"Eat this, nerds!" I cried, sending a storm of lead raining down upon the men standing in front of my door. My vantage point on the roof had given me both the element of surprise and a good view of their heads. The submachine gun I held in my right hand shook slightly as it dispelled its ammunition. Each bullet's departure from the muzzle added to the rapid beat of the weapon, sounding like a drummer on cocaine. The rough grip of the gun felt heated in my palm, and I held tight to it to stop it from bouncing all over the place.
The reply I received was a complex riff on an electric guitar that I could never hope to replicate. It came from a pair of earbuds which I had firmly entrenched in the sides of my head, because submachine guns are loud. I could barely hear the heavy metal that I was blasting at full volume. And it was a good song, too, so that bugged me a little. But I’m not one to back from a challenge, so I persevered, squaring my shoulders and gripping the gun tighter.
The bullets ripped through the men on my doorstep, shredding their vital organs and killing them before they had even started falling over. They didn’t have the time or ability to scream, given that their mouths were mostly filled with nine millimeters of swift death - save for one, who lay there moaning, his own gun just out of reach. His eyes rolled like a spooked horse’s, and his arm - the only limb that was still functional - spasmed, bouncing around and smearing blood on my front drive. I could tell he was still struggling to determine where the attack had come from since he’d been at the back of the group, so I waved to him from my perch as I took out my earbuds.
“You look pretty busy there and I don’t want to bother you, but would you mind telling me where I can find your other friends? I know there should be, what…” I paused to count on my fingers, looking between them and the five men lying around him. “...six more of you, right? Yeah, six sounds right.” His groan was a less than helpful reply, and, figuring that was all he would give me, I prepared to speed up his trip to a place that wasn’t my driveway. I paused for a moment, however, as his eyes fixed intensely on mine. His lips parted as he made to speak. I waited patiently, fiddling with the safety on my gun.
In a move that I might have found amusing were I not aware of his objective before he’d found himself pinned to the ground by yours truly, the man raised his good arm, hands clenched in a fist, and extended his middle finger in my direction. He grinned weakly through bloodstained teeth.
He screamed as a stream of bullets cleaved it from his hand, but was silenced when another passed through his face. Taking inspiration from his compatriots, he lay still, a fresh pool of blood swelling up around his head and running down the driveway.
“That’s just unappreciative,” I said heatedly, expelling the spent round from the smoking gun and putting in another. “I mean, honestly, wh-”
I was cut off as my bedroom window exploded outward, glass flying into the open air. Smoke rose up from the newly made hole in the wall, obscuring my view inside. I rolled immediately and instinctively to the left, finding cover behind my chimney. Sure enough, the sound of automatic weapons firing rang out before the air had even cleared and the shingles where I’d been standing shattered. I poked my head out and raised my arm to fire off a few return shots at my window. I didn’t hear any cries of pain to indicate that I’d hit someone, and that raised my ire somewhat.
“You interrupted my quip, you brainless jerks! Weren’t any of you taught manners?” I yelled from my makeshift barricade. The response was a shotgun blast that disintegrated the bricks on the corner of the chimney not two inches from my nose, shooting red dust up into the air. Evidently not, but their aim doesn’t need much more practice, I thought morosely, watching the dust get carried away by the light morning breeze. I sent a few more bullets their way, trying to think of an escape route. Bullets flew past me on all sides, pelting the roof and chimney. Then I remembered.
“Oh, duh!” I looked to the ammo belt across my chest, removing one of the half dozen hand grenades clipped to it. I waited for a lull in the shooting. Hearing one, I pulled the pin and quickly leaned out from the cover to put the grenade through the hole in the wall with an underhand lob. I didn’t wait to see it go off out of fear of suffering a similar fate to Rudeman McUglyface out on my driveway if I stayed out of cover, but the deep booming noise and the way the roof tremored a few seconds later convinced me that it had gone off.
There was no further shooting, but I restrained myself from peeking out at the scene nonetheless. I knew I probably hadn’t gotten them all. These guys were pretty dumb, but I doubted they’d all been in that room. It was more likely that there were still at least three of them on the stairwell or lower floor of my house. The ones I’d just encountered had entered from the back door, and their friends had likely come in from the side windows. They’d probably be much harder to find now, as they knew that I knew they were there. Doubtless, they’d be hiding behind my expensive furniture somewhere, and I’d need to hunt them down with a bit more discretion. I sighed and stood, walking out from behind the chimney - which was significantly more resemblant of Swiss cheese than it had been before I leapt behind it- towards the smoking crater in my roof.
The silence after the attack was broken by the sound of sirens in the distance. The mundaneness of it gave me pause for a moment. It felt out of place after having just fought two groups of hitmen wielding firearms. I’d sort of forgotten that we were in a residential area, and that the nearby families probably weren’t used to the sort of thing I used to go through on a near-weekly basis. A part of me thought I should have been worried, but I figured that I’d be finished long before the local doughnut squad hauled themselves over there. As I stepped over the waist-high wall where my window had been I surveyed the wreckage of my once-lavish room.
