The Raiders double-timed it to the gatehouse under scattered wild fire from above. They wore SFPD tactical body armor draped with silver duct tape, Raiders jerseys, and dented football helmets.
The first one through the turnstile set off a homemade claymore filled with bathtub napalm. It set him alight, but did not stop him. Sheathed in flames, he stalked through the atrium yard, raking the guardhouse with a belt-fed automatic shotgun as flares, bricks, and small arms fire rained down.
One crazy devotee jumped from cover and charged, but his M16 jammed. The burning Raider cornered and hugged him as its ammo cooked off.
Aerial recon had the ashram’s sixty-four devotees holed up in the press boxes. Moving as a hedgehog, the Raiders crossed the courtyard and tossed grenades into the spiral pedestrian ramp. They never spoke or cried out when they got shot. They spent their bodies as cheaply as their bullets.
A gang of wild-eyed devotees dressed in dhotis or long underwear charged down the ramp, brandishing machine pistols and howling the Master’s name. Another drone chopper swooped into the open well around which the spiral ramp wound, a toy with twin fléchette cannons in its nose. They sounded like tambourines shaking, but they reduced the defenders to a blizzard of red confetti before they could get off a single shot.
The only effective resistance the Raiders faced was the sluice of gore they slipped in as they climbed the ramp.
On the press level, Ajay ran past a barricaded snack bar with two machine guns.
“Get down!” Sister Sharon bellowed from inside. “Move your skinny ass, Ajay!” And opened fire.
She cut the first Raider in half, blew his torso clean off his hips, but still couldn’t stop him. He dragged himself up to the snack counter while his teammates laid down withering cover fire.
Ajay prayed for a weapon. He prayed for the courage to do something.
The mangled upper half of the Raider crawled right past him. He saw a gray human face behind the facemask, but telescoping goggles covered its eyes. It had no lower jaw. Earbuds in its helmet screamed loud enough for Ajay to hear the Raider’s tinny mantra: “Get some, 49, get some, get some… take that nest, you little bitch.”
The Raider tossed two grenades in through the gun slits. They bounced off the menu board and detonated in Sharon’s lap.
Ajay ran without looking back until he’d hopped the barricades and found them unmanned. He picked up an MP5 off the sandbags, but before he could find the safety, the corridor was engulfed in flames.
The Raiders swept into the luxury skyboxes, where the Master’s favorites were kept. Their guards resisted with pistols that didn’t dent the Raiders’ body armor. Room to room they stalked, giving out headshots or grenades.
Ajay shot one of them in the back without even getting its attention. He almost threw himself upon them with his fists, but he knew it would be suicide, and the Master forbade martyrdom. It would be easier to die than see the end of everything they had built, of everyone he loved.
Ajay went to the window in the owner’s box and looked out on the field. Together, they’d bulldozed the wreckage of a relief center into the cheap seats to make room for a massive tented victory garden, and a parking lot to mirror the one outside.
Hundreds of Jaguars, Rolls Royces, and Bentleys filled the infield.
Before the eye of Kali Yuga opened on the world, the media had mocked Master Ganguly’s weakness for British luxury cars, but the fleet had brought them all here from the ashram in Big Sur quickly and in fine style.
He could get the keys to one of the Range Rovers they kept in the underground VIP parking. He could get away, and live with a coward’s karma. But he heard his brothers and sisters chanting in the big room. If this was truly their karma, they would gather at the Master’s feet to meet it.
Ajay ran into the banquet hall with his hands on his bleeding head. There were at least three dozen of them, and even the women and kids were armed and shooting at the double doorway entrance.
The Master sat at the wheel of his favorite Silver Ghost Rolls on a dais in the center of the room. He gunned the engine and honked the Rolls’ regal horn. The inner circle of devotees locked arms around the car.
A hulking Raider linebacker stepped into the room and got its face shot off. Inside its hollowed-out torso was a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of grenades, RPGs, and a TOW missile.
Even as the hail of lead chewed its helmet and head off, the linebacker fell to its knees and unleashed a holocaust.
The windows and walls blew out of the banquet hall. The secondary explosions brought the upper tier bleachers down on the banquet hall.
But when the smoke cleared, four Raiders were still standing.
“Game over, bitches,” said Ajay’s walkie-talkie. He threw it away and ran for the VIP staircase.
The corridor was choked with burning bodies, but nobody stopped him as he barged through the door and ran down the stairwell.
He got four steps before he crashed into a Raider’s back and hit the stairs on his tailbone. His legs went numb.
DEATH MACHINE, said the name above the number 24 on its shredded jersey. It turned and looked down at him, cocking its head and popping its goggles. Ajay’s skin crawled as he felt someone intelligent looking at him. Someone who was probably miles away.
“I am surrounded by light,” Ajay prayed. “This house is surrounded by light. I am-”
The zombie in the Raiders helmet stopped over him and put a gloved hand on his shoulder, gave his arm a gentle little squeeze. “I’m sorry, dude, but my pizza’s here,” it said.
The gentle hand shoved the nozzle of a flamethrower in his mouth, and pumped a jet of high-octane gasoline down his throat.
“Vaya con huevos, Gandhi,” said Death Machine #24. The jet of gas ignited, and Ajay was surrounded by light.
III.
The Dungeon Master peeled off his VR goggles, and shucked his data gloves. Checked his pulse rate. Breathe, barbarian, breathe.
“Holy shit, that was brutal!” He shivered with a bowel-clenching adrenaline chill, despite the suffocating kiln atmosphere of his server bunker. His muscles tensed and twitched like the dregs of an amyl nitrate rush, still juiced from something that happened to somebody else’s body. He’d sweated right through his silk Deth-klok pajamas. It felt like someone had dumped a cooler of Gatorade on him, from somewhere up above.
Sherman Laliotitis blinked out of his mystic warrior trance and buzzed in the delivery boy, put his hands behind his head and stretched in his ergonomic office chair. His catheter jabbed his semi-tumescent wang as he emptied his bladder. The tube snaked out of his PJ bottoms to join the spaghetti of cables on the floor to the reclamation tub in the closet. Christ, he thought: Life during wartime.
The door thudded shut behind him. “So, uh… Seagull, how much for the pie?” His headset burped in his ear. “Wait. Hold that thought.”
His eyes unfocused as he gritted his teeth and listened to Charlie Brown’s teacher natter in his ear. “Front office is pissed. You’re breaking too many eggs.”
“Excuse me, but you weren’t there, and neither were they! No strategy survives first contact with the enemy-”
“We’re watching the streaming feed now. They wanted to fire you. I told them you knew what you were doing. They’re starting to think you’re doing it on purpose.”
“Wait a goddamned minute! Those eggheads built these teams to take deadheads, but we haven’t seen free-range street-meat in weeks-”
“Calm down, Sherman.”
“No, you calm down! You have no idea what it’s like, running a squad in a hot combat zone! You wouldn’t last two minutes in my fucking chair! Dungeon Master out.”