“Well…” said Mr. Crane. “Fuck.”

“Mm,” I replied, forehead pressed against the wood of his desk.

His office was fairly roomy, with two filing cabinets on the corners behind and to the sides of his desk, a nice carpet under said mahogany desk, a single ceiling fan, and a shelf with a typical box-like TV on top of it. In front of the desk were two chairs, one padded and comfortable and the other had nails sticking out of joints and uneven boards making up the seat.

Which chair you sat on depended on how much Crane liked you.

Proud to say I’ve always sat on the cushy chair.

I’d gone to his business as soon as Will had given me the orders, and I had just finished explaining.

That saying ‘well… fuck’ was the best he could come up with was a tad worrying.

“... okay,” I heard him say, before he repeated more firmly, “Okay. No more moping around. Chin up, DeRose.”

I begrudgingly raised my chin and looked at him as he stood up and started to pace around the room.

Michael Crane was a tall, spindly black man whose hair was more white than black by then, with a constant five-o’clock shadow and a collection of scars upon his knuckles. He wore round wireframe glasses and was usually seen in an oversized button-up shirt.

His forearms had black scales tattooed all across, his fingers were tattooed completely black, and I’d caught glimpses of other tattoos all across his body. The mark of real Blackfish soldiers.

The elite ranger to my child soldier.

In my eyes, he was one of the most trustworthy people in the world, despite my knowledge that he’d killed and betrayed more than a few friends in his past.

“Who’s the target?” he asked..

“Some guy named Jake.”

“You don’t know his last name?”

“No, but he told me what he’s wearing today, where I can find him and who he’s with,” I shrugged.

“... I don’t like this,” he muttered, “This smells like someone fucking up.”

“Yeah, me,” I said. “I fucked up by not telling him no in the spot.”

“No, that… that was the right move,” Crane assured me as he kept pacing. “If you said no, someone might’ve looked into whether or not you’d proven yourself. Then you could’ve been forced to do it, or just killed outright.”

“Hrm,” I grumbled.

“... I can get you out of this,” Crane said, stopping his pacing behind me. I didn’t turn to look at him, but I felt how he placed his hands on my shoulders. “I… you’ll probably have to walk out of the game. For good. But I can get you out of this.”

My teeth clenched as I thought, and I leaned forward to get out of Crane’s grip. My heel started tapping rapidly against the floor and a low hum escaped me.

If I left the game, I wouldn’t be able to help mom anymore. I’d lose… all the respect the other kids at school gave me and John after it got out that I was with a gang. And… that dream. The possibility of moving mom to a suburb like the one I’d seen earlier.

The cab driver had been right. That was what it was all about. I could see it, I wanted it so desperately. Unbroken windows, kindly neighbors… paradise on earth.

And what would it cost me?

Murder. A permanent stain on my soul.

Could I do it? Of course I could, it was just a movement of the hand and a pull of the finger.

But could I do that much? It didn’t sound difficult, but… everything I’d been taught by family and church said that murder was the ultimate sin.

Then again, everything I’d been taught by gangs and streets said that murder was just part of the game.

Who did I believe? Did it even matter?

I’d learnt pretty quickly that belief didn’t matter as much when compared with facts. Father Watterson had said that selling coke and dope made a man a monster, but doing just that had been what allowed mom to keep us fed, dressed and housed for month after month for a year.

… I’d known that I couldn’t escape it forever. On some level, I’d always known. Or maybe that was just a justification in the moment.

But… I knew what the cost of continuing down my path was.

And I wanted the reward at the end too badly to give up now.

So then…

I stopped tapping my heel. I stopped the distressed humming.

I stood up, turned around and said, “No.”

“No?”

“No, you won’t get me out of this,” I said. “I… I’ll do it.”

“... Luke, this isn’t a joke,” he said, looking down at me. “If you do this, you’re in for good. I don’t think I’ll be able to get you out anymore.”

“I know,” I said, annoyed at the perceived condescension. “But… there’s too much to gain. Like you said; what I get versus what I lose.”

