle does percursory scan, any other threats. There has to be more than one attack from a boat. "Keep a perimiter!" The marine shouts, as if these tardles know how to do anything he might be shouting. And then his eyes move to the left. Oh. Hi Jordan.

Ohgodohgodohgod! "Feck!" Cause saying 'oh god' over and over sounds too much like having sex. And in Lola's mind, this is an important distinction to make - she doesn't want people thinking she's having an orgasm while people are being blown up. That's just not right! Of course, those are hte only words she has time to utter before she's thrown down through the dirt, arms wrapped tightly around her now 5-pack, protecting it agianst her chest.

Once she comes to a stop and opens her eyes, peering through the dust, she sees the man with fatigues. And she's just…well…confused. So she sits there, breathing heavily, chest rising and falling while still clinging to the beer all the while.

Suddenly, the little granny boat grows saucy. Flirts and plays in the water slightly, engine hiccoughing to a higher velocity and vivacity, wriggling her stern in the water as her driver allows the boat to meander slightly, speeding, controls shifting with unprecedented celerity. These are fucking nobodies, went the commed complaint, minutes ago. This is different. The baby terrorist doesn't have to add to that.

It is what it is, and the Ferry is left to make the most of what it's given. The byword of guerrilas and carrion-eaters, both. With this in mind, duly philosophic, optimistic despite that the night reeks of freshly burnt death and the indigenous persons are shrieking their little heads off, Teo finally steps out onto deck. He's a tall young man with a mask pulled down over aquiline features, pale eyes blinking down at the amphibious corpses-in-progress buoyant in the water.

He swings a rifle up to his shoulder with the flippancy with which he'd handle car keys. Squints around the edge of the doorway, bracing his knee against the doorway for the moment the boat bumps against the desiccated tires that line the derelict quay's edge. Catches his balance when it comes.

«Somebody's pointing a gun at me,» comes the observation from Elisabeth's shoulder unit. «There's movement in the water and the buildings. Lower levels than you— I think. Don't see any retreat.» To be fair, to be perfectly human, Teo shouldn't be able to see nearly that much, but that's left somewhere in the margins of ambiguously defined need-to-know basis.

In all the confusion on the ground, the fire lights up some very clear targets. It's not the half-dead ones or the ones who've been thrown into the water that Elisabeth searches out. It's the ones still standing… the ones who are organized and still barking orders. Shifting the sounds around her, Elisabeth keeps audio tabs on what's going on behind her while she scoots upward slightly to take aim and take her shot at Karl, because he's one of the biggest targets out there. You wanna fuck around with scared women and kids, asshole? Let's see how you fare against someone your own size. The words are spoken in a bare whisper through the mask Liz has, the radio at her shoulder sending them to Teo when she says them. Her rifle, encased in its own personal sound bubble to silence the report as she takes her shot — thank you Conrad Wozniak once more for those lessons — spits high-powered hollow-point hot lead at her target's center of mass. And while she's no Marine sniper — she's got plenty of time to make her shot, since sound doesn't give away her position. And Elisabeth proceeds to start picking off anyone who is still standing, one at a time. I've still got clean egress right now, she replies quietly. Give me two minutes worth of shots, and I'm out.

"Who the fuck are you?" is what the marine bolstered up against Tuck has to say for himself, bass bellow overloud to compensate for the aftermath ringing shrill in his ears and the blood tacking dark through his crewcut. His lower jaw juts after the point of the gun; his brow knits. He makes no sudden moves. "Sorry. Charlie Madden, United States Marine. There are terrorists — there are terrorist threats residing on these premises…es," aaand he is a shitty liar.

Ahead, the fireball furls out into one last gasp. Flames snarl in long rips along flammable parts of the scenery in its wake, just barely touching on the massive tire pile on one end of the docks and nipping dangerously close to Karl, Lola and her beers closer to the other. A portion of the warehouse face caves in and collapses, vomiting dust and debris across the fallen and rapidly ushering the fire from nuisance to inferno in the process. Ten feet away from Aude, a sniper round plucks neatly through Jeff's unshielded chest. He goes down in a scarecrow crumple, eyes boggled.

