Wish upon me
“Got em.” Luke dropped prone at the edge of his crater. He opened fire and the new shadows dropped down and vanished into the black.
“Shit! Forgot to make nods!” He glanced at his rifle then aimed it back down the plain and flicked on a white light. Gradie laughed out loud. Three guys advancing behind red tower shields straight out of the Roman legions were lit up by Luke’s high-powered light like a late-night cryptid sighting.
“Holy shit I get it!” said Nova. “The glass is rigid at first so you make mundane shit, then as the game progresses—”
Luke’s rifle slapped the dusty still air and sparks flashed on the shields. The shieldmen kept stomping forward.
“Oh hell nah! Those fucking things are not bulletproof!” Luke yelled at the sky. The attackers retorted by firing a MG42 over the top of the shields and the team dove for cover.
“I got em,” said Angel, and his rifle started whining again as the MG went to work on every inch of air around them. He popped up and laser-beamed the lead shield, turning its central bronze orb molten red in an instant. The stream of orange tracers intersected Angel’s aqua beam and swept towards them just as the shield dropped and the former shieldman bounced behind his friends, shaking his hand like a Tom and Jerry gag. Gradie, watching through his AUG scope, let the idea that this place must have some top notch pain simulation go on a rampage in his mind. Luke fired another M203 at the spot just behind the fallen shield and the oncoming roman turtle collapsed like a pyramid of playing cards.
“They’re gonna have to nerf noob tubes when this shit goes live,” Luke said. Two stars twinkled and fell.
“Shouldn’t there be three—” Angel was cut off by the chainsaw shout of the MG42 and they all ducked back down to cover.
“How the fuck!” Luke hissed. One of the three invaders dashed out from the pile of bodies and shields swinging the MG like a leaf blower and running toward a strange mass of darkness on the edge of the plain.
“Where’s he—” Gradie got out, then the dark mass went bright.
A Culver’s drive through, all stone facaded concrete and blue awnings.
“What the fucks a butter burger?” Luke said hungrily, looking at the parking lot sign.
“Some Midwest shit,” Nova said. “I played Siege with a guy who was obsessed with them.”
The MG fire died as the guy disappeared inside, and Gradie noticed the windows were boarded up and surrounded by sandbags and mesh and sand barrier pallets like it was the first Culver’s in Iraq circa 2006.
Angel stood up and did some tweaking to his rifle.
“Let’s blast it down and put a Whataburger there.”
“Not before I try one,” Luke said, reloading his M203. “Butterburger sounds good as fuck.”
“Cover me,” Gradie said, an idea forming in his head. “I’m gonna make an MGL.” He looked around for an unmorphed section of black glass to use as a mirror.
“Fuckin a,” Luke turned and smiled. “Actually fuck that. Go all the way and make a Mark 19.”
Gradie moved low and fast to the edge of the fluorescent glared section of plane affected by the restaurant. He found the glass rippling with new energy and his reflection a hazy outline, and tugged at a nestled memory. At the clubhouse, in between shit catching sessions with Philip, a tarp pyramided oddly at the edge of a back yard facing fenceless out towards a field. A past birthday present for Luke, EP had said, from Philip. She had let him take the tarp off and look it over while describing a day of remotely operated cars and heavy drones forming a live target range where cigar clouds and raucous laughter had beat back a sibling wall of ordinance smoke.
Now, the reflection reacted smoothly, as if the glass had been woken up by repeated use. Again, Gradie got the feeling its previous period of inactivity had lasted at least a decade.
The Mark 19 belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher formed as a dark outline next to his reflection, and then as a solid, detailed thing next to his avatar.
“Hell fucking yeah bitch,” Luke said. “Now turn that Culver’s into a culvert.”
The twins groaned and booed and another burst of MG fire broke out of the Culver’s window. Gradie snapped to the Mk 19, swung it around and pulled the trigger without looking down the sights. Barrier pallets and windows and the rooftop air conditioner erupted in grey flashing blasts and the sound skipped over the flat plain and punched Gradie in the eardrums and hammered his chest.
“God damn! Fuck a burger! Level that bitch!” Luke whooped.
