In between, forgotten places

The dark office smelled like microwaved Styrofoam and long-gone fast-food oils. The door slammed closed, leaving them in solid darkness until Sam flicked on the lights. It was half waiting room half break room, with two flimsy tables, a microwave, and a glass pane facing into the security office, in which their reflections loomed darkly.

Lindsey shoved a table out of her way and threw open the inside door. As they walked out onto the main floor, a motion sensor flipped on the warehouse lights. Philip threw out two small drones the size of coasters and they buzzed up and out across the ceiling, tripping other sensors and lighting the rest of the warehouse. Gradie felt like he was watching it all come into existence.

It was devoid of all human aesthetics. Wherever he looked, lines of metal, in the form of pillars and beams and shelves, mixed with cardboard and concrete in an even distribution of unevenness. It was like a landscape designed to sicken. Only things without eyes, or those blinded by a kind of selective vision evolved from seeing it daily could handle it. Plastic and cardboard and metal and dust and paper and industrial orange and fluorescence. All the ingredients of the world outside, ground up into pieces, assembled here, wrong.

Gradie thought of those images meant to simulate what a person sees when having a stroke. This was like that, but all the more unsettling because the mind did, eventually, find a form. The backrooms of America, the unseen ugly thing hidden beneath it all, everywhere, not even a skeleton, more like insulation, itself subject to some other greater overarching structure.

He didn’t have time to find out why it disturbed him so much.

The bay door flew up with a musical sound, like as sting in a film score meant to express anticipation. Sam came out of nowhere on a forklift and moved a pallet with a six-foot-tall container on it out onto the staging area. Philip broke off the plastic and opened a door in the front of the strange, unfolding crate.

“Alan, get the fuck over here.”

He tossed a duffel bag on the ground, with a set of black coveralls hanging out of it. Gradie picked up the coveralls and tried to step into them. Luke was already in his boxers, pulling another kit on. Phillip shook his head at Gradie.

“God damn, didn’t the twins show you the kit? Strip down and get all that shit on, now!”

By the time Gradie got his shoes off, Luke was finished. Dark coveralls in what could only be described as “warehouse camo print”, gloves, boots, plate carrier, helmet with four-tube night vision, and a strange face mask.

“Are you going to literally let them catch you with your pants down?” Philip snapped as Gradie stared at Luke.

“Why couldn’t I just keep my clothes on if I’m going to be digging through boxes anyway?” Gradie had meant it sarcastically, but Philip was in no mood.

“Because the kit is IR and fire resistant. Because your plastic mall goth boots might melt to the concrete. Because your colors stand out. And because using common sense is my job, apparently, and your job is to do as your told.”

Sam zipped by with another pallet, apparently having changed somewhere out of sight, and Lindsey zoomed out of the trailer on a Honda Grom, also in full kit, with her suppressed Galil slung over her back and a duffle bag over her shoulder.

Gradie pulled over his coveralls while Luke tore into the rest of the strange container, which unfolded on hinges into four pieces. Guns, magazines, grenades, and brass glittered inside various compartments. Still, silent, but Gradie imagined the noise, the destruction, waiting inside it all, and felt his heart rev up.

He dug into the rest of his kit, infrared lasers and illuminators, his own helmet and NVGs equipped with thermal overlay, eye protection, plate carriers, and a myriad of other things, and got them on with a little help from Luke. Eventually, he was encased in a shell of battle readiness that belied his own fears. Luke showed him how to adjust straps and position pouches to minimize noise, then asked him, with a meaningful smile,

“Anybody ever teach you how to move silently?”

Gradie exhaled and cast back with memory. It was rough at first, crunchy, like a dried thing moving for the first time in days, but eventually, the Spirit pushed the Self into a corner and he remembered. Forest walks, thousand-dollar classes, advice from friends of friends, given for free, hunting trips, airsoft excursions, sneaking up on a fuck buddy spotted in a grocery store, her bursting glowing smile.

“Yep.”

Luke nodded and patted him on the back, but he couldn’t understand why. He was almost certain he hadn’t even done anything.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Got something special cooked up for this,” said EP, sounding more like she was talking to herself than anyone else. “I synced some pressure pads with my drones. If you go white, they’ll hit the target with a twenty-thousand-lumen light. Should give you some element of surprise if you need it.”

“I like it,” said Philip.

“I don’t know how much surprise I’ll need with this.” Luke smiled and lifted an MG3 out of a case, and Gradie got flashbacks of middle school days playing the second Call of Duty.

“I’m gonna have these dudes dancing like it's D-Day.”

“Please don’t,” Lindsey sighed. “As I recall the other guys won that one.”

Sam scowled at the MG3.

“Please tell me you have something else for me Max. If I shoot one of those I’ll go flying across the damn warehouse.”

