“What does that mean?” Chase whispered through clenched teeth. “Yes, to fully-auto, or no?”

Rudy pointed above his head and mimicked tapping at a keyboard, then wrote his full name on a piece of paper and slid it across the countertop. Chase took it, found him on his System, then sent a random message to log their conversation.

[I like cheese.]

Rudy raised his eyebrows, but sent a quick message in reply.

[I’ll tell you later. Mum and Dad don’t know about my side business.]

The young man made a strange face, then pretended he was in the midst of a sale. “Um, yeah!” he improvised. “Really cool gun and stuff. We stock, um…night vision goggles which might be helpful for that kind of hunting?”

Chase paused for a moment, unsure how to fill the silence. The questions in his head seemed more important.

What kind of ‘side business’ does he need to hide from his parents? How illegal is it going to be? Do I bail?

He considered all that might be possible with some tankier weapons. The Beretta APX was great, but he felt he was coming close to the ceiling of its usefulness. In the larger dungeons, he always shot two bullets at enemies, because more often than not it took that many to kill them. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but considering the density of monsters in some dungeons, he would sometimes be swapping and refilling his magazines a dozen times every half hour.

Of course, going all out with a fully-auto weapon wouldn’t help with conserving bullets, but he was pretty sure he’d be shooting in bursts anyway, which the larger magazine capacities would allow. He’d want a relatively light weapon if he was going to lug it around all day, and that would result in some intense recoil when shooting long streams of bullets.

“Oh…right. Maybe next time, I guess? I’ve gotta get going.”

There was a thump out the back of the store as Darryl whacked his hands on his workbench. He came out with a wrench in his hand, and pretended to take a swing at Rudy. The younger man didn’t flinch, which made Chase feel a bit less concerned about it.

“I leave you with a customer for one minute and he’s out the door. What’ll I do with ya?”

“Shoot me?” Rudy suggested.

Darryl scratched his chin as if debating the merits of the idea. “But then I’d have to deal with the police, and that would be a hassle…Maybe I’ll lock you in the basement instead.”

Chase stepped backward, steadily edging toward the door. When he was halfway out, Darryl finally acknowledged him.

“No need to pussyfoot around, Chase. I’m not gonna keep you hostage this time. Lemme know if you’re keen for another trip to the range.”

“Will do,” Chase blurted out, then he completed his manoeuvre to exit the store. He didn’t want to hang around and see if Darryl would hold true on his plan to lock Rudy in the basement. The store was so far down the alley that no one would hear him, that’s for sure.

Despite owning a gun store, he couldn’t imagine Darryl hurting too much more than a fly. By the sounds of it, he hadn’t shot anything other than clay targets in years. The man was more interested in pulling apart and (sometimes, if he was lucky) restoring old guns, and his son didn’t seem perturbed by the threat.

Maybe it’s cause he’s got a giant belt-fed machine gun hiding in his room.

Chase shuddered. There was only one way to find out.

*******

He stepped off the train at Seven Town and followed Rudy’s directions to the ruins that he referred to as ‘The Market’. To call them ruins was a generous term — it implied the structures that lived there were once great, or ancient. In reality, it appeared to be the unfortunate site of a building company gone bankrupt.

Temporary fencing covered the broad side of the forgotten housing development, which Chase slipped through. He took care not to scratch himself on the rusty wire — the amount of litter and debris around the place gave him no reassurances on the cleanliness of Rudy’s secret operation. The first hundred metres or so were like walking through a ghost town, but further in he started to see signs of life, or at least slow death. Bottles of vending machine coffee sat strewn around one miserable front yard like fallen confetti, though the colours on the paper label were still fresh and unfaded.

It wasn’t much, but it was better than the sodden advertisements for Bill’s Builders which had undoubtedly been left behind when Bill ran out of money.

He continued on, shivering as a cold wind passed straight through his woollen jumper. He deeply regretted not wearing his magical hoodie, though there was a limit to how much one garment could be worn before it cried out for a wash. That hoodie had far surpassed that point, as evidenced by the Echin goop on both sleeves and the Noctant guts that somehow found its way into the hood.

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The rear of the housing development backed onto a lazy creek clogged with bullrushes, and it was here that Chase began seriously seeking his target. Rudy told him to look for ‘the blue door’, which so far wasn’t helping. Most of the front doors on the half-finished houses had blue tape running all around their edges, probably to stop paint from flicking onto them. He poked around a few front gardens (mainly just mud pits with tire tracks from wheelbarrows and cars) and even entered one house just in case the fleck of blue paint on the front step was what Rudy meant.

Finally, he came to a two-storey house with a sky-blue front door. It had stained glass panes in two rectangles at about eye level. Chase peered through these to see if anyone was around.

There was a low humming sound, but no people.

Tentatively, he eased the door open, slipping inside. It creaked as he closed it, then the wind caught it and the door slammed behind him.

Shit.

He thought the house was silent, but once the door slammed there was a more serene, still silence. He realised that there had in fact been some kind of white noise aside from whatever was making the humming sound. It was like going from a ‘silent’ house into a recording studio with sound-deadening foam in the walls and layers of insulation.

