ours is not to ask why, yours is to shoot and die

Kibbles looked like the car ride might kill him. Luke considered asking him what else he was on besides the weed, and if he had eaten anything with it, in order to gauge his own chances of getting puked on in the next five minutes, but decided against it. Backdraft was smiling at the blurring highway and flat cement landscape like it was all dancing for him, and Luke didn’t want to put Kibbles in his crosshairs pointlessly.

Despite his best efforts, Luke felt sorry for Kibbles. Didn’t help that the little scraggly-bearded pot head kept looking over Whisper’s shoulder at Luke with a strange pleading look, like only Luke had the answer to whatever illness was bugging him.

That should have given Luke a clue what was going to happen next, but it took him completely by surprise. Probably because he was too busy looking for any indicator that Kibbles was about to hurl.

They exited onto the access road and stopped at an intersection between the bridge and a gas station, and Kibbles got very still.

“Shit, here it comes,” thought Luke. But a few moments later, they got moving again, and Kibbles swore under his breath. Whisper looked at him, then looked at Luke, with a kind of “you seeing this shit?” glance. Luke still didn’t get it. At that moment, he was convinced that Kibbles was about to shit himself.

Whisper leaned towards the front seat and cleared his throat.

“Hey Backdraft.”

That did it. Kibbles threw open the door and tried to launch himself at the street, which was going by at 40 mph. He didn’t get far. Whisper shot off the seat and got him by the jeans with one hand and the back of his hoodie with the other.

“Get the fuck—” Backdraft started. Daytona slammed on the breaks. A car behind them honked, and Kibbles lifted up one foot and Mule-kicked backward right into Whisper’s face. The kick slipped across his chin and slammed into his shoulder, sending him backward into Luke. Suddenly, Whisper was very loud.

“Fucking bitch ass—”

Kibbles shot out of the car and crashed over the hood of a sedan that had squealed to a stop in the next lane. Impressively, he didn’t even lose that much speed. He just rolled and slammed and bounced off the bumper then off the street, and was up running again, flailing his arms like he was being chased by bees or something.

Whisper had some fucking bees for his ass. He raised his APC9K towards the street without getting up off Luke’s lap.

“No! Shut the god damned door!” Backdraft boomed with fire in his eyes. Whisper sighed and grumbled as he got up, but lowered his gun and slammed the door shut anyway.

“Man, do not put me on a job with that mother fucker again. If he—”

“Shut up!” yelled Backdraft. “Tona, tell dispatch we got a fucking code blue.” He took the suppressed G30s out of the glove box and wagged it like a finger out the window.

“And ask if I need to drop him out.”

Daytona shook his head in a kind of “why the fuck can’t you do it?” way, and tapped on a flip phone with one hand while the other steered them through traffic at fifty miles an hour. They turned right on the main road that came out from under the bridge, and Kibbles was already sprinting through a Mcdonalds parking lot fifty yards from the intersection.

“The rest of you watch for cops!” Backdraft said, like they had all conspired to make this happen.

“Why?” Hamstar asked. “I thought our job was to make—”

“Not halfway across the state from the fucking target!” Backdraft spat at the dash.

Kibbles had gotten some brain cells activated and took a sharp right turn towards the back of the Mcdonalds and disappeared behind a dumpster. Daytona sighed and sped ahead, then turned right just past the end of the parking lot. It was a dingy part of town, nothing but massive chain hotels clinging to the highway for dear life. Unfortunately for Kibbles, the one spot of bare land was the massive empty field just behind the Mcdonalds, which he was now running into. He looked to his left, ready to sprint across the road, and saw the squad coming up behind him. He made a weird kind of half jump, like something had shocked him, and then sprinted across the field in the general direction of the highway.

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“You think he’s going for the Cracker Barrel?” Hamstar said with a smile in his voice. Luke had to admit, the sight of Kibbles running and tripping across an empty grass field, in the direction of a Cracker Barrel sign floating above the highway a quarter of a mile away like a beacon of safety, was pretty fucking ridiculous.

Backdraft squeezed the pistol in his right hand and rested his wrist on his left forearm.

“Get past the curve and stop.”

The road they were on curved to the right back towards the highway, giving Kibble’s chosen field the shape of a headsail with the wind in it. Luke was just thinking that Backdraft's master plan would only work if Kibbles kept running forward in a straight line like a zombie, when Daytona’s phone went off with an alarm chime, and he glanced at the screen.

