Second hand kills

Sirens that had started gently a minute ago now rose into a screaming swirling song that cut through the buildings and ambient drone like bright glass blown out of a shotgun, destroying any directional quality of the rest of the noise, which now included explosions and obvious machinegun fire.

Whoever this guy was, he had gotten out just in time.

“Uh, what?” Sam said, gawking at him, trying to find some cue in his appearance that would tell her what the fuck was going on, because from the calm way he ordered her, she must have missed the part where he became her boss.

“Put it in reverse, get us out of the lot, like you’re done with your lunch and you don’t like gunfire—” More of it broke through the window he had cracked behind him. “—and I’ll tell you where to turn and when to stop.”

He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t rushing her. He wasn’t even reacting to the battle sounds that made Sam flinch every time and had her Self screaming in whatever back room of her mind she was locked in. His tone was like he was reminding someone they had forgotten to take their card out of the reader after ordering their burgers and shit. A simple nudge, sure to be reacted to with a simple swift hurried motion that benefits everyone involved, especially said card owner.

But she just sat there and stared at him. His aviator shades that somehow didn’t obscure his smile in the slightest, but became a part of it like cartoon goggles that could blink. His get up, like a mobster was doing his best to go professional, honest, black jeans and vest under a Burberry trench that was a crime in and of itself in the near ninety degree Texas October, and thick combat boots, all of which screamed “up to no good” but somehow matched his smile and pose and something unseen so well that it didn’t look out of place and gave her the impression she might not have been able to necessarily recall him from a crowd.

She tried to remember seeing him walk up, but couldn’t, then tried to think of how she could have missed him what with her nervous-dog scanning of the complex for the past few minutes, and was at a loss again.

He let her stare for a second or two then tilted his head slightly and she felt, like some magic trick given his shades, his gaze burning a hole into the gear shift.

“Oh sorry,” she said, and the words bounced around in the car like something dropped as she put it in reverse and backed out. In her peripheral vision, she saw him slide something into her phone and toss it out the window.

It had been right about there that she decided she was not only going to do what he asked, but do it to such an extent that he would be bowled over by her ability to do so.

And she guessed, looking back, that it had been because for the first time she had found someone who she felt could guide her through the funhouse insanity that was the Hardworlds toward something she couldn’t articulate but that she was fatally drawn to just the same. Some unknown nugget at the core of the kaleidoscope worlds, some piece of purpose that would set her right.

She pulled up to the street, where across the way two squat office towers slumped atop a section of land raised above a little terraced parking lot and small corner pond, and felt suddenly, what with all the cars waiting patiently at the light and the cotton gold-orange tinged clouds whispering by overhead, that all the violent noise had been a weird dream, and the strange man in her peripherals was simply batshit.

Till a flock of police cruisers and SUVs, lights and sirens slicing through the felt-textured evening like neon blades, flew through the intersection to her right.

“Turn left when you can,” the guy said, calmly, and she couldn’t help but chuckle, which brought a glance from him that she felt in the side of her face.

The light changed and the cars cleared, and she crossed over and turned left down the road, which sloped upward with the land before her, as if the world was molding itself to her feeling that she was being lifted out of whatever groove her other-live had been stuck in till now.

Then the ride got quiet. The complex passing on the left, where leaning power lines and hedge dappled fence zipped by, and the office buildings on her right, screened by dry sloping lawns and soldier like live oaks guarding against maybe something more than just the sun. The guy sipped his coffee and set it down. He got a torch lighter out and rolled the end of his cigar over it, then blew on the cherry red circle. He took a slow drag on it, let the smoke roll off his face in the wind from the few inches of window crack, and looked as relaxed as anything, until an engine revved behind them.

His face snaped to the rearview mirror and his body froze. She followed his gaze and saw movement far back closer to the complex, a grey blur rising like smoke behind the traffic.

She glanced back at him and he was twisted in his seat, looking straight back past the headrest like a sniper using it for cover, only a sliver of his right eye exposed to the backseat, and a blued steel pistol in his hand that had looked to Sam like the biggest fucking handgun she had ever seen in her life comfortably aimed at the floorboard.

He shifted back into his seat like nothing had happened and picked his cigar up from the cupholder where it had been resting, and rolled it in his lefthand thoughtfully.

“Don’t accelerate until I tell you.” Gently again, like he was reminding her it was a Tuesday (though it was Saturday, if he had said it she would have believed him).

The engine roared then went into a low rumble, then roared again. She glanced up and saw it in the rear view clearly, a big grey chevy truck weaving through the traffic. The sight of it, metal and moving with menace, made the memory of his gun flash in her mind, with a sprinkle of the earlier gunfire thrown in, and she felt a hard world of death and unfeeling physics closing in on her.

