Home is where the guns are
The downtown skyline slid across the distant horizon as they drove over the curving ramp. Clouds swirled in the wide open sky above, trying to bind into a storm, and a green bowl of fluttering grass cradling the interchange rolled slowly far below them. It felt like flying.
Another slice of concrete grey rushed over them as their ramp dropped towards the dusty world of ten-lane highways and access roads and gas stations, and the glowing sky with its humming horizon fell backward into memory. Gradie let the inertia of the turn press him into the door, and a question slipped out of the sensation.
“Who’s feeling this? Who’s looking at the highway, the sprawl, the sky? Is it my Self, or my Spirit? Is my Spirit now separate from—”
He hesitated to call the him that lived in the Real ‘himself, not just because the word self was now attached to these other doppelgangers he drove like stolen cars, but because that him felt more distant than even the Otherworld.
Unlike his awakening in the office job, his disconnect from this reality wasn’t a sudden jolt that brought clarity, but a revelation drawn out maddeningly into a fragile sensation, like becoming aware of the cadence of his own breathing and feeling he might suddenly be unable to do it automatically. Below him, he sensed the self, waiting to take him if he fell, stretched out like a plain of quiet sand.
“You all right dude? Don’t drop out on me.” Sam’s voice brought him out of the trance. He saw her in the Otherworld, in the Clubhouse, and here next to him, and his universes aligned bilaterally, with those she inhabited on one side, and the Real on the other, distant and hazy.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just enjoying living in a world where I never have to work again.”
“You’re gonna be doing some work tonight buddy. Don’t get too comfy.”
The GPS told them to merge onto the access road and Sam tossed her empty can at his feet. EP had sent them the address of a safe house where they would hide out till nightfall. A parade of dirty fantasies all proceeding naturally from Gradie being shut in with Sam for the evening had rattled his brains for a good portion of the car ride, but they had all slipped out quietly to make room for the big hulking elephant in the brain; Gradie was nervous about tonight’s raid.
He had finally got his panic beaten down to just a vague unease by reminding himself where he was.
I’m in another dimension, another universe, packing a pistol, riding around in an armored car with a hot tom-boy assassin, and tonight I’m gonna break into my target’s work and look for something that Spirits from another world are killing to get their hands on. And if I die, I’ll just pop back into the world of limitless imagination and go have a drink at the dance club continent. I’m going to have fun, I’m gonna shoot back, and It’s going to be fucking amazing.
Then the depersonalization atop the ramp had shaken his fragile confidence. Maybe he wasn’t as prepared as he had led Michael to believe.
“I’ve got the floor plans and cameras for the POE loaded up on the PC upstairs, so when you get there start studying them.” EP’s voice, sexy even in its gruff professionalism (or even more so because of it?) crashed his reverie and the word ‘study’ got lodged somewhere he couldn’t think it out of. Before he could get back to the good thoughts, they were slowing into a turn up a suburban driveway.
The house was a familiar two-story brick box with blackout solar screens on the windows and a front lawn you could hop over. The only thing that made it stand out among the other homes was a lack of wood paneling, as if it had siphoned the brick from all the other houses and they had to make do.
The garage door rose slowly, revealing walls lined with cabinets and cases that had the same look as the ones in Philip’s storage unit. They stepped out into the chemical-smelling garage as the smooth armor plates at the back of the garage door slid into place and the last slice of sun-warmed suburbs disappeared. It felt like standing in a bomb shelter.
After the ammo cases and boxes marked “explosive’ in the laundry room, the kitchen was mostly unassuming, besides the brushed steel and bullet-resistant glass of the back door. Sam set her bag on one of the seats in the breakfast nook and started up a massive espresso machine on the counter. It looked like a piece of hospital equipment from the eighties with a bowl of whole beans stuck on top. A memory snaked its way up from the sleeping subterranean of his self. La Marzocco GS3. Attached were the spindly whisps of a meeting at an associate’s house, the cautious texture of his portfolio (a cultish devotion to the index), the self-assured tone of his voice, and the rising question; “If you’re so god damn satisfied with your returns, then why did you ask me for a consult?” and the memory of the answer, revealing itself over the course of an hour. “No, I don’t have any insider knowledge of some unicorn you can short.”
