Without a word Bamba lunged to grab the grey box of digital treasure from the fixer.


    Reacting faster, Emz stepped back out of reach and pulled his gun. "What the fuck!"


    Unrelenting, the giant advanced, clawing out with his large left hand for the old slab phone, while his right reached for his own sidearm.


    Emz backpedalled another step in panic and fired, blam, the gun’s bang echoing in the wide space as the small dim red display changed to 14. The bullet hit Bamba mid-chest, knocking him back, but not down, thanks to some hidden body armour. Emz was about to attempt a headshot, but the crocodile recovered too quickly. Bamba’s left hand snapped around the gun, twisted it free from Emz''s grasp, and hurled it aside.


    In quick response, Emz smashed a corner of the bulky grey rectangle into Bamba’s temple. There was a huge difference in mass between the two men, but Emz put his whole weight behind the strike, focusing the blow into a thumbnail-sized angle of reinforced mobile technology. The African giant was briefly dazed, almost dropping to a knee.


    Emz used that moment to turn and bolt, scanning the ground for his gun. The floor was littered with weapons from the bloody carnage, but in 2051, nearly every modern gun required the owner''s biometrics to fire—a UN gun safety law designed to monitor ownership and supposedly reduce gun violence. It also created a new profitable black market in jailbreaking legally registered weapons.


    Unable to spot his own or an older, potentially analogue gun, Emz darted behind a stack of crates just before Bamba could tag him with a clean shot. Blam. The bullet instead tore through a huge section of composite wood, showering Emz in ragged wood chips on the other side.


    The stack he had reached was the one where the two men had stabbed each other to death. Quickly rummaging through their clothes, Emz found both their guns—but both were digitally locked and useless. Even with a quick attempt to use their owners'' fingers on the trigger sensors, but it was no use, as dead tissue doesn’t conduct the necessary electrical charge. Left with no better option, Emz grabbed a bloody knife and waited for Bamba to reach him.


    Emz considered his options: crouch low at a corner and thrust up the moment Bamba rounded the stack; climb up the crates and lunge down from above; move in parallel and dash around the other side, attacking from behind; or perhaps use the bodies gruesomely to create a distraction. But before he could decide, in the few seconds he thought he had left, both warehouse doors were smashed open, one after the other, and armed men rushed in, opening fire. Blam, blam-blam, blam.


    The crates around Emz were suddenly hit by stray bullets, sending another spray of wood fragments all about him. The bulk of Bamba suddenly appeared, edging backwards behind the crates, returning fire at the new arrivals. The unexpected turn of events left Emz confused about what to do. Crouched on his haunches, gripping the sticky knife, he stared at Bamba’s profile, who moments ago had been his only enemy, but now the large space was filled with many more threats.


    The big mercenary stole a quick glance at Emz. "Where is your gun?" he asked, his tone critical, as if chastising Emz for not helping fend off the attackers, before turning his focus back to the raucous firefight.


    "You pulled it out of my fucking hand and threw it away somewhere while trying to fucking kill me!" Emz shouted back. More wood chips rained down as more fired ammunition hammered into their cover.


    Bamba fired twice more, blam-blam, before snapping back his reply. "You had shot me, non?"


    Emz shook his head in astonishment. Ignoring his newfound compatriot, he stole a quick look around the large room through the bullet-damaged gaps in the crates. They were in the midst of a three-way battle, between one group by the main entrance, who had made it behind the first crate stack, that hid the dead man with the gut wound, and a second group firing from the fire exit doorway. There was no inner cover close enough for them to make a safe run to.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    There were around four or five people in each group, though maybe more were just outside. None of them spoke, and they wore no uniforms, insignia, or colours to indicate who they were. They didn’t look like undercover cops—too disorganised for that. Emz had a gut feeling that the group by the main door was Russian. Something about their clothing, their haircuts, the broad-faces, East Slavic features matching some of the original bodies on the floor. Blam-blam, blam. The other group, who had just taken a casualty that slumped lifeless to the ground, looked more Central European—blonder, perhaps.


    Emz pulled back his cuff to check his wearable screen and spoke quietly to his digital assistant. "Syn, find my gun."


    Blam, blam-blam, blam.


    The contact mic in his discreet in-ear bud easily registered his command despite the explosive cacophony around him, and the bot responded with a gentle beep of acknowledgment. Emz preferred subtle responses from his tech; a verbose bot drove him mad. His wrist screen lit up, displaying a wide map of the surrounding area that quickly zoomed in, offering a detailed building-scale plan. A blinking dot marked the location of the gun, but the signal remained frustratingly vague—limited to a two-square-metre area.


    Blam-blam, blam-blam.


    He moved around, trying to find a damaged gap in the crates to get a view of the marked location. He was disappointed to see that it appeared to be somewhere among the dead bodies and their scattered guns. Not a realistic option right now.


    Chewing his lip in thought, he assessed both doors before finally turning to Bamba. "We can''t stay here." He pointed towards the main entrance with the knife. "We should try to make it that way—use the middle stack as cover, take out those Russian guys from behind, and once we''re outside, we’ll be closer to a main street."


    "Non," Bamba replied simply. Blam. He put a bullet in the face of a Russian gang member peeking out from behind their wooden defences, killing him instantly, then quickly snapped another shot, blam, at the blonder gang at the fire exit, exploding someone''s kneecap. The man screamed as he was dragged back outside, replaced by another shooter in the door frame. Bamba then wheeled back behind their cover to reload his gun as a barrage of wooden shrapnel cascaded around them, with both gangs returning fire in retribution. Blam, blam-blam, blam.


    "What do you mean, no?" Emz asked incredulously, brushing fallen wood chips from his head and shoulders. "We’re soon going to run out of cover. We have to move."


    "There are fewer people now at the far door. I will thin them out, and then we leave that way."


    "Mate, that’s a fifty or sixty-metre run with no cover, while everyones taking shots at us!"


    "I am wearing armour," Bamba shrugged dismissively.


    "I’m not!"


    Blam-blam, blam.


    There was a sudden yelp amidst the gunfire as another Russian was hit. Emz immediately reacted, moved to dash towards the middle stack of crates—set further back and roughly midway between his and the Russian position—but was held back by a meaty hand clamping down on his left hand, which still held the grey slab. Bamba was strong enough that Emz bounced back, as though suddenly shackled to a large boulder.


    Bamba’s gun came around, but before he could fire at such an intimate range, Emz stabbed the knife hard into the exposed mound of palm flesh below Bamba’s right thumb. The African winced, recoiling in pain just enough for Emz to break free. With a quick twist of his body and a scrape of his feet against the concrete for traction, he ran as fast as he could to the midway stack.


    Expecting a fatal bullet at any moment, Emz was shocked to find himself still alive when he reached the middle unmanned stack. He resisted the urge to take relative shelter there, and instead, he kept running, determined to reach the main door.


    Miraculously, the Russians hadn’t noticed him. Besides two bodies, the gut-shot one and another recently killed by Bamba, two men were focused on ducking in and out of cover to fire at the other gang, while another was tying a belt as a tourniquet around the bleeding leg of a final, dying man.


    Emz ducked his head low and pelted diagonally for the entrance, about twenty metres behind the Russian position. He heard a guttural shout and couldn’t help but peek over his right shoulder. One of the Russians had spotted him, raising the alarm and his gun, but before the man could fire, his chest exploded outward from a bullet to the back. Whether Bamba had intentionally saved his life or had simply taken advantage of the open shot for his own survival didn’t matter. Emz made it outside and kept running.