Her Self screamed inside, then made like a determined huff, and spirit Sam squeezed the wheel and narrowed her eyes (which must have looked funny, given her beady eyes and baby face, because he glanced over at her with more concern than he had shown the pursuing murderers) and the adrenaline and determination and sudden focus came together and moved her, directed her actions in the same way he had since he got in her car, but with far more power and authority, she realized with surprise, than even he could ever inflict on her.

She flicked on her right blinker and pressed the brake.

“Wha—” he started, but cut himself short, and watched her instead. She turned the car slowly, steadily, even hesitantly, like a person finally arriving at work, into the parking lot of a passing warehouse, its five-storey high wall of flat windowless concrete looking like the proverbial kind you could really put your back to.

The engine rumble rose behind her, paused, then exploded as the truck continued on down the road, leaving her there in the silent evening stillness among all the dusty cars and staked trees, reminding her of a job she had had some other years ago sorting mail for a discount department store’s warehouse office. Once again, the violence had left her in the realm of mundane softness, and while the Self was weepingly grateful, personally, Sam was fucking sick of it.

“Good job,” he said. “But don’t do that shit again. Just cause you’re at the wheel don’t mean you’re the one driving, understand?”

There was a bit more steel in his voice this time. She nodded, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore. As of a few seconds ago, she had found a new master.

“Pull in that spot.” He pointed to one facing another empty spot between two trucks and under a wimpy staked tree. Her adrenal fired mind decided his selection was not random, as the spot had cover on both sides, but could be pulled through in a hurry.

She used her blinker again and came to a smooth stop. He glanced over at her, and following his gaze she noticed she was white knuckling the wheel and leaning forward in the seat.

“Close your eyes, lean back, and take slow breaths.”

She did so reluctantly, noting before her lids dropped that he had a phone in his hand in a thick bomb-proof looking case.

After a few seconds of very unrelaxing darkness, in which giant Sig Sauer handguns and cigars that smoked like car fires floated in her vision, brakes squealed down the street.

“Not very subtle are they,” he said, and she heard him sigh and unbuckle his seat belt.

She snapped her eyes open and gawked at him again, despite herself.

He was pushing his index finger into his ears through his beanie (a cris cross patterned designer variety that wouldn’t have been out of place atop a runway junkie and now that she thought of it looked a bit like urban camo) and didn’t even look at her.

“Keep em closed and get down in the floorboard. Don’t move till I get back.”

He had set his cigar sideways on the console so some ash flaked off and fell to the passenger side floor as he whooshed out of the car like a billow of smoke. The door shut more softly than she had thought possible in the 6 years she had owned the god damned thing, and she pushed the driver’s seat back and put her face to the floorboard and closed her eyes.

The other car revved and growled some more out beyond the lot, then she heard metal scrape on concrete as it rushed into the lot.

Then a strange combination of sounds; the scream of brakes and a gunshot braking off the end of it, so that the two sounds blended in the rubber and plastic bucket of the car seat, and then shit got really loud.

For some reason she couldn’t think of, she counted the gun shots and divided them into two varieties. One which she thought of as “scared/loud/rapid” and another “not-quite-as-ear-shatteringly-loud which was also infrequent/single/final”. There were twenty seven of the first kind, and six of the second kind, and after the sixth shot of the second kind, the gunfire stopped.

Boots crunched on glass, then went quiet. For a few moments, it was just her and her Self, the bitch screaming and telling her dumb ass to run, then the door opened.

“Get out. Stay low.”

He wasn’t even sweating. His pistol was half stuck in his belt and he put something in the SD drive of a cell phone in his hands, which was half wrapped in electrical tape, covering the camera.

She crawled out and crouched down at his feet while he finished whatever he was doing, tossed the phone in the car, zipped up the pouch and re holstered his pistol. When he lifted her up off the ground, both pouch and pistol were tucked out of sight.

“See that blue KIA?”

“Yeah.”

“Walk towards it like you’re going on break and stand by the driver’s side.”

She did, and for a moment thought he had let her go on her own, and her Self renewed her plea to “run the fuck into the street and just start screaming what is he gonna do?”, until she reached the car and turned and found him approaching the passenger side, his steps having been just as silent as before.

He popped the door open, slid into the passenger seat and leaned over toward the steering wheel and started working under it. It felt, for some reason, like watching a shark move in a fish tank. In the strange silence, a voice slipped out of her head.

There’s an issue with the KIAs lack of immobilizer. You just have to open the steering column—

It was her Self, but she still looked around like she was going to see some other Sam standing there whispering to her, but instead there was only a very quiet parking lot, and

Gen 3 Camry, the steering column, that Civic…

Her Self started rambling about relay extenders and wheel locks and half the cars in the lot opened up in her mind like blooming flowers.