Bodies and body parts bob lumpily at the surface around Teo's fishing boat. Slosh slosh against the crackle and roar of the fire further in. A mouth gasps fishlike, one hand flops. A man without an arm tries to turn himself over, bloodless fingers stretching hopelessly towards the back of the boat. Trying to drag himself sloppily aboard with feet planted weakly against the silty bottom, only a few feet down.

Holy shit. The two words keep reverberating through Aude's mind. Explosions they had said. Not a gunfight and not one in which they are getting massacred. "see you flip flop" and then she's shimmying/crwaling, keeping close to the ground as she possibly can. She's not dying here and certainly not underneath fucking asshole with the Boat. Standing up and running is not an option as they seem to be taking out anything that movies. So Aude keeps low, very low and slithers towards safe harbor, or at least a direction that's not being assaulted.

There's an eyeroll from Gilbert at the lie that drops leaden out of the marine's mouth. "The Marine Corps doesn't give a fuck about Staten. No one does. And they certainly don't go whispering in shitholes in the middle of the night. I think you might wanna try again there, sport." Tuck re-grips the handle of his gun, fingers tapping a light beat against the barrel.

He keeps as much awareness of his surroundings as he possibly can while keeping the weapon leveled on 'Charlie' - if that is his real name. "I'm just a businessman, come down here to meet a good chum of mine. I'm not…" he waves a vague hand (the gunless one) "..involved in your fireball of death business. Or dismemberment. But I would like to know who the fuck is bearing down on my island. And who is fireballing whom for what purpose."

A round of hot lead inserts itself into the ground right next to Karl's chest. But the bear of a man seems relatively unphased, his eyes flick to where the muzzle flash came from. Then he glances to the side. Lola. One arm strikes out to grab at Lola's wrist, his rifle coming up to point at her. "I'm sorry, but they won't shoot at you." Maybe. The marine goes to tug the woman into him, going to stand and hold her in front of him as a human shield. His rifle is held up in the direction of the sniper, just as one of Bill's boys near him sinks to the ground.

"Hi." Comes the all too friendly all too warm and all too close voice in Elisabeth's ear. Unlike the sound she is picking up from afar, this voice is one that is quite near. And in that brief moment where anger slips quickly into fear, the sound of fire taking to kerosine sounds out. Behind Elisabeth are two men standing before a quite literal ring of fire.

Stepping away from the blazes that raise up behind him from the ground, Douglas swings the large baseball bat over to the fire, the thing wrapped in cloth and gasoline, which then too, is set on fire. Taking a step forward the fire bat is held one handed at his side as Douglas calmly approaches Elisabeth from behind.

Lola finally decides it's time to drop the beers. Really, she's got more important things to worry about right now. Like being a human shield. "Doncha shoot! I ain' a part a ya'lls crazy shit! Doncha shoot me!" She calls out into the darkness, thinking a moment. "An doncha blow me up, neither! That just ain' polite!"

Lola is still doing what she does best, however. As Karl pulls her to her feet she runs against him, forced to turn to be a shield, she grabs him, bumps him, jars him. It all seems natural, unless you're Lola - because she knows that she's checking her pockets and lifting anything that feels like it might be important or useful.

Being encased in your own shiny bubble of sound is useful in its own way, but it generally doesn't do much to stop people from walking right into it and going "Fine evening, isn't it?" as Khalid affably does, right as soon as he has emerged from the shadows of his own cover. The Syrian makes his entrance a little ways behind one of Doug's shoulders, a tiny smirk formed below the hints of a stubbled mustache. The circle of fire is a garishly orange backdrop for his own lean, darkly illuminated figure.

The next thing: a thick THUMP near the base of Elisabeth's skull with the butt end of a truncheon, and then a vicious jerk outwards again. Then a murmur far closer to her opposite ear, no less cheerful. "Not for you, though."

The drowning man will have to wait, a ffffew seconds, hope he doesn't mind. Distractions abound for Karl and everybody else on land, windows of opportunity and points of vulnerability that Teo has to exploit and account for, in the compressed instants he has available.

