t’s a living, but not for you

Back in the day, when he was first getting started, Luke had found it necessary to drop into the Hardworlds with a singular, focused affirmation.

“I don’t wake up hungover.”

Despite focusing more feeling and effort into priming sobriety than any other aspect of his self, he woke up with a pounding headache every time. Once, he had worked through an entire job withdrawing from opiates, and another time he had lost a job with SYS after throwing up in the point man’s interceptor ten minutes into an hour-long chase. Eventually, he had given up trying to fight or even understand it. Now he just dropped in with a simple prayer.

“Let the hangover not be that bad.”

Sometimes it did the trick, but he wasn’t sure if it had this time because he hadn't moved. He knew that only when he stood up, threw open the blackout curtains, and started moving around, would he discover the full extent of the hangover.

So, he was still in bed, after three phone alarms and two wake-up calls.

“Joey…We’re waiting.” Sam’s voice came out of the speaker phone on the nightstand (courtesy of EP) and stabbed him in the eardrums.

Annoying little bitch. What good is a redhead that cut it all off and hid her tits under coveralls?

“No fucking good at all,” he said to no one. Something moved in the bed, and he froze.

“No fucking way.”

“What?” she said. It was a cute voice, almost as cute as EP’s, which helped him keep from kicking her off the bed right there. Cute or not, it still knocked his brain around.

He closed his eyes and focused.

“The body does what it’s told. The spirit demands, the flesh be damned.”

The iron chains on his head fell away. The aches left his muscles. The dryness in his mouth faded. Or at least they all shuffled off to somewhere he could ignore them. Sam said something through the phone again, but this time she was just a kid he worked with, almost a friend.

He got up and threw open the curtains.

“Fucking shit!” The girl pulled the covers over her head. Luke grabbed the bottom of the comforter and yanked it off the bed. She almost came with it and ended up sitting in the middle of the mattress.

A short-stack brunette with rug burns on her knees and red marks in other places.

“I’m checking out,” he said, but she had already slithered under the sheet. It clung to her body in a way that finished waking him up, and he wondered how long Sam’s stop would delay her.

“Unless you want me to stay for a bit?”

“Fuck you, I want to die! How do you drink that shit?”

Luke looked at the various bottles around the room and wondered which one she was talking about. A few of the labels triggered primal sensations of nausea and weakness that cut through his Spirits control and made him shudder.

He grabbed the one with the label facing away and took a few swigs. That’ll have to do.

He got showered and dressed while the girl snored softly. His clean clothes were hung with his pistol in the empty closet. He pulled the earbuds out of the envelope shoved in the chest pocket of his plaid flannel button up and squeezed them in. A call chimed in his ears before he got his shoes on.

“Yep.”

“You’re late.” It was EP.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“I didn’t get a time. Thought we were just doing recon today.”

“Maybe not. Boss is seeing some activity he doesn’t like. Maybe another team. Might have to jump on it.”

“Aight.” Sure enough, the promise of “simple job, no defense, no other teams” turned out to be a pie in the fucking sky. Not to mention the god damned quarter.

“Alan and Kate are out front.”

“Alright, I’m coming out.”

“Files are on your phone.” She beeped off. Her voice had been rough and terse this time, as if she was trying to disguise it. He vaguely remembered telling her that having a little dove cooing in his ear all job was one of the perks, or something like that, in some resort bar one time after a client meet-up. But that had been aeons away in another world, and was even less than a dream here, and what with the hangover…

He went out the back door to the lot, and after stumbling a bit into the blazing daylight, he found himself up on a hill, like he had stepped out of an old horror movie castle, but instead of flying buttresses and machicolations, there was just the flat drywall of a hotel chain.

