Suburban Decay
The platform faded away and Gradie fell. In the swirling dark, something prodded the surface of his mind, asking him to pick a color and a style, and gave him some options. He chose, of course, black, and “Heist”.
He landed with a thud in a high-backed winged chair of red leather with the upholstery coming up under his left hand. The other three sat across from him, Luke in a bursting recliner, dressed like a military contractor who just bought a cattle ranch, the twins in a leather love seat, dressed like raver hackers from a nineties movie that had only a tenuous grasp of either culture, Angel toned in greens and black, Nova a tie die holographic sparklefest.
“Fuck yes!” Nova shot up and clapped. “I cannot believe it’s been a year since I’ve been in Killcity.”
“You got burnt out, remember?” Angel stood up like a skater sliding onto the top rim of a halfpipe.
“This that game where I shot down your buddy’s helo?” Luke asked, and Nova stiffened.
“Yeah, bro, it is. That was JimmyJuice and he’s still pissed about that cause he was on a thirty streak—”
Luke broke into a smiling laugh that reminded Gradie of an eighties mobster film.
“So watch the friendly fire this time you piece of shit,” Nova said. Luke bounced his eyebrows at Gradie.
“We’re on the eastside, Beaver Creek, close to the waterpark,” Angel said, looking at his phone. Distant cracking gunfire floated in from the kitchen, which, from what Gradie could see, looked like a drug addict’s kitchen from one of those edgy 00s movies with the brown filter, stacked plates and grimy black and white checkerboard tile and all. In fact, the more he looked, the more film-like everything appeared. The TV in the corner would have been out of date thirty years ago, and the half empty TV-diner trays on the low wood grain coffee table might have watered the mouths of some 70s sitcom family.
“Shit looks goofy, huh?” Luke said, smiling.
“It’s supposed to be surreal,” Angel said, not looking up. “First Killcity drop back in the day was copy paste of Real mem and players started having Spiritual breaks. They had to make it more obvious to the Spirit that this wasn’t the Real and nothing could hurt them.”
“Yeah, imagine going into something that feels like the Real. That would be fucked up.” Gradie said with a smile. Luke shot him a glare that melted the joke in the air.
“Ok, looks like Mike and Dodo are downtown claiming the telecom tower,” Angel said, speaking louder than he had before, as if to drown out Gradie’s fuck up.
“Alright, we’ll cruise that way, but mostly this is gonna be free form.” Nova said, opening the doors and drawers of a busted china cabinet.
“Should be four guns somewhere in here. Ya’ll look around.”
“Found one,” Luke announced, and pulled a chrome 1911 out of the Lazy boy. He ejected the mag and checked the chamber then smiled at the team.
“Dad’s gun.”
“Damn dude, how do you always find the weapons first?” Nova said. Luke just winked at him.
“The other three are in the other rooms,” Angel said. “That’s usually how this works.”
“Especially if you expect it to work that way,” Nova said, frustrated, slamming one of the drawers in the built-in wall shelves closed.
“Bro, don’t start—”
“I’m not starting and I know you don’t believe me, so—” Nova shrugged and walked into the hallway.
“Believe what?” Gradie said, and Angel and Luke shot him a look.
“So basically Killcity is old school,” Nova said. “One of the oldest, despite the upgrades,” He pulled Dad’s briefcase off the buffet next to the front door and handed it to Luke. “It still has a manifestation framework.”
“What?” Gradie asked. Luke popped open the briefcase and pulled out some spare mags for the 1911 like a kid finding some skittles they had forgotten about.
“Meaning it draws on the users mem and expectations to generate.” Nova caught Angel’s eye roll and emphasized his next words by leaning in. “Partially, but it still does at times.”
“It’s fucking illegal, so I guess you got a whistle blower prize waiting for you at the—”
“First of all, I’m not a snitch. Second of all, If you think they haven’t paid off the investigators you’re insane, third, I don’t really care if they do it, I just wish—”
“But you do care, because every time we—”
“Mom and dad are fighting,” Luke said on the private line, while making a face at Gradie. “Go check the kitchen and Ill check the back rooms. If I find a five seven or some goofy ass bullpup, I know you got dibs.”
Gradie smiled and turned his back on the twins to hide it.
“Ok, but if I find a Wal-Mart AR or something I’ll save it for you.”
In the kitchen, harsh streetlight poured in through the bent blinds and half-length curtains patterned with idyllic cottage table settings and deep black inky night stretched out from the street. Car horns and gunshots, distant and muffled, which he hadn’t noticed before, now sounded like they were getting closer by the second.
Gradie looked in the fridge first, but there was nothing but to-go boxes and condiments. The cabinets held old cereal boxes and disposable dishware. He pulled open the drawers absent mindedly, distracted.
So it’s illegal to pull memory from the users, but Nova seemed sure that they still did it. Why? Simplicity, convenience, cost, or something more? How could anyone be sure their memories and thoughts were ever really safe? Their private comm lines. The memory banks and vaults. Even the thoughts in their heads and deeper than that, memories and drives the Spirits themselves weren’t even conscious of.
He had heard of the extractors, the people, or machines, or both, who specialized in drawing out and rendering memories in precise and vivid detail, but “they need your help to do it,” as Michael or someone had told him. But what if they didn’t? If he couldn’t even make a craft, but there were Spirits out there flying around on entire planets, how great was the gulf between him or even the twins, thinking their private thoughts were secure, and other unknown Spirits who had spent decades learning how to break that security?
