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Old 03-23-2017, 11:43 AM   #115
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default It's All Fun and Games, Until Somebody Loses an Eye

Reacting instantly to Sherilyn Bell‘s cry, Taylor started moving before she finished saying his name. With his shotgun before him, he reaches the kitchen doorway and glances down the length of the corridor to the front central building of Manhanock Asylum. He sees two men dressed in SRT guard tactical outfits over fifty yards away. One of them is firing an M16A2 rifle while the other seems confused. Behind them there are other SRT guards coming up the stairs from outside.

Taylor immediately pulls the trigger of his shotgun, pointing at the firing man, racks the slide on his next step and shoots at the other. Still moving, Taylor grabs a M84 stun grenade from his web gear and throws it long like a football, with all his power. Fifty yards is well over the effective range for beanbag ammunition, even the modern oblong, drag-stabilised variety. The projectiles can reach that far, but by the time they hit, they’ll have too little power for reliable incapacitation, unless they hit something extremely vulnerable. And with the limited accuracy possible with the oblong projectiles, that was unlikely, to say the least.

Taylor hadn’t even stopped for half a second to estimate range, but simply gone with his instinct and tried to shoot for the head of each target, guessing at the elevation and range. With his throw, he has entirely left any cover and is a natural target for the next burst of fire from the guards, but it doesn’t even occur to him that this might be stupid. If they’re aiming at him, they’re not aiming at anyone else. Unfortunately, 50-60 yards is a pretty easy shot with a rifle, for all that it is pretty much impossible with a beanbag round. The guard who’d been firing at Bell transfers his aim at this new, open target.

Taylor has put his throwing hand on the shotgun again and is starting to chamber another round when he sees the first beanbag impact. The guard who’d been about to shoot at him starts to collapse, blood and jelly spraying out from his face as his left eye turns into a bloody mess. Half a second later, the other guard, the confused one, staggers at a hit to his face, his legs swaying under him. Taylor tries to feel satisfaction at the incredible feat of marksmanship, but he is well aware how large a part luck played, and, in any event, feels sick at the thought of having blinded and crippled a man who might be coerced into being there.

Behind the two stricken guards, voices are calling out commands. Taylor can hear someone shout for one team to cover and someone else is shouting to advance. He can also hear the voice of Warden Tyrrell: “…dare hit her! No shooting unless you know…

There wasn’t enough horizontal clearance for the thrown flashbang to follow a proper parabolic trajectory. Taylor had launched it low and fast, but it still hit the ceiling, but the bounce didn’t send it all the way to the ground in front of the injured guards. Instead, the flashbang lands exactly where Taylor had aimed it, five feet behind the two guards. It bounces once and then explodes, just about exactly where the voices of the tactical team had been, just inside the building. The voices turn to screams of pain and confusion.

While rapidly topping up his Remington 870 with beanbag rounds, Taylor blinks in surprise. He’s had time to estimate the distance properly while the flashbang was in the air. Sixty one yards. That’s the yardage of the ‘Miracle in Motown’ Hail Mary pass. Without any room to throw for distance, just a hard, flat trajectory from the roll step. And it hit exactly where he’d imagined it, even though he’d known when he threw it that Aaron Rodgers would probably have trouble with reaching that far without throwing in a proper arc, let alone hitting anything without so much as a second to judge the throw. I ain’t touched a football in over five years. Nor gun, neither, which ain’t gone stopped me from makin’ those two headshots. Sweet Jesus, what did Project Jade Serenity do to me?

Taylor [to former hostages]: “Okay, y’all need to git up them stairs here. Stay in the rear central building, level two, ‘till I or them Coast Guard come. Doc an’ O’Toole, join ‘em with Mrs. York.”

Taylor walks onward toward the men he shot while he speaks. Bell peaks out from the doorway of the room where Dr. Anderson and O’Toole were talking to Dr. King, all of them to all appearances unhurt by the firing. Still focused on possible threats down the corridor, Taylor addresses Bell.

Taylor: “Lynnie, you take ‘em up, point an’ cover. You in charge, you defend ‘em. I think nobody’s up there, but I might could be wrong. There’s still other threats, anyhow. Recollect your training an’ all I said to you. Don’t cross over into the front building. Jes’ keep everybody safe until I or somebody else relieves ya.”
Bell: “Where are you going?”
Taylor: “Takin’ care o’ threats.”
[Taylor looks away from his sights to look Bell in the eye]
Taylor: “It ain’t matter what anybody else say. Whatever doubts you got ‘bout yourself, I got none. I trust you, ‘cause you worth trusting, Lynnie.”

