Marco didn't even know how that shot had landed.
He didn't have time to pick his next target. He just raised the pistol, aimed vaguely at the silhouette of the SUV's driver cabin, and emptied the remaining four rounds in one breath.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Shell casings clattered onto the pavement with a crisp, cold sound. The moment the last bullet left the chamber, he didn't even pause to confirm if he'd hit anything. He just threw himself backward behind the wall, landing hard on his shoulder.
Only when his back pressed against the icy brick wall again did he realize what he'd just done.
He might have killed someone.
But the nausea, dizziness, or guilt he expected never arrived. Instead, a chaotic surge of adrenaline flooded through him. It felt like electricity coursing blindly through his body, making him tremble uncontrollably. Not just his right hand holding the gun, his left armm, his legs, and even his jaw was chattering. Every muscle in his body twitched beyond his control. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, each thud so heavy it felt like it would smash through his chest. His throat was parched, scraped raw.
He slapped the magazine release. The empty magazine dropped into the dust at his feet. His left hand fumbled at his waist for a spare magazine, but his fingers were clumsy and stiff, like they'd lost their bones. It took several attempts before he managed to pull the fresh magazine free.
"Fuck. Fuck!"
He clenched his teeth hard, hammered his left arm against his thigh a few times, and finally forced himself to calm down. He took a deep breath, steadied his wrist, aligned the weighted magazine with the grip slot, and shoved it in until the lock clicked. Then he racked the slide.
Clack!
A bullet chambered. He held the pistol in both hands and used a 4-4-4 breathing technique to steady his emotions. The blank space in his head slowly filled back in.
The 1911 had left four torn holes in the windshield. Spiderweb cracks spread outward. He wasn't sure if the shots had hit their target, especially given the shifting angle. If those guys stepped on the gas and charged forward right now, he would have no way to stop them. His firepower wasn't enough to halt an SUV, he'd just have to hide and hope.
But something was happening on the other side. The attackers seemed to be arguing, some wanted to run, some wanted to rescue their injured teammate.
Then suddenly, two muffled blasts erupted in the alley.
The Mossberg had opened fire.
Darnell had seized the moment. A dozen lead pellets swept past, drowning out the assailants' shouting beneath the shotgun's roar and the sound of shattering glass.
After the second shot, Marco risked a glance.
The SUV driver was slumped forward against the smashed dashboard, held upright only by his seatbelt. His upper body twitched uncontrollably, riddled with bloody holes. Dead or alive, hard to say. The driver's cabin looked like someone had sprayed it with a garden hose full of blood.
Beautiful work... And also disgusting.
His hands were still trembling, though not as badly as before. The tremors actually reduced the queasiness in his stomach, forming a bizarre equilibrium.
By now, the remaining two assailants had jumped out of the vehicle. The burly man in the leather jacket took cover behind the rear bumper, while the man in the baseball cap crouched beside the passenger door and fired a shot back toward the second floor.
Pellets hammered into the window frame and wall, sending down a rain of stone dust and shattered glass. But the recoil made him lean backward slightly, exposing his shoulder and half his neck behind the window glass.
Seizing the moment while the man was reloading, Marco stepped out, pressed down on the front sight, and pulled the trigger.
Another double tap.
The first shot struck the man in the shoulder, spraying a burst of blood mixed with pale bone fragments across the chrome trim. The man in the baseball cap staggered back and collapsed, causing the second shot to miss completely.
The shoulder wound wasn't immediately fatal. But as the man lay on the ground looking upward, he saw Darnell's face, and the black maw of the Mossberg barrel pointing down at him.
He instinctively raised a hand to block.
All he saw was the muzzle flash.
BOOM!
Marco knew his own shots had landed, and he'd seen Darnell fire, but parked cars blocked his view of the results.
He hunched low, keeping to the wall, slipped behind a Toyota. Before he could peek out again, he heard retching above him, and behind the SUV. Then came the burly man's thick, slurred voice:
"Don't shoot... I... hurk... I surrender... hurk..."
Surrender was good news. But if they were vomiting this badly, and even Darnell upstairs had thrown up, then the result of that last shotgun blast must have been horrific.
Grinding his teeth, Marco forced down his curiosity. He refused to think about the gunshot trauma photos he'd seen in training.
He circled around the SUV cautiously and saw the leather-jacketed man had already thrown away his weapon. He was kneeling on the ground, retching uncontrollably.
Good thing I didn't look earlier, he thought. If three grown men ended up crouching together puking, none of us would ever be able to look anyone in the eye again.
