It’s getting away with it that’s the trick

An SUV shot off the bridge and barreled towards the intersection under a hail of red tracers, shedding chunks of tempered glass and fragments of the grill. Its speed dropped suddenly and the engine made a squealing, grinding sound that rattled Grade worse than the gunfire. It swerved sharply and crashed into the side of the far office building as its tires exploded and the last of its window glass dusted down to the concrete.

Gradie emptied his magazine into the black square that had once been the windshield and reloaded without taking his eyes off it, but it wasn’t showing any signs of life. As his mind caught up with him, he realized he had seen another car, a small grey sedan, swerve off the bridge in the opposite direction and disappear down the berm.

“Shit. I think—”

Sam put the SUV in gear and revved the engine.

“Hurry the fuck up!” she yelled, her voice going all squeaky in a way that made him smile, despite the circumstances, as he dove into the center seat. Sam pealed out of the lot before he had the door closed.

“You want to stick around and take on another squad by yourself?” She yelled back as she took a sharp left turn that threw him off the seat. “Boss says move, fucking move!”

“I’m gonna have to shoot them later anyway!” he said from the floor.

“No you won’t,” Michael said. “Joey, pop a smoke on that office building when you get in. We need to move the fuck out.” The Mercedes roared under his calm voice.

Sam made a U-turn and screeched to a stop in the middle of the street as Luke sprinted out from a side alley. Gradie kicked the center door open and Luke jumped inside.

“All right, you studs gonna cover me while I smoke these guys out?” He grabbed something out of one of the storage spaces as the SUV roared towards the intersection.

The gunmen around the beetle opened fire on the SUV, but before they could get more than a few shots on the windshield, the PKM roared on the ramp. Strange green lights flashed among the cars, glowing like rays from heaven in the smoke. The red tracers found their way to the targets marked by EPs drones and it all looked like Christmas.

“Get em girl!” Luke growled.

By the time the SUV pulled up to the intersection, the last gunman around the beetle had been cut down. There was a single, eerie moment of silence, a humming softness with sirens at the edges, between the time Lindsey stopped shooting, and the moment the shooters in the office building opened fire.

“Cover me!” Luke said, as the familiar hailstorm sound of rounds hitting the windows kicked up again. He kicked the door controls and hopped out with a grenade launcher in hand.

Sam had parked at the intersection with the SUV facing the bridge and the passenger side towards the office building. The Mercedes rocked to a stop on the other side of the Beetle and Philip was already out firing. Gradie followed Luke out the driver’s side center door and opened fire over the hood, as Luke peeked around the rear end and shot the grenade with a ‘chunk’. A thick grey smoke spread out across the parking lot as Lindsey emptied the PKM into the office, giving the glowing crimson bolts a misty backdrop.

“Let’s go!” Michael yelled, sing song-ish. Hearing his voice outside the earbuds was jarring, but it was nothing compared to watching him walk in long relaxed strides, like he was immune to bullets, towards what was left of the Beetle.

They had got to it just in time. The windshield was completely white and half the paint was gone. Everything from the headlights to the tires to the door handles had been shredded by the PKM in the machine gunner’s attempt to scare them into doing something stupid, and a black hole the size of a tennis ball near the top of the windshield testified to a final desperation.

Michael opened the rear driver’s side door with his back to the office buildings and pulled Celeste out with one hand like she was weightless. Cooper came after her, attached at the wrist and trying to shield her by waving his arm. Michael swung them around and put his hands on their backs and marched them to the Mercedes. At two heads taller than them, he looked like an angry parent picking up his kids from school.

“Let’s fucking go!” Sam yelled and Gradie realized he had been staring. After all the struggle to get to them, he had half expected a stray bullet to put them down at the last second. He threw himself back in the SUV and slammed the door. Sam whipped the SUV around and gave the V8 every bit of pedal she had. Before they had gone fifty feet, the sound of a police chopper rose faintly from the south.

“Zoey, you got that chopper?” Sam asked.

“I’ve got his feed,” EP said. “He’s watching the smoke.”

The Mercedes turned off the main road ahead of them and pulled into an overflow parking lot for the Bazaar ahead. Within seconds it was just one car amongst a hundred, its bullet mangled side hidden from the street. Lindsey’s bike rumbled somewhere in the construction zone and faded away.

“Zoey, get our friends to shoot at a drone if you can,” said Philip. “Kate and friends, pull into the Bazaar and ghost. Zoey can guide the wagon after you bail. The swap car is in the back left lot.”

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“Just one?” Sam asked.

“Oh, sorry, next time I’ll have a couple limos waiting.”

“Oh hell yeah!”

He dropped off the line.

The Bazaar was up on the right, past the train tracks that ran across the street and under the rising metal ramp. The parking lot out front, running parallel to the road, was packed with the Saturday crowd. Luke had already gotten his plate carrier and ammo pouches off and was in the process of pulling a wrinkled old Volcom hoodie out of a duffel bag full of clothes. Gradie tried to claw off his own gear and fell over on his side as Sam swerved to the right.

“Take your phone and pistol, leave everything else!” she shouted. Gradie sighed at his X95 on the floorboard and pulled on a faded Nightwish sweatshirt.

“Here.” Luke handed him a ball cap with a bottle opener in the brim. “And ditch the shades.”

Gradie let his ballistic sunglasses, with the fresh notch from the ricochet, fall to the ground next to his X95. It looked like the real him had vanished in smoke and left only two artifacts behind.