The Sicilian jolts out from the doorframe, swivels across to its other edge, briefly, affording himself a brief peek out into the open using his own eyes. Overlaid in his mind is secondhand camera footage— of Lola's hands dragging against the flak canvas of Karl's vest, the gunmetal weighty in Tuck's hand, dark water pressing against mouths and slimed hands, too much data for him to process. He's forced to simplify things down to their most basic parts. Boat. Water. Shore. Enemies, bystanders; his friend too far out of range for the scope of his ability to ascertain.

His boots thud the deck. A shot goes off from the weapon up on his shoulder, just one: implodes somebody through the shoulder, not an outright kill but enough arterial damage to get the process started. Safetying the longer weapon, he flips it deftly over his shoulder, kicks the ramp down and snags a pistol free, its weight solid reassurance in one hand even as he stoops to snag the nearest sodden, grasping corpus out of the waves with the other. "Buona sera," he gruffs down. "Please surrender."

One minute she's entirely alone up here with plenty of ways to get out. And the next? She is absolutely not. Where the fuck did they come from?? She should have heard them coming! Elisabeth hasn't got time now to think about the whys and wherefores of it. «FUCK! Company!!» is about all she has time to say before her skull takes a crack that renders her silent and unconscious. Her shoulder mike picks up the man's words into her ear and conveys them to Teo. «Not for you, though.»

"Uuuhm," says 'Charlie,' which is apparently a popular psuedonym among bigoted Humanis First terrorists. His brows knit. He looks away, sideways to the fire that is rapidly overtaking the mass of tires he and Tuck have utelized for cover. Rubber bubbles and runs black; toxic smoke thickens in the sinuses and stings at red eyes. It's getting nasty over here — nasty and hot, and he finds himself trying to lever himself carefully away from the heat at his back. "I'm not at liberty…"

"Shh.." The soft soothing sound is ushered into Liz's ears. "Shhh. Just relax." Douglas voice is completely that of a concerned father, or a husband, or anything caring like that. While Elisabeth fights with consciousness, Douglas drops to one knee beside her, his arm wrapping around her back to catch her from a fall. "Be quiet now.. Just relax." His head gravitates towards her, his voice sounding more like cooing now. The fire bat is held closely to both of them, the warmth practically licking their faces.
The rest of Douglas' words to Elisabeth zip through the shoulder com. «Later, I'm going to pee on your face.» His forehead touches against hers tenderly, before he without warning abruptly drops her the rest of the way to the ground. Though he gives a disappointed look down at his firebat, then a practically elated look at the sniper rifle Elisabeth left for them. "Lookie, lookie." He gives an eager look to Khalid, suggesting the other man use the weapon. Douglas after all is holding a baseball bat on fire.

Tucker is a survivor. He's survived by knowing when to keep his head down, who not to piss off, and when it's a really good fucking idea to leave. "Right. Liberty." He starts to edge away from the tires melting like black marshmallows.

He backs up a little farther, then his lips twitch and his nose wrinkles. He suddenly lowers the weapon, aims, and squeezes the trigger. A bullet from his untraceable 9mm rings out and slices into 'Charlie's kneecap, slicing through tendon, bone and arteries. "Please, kindly? Stay the fuck off my island, 'Charlie.'"

The weapon is lowered and he turns quickly on his heel. Then, the pawnie is making his way down the shore as quickly as he can without making himself a target, sticking to shadows cast by twisted buildings.

On the ground not far from where the tires melt is a paper package that contains two hundred bucks' worth of some very good weed. He'll remember that halfway home.

Fuck.

Through the immense amount of pockets Karl has, not much of interest is found. Bubblegums, cigarettes, nickles, replacement parts for guns, it goes on. Karl is practically dragging Lola along the beach, his rifle out and pointed at the boat that Teo arrives from. Growling at Lola, his arm wrapped around her neck goes to slap against her mouth instead. "Don't be annoying right now." He growls.

Continuing towards Teo, Lola might eventually notice the knife strapped to the very side of Karl's belt.

Hell, she'll have some of that! The knife that is. It is plucked with skilled, nimble fingers from the sheath, tucked quickly into the waist of her pants, her shirt pulled over it to cover the slight bulge. Why? Because this is exciting, and rather interesting. She's surely curius, and the man seems talkative enough to say if he's going ot kill her. In which case, she'll stab him. Easy as pie.

