It was a cold winter night.  The city endured a heavy snowstorm. Business was slow, nothing much was happening in the Streets.  The crew was sitting around the headquarters, somewhat bored.

The order came down just after midnight, when half the crew was a few blunts and three drinks deep, and the other half was pretending they weren’t.

 Shane_Stetson, Boss of The Boom Crew, leaned back in his leather chair and said, “There are fucking rats in the basement. Big ones. They’re eating through the fucking crates. Go handle it.”

He meant traps. He meant brooms, maybe a pipe or two. He absolutely did not mean guns.

But that’s the problem with telling a group of out-of-the-cold, underpaid, overconfident, bored criminals to “handle it.” They all hear something different.

The basement smelled like damp concrete. You could see frost and snow on the basement windows.  MsRain held her flashlight like she was exploring a tomb. SilentAssassin carried two pistols because he never traveled light. Stefan_Babic brought a shotgun,  only because, of course, he could. 

Something skittered behind a stack of crates.

AlphaKael froze. “There! I saw it!”

John_Manna  fired.

The blast echoed off the walls, shaking dust from the ceiling. Half the lights flickered out.

RDAKE  yelled, “What the hell is wrong with you? You’re gonna bring the whole fucking building down!”

John_Manna, wide-eyed, shouted back, “It moved!”

“You don’t shoot at movement, John_Manna. You shoot at things you can see!” Limits shouted.

“It was fast!”

“IT WAS A RAT!”

That one shot woke every fucking rat in the basement.

Suddenly, the basement erupted with shrieks, squeaks, and shadows darting between boxes.

Shaggy_Rogers fired at the floor.
Pogacar fired at the ceiling.
@SouthernAssassin blasted rats off crates.

When the smoke finally settled, the rats were dead or gone.

Gone, because the back door had been blasted clean off its hinges. They escaped simply because they were the only ones with common sense.

The crew shuffled upstairs, covered in soot, plaster dust, and shame. Alysia asked, “Who’s going to clean up that fucking mess?”

It was “The Boom Crew’s fifteen straight minutes of gunfire, ricochets, and absolute idiocy that winter night that marked the beginning of the Rogue-A-Thon tradition.

Still sitting in his chair, he enjoyed one of his fine Cuban cigars. He was going over the new member roster and financials when he began to hear gunshots downstairs. Somehow he was not surprised that his family decided to pull out their revolvers instead of the Victor traps, but they were good at their jobs. These weren't your regular old rats though, they were tough bastards that that needed a bit more oomph to kill. Maybe it was because of the chemical-filled reservoirs in the area that the rats fed from or perhaps all the coke the rats got into in their storeroom, but they didn't go down easily. Either way, with the Boom Crew on it, they would be taken care of.