The window shattered beside them.

Cassie screamed in surprise, but Jericho could barely hear her over his yell.

Somewhere nearby, a metal canister started hissing and spewing smoke.

“This is the New Orleans Police Department,” a voice called out over a bullhorn. “Come out with your hands up.”

Cassie and Jericho had just a moment to share their surprise before they both started scrambling away from the broken front window.

“What the hell?” Cassie cried. Crawling on her hands and knees, she headed for cover.

“I don’t know,” Jericho said, moving behind the cover of a concrete pillar.

The smoke billowed out into the room, a terrible presence growing larger with each moment.

Considering how this all started for him, Jericho had no intention of giving himself up. Glancing for some way out, Jericho saw the staff door in the back. He nodded towards it. “Out that way.”

Cassie glanced at the door then back at him. Her eyes were wide and glistening, but she nodded her head and reached out to him. Grabbing her hand, he pulled her up and over to him. The smoke was getting thick and making it hard to see. He had a moment to feel glad it wasn’t tear gas again.

“Go, go, go,” a voice shouted outside. Heavy boots crushed broken shards of glass behind him.

Jericho shoved Cassie hard. “Run!”

The smoke curled around him, trapped in the tiny gym space. The terrified whites of Cassie’s eyes faded into the smoke and darkness of the unlit room.

Jericho closed his eyes. He tried to focus on the liquids in the room, on feeling it moving around him. If Cassie was right, he could use that to ‘see’ people in darkness, unveil their location like sonar.

Only the darkness behind his eyes unveiled itself.

A crunch behind him brought him back to paying attention properly. A figure garbed completely in black, needless, military gear, holding a sub-machine gun at eye-level. Without thinking, Jericho reached out and grabbed the barrel of the weapon. With a rough jerk, he slammed the weapon back into the face of the wanna-be army reject. The man’s plexiglass face-plate shattered and the man fell back with a grunt.

As the cop fell, another further back raised his weapon and started firing towards Jericho. Bullets smashed the concrete pillar. He flinched back, trying to become smaller, to shrink into himself. After an endless age, the cop stopped shooting and his footsteps receded. Jericho could barely hear the fallen cop getting dragged away above the ringing in his ears.

Jericho looked down at his brand new gun. For a second he considered flinging it away, but instead, he gripped the handle and pointed it at the ceiling. “Get down!” he shouted, before firing the gun into the ceiling. The weapon barked, spitting fire and metal everywhere. It was so much louder than he imagined, deafening him.

Hoping it was enough of a distraction, he ran for the door. Casting a quick look over his shoulder, the cops had hit the floor when the gun went off. He jumped past some exercise equipment, then leaped over a counter.

Guns spat death at him. Bullets pocked the walls in front of him. Something smashed into him, stinging his shoulder. He stumbled, almost falling. Pushing up from the floor, he scrambled towards the door. Throwing himself into it, the door slammed open while angry wasps flew past him.

Cassie, crawling along the floor, glanced at his entrance. “We gotta get outta here!” she cried.

“I know! Stay down. There’s the back door,” he said as he indicated a heavy metal door beyond her.

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“What are you doing with that gun?” she asked.

“Borrowed it.” Grunting, he realized he was still holding the weapon. How many shots do I have left?

“Oh, shit, you’re bleeding!” Cassie said.

“What do you…” Jericho looked at his left shoulder. Looked like the bullet had gone through the shoulder and came out the front, leaving a hole in his shirt. Blood was running everywhere. Weirdly, it didn’t hurt that much. Must be adrenaline. But, thinking about it, this was the third time he’d been shot in less than a month. He was not living his best life, that was for sure.

“Don’t worry about it. We gotta get out of here before those assholes kill us.”

They crab-crawled across the floor, keeping their heads down as the occasional bullet tore through the wall and zinged overhead. Papers and old detritus from before the flood, like coffee mugs and crockery, exploded and fell around them. Ten feet from the door, they were beyond the angle of fire that the police were using.

Rising from the ground, Jericho ran to the door and bashed it open with his shoulder. “C’mon,” he shouted at Cassie before turning and looking outside at the back alley behind the gym.

And right at a police car and two cops pointing their weapons at him.

Years of his momma’s voice, beating the age-old fear into his skull, caused him to raise his hands above his head without thinking. The gun fell, discarded without a thought.

A red flower of flame blossomed from one of the guns.

His chest hurt.

“Drop the weapon!” someone shouted long after it was already on the ground.

His legs didn’t work anymore. When did he sit down?

Cassie was screaming in the building. He wished he could help her. He wished he could tell her it would be alright.

The two cops approached, pointing their weapons at him. He tried to tell them it was okay, he wasn’t going anywhere, but his mouth was full of something.

About six feet away, he heard one of the cops say, “Looks like he’s reaching for his gun, don’t you think?” He tried to make out the guy’s face, but all he could see was the barrel of his gun.

“C’mon man, don’t do that shit,” the other cop said.

“You weren’t there man, you didn’t get hit by whatever it was this fucker did. We should put this boy down before he does some more hoodoo. You know what the chief wants.”

Fuckers. All his life, these fuckers had been a source of fear, not just for him, but for everyone he knew. And this was where it was going to end.

Everything turned red. For a moment, he saw them, just as Cassie imagined. Just floating veins and arteries. Flesh bags containing nothing important but water.

“Dude…” the other cop said, before lowering his gun. “Fuck man,” he said, breathing hard.

The other guy stared at him. “What’s it going to be?”

The hesitant one was smaller, slender, his veins and arteries were fresh. He was younger. His heart thundered as he wrestled with the choice.

But not for long.

“Fine, do what you want but I’m not having any part of it.” He turned and started walking away.

Gunman turned back towards Jericho. His heartbeat with a different kind of emotion, a different kind of excitement. Blood roared through his groin, oddly.

“Put the gun down!” Gunman screamed to no one in particular.

Jericho tried to stop the water. To move it. Squeezing his hand, he willed the cop to pass out, to have a seizure.

Nothing happened.

Should have practiced more. He wished he could apologize to Cassie for not taking her ideas as seriously as he should.

The gun barked.

Young cop’s water spasmed and misfired erratically. Large amounts of it splashed across the ground.

Gunman turned away, towards the sound.

His skull exploded, spraying his fluids across the concrete.

“Hello, Jericho,” a large man in a dark suit said as he stepped from behind the collapsing cop.

Jericho’s entire body tingled and throbbed. If he wasn’t in so much pain, he’d have said he was getting turned on.

Lowering a pair of dark glasses, the man’s green eyes flashed as he smiled a wide grin at Jericho.

“I’ve been dying to meet you.”