“You want one, or you just looking?”
Sam’s voice and look brought him back. The Gradie that had moved from trading shitcoins to hedging with options and worried about the Monday ahead dropped back down into the soft sand of the Self.
God she’s cute.
“Yeah, can you do a flat white?” he asked.
“Boy, I don’t think you know what a flat white is, but I’m gonna show you.”
It was perfect. He drank half of it while she sat in front of the massive wall mounted TV in the sleek furnished living room. She had a PC controller in her hand and was scrolling through the game library.
“The plans are on the computer in the upstairs bedroom,” EP said in his ears. Sam looked at him and smiled.
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“Have fun.”
The menu theme for Rainbow Six Siege chased him up the stairs. There was a game room with a pool table, covered in gear. Both windows had low wide shelves in front of them. One of the three doors stood open and a rectangle of gently carpeted room lit by softened sunlight beckoned him inside.
The floor plans, satellite views, folders, and other documents were arranged neatly across two monitors on a desk against the wall. Besides a twin bed in the corner, there was only another low shelf, this one just wide enough to span the window. His steps bounced on the thick carpet as he moved to the window. The drawer didn’t pull out and he remembered they filled these with sand. There was an M27 leaned against the wall with a shoebox full of magazines next to it.
He felt it in his hands, the recoil in his shoulder. Brass clattered against the wall as he fired out the window at faceless assassins advancing across the lawn, their rounds thunking in the brick walls and cracking into the sand behind the drawers. He crouched down, reloaded, and was letting out a full auto mag dump when EP cut his daydream short.
“Are you gonna just stand there all day?”
“Do you ever stop watching me?”
“Oh! Cause I have a crush on you, right? That’s the joke? Not that you’re standing there drooling all over yourself?” EP’s voice dripped acid and he was halfway back to the desk when she finished.
“All right. What am I supposed to be looking at here?” The floor plans were meaningless boxes and the gallery of photos, taken from the phones of anyone who had snapped a photo inside the store in the past few months, didn’t point towards any secret hiding place for a magical quarter.
“Know the layout, know where the exits are, and know where you need to search. And read the document. I already did most of the work for you.” She chirped off the line.
Gradie spent the next few hours looking over the images, reading EP’s write-up of the job, (where she thought the coin might be, what to search in what order, best escape routes if the cops came,) and falling into daydreams of late night shootouts, most involving a swarm of well-armed but hive-minded gunmen descending on the store, being dropped in twos and threes by Gradie’s supernaturally accurate fire, culminating in a high speed drive off into the night with Sam at the wheel, staring at him in awe. The last fantasies ended in a romantic downpour as the rain fell on the window at the edge of the room.
After the hundredth review of the files, the minutes spread torturously and his daydreams dried into still collages. He changed tabs mindlessly and something in the motion made candle charts and spreadsheets flash on the screen. The months and years spent by that other him tracking volume and sentiment and all the highs and lows that came with it spread below him suddenly like a great open space he was floating over.
He looked away from the screen and found a nickel-plated Smith and Wesson 5906 set next to the mouse pad, reflecting the monitor in bright lines. Its twin fired at Michael on the rooftop in the Otherworld and that other person fell away as if banished, but the feeling of office work remained. The dual monitors showed, in his peripherals, the programs and notes from his work in the Real. The intrusion was repulsive. He stood up and walked out of the room.
“Zoey, how much time till we leave?”
Rainfall roared into the now dark game room and lightning flashed neon blue in the windows. Digital gunfire and studio screams bounced up the stairs. He rested his hand on the pistol holstered on his hip.