The land around was an alluvial plain of retail space. Concrete caught and expelled by the flow of the nearby interstate, formed into strip malls and mid-range restaurants. Luke took note of the important details, landmarks, weather, and filed the rest of it, memories that sprang up out from the self, away as trivia. He had been trained to move through the Hardworlds under the belief that it was something between a hallucination and a dream. It worked through a kind of brute persistence that fit some of the old-timers like a glove, but was only just good enough for him. Luckily, he didn’t need much. Even in the Real, he and his thoughts had never been close. What really worked for him, was the work. On a job, in a gunfight, giving chase, he never had time to get all philosophical.

The SUV waited at the edge of the lot, looking down on the sloping plain like a mirror-polished panther watching gazelles pull into drive-thrus. Sam unlocked the center door and he slipped inside.

“There’s our sleepy boy! Did you forget we had work today?” Sam said. Luke had found it best not to acknowledge when she seemed unusually pissed about something, so he went with the “joke about it and hope she gets distracted” strategy.

“Them hotel beds are just too comfy.”

He stopped halfway through climbing over the center seat when he noticed Gradie siting across from him, all black pants and combat boots and an actual trenchcoat over his wrinkled grey shirt.

“Should I stay home from school today, bro?”

“She already made that joke.” Gradie sounded disappointed.

“No I didn’t!” Sam said. “And I wasn’t joking!” “We’re supposed to be low profile!”

While the two of them went at it, Luke moved into the back, where the last row of seats had been taken out, and went through the compartments, pulling things out of bags and stashing them on his person. He got his plate carrier on between his undershirt and his button-up and found his SIG Rattler in a backpack with his mag pouch. As he was going for the pistol case, he noticed Gradie looking at him.

“What guns do we have?” he asked, like a kid asking about cheeseburgers.

“Who said you get guns?” Sam said.

“Oh, I forgot I killed our last target with my bare fucking hands.”

“Here it is.” Luke handed him a holstered Five-seven and a mag pouch. Gradie took it religiously and smiled in a way that set Luke’s hair on end.

“Damn boy, are you in love?” said Sam. Luke started closing everything back up.

“Wait, is my rifle back there? Shouldn’t I get some plates?” Gradie asked. Luke stopped and faced him.

“Nah, just put that on your hip, cover it with your matrix coat, and if any shooting starts get to cover-

“What’s the point of—”

“Look, I’m not trying to box you in, man. Really. But I’m the shooter, alright? If shit gets bad enough where I can’t handle it, you and her need to get moving, cause you’re the backup.”

“I wasn’t the backup last job,” Gradie said, obviously before he had thought about it.

“Yes you were!” Sam cackled.

“Look, really, I’m not putting you down or being a dick or anything,” Luke continued, headache flaring back up. “One bad fight and we all lose, right? Just stay safe, take some shots if you can. I’m not saying don’t shoot. Shit, let em get it if you can, ok? But just be ready to duck out, you know, blend in with the crowd and get away, gotta be smart about –”

He took an aspirin and more whiskey and cracked open an energy drink as he talked.

Gradie could tell he was being serious. Thinking about it, he had never heard him put anyone down without a playful smile on his face. He had started nodding and saying “alright” over and over partway through Luke’s explanation, and felt like shit by the end of it. Like he was a kid who had to be shown why he couldn’t drive until his feet could reach the pedals. Sam made it worse by laughing almost in his face, twisted out of her seat, stretching the seatbelt to its limit.

“How’s he supposed to blend in dressed like that!”

Gradie didn’t look at her. Luke looked at Gradie’s jacket with a wince and started making motions with his hands.

“Yeah, maybe next time don’t, you know, maybe just wear like,”

“Alright, got it.” Gradie turned around in his seat and put the holster on his hip and got his coat around himself. He hoped that by the time he was done pretending to adjust himself, Sam would be turned back around, but she just sat there, slanted over the center console, grinning.

“I know I’m cute, but—" he started.

“Yes, you’re very cute, I’m just messing with you.” She patted his knee. “You look very dapper in your lil’ outfit.”

“Let’s go.” Luke got into the passenger seat and shut the door. Sam spun around, still giggling.

Gradie looked in the back and tried to guess where the assault rifles were stashed.