The only way out is through

Backdraft got in the passenger seat and put his shotgun between his knees. Luke got in the center seat with the short dude who had been the calmer of the two voices in the apartment, and who now took his APC9k, a small submachinegun, out of his jacket and started screwing on a suppressor like he was clipping his nails. The other guy, a heavy-set dude with a wiry rodent-like energy and a Glock 17 in his waistband, climbed in the back seat and glued his eyes to the back window. The way everyone kept looking around was infectious, so Luke did his best to see if there were any barrels peeking out of the bent-up blinds behind the apartment windows, until Backdraft turned around in his seat and got his attention.

“All right, listen up mother fucker. As of this moment, your name is Bottle.”

That was about the last thing Luke had expected him to say, but after giving it some thought, recalled how Backdraft had sneered at all the empty beer bottles crowding the faux granite laminate counter top in his apartment just moments ago.

“Oh, cause of the—”

“And this is Daytona,” Backdraft pointed his thumb at the driver, who raised a hand briefly before continuing the rapid U-turn out of Luke's lot. While Luke went sideways in his seat, Backdraft stayed as vertical as if he was outside on the street, and pointed at the guy with the APC9k.

“That’s Whisper, and the guy in the back is Hamstar. Today our job is to draw the fuzz off the peach when the boys start making cobbler.”

“Uh,” Luke muttered. Backdraft smiled, enjoying his confusion.

“Meaning, for the uninitiated, we are to attract the attention and energy of law enforcement when the main attack crew is ready to make a move on the target. Understand?”

“Oh. Yeah sounds—”

“Gotta pick up Kibbles,” Daytona said suddenly.

“God damn, it really is fucking training day huh?” Backdraft laughed.

“I thought he was out?” Hamstar said, sounding disappointed.

“I’ll make something useful out of him yet,” Backdraft said, defiant.

“Like an ammo bitch,” Daytona suggested. Hamstar cackled.

“He aint touchin my shit!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Backdraft yelled at the rear view. “You all started out same as him, like gum stuck to my fucking shoe, and now—”

“I did not start out like that,” Whisper said, true to his name, quietly.

“Is this gonna be his third strike or what?” Hamstar groaned.

With the attention off of him, Luke shifted his own to his surroundings and watched the non-world flow by.

To a lower, physical part of him, it was nothing special. The same shit he’d seen forever. But when he flicked on the focus of his Spirit, and allowed the flow of awareness to move from his life in the Real, to his existence in the Other, and then down into the vessel of the Self, and from there look out on the parking lots and window barred convenience stores and shirtless marching meth heads, the knowledge of where he really was filled him with an electric excitement, a real feeling of anything’s possible that he hadn’t felt since he was a kid.

This was the real world. But not his real world, with its plethora of responsibilities and requirements, littered with the husks of his failures, this one was expendable. Fleeting. Impermanent. Like a dream given substance. A video game with a quantum processor. Here, he could do whatever he wanted, and it would all fade like vapor when he—

He glanced back at his companions, still deep in discussion on the pros and cons of giving a guy named Kibbles access to firearms, and decided not to ask. How the fuck was he going to get out of here? Did you have to die to leave this place? He woke up to get in, would he just go to sleep to get out?

The pressure building in his mind broke the damn with that one. The thought of being a Hardworlder, the question of what he would do in a world where he could do anything he wanted, and his reflection on his distance from not only his Real self but also the Other, had all been leading his mind toward the one thing he had instructed it to avoid.

Rory.

And the fact that his mind or Spirit or whatever it was, was finally free of the insipid tug of Bliss, allowed it to pursue the subject with agonizing vigor.

He remembered that first day, the non-sun reflecting off her rave girl visage as she lay on her side rambling sweetly about his new existence, in particular, why his first memories of being in the Other, racing down highways and running through schools and all that shit, were so hazy.