He cuffed the man behind his back. The suspect had gone limp and docile, his face ashen, vomit turning from bile-green to blood-tinged yellow. His diaphragm spasmed like a dissected frog hooked up to electricity.
The alley stank of rusty iron sweetness and sour rot, brain matter mixed with half-digested food steaming on concrete.
Marco stood up and glanced at the prison van. Three security officers lay on the ground.
Three down without taking even one? Useless. Waste of a salary.
He grumbled silently. If not for these guys, he wouldn't be here risking his life in a firefight. If the prisoners escaped, so what? Not his business. But abandoning colleagues under the same Gotham PD jurisdiction without reason would kill his future in law enforcement.
"Did you call backup yet? We need ambulances!" he shouted.
Darnell finally staggered down from the stairwell, pale but holding himself together.
"Already called. They'll be here soon." He glanced at Marco. "Man, don't you want to see how I did?"
"Check your ego later! You check the Blackgate prisoners, I'll check on the one they were trying to rescue."
Marco circled back around to the rear cabin, opened the door with his pistol raised, and found an inmate curled up on the seat.
"Get your fucking hands on your head and climb down. You've caused a world of trouble today."
"D... don't shoot!" The prisoner scrambled out of the car, collapsing on the pavement with his hands clasped over his head. "I swear, I swear I don't know them!"
"That's not my problem." Marco holstered his pistol. "They hijacked a transport and killed people to rescue you." He pointed. "Three bodies over there. Once you get to prison, take a guess what that means for you."
"Hey! Over here!"
He spun around. Darnell was shouting from across the lot.
"One of them's still alive!"
From a distance, all three officers had looked stone dead in their pools of blood. To think one was still breathing...
Hr quickly handcuffed Hargrove to the shattered B-pillar and sprinted toward Darnell.
There had originally been three officers in the transport. The driver and the guard in the back had been blown open by shotgun fire, dead beyond saving. The female officer in the passenger seat had also taken a hit.
She had soft body armor over her uniform, but at such close range, the buckshot might as well have been fired point-blank through tissue paper. Her chest and abdomen had ruptured outward. A fist-sized cavity was torn open in the center. The frayed layers of ballistic fiber were studded with small lead pellets. Dark wetness spread rapidly outward, blood pulsing through the armor lining and dripping onto the cold cement floor, forming a sticky dark red puddle.
"Hey. Look at me. Can you hear me? What's your name?" He patted her cheek. Her skin was cold and slick with sweat. Her eyes shifted slightly, lips working to squeeze out a faint whisper.
"Help... me..."
Every breath came with torn coughing, bloody froth bubbling from her lips, a sign of pulmonary contusion or a rib fragment puncturing the lung.
"Stay with me. You're not dead yet, don't give up. Get—" Marco tore open her collar, then snapped his head around and saw Darnell running from the patrol car with a first-aid kit. "Get a chest seal! Her lung is leaking, we need to seal the wound letting air in!"
"What? What wound? Where?" Darnell rummaged frantically through the medical kit.
"Listen carefully, when she inhales! Find the spot making the hissing sound! What the hell did you learn in first-aid class?!"
Marco pulled out his tactical folding knife, cut through the side straps of her ballistic vest, and slowly peeled it away. As the blade sliced open the soaked uniform fabric beneath, the sight that greeted them made his stomach twist violently.
Below the blown-out gap in the body armor, the police shirt was torn open, revealing a massive wound near the lower left ribline. The edges were ragged and peeled back. The hollow inside was deep, bloody, and indistinct. With each shallow, strained breath she took, a small length of intestine wrapped in a membrane pulsed faintly between mangled muscle tissue, fully exposed to the cold air, caked in dust and dirty blood.
Around the wound, a dozen small black-rimmed perforations dotted the skin like branding marks scorched by hellfire. And the fabric at her upper left thigh was also ripped open, dark blood flowing out in rivulets, soaking through her trousers and spreading across the concrete beneath her.
Three fatal wounds.
"Shit, stop the bleeding first!" Marco yanked out a rapid tourniquet and cinched it high at the woman's groin, then cranked the windlass tight. He looked up at the stunned Darnell. "Don't blank out! Turn her head to the side and clear the blood and vomit from her mouth! Then soak some gauze in clean water and lay it gently over the abdominal wound! Don't stuff it in, just cover it! Protect the intestines! Move!"
Darnell jolted like he'd been whipped. He tore out a roll of gauze, balled it up, soaked it with the purified water from the aid kit, and laid it across the torn-open abdomen. The warm, sticky blood immediately soaked through and trickled out around the edges like tiny red springs.