Although when he clamps his hand over her mouth she grumbles, the muffled words almost plainly audiable - I'm not annoying.

She continues being led along.

Over by the tires, there's the report of a gunshot and a strangled, “Aaaugh,” while Charlie tries to get a grip on the mess Tuck's just made of it. Everyone on this island is an asshole.

Far away, greying fingers feel like rubber in their clumsy grasp after Teo's efforts. The guy is shivering — shaking so violently his teeth clack and clatter in his head and he's still pushing. Still trying to make it up there on his own steam. It's a little sad, really. He knows he's not gonna make it, terror bright in his firelit eyes.

So it is that the frenzied blast of black water and stinging salt that rolls the drowning man aside and back into the harbor has no readily apparent context. The hand that closes around Teo's forearm is not cold or clammy or weak with death's encroach. It's coarse and black, gloved, and there's no fear in the flash of grey eyes and white teeth that follow in a blur that adrenaline doesn't have time to think about slowing down. Danko drags down and thrusts up, pulling himself along Teo's stooped length to snare his left arm into iron around his neck. Then they're both crashing back into the surge he came up in. Two brands of fuzzy, a gun, the glitter of a familiar knife and a whole lot of nasty water to choke on.

"Yeah I see it, I see it." As Douglas is busy cooing away at his newly unconscious prize, Khalid has reached down to scoop the conveniently askew sniper rifle out of Elisabeth's clenched fingers with his other arm resting on a knee, brow scrunched as he thoughtfully drags a glance around what is left of the scene. Into his belt his truncheon goes, both hands wrapping themselves into position around the rifle and stabilizing it without moving from his half-kneeled position.

Down by the waterfront, the solid but elusive form of Teo is the first that Khalid sees down his line of sight. Too bad this isn't a situation where he could really hunker down and spend a minute or two making sure his aim is perfect; as it is, though, his focus is as sound as it can be when he does release the trigger. -Thwip-. The instant before Danko himself crawls his murderous way into view, too. Timing, timing.

Liz. The woman's name lances through Teo's memory, fuelled by an adrenaline spike of terror. He'd jerked his head up, fractionally, shifted his eyes in their pits, found the sharp-edged, slate relief of rooftop against the night sky where he knows Elisabeth is hidden. Somebody's standing up. Somebody with a weapon, and he can tell even without reaching— it's her weapon, but—

No. 'Thwip,' indicates on indisputable terms, that that isn't Elisabeth Harrison sniping.

Sudden hands on his sleeve, like sudden blood flaring a ragged wet splatter onto the fiberglass hull at his elbow. Suddenly, suddenly, Danko's drags him down like a thing from Hell, despite the jack-knife reflex of his spine. His trigger-finger hauls back on reflex, jerking, sending the muzzle of the pistol along a vicious arc above the water. He goes down, boots scissoring in air, a snarl on his mouth. The panultimate sign of him is the taloned scorch of a psychic blast ripping down Khalid's mind, reflexive, like fingers scrabbling desperately, futilely for purchase.

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." Douglas says as Khalid so obviously 'got it' watching intensely for a moment, the whiter of the pair seems to give up on this sniping endeavor after the first bang lets out. A bang which turns into a thwip, mind you. The bat on fire is raised up towards his face. "Wasted." He says, as if his father didn't show up at his birthday party. The bat is tossed to the side, before Douglas is faced with the reality, oh yeah, they lit up a wall of fire.

"I'm taking this." He barks at Khalid going to grab Elisabeth by the arm. And then he spends a good time pondering on how the hell to get out of their own fire wall of doom. Hm.

Meanwhile Karl is surveying the damage, the enemy is mostly eliminated, as are most of his 'team' and so Lola gets a violent shove to the left before the rifle is brought up and trained on her. "Get out." He commands sternly, taking a few steps back. 'Retreating.

Lola keeps hold of his knife, placing a hand over it - hidden under her clothes - as she's shoved roughly to the ground, making sure the thing doesn't inadvertently stab her. Because that would be bad.

But she doesn't 'get out' either. No, instead she watches, looking from Karl to Douglas to Khalid to Elisabeth and back around again. "Ya owe me a six pack a beer, an I 'spect it ta be the good stuff - not some cheap second-hand brand." Yes, even with a gun so close, she's still - well - annoying.

