Division by Zero
an excerpt

Right now, all Darryl wants is to know where he is, but he'll settle for a glass of water. His throat feels like road kill. In fact, now that he's starting to notice these things, the rest of him kind of feels like road kill, too. He can hear someone screaming in Russian; a long, ceaseless stream of syllables punctuated only by sobbing gulps of air. A dog is barking. Somewhere nearby, car alarms blare. Two of them, wildly out of sync. It's annoying.

He forces his eyes open - a process that takes far more effort than it should - and wishes absently that he'd found something more malleable than slabs of concrete and bits of rubble to land on. His hand comes down on something soft and vaguely warm when he uses it to lever himself up. He looks at this thing, fallowing the line of his arm from shoulder to elbow to wrist, and is somehow unsurprised to find that it's a body. Male, from the look of it. Though he's more interested in getting to his feet than checking, and judging by the state of their skull their gender isn't really something that matters anymore.

His ribs creak as he straightens up, making him think that at least one of them is almost certainly broken. Isn't the first time, won't be the last. He finds his gun seventeen feet away, on the other side of the alley, and checks the clip before shoving it into the holster clipped to the back waistband of his pants, hidden by the drape of his coat. Seven rounds left. The movement makes his ribs hurt badly, but it's superficial pain. Not life threatening. He knows the difference.

Surprisingly enough, there's very little blood on him, and even less of it belongs to Darryl himself. He nearly stumbles on another body near the end of the alley. This one looks like it fell from quite some height. The man won't be getting up. Darryl glances up, takes in the clothes lines stretched between the buildings - and where those lines have been broken or torn loose. Plaid flannel shirts flap in the breeze beside satin brassiere and cotton dresses. The roof is a good ten or eleven stories above him - now that things are starting to clear up he has a distinct memory of the man who now lies dead at his feet. The man was walking along the edge of that roof. A lookout.