Generational differences with live ammo
When they got to the storage, Sam pulled into one of the units and the door rolled down automatically. To Gradie, it felt like it had been weeks since they had left the place in separate cars, and he was shocked when, after doing the math in his head, he realized it hadn’t even been a full twenty-four hours.
They went out through another connected unit and followed the outside row to a gap between two of the storage buildings, where they would have formed the corner of a right angle. The space cutting through the corner was zig-zagged, as if the square storage units that should have been there had been plucked out of existence, and the quasi-lightning bolt-shaped concrete space had a liminal feel to it.
Philip unlocked a gate in the metal fence bridging the two buildings and lead them across a backyard inside the L formed by the outside fence of the storage. There was a small house across the yard, with a square brick garage addition almost as large as the original house, and a wide back porch and an outside grilling station that reminded Gradie of the clubhouse. He counted six cameras on the way, and his hazy dream filtered memories of training in the clubhouse and the way the others followed Philip in a near single file told him there were probably explosive traps buried in the yard.
Inside, the house had a firearm infestation. Boxes of ammo sprouted everywhere, and all the tables and shelves bristled with firepower. Philip got a canned coffee out of the fridge and sat down in a recliner in the corner of the living room. He pulled his phone out and started skimming through something.
Sam looked around, disappointed, and sighed.
“So, how long is it gonna take?”
“A couple hours, kid, chill out. This job should be done today anyway.”
“Can’t you push that his bail goes through sooner?”
“That’s not the way my thing works, but it's charming that you think it’s that simple, or that I’m that good.” He held his phone up to his ear.
Luke came out of the kitchen with a handful of energy drinks and nodded at Gradie and Sam.
“PS5 in the back room.”
“Uh, ok. Y’all have fun.” Sam didn’t even look at them. She grabbed some keys off the coffee table.
“Max, which unit is ol’ girl in?”
“Hold on, man.” Philip tapped the screen. “Sit down and wait, you’ll get behind the wheel—”
“I wanna see if they fucked up the handling again, or would you rather I found out while—"
Gradie followed Luke to the back room, where a small couch and some bean bags were set in front of a massive TV that took up the entire room and told a story of burglary just by sitting there. The only other decorations anywhere were the fractured drywall, water stains, and black lines of bars stenciled by the sun through the bent blinds. The low wide shelf on the opposite wall was an armory that promised the TV wouldn’t be stolen a second time.
The hours melted away, the weaklings, unable to keep their structure against the steady procession of thumbs and fingers moving on the controllers like bees at a hive. Time was broken into rounds, beaten further into gunfights, and shattered into 60 frames a second.
The red dash in the corner of the screen, signifying a single round, became five dashes, then ten, then twenty-something, then one, again and again. They were on round ten or so, for about the hundredth time, at that point feeling like a walk to the corner store, when Gradie brought up Sam and the highs and lows of the last 24 hours with her.
“She’s just suspicious of anyone that likes her,” Luke said.
“How do you know? You tried to move on her?”
“Nah, I don’t shit where I eat.”
“I’ve seen you talking to Ashley and April.”
“Yeah, I’ll flirt, you know. Keep things light. Some girls, if you stay quiet and act all monkish, they’ll assume you’re hiding a secret crush. But I don’t let it go beyond that.”
“So, if Ashley walked in that door and threw herself at you—”
“Well,” Luke smiled “I guess I’d have to start shitting then.”
There were a few moments of silence and digital violence, trying to get back into it, but now Sam’s pink face fresh from the shower floated above soft sloping shoulders and goosebumped flesh somewhere in a corner of Gradie’s mind, like a glare coming through a crack in the blinds, and you have to move around till it hits you in the eye again to find it.
“You think she was flirting with me, standing there in the towel?”
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Luke smiled. “Mute me.” He glanced at Gradie.
“Mute me.” A few seconds after he said it, there was a chime in his hears he had never heard before. Of course, she hadn’t taught him that function.
“Yeah, I think she was. But I think she thought you expected her to give it up right there, and she got all offended.”
“Shoulda just smiled or winked or something.”
“Maybe. Gotta remember, for a lot of people this is their afterlife, they treat everyone like props and girls are really sensitive to it, if it’s not their thing,” Luke said, with weary annoyance.
“So—”
“So now she knows you wanna fuck, and the next move is to not deny it when she brings it up, cause she will. If you try and hide it, you’ll be playing catch up forever.”
Something about the way Luke said it reminded Gradie of walking through the backyard. Worrying so much about what Sam thought felt like something he might do in the Real, the opposite of that electric freedom he was trying so hard to preserve.
“I’m not even sure I care,” he said after a while. “Lots of other girls dancing around out there.” Gradie watched the words drop down like paper airplanes that had caught the air wrong.
Luke smiled at him sideways.
“That’s the spirit.”
As the game continued, and time resumed its slippery slide, Gradie floated back into visions of the foreshadowed gunfight and tried to perfect the scenarios that ended with him saving Sam from a storm of gunfire and them making out on a pile of corpses.