“Your Spirit was kinda in a larval stage at that point. Just barely there, a sketch of your real Self you could say, like a photograph of a real thing. But the more photos you take, you can make a video, right? And then you record sound, and maybe like brainwaves, get it? Until eventually you have a real copy of yourself.”

“So I’m a copy?”

“Maybe. Or maybe this is the real you. But the important thing to remember is that you were being born, right? And being born all at once, as an adult, would have been terrifying. Might have made you go crazy, made the new you break apart before it had formed. So this world did it gradually. Because this world knows how to treat us.”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

He wondered if she believed it. Probably not. He couldn’t imagine the Other had treated her any better than him, given the way she spent her time in it. Just more bullshit to convince him the rules of predator and prey didn’t apply to this new dream world.

It put a brake on his newfound excitement. The last time he had felt something similar, he had his memories scanned and his life turned into one big Bliss hunt.

But, he realized as he shifted in his seat and fought back a yawn, she had been wrong. Being born suddenly, here in this Hardworld, hadn’t driven him insane. The new him, the old him, the Real him, were different, but shared a common center, like petals on a flower. Experiencing this, suddenly, gave him a way to compare his selves. It was a cathartic, relieving experience, to know he was something more than just the things that had happened to him. It answered a question he hadn’t realized he had even been asking.

“Call him,” Backdraft said, like a man giving a surgeon the go-ahead to amputate. Daytona flipped open a corner store burner phone and punched in some numbers, then held the phone to his ear and scowled out the window.

They were parked at the side of an apartment complex, on a wide double-sided street with a big grass median in the center. An iron bar fence surrounded the complex, and they had parked across from a keypad gate with a well-worn path in the grass between it and the sidewalk. Luke noticed the balconies held planters and exercise balls and full sets of furniture, as opposed to the wind chimes and picnic chairs and grills zip-tied to the railings found at his own complex. There wasn’t even a window-unit in sight.

“Hey. Side gate,” Daytona huffed. There was a pause and he glanced at Backdraft, and they exchanged a “sick of this shit” glance as someone on the other side of the line rambled.

“No, you will be riding with us. Yes. Why would you need a gun?” Daytona tried to put as much wink-wink nudge-nudge in his question as he could without crushing the phone. Hamstar started laughing until Backdraft shot him a murder stare.

“Ok. Yes. Side gate. And leave your phone!” Daytona closed the phone with an angry clack and tossed it in the center console.

“If we don’t burn him in the first—”

“How did he sound?” Backdraft interrupted. Daytona snickered.

“Like someone was standing there with a fucking gun to his head. I’m texting CiCi.” Daytona took out a thick-cased phone and tapped on the screen.

“I yanked the cables on his car last night,” Backdraft said, in an odd tone, like he was just now remembering, or casting a spell.

“He’s been pacing for half an hour,” Daytona read. “Out the door. Took a right. Goin for his Car.” He said the last words with a tone of relieved finality. Backdraft sighed and opened the glove box. Down there Luke saw, for the first time, the compact .45 with the big silencer on it, sitting on top of the registration, and put two and two together. Some part of him raged and screamed, but Spirit Luke was impressed.

“Wait. He went back. Laughing. Headed for the gate.” Daytona read, sounding disappointed, and Backdraft slammed the glove box shut.

“Scoot over,” Whisper muttered to Luke, in a very “go on without me” tone. Luke moved to the far driver's side of the center seat and Whisper scooted into the middle seat and stared out the windshield like a doomed man.

A few seconds later, a lanky buzz-cut guy in a hoodie and knee-torn jeans stomped out from around the back of a unit. He trudged across the sidewalk toward the gate, glancing up at the 4Runner every other step like it was going to leap over the curb and tackle him. His mouth was half open and his eyes peeled so severely that Luke could see the tell-tale bloodshotness from his seat.

“Mother fucking little—” Backdraft broke the rest of the words into a growl then a deep exhale. Whisper opened the door as Kibbles came through the gate, and before he had even got next to the car, Luke could smell the weed.

