A short time to be here, and a long time to be gone
The plane drifted off into the black at over 20 mph as Gradie rolled up in a crouch. He watched Luke land on the tarmac just ahead of him while the twins scrambled across the opposite wing.
“Ahhh fuck!” “Shit dude watch it!” “Where’d it land Banned?”
“Right on the wing bitch!” Luke yelled.
“You fucking asshole!”
As the rounds fell, they threw themselves away from the C4 stuck to the wing like they had walked in the kitchen in the middle of the night and found a very big and possibly explosive roach scurrying around. After a few moments of gravity defying footwork on the wing, they fell off and landed on each other with a dull thud.
“Get up you silly billies!” Luke said sing-song as he jogged over to them. Gradie followed, scanning the looming darkness for muzzle flash.
“You fucking dick!” “Get me—”
More machine gun and AR fire fell on the plane as the twins scrambled to their feet. After a few seconds, it seemed they were home free.
“I don’t think they can see—”
Two rounds zipped by overhead a second apart, one of which Gradie saw spark off the ground between Luke’s legs.
“Move! File out!” Luke hissed on the comms. Gradie bolted first. The Terminal was just under 100 yards away, but about 40 yards from him a staircar waited next to a luggage cart. He called it out on the comms while rounds cracked through the air and his adrenaline surged to a point he had thought impossible here, turning reality into a darkness and gunfire tunnel with a staircar shaped light at the end.
The machine gun rattled again, but none of the rounds cracked anywhere near them. In the relative quiet after the burst, he realized why. A loud hissing and grinding noise came from one of the landing wheels, but the 737 just kept on barreling down the strip. They had been shooting at the landing gear.
“Blow it!” Nova hissed.
“Wait for it! Wait for it!” Luke said rhythmically as he sprinted up behind Gradie. Gradie made it to the stair car and immediately set up behind the engine block and tire and started scanning for muzzle flash in his monacle. The MG went off again somewhere unseen and sparks bloomed on struts above the 737’s front tires, now about a hundred yards away.
“God dammit!” Angel said as bullets skipped around him.
“Fine. Aloha snackbar time,” Luke said, nudging Gradie and grinning at the NVG scope. He flicked a button on the detonator.
The explosion lit up everything in orange, and the sound and heat and wind hit them just after the first flash. In the next few flickering moments, pieces of blazing debris flew erratically in varied arcs and a burning piece of metal skipped across the tarmac just yards from their position, while other bits hailstoned on the staircar.
Though he had seen explosions and destruction in Soulara and to some extent even in Colors, seeing it here, in a modern earth skinned world, he was struck with how monumental a task it would be for him to even theorize how to create something like this out of the flimsy dream material of the Other, at least the material he had made himself. He thought of his brittle and awkwardly heavy craft, sitting like a sad lump of coal in the Twins spaceship’s hatch, and realized he probably couldn’t even make a convincing matchbox, much less a jet fuel powered complex machine that responded realistically to gunfire and blew up like the real thing.
But, a slithering voice reminded him, that first day, didn’t you make a gun that fired?
“Move!” Luke said, the moment the fireball had darkened into a rolling pillar of smoke and night returned to the airstrip. He had the sniper over his shoulder and sprinted with his AR at the ready. Gradie ran after him and the twins followed. The only sounds in the strange diorama world were the rolling rush of smoke, the pattering of their feet on concrete, and the sparse strikes of debris on the tarmac, a strange sibling to hail and rain that stirred up in Gradie another wave of nostalgia that he couldn’t explain.
The gunfire had vanished. The run across the concrete became less frantic and more unsettling with every step. The false adrenaline faded, and an unsettling eeriness pulsed in its place, from the sight of the vast, open, empty space rolling by them, made so obviously for swarms of people, now darkened and empty.
Apparently, he was alone in the sensation.
“Here! Stairs,” Luke said excitedly, as he zipped ahead of Gradie with ease and moved to the outside stairs of a skywalk. He stopped and covered and waved Gradie ahead.
“I’m getting Modern Warfare 2 vibes, bro,” Nova said.
“Yeah I feel like I’m about to get tapped with a Barrett,” said Angel.
Gradie climbed the stairs and moved into a slightly translucent tunnel. He sucked in air in an inverted gasp. The Airport terminal stretched across the end of the tunnel, chairs and luggage waiting, and everything about it told him someone was going to walk towards him at any moment, ticket in hand, stunned expression on their face.
But he moved out and into the empty terminal and the same dead silence, now that the rolling fire was beyond hearing, and tried to clear an area that was essentially unclearable. Rows of seating and kiosks and man height displays stretched endlessly both ways and curved around toward some unseen point ahead of them. Restaurants and bars branched off everywhere into stacked shadows. In his monocle, luminescent smoke wafted across soft beams of radiance and under skylights that glittered with stars. In his real eye, the terminal’s darkness slowly melted at his night sight returned, and he wondered if the process was controlled by the game world or drawn directly from his physical memory.
He felt the other three moving alongside him. Adrenaline surged through his false body, and like cold wind amplified by damp clothes or wet skin, it caught on another sensation and set it ablaze all down his spine. The other sensation was the same inexplicable nostalgia he had felt under the drop point.
He had never been on a plane in his life. He had never even been inside DFW airport back home. But it felt like something more than just the gaming memories Nova had alluded to. It was like he could just touch the edge of a memory not quite his own. Was it a memory owned by one of the thousand other hims he summoned and discarded every day in the Hardworlds? Was one of those lost Gradies reaching out to him, unsatisfied with being a single use prop?
“Only one way to find out,” a part of him said. “We need to get the fuck back to the Hardworlds.”
“Through those doors, next building,” Nova said on the comms.