He then tore off a smaller piece of gauze and wiped the blood and vomit from her mouth. Looking up, he saw Marco pressing another pack of gauze tightly against the bleeding chest wound.
"And then what?!"
What else?
What else could they even do?
Marco stared at the side of the woman's neck. Her veins bulged like twisted earthworms, signs of severe hypoxia and rising internal chest pressure. He realized in despair that the air-leak entry wound might be hidden under clothing, or close to the abdominal tear, but there was no time left to find and treat it.
The hissing of escaping air grew weaker, swallowed by the gurgling of blood.
He glanced at his watch and croaked, "Time of note: 15:37. Keep talking to her! Don't let her fall asleep!"
"Okay, okay... listen, ma'am, my name is Darnell Wilson. Stay awake, don't sleep. Think about your paycheck." Darnell rambled. "Or your kids, or family. Even if they treat you badly... it's fine, mine aren't great either..."
Marco said nothing, kneeling in the wind, desperately searching the mangled chest for the fatal leak. His hands shook even harder than when he'd killed someone earlier, fingers ice-cold as they slid across her skin.
He pulled off his uniform jacket and laid it over her.
Only to notice that her eyes were fixed on him, pupils dimming, the last spark fading into emptiness.
"Stay awake! Don't sleep!" Darnell stripped off his own jacket and laid it over her too. He looked up at his partner. "She'll make it, right?"
Marco swallowed, but his throat burned too sharply for words to form.
Darnell squeezed the woman's hand, sniffing hard. "She's freezing. We need to cover her more. Maybe we should do CPR? She can't breathe!"
Marco looked down at her face.
The painful, shallow breaths had stopped entirely.
"She's dead." He heard the distant scream of approaching patrol cars and ambulances. "Backup's here."
"No..." Darnell lowered his head. Something dripped onto the ground. "They came too late... if they'd just come a little sooner..."
Marco let out a humorless laugh. "Don't forget, this is Gotham. They're always late."
He pulled Darnell back a little. "Move. Don't drip tears on the body, you'll have trouble explaining it later."
"Who said anything about tears? The smell's just unbearable." Darnell wiped his eyes with a sleeve. "Hey, you smeared blood on me. I've seen dead bodies before, but..."
"There's always blood." Marco chuckled tiredly and sat on the curb, watching police and paramedics flood the scene.
Darnell sat beside him. They watched as bodies were covered with white sheets in silence.
Suddenly, commotion rose at the cordon. A middle-aged man in a beige trenchcoat pushed past the officers and walked straight toward them.
"Major Crimes Unit. James Gordon."
He stopped at the steps and extended a hand.
Both men instinctively stood. Marco looked at his blood-stained hand and lifted it slightly. Gordon glanced at it, but kept his hand out firmly and even leaned in a little.
"Well done, boys. This is a hero's decoration. Thank you."
"Decoration?" Marco's lip twitched into a sardonic smile. He looked at Gordon's clean, well-defined fingers, then finally lifted his hand and brushed Gordon's fingertips lightly.
"Thank you, sir."
"And me too, right?" Darnell hurriedly wiped his hands on his shirt, then grabbed Gordon's other hand enthusiastically. "Darnell Wilson, sir! Hell of a day!"
Gordon shook his hand firmly, clapped Darnell on the shoulder. "Major Crimes and forensics will take over from here." He gestured toward the perimeter.
Marco followed his gaze and saw Edward collecting shell casings with delicate care.
"You did well. Go rest, shower, change. We'll do the paperwork later."
"Thank you, sir."
The two men saluted and watched Gordon walk back.
Darnell slumped onto the steps again. He nudged Marco with an elbow. "Phew... finally over. He said we're heroes! You know him? Doesn't matter, he's the boss. Boss is always right. 'Hey Wilson, good job today!'"
He turned to Marco. "So, buddy, what's the thing you wanna do most right now?"
Marco didn't answer immediately. He slowly sat down, staring first at Edward working in the distance, then at his own hands. Police lights flashed red and blue across them.
"The thing I want to do most?" He frowned and looked sideways at Darnell. "What about you?"
"I don't know. Maybe go to Lisa's bar down the block and really relax, forget all this crap. And tell everyone I'm a hero." Darnell looked excited, as if fear and grief had been shoved aside completely. Then he pressed again, "What about you?"
Marco didn't look at him. He pressed a thumb repeatedly against the hardened dark scab at the base of his fingers, but the stain seemed sunk beneath the skin.
"Me?" He stared at his hands.
"I want to wash them first."