Crane closed his eyes and sighed with annoyance. “You know, I don’t remember the shit I say half as well as you do.”

“Yeah, that really bothers me,” I said.

It really did. It felt like what people said mattered more to me than to them, which was just weird and bad if you asked me.

Crane looked at me for a while, his expression unreadable to me. Perhaps sadness? Could have been anger. Could’ve been anything. Even if I’d been better at reading people, Crane was inscrutable.

After a moment of contemplation, he walked back around the desk, sat down and looked at me..

“Have you thought about how you’re going to do it?”

=]O[=

The night was still. The streets were unusually empty in the area we were driving into, the stillness of the night interrupted only by the grinding of wheels on concrete and the occasional other car.

For a moment of brief delusion, I imagined that the world was holding its breath to see me ruin my soul.

I was sitting in the back seat of Crane’s car, head leaning against the window. For a while the radio had been on, playing some of that old-fashioned soul Crane liked so much before I asked him to turn it off. He’d complied.

It wasn’t more than a few minutes before we found Jake.

Before we did, the wait seemed to stretch on forever. Upon seeing him, I felt like I hadn’t had enough time to prepare myself mentally.

“Is that him?” asked Crane, still driving slowly.

I considered lying. I looked at the trio, as if trying to confirm it.

Jake was a tall black teenager with a shaved head, and at the moment he’d been wearing an orange hoodie.

I couldn’t see his face so I couldn’t see if he had the big-ass nose Will had assured me he had, but his company confirmed his identity: an asian kid in a green shirt and a samoyed furry, the latter of which was plenty rare in Santo Ataúd.

My mom had tried to put off explaining where furries came from until I was a teenager.

Unfortunately, the company of careless teenagers at work had meant that I’d quickly learnt that way back when cogs had started showing up, some of them had had fetishes that didn’t match reality, so they decided to use the wild amounts of funding that were being thrown their way flip off Mother Nature and bring certain things to life.

Then I’d asked what fetishes were, because I’d been eight at the time.

After the explanation I felt bad about furries being born as a race just because people were horny.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Then I expressed this feeling to my coworkers. They then explained that technically, we were all born ‘cause people got horny.

I stopped feeling so bad for furries.

In any case, most furries lived with nomad tribes outside the city-states, as a lot of people associated them with Dark Science, but occasionally they settled in somewhere and dealt with public opinion one day at a time.

Santo Ataúd was particularly hostile towards them, especially among the older generation of the immigrant population, since they’d traveled across more than ten thousand kilometers of nuclear winter, escaped experiments and other wonders of Dark Science to get to Third York from the city-state of Tierra de Fuego.

Which was a long way to say that no, there was no chance this was some other samoyed furry hanging out with an asian guy in a green shirt and a black guy in an orange hoodie.

I considered lying to Crane.

“Yeah, that’s him.”

He turned a corner, drove halfway down the block and stopped the car. I pulled on the handle and opened the door just a tad, turning on the overhead light before pausing, swallowing thickly with the taste of bile on my tongue.

Crane watched me, then he reached over and closed the door, muttering about a waste of electricity.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

He watched me some more, opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again.

After a while, he said, “I’ll drive around and pick you up a few blocks to the right from that street–” he gestured in the direction he’d go “–and from there we drive you home. Okay?”

“... okay.”

“... you got a mask with you?” he asked.

I shook my head.

He tsked in frustration, “Me neither. Then… you should probably take care of witnesses.”

I closed my eyes, breathed in, then nodded.

He raised a hand, let it hang there awkwardly for a moment, then laid it down on my shoulder.

Instead of responding, I opened the door and walked back up the block.

The stillness of the night stood out to me again. I passed next to a 24-Hour Gym and imagined someone stepping out and yelling for me to stop, but I walked past it without incident.

I turned the corner. They were still there.

As I approached, more of their conversation became apparent to me, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. There was a buzzing in my ears as I walked closer, head down, hood on and hands in the pockets of my huge hoodie.

I looked at my feet as I walked. Due to a trick of perspective, I could imagine that I was turning the world with every step.

