Blood runs downhill

He tried to go it alone, in ways the scrape might not notice. Engineering situations that required him to have direct radio contact with the assault team or that put him, miraculously, near their probable location, but now that management was on to him, it was slow going.

But after one close call, in which he raided a police cruiser from the wreckage of his crash team’s rampage and tracked the assault team to an abandoned grass-poked warehouse off the highway, until dispatch reminded him of the cruisers GPS which was drawing every cop, trooper, and deputy in this half of the state right to him and he bailed it into a ditch and dropped out, someone reached out to him.

“You ain't gonna quit huh?”

It was a voice on his comm, sounding more impressed than scolding. Still, Luke had a thing about being spoken too when he wasn’t expecting or inviting it. He had heard somewhere that the first wars in this place had been waged between “silence and noise”, and every time some speaker found him uninvited, he understood what they meant. Rory had shown him how to set up the comm pieces so that any Speaker that tried to talk to him would have their voice routed through the little bead instead of booming inside his mind, but he had gotten distracted before she finished explaining how to set up the answering machine function, and they had moved on to other, less mechanical activities.

He tried to shake off the memories and not let them steal his cool.

It didn’t work.

“Who the fuck is this?”

Who it was, was one of the AT lead operators, who refused to give his name, but offered a proof.

“Next job you’ll get is gonna be for a chick charged with robbery. Role play addict. Swipped a shit ton of mem so she could by her Arthelian avatar a fucking eye color change, if you can believe it. I’ll be in touch.”

Sure enough, when he dropped in a few hours later, dispatch let slip that they were after a female this time.

“Just in case any of you got a problem with that. Management thinks its best we give you a heads up.”

And then, after his dummies had burned themselves out bank robbing and hostage-taking and highway self-smearing, Luke got a phone call.

“Figured you didn’t burn up with your boys. Want some action?” It was, though less echoey, the voice he had heard in his comms earlier.

“Sure.”

They told him a make and model of a car, and advised that a certain Burger King was the “good one”.

“They really load up on the bacon.”

So there Luke was, smoke broiled scent wafting over him, his stomach growling from two different types of hunger, as the prophesized car sped by.

And that was all the help they gave him, other than dying in an assault on the defense team that left the target's vehicle with only one tail.

He followed the two vehicles as unsuspiciously as he could, until they turned off onto a thin road rising between two fields, and he kept going down the main road. A quick review of the maps and a lot of head swiveling as he came around the back way through an old neighborhood brought him towards a sheet metal machine shop. From across the vacant fields and behind a chemical storage, he watched them load up in a single, surely armored, car.

He followed them enough to see them get on the highway, then doubled back to a sedan he had noted on the ride over. It was, in a forced coincidence, the same make and model his Self had learned to hotwire years ago, as his life briefly arced through drug dealing and boosting before a family emergency had shaken him out of it. It was his first real act of pushed memory, and for all the frantic studying and preparations in his mem-painted realm, in practice the act moved by so swiftly and silently that he didn’t realise he had even done it until he reviewed the mem weeks later. At the time, it had seemed like simple dumb luck.

A few minutes later, he was speeding down the highway in the opposite direction he had seen the target get on, and sure enough another ten minutes later there they were.

He ran his mind over every job he had studied and recalled something in the murky edges. A job where, after a near totally mortal shootout, the defense team had scrambled to get to someplace secure enough to let one of their team members drop out into the Dreamworlds and make contact with the higher-ups to request back up.

After racking his brain for his own role in that job, he realized he had never been part of it. It was a story found during his research into the Dreamworlds on the freed. He made a mental note to try and get his hands on Hardworld mem beyond his own experience, and pulled up the map.

A few miles ahead, a massive hotel cluster waited just off the highway. He picked the biggest one and got into the passing lane. He had been behind the target for five minutes now and knew if he was in their shoes they’d be running the plates if they could. He passed them with his best, these motherfuckers wasting my time face and sped off down the highway.

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He stashed the car in a non-functioning car wash kiosk next to a gas station, took some glasses, a beanie and a hoodie out of his bag and swapped clothes, then sauntered across the street to the hotel.

It played out like something slipping out of your hands and falling to the ground. Car keys on the concrete maybe, or like when you hand someone something and they drop it, and you both kind of watch it happen and wonder later why you didn’t reach out faster, why it seemed, at the moment, so inevitable.

The target car parked in the back. Luke had broken into a chrome-rimmed sedan with the tintedest windows he could find and sat there waiting as the one guy got out and walked around to the front to get a room. He was doing his best to act normal, which was always easy to pick up on. Luke wondered, as he got out, if it would have been better for them just to pull up under the awning next to the front door, if maybe the best defense was to act like you had nothing to defend. If he was on the defense, how would he have prevented this?

He walked over to the picnic tables and grill next to the back door and sat down. He got out his vape and phone and sat there scrolling. It was so obvious, so blatant, they must not have expected it. When the guy came back around with the key cards Luke made sure to look him in the eye. The guy studied him, maybe trying to see if he could remember the face, but who would be so stupid to sit here like this if they had seen him earlier in the day?