For a few surreal seconds, the boat rocks quietly amidst the miniature sea of body parts it's stalled out in, fiberglass sloshing pleasant through the rolling lop of low waves. Flaming debris clonks against once side, then drifts away again without incident.

A leg blurs just beneath the surface — the attached boot kicks once, hard, and there they are again, grimy runoff slung out while Danko struggles to resecure his grip around Teo's neck from behind. The knife in that same hand prises at the corner of Laudani's peripheral vision, dribbling water with every stiff jerk and swing. His free hand is snaring after the gun he knows is there, damp skull rigid at Teo's temple and breath hot at his neck. No fucking around. There's nobody around to call the cops this time.

Sound stemming from the back of his throat, Khalid grates out a low snarl when Teo's psychic assault slashes through his head, his palm clapping itself against the center of his forehead and squeezing hard. The rifle drops right out of a nerveless hand, one end of it thumping back onto Elisabeth's calf. "Yo, grab—" he manages towards Douglas, in reference, of course, to the falling firearm even as he himself falters like a suddenly-lamed racehorse nearly to one knee.

As he hauls himself up again, a knock of his toe sends the rifle re: tipping in another clatter, only half-accidental, a combination of baffled disorientation and rage. "Fucking can't see straight; little help." Thanks. Ow. From a distance, Lola also receives a severely lifted brow in between intermittent stabs of tremendous discomfort. The hellll.

Barely above drowning, all Teo can think about for three, four seconds of drubbing on his skull and vise-like fingers on his neck is someone who is not here and completely irrelevant to the immediate premise of his death. Liz. Liz, Liz, Liz, oh God Liz. He should stop thinking about Elisabeth because water's funneling stinging, gagging, saline up his nose, briney in his teeth, and the weight of Danko's body— however slight and easily pinned he'd found it at the bar— is a drowning weight here, with the added accumulation of his mask, canvas, armored clothes. Liz, Liz.

Danko.

He's a strong swimmer, but Danko's worse than a fucking riptide, easy, and now there's a corpse bumping into his other bicep. He tries to say something. 'Get the fuck off me.' 'Vaffanculo.' Or even to exhale, but his lung's skipping tracks, his mind staggered like a crippled thing trying to find its way back to appropriate measures. He twists an arm back behind him and the other before, digs free fingers at the shoulder he remembers, last week, Emile had—

Pushing to her feet, Lola dusts herself off, as though she had somewhere to be where she needed to be clean. As if she was even all that clean to start with. An accusatory finger is pointed to Karl. "Good beer." She reminds him, picking up what remains of her now dirty, useless midnight snack. Seeing the men still fighting in the water, she hurls the bag o' bagles at them, using her perfect aim to try and ping them off of Danko's head, gleaming in the half-light whenever it surfaces.

"Waste a good food an booze…" She grumbles, slinking toward the darkness.
She needs to get to the mart before it closes, after all.

In the end, it turns out the Bloodhound doesn't need Douglas's assistance or anybody else's, for that matter, despite still entertaining a terrifically throbbing headache and difficulty keeping his gaze straight. His shoulders stay hunched for an extra minute or so, hand still pressed to lower scalp, waiting for a small amount of recovery to happen. The moment something like it does he retrieves the fallen sniper rifle himself, grumbling as he stiffly grasps Elisabeth's other arm, hoisting her just beneath her shoulder joint. The semi-circle of flame continues to roar, curling upwards, but it isn't long before the two men have wound through a gap in it and slunk off with their blonde prisoner in tow. Dragged, really. Bump bump bump bump her underside goes.

Fingers give way to the crook of Danko's elbow scuffing in at a V, and at this point, he's using Teo as a flotation device as much as he's trying to rely on the harbor bottom slick under his boots. The water's shallow, but he's lacking for height and purchase. When one goes under, so does the other — foul streams of the stuff ejected out of his sinuses in a broken snort when they clear back into oxygen. His own gear weighs him down, waterlogged. Ill-designed for amphibious assault.

An abortive attempt to snap the younger man's neck culminates in a rasp of one rough glove harsh across his face, where it fails to take hold. In all the thrashing, he's lost his footing entirely, and then there's his shoulder, with bony fingertips digging into it through the stiff of his fatigues.

