You can get anything there
According to the clock in the dash, it was 4:15 am. Luke was in the back with the AK and Gradie was in the driver’s side next to him, covering Nova’s blind spot. They were going 100 miles an hour and the freeway was surprisingly empty. Nova explained that it was because most players used the highway the same way the team used it now, as fast as they could in brief bursts between gunfights.
In evidence of this, they passed through a region of warehouses and hotels where gunfire and explosions raged. Nova killed the headlights as they flew down the dark ramp, lit only every so often by one of the third of the streetlights that were still on. Downtown was a glow in the distance and Angel pointed out the airport, a wide plain of amber lit smooth runways and wide glass building faces under a blinking tower. There were already a few fires raging here and there that made Gradie choke up on his USP.
“We gonna get a plane or what?” he asked.
“Helo,” Luke said. “With some guns on it this time.”
“Will there be any at a commercial airport?”
“Yeah,” Angel said. “The storyline was a collapse after a rapture, so the military moved into the airport and left a bunch of shit. Just hope there’s some of it left.”
“Roxy’s downtown with Noodlesquad,” Angel said, looking at his phone.
“Do they have anyone near the airport?” Nova asked.
“No. They’re trying to trigger that UFO event. With the radio shit.”
“Ok. Find out what rooftop we can use to land if we snag a chopper.”
“Oh shit! Drop going down!” Luke said, twisting to follow something moving out the window.
“Where?” The twins said.
“Driver’s side, north. Oh shit its close.”
Gradie watched the blinking pyramid of lights drift out of the oily blackness as they came down the ramp. The lights rotated as the car followed the curve, and Gradie felt he was close enough to hit it dead on with a pistol shot.
“Slow down, slow down,” Angel said, and Nova braked to just under 30mph before they dropped down to the highway.
“Shit, back up.” Luke said.
“All right, but look out. We’re sitting fucking ducks.” Nova threw it in reverse and backed up at nearly 40 mph up the ramp, leaning back around his seat and scowling at the back window.
“Ok slow up,” Luke said. They were halfway up the ramp and the lights were just even with the car, drifting down to a plane of LED lamps floating over a parking lot.
“Its gonna land on the roof,” Angel said, and sure enough, the lights drifted over the lot and dropped onto the black parallelogram above the Wal Mart, and only then, as the boom echoed over the lot and highway, did Gradie realize that though it had looked like the lights had been falling at a lazy pace, the drop had actually moved more like a stone with a paper bag stuck to it.
“We goin for it?” he asked.
“Fuck yes,” Luke said. “Go Go!”
Nova floored it back down the ramp and on to the highway exit lane.
“Alright, park behind the bay doors,” Luke said, looking at something like Google Maps on his phone. “We’ll hide the car behind the dumpsters and take the ladder to the roof, load up, then get the fuck out before anyone else gets to it. I’m not trying to get in another fight until we get the bird. Then we can fuck up the plebs stuck on the ground.”
“Sounds good, in theory,” Angel said.
“Now watch me make it a reality,” Luke smacked him on the shoulder and winked at Gradie.
They U-turned at the bridge and came down the access road towards the Wal Mart. Fluttering fragments of training trivia bounced around in Gradie’s head, and he automatically went through the process Philip had drilled into him; How to get in, how to get out, highest/lowest traffic area, high/low visibility area, vehicle access, pedestrian access—
“Is there a ladder to get to the roof? I thought most didn’t have them on the outside,” he said as it occurred to him.
“They always leave one on the outside,” Nova said. “Killcity is made to be more accessible than the Real or—” He caught himself and trailed off as Luke cut a sudden glare at the side of his head.
The parking lot was glassy black in the shadows and bright glare everywhere else. There were only about a handful of cars spread out across it, and another handful of burnt blackened frames.
“Kill the headlights and hook around there to the back.” Luke pointed and soon they were driving in darkness between sparse pools of amber-lit concrete. Luke rolled the window down and scanned the lot, rolling his eyes and ears either way. Gradie rolled his window down and followed suit. Just before they got around the back of the Wal Mart, an engine roared out on the highway.
Nova hugged the outside curb of the back alley next to a wooded area and made it halfway down the back of the store before Luke spotted an orange maintenance ladder leaned against the building.
“Pull the car up there, under that tree,” Luke said on the comms, pointing. Nova hopped the curb and parked in the shadows. Shrubs and weeds scratched the doors on the way.
“Aight, Quasar,” Luke said. “I’m gonna ask you to stay with the car, but you can tell me to fuck off.”
“Nah bro its fine. I’ll keep lookout. But don’t bring me any bullshit. I want something compact and with a lot of firepower, and if you see anything long range like a 50, I call dibs.”
“You’re a real renaissance man,” Luke said, and slipped out of the car in his trademark teleport fashion. Angel handed Nova the auto Glock and put the Jericho in his waistband.
The side of the store loomed in darkness broken in places by flickering amber cones, and flashes of memory burst at the edges of Gradie’s vision like cloud covered lightning. Another store, approached in the rain, alone in another world, a memory that had seemed forgotten, now flashing, briefly, across the cartoon landscape.