“Left side. Grey tote.” Philip hefted his own LMG, a Knights Armament AMG in 7.62x51 with 150 rounds in its ammo container and a suppressor already attached, out of the crate followed by a canvas bag of ammo. Sam opened the grey tote and found an Ultimax 100 Mk4/5 Para with the 10.5 in barrel, an ultra-light, low-recoil LMG from Singapore. With the 100-round drum mag and angled foregrip, it looked like a modern-day Tommy gun.

“Cute.” She slung it over her shoulder and picked up its ammo bag. “What we got left?”

Philip shouldered his MG and looked at the trailer.

“Crack open Zoey’s done crate and move that big barrier pallet down to the recycling bay door. There’s a ramp outside of it. Then get to work blocking off doors and setting up MG positions. After that, get to moving as much off the racks as you can to give everyone a good line of sight. Why are you still here?”

Gradie was waiting to dig out a weapon of his own. “Where’s my gun?”

“Oh shit. Here.” Luke handed him a backpack that felt like it was full of bricks. Inside was another X95 and a loaded mag pouch, some smoke grenades, and a box cutter.

Philip pointed in the direction of the returns area.

“Get that on and start working on those pallets. Now!”

Gradie started putting the mag pouch on.

“Gear up while you walk!” Philip hissed and the echoes backed him up from down the rows. Gradie took off across the staging area as a swarm of drones buzzed out of the trailer.

It came on like an undertow. Like driving along and suddenly feeling your car die beneath you; thoughtless highway driving turned suddenly into a mindful cataloging of costs and possible outcomes.

Her Self was weighing on her. Maybe she shouldn’t have picked a grocery store. It brought on memories. Real memories.

She remembered walking down the aisles. The colored boxes flashing like taunts, the sugar singing out to her in rainbow logos. Her mother somewhere near the produce, the real food, as she called it, surely speaking to the vegetables and herself in Russian, scolding them both for an unknown failing.

Outside, beyond the bolted doors and camera palisades, just past the dusty employee hallway that lay quiet and ready as a castle’s lists, something pushed into the store.

It was the world. A great darkness moving across the bare cement, down the empty aisles and freezers, trying to push her out. Push them all out. It knew they should not be there, and it would either push them out or swallow them, dropping them out and trapping them forever.

Despite this, she was nested into the world. She was in the police systems, the traffic cameras, the company intranet, the satellite feeds, the emergency disaster lines and sensors, left ignored and unused (these gave her the sensation of travelling down old sewer systems, now barely moist, waiting for the rush of water at any moment), in the phones of almost everyone in the district, her botnets sleeping, her eyes expanded. She was like a specimen held between mesh, touching everything, stretching out, defined by what held her.

It was quiet. The police were in wait mode. They had raided the homes of Philip’s associates, but had gotten no closer to touching ‘Max’ than if they had clipped his fingernail. Just there, but inert. Cooper was dead, and with their target dead, whatever shadowy criminal syndicate had attacked was now surely on the retreat, wiping down doorknobs, executing the impotent and the unnecessary, right?

The two cops on leave had disappeared off the face of the earth. Unmarried, their mothers and cousins and co-workers sent texts that went unanswered, their phones turned off, banks untouched.

Michael had spoken to her of the gut feeling, the smell he had said, of Hardworlders in action, that a good Overlord could spot. It had stung her, though he hadn’t meant it to. Because she had never experienced it. He had pointed out the signs, given her names of men with suspicious backgrounds, but how he picked those out of the thousands with the same kind of backgrounds, she couldn’t tell, and he had no time to tell her. “Watch the highways,” he had told her, like a child told to dump potato peels in the trash. Be sure to get them all!

She had enough things to do, anyway, she told herself. But the drones found their spots on the warehouse roofs and hooked onto the ceiling beams of the DC with ease, her Self having done this countless times, apparently, and Lindsey, when passed control of the bomb drones and other sensors and explosives, had got the perimeter defenses set up, so that now EP could only sit back, while others planted charges and trips she had built, and prepared to take on gunfire she would never even hear, and watch the highways.

The phone call broke in like a ghost. It came in on the extension for a desk near the returns section. It was a regular cell number, with a name and identity attached to it with its own mundane history. She was sure, somehow, that if she went looking for the person her databanks told her had been using the phone for three years, she would never find them, because they didn’t exist.

The hairs went up on the back of her neck. She focused on the feeling, tried to memorize it. This is what Hardworlders feel like.

“Call coming into the DC.”

“Anyone near?” Michael said.

“Alan is.”

A pause. Another ring ruptured the silence. EP breathed as if throwing punches.

“Have him answer it. See if you can track them.”

“What?”

“They already know it’s here, or they wouldn’t be calling. Trust me.”

EP pressed her lips together and nodded to no one. Wouldn’t it be better to let them wonder if anyone was here? How could they know?

How she wished for just a fraction of Michael's senses.

“Alan. Go answer that phone.”