Have you been having strange dreams?

Gradie had been listening to distant gunfire and explosions for half an hour when Holly came out of her office and said in a loud, shaking voice: “Guys, we just got word that there’s a shooter in the other building, and they’re telling us to go into a lockdown, so everyone under the desks. Matt, get the lights—”

The office broke out in a panic. Was this it? Was he really going to die here?

Another explosion thumped outside. It felt like reality was collapsing, and somewhere in the chaos was a message meant for him. The phantom gun. The terrorist attack right next door. It didn’t seem real.

The feeling of having forgotten something became too intense to ignore. He had to do something. So he did what he had been terrified of doing all day. He reached in the bag and grabbed the gun.

This time, it was something more.

FN Five-Seven. Twenty-one rounds of armor-piercing 5.7x28 ready to fucking go. He could feel it fire just looking at it. All at once, the office snapped into place around him. His life jumped off the track it had been chained to since birth and took flight.

Hilarious. He looked around at the panic. Nothing here had anything to do with him. This wasn’t his job. This wasn’t his life. His destiny had fallen out of a cage and landed right in his hand with one in the chamber. He loved the feeling so much he laughed out loud.

In a hidden flap inside the mag pouch, he found the phone and earbuds. There was a moment of silence as he pressed them in. They chimed and sound returned. He pulled up the chat logs and opened the map. Holy shit. He was right there. He sent EP a message.

“In building three. Moving to tunnels. Call me.”

Matt yelled at him as he moved down the aisle.

“Gradie! We’re still in a lockdown! Gradie!” He ran into the break room, humming darkness lit only by the microwave clockfaces, like a transition zone before the rest of his life. He pulled out the Five Seven, got it in the holster then on his hip and put the mag pouch on his belt.

In the dark front lobby, police lights glittered across the lot like magic. A smile spread across his face that he felt he would never lose. He went into the stairwell and waited for EP to call him.

When EP was sick of looking at the smoking lobby, she leaned back in her chair and groaned at the ceiling.

The massive desk in front of her supported three large monitors and was covered with papers, phones, detonators, sensors, empty energy drink cans, and used coffee cups. The attic was decorated to host a Halloween party and smelled of spices and dried marigolds. There was a custom mini-Uzi on the desk next to her coffee and a Saiga leaned up against the bookcase.

All the windows were quadruple thick and bullet resistant. The ground floor and most of the wooded, uninhabited land around was rigged with traps and cameras and her solar-powered drones hovered above in set flight paths, augmenting borrowed satellite feeds.

Now that the noise of violence had died in her headset, the gentle sounds of nature pushed in through the windows. When she was done regretting the failures of the day, she leaned forward with a sigh.

One of the icons on the bottom toolbar was orange. She jumped. How long had it been like that?

“Can you hear me?” EP said in his ears. Memories attached to the voice flooded in, bringing in pieces of another world and another him. It was electrifying. He felt ready for anything.

“Yea. I’m in the stairwells. Where do you want me? I’m assuming shit is getting heavy next door, right?”

“Everyone else is down. They’re moving the target through the tunnels.”

His chest dropped out. Whatever tore through the rest of the team was escorting the target right below him, and his only purpose on earth was to get in front of it. He went down the stairs in a hurry.

“The door is down there somewhere,” EP added.

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“The what?”

“The Door!”

“I thought that was in his head?”

“What? Didn’t you listen—”

“Ok, whatever. Where is it?”

“I don’t know! Somewhere in the tunnels. They took out the cameras.”

Gradie stopped on the landing. The feeling of forgetting something hit him again. It was too much of a coincidence. He had been completely out of it until five minutes ago and now the target was right below him? He had put himself here for a reason, and if he could do that…

He closed his eyes and reached into his memory, and felt it start to open. He pushed it, guided it. It was like light falling on hidden things.

He remembered yesterday, last week, a month ago, looking for anything about the tunnels, and there it was. A few months ago, there had been loud construction noise coming from the basement. He always liked to eat lunch down there if he could, and that day he had seen the back maintenance area blocked off with a temporary fabric wall and a security guard sitting on a fold-out chair.

“The doors in this basement?”

“What? How do you know.”

“I saw some construction a few months ago.”

“You pushed memory?” She sounded surprised. He tried not to let his ego flare up and jumped down the stairs.

“How many guys are with him?”

