It stops between Gavin's eyes.
"Laser," Madison says, already low.
"Break sight," Gavin answers. He dips his head behind the A-pillar; the red dot slides off glass to steel. He sideslips the wheel a hair so the engine block takes the line and not his skull. You can't shoot what you can't see; you can't see what I hide.
"Two o'clock high," Rick says, peering through the fractured right triangle. "Balcony. Second floor. Carbine with a toy."
"Copy." Gavin drags the right tires along the gutter—ssss—turning sound into a rail that keeps him honest without eyes. He angles left to put a parked panel van between them and the balcony. The laser dot skates the hood and disappears under the line of the metal.
"Voice," Madison says.
"Stop the vehicle!" a man shouts from high and left, breath clipped tight. "Hands out the windows!"
"Wish," Rick mutters.
A round snaps the windshield—a spiderweb growing old and mean. Another thunks the hood and ricochets with a flat whine. Someone else on the block opens up with something shorter, faster. Muzzle pop, then fast echo. Plaster dust spits off a stucco wall to their right like chalk.
"Stay engine side," Gavin says. He threads past the panel van; the laser dot returns, tastes the A-pillar again, and loses interest as he drags them into the shadow of a low brick garden wall. "Don't give them glass."
Behind them, sound changes—a ribbon of footfalls and throat-noises the city will have to learn the names for. The pack pours from the drainage underpass like ink. The balcony gunner swears—short, human—and the laser dot jitters away from them toward the new problem.
"Borrowing your friends," Rick says, not loud enough for anyone but them.
"Careful with your prayers," Madison says. "They're answered stupid lately."
The street pinches around a median with shrubs dead in a polite shape. Ahead, the block is half-barricaded: sawhorses, trash cans, a couch that used to be someone's porch. A pickup sits sideways, nose against the curb, tailgate open like a mouth. A tall figure in a ballcap stands on that tailgate with a shotgun tucked lazy-ready. The laser dot from the balcony rips over their hood again and lands on the couch, steady as if that matters.
"Lane right," Madison says. "Between couch and bins."
"Curb braille," Gavin says. He puts the right tires back on the gutter tone. The couch's arm brushes paint; foam coughs dust. Shotgun Man swings the barrel, hesitates—not at us, at them, as the pack fans into the intersection like spilled coffee.
Rifle cracks from the balcony, working the lead of first runners. A girl in a sleeveless top leans from a second window and sprays with a pistol like it's a hose. Two bodies tumble; three more step into the holes without wondering why there are holes.
"Window," Rick says. A clean rectangle opens just past the couch. "Angle fifty, then hard left. Go now."
"Going." Gavin commits. The van's nose sniffs the window of a path, then inhales it. A round taps the quarter panel and goes somewhere unimportant. The van shoulders a trash can; it tips and rolls, useless now for any civilized task. A hand smacks the sliding door and holds too long; Madison catches fingers with her hammer through the slit, and they let go of both van and philosophy.
They clear the barricade and leave the defenders to their new math. The balcony laser finds their rear window and paints a flower that means nothing. A round pings the license plate. A woman screams at someone named Trevor not to waste rounds. Trevor wastes one to prove a point to himself.
"Hard right," Madison says. "Driveway under carport—narrow but clean."
"Carport is cover," Rick says. "Low roof."
"Good." Gavin clips the gutter to make the turn a geometry he likes, then slides into a tapered driveway that dives under a corrugated carport roof. Round pops chew the back wall where they were, half a second late. The carport's low brace makes a lid that swallows line-of-sight and someone's courage. The hood strap hums; the latch loop holds.
"Gate," Madison says. A chain across the back alley, padlock bright, as if new mattered.
"Angle breach," Gavin says, breath steady. Don't brake. Don't gift them time. He puts the nose at forty-five, asks weight to do the job, and lets the bumper shoulder the chain low. Links climb, skid, and pick the wrong fight with metal. The anchor screw rips out of old wood; the chain slaps the cargo floor with the sound of a lesson. The van slips through into an alley that smells like wet trash and bleach that lost.
"Eyes left," Rick says. Infected cut through a side yard ahead, low and eager, hands learning fences. Someone on a rooftop whistles to a dog that will not come. A porch light pops like a bulb in a world that still thinks it can help.
Behind, the balcony voices argue policy—"Don't fire past the—" "They're bringing more—" and then the talk dissolves into loud choices.
The alley doglegs, pinched by cinderblock walls tagged with old names and fresh panic. A satellite dish lies on its face like a shield no one carried. A dripline from an AC condenser writes a wet fringe on the ground that their tires erase.
"Rake coming up right," Madison says. "Roof brace again."
"Take it," Gavin says. The roofline kisses the brace and shaves off a fresh grabber that thought gutters were forever. It thumps away with the soft pride of a plan defeated.
The alley spits them onto a service strip behind a row of duplexes. A backyard trampoline leans on a fence like a moon caught in a net. A sprinkler head ticks itself to death against a tire rut. A hand-lettered board says WE HELP and then below it, hurried, NO WE DON'T.
"Windshield," Rick says. The mosaic takes a new star; something small hit and stuck—gravel or a bad idea. Gavin tips his chin a degree for cleaner sight. See the edges. The middle is a lie.
A shape cuts from the right between hedges—a boy, maybe, or a small man, hoodie up, backpack loose, pistols in both hands like internet TV taught him. He sees them, decides electricity, and fires from the hip at the hood. Two pops. One strikes the strap. The strap song changes but doesn't let go.
"Not this day," Madison says, as if to the strap.
"Left," Gavin says, taking a lane that shoulders a cinderblock wall with ivy pretending at softness. The tires hum on smoother asphalt. The alley widens—oh no, don't love that—and then pinches again with two dumpsters kissing like old drunks.
"Thread," Rick says.
"Thread." Gavin folds the breath he was about to take into the wheel, left a quarter-inch, right a finger, left steady. Paint comes off doors like chalk dust. The hood strap hums high and thin. A round from somewhere taps the brick behind them and complains to the night.
They pop out into a T that faces a chain-link yard with a pair of stacked pallets guarding nothing. To the right: a ramp climbing back to the street beside a retaining wall. To the left: a deeper cut behind a strip mall that grinds toward a loading dock.
"Up is guns," Madison says, hearing the blockade. "Down is more cover but maybe a trap."
"They like lanes," Rick says. "Lanes are their church."
"Under," Gavin says. He takes the deeper cut. A loading dock hangs overhead, black grit, steel braces at skull height; he centerlines it so the braces stay suggestions. A cat watches from atop a baled-cardboard stack with the tired interest of someone who knows they won't be asked to help.
"Gate ahead," Madison says. "Chain again. Smaller."
"Same story," Gavin says. He sets the angle. The bumper kisses link. The chain tells the anchor about the old days, then remembers today's physics and lets go.
They burst into a short employee lot behind a tire shop. Stacks of mounted wheels glow faintly like halos. Someone left the bay door up and a stack of lug nuts on a stool like a sermon note. The van wants to slow. The pedal is a poem about softness. Gavin doesn't ask it to recite.
"Street beyond," Rick says. "Open for twenty, then a light, then God knows."
They clear the lot mouth and punch onto the street, engine still doing all the lying for the brakes. Ahead, a pickup noses across the lanes, driver door open, no driver. A tow strap trails from its hitch and droops across the asphalt like a lazy snake.
"Strap," Madison says.
The strap leaps. Someone yanks from the far curb, hauling the slack taut at bumper height.