Page 34 of Ravaged and Ruined

“Not yet,” I say. “But someone knows we’re here.”

“Abort?” Crank asks.

“No.” My hand tightens on the cutter. “We came for guns, we’re leaving with ‘em.”

The lock snaps. The sound punches through the air, sharper than I wanted. We pull the doors wide. Darkness inside. My flashlight clicks on, the beam of light slicing through the black.

Crates. Wooden. Marked in Cyrillic. Packed tight.

Surge starts prying one open while the others form a loose perimeter. Inside, clean steel glints under oily packing cloth. AK variants. Maybe a dozen in this box alone.

“That’s a good payday,” Grizzly mutters.

“Start loading. Quick and quiet.”

Tango and Pike begin dragging crates out and stacking them near the fence for the Prospects to load into the van.

“Fuck,” Surge growls. “Footsteps. East flank.”

We go still.

Backdraft, of course, is already palming a detonator. “Wanna make a little noise?”

“No,” I start, but then we hear gunshots from the shadows.

One of the guards collapses, blood blooming across his chest. The other one’s screaming into a walkie, ducking behind a forklift.

Too late now.

“All in!” I yell.

Weapons come out. Padre drops to one knee and returns fire with a short-barrel shotgun, blasting the second guard off his feet. Grizzly moves like a damn tank, shielding Pike as he pushes another crate out of the container.

“We gotta move,” Tango barks. “No way we get the rest before more show.”

“Backdraft.” I turn to him. “Make some noise.”

He grins like I just gave him Christmas morning. “With pleasure.”

He darts off into the darkness, toward a stack of abandoned containers marked for scrap. He’s about to detonate a surpriseover there. Something to pull eyes and ears in the opposite direction.

“Fifteen seconds,” he says into the comms.

“Copy. Everyone else, prepare to fall back.”

The air goes electric.

Then—

BOOM.

The explosion rips through the night like a bomb dropped from God’s own hand. Fireballs mushroom into the sky. The ground shakes under our boots. It’s more than we expected. Bigger. Hotter. Something in those scrap containers must’ve been volatile.

The sound tears across the bay like thunder. Lights flip on across the port. Sirens wail. Alarms scream.

Hashtag yells, “Phones lighting up. Port authority’s calling everyone in. You’ve got maybe five minutes, tops!”

We grab what we can.