As violently as he appeared, he breaks off — one boot lashing blindly after any effort made to detain him on his way back down. Out've sight. When he surfaces again, he's powering his way through the water — not for land, but for the abandoned boat a few short meters away.

One of Teo's eyes isn't working. The arm on his opposite side isn't working, either. He doesn't fully understand why either of these circumstances are occurring, but there's an obscure realization that blood is involved, leaking out of a shallowly flayed cut that's— probably— hopefully— worse than it looks, pooling in under his brow and swarming the nerves of his arm with the gnash of salt on submerged injury. He means to say 'I'll kill you,' but there's only a desultory groan.

He can't swim like this, doesn't try. Sucks his breath in through his mouth and sinks himself down through the water until his feet hit molding silt. Kicking off, he emerges in a frothing vault with all of the ponderous grace of a particularly corpulent walrus. Water slithers off his shoulders and draining from his clothes in fat rolls and sheets, flushing out of his boots and his lungs in a damp wheeze. His forehead connects with concrete once, briefly, loud enough to be the loudest thing he can hear inside his head for an instant.

The 9 in his hand is rejected without strength enough to throw it. He scrabbles pale hands over scorched pavement, rust, a blackened scab of pooled blood and the remains of somebody's singed-off foot, searching for a weapon. Somebody must have had a fucking gun up here that still works.

Danko's short on intelligent conversation in turn. He heaves himself up onto the back of the boat more deliberately than before, back exposed in the time it takes him to drag himself over the railing and flop into a blunt roll over it onto the deck. Breaths wheezy and eyes shut hard against runoff already pooling back into their sockets, he's quick to let the knife clatter out of his hand in favor of the sidearm strapped in at his side.

Watery muck drizzles dark away from the firearm when he shuffles his way up onto one knee, and then a hunch when his glare fixes rigid on Teo already ashore and in the vicinity of Jeff's blackened hunting rifle.

It's not the only gun lying around by a long shot — but as of this second, the one in Danko's hands is the one that matters, and there's no doubt in his mind that it's functional in this state. "If you want your friend to survive the week…" the shout he was attempting comes out as more of a hoarse warning. He's holdling the gun, but he's forgotten how hard he's breathing. How much his fucking shoulder hurts. "…You're gonna have to be more convincing than that."

Snot, blood, saltwater come off on the back of Teo's sleeve when he tries to clean his mouth off and then his eye. His mask is floating around somewhere in the sea, looking all the world like the severed head of a ghoul wafting emptily in the blackness of ether, its mouth hole and eye holes undulating faintly with the flux of ocean. Teo's an expert at ghosts; the one trapped inside his head would do almost anything to be able to jump, now, and chase down the woman being dragged bodily away, away, already further than he can follow. As if he were in any state to.

Snot, blood, saltwater come off on the back of Teo's sleeve when he tries to clean his mouth off and then his eye. His mask is floating around somewhere in the sea, looking all the world like the severed head of a ghoul wafting emptily in the blackness of ether, its mouth hole and eye holes undulating faintly with the flux of ocean. Teo's an expert at ghosts; the one trapped inside his head would do almost anything to be able to jump, now, and chase down the woman being dragged bodily away, away, already further than he can follow. As if he were in any state to.

Somehow, he's wound up kneeling, on legs that had refused to acknowledge that lesson for so long, and so often, that he's forgotten church or prayer more often than he's remembered in the past few months. There's a rifle in his hands. It is one of those tools that so often require two hands to operate, and while he has both of those properly secured to his wrists, the arms attached leave something to be desired by way of celerity, accuracy, functionality. Oh, well.

Ringing crack, and then a dissipating groan of air; the weapon's kick jolts between his arms and there's a moulded cauliflower bloom of exposed paint caking in the hull that is difficult to confuse with any part of Danko's person, but it's close than missing. Teo's face is half white and half crimson. "Whwhat" exhale, inhale, "what the fuck do you think I'm playing at, Emile?"

