A projection from an unseen dimension
After at least ten rounds sparked off the cars and a few red-hot tracers scraped the side of the beetle with no effect, EP was convinced the gas can had been full of water. Clever, and it had almost worked. If Cooper had been half a second slower with the door, it might have been game over.
She pushed the thoughts out of her head, and let the map become the world. She knew the battlefield by heart but scanned the map anyway, drawing lines of sight from the PKM’s position to everywhere else. One of her camera drones watched Lindsey, lying in wait next to a big mound of fill dirt, looking like an android designed to kill, all black leather and gunmetal and full-face helmet.
She stared in the direction of the PKM, screened by the dirt mound, and clenched the grip on her ACE every time a round cracked anywhere.
“I’m moving on the gunner,” she hissed. EP tabbed onto her line frantically.
“Wait, I’m trying to put—”
“You got one minute!” Lindsey hissed.
“Fine!” EP said. “Joe, Max, I need you to suppress the MG!”
“Uh, how—” Luke started, between bursts.
“Move West, keep low, get up on one of the buildings or something. Ill tag one for you. Max—”
“I’ll be in position, just call it.” Calmly, in an ‘oh these kids’ tone.
Lindsey scraped the ground with her boot and exhaled like a bull. EP would bet her cut of the payout that she was counting down the 60 seconds in her head.
“Moving out!” Luke shouted, and dashed around the back of the SUV.
“What!?” Gradie yelled, firing at the intersection as he disengaged. There were at least three shooters left in the street, hidden among the windowless cars. They hadn’t approached or even shot at the Beetle since Philip had pinned them down then vanished, but now that Luke was leaving him and Sam to fend for themselves...
“I gotta sneak,” Luke said, suddenly right next to him. “Just keep firing like there’s three of you!”
He flung open the driver’s side center door and ripped open his shirt, exposing the Velcro patch on the front of his plate carrier, and slapped on a full mag pouch. He ejected his mag and loaded a fresh one from the under-seat storage and clapped Gradie on the hip.
“Keep their heads down so they don’t see me!”
Then he was gone, vanishing behind the dumpsters next to the covered parking. Between shots, Gradie heard him sprinting down the slope of Asiatic Jasmine into the road on the other side of the wall behind the covered parking.
Taking Luke’s advice to heart, Gradie put an entire magazine into the cars he had last seen the gunman hide behind. As he ejected the empty mag onto the concrete and pulled a fresh one from his belt pouch, he felt the pouch hang weightless on his hip. Last mag. He would have to grab another pouch out of the—
“Alan! You’ve still got two on your left somewhere!” EP said in his ears, like she had reminded him his fly was undone, then snapped off the line.
Gradie had spent what felt like hours engaging the guys in the street since Philip had engaged the PKM and had completely forgotten Michael had warned him of the two guys going around. Now, down to his last mag, with all his cover between him and the street, and his body exposed to the face of the office building, a chill ran up his back and screwed his jaw closed.
The office was made up of two small brick buildings with a walkway between them. The building closer to the bridge was shaped like three boxes staggered in a zigzag, and the one closer to Gradie and the SUV was a plain rectangle, it’s long end facing the dead-end alley-street Luke had just disappeared down.
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A window at the far end of the zig-zag building, shaded by a tiny spindly oak tree, dropped like a waterfall and a muzzle flashed in the dark as the distinctive report of an AK echoed in the lot and rounds hit the back window of the SUV inches away from Gradie’s face.
“Right!” he yelled, and dropped back behind the driver's side flank of the SUV and tried to get a bead into the window. “The building!”
Sam’s gun rang out again but the fire from the window didn’t stop.
“Keep firing god dammit!” She yelled as the fire from the street rose. Gradie realized, sickeningly, that if the gunman figured out they were down a shooter, they would be in serious trouble. He snapped his rifle up to his shoulder and started to come back around the rear of the SUV. As he did, he saw his reflection in the window. Mask pulled up over his face, black ballistic sunglasses reflecting a warped world, X95 gliding like an arrow, suppressor still smoking.
“This isn’t real. That’s not me.”