“Two.” Adrenaline bit his tongue and worked out towards the rest of him.

“Any other advice?” he asked.

“Move fast.”

He pushed the handle on the basement door. Locked. He reached out again and remembered getting into lockpicking a few weeks ago, buying the picks online...

He slid the thin metal tension and rake out of the back of his wallet and raked the lock. After he got the handle down, he waited until he was sure of the silence on the other side, and slipped through the door without breathing.

The basement was dusty and still, lit only by a weak amber glow from a thin viewport in a large metal door. The floor was bare besides the junk pushed up against the walls and thick concrete pillars that reminded him of all the glass and steel stacked above him. It felt like the bottom of the world.

A light flickered in the darkness to his left. A flashlight, pointed by someone coming down the stairs behind another door. The beam caught swarms of dust as it flashed out of the narrow glass pane. He looked around for somewhere to hide.

A few ceiling panels were missing right above him, exposing solid blackness. He ran forward, kicked up the nearest support pillar, and grabbed onto one of the exposed beams. He pulled himself up into the ceiling just as the door opened and more flashlights scanned the room below him. He positioned himself horizontally, with his feet on one beam and his hands on another, and held his breath. The large metal door opened with a sucking sound. Someone stepped out.

“Where the fuck is everyone?”

“Dead, but it’s clear now.” said the lead guard.

“Even Anthony?”

“Yea. For all the shit he talked.”

Gradie held himself steady with his left hand and reached down and grabbed the gun off his hip with his right. They passed below him with the target in the center, cradling an AK patterned shotgun. The guard up front killed his light and approached the door, while the guard in the rear shined his light at the door Gradie had come through. Gradie flicked the safety off, aimed at the side of the target’s head, and stifled a laugh.

The muzzle flash lit up the room like a rave. All three shots blew through the side of the target’s head before the guards reacted. Their flashlight beams crossed below him and he put another two rounds through the front guard’s face. The rear guard aimed up past Gradie’s right arm, where he had seen the muzzle flash, and fired into empty dark air. Gradie let go of the beams and brought his hands together as he fell.

He put three rounds through the guard’s face before he hit the ground and landed in a low squat with a support pillar between him and the guard at the door. It was only a foot wide, but it was enough to give Gradie the second he needed to bring his weapon around while the guard stepped to the side to get a shot. As his head came out from behind the pillar, Gradie shot him under the chin and the bullet came out the crown of his head. He fell over and kicked up a cloud of dust that danced in the crossed beams of the fallen flashlights.

“Fuck!” someone yelled from inside the room. Gradie aimed back at the target and saw him twitching. The Five Seven spat fire four more times and left the target's head and neck a dripping mess.

“He’s already gone, dumbass.” Said the guy inside, stepping out to have a look. His rifle was down at his side.

“With a fucking pistol.” He smiled and shook his head as he unclipped one end of his rifle from the sling and brought the barrel up to his mouth. He dropped in a blast of brain matter and the shot echoed off the back wall of the basement.

Gradie stood there in the silence until it occurred to him that EP had no way to see what happened.

“You got any cameras in this room?”

“No. Hold up your phone.” Her voice shook.

He did and the camera and flashlight came on by themselves. He took a wide triumphant pan of the bodies, lingering on the target's crumpled head.

“Holy shit. You did it.”

“Now what?”

“Go to sleep. Or eat a bullet. Job’s over.” She clicked off the line. Not even a ‘way to go’.

He stepped over the bodies and went through the metal door. It was a small room that smelled like weed and rust and there was a man dead asleep on the couch. In the far wall was another door, plain wood laminate, faux brass handle. Just like any other office door. For no reason he could understand, Gradie opened it.

It was a long hallway, with dull carpet and flickering fluorescent light that came on automatically. There was a wide tunnel on the other end, unlit, that ran perpendicular to the hallway, and looked like a forgotten arm of the pedestrian tunnels that connected the office parks. It felt like the edge of the world, and the beginning of another one.

He slammed the door shut. Something about it terrified him, and he had other things to do.

Inside the fridge, he found a vial of Propofol and some syringes. He got the vein easily. In a few breaths, the world folded in on itself, and something else grew out of the pieces.

Across the highway, a woman in handcuffs fell asleep in the back of a cop car, and miles away, a wanted scammer took sedatives with her wine and laid down in an attic.