Free The Lawless Kind by Matt Hilton

armed thieves.
    Rink ducked just as the windscreen exploded as a bullet struck the upper left corner. Chunks and slivers of glass rained over me, and out of instinct I squeezed my lids tight to avoid injury. When I looked again, the truck in our path was weaving side to side, attempting to block all lanes of the road. What did the driver think we were going to do? Stop?
    Rink forced more speed from our rental, and I leaned past him.
    ‘Ears,’ I said in warning, a split second before my SIG cracked noisily. Rink didn’t flinch but already he must have been half-deafened by the nearby blast. He gritted his teeth and powered directly at the truck, even as I continued to fire through the shattered windshield. Below me I could hear Kirstie’s faint yelps with each empty shell that bounced across her shoulders. I watched where my bullets struck the other vehicle and tightened my grouping. Moments before I’d been reluctant to shoot; thinking the first figure was a cop. Now the rules had changed. I placed six rounds through the low corner of the windscreen exactly where a driver would be hiding behind the steering wheel. This time the truck shot across the shoulder at the side of the road and impacted with the cliff. The hood crumpled, the rear end thrown skyward, and a man was ejected from the bed, flailing in the air before he too struck the unforgiving rocks and moved no more. I doubted the driver had survived my bullets, and the likelihood was that any passengers would have been squashed when the cab was compressed to a quarter of its original dimensions.
    Two vehicles were still pursuing us, and likely a number of armed and determined enemies, but now the road ahead was clear, and no way could they catch us. Not that I was ready to cheer just yet. I’m a firm believer in Murphy’s Law, and if anything could go wrong it probably would. There are too many variables to rely on luck remaining on your side. A tyre could blow out, the engine could seize, or another third-party element could enter the fray, and slow us enough for our pursuers to catch up.
    Or Rink could hit a one-eighty skid so that we again faced our enemies, which was precisely what he did.
    Ordinarily the tactic would be madness, but I wasn’t complaining. The only way we could be certain of escape from these determined attackers was to neutralise them and we couldn’t do that while running away. With a screech of rubber on blacktop, the car shot towards the two oncoming vehicles. I hit the release on the magazine and it fell in the spare front seat, rattling across the cooler box. Then as Rink accelerated I slapped a fresh mag in place and readied the SIG for action. The first truck’s gumball lights punched shards of conflicting hues across the cliffs that were now on our right. The third vehicle in their pack had overtaken the first, and was heading for us; illuminated by flashing lights were two men on the back who were holding long guns. One of them fired but the round was lost in the desert somewhere; then the second man opened up, which was more troubling. He was armed with a machine-gun and was rattling bullets at us on semi-auto. They walloped the front grill like a roll of thunder. The car shuddered with the impact, but kept moving.
    Rink concentrated on driving. He had a gun in a shoulder rig, but to go for it now would compromise his control of the car. It was my SIG against a rifle and an MP5: not good odds.
    ‘Give me a weapon,’ Kirstie shouted. ‘I can help.’
    ‘You can help by keeping your head down,’ I shouted over the continuous roll of my gun as I rapidly squeezed the trigger. Within seconds the slide locked back and I hit the mag release and slapped in a fresh one.
    I had starred the windscreen of the oncoming truck, but hadn’t got the driver this time. The men on the back fired at us, and I could hear their war cries over the roaring of engines and rattle of gunfire. Bullets shattered one of our headlights and tore chunks