Just as Danko's thumbing back over the hammer, Teo's rifle takes on the rigidity of attempted aim, and one knee nearly buckling in haste to get out of the way, the older and balder of the terrorists currently present throws himself sideways beyond the cover of the wheelhouse. Not nearly fast enough to dodge a bullet, but the round blasts low through the boat hull rather than flatten itself against the back of his vest.

Breathing even harder now, he takes his time in trying to get himself back under control with his back flattened to the far side of the wheelhouse and his gun raised. He's wily, experienced, athletic, and hard to shake. He's also 51.

"You just killed ten men who've probably never done anything worse than cave in….than cave in a few mailboxes," is called back at long last, still weaker than he might like while he relaxes his grip and leans out an inch or two to mark any progress Teo might've made across the shoreline. "Blew their legs off; blistered their eyes out've their heads with gunpowder. And fire. I don't know what you're playing at…but it's sick." Sick.

"Self-defense, mio amico." Hitching and then a scrape of boots on concrete: Teo falls sideways more than he walks, but he is kind of sort of walking, his legs untangling themselves along an uneven gait. He's clever, half-experienced, athletic, and tough as nails. He's also wounded, sleep-deprived, and a man down out of— "—and understaffed," he hollers back, after a moment's pause, almost lamely, an afterthought chickenscratched in under the footnote margin a draft away from published completion. He doesn't know why he's getting defensive, really.

Danko is a prick. But God, he's right about one thing: there are legs lying around here, the head lapped limp against the grille there may well not have eyes in it, and much of the soot-black that clots the terrain his boots are sticking against has a quality of organic filth to it. It reeks of human flesh, just as it had at the safehouse Danko had nigh burnt to the ground. "These were your fucking people."

"And you killed them," Danko finishes with a hint of disgusted waver rubbing the wrong way through the hoarse of his voice. A ragged sniff does little to clear out the rancid water backed up into his sinuses. A scrub of wet sleeve under his nose doesn't help much either. Teo's moving. Probably only a matter of time before he finds cover amidst blackened bone and red muscle strung in clumpy blots of flesh and color through the cinders.

His move. He makes it. One boot crosses the other, and out he swings into the open with the black of his gun hefted level ahead of him. One second to aim — another to pull the trigger twice at the block of Teo's torso, one two. But they aren't as alone as he might have hoped.

Before either spent casing has time to hit the deck and before he has time to gauge whether or not he should keep on shooting, there's a hiss and whap of lead ticking through the wheelhouse next to him. The sallow glisten of his skull whips after it, then back again just in time for him to receive the second ssss whap in his side, effectively knocking him sideways into the structure he was trying to use to block incoming fire. Not attract it.

But whoever it is — they're just getting started. Far to shore, rapidfire flashes of white and yellow light mark and incoming hailstorm fractions of a second before bullets drill against the boatside dozens at a time, and Danko hardly has time to rake his knife up off the deck on his way to diving neatly off the far side of the boat. Back into the water, with a rather crocodilian absence of disturbance around the surface.

Apparently there is some honor among thieves. Even on Staten Island.

Well. Well; Teo hadn't been using those ribs anyway. The two bullets fired into his vest have the same net effect on him as the ones that the anonymous Statenite contributes toward Danko's half of the situation: he's knocked down on his face, or near enough, pitched heavily onto a knee, the hand he puts out to stop his fall jarring broken muscle strings and a sharp gust of air out of his lungs.

He wasn't supposed to land on his knee, his knee points out in a violining shriek of nerves, but he gets the next stride right, dumping his weight onto the flat of one boot, lurching up, machining away at the snaggletooth space between buildings. Dull in his sodden head is the awareness that Danko's still out there, sinuous in the water like some horrible animatronic creature out of an ocean thriller, but he can't spare the thought to push Ghost's ability beyond the threshold of his threading concentration and the claustraphobic crash of other priorities.

Liz. "Hana." His voice is a rattle. For a few seconds, he speaks to no one, the cold-numbed fingers aimed at his shoulder missing the buttons that constituted their target, utterly. The second try is better; his fingers bite down on waterproofed plastic hard enough to pinch so he can feel it. "Hana. Wireless. They got Liz." There's a certain bleat of apology underneath this, crookedly syncopated to the drub of his shoes. "Emile Danko go—t Elisabeth. 'M gonna go her. Find me; I have to go get her."


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