Gradie kept firing long after the MG had gone quiet, until a cloud of powdered drywall and concrete obscured the building completely.
“Aight you two,” Luke said. “Go over there and hoist the white and orange W.”
“Fuck that. Let’s put this launcher on the roof.” Nova pointed at the top of the burger box.
“Corpse, targets 3 o’clock,” Angel said. Gradie swiveled the launcher to his left and got the other horizon in his sights. Two silhouettes dead ahead, with another two at least twenty feet away on their right-hand side.
“They’re learning,” said Luke. “Don’t wanna give me another four for one.”
“Wait, maybe they changed their mind about the truce,” Nova said.
“A bit fucking late for that!” Luke snapped. “Light em up!” He raised his rifle.
“No! wait dude! I want to see if the other sides have like a different mechanic!”
“Bro you have got to be joking!” Luke groaned.
One of the figures lit up, a field of pulsing golden electricity radiating around him like a familiar anime, illuminating the figure next to him, a slim figure reflecting the light in cool tones with a cloud of icy mist wafting off of him.
Up till that moment, Gradie had felt indifferent about shooting them, but a pang of jealousy shot through him. That other guy had flown through the air shooting energy beams, and this one was halfway to Super Sayan, and here he was lobbing grenades like a defense contractor. A now familiar flutter rumbled in his stomach. God dammit, he wanted to fly. He wanted—
His finger squeezed the trigger on its own and a double burst of grenades popped at the invaders. There was an immediate explosion, but it took Gradie’s mind a few seconds to catch up with his eyes. The rounds had gone off too soon, detonated half way across the plain by a wave of electric energy shot out of the glowing guy’s hands.
“Aw shit,” Luke said.
Gradie lay into the trigger again, but electric guy threw out more waves of energy and the grenades exploded in a line leading straight back towards the launcher. The last explosion in the chain detonated just yards away from him and he heard the shrapnel whizz by his head.
“Uh,” was all he could get out before another wave of energy shot out of the dust clouds and slapped right into the Mark 19. The ammo box started sparking as the electricity arced around the launcher like an animated effect in an 80s movie.
“Get—” Luke started, then they were gone.
It was like being inside a kaleidoscope. Facets the size of 20-inch CRT screens cut into odd shapes displayed camera-like views everywhere he looked. He floated at the center of the strange cocoon, eyes darting from scene to scene. He saw the explosion that had killed him and Luke dissipating in front of the Burger Box, two tanks shooting each other on another side of the cube, a helicopter taking off, a forest flowing off one black side, and then Nova clutching an amulet around his neck and bursting into flame just as a misty figure thew a wave of ice at him.
At the last second, he noticed a strange effect. While the facets he looked at head on always showed some part of the game, those offset in his peripherals revealed more mundane scenes; a dim bedroom, a row of cubicles, a magazine strewn waiting room. He felt the creator’s intention in these details, that much as the demanding mirror glass’s initial inflexibility was meant, as Angel had said, to cause a continuity in the creations from mundane to magical, so did this effect make Gradie feel that the real world was on the edge of this place, dreamlike, slipping away.
And the kaleidoscopic facets reminded him of exactly what he had been trying to push out of his head since he entered Gunmaze, the myriad possibilities of the Hardworlds.
Then everything went white, and the air rang with a crystalline shattering sound and his stomach dropped out.
He fell like a shooting star. There was a disk of clear air in front of his face, but everything else was all fluttering flame. Through the clear disk he saw the cube, rotating slowly, flashing with activity. The dragon came up around the eclipse side, and something flew into it. A helicopter. It dove below the serpent, stalled, then rolled end over end, violently, caught in some unseen wake surrounding the dragon.
“God damn. Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get that fucking thing of the ground.” Luke said on the comms.
A familiar section of the cube rotated to face them, slightly altered. The Culver’s sign hovered above a cloud of fog, and the Burger Box neon glowed hazily at the center of it.
“Who brought out the fog machine?” Luke asked.
“It’s fucking Quasar fighting this Iceman douchebag!” Angel said on the comms, his voice tinged with frustration. A laser beam lit up in the fog and Angel swore again.
“Call him out!” Nova said. “I had him on the ropes!”
