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[h2]The [color=violet]House[/color] [/h2][/center]

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"Shit." He muttered as he drew his hand away from the gut wound, and saw that the blood was still fresh, red, and running. He shook his head in what might well have been disappointment.

"They hit us about two hours ago. I'd say maybe six guys? Two of 'em came in over the westward hill, had a rifle, killed Michael where he stood. We fought back, but the guys on the hill managed to get Niki before they-" He gave a grimace and a loud, agonised grunt, as he tried to shift himself into more of an upright position. "- oh, fuck. Fuck. Before they pulled back. Alex and I came out when we heard gunshots, but we took gunfire from down the road. Didn't get much of a look at em. Hit Alex in the chest, me in the guts. Alex ain't- he wasn't moving, wasn't breathing."

He stopped, staring at the body of his fallen comrade.

Meanwhile, Brooks was stalking about the house, taking note of the details of the fight. The most immediate thing he noticed was the distribution of the structural damage - the bullet holes where more or less exclusively on the front facing side of the house, and scattered all over, forming three general clusters. The individual shots weren't terribly close together, and did not form obvious patterns of fire like an automatic weapon would - so it was at least three separate people, from three separate angles, firing non-automatics.

One of the patchwork clusters had fewer, but larger, holes - the one that went through the door, in particular. Brooks could recognise that this, at least, was rifle-caliber. Probably a bolt action rifle, firing hunting rounds. 

The other two were harder to discern, mostly because one of them had gone mostly through a wooden-shuttered window. The sheet glass on the inside of the shutter had been completely shattered, and there were about twelve holes in the shutters on the other side - but Brooks couldn't see any specific, well-bordered holes on the other side of the living room that would match up to these ones, just some areas of patchy damage to the wall, not unlike buckshot or birdshot. The third source of fire hadn't penetrated very much, but had left lots and lots of much smaller pellet holes where it had - so the third weapon was probably a shotgun.

Overall? Three specific sources of gunfire. One probably a hunting rifle, one most likely a handgun loaded with hollowpoint ammunition, and one a shotgun loaded with buckshot. 

The spatter of blood on the floor seemed consistent with a major injury at gunpoint, but at the point where it had happened the blood was too smeared to be easily readable. Enough was on the walls to be sure that they'd been shot and not stabbed, but nothing further could be told. When he took a closer look at the blood though, something else became apparent.

Off to the side, stuck to the floor by the congealing blood, were shell casings.

9mm Parabellum rounds, six of them. Plus one larger, .45 ACP casing. 

It didn't seem like very much fighting had happened [i]inside[/i] the house, if any. Whoever had hit the bootleggers had been satisfied with killing two of them, suppressing the others, and presumably stealing their cargo.

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