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Chapter XVIII - Sailing Into the Storm

Great. Hot chopper landing under sniper fire. In the fucking RAIN.

Arlen held a paw over his eyes, trying to see through the sudden downpour. Next to him, Buck cracked a flare and started waving it around, making the night-time air light up around them.

Makes the rain look like glowing blood from the sky.

Over the driving thunder of the rain hitting the roof under their footpaws, he finally made out the whup-whup-whup of what they'd been waiting for. Cracking his own flare, he tossed it to one corner of the roof, lit another, tossed it to the opposite corner, then joined Buck in running to the sides as Rene's stolen air ambulance touched down.

As soon as the chopper was down, the tall stag ducked down, tilting his head until it was nearly touching the ground in order to avoid catching anything on the rotors, and ran to the chopper followed by Arlen who covered behind out of sheer habit with his weapon in one paw and the bound, unconscious dog over his shoulder.

The thunder overhead was drowned out by the whirling storm of noise from the chopper blades, but Arlen saw the lightning distantly, and prayed they would get to the hospital and back out again before the electrical storm could put them down for good. A direct hit to the chopper would be, in a word, bad.

Buck yanked the door handle, sliding the door on the side of the chopper shut not a second before Rene started to lift off again. The tiger first laid the dog down none-too-gently, strapped him to the bolts in the floor with zip ties, then pulled on a headset which thankfully deadened the cacophony of sounds and tuned him in to hearing Rene's labored breathing.

"Shit, Ren, you okay up there man?"

The hare coughed wetly and waved a paw to his side, where they could see it down the aisle. The tiger grimaced, seeing spatters of blood all over the paw...And he doubted it was from the corpse in the pilot's seat next to his friend.

Buck spoke through the comm system then, having pulled his own set on.

"Get us to the hospital toot sweet, Rene." He didn't state the other part that came into his head...There's little chance we'll make it in time.

Minutes later, the chopper was buzzing low enough Arl could swear he could count the gravel on the rooftops of the surrounding structures. The hospital loomed at the edge of their limited visibility, illuminated only with flashes of light both from inside and from the lightning storm moving through their area.

Rene's liquidy voice came through the system.

"We get one...Chance to touch down...Hngh..."

Buck's eyes were calculating, and he reached up to pat Rene's shoulder.

"Wave off, we're landing next door."

The hare turned his head to look, with his brows furrowed. Buck's explanation had him grinning, shaking his head, and looking for a good spot.

"Sniper. Fuck that noise. We'll get them from behind."

Rene banked the chopper over the street, the storm water all around them suddenly illuminated by flashing blue and red lights from the police cordon being set up to block the attackers from escaping the hospital. No gunfire was emerging from or entering the building, Arl noticed. A few windows looked spider-lined, with the tell-tale mirror effect in their center indicating ballistic glass.

"Cap'n, what's the plan?"

"Same as the hotel. Zip line in, kill whatever needs killing."

Suddenly, the rain was being blustered away from them. The black tiger knew they were landing, the air cushion created by the whirling blades over their head literally beating the rain away from them.

With a light thud of impact, the chopper landed, followed by the much louder sound of Buck wrenching the door open. Both mercenaries scuttled out of the chopper crouched low, and without missing a beat ran to the edge of the roof, checked below for anyone watching, and fired their grapple launchers in tandem.

Arlen gave Buck the thumbs-up as soon as he was hooked to the line, then double-checked his SMG. Five magazines left, he tallied mentally, along with the usual complement of stun and flash grenades, pistol...Check check and check.

Buck jumped first, lifting his legs and keeping them out in front of him, slightly bent. The zip-line's pully did its job, slowing him enough that he didn't hurt himself when he impacted the building. Arlen landed a second or so later, and waited as Buck checked the window they'd ended up near, frowning as he found it locked, and tapped it with the butt of his gun.

The hollow noise told Arlen what he needed to know. Bullet-resistant high strength stuff, not going to open easily. He wished Sato were there. The silver wolf would know exactly what kind of charge to use, how to put it up there, shit probably have it on him.

Buck shook his head, and dug out the glass cutting tools, putting them to work as best he could.

"Arlen, when I'm done with this, set up to swing out and try to break through. You're heavier than me, better chance it'll work."

Arlen nodded, and dug out a stick of chewing gum as he waited. Munching the stuff kept his stomach from growling, which helped him keep his focus. Also, it was raw meat-flavored.

A few circles of the glass cutter later, and Buck made the hand signs to get moving. Arlen messed with his leads a bit, latched himself to a pair of pitons pounded into the hospital's concrete façade, and kicked off the building as hard as he could.

The tiger flew free of the building, for a moment filled with vertigo as he looked down at the swirling police lights below. The sound of gunfire slowed in his ears as his eyes came up to the glass rushing at him, and he gave a grin as his boots' soles crashed into the glass, breaking the circle loose.

