Flesh and blood and misconceptions
Sam led Gradie down the hall and into the back bedroom.
“If the cops or any other baddies show up, EP will set off an alarm on your earbuds,” she said.
The door opened against the left wall, and two bookshelves struck out into the room, flush with the door jamb on the right, making a kind of second hallway inside the bedroom. Gradie followed her through to a window in the back wall, between a cluttered work desk and a makeup and product topped dresser.
Gradie looked around the room and saw a boxspring and mattress against the wall on the other side of the bookcases. If anyone broke through the door, they wouldn’t have line of sight on Sam in her bed, and he would bet money she knew which part of the bookshelves to shoot through.
“If that happens, we’ll come in here, quickly, and grab the AR. I’ll put it right here.”
She pointed to a bare space of wall next to the open door.
“Then I’ll pull on this.”
She touched a piece of orange extension cord striped with red reflective tape hanging next to the window, with the pull cord for the blinds wrapped around it. It disappeared inside the curtain rod, which sagged in the center and was held up by two rings bolted to the wall. If the cord was pulled, the curtain rod would collapse and the curtains would fall, while at the same time the blinds would fly up.
“And you do this.”
Sam stood a few steps back from the window and aimed an invisible gun out toward the street, then moved up in a low stride to the bookshelf on the right, which held file boxes that he guessed were filled with sandbags.
“And I’ll move out the window with this.” She lifted a rope off the ground. There were two of them coiled up next to the window, sprouting out of a polygonal hole cut through the carpet and floorboard. She held another invisible gun in one hand and made a motion like knocking the screen out, then squatted down.
“Cover me while I drop down, then I’ll cover you and give you the all-clear. Then you grab the other one and come out after me. All the lights are dead out there so be sure you have your nods on. Then we’ll head that way down the side of the creek.” She pointed towards the right wall of the room.
“It goes behind the houses, and we’ll come out on Churchill. Zoey, or Max I guess, will have a car waiting on the street. Ill drive it dark with the nods, like we did at the POE, until we get to the highway.”
She got quiet and stared at him. Sometime during her explanation, his imagination had taken off and he was already halfway through a scenario that involved carrying a tourniquet legged Sam to the getaway car while landing precision shots on shadowy gunmen as the rain fell without mercy. The rain-soaked Sam in his head looked at him in a way at odds with the Sam in front of him, who had the signature disappointed stare of someone who had realized they had been talking to no one.
“All right, anyway!”
She waved him out of the bedroom and shooed him down the hall. He clenched his fists as he walked, glad to have his back to her.
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You stupid fuck. You want to be the hero? You really want to save her? Then keep your head in the game and be ready to do it for real.
Somewhere, he could feel Philip shaking a cigar at him.
“Oh, I forgot about those buns!”
They were back in the living room. Sam was swiping through the menu on her phone. Bojo meowed at them.
“What? Do you need water?” she said, picking up a ceramic bowl in the kitchen.
“Is that really the same cat?”
“Yeah. He was my cat. In the real.” She said the last part reluctantly, as if she had already said too much.
“Was?’
“Yeah,” she sighed.
He would have left it at that, but the implications had already set his brain to work.
“So, you push that he’s still alive? Before you drop in?”
“No. It just happens. Philip used to give me shit about it. They were trying to find out what I was good at, and every time we dropped in, he would be at my house. I was shit at everything else, but Bojo is ol’ reliable.”
She looked at Bojo like he was doing something impressive just by laying there. Gradie watched him flick his ears and got lost in thought.
If someone died in the real, could you go into a Hardworld and find them? If I die, can they find another me in here?
Sam popped the top on a can and brought him back to reality. She was squatting in front of the open fridge, her body a cluster of tight curves, silhouetted against the bright shelves. She hadn’t turned on the kitchen light, and the fridge light back lit her face and made her hair glow. It reminded him of the Otherworld. She seemed to be floating in space. Her eyes shot to him, and he knew she had seen him staring, but she didn’t react at all.
“You want a drink?”
“Ill take a water.”
She nodded and came out of the kitchen with a Dos Equis and a Fiji.
“You can drink if you want. Might help you calm down.”
“Thanks. I like being sober.” Sam opened the bottle with a knife from the coffee table and took a drink.
“Wait till you get in a gunfight.”
“I did already.”
“That wasn’t really a gun fight. Hand me that box.” She pointed to an empty amazon box.
“What? What defines a gunfight, then?”
“You get shot at and you shoot back. For longer than ten seconds.” Sam started dumping trash from the coffee table into the box.
“I’ve had plenty of training with Max.”
“Oh, so you’ve never been afraid in a Hardworld?” she said, like he was trying to lie to her.
He thought about getting shot at by the cops at the Clubhouse. He thought about the fear that had taken him at the POE. It had been like dreaming he was about to die, then waking up moments later. Had that been real fear? Had it taken any control away from him? How bad could it get?
“A little, but—”
“Well, it won’t be a little if you get in a real gunfight. So just be ready—”
“What, you think I’m gonna freak out?”
“Everyone freaks out. That’s why we prime a self that can deal with adrenal dumps and all that. Bring that bag over and stack all these games in the chair.”
He set her bag next to the couch and started clearing the game cases and disks off the coffee table and moving them to the couch. The cover of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory reminded him of Sam in the rain, and the dusts on his hands reminded him of searching the POE. Other vague memories floated out of the nostalgia kicked up by the PS2 games, but he pushed them away and went back to the couch.
Sam was already getting guns and ammo out of the bags. The coffee table was bare now, but not clean. There was a layer of thin black film on the top of it and in the recesses of the curves on the lip around the edges, years of spilled drinks and dust combined into something uniform and final. It made him nostalgic again, but he had no idea why, as if the memory was locked in some untouchable other him.
He got sick of the quiet.
“An adrenal dump’s a physical reaction, though. I’m talking about my Spirit. It’s hard to be really scared if I know I can’t actually die here.”
“That’s cause you haven’t been shot yet,” Sam said. “Trust me, it’s not fun. Your only options are to push the pain out of your head, which only Boss and them know how to do, or just deal with it, or drop yourself out.” She made a gun out of her hand and pointed it at her temple.
“And if everyone did that every time they got a booboo, we wouldn’t get any jobs done. So, you’re probably gonna have to suck it up. And you won’t be saying ‘oh it’s just a physical reaction’ if that happens.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he just watched her move. She set a box of ammo on the table with a soft rattle, and he felt that every bullet was searching for him, as if the Hardworlds wanted to make him pay for taking them so lightly.