Weaponless, she turned to hand-to-hand combat.
Dahl had been in that situation a while now. The big Swede blocked and slammed and barged. The noise of screaming, yelled orders and battle cries that curdled the air around him was like nothing Alicia had ever heard. Faces kept appearing all around her, warped by hatred and cruel intentions, striving to join the battle. Their eagerness blunted much of their effectiveness. Desperation set in among the Yakuza as the few insurgents and the legendary Mai Kitano herself, moved closer and closer to the exit.
Thus, came a desperate measure — machine guns.
Alicia heard the screams, saw the parting of the throng to her left, saw Yakuza throwing their own brothers in all directions to help clear a path. Dahl nipped into the space and the rest followed, the exit doors suddenly looming above them. Many Yakuza were slow in responding to their superiors, so caught up in battle rage, but the shouts continued and the machine-gun toting men began to find a way through. Mai threw her last knife, its blade thunking into one’s forehead, but still four remained.
Alicia had saved bullets for the glass door, as she hoped had the others. But could they reach them in time? Men still assaulted her from the right, but she could only afford them half her attention as the machine guns were raised.
The Yakuza are risking hitting their own men.
It’s not gonna stop them.
Concentration carved their features into hard relief as they lined the insurgents up in their sights.
Alicia saw Dahl start to run at them. It was a desperate measure. No way were they all going to come out of this one alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Alicia lived the next few minutes in an agony of slow motion, positive she was about to see her own death and worse, the deaths of her friends, at the hands of these gangsters. Dahl grew optimistically close to the gunmen; Mai cleared the final stragglers away from the door; Hibiki and Chika were as close as they’d ever been; Alicia threw a facially tattooed man over her shoulders and into his brethren.
Keep fighting. Just… keep… fighting.
But they were out of time. Yakuza bosses were standing up on the lobby’s reception desk, aghast at the bloody mayhem but still calling for deaths. Mai Kitano’s last stand would be long remembered. The tales would be even more legendary once they surfaced, and surface they would.
“Kill them! Do it! Do it!” a man cried.
Yakuza all around Alicia scrambled aside or fell away. Dahl was a finger-length away from the first gun barrel when its owner was ready to fire. Then came the horrible instant of pure disappointment.
We failed…
The first crash was loud enough to disrupt everything — all eyes and focus switched to the front entrance. Something huge hit the glass very hard and even Alicia felt alarm. Her first wild reaction was to remember the old Godzilla movie and how the beast had trashed Tokyo. Hairs rose along her spine. But then reality checked in and she saw somebody had driven a small truck into one of the stanchions that supported the front of the building.
Jarring it.
Next came a hail of gunfire, aimed wild and high into the windows, and the crunching impact of another vehicle, this time into the reinforced glass frontage. Alicia saw cracks appear in the windows, spider-webbing across their entire surface. The bullets did the rest, sending the overlarge shattered panes crashing down like rolling torrents of lethal water. Alicia saw an opportunity and gripped it by the scruff of the neck — grabbing Hibiki and Chika, lowering her head, and charging through the piles of fragmented glass. Her feet slipped and skidded out from under her but she kept her balance. The heaps shifted and slewed but she jumped from one to the next, feeling a little like a fell-runner. If Chika stumbled, Hibiki steadied her and Alicia steadied him. More gunfire slammed into the building, loud and deadly, aimed high but the Yakuza couldn’t be certain about that. They fell away, shocked and distraught at being assaulted on their own turf, most still in a state of disbelief, some beyond their limits and just trying to stay alive.
Of course they had never come up against anything like the SPEAR team before. Even half of it.
Dahl wrenched a machine gun free and sprayed the men in his vicinity. Mai grabbed his shoulder and urged him out of there. Still some bullets whizzed past him. Still a man attacked from his side waving a machete. Dahl let the huge blade slice a millimeter past his right ear, ramming the wielder’s face with the full force of his shoulder. Blood sprayed his back. Machete Man went down, twitching.
Alicia felt the outside air wafting around her face, cooling her skin. Yorgi struggled to rise off to her left, having jarred his ankle as he jumped out of the second vehicle that had struck the front of the Yakuza building. Drake stood in the middle of the road, waving his arms.
“Come the fuck on! My bloody grandma would’ve gotten outta there faster’n you and she’s been dead twenty years!”
“Piss… off,” Alicia panted and hauled Hibiki and Chika along. Yorgi managed to gain his feet and limped up.
“We good?”
“Yes, Yogi, we’re good.”
Dahl ran up, hunched over, Mai at his side. “We’re sitting ducks,” he growled. “Where the hell’s Drake?”
“Fuckin’ lucky ducks, I’d say!” Drake shouted, urging them toward him. “Hurry. That was plan C. Ain’t no plan D.”
“I hope you have an escape plan.” Dahl glanced back into the devastated lobby, toward the surging, enraged crowd of mobsters who now looked even angrier than before. “They’re not just going to let us stroll out of here.”
Drake snapped his fingers. “Bollocks. Never thought of that.” He led them at a sprint into a nearby alley, pointing out the waiting bikes.
Mai set eyes on Grace for the first time. Her sudden exultation was then tempered by disbelief. “You brought her here? Are you insane?”
“Long, long bloody story,” Drake grunted. “Hurry!”
Alicia checked out the scene at their backs. The Yakuza lobby was a seething mass of bodies, most yelling and strapping on weapons, some already running toward the apparently innocent building across the road that also included a parking garage.
“They’re starting to get their heads straight,” she said. “Some are already going for their vehicles.”
“Then let’s move.” Drake turned his bike on and readjusted his mask. “Follow me.”
The team jumped astride the other bikes without any more words. Alicia would have liked to thank the Yorkshireman, as might Dahl in his unique way; Mai might have liked to hug Grace and Chika and possibly slap Hibiki; Grace herself looked as if she wanted to embrace everyone at once — but fate had already rolled the dice and not in their favor.
Yakuza swarmed into the streets, weapons bristling like endless stalks of corn, as Drake spun his Ducati around on its back wheel and then fired it like a rocket deeper into the alley. Alicia clung to his waist. Behind them came a black Honda CBR and a slower Yamaha, one driven by Mai with Grace behind her and the other by Hibiki with Chika at his back. Dahl fired up the last in line, another Honda with Yorgi riding pillion. Alicia dug her fingers in as Drake shot along the dark, blind alley, scattering garbage and accumulated debris to both sides.