The door shut and Backdraft glared at him. He squirmed in his seat and looked around.

“What?”

“Fucking what me bitch,” Backdraft said, twisting in his seat. “This ain't a god damned munchie run. I told you this job is straight edge.”

“Uh, sorry bro, my Self,”

“Fuck your sorry and fuck your Self.” He took a breath and leaned in even further, putting the seatbelt and the seat itself in an awkward contortion.

“Mem stop. You are in violation. Pay will be docked for this job. Report to your super for training immediately after scrape. Mem go.”

Luke would later learn that this was a technique to get the memory scraper to pull a specific statement from the job for record keeping. In this case, kibbles would have a few weeks of shit eating in the killhouse before he was let back on a job. But, to down there Luke in the passenger seat, it seemed like Backdraft was losing his shit.

Backdraft spun back around and shook his head.

“Drive.”

Daytona pulled off the curb and the apartments melted away out the window. They got to the end of the street and halfway on to the access road running alongside the highway before Kibbles opened his mouth.

“So, uh, is this thing armored?”

“Jesus,” Whisper whispered. Hamstar cackled something that might have been “what?” and Daytona got a big smile on his face. Backdraft seemed less than amused.

“No mother fucker. You won’t see the inside of a war wagon for a decade if ever. Those things are reserved for the big boys. Not kids who cant get their pants on without smoking a bowl.”

“Who are the big boys?” Luke asked, the image of the grey-man killer from the hype video still nagging his thoughts. Backdraft glanced at him, and must have seen in his eyes a legitimate curiosity born from a desire to move up in the job, because his glare softened and he nodded ahead at the dashboard.

“Not us, for starters. Sometimes the Point Operators will roll in a wagon, but it depends. There’s generally only a few of them to go around, and the spear guys like more flexibility than sticking to one vehicle allows. Generally, your higher-ups on an Op will use them if they have to move.”

“You mean like, uh supervisors? Like Car—”

“No names, god dammit!” Backdraft snapped and Luke just nodded back at him, bored-faced. With dudes like Backdraft, you had to let them know you wouldn’t bitch out over getting chewed out, and eventually they’d talk to you like an equal.

“But, no. Team leads like the individual you mentioned, when on a job, take point with the Operators, or one of the other teams, like this little gang of shit stirrers. By Higher-ups, I mean the Boss and other VIPs. Overlords, Wizards,”

“Wizards?”

“Yeah, Wizards. Sometimes called a Keyman, Safelord or Sage.”

One look told Backdraft Luke was lost at sea.

“Ok, a wizard is a guy who can manifest things here in the bricks. Weapons, cars, electronics. A good one can walk into a gas station and pull an m60 out of the bathroom stall, or get a laptop loaded with NSA spy tools. Shit like that.”

After Luke recovered from the shock of hearing a guy like Backdraft use the term “manifest”, which he associated with middle-class housewives trying to boost sales in their Etsy shop, he asked a question that would, ultimately, prove to be quite prophetic.

“Is that something I can learn to do, or is it like an innate talent?”

Hamstar laughed. “Shit, I wish. Man.” Whisper looked at Luke sadly, and Backdraft gave him a “What the fuck is this guy’s game?” stare.

“I’ve heard strong opinions both ways, Bottle. But my advice to you is to take this shit one step at a time. Stay focused on not shitting the bed on this little job here, before you start fantasizing about being some big-shot magic man.”

“Shit, let the little birdy fly B.D.,” Hamstar chuckled. “Hey bro try and pull me out an RPG when we stop—”

Daytona’s phone went off with a harsh siren chime and Backdraft snatched it out of the console and read the screen.

“All right. Flip a bitch. Get us on the other side of the loop.”

Daytona took the U-turn lane under the bridge at 50 mph and Backdraft smiled back at the crew.

“Time to make some noise, y'all.”