“Oh shit, Auto Glock in Timmy’s bedroom,” Luke said.
“You mean the 18, or like a 17—”
“17 with a ghetto switch and 33 round stendo. Go check the master bedroom. I’m gonna look around for some extra mags.”
Down the hall, past the bedroom Luke was combing through, he found two doors opposite each other. Luke told him it was on the right, and he pushed into a comically staged scene that he wasn’t sure had come from a sitcom or someone’s actual memory. It teetered on the edge of both.
The bed was half covered in decorative pillows. A CPAP machine snoozed in the corner. He found ear plugs and boxes of sleeping medicine on both nightstands. The dad’s side had a dogged copy of "The Subtle art of not Giving a Fuck” riddled with brightly colored place markers and a highlighter clipped to the spine on top of the nightstand, while the drawers were stuffed with half empty supplement bottles, more self-help books, and a surprisingly neat stack of used scratch offs under the socks.
The wife had wine rings and a true crime novel on her nightstand, and in the top-drawer Gradie found a Kindle with the screen still on displaying her library of mafia romance books. Under that, however,
“Suppressed HK USP in the mom’s dresser,” he announced to the team.
“That’s wife material right there,” Luke said. “Whoever set this up got jokes. I found a Jericho in the baby’s crib.”
“What?”
“You know, a baby desert eagle?”
“Jesus. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Gradie sighed.
“And the kid’s school shooter manifesto is called “Why bitches don’t gotta have riz but I do?”. I’m not joking."
The twins laughed and accused each other of being the unnamed author, while Gradie followed Luke to the garage door, which was swiftly kicked in. Inside, a minivan waited in the dust.
“Alright kids, time for school,” Luke said. “Now remember, nice clean grouping, don’t embarrass your old man.”
“Might need these,” Angel dangled a set of car keys, with a cats-head self defense thing and two bottle openers, in his hand.
“Thanks lil’ bro,” Luke reached out his hand.
“Nah, get in the back.”
Luke shrugged and slid open the center door and climbed in with the 1911 in his waistband. Nova rode shotgun with the auto-Glock, and Angel set the Jericho in the cupholder and pressed the garage door opener clipped to the visor.
Clubhouse training snapped in in Gradie raised his USP at the back window in a two-handed grip braced by the seat. Luke was already in the back, far over on the passenger side so Gradie wouldn’t flag him, 1911 resting on the window glass. The garage door opened up onto a dark street blotched in places with wide ovals of amber light, dead still.
“So, who are we fighting?” Gradie asked.
“Everyone,” The twins said together.
“What’s the objective then?”
“In Killcity, rule number one is have fun,” Nova said, as Luke snickered. “It’s pure free for all. Started out as a timekiller zone between games. Now it’s one of the most requested segments. You get tokens for kills and there’s a bunch of mini games they’ve added like conquest and heists and shit.”
“So it’s like GTA online?”
“No!” The twins said in unison, but Luke caught Gradie’s eye and nodded with a smirk.
“There’s no leveling up or any of that shit,” Nova said. “You get wiped you start over from zero. And everything resets at dawn.”
“So it’s kinda like—” Gradie started, but Angel’s scowl cut him off.
“Ok, I got it. So where we going?”
“We’re gonna head downtown and maybe link up with some clan guys,” Angel said. “Depending on how much time we have.”
They backed out on the street and bobbed on the squeaking breaks.
“How much time do we have?” Gradie asked.
“That’s up to you,” Nova said. “It costs tokens to say in past your slot, which for us looks to be half an hour. If we get enough kills to stay in, we can, or if you’re not feeling it we can leave early. Just let us know.”
They turned down a street at 40 mph and a bright glow bloomed in the windshield. One of the houses was on fire and a thick smoke was rolling off into the night.
“Heads up,” Angel said.
The cookie cutter house was in a rolling flame, its brick face a dark silhouette of drooping rectangles. In the air above, a swarm of quadcopters doused the fire with hoses connected to ground terminals.
“Why are they drones?” Gradie asked.
“No people in Killcity,” Nova said. “I think original lore was like a rapture thing. But if a fire gets out of hand there won’t be a game for long. They figured that out early. I think it used to be cyborg fire fighters.”
“Yeah you can still find them in a warehouse downtown,” Angel said. “Shortcake bought their skin in the shop.”
They passed the house and the ghostly roto blades swirled in the orange light like some kind of demonic portal above the flames, and the water gave the smoke a steaming, dreamy quality. It was like the house was being blown into hell. Not the kind of cliché visual Gradie had come to expect from this game, and it gave him the feeling of seeing the hidden skeleton hiding under it all.
The fire and roars faded as they chewed up yards of the quiet suburban street. A minute or so later, they passed between the brick walls of the subdivision onto an empty avenue with a field of droopy brush across it. They all looked both ways, heads on swivel. Gradie saw nothing down the driver’s side of the street but more streetlights and subdivision wall stretching into nothing.
“Watch this gas station,” Nova said. “Some cars parked at it look like players.”
They turned left and the bright fluorescent glare of a gas station rolled into view out the windshield. It was at the far end of the road, the only sign of life at that distant intersection, where the highway overpass floated over a block of solid darkness. Cars parked around the six pumps at the tiny convenience store were stopped in abrupt angles, some with their doors still open.
“You wanna chance it or go around?” Angel asked.
“Shit, it ain’t called Runmaze,” Luke said, and the twins groaned.
“Bro, that’s it. Get the fuck—” Nova was cut off by a sudden burst of gunfire from the gas station.
