She winds her pitch and throws it. It lands on the floor well and truly in front of them, doing nothing.

The grenade was a dud and that was all she had.

They swarm through the broken marketplace, using caved-in portions of the minimall for cover. Treating a delapidated escalator as a shooting gallery. They don't stop shooting, and when one reloads the other other lays down suppression.

Helvetica was getting desperate. She'd seen them coming, sure, but not until the sharpeye had taken the shot. She'd seen the muzzle flash and moved, but the pain ripped through her side as the sound finally hit her eardrums.

If he'd been closer, she'd have been dead.

The troops came in after, to put her and Nicky Dime down. Were coming in now, to mop her up.

Assault rifles, ceramic plates, four of them, one with an underslung something. If it was a grenade, she was fucked. If it was a shotgun she should be about as fucked as her current state. If it was a flamethrower the fucking she was suffering would be far more excruciating, but no more or less likely. 

Nicky was going through their stock. Last time Hel took a mercenary job from a kid, but she'd talked her into it, hadn't she? That counted for something.

Speaking of counting, four of them, and something else to keep in mind.

"Spray and pray!" She orders the kid. Nicky, fourteen and wise beyond her years, balks at the much older merc.

"That's not going to do anything."

"It'll keep their head down."

"That's just stalling tactics." She's panicking now, "Just keep their heads down."

"Yeah well you can't shoot for shit, and I'm bleeding bad."

It'd heal in time. It always did. Mostly a flesh wound,  just happened to take a damn lot of flesh with  it.

"Uzi ammo isn't cheap! If I'm going down, I'm not dying on a deficit."

"Holy shit, kid, you can't take it with you. Just empty the goddamn clip. You're the one who pissed them off."

They'd been cornered into the area designated for the food court, and the fryers and freezers had enough metal bulk to them that they weren't just disintegrating. If they'd been raiders, they'd have swept them by now. She counted on their discipline though.

Hel just needed to delay them a few seconds longer.

The kid pulls out three uzis from her bottomless rucksack. Whatever you need, she reaches in and just has it. If Helvetica didn't know better, she'd have called her a precog.

But Hel did know better. Speaking of.

The uzi fire sprays them. The gun goes hot and silent, it's tossed back into the sack, the next one's pulled up, safety flicked, and emptied in kind.

It doesn't catch any of them, because the kid really can't shoot for shit, but it's bought them about ten seconds.

Nicky reaches for the third when Hel grabs her wrist and gives her a wait handsign. The ambush moves up on her, right over the dud grenade she threw a moment ago moving to flank through some columns, just as Hel saw it.

She's reaching for the morphine. It's coming out of Hel's wages, she's sure of it, but with a chunk of her side gone, and coming out of an argument with a kid, it's money well spent. 

"You want to know something kid?"

"Sure. Dying isn't an excuse to stop learning."

Smart. Smart ass. Either, both. "Time heals all wounds, kid."

The dud grenade bursts bright, and the tac squad's mincemeat to the shrapnel. Not even a time bomb, she just knew it had a delayed timer, knew it'd take about that exact amount of time, knew that they'd swarm through there. Knew they'd let their guard down if she took the sniper's shot. Didn't expect that, mind...

"Time bombs, on the other hand, cause a shitton of dead."

Never fuck with a precog.