His Self had been too preoccupied with the fire fight, too laser-focused on the gunsight and his practiced movements, to give the Spirit much trouble, until Gradie took cover to reload. It had created a strange dichotomy of experiences, a dual-sided orientation of reality that had pushed Gradie to spend as much time up and firing as possible, at least then facing off against enemies he could see and fight.
When behind cover, while reloading or repositioning, the Self had leaped up and tackled him, every time, only falling silent when Gradie threw them both into the crucible of gun fire.
But now, as he was just two steps from getting back into the fight, the Self made a final mad charge, and the two Gradies met in conflict.
The Self’s weapons were simple. Fears, memories of its own simple life, now being ripped to shreds, and the flat dry knowledge that this was illegal, and dangerous, and would hunt him for the rest of his life, and above all, was absolutely pointless.
The Spirit responded, and Gradie saw the Allcity slide beneath him, Michael in his craft, the twins working their magic, Sam looking at him across the Astralarium, EP glaring at him in Michael’s car, Lucy’s impossible eyes dissecting his secrets, and a thousand other Gradies in the clubhouse, all sacrificing their existence for this moment, all giving real blood sweat and tears to learn lessons Philip had driven, somehow, into the fabric of his soul. And finally, a million lightyears away, he saw himself, in a small apartment, watching another Saturday burn by, safe, untouchable, immobile.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Lucy had asked him, and his soul had answered, his Spirit, the real him, and now, it spoke to the Self, reminded him that all he had ever wanted was to step beyond the world he knew, to find a real kind of magic, to believe in something more, and that this was his dream, and all these other shooting fucks were just in it.
Suddenly, the Self’s cries went quiet, and something else rose up from it, a pleading, a demanding, a promise.
“I’ve been waiting for this all my life, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to have it. I’m ready to live. I’m ready to die.”
The Self and the Spirit fused, like two tones matched in pitch, indistinguishable, their volume more than the sum of their parts, and Gradie stepped out from behind the SUV.
The window across the lot flashed, and the air cracked. The bullets missed him just as he imagined them doing so, and he fired into the center of the black window, and was overcome with the supernatural knowledge that he had killed the gunman.
Half a heartbeat of euphoria later, the AK clapped again and proved him wrong.
“Fuck You!” He kept firing, using the flash of the AK to find the shooter in the dark square, until something stopped him. The AK hadn’t flashed in what seemed like ages but had only been enough time for him to fire five times. The shadowy square was silent and still, another eon passed, then suddenly, the office lit up.
Gradie almost fired reflexively, then breathed relief. One of EP’s micro drones was shining a high-powered flashlight into the building. Through his sight, he saw the body of the gunman crumpled next to a cubicle wall about ten feet from the window frame. His relief was short lived.
“That’s why you bring white light! Where’s the other one?” EP hissed, almost to herself, as the micro drone flicked off its light and zipped over the building toward the river. In half a second, Gradie’s brain kicked two thoughts at him.
One, there was another gunman somewhere close, trying to kill him. Two, the wide black window of the rectangle-shaped building to his right, just fifty feet away, would be the absolute worst place for the shooter to be.
He was bringing his weapon around, with that same ‘dragging it through molasses’ feeling he had felt on the bridge, and dropping down into a low crouch, when the glass dropped out. He watched the muzzle flash out of the window for an eternity, helpless, before he got his own gun around and fired. His own suppressed semi-automatic shots seemed weak against the full auto blast of the gunman’s Draco, but the attacker dropped in a heap just a few seconds after the glass finished waterfalling.
Only afterward did Gradie realize how fast it had all happened. What had felt like a slow movement had really been a quick drop down to one knee while snapping his rifle up and firing before the window was done breaking, all while rounds glanced off the SUV above his head.
There was a moment of silence, of only his newfound Spirit Self synchronicity singing in the air, and he noticed the wind rustle a piece of the dead shooter’s shirt.
Then the air cracked open and buzzing rounds sparked off the concrete in front of him, and an instant later the gunfire echoed from the street. The gunman there tasted blood, or sensed an opening, or had seen their comrade die.
Gradie shot up and got behind the SUV and changed mags in a single breath, then stepped around the front end, high on adrenaline and victory.