From out of the darkness, it came to him. Just as it had poured out of the landscape that day at the clubhouse. He recognized it as the magnetism he had felt looking at Sam in the storage, the energy that had carried him away from his desk and down into the tunnels in the office job, and the exhilaration of the falling and the kill.
What Lindsey had called the Pull. He focused on it, hoping that if he committed the feeling to memory, he could summon it at will.
Whatever the night brings, I can take it. This is my world now.
EP chimed on. “We got lucky with the rain. Tape came down about ten minutes ago. Be out the door in half an hour.”
“Got it,” Sam said in double, first crystal clear in his ears, and a muffled stairwell-shaped echo an instant after.
In the bathroom, Gradie found a Benelli M4 leaned against the toilet, an RPK 16 with a 14-inch barrel on a pile of ammo in the bathtub, and, while washing his hands, a Glock 17 by the soap. His mind drifted to fantasies again, but now with the job close at hand, they had an edge he wasn’t in control of.
The roar of gunfire at the strip mall echoed at half-strength in his head. The idea of getting into a gunfight here, in a house that so resembled all the houses he’d ever visited or lived in, made his heart beat in a strong upward direction, as if it could lift him into the plane of reality where the guns had already come alive. In a moment of absent-minded panic, he looked out the window.
Nothing but dark outlines of lawns and cars, struck out for a moment in bright fragments by a silent flash of lightning.
Halfway down the stairs, he suddenly felt that he was the only person in the house. Every room stretched dark and empty in his mind like things revealed by some threatening force, and he almost missed a step. Every bullet in every casing in every magazine in the house felt pointed at him. Just a mass of flesh on a staircase waiting to hurt.
He took the last steps two at a time and when he turned at the bottom, Sam’s face floated in TV light in the living room. She looked over at him, eyes glowing like moonstones. Nothing but pure curiosity in them. A thing to be protected, just as exposed as he was. Stepping into the dark living room, the fear remained, a thing to be endured.
“You ready? You weren’t just up there beating it were you?”
“No, I like to go into these things fully loaded.”
“Nice.” She winced at him and left the controller on the table and her immobile avatar got gunned down by a figure bunny hopping across the screen. In the kitchen, they got two water bottles out of the fridge. Gradie noticed a Jericho 9mm in the door shelf and five frag grenades in the crisper. Sam took her bag with her into the garage.
“Are we coming back here afterwards?” Gradie asked.
“No. Never want to go to the same place twice in one day, at the least.” She set her bag in the back seat and opened up one of the shelves.
“So, what? Another safe house?”
“One thing at a time. Here.” She passed him a plate carrier, a soft armor low profile kind the twins had cooked up, and put the plates on a small table. He took his jacket off and started putting them on.
“Shouldn’t we have a place in mind?”
“No, because we might end up trying to lose the cops and wind up on the other side of town anyway,” Sam said.
“Or one of you might get shot and we’ll need a place with a sterile room.” EP came in suddenly.
“How many you think are gonna be there?” Gradie asked.
“Hopefully zero. If any show up, run.” She clicked off the line.
Sam chambered a round into something and shut the passenger door. She came around to the driver's side door with a pistol in her hand, a subcompact Beretta PX4 Storm with the stealth decockers. She put it in her coat pocket and got in the jeep.
“Get in the back.” There was no taunting in her voice this time and Gradie got in without a word. He saw the stock of a weapon over the edge of the passenger seat. The garage light went out as the door went up and Sam’s face was lit up like an angel as she watched a rearview camera in the dash.
Gradie looked out the back window. A solid sheet of rain. The streetlights floating in clouds of chaos. They backed out and the downpour took over the windows and everything was water until Sam flipped on the front and rear wipers, then it was like moving through a tunnel.
Sam flipped on the stereo and Juno by ASC gave the entire ride an extra otherworldly feel, but it was the reality of the situation that had Gradie’s heart beating out of his chest.