Bobbing on the line, spinning, Arlen tried to grab onto anything that would stop the dizzying movement. Buck grabbed him by the shoulder straps, and with a grunt of main strength shoved him into their new little doorway.

Unclipped from the line, Arlen dropped to a knee to let his head straighten out, as the stag came through behind him, covering the door with his rifle.

Too fucking quiet. Where are the yelling people?

The ferret girl, Raven, was now lugging an oxygen tank that felt about as heavy as her whole body, grunting and trying to tough it out without whimpering. In front of her, the frightening silver wolf in the black suit moved calmly, gracefully, low to the ground with his gun in paw.

Behind her, the skinny wolf she kept thinking of as 'beta wolf' was carrying two more of the heavy oxygen tanks, though with less difficulty than she was having.

The two were talking back and forth in hushed Japanese that had her scowling and wondering how they could be so rude.

When the frightening one stopped and made some kind of paw signal, she crouched, grunting under the weight of the tank, and looked at Maasa. He just put a paw to her shoulder and stood there like that, having set one of the tanks down, and gave no explanation. It made her glare at him, though he seemed not to notice.

Kiyosato spoke, very softly.

"They have cut the door open. There are six of them. On my signal, throw one of the tanks around the corner. Try to roll it towards them, yes?"

She blinked at him, and scrunched her eyebrows, unsure what he was up to.

"I...Y-yes."

Collin had ordered a cease-fire as soon as the steel doors closed, and now the only noise was the crying of wounded civilians and the sounds of his men checking each other and their gear. A few had been hit by fire from the outgunned security staff, but nothing fatal, reported one of his group.

With a frown and a nod, he walked up to the stairwell, opening the door to see the metal security wall that had descended when his otter cohort had set off the quarantine system.

"What the fuck. Were they expecting a zombie apocalypse or something?"

He kicked the door with a dull 'wong' sound, then whirled around and gestured for one of his men to come over. The fur, black-clad and balaclava'd as he was, didn't out visually, but Collin knew he was a demo guy by the particular kind of pouch he was carrying.

"Gav, what's the situation? How many doors between us and Goza?"

Back in the security room, Gavin was messing with the machines, trying to figure out a way to raise some doors and having no luck. Still, he figured, at least he had the maps.

"Security lockdown doors on the stairwells are pretty tough, but inside the wards they aren't as reinforced. If you can get onto the second floor and blow that door, then blast through the floor into the third, you should be good to go for a bit."

"Heh, Gavin, you are a fucking wonderful male."

The otter replied dryly, as was his habit.

"Sorry buddy, I don't swing that way."

Collin smirked and gestured for the demo man to get to work.

A slight but sharp motion of the floor told the commander of White team that his comrades were blasting through from below. He ordered, with quick chops of his paw, for his remaining team to get in there and clear rooms out.

How tough could a bunch of cancer patients be?

He heard a metallic clang, and saw something rolling towards him down the hall. The cat had enough presence of mind to raise his SMG, but he just wasn't fast enough to squeeze off a shot accurately when a gloved paw came around the corner and fired off three rapid shots into the rolling green tank coming at them.

The world erupted in whiteness, and White One briefly felt the sensation of being in flight as he hurtled backwards, singed and blown off his feet by the sudden detonation of an oxygen tank. He struck the rail in the stairwell, and heard the distinctive wet 'crack' he associated clinically with broken bones before sliding to the ground unconscious.

Back in the hallway, Kiyosato tried to move in on the injured enemies, but saw one of them had managed to evade the blast by being in a doorway, and ducked back just as the fur unleashed a storm of lead in his direction.

The ferret girl had seen him begin to move and, being too smart for her own good but not nearly graceful enough to correct, flew out around the corner, staggering and falling prone as fiery pain blossomed from her thigh.

"NO!"

Maasa darted out to grab her, in time to see the old, infirm ferret from before slam into the gunman from behind, tackling him and swinging wildly with fists strengthened by maddened parental instinct.

Maasa grabbed Raven, pulling the bleeding, screaming girl across the hall into a doorway just in time to be missed by the other White team fur as he emerged from another room firing blindly, bleeding from the blackened, burned skin on its side.

Raven looked down at her leg, saw blood pumping from her outer left thigh, and felt herself being pulled. Then she looked up and saw her father on a much larger fur's back, wrapping some kind of tube around the male's neck, holding on for all he was worth as the scary wolf in black came around the corner an instant too slow to prevent the burned fur from noticing her father, leveling his weapon, and putting three bullets into his back.

She screamed, so hard it hurt worse than her leg...Then blackness took her.

Tamra was sitting with Sato, holding the semi-conscious fur's paw, as the bodyguard paced up and down the steps, as he'd been doing the past ten minutes. On Sato's other side, the rumpled and frightened doctor was fidgeting, squirming, unable to stop twitching whenever they heard noises down the stairwell. Muffled thumps she was pretty sure were demolitions charges.