Then it was gone, and he wondered if the sensation, which had seemed to him not like something pulling the memory out, but like the memory itself had wanted to rise to the surface in the weeks since the coin job and had taken the first opportunity to do so, had given rise to the theory mentioned by the twins that Gunmaze tapped into the memory of the players.
In his peripherals, Angel shot up the orange ladder like a stuntman on a wire.
“How the fuck,” Gradie said under his breath, mostly to himself.
“You just gotta believe, bro,” Nova said on the comms. Luke, who was crouched behind a transformer, covering their ascent with his AR, nodded at Gradie to get fucking moving.
The ladder felt real and wobbly under his hands, but he tried to believe that falling was impossible. He moved slowly at first, but testing the limits of his intentions effect on the gameworld, he soon moved up at a near sprint, and by the end of his climb he had abandoned hand holds all together.
Compared to the Hardworlds, Gunmaze gave to his demands like a slave. It was ironic that it had taken a gameworld skinned to look like the real world for him to overcome his mental resistance to attempting the impossible in Gunmaze. The other worlds had seemed so unnatural that he had taken their laws at face value, but here, his mind knew that if something presenting itself as real was obviously not, then everything was suspect.
The roof was a wide plain of metal. Soft light from some open freezer or back stock room glowed under a few of the domed skylights, but the rest was fuzzy shadows. The horizon twinkled, headlights moving in erratic zig-zag patterns at double the speed limit somewhere miles away. Distant gunfire, softened to whispers, floated in, and flashing lights in the sky marked a plane or helo flying in the jittery coke-head motion and speed of someone who didn’t give a shit about the integrity of the fuselage or their own safety.
Smack dab in the middle of the roof, a large rectangle of shadow blinked at its corners and the parachute billowed flatly to the side like a more solid smoke.
“Moving up,” Luke said. Gradie snapped behind him and covered him while he moved up the ladder. If he was fast in the Hardworlds, he was a monster here. He scaled the ladder in under two seconds in a full hand-holdless sprint that ended with a jump off the top and a roll on the roof.
“Aww fuck yeah what we got?” He skipped toward the drop, but Gradie stopped him.
“Wait. Help me pull this ladder up.”
“Shit good call. Might be a minute drooling all over these guns.”
They grabbed either side of it and jogged across the roof, pulling it behind them and setting it down softly once they felt the bottom feet drag on the sheet metal. Angel was at the crate, working some mechanism when they approached. Luke took up position behind the box and scanned the roof with his AK sights.
“What we got?”
“Back up,” Angel said. “It folds open.”
The crate swung apart on hinges and a cold feeling of déjà vu dissolved out of some back chamber of Gradie’s mind. The sheet metal roof reflected in the air over his head and the ground at his feet became smooth concrete. Ghosts of Philip and Sam dug into the weapons pallet and his heart beat a machine gun pace as he tried to control his breathing. Time wrapped itself around the scene like a stone dragging a long ribbon down some dark drain, and the shootout at the distribution center sparkled as if its most violent moments were polished facets on a clouded stone.
While in one world Luke and Angel dug through the gear that popped out like someone had greased it, Gradie watched another him shoot and die in a more solid land angled askew to this one, like a shoe store seen in one of the bench mirrors, and wished he could drop into that more solid world for good.
“Damn dude, it’s like they knew you were coming.” Luke handed Gradie an odd looking bullpup with an integrated suppressor.
“Got an anomaly detector.” Angel waved a small device that looked like a walkie talkie with the antenna in the middle and clipped it to his belt.
“A what?”
“Detects anomalies, like those doors we were talking about, and entangling points, which is where you can duplicate items and—”
An engine roared out beyond the roof and revved down from the highway into the parking lot. Some kind of tuned up Japanese sedan. As the motor died down at the edge of the lot, another sound that had been drowned out before rose in the air. Music blaring out of subs that rattled the cars frame, adding another level of grittiness to the sound. It only took Gradie a few seconds to identify the song. The theme to Initial D. Luke started singing along and snapped the plate carrier around his chest.
The music died as the car approached the store and the front wall buffeted the sound. A few moments later, more engines roared off the highway.
“Shit, get loaded up,” Luke said on the comms.
Angel loaded a UMP45, a plate carrier, and a bag of ammo and grenades into a larger bag and threw it over his shoulder. There was also a single camera drone, two claymores, five grenades, two smoke, and a few other things Gradie didn’t see that they divided amongst themselves.
Luke had picked up a 20-inch AR in 5.56 with a suppressor on it and found one monocular NVG, which he scowled at.
“Thought there’d be more eyes in a fucking army drop.”
“They keep a cap on the night vision and thermals and shit cause they can be really broken,” Angel said. “That’s a reload station by the way.” He pointed at a large metal box with a black glass screen the size of a phone in the front.
“What?” Luke asked.
“Here.” Nova grabbed the Draco off the top of the box where Luke had set it and held it in front of the screen. A small red light flashed and the thing beeped and four AK mags spit out of a flap like a vending machine.
“Oh shit I forgot,” Luke laughed. He put the Draco and the mags in a shoulder bag and threw it over his plate carrier. Gradie was in the process of scanning his USP .45 and collecting the mags when an engine roared in the alley behind them.
“Shit,” Luke and Angel said in unison.
“God damn, they’re coming down the alley!” said Nova on the comms.
