Gunpowder

Something was off.

Axis knew that her instincts weren’t always right, they sure as heck hadn’t been right about Poppy, but this time she wanted to trust them.

The policewoman was in the middle of a war, or at least a sort of war. She, along with Jelt and Cella and a few other policemen she didn’t know, were in the middle of a battle between two street gangs. The two groups of young boys and girls were fighting over a stash of cocaine, which one of the factions had claimed to have been stolen by the other faction. Instead of resolving it diplomatically, they were now beating each other senseless with guns and baseball bats and all manner of weaponry, rudimentary or not.

The police were doing their best to stop the battle, sedating as many of the gangsters as possible, but they were simply outnumbered. Axis had found herself in a particularly dangerous situation, in the middle of a large mob of people beating at each other with bats and other kinds of objects that were being used as clubs.

She was mounted on her robotic equine, as she almost always was when on missions, but that didn’t do much in terms of advantages to her. The giant robot did give her power, though. She would charge through the group in attempts to break them up. The scattered gangsters would then be dealt with by the other officers.

As if she was a child trying to gather the ocean in a tiny bucket, Axis was getting frustrated. The group would split for a few seconds, a few fighters would be scattered and wrestled away, but more people just filled in the gaps. She was also aware that the mob, which probably consisted of about one hundred people, but that was just her guess. And that wasn’t all of them. The gangs, which were gigantic in size, also had several snipers, which were stationed in the abandoned buildings above. She wasn’t really sure why they were considered snipers, they aimed a bit more like drunken hooligans who had somehow acquired guns, but still, they had guns, and that made them dangerous. Lucky for her, but probably not lucky for the other police on the scene, the snipers were firing at the officers.

“I could use some help over here. Some mounted help. Delta sixty four maneuver!” the woman yelled at the others. “Delta sixty four” referred to a maneuver in which three mounted officers, or a group of mounted officers whose number was divisible by three, would charge in different directions, but meet at a center point, before rushing out into the outside. It seemed to have been designed for this very situation, and it probably was. Gangs were a big issue in Kawden, especially in Jeune, which was a poorer district of Kawden laying in the outskirts of the city.

Jelt and Cella had heard Axis’s orders, and were now rushing over to join her. With a quick exchange of words, they were off, executing maneuver Delta sixty four.

Axis kicked her robot into a gallop and charged into the crowd, seeing her two teammates do the same, though they were entering from different edge points of the crowd. They all met up at the middle, shared a glance, and continued running. In their wake was a cleared area, which widened the crowds entire area. A wider area meant a less dense crowd, and the confusion cause would mean that people were stumbling into each other. In a sort of domino effect, people ended up stumbling out of the crowd as a whole. The maneuver was working!

Cries of anger and drunken screeching resounded from the mouths of those in the crowd. Most of them were high, especially the girls.

“Stand down!” rung Axis’s voice, aimed at the crowd. They didn’t hear her, or at least didn’t seem to, as they just kept clobbering each other. A cry tore through the air, and someone fell to the ground.

It was an older boy, probably around fifteen, who had suffered a hit to the head with a rudimentary metal club. His skull seemed to be bashed in, and blood was pooling in a huge puddle around him.

Axis took this one upon herself. She shoved her way to the injured male and hauled him onto her mount. Pushing aside armed teenagers, the policewoman managed to get out of the massive crowd.

She dumped the male on the ground, being as gentle as she could while lowering him. She pulled out her communicator, which was safely tucked away in her belt, and dialed up the medical hotline for police officers.

“There’s a kid out here whose skull was just bashed in during a gang conflict! I need a team out here!” she called. It may have seemed extreme, but such calls were sadly commonplace on the hotline. A lady on the other end of the call promised that a team would be dispatched immediately, and Axis hung up.

She got to work with the simple medical procedures she herself could perform. She started by checking if the man was breathing; Luckily, he was. Next, she wrapped a strip of gauze, which she had stored in her belt, around the man’s head in an attempt to stop the bleeding. The white bandage quickly became a deep scarlet with the young man’s blood, which sicked Axis and made bile rise in her throat. She forced it down and sedated the man, which would not only calm him but also help with the pain, which he was probably feeling a lot of at the moment.

“Keep this one safe!” She warned the others before mounting her horse once more and racing back into the swarm of battle.

No matter how much she fought to keep focused, her mind kept going back to her roommate, as always. She was out quite late, she hoped that Poppy would be okay. She was armed, after all. But that gut feeling remained. That gut feeling that something bad was going to happen. Now she recognized what the instinct was pointing to.

Something bad was going to happen to Poppy.