"Don't worry doc, they're not here for you. Just keep your eyes closed if they get here. They won't kill you if you can't identify them."

Sato opened his eyes just enough to give her a very distant, unfocused look.

"Defeat is in...Definition..."

Tamra looked down at him and shook her head, ruefully grinning.

"Shut up, Buddha, you're supposed to be unconscious."

He grinned back at her placidly, speaking in a soft, dazed tone.

"Its not over till the fat lady sings?"

She snickered at his Yogi Bera-ism.

"That's more like it."

Arlen glanced up, the reddish emergency lighting that illuminated the 'exit' sign also showing him they were on the fourth floor. He patted Buck's shoulder as the stag cleared the hallway behind them, rifle raised and shouldered.

Silent as shadow, they moved to the stairs, and found their way blocked by a steel security door. Buck was about to signal to turn back when Arlen stepped around him and started examining the thing.

Fucking shitty welding, jesus.

Pulling out his combat knife, he made a few scrapes, then slammed his boot into and through the skirting welded onto the bottom of the door, before dropping down and crawling through.

Buck blinked.

Guess you just can't trust contractors.

Arlen was going up the stairs fast enough that Buck had to run to catch up after getting through the skirting, and caught up mostly because the tiger had to stop to break through another metal doorway, onto the ICU floor.

Buck noted the pair of armored corpses on the stairs, perforated with dozens of small caliber rounds, and frowned as he went over them.

Arlen didn't talk, or stop to acknowledge Buck, as he booted through the weak point on the door.

Guess I can thank dad for one other thing...

When he ducked down to get through the door, Arlen saw movement in the hall beyond. Knowing the noise of fatigued and bending metal had to have alerted whoever was in there, he popped a flashbang from his belt and hurled it underhand through the gap before ducking back and covering his eyes.

The bang was followed by a yell and the sounds of someone falling down. Arlen counted backwards from five in his head, knowing that's about how long it took for a fur's eyes to be able to see anything after a hit that close.

Sure enough, a black-clad wolf was rolling on the floor, trying ot get its bearings enough to get behind cover. From down the hall, there were yells, others coming. Behind him, Buck was struggling to get through the broken skirting.

Arlen charged the flashed wolf, bringing a steel-toed boot up into his chin. The wolf flew half a foot, and rolled like a marionette with broken strings, instantly knocked cold. The black tiger kept moving, bringing Sato's SMG up as two other mercenaries came around the corner, and he let rip with its fully-automatic setting.

At such close range, the tactical armor just wasn't strong enough. Black ceramic flew from the mercenaries' trauma vests, followed by sprays of red flesh and blood as Arlen walked high-caliber fire up, over, and through them, as he advanced down the hall with a snarling growl rolling out of him.

Down the hallway, a member of Green team saw what he thought was a demon. In the darkened hallway full of reflective glass, he saw flashes of light, and a black shape stalking through, blasting away from its paws with hot death, tearing his two companions to bits.

When the black shape stepped over his dead comrades, it turned and stared into a doorway, and the roar it let out chilled his blood so badly he wet himself, turned, and ran for his life.

Buck saw the fleeing fur, but couldn't get off a shot before it was around the corner and gone. Cursing, he ran up to Arlen, grabbed him by the arm, and forced the enraged tiger to move away from Sato's room.

He only looked inside long enough to verify Sato wasn't in there. Of course, he also registered the three dead Goza soldiers, who must have fallen back in there to keep the enemy busy while Sato escaped.

There would be time to worry about that later.

Tasha and Tristan had stayed right where they were for so long, Tristan's ass started falling asleep. The beautiful vixen was so tense that he could pick the muscle definition out all along her shoulders and back through the thin nightclothes she was wearing.

He looked to the clock on his laptop, flipping the thing open in his paws long enough to look, then cleared his throat nervously.

"T-tosh? Sh...Should we still be waiting?"

She looked back at him, and shook her head sharply, as if warding something off or just waking up. The look of tension wasn't gone, but it had lessened slightly. Her voice was quiet but hard, and he knew better than to argue with such a tone.

"We need to go. Now. Do you have enough cash to pay for plane tickets?"

Tristan nodded his head and stood up too quickly, wincing as his legs went all pins-and-needles.

"Do you think they're gone?"

Tasha looked at the door one more time, then moved to the closet to look for clothes that would fit her.

"Probably. If they had been looking for us, they would have started booting open doors to nearby rooms. Must have either had bad intelligence, or they were looking for someone other than me and you."

As she bent down to pick up discarded pants from the floor, Tristan licked his lips, staring at her behind just long enough ot be caught, blushing and turning away, as she straightened up.

"Tris, stare at my ass later, we need to go now."

He nodded his head and bolted off into the other closet to dig around, pulling on pants and a shirt.