As they got out of the car, in a nice little diamond formation, Luke noticed, he set off an alarm on his phone. Luckily, it was about five minutes till the hour. He sighed and groaned and stretched and got in line behind them to go through the door as lead guy used his keycard. Two of them looked back.

“Hey, how yall doin' today? Enjoy your stay?”

It wasn’t even a question, just the weary automatic ramblings of a wageslave obeying some memo from the distant past. The fact that they had obviously not even started their stay yet only added to it. One guy nodded and the others kind of smiled. Guy in the center looked scared, but the guard right behind him put a hand on his back and pushed him down the hallway. Ironic. The only guy who actually saw it coming was the guy who didn’t know the rules, so he didn’t know, as the other guys did, that everything Luke was doing made for a terrible attempt at a hit.

Luke reached in his jacket with the most obvious “I’m getting something out of my jacket” motion he could muster, so obvious that one guard saw him do it and still looked away down the hall. Halfway through the motion, Luke's entire body changed. His slow, reluctant steps, his drooping movements, vanished, and he pulled the Beretta out the rest of the way in a swift snap like a hammer coming down.

He shot the target three times in the head and the guards yelped and one put two in his chest immediately afterward. The rounds bounced off the plate and they all looked at each other, none of them more surprised than Luke.

The closest guard yelled at the dead body.

“Mother fucker!”

One of the other guards started laughing.

“I cant believe that shits going on the boards! I’m gonna get so fucking hosed! You son of a bitch!”

Luke smiled at him and struggled to get his drop-out kit out of its pouch. Something warm ran down his leg. One of the other guards had got him in the side. He leaned against the wall as the adrenal dump and blood loss took turns wailing on him. The guards kept talking.

“I fucking knew—”

“Then why’d he get away with it?”

“Fuck you, I had the lobby—”

“Fuck are you laughing at? You were right next to him!”

And so forth. Laughing guy helped Luke get the needle plunged and asked if he could use it after. Luke just kept on smiling and faded away.

The mystery man who had given him the heads-up contacted him later, using Car-Crash as an intermediary, who explained the situation to Luke over dreamsmoke in Luke’s realm.

“Couple of guys sympathetic to your efforts. Wanted me to talk to you about them setting you up with some kills.”

“Fuck I need them to set me up—”

“That’s exactly what the fuck I told them. And I’m telling you right now if you wanna tell them to go fuck themselves then I greatly approve. This smells of politics. They don’t want A.T. stuck as a crash team because it means they’re stuck as dummies, but they don’t wanna risk too much to get out of it. They let you do the kills and take the heat while riding your coattails to the big times.”

Luke thought about it for a second, and his mind gave up. It just wouldn’t budge toward any kind of political imaginings. He ultimately didn’t give a shit. He wanted two things in all the god damn other. And one was to keep bagging kills.

“Fuck it. Let em ride. Tell them to hit me up.”

They did. It turned out to be a smooth-moving conspiracy, which made Luke wonder if they had tried something like this with some other naïve try hard. They even had Drudge paid off so he wouldn’t kick up the mem of the phone calls to management. Even dispatch started slipping him help. Luke got the feeling that they had all been waiting for someone good enough to snag kills yet dumb enough to try and defy Constellation.

That day, he was brought into Tenpounds office and grilled for every little mistake made while on crash duty, but let go without his kill even getting a mention.

There was a simple explanation. The conspirators needed Luke on the crash team so if shit came downhill it would smear the expendables, and because they didn’t want to risk having him moved up to the assault team and shining a light on them. Tenpound was getting a big payout to keep Luke where he was, and for someone who had managed to get nothing higher than a shift supervisor position on a dummy squad in ten years of Hardworlding, that was enough.

And so, after so much uncertainty, Luke found a groove, and so did the Extractor. The montage practically made itself.

Job after job of kills or near kills, a series of Tenpound pseudo meetings, memos, and whispers of the higher up's concern, of Constellation headed “client meetings”, revealing that the conspiracy had reached the highest level, with half the owners trying to keep the trees from shaking, while the other half looked to take Ace Tactical private.

Right in the middle of it all, Luke’s star shot up the boards like the drama was nothing but rocket fuel, and more importantly to him, he learned a lot about being on the trigger. He took out targets with bombs, ten-shot handguns, cars, hunting rifles, and even a few knives.

It got to the point that he could knock off an A.T. target like tying his shoe, and he could see the next level so close he barely even had to raise his foot to step over it. Job offers, rumors, frantic talks with the conspirators. In a few months, he had gone from a caged dog to having so many open doors his only issue was figuring out which one to take.

And the cherry on top, which, ironically, he didn’t even realize at first, was that with all the excitement and all the advancement and learning, he had forgotten to even think about bliss.

Then it all hit a snag.