Eventually, that awful orange hoodie entered the corner of my vision, and I stopped walking.

I looked up and found them still talking to each other, not paying me any mind. I knew that wouldn’t last.

I expected myself to move slowly, but there was a casual ease to reaching under and behind my hoodie to grab the pistol.

The asian teen looked at me and his eyes widened as I pulled out the gun, but he failed to say a word before I aimed and pulled the trigger.

It was really that simple. It didn’t take a lot of force to pull a trigger, and a bullet moves so fast that it’s easy to think that shooting someone point-blank is the same as pressing an instant death button.

I aimed the gun up, pulled the trigger and suddenly Jake was falling forward, his blood coating the street sign he’d been leaning against, my face, and the faces of his friends.

There was a moment of stillness as the thunderous gunshot rang out throughout the street.

The human brain, on average, processes information and decides on action in about one hundred and twenty milliseconds.

If you were trying to hit a moving target with a dart, for example, you would have to aim to where the target is going to be because you cannot react in time to hit it, even accounting for the velocity of the dart.

After seeing someone’s brain suddenly attain flight in front of you, it might take you more than one hundred and twenty milliseconds to react, on account of shock and confusion.

The asian teen had seen me pull out the gun, so he was a bit less confused. He started running first, before Jake’s body even hit the ground.

The samoyed furry turned to watch his friend go, eyes wide and shocked with incomprehension while I aimed once more. He was running in a straight line, and I’d been taught that the best way to make sure someone dropped was to aim for the chest, where basically everything important was.

The furry realized his mistake and started running at the same time I pulled the trigger a second time. At a distance I couldn’t say exactly what part of his chest I hit, but I was pretty sure I’d put a hole in the asian teen’s lung, so I switched my focus to the anthropomorphic samoyed.

He was running in zig zags, trying to be harder to hit than his friends.

If you’re trying to hit a moving target with a gun, you should aim to where the target is going to be because you cannot react in time to hit it, even with bullets moving at around three thousand kilometers per hour.

Expanding on this, the best way to conserve ammo on firing at a moving target is to make it stop moving. Now that I’m older and debatably wiser, I would’ve just aimed for the chest and gone for immobilizing pain.

Instead, it was with this rationale that I watched myself aim at the height of his leg and wait until he was heading to where I aimed before I pulled the trigger.

The bullet went through his leg and he fell with a scream, before starting to crawl away.

I walked in his direction.

I was… I felt the same as I’d ever felt. I felt just… normal?

Like I wasn’t doing anything odd. Like I was watching someone else go through the motions. Like it was my birthday and my mom had taken me to watch a movie. In my mind, I was totally disassociated from what I was doing, even as I walked up next to the samoyed furry and aimed down vertically. Even as I noticed that he’d cracked his fingernails and fingertips crawling away. Even as he closed his eyes and whimpered before I pulled the trigger.

I stood there for a moment, just watching the cooling body with a sort of morbid fascination, before I walked out with a lack of fanfare that surprised me.

I turned the corner, went down the street, and walked up to Crane’s car. He opened the passenger seat’s door, I got in, and we drove away.

=]O[=

“Come on,” he said, getting out of the car.

I watched him with wide eyes, then stepped out and followed. My hands trembled slightly on the handle.

Crane led me into a corner store, which only had a few people inside, shuffling around under the fluorescent white light bulbs. A few eyes tracked us, including the ones belonging to the man behind the counter.

Crane ignored them all, gesturing for me to come closer and putting a hand behind my back to guide me towards the little freezer where they kept the ice cream.

“Pick something,” Crane ordered, in a low but firm whisper, hand still on my back.

Usually I dislike being touched, but I allowed the contact as I looked before opening the screen door and pulling out a chocolate-covered cream popsicle.

“That it?” Crane asked. When I nodded, he again steered me back towards the counter.

We stood in line for a while, still getting looks from other customers, until we got to the front of it.

Crane put down the packaged ice cream, then pointed and asked for a pack of cigarettes and one of those little plastic bottles of cheap whiskey.