Bell straightens up with her eyes filled with pride. She nods eagerly and moves ahead of the former hostages with a spring in her step, with her Remington 870 shotgun at the ready. Taylor resumes aiming, his heart breaking at the thought that the quick flash of happiness and pride in Sherilyn's eyes is the first he's seen since he got there. Contrasted with the terror he'd seen in her eyes when she talked about this Dr. Cotton and the bitterness when she talked of Warden Tyrrell, it makes him furious. She oughta been happy all her life, but I done failed her an' they've done their best to break her, make her bitter and afraid.

Inside the room, Dr. Anderson tells Emma King sternly to stay behind him as they cross the hallway and then tells O’Toole to grab the other end of the stretcher.

O’Toole: “Can’t we just leave that in here?”
Dr. Anderson [steel in his voice]: “I will not discuss this. You will carry that stretcher or you will regret it the rest of your life.”
O’Toole [picks up the stretcher]: “I only meant that we might need our hands for shooting. It’s not as if carrying a casualty into a firefight is any safer!”

Dr. Anderson seems to be quite energized by the situation and starts to harangue the former hostages as soon as he is into the corridor, ordering them into some semblance of formation so that Cherry Bell can go first and he and O’Toole come after her, in case she runs into anything. Emma King follows Dr. Anderson closely as he shouts commands and moves through the press of people, holding on to his arm with while gazing on him with obvious hero worship. Among the former hostages, the head cook, a heavy-set Hispanic man, orders around his staff with the aplomb of a sergeant.

Taylor moves down the corridor in a combat shuffle, with his shotgun covering corridor where the flashbang went off. He notes that the SRT guards have managed to get to cover, probably in one of the rooms off the side of the corridor. He guesses that they moved to his right, from what he could see. While he glides forward, he can hear noises above, on what he guesses is the third floor of the front central building of Manhanock Asylum. Running men, probably rushing to stairs to come to the aid of the SRT guards. He can also hear a voice, cultured, educated, but with a slight touch of Dixie remaining under the expensively acquired diction.

Southern voice: “Now, Mr. Townsend, as we are once again alone, we might perhaps continue our conversation.”
Townsend: “I won’t say that my superiors might not be interested, but once the authorities get here, what’s to stop…”

Taylor sees a head pop out through a doorway some hundred feet ahead of him. The man is wearing a PASGT helmet and trying to throw something with his right hand. Taylor shoots at the head and as the distance is less than earlier, he is not surprised when the beanbag hits straight on the nose of the guard, causing him to fall inside the room. A tremendous explosion follows. Taylor is relieved to note that it seems to have been a flashbang rather than a fragmentation grenade, but nevertheless shudders to think of what an M84 stun grenade is going to do to a man holding it as it goes off.

Southern voice: “I do not know if that is Warden Tyrrell and his men or tactical teams belonging to your superiors, but in either case, I doubt we have much more time. I’ve memorised all the information most valuable to your people. You won’t get it by searching my files.”

Taylor has crossed the corridor that connects the front central building of Manhanock Asylum to the rear annex he is coming from. He notes that the rooms to either side of the connecting corridor contain huge glass windows, large verandas and Gothic cast iron balconies on the second floor, overlooking the verandas. These face the windows of the second floor of the rear central building, where Sherilyn Bell and the former hostages have gone.

Taylor can hear that ahead of him, on stairs that come down on either side of the corridor from the second floor, men have taken up position. It sounds like one man on each stairway, probably crouching down or sitting, aiming a weapon down into the corridor, waiting to ambush him. The SRT guards couldn’t have made it there this fast, so these are some of the guards or orderlies who were upstairs in the central building before, working up the courage to come downstairs.

Crossing their line of fire is profoundly stupid. It’s also the only way to reach Warden Tyrrell and his men before they regroup from the two flashbangs. Taylor doesn’t have another flashbang on him, but he’s still got an M67 fragmentation grenade. Which would be the appropriate way to deal with these men waiting in ambush. Kill one and confuse the other, gun him down before he recovers.
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Last edited by Icelander; 03-23-2017 at 12:04 PM.
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