“Hello?” he called to the empty, half-tiled hallway. “Rudy?”

There was no response, so he advanced into a large kitchen area. The place would’ve been fantastic if it were finished — the marble benchtops and exposed stone splashback had to be worth a pretty penny, to the point that Chase was surprised no one had picked up the pieces of this development and finished it themselves.

If Ballistic felt like expanding its operations…

He chuckled at himself. That kind of idea would earn him a smack upside the head from Jenny. His schedule was full enough as it was.

The investigation went on. There was something odd about the kitchen, something that didn’t feel right in the space. He just couldn’t put his finger on it until he stepped around to the dining area and nearly plunged into a four-foot-deep pit beneath the floorboards. He spun around and returned to the massive white fridge nestled in its cavity.

There’s giant holes in this house and it’s not even close to finished. Why do they have a fridge?

Feeling ridiculous for raiding the kitchen of an unoccupied home, he yanked the fridge door open. As expected, there was no milk in the side door, and no fruit lying forgotten on the shelves.

But there was a young man standing inside, his hand outstretched to open the door from the inside.

“Holy shit!” Chase cried.

“Fahoogitawat!” Rudy responded, nearly falling down the long line of steps behind him.

“What the hell are you doing in the fridge! You scared me!”

“You scared me!”

Rudy hopped out of the fridge and leaned against the bench, taking long, deep breaths and holding his chest. He looked like Darryl at the range after Chase’s poor aim had sent the man into a fit of laughter.

Chase held the fridge door open and spied down the dank concrete passage. It was like the entrance to the ice-bar that Kim took him to except grungy and disquieting and definitely lacking the friendly staff and jovial atmosphere. There was also a smell of mould and something else sour.

“Is your, uh, side business down there? I was kind of hoping to be a little more out in the open.”

Rudy slapped him on the shoulder and guided him into the fridge. “Trust me, Chase. The things we got down there; you don’t want them in the light of day.”

“Who’s we?”

Rudy didn’t reply, simply giving him a light push down into the darkness. Chase obliged, making it to the bottom and turning left on a short landing before opening a heavy metal door. This one didn’t have a metal slider for a waiter to greet them at; it was blank and impenetrable if not for the wheel-handle in the middle.

“Snagged this one off a submarine,” Rudy said. “The ol’ Miss Mary, apparently. Don’t ask me who or how.”

He brushed past Chase and struggled with the wheel, fighting to budge it before it gave way and started spinning counter-clockwise. When it caught, the door swung open on oiled hinges.

Before them was a huge hollowed out space, similar in size to a boss’s cavern in a Dungeon. There were dozens of people in there, maybe closer to a hundred, all milling about at various stalls where stern-faced masses of muscle and anger stood guard over their products. People shouted, swore, bickered and negotiated with each other like five men in a four-man golf cart.

And the product they guarded was exactly what Chase was here for. On his left ran a number of stalls parading racks of sniper rifles varying in size, shape, colour and country of manufacturing. A middle-aged man with more hair coming out his ears than his head was holding a rifle to his shoulder, pointing it at a wall and feeling the weight. Further down, Chase could see assault rifles, submachine guns, pistols with such long stocks that they looked like rifles, and other trinkets to attach to all these weapons. To his right were the more standard weapons, the ones that he could probably find in Darryl and Mary’s shop.

Probably cheap and crap, though.

Rudy poked him on the chest, raising Chase from his stupor.

“Not bad, huh? This the kind of thing you were looking for?”

“This is bonkers,” Chase replied. “All these people crawled through the fridge to get here?”

Rudy shook his head. “There’s another entrance through the big ol’ pipes they lay under the development. Big enough to fit two people across, though a tall fella like you’d hafta bend over a bit. Thought the fridge would be funnier.”

“No kidding.”

He strode up to the assault rifles where a seven-foot, three-fifty-pound guard stood with his arms crossed and a surly frown focused squarely on Chase. The guard stepped forward, his imposing size dwarfing Chase in every facet.

“Members only,” he spat in a blurry Russian accent. “Fuck off.”

Rudy came up behind him and laughed. “Joe! Big Joe! Relax buddy, he’s with me. He knows his way around an AK, don’t you Chase?”

The guard grunted and picked up a rifle in one hand, passing it to Chase. He did it with no effort, but when it rested in Chase’s hands, he needed both arms to feel comfortable enough to not drop the nose into the dirt floor. Despite Rudy’s high hopes, he didn’t have any clue how to operate the thing. It was at least not as confusing as the top-loading bolt action rifles he’d seen, but he was secretly glad there wasn’t a firing range in the underground cavern where he could show off his lack of knowledge.

“Twenty thousand Credits,” the guard (now salesman) said. “Soviet-made. Never fail.”

Chase put the rifle back on the shelf as if it were burning hot. The Guild Treasury could technically afford it, but Jenny would go blue in the face if she knew.

“How about the submachine guns?”