It had been her first brush with that sensation, that fleeting feeling of remembering charged with something else that dissolved just as quickly as it had come, leaving her with no proof that anything had happened beyond some panicked idle thoughts.

The KIA started up and she jumped. Then the door opened and he was looking up at her from the drivers seat.

“Come on.” Fast, but not hurried. Eager. Like he was leading them both to a late night excursion they had planned for months. Like a friend.

She climbed in and put the car in reverse, the feeling of being in someone else’s car for the first time in ages bounced up her spine. It smelled like weed and the Glade air freshener clipped into the vent, and the seat and mirrors aimed at someone else’s height.

“Seat belt.”

She looked at him, but he was scanning the lot. She drew the belt across and had trouble finding the catch.

“Take the lot around to the access road,” he pointed, as a cluster of sirens broke off from the main flock screaming in the distance and got louder on the main road.

She backed out and got a few yards down the lot before the other car came into view. Its engine was still running and a slight smoke was wafting off the edges of the hood. The driver was slumped dead, most of the doors were opened, and she saw two other corpses next to it as they passed. The sirens seemed to double as she watched it, so her foot sunk into the gas pedal.

“Slowly,” he advised her.

Maybe to drown out her screaming Self, maybe just to see what he would say, she nodded at a Civic as they passed.

“I could have stolen that civic for you. Been a little more power than this thing.”

“What?” He actually had some emotion in his voice this time.

“This is a four cylinder—”

“What makes you so sure you could steal it?”

She didn’t have anything to say to that, because only her Self could answer, and Sam was not about to let that crybaby start talking.

“Alright, how would you have stolen it?” His voice was back to the calm narrator sound it had before.

She told him, and just as she was rambling past the minor accessory details and comparing it to other methods, they were turning around the front of the building, and a bunch of screaming sirens pulled into the lot back where they had first parked.

She glared at the rear view nervously and he laughed in his throat.

“Calm down. They don’t know what our car looks like.”

“They do if whoever called it in is still watching.”

He nodded approvingly and looked at the side of her head.

“Good thinking, but no one called it in, they just heard the shots and drove down here.”

“How do you know that?”

“Another little birdie told me.” He smiled.

He directed her out onto the evening traffic, where just released office workers clogged the lanes around the industrial zone, and she drove under a bridge toward an Oak infested suburb.

After a few minutes, he slid back the sunroof cover and looked up. It took her a few moments to think of what the hell he might be doing, until the sirens echoed in some lull in the engine noise.

“Police chopper?” she asked. He scoffed out his nose.

“No, that birds still chasing down a squad of crash dummies around the skirmish.”

She waited for him to explain what that meant or what he was looking for, but he just scowled at the sky, cracked his window and held his phone up to the crack near the dash.

“Lay off the gas a second,” he said. She did and he moved the phone along the crack, then back down towards the dash, then glanced at the screen and put it back in his pocket and gave the sunroof another glare.

It would be months before she found out that he had been using a custom app to listen for the tell-tale signatures of a drone, and a few months after that before she would experience first hand just how unreliable that iteration of the software could be, but at the time she had just kept quiet, hadn’t asked any questions, but had done a lot of watching and thinking.

Poppy had been a bit obsessed with Hardworlders, and had told Sam stories of the legendary ones, The Gods, The Angels, Obsidian, the Circle, which had made them sound like superheroes. Even the “normal” ones, had in Poppy’s tellings been magical creatures, able to manipulate the hardworlds like a player with cheat codes, dodge bullets, find military grade weaponry anywhere, learn anything instantly just by “fake-remembering”, all while fighting other superhumans in clashes that sounded like every 90’s action movie thrown together.

But this guy didn’t seem like he had any magic powers. He seemed like a guy just trying not to get caught by the cops. And though he had quickly dispatched like four guys with a pistol, it didn’t seem to have given him any special confidence in his situation. He watched everything, suspicious that even the overhanging powerlines could snap and throw themselves at him at any moment.

His nervousness, or more accurately his alertness, had set her on edge, and at a light she had pulled out a pack of Marlboro red 100s from her hoodie and lit one up.

“Put that shit out. Those cowboy killers smell like dying old people.”

She had turned to flick it out the window, and stopped herself, then turned and exhaled right at his face.

“You can get the fuck out then cause I’m smoking this.”

He stared at her for a bit, then smiled, the most genuine smile she had seen in a long time, and, she realized in that instant, not the kind you would ever see in the Other, and he turned back to the windows.

“Light’s green,” he said to the glass with a chuckle in his voice.

The rest of the evening had flown by in a haze, and even in the meticulously detailed mem of it, which Philip had given her as a gift her first month at ST67, the mind ran across it like a hotwheel down a ramp.

It had been a madhouse out in the city, even without the swirling police chases and shooting scene media coverage. Covid restrictions had just ended. The radio, which Philip had set to classical 101, opined once that people had finally completely lost it, and tried to soothe the collective psychotic break with Gieseking playing Debussy.