The first thing to draw my attention was one of the hitmen lying facedown on my bed. His arms and legs were splayed like he’d just gotten really tired and decided to go to sleep, but the red saturation of the sheets beneath him told a different story. There were two bloodied, unmoving men missing various appendages near where a rough burnt circle and lack of carpet indicated the grenade had exploded. They wouldn’t be a problem.
Most of the room around the center of the blast was blackened and broken, my poor armchair having taken the brunt of the explosion. It was now just a collection of singed upholstery and splintered wood, some of which had embedded itself in the ceiling, as well as the three dead men. These splinters actually seemed to be what had killed the man on my bed, as he was too far from the scorched circle to have been caught directly in the blast. There were four guns scattered about the room, indicating two things: first, that there had probably been more than four people in the room; and second, that if the last guy had left, he was probably unarmed. Advantage, me. Though there were additionally two others waiting for me somewhere else in my house. I took my eyes from the scene and carried on towards the hallway.
I had only barely stepped through the threshold when I heard a loud bang, and then a crack. A hole the depth of my index finger appeared in the doorframe, spraying dust in a fine plume behind it. I whirled to my left to see a man holding a gun with a scope and a very long barrel. I stopped dead in my tracks.
“You brought a sniper rifle… for close-range combat?” I asked. That was insane! How did he even get that thing through the door? “They clearly do not hire you people for your intelligence.”
The man grunted and pulled the gun back again to take another shot. I sighed. They weren’t making this all that difficult. I dropped low, throwing off his aim, then sprang forward into a roundhouse kick, smashing the gun from his grip. I twisted at the waist to bring my own gun around in my arms and unloaded the remainder of the clip into the poor fool.
I was reaching for another ammo clip on my belt when I heard a thump downstairs. Actually, it seemed like it had been right at the base of the stairs. Another one was trying to climb up to me. And he probably thought he was being sneaky. I quietly put down my gun, exchanging it for the rifle. Then I tiptoed over to the wall by my staircase, hiding behind it so that I’d be right next to him when he got to the top.
He took his sweet time about it, creaking on each floorboard like making crazy amounts of noise had been his goal all along. But eventually he got there, and I saw a head poke out from around the wall I was leaning on. He had just enough time to see his friend on the floor and emit a short gasp before I detached from the wall and grabbed him by the collar. I gave him a once-over, saw the gun in his hand, and pushed him back down the stairs.
As he tumbled, I raised the rifle. After a lighting-quick evaluation, I pulled the trigger. A fifty-caliber bullet exploded from the end of the rifle with a near-deafening crack. The shot slammed into his side right as he hit the bottom of the stairs, and he stopped moving altogether.
“Yeah!” I gave a screech of victory. “Did you see that no-scope?!” The presumably last remaining thug gave no reply, so I just assumed he’d been too shy to respond. It had been too cool not to appreciate. I hadn’t actually done that before. My spirits soared with pride, and I descended the stairs to go find my last new friend and tell him about it.
A screaming rang out the instant I hit the bottom. I ducked instinctively, thinking more bullets were inbound. Nothing came. A welcome change, I thought, all too aware of the last thug’s proximity. Thinking about him made me think again about this whole intrusion, which lead me back to thinking about my life before today, and this formerly nice place I lived in. My mood darkened.
“Two years, you ignoramus!” I called out. “Two years of peace. I was friends with my neighbor! His name is Phil, and he has two cats. Now he probably thinks I’m a weirdo. Thanks a lot, scumbag!” I heard scuffling to my left and whirled. The last man had rounded the corner into the front hall and was charging me, my chatter having likely helped him triangulate my position. A flash of metal told of a knife in his right hand. That explained why he hadn’t just shot me. He’d probably left his gun in the room as he made a mad dash for the ground floor.
I downed the man without much circumstance, ending his stint as a jouster before it could begin. He remained silent on the marble floor of my front hall.
I was struck suddenly by how messy my house had become. There was a hole in my roof, and blood all over the second story. I hated it. If there was one thing I had actually done well in my life up to that point, it was keep my house clean. There was work to be done. I decided to start with the most easily manageable part first: body disposal.
I opened the door to my house and started dragging out the body of the man with the knife.  I stopped when I saw a man standing there on the front step. He had a sort of variation on a business casual get-up going for him, and some amber-tinted shades obscured his eyes.
“Uhhh…” I glanced back and forth between my visitor and the dead thug in my grasp. “Can I help you, sir?”
The man said nothing, so I figured his needs could wait a few more moments. I got back to dragging the corpse. Suddenly, the man pulled a gun from behind his back and fired at me before I could react. A bullet took me in the side. I yelled in pain and let go of my captive, spasming. I lurched forward, noticing with a grimace that some of the dead merc’s blood had gotten on my front mat. That would take some serious scrubbing to remove. I kept yelling as I absorbed the impact of the ground with my face.
And everything went dark.