“Excuse me!” Sam climbed over the seat, and the SUV kept going as she shed her plate carrier, mask, and top all in one go. After she had pulled on a knit sweater and a beanie and finished with a pair of circle-rimmed sunglasses, even Gradie had to wonder if she had ever been involved in a shootout.

“Get out and split up,” EP said. “Remember the drill.” The word “drill” kicked up flashes of dream-blurred romps through a half-built housing division in Gradie’s head.

The SUV stopped suddenly in a patch of dirt and gravel just off the train tracks, with two parked vans and a transformer screening them from the Bazaar and the main lot. Gradie went out the driver’s side center doors while Sam and Luke dissolved out the others.

“Let the SUV go for a bit,” EP said. The SUV drove ahead on its own and revved its engine as it moved down the main row of the parking lot, and Gradie felt a tang of loss watching the big friendly storm cloud, that had been his only salvation from a hail of bullets for what felt like an hour, roll off into the sunset.

Luke was already nowhere to be seen and Sam’s hat bobbed over the brush as she marched across a storm drain creek to his right. The sirens were raging out somewhere across the river and the chopper sounded like it was right overhead. He stomped towards the lot with his head down.

As he came out from behind a van, the SUV’s horn started blaring, drawing the attention of the crowd that had gathered in the main lot. Gradie noticed quite a few of them had handguns out and a few even had short ARs, probably freshly pulled out of their vehicles, and vaguely remembered the twins saying something about jobs in Texas carrying a higher fee.

“How’s that bird doing?” Luke said in his ear.

“Still watching our friends,” EP said. “I bricked their sedan so they’re trying to find a car with the keys still in it.”

“Fuck,” Gradie hissed, feeling the absence of his rifle and armor.

“Oh God, relax,” EP said. “Boss is already on the road, and they don’t know what you look like, even if they were going to come looking, which they aren’t. They’re just trying to get out and stay in the game.”

“Hard parts over man,” Luke said.

Gradie tried to believe it. But if it was over, where would he be tonight? And who would he be? The idea of returning to the Otherworld and leaving this self to continue on without him, forever, seemed paradoxically both unpleasant and impossible.

He tried to remember what it had felt like there, but the memory was as hazy as a stale dream. He looked for a sign, somewhere in memory, of what it would be like to look back on this world from there, but found only confusion. He was dimly aware of the fact that his Selves faded like vapor the moment he stepped back into the Otherworld, and though it had never concerned him before, the idea seemed a bitter tragedy now.

He shook himself away from thoughts of identity and focused on the electric adrenaline still pumping through him. Walking through the rows of tables, trailers, and wooden stalls, listening to the sounds of people moving and speaking and the smells of the street food all bubbling beneath the sheet metal roof, felt like a Saturday out. But at the edge of it, all the sirens kept blaring and some of the voices around him were panicked and questioning.

Still, he felt powerful, untouchable. Everything that had brought him here was worth it. To be among the living, but beyond them. To be part of the world, but above it. This was everything he had hoped the Hardworlds could be.

Being a ghost, it turned out, was kind of easy. Most of the stalls were abandoned and most of the bazaar goers were clustered at the edge of the lot, watching. Of the few left behind, no one paid him any attention anyway, and it occurred to him, finally, that he probably looked like the last person on earth to have done what he just did. The hardest part was keeping the smile off his face.

He came out of the Bazaar onto a thin alley that ran alongside it. Cars and trailers were crammed in a line against a chain link fence, and just beyond it the ground rose into a grassy berm that guarded against the river and gave the strip of gravel that familiar, liminal feel. Sirens and the sound of a second helicopter skipped off the top of the berm and bounced over his head. Untouchable.

“I see you,” Sam said in his ear. A dark blue hatchback came down the row from the back of the lot. Luke was already in the passenger seat, smoking out the window. Gradie got in the back and Sam turned down the music.

“We’re getting some food,” she said, as if shootouts only happened in movies. “Do you have any preferences?”

“Fuck no. I could eat anything. Can I get a cigarette?”

Luke smiled and handed him the pack with the lighter on top. Sam complained loudly about the driver in a lifted dodge ram not letting her into the stream of cars fleeing out of the lot. Luke waved through the windshield at the driver in the car behind the truck and they braked and let them through. Sam and Luke waved thanks while Gradie lit the cigarette.

By the time he had blown all the smoke out the window and handed Luke the pack and lighter back, it already felt like another world. The day was giving way to soft evening, and the sun was sliding out toward the horizon like a thing rolling off the edge of a slick dome. The night gathering at the edges, unseen, felt as likely to hold violence as the sun was to bounce back and blaze overhead.

Sam and Luke bartered restaurants like old friends. The constant police sirens had become background noise, screaming at someone else that Gradie would never meet. But, the bridge was blocked off and glittering in red and blue, so they followed the traffic out of the lot as it crossed over the road that rose into the half-built ramp to their left, now like the ruin of an old warship.

The detour took them and a hundred other cars through an industrial zone of warehouses and small factories, and during his last quiet drag on the cigarette, he glanced at the clock in the dash and almost choked on the smoke. It had been less than ten minutes since he had been sitting in the SUV with his X95 between his knees, watching their twelve-o clock, waiting for all hell to break loose.

A helicopter swooped by overhead, then died into distant silence. Gradie joined in the talk of BBQ versus Mexican and tried to stop seeing muzzle flash every time the sun flashed off a windowpane.