“Negative. Get to marker ASAP,” he read to Backdraft. He put the pedal down and followed the curve back towards the access road. Out on the field, Kibbles rotated at the center of their trajectory like a frontman in a 90’s music video, and Hamstar snickered into his hand.

“Shit, might as well pop him first,” Whisper said, again in his usual low-volume purr.

“Fuck him,” Backdraft said, putting the pistol back in the glovebox. “Dropping outs too good for him. Let him bake in that fucking field till the Spiritwalkers come for him. Maybe then he’ll quit for good.”

They got back onto the access road and sped onto the highway, and Whisper kept his eyes on Kibbles until he disappeared behind the barrier wall.

As they got on the highway, Backdraft lit up a plastic-tipped cigar and cracked the window. After a few minutes of scowling at the highway, he picked up the flip phone and started texting. Luke watched him, wondering if it would be worth it to ask where they were going, until he slapped the flip phone shut and barked at the roof.

“Hamstar, hand Bottle the 5K!”

There was some rummaging in the back, and then a tap on the side of his seat. Luke looked down to his left and saw Hamstar’s big hand offering him an MP5K between the seat and the door. He grabbed it and held it between his knees. It looked well-worn, to say the least. Tape on the foregrip, tape on the sling. Hamstar tapped again on the seat and handed him a tool pouch of some kind with three extra mags in it, none of which looked the same.

“Boss wants a big to-do on the mixmaster at a quarter till,” Backdraft announced. “Ham, I’ll drop you there and we’ll split. Take a hostage if you can. Shit starts to look final, surrender and start telling tales about all the bombs you stashed. Got it?”

“Yeah bro, all right.” Hamstar nodded to himself out the window, clearly trying to psych himself up. Luke realized, for the first time, that even the professionals might have trouble believing a parallel life was waiting for them on the other side of death.

“The rest of us will stay mobile. Whisper, you and Bottle will be team two. We’ll be following chase at that point, if it comes to that, so no telling where you’ll get dropped.”

“Unless they move us to kill team,” Whisper said hopefully. Backdraft smiled back at him and talked like a dad whose kid had mentioned going to six flags on a school day.

“Now don’t go getting your hopes up for that. Murder squad already popped lucky guy number one last night, no issue. Probably wrap this one up pretty quick.”

“But the defense will be looking out now,” Whisper said mostly to himself.

“You might be right, Whisper,” Backdraft said like the kid was now talking about Santa Claus. “Keep the dream alive and your chambers loaded, as they say.”

After that, the ride got quiet again. Luke squeezed the MP5 and watched the same metroplex he’d spent his entire life in float by, but now under a different sun. In the silence and the white noise scenery, his mind wandered. He wondered if all his jobs would be here, and thought that it would be darkly funny if even when projected through dimensions and beyond his own flesh, he still couldn’t move out of the fucking area.

As his thoughts wandered to Kibbles and attempts to theorize his fate, that old train of thought sounded its horn and he could only watch it smash through.

Rory had been right about people like Kibbles. This place really did drive them insane. Hell, she might have been right about half the people in the car with them. Maybe they just had gotten to the point where experience masked insanity. He saw that a lot in the construction biz.

He was thinking about her dancing, and wondering who with, when another alarm tone screamed from Daytona’s phone. This time, it kept screaming.

“Oh shit.” He flipped it open and held it to his ear. “Hello?”

Backdraft was still as death and watched Daytona with wide evil eyes. The car got breathlessly quiet, and Luke could hear someone half yelling on the other side of the call, dishing out their words like measured punches.

“Ok. Yeah. West? Ok.” Daytona sounded like the guy was telling him how to defuse a bomb. Backdraft leaned in hungrily, but kept quiet.

“Ok. Understood. And— Hello?. Shit.” Daytona slapped the phone closed and got into the fast lane.

“What—” was all Backdraft got out.

“Shit went south!” Daytona squealed. “Point squad knocked out. Targets coming down 183. Gold Camry. Oh Seven. Wants us to park at some bank and wait. Call the moment we see them and follow behind. Far behind.”

“We’re gonna fucking hit them,” Backdraft said like revealing a secret.

“No, they said just to follow. Other teams dropping in—”

“Fuck that! TP is being a bitch cause I called him out at the Quarterly!”

“Look man,” Daytona said in a suddenly measured tone. “I'm just following him. Ok? You know the fucking game by now.”

Backdraft didn’t even look over, and not a single hair on him moved for a good five seconds, until,

“We’ll see.”