Gradie moved to the push doors and shoved through the far right one with one shoulder and fanned the hall with his barrel while Luke pushed in the far left and cleared the rest.
The hall stretched towards a set of four push doors at the far end, and was flanked with more push doors spaced apart on either side. Three blocks of shadow stood out among the flat linoleum and drywall. Bodies. National Guard uniforms. Sprawled out on the ground and leaned against the walls.
“Shit, check them!” Angel said excitedly, but the search, guarded by Gradie and Luke, who had swapped the thermal scope to his AR at some point, yielded nothing but pistol mags and a few flash bangs.
“Damn someone must have looted them already. Keep an eye out,” Nova said.
“The fuck you think I’m doing?” Luke joked. “Let’s move.”
Something about the bodies seemed off, and as Gradie finished stepping over them, he figured it out. They were posed. Two of them laying in similar poses of face to the side, one arm up over the head, and other arm down past the side, and the third sitting up against a wall, head slumped down and slightly to the right, arms and legs spread out from him like he had made a final “aw fuck it, I give up” gesture before dying.
The cold chain of memory tugged at his mind, went taught, and pulled up visions from the depths. Other bodies. Real bodies. The Hardworld dead. Their postures unlike these, their limbs bent and stuck awkwardly, some propped up in unlikely positions, others so flat against the ground it seemed some massive weight had pressed them into it, the variety revealing just how much life even the simple act of lying down involved. They had looked not like people gone still, but like objects that had been sneakily painted and draped in human facades in the night, the way a fallen log might resemble a torso, briefly, when the eye was not quite focused, or a scrap of trash might resemble a limb until another step brought the shadows out of place.
These sights had not touched him at the time, in the Hardworlds, but seen from the vantage of the Spirit in the Other, where they stood alongside his daily dissolved memory of the Real, like two stars millions of lightyears away seem to be sibling notches on Orions belt by a trick of angle, the visions disturbed him, and for a brief moment, stepping down that hall, gun in hand, he felt his persona unseat itself from any of the identities speaking to him, and float between them, unable to tell game from memory from false world.
Then it passed, as they broke through a push door into a fire escape stairwell with roof access, their footsteps echoing up, and Nova said on the comms,
“Chopper’s still there!”
And suddenly Gradie knew where he was, in a gamer’s paradise dreamworld, armed to the teeth and surrounded by friends, about to board a helicopter and fuck shit up, and for once, he was thankful for it.
They came out onto the roof in low crouches, scanning the edges as Angel did one last sweep with the drone. AC units cast shadows and threatened hidden gunmen, but as they sprinted across the roof, none appeared. The smoke rolled behind them and wafted over the roof in car sized whisps. Gunshots bounced up from somewhere far beyond the strip, and twenty yards ahead, in an open area of the roof relatively free of AC units, the chopper sat in the dark.
“Aw shit, I was hoping for a Blackhawk or a Hewey,” Luke said.
It was a little bird, and it almost looked offended.
“Nah bro the smaller ones are better,” Nova said. “Draw less attention. Get in tunnels and shit.
“You got a lot of faith in my flying, but it’s not misplaced.”
“You’re flying? Nah, I’m flying this bitch. You’re the gunman.”
“I’ll gun your ass down if you don’t—”
“Bro, we found it!” Angel said.
“And my shooting got you to it.”
“Which is why you should be the gunman!”
“Look, uh, Notbanned,” Gradie said in a faux mediator voice. “Why don’t we compromise. You shoot the helicopter.”
Luke cackled out loud and the twins shared a “What the fuck”.
“You really want to leave the shooting up to us?” Angel said.
“Hell no! Corpse will do the shooting, yall just—”
“Hey there’s more NVGs in here!” Nova had been climbing into the chopper on the passenger side, as Luke stood defiantly near the driver’s seat.
“Shit let me see.” Luke ran around the bird to Nova.
“Only two of em bro. Me and Swordsman got dibs.”
“They’re quad tube!”
“Let me fly and you can—”
“Oh bro I was just fucking with you. Go get in the front seat Top Gun. And here take this monocle shit. Corpse, come get—”
“Hold on,” Angel said. “Give me one so each team has—”
“Thought we were one team one dream!” Luke said. “And you can’t hit shit from up here with that sub gun anyway.”
“Bro, let them handle the shooting and you scout targets for me,” Nova said. “The copilot seat’s got a feed on the infrared cameras.”
“Thought this thing would have rocket tubes at least,” Angel said sullenly.
There was a smaller stash box similar to the one dropped on the roof built into the back of the bird. They refilled their ammo from the vending machine style slot and got another 5-pack of frag grenades, two flashbangs, two smokes, and another thermal drone. Luke and Gradie got the quad tube nightvision on, and Gradie recalled Philip laughing when he had asked if they would ever get any. They squeezed in the back, kneeling on one leg with the other outside on the struts, and strapped themselves in and tapped the back of the seats.
“All right let’s drop in on some mother fuckers,” Nova said.
“Remember, she’s not armored, so try and—” Luke started, but was cut off by the radio coming on with the engine. A familiar guitar melody started playing.
“Fucking Freebird!” Luke laughed.
“Turn that shit—” Nova reached for something in the dash and Luke poked his AR suppressor between the seat and the frame.
“Do not touch that shit!”
“It’s gonna fuck our stealth!”
“Good! Let them know we’re coming! They’ll hear the solo from a thousand feet up and shit themselves!”
Nova’s laugh echoed on the comms as the bird lifted off like the world was falling away from them and Gradie got that roller coaster drop in his stomach, now enhanced by the energy of his companions and fanned by the hope that anything could ever be as fun as this night promised him it would be.