It all made the evening feel, to her Self and Spirit, like some apocalyptic ending to everything she had known before, which wasn’t that far off, really.

They had swapped cars in an old neighborhood where each lawn seemed to double as a mini used car lot, and Phillip quizzed her on the various models, pros, cons, and mainly, methods of “recovery”. Then they had stopped by a self storage and he had loaded himself and the trunk up with more weaponry than she had ever seen. Driving with a killer and his expansive arsenal at her side, preparing to risk her Self like life was a game she could respawn into, pursuing a definite goal, was a sudden departure from the “purchase an experience, achieve happiness and understanding” quest that Poppy had had her on since they first found each other in the Allclub.

Happiness and fulfillment, she felt, was something Philip absorbed from the rack of a shotgun, the tight turns she took around the back alleys without jostling him, the way the cops flew by them unawares, and, though he tried to act like he was looking for drones, the way the clouds floated by beyond the smooth steady slice of the power lines. As for understanding, she got the feeling that as long as something worked in his favor, he couldn’t give two shits about understanding it.

In the deep late evening, as they reached their final destination, a boarded up restaurant under the sweeping arm of a Texas-sized mixmaster at the far end of a Motel 6 parking lot, she felt a pang of regret as he said,

“Well, this is it for me. Tell your bosses and anyone who watches this mem’ I said—” and turned and flipped her off with such an overstated movement and laughing eyes that she couldn’t help but cackle.

He got out and swung his Benelli M4 (with one in the chamber and a ghost load, she recalled) in front of him and unclipped a pouch that hung under his jacket over his hip, which dispensed frag grenades like a coin changer.

“Oh, one last thing.”

He snatched something out of his inside pocket and pointed it at her through the window.

“Read this card. You can reach me at that place or that number in the other, any time.”

She stared at it, and a pure shock, of seeing something that seemed to have fallen out of that Otherworld shining in this grimy car interior, ran up her spine and she vibrated in the seat like she was about to teleport.

The card was black with yellow-orange hand-stenciled text, like an inverted road sign, and read:

Outlaw Eleven

C# 688 - 529 - 11

Lead, Strike Team 67

Lightweight Hardworlding Solutions

Raids – Ambush – Surveillance – Escort

Millennium Tower East, F241 Suite 1601

1800 x 33, Allcity

He snatched it back and set it alight with his cigar and she made a confused sound.

“Tell whoever scrapes your mem to pull the info. They’re required to do that if you ask.”

Her mind rolled around and she blurted out,

“I have a girlfriend.”

He laughed.

“It’s a job offer, kid. Jesus. I have a feeling you’ll be needing it after this one.”

He dropped his shades, looked her dead in the eye and winked, then turned and marched off towards the Motel 6, whose L shape hugged the razorwire fenced outline of another self storage complex.

She watched him until he disappeared into one of the back doors, then sat there in the silence, and realized she had nowhere to go. No contact with her team, no idea if she should stay in the Hardworld or take the “drop out dose” and wait for her collector in the “dreamworlds”, which were always closer to nightmares and were sure to be extra horrific after all the screaming her Self had done today. She wasn’t even sure if this guy had been on her side or the other. It really smacked her in the face, her helplessness in doing this thing, her dependence on so many people and forces she didn’t understand and some of which she never even saw.

An explosion snapped her out of it. Then a double boom. Then an eruption of gunfire, like the first boom had set off fireworks. All coming from the Motel.

She turned off her car, got out, and watched. A window blew out, glass glittering in the evening light. Three gunmen came running around the corner of the building, then disappeared inside a door. Shouts and engine sounds rang out of the self storage and reinforcements bled out of it into the far end of the lot.

It occurred to her that she was watching something amazing, something close to the tall tale scenes Poppy had been obsessed with. The guy was all alone, but no matter how much gunfire sputtered out of the hotel, the shotgun kept booming, and the grenades kept blowing out windows.

The air was cool on her face, and the hood of the car warm and dirty under her hands, the ground crunchy and solid at her feet, her joints sore in her flesh and her mouth dry and thirsty. And she felt satisfied, for once. Accomplished. Useful. She had brought him here. She had taken on the city and its roving hunter killers and here she was, at the edge of it all, watching a firework show that seemed less a struggle than something playing out the motions, its ending forgone.

She looked over at the last smear of daylight off in the distance, just a dull orange glow, then rolled her head over up to the darkening night sky, washed out by the city lights but still twinkling in places. It felt like the Otherworld was right over her head, ready to open up and accept her into it at any moment. She felt, for the first time, like she wasn’t just a spectator, a fresh Spirit watching a world made by other people. She felt part of something, and the feeling was absolutely addicting.