Then the mist enveloped Gradie’s disk of vision and there was another shattering sound and the sudden return of gravity.
He landed on his knees with his face in the crumpled glass and his hands at his sides. A glittering smoke wafted around him, and once the echoes of the shatter had faded, laser fire, shouts and other unidentifiable sounds filled the air.
“Spawned me back without my fucking gun this time?” Luke hissed.
“Probably wants to incentivize the players trying different things,” said Angel.
“That’s fucking stupid. What if Mr. Ice Christmas was camping my drop?”
A stream of bullets cracked overhead from Culver’s ruin and Luke swore.
Gradie had been looking for his own weapon, which was also surprisingly absent, but as the strange glittering smoke cleared, he found something better.
“You have to use the crater.” The pit he had created with his fall was faceted with mirror faces. In a few seconds, he was dripped out in black kit, plate carrier, and his Aug again. He stood up out of the pit and into a dense fog.
“Oh shit I got it,” Luke said somewhere.
Gradie stepped up to the edge of the pit and looked out through his scope. Just mist and shadows. Muzzle flash glared from the Culver’s as tracers and round struck out over his head. Gradie pivoted and let out three bursts at the muzzle flash that did nothing.
“Let’s go!” Luke stomped out of his pit, just yards from Gradie’s position, and Gradie laughed out loud.
Luke was encased in a bomb disposal suit pushed ten years into the future, with some kind of visor built into the helmet that Gradie knew, through the bleeding dream knowledge wafting off of him, was an armored night vision/thermal/gas mask combo. He also knew the suit was flame and electricity resistant and partially powered by an exoskeleton. Luke swung around and bounced an M2 50 cal machine gun in his hands, the ammo belt connecting to a side saddle ammo pouch. It clashed anachronistically with his future get up.
“What the fuck is that suit?” Gradie asked, surprised by Luke’s imagination.
“Nothing,” Luke said dryly.
“Suit? What— Hey mother fucker!” Nova yelled on the comms.
“That’s a prototype!” Angel whined. “That shit stays in the vault!”
“Thought you said it couldn’t make the jump to, uh, the land of the living.”
“Not yet!” Nova sounded hysterical.
The MG flashed again from the Culver’s.
“Consider this field testing!” Luke whooped and the M2 went wild, its muzzle flash the size of a basketball, tracers like molten javelins, grey smoke tearing at the white mist. Shells went skipping across the glass ground towards Gradie and he felt the blast in his chest and his earbuds, which he must have subconsciously summoned in his ear canal, made the world go dead quiet during the bursts, but the echoes in between were loud enough to shake his teeth.
The Culver’s MG went quiet after half a second, but Luke let out about five two-second bursts just to be sure. High above, in the dark dome of the mist, a star streamed through the air.
“God damn this thing fucks.”
“Yeah, but why not go with like a minigun?” Gradie said, watching Luke bounce the hundred year old hunk of metal around on its gyroscopic mount.
“Don’t listen to him, baby.” Luke patted the top of the mg.
Gradie stepped out of the pit and covered Luke’s rear with his own gun, then stopped himself.
With electric shocks and Super Sayan blasts and 50 cal shells flying around, his Aug and plate carrier seemed out of place, like the proverbial knife in a gun fight.
He looked down at the glass and scowled at his reflection, and that’s all it took for Luke to get hit.
“Mother fucker!”
Gradie snapped back to it to see Luke half white and a mat of ice forming at his feet. He swung the gun around before the words were out of his mouth and blasted the iceman, who was wearing some kind of sci-fi space suit with blue tubes all over it like a water-cooled PC straight out of 2009. The guy misted in an instant and Luke’s 50 made a crunching sound.
“God dammit!”
The belt had snapped off, and Luke was hammering the charging handle with one gloved fist.
“Hang tight, we saw your muzzle flash. Headed to you now.” Nova said.
“I got your Ice dude,” said Gradie. “You’re fucking welcome.”
An engine revved out in the mist, and a second one joined in.
“What, yall make a Lambo or something?” Luke said.
“That’s not us,” said the twins.
Two headlights bloomed in the mist and sped right for them.