After paying for everything, Crane led me back to the car. He put the tiny plastic bottle between us, the ice cream on the dashboard in front of me, and a single cigarette in his lips before starting the car.

We drove wordlessly before he, without turning his head, took the bottle and handed it to me.

I hesitated for a moment, before taking it, twisting off the cap and bringing the bottle up to my nose.

I gave a sniff then made a face at the horrid smell.

“Don’t bother tasting it,” Crane advised. “Hold your nose if you gotta, just down a swig as fast as you can.”

I swallowed nervously, before putting the bottle to my lips and knocking it back for a pretty big gulp. I only managed to get half of it down before I choked, and I spent a couple of agonizing moments with my mouth full of some of the worst stuff I’d ever tasted.

Crane, the unhelpful bastard, chuckled at me while I struggled to swallow what was left. He called out that spitters are quitters, which I didn’t get what that was a reference to, but Mamá DeRose hadn’t raised a quitter, so I forced the rest of the swig down.

I gasped for air once my mouth was free, then smacked Crane’s shoulder as he kept laughing.

“Wash it down with the ice cream,” he advised as he fished a lighter out of his pocket. “Before it melts.”

I watched him for a moment, then asked, “Can I try that?”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, flame held to the tip of his cigarette.

“Try what?” he asked out of the corner of his mouth.

I pointed at his cigarette.

He frowned as he turned off the lighter, seeming like he was going to say no, but then he sighed out a cloud of smoke, pulled it out of his mouth and offered it to me with two fingers.

I took it hesitantly. Pretty much everyone I knew smoked, but mom had always advised not to pick up the habit, hypocritically.

“It won’t taste much better than the drink,” he warned, even as he reached for said bottle.

I handed it over without looking and put the cigarette to my lips, taking a deep drag then pulling it out of my lips. I hadn’t stopped breathing in when I did so, and the air forced the smoke deeper into my lungs, making them ache and making me cough up a storm.

My lungs burnt with tobacco smoke, the smoke made my eyes water, and there was the lightest feeling in my veins as the nicotine worked through my system.

Crane didn’t laugh this time, just looking at me out of the corner of his eyes with something even I recognized was sadness.

I breathed pure air for a few moments, before taking another, smaller drag from the cigarette. It wasn’t any better than the first, but I managed not to cough.

We drove on, slowly.

The streets were still mostly empty.

=]O[=

Eventually, we reached my apartment building. By then the cigarette had run out, Crane had put away the tiny bottle after I refused another drink, and I was halfway through my ice cream.

We were there for a while, with me looking out the window, not making any moves to get out.

“... I can tell it hasn’t hit you yet,” Crane softly said. “Not totally.”

I turned to look at him.

He looked back.

“... will it?” I asked.

“At some point,” he assured me. “You’re not… broken, or anything. Sometimes the mind just lags behind and takes a while to realize what happened. I promise.”

I breathed out a sigh I hadn’t realized I was holding. I tried to say something, opened my mouth to do so, but words failed to form in my mind.

Crane watched me flounder, then he gracefully spared me by continuing to talk. “You’re going to feel… like the biggest piece of shit in the world. And it’s very possible that that feeling will never fade completely.”

I looked down, swallowed.

“But you gotta know it’s not true,” he continued. “There are much bigger pieces of shit out there.”

“... what if there aren’t?”

“Then you do some stuff to make sure you aren’t,” he said. He moved a bit and put his hand on my shoulder, then said, “Luke… the nice thing about being in the game is that even when you kill, you’re most likely killing other assholes in the game. And if you’re a piece of shit, then they’re all pieces of shit. Probably bigger ones than you.

“You're a man now. If you gotta do bad, sometimes you just gotta try to focus that bad on worse people, so it all more or less evens out. That's what it's all about."

“… does that work?”

“I gotta believe it does.”

I sat still for a moment, before brushing his hand off my shoulder and opening the door. As I got out, I paused before closing the door and said, “… thank you.”

I didn’t wait to listen to his reply. I just closed the door and walked towards the apartment.