Sam shouted something a few rounds later and they walked back to the front room, stretching against the mummification of their spinal cords.
Gradie hadn’t heard a car pull up or even a door open, but there was Michael, standing in the center of the room like a ghost. Philip was still sitting in the chair, almost defiantly so, watching as Sam flipped a coin in the air. It landed on the table and she leaned over to look at it.
“Fuck!”
“I told you, give it a break for a while and come back to it,” Philip said.
“I thought that was the first thing we learned,” Gradie said. Sam flashed him a look then frowned at Philip.
“It’s pointless. When am I ever going to need a coin to land one way up?”
Philip shrugged. “Then forget it.”
“Fuck you!” Sam said, maybe only half joking.
“I mean it. Pushing outcomes isn’t necessarily a good gauge of your skill as a Hardworlder right now,”
Sam flipped it some more, ignoring him, so he continued, louder.
“—And it’s a double-edged sword anyway. If you nail it, you feel more secure in the instability of the Hardworlds, sure, but If you fuck it up five times in a row, you start to lose faith you can effect anything here.”
Sam flipped the coin over in her fingers like it was hiding something from her. Philip stood up and looked at Michael.
“Time to gear up?”
Michael smiled and dumped some tropical skittles into his hands as he walked to the door at the end of the den that used to be a back door before the construction of the brick addition. It beeped and security locks whirred out of place.
Inside was a long garage with the SUV taking up one end of it, clean and menacing, now a grey that reminded Gradie of rain clouds ready to burst. The hatch came up slowly and Luke started loading things from the shelves and the bags nearby into its compartments.
Sam had a locker open and was loading her kit. Gradie looked around and reached for an AR that had a tag reading ‘.300 blk’ hanging from the grip, and Philip barked.
“Won’t be needing that this time around.”
Sam looked at Gradie without a hint of mockery, just a doe-eyed face of pure surprise, that was somehow worse than a mocking grin or something. He looked at Philip, trying to ignore her.
“Why the fuck not?”
“Cause last time we got into some action you ran off and almost got dropped out next to a battery kiosk. This time will be a learning experience for you, just lay low—”
“I’ve had enough learning experiences, thanks.”
Philip smiled as if he had fallen into a trap and stepped up to him.
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I learned if I’m gonna get shot at, I’d rather shoot back with an AR. I’m not going into another fire fight with a fucking pistol, despite how much I’ve earned for this team with one.”
“Earned for this team?” Philip drew the words out like he was pulling them out of Gradie’s bullet wounds.
“Alan,” Michael started, but Philip stopped him with a motion like readying a knifehand strike.
“I’m in charge of handling personnel, so let me handle personnel.”
He stepped closer to Gradie, took a deep breath, and met his gaze like Gradie had a gun on him but he knew he was bulletproof.
“Look, I’m gonna waste my time giving you a dose of reality, out of the kindness of my own heart. Let me tell you how it goes for most Hardworlders, meaning most of the people in this room, and most of the guys you plan on shooting at.”
He pointed a single thick finger at Gradie, and smiled.
“You start out lower than dirt, driving around delivering guns to guys worth even less than those ATV wastoids we saw yesterday. Or maybe you just shoot a few cops while the real ones do the real shit. Then once you can stay in for more than a day, you get to watch a building with a radio for a week, or run more guns, or whatever else someone with a pulse and a body to burn can do. And you do that for a year, at least. Following so far?
“Ok, so I didn’t—” Philip snapped the finger up again and cut him off.
“Now notice I didn’t mention anything about training, because there is none, beyond getting shot by your own guys if you become too much of an inconvenience, and even your mem of the job is property of the corp you sold your ass to, so no frolicking in some Vault worth more than you could earn in ten centuries. Oh, and the pay is shit—”
“I don’t give a fuck about the pay, I told—”
“Yeah you say that, but you’ll need the money if you want to buy any mem to help you prime, cause remember, no vault. And on the off chance you get out from under the org and freelance, you’ll need to pay a Keeper to preserve your Hardworld mem, so you can actually gain some experience, cause otherwise, you’ll never even learn enough to have the opportunity to catch a stray round from the caliber of people that make up this team, much less get close enough to jeopardize them by running out—”
“Well, I was never given a choice to do any of that,” Gradie snapped. He glanced at Michael, who said nothing, watching the two of them like they were all just something on TV, so he returned his gaze to Philip.
“And maybe that’s the way I should have done it, maybe I shouldn’t be here, maybe I should have told this big asshole—” He waved at Michael, who smiled big but stayed quiet “— to go fuck himself with his propaganda videos and his friends who wanna dig through my childhood. But I’m here now, and if you don’t trust me to handle an actual weapon, then cut me lose, or I’ll do it myself.”
Philip had been smiling and moving is jaw the entire time, just waiting to say something, but Gradie was done with it. He put his pistol to his head and set his finger in the trigger guard.