This map used to be open 24 hours
Two engines converged in the alley and went silent right below where the team had climbed onto the roof.
“They’re looking for the fucking ladder,” Nova said on the comms, adrenaline dripping off his word-thoughts.
“They know where it spawns?” Angel said.
“Great. Fucking no lifes,” Luke said.
“They’re getting out. Like eight of them. Jeep and a truck.”
“You see their guns?” Luke asked.
“Pistols. Couple shotguns. One AR. No, two ARs.”
“Welp. Let’s hope they leave.”
“A couple of them are breaking in the door. Probably going for the indoor ladder. Looks like they’re leaving four around the cars. Setting up behind the engine blocks and shit. Watching both ways and the roof.”
“We’re fucking trapped,” Angel said.
Automatic fire broke out in the front lot and tires squealed.
“Fucking vultures coming in y’all,” Luke said, looking around. “Let’s get away from the tasty looking roadkill. Maybe set up behind the ACs, wait till they’re head deep in the stash, then—”
“Got some repel lines here,” Gradie said. He had been digging through the boxes, hoping to find an LMG or grenade launcher or something to even the score, but found bundles of ropes and gloves.
“Oh right!” Angel said. “Should be some clips next to it.”
“Aight Quasar,” Luke said. “We’re gonna drop in the store and find another way out, so get ready to move.”
Luke and Angel unrolled the cables while Gradie jogged to the nearest skylight and took aim with his USP. More gunfire broke out on some other corner of the lot and his suppressed snaps sounded cute by comparison. The plexiglass shattered and fell away and he saw the softly lit tops of the grocery isle.
“Who’s going first?” Angel asked.
“Me,” Gradie snapped, before Angel was done asking. Luke snickered.
Gradie grabbed the rope and pulled it taught and backed up to the edge and placed his boots on the glassless rim, and listened. The store was dead silent.
“Hold,” Luke said. He moved to the other side of the skylight and crouched down and motioned for Angel to do the same. Luke bobbed and stepped left and right on the balls of his feet, aiming down into the store. Angel tried to match his methods but almost fell over into the hole
“Shit!”
“You might be clear,” said Luke.” But there’s a lot of dead space so be on it.”
“I’m out.” Gradie bounced off the end and dropped down into the store. The liquid black sky vanished and the almost-shadow toned ash grey ceiling flipped into view with its lattice of struts and supports. He tried to scan below, but the force of his fall pulled the cord against the skylight frame and swung him forward, disorienting him. He executed the descent perfectly, as he had a hundred times in the vault and maybe a thousand in the clubhouse, where he had been forced to drop down mock stairwells and off apartment balconies under a hail of chalk rounds. The rope flowed between his feet and in half a breath the familiar floor of the men’s clothing section rose up to meet him The store transitioned from a strange dreamlike image seen from above, like a friend found in a dream in a situation they would never encounter in real waking life, into the banal place he had been a thousand times, though the shelves and rows now edged with potential danger.
He got low next to a four-way clothes rack and scanned the darkened store. There was nothing but shadows in the clothing section, but beyond then next aisle, at the front registers, some of the smaller lights of the inserted retail spaces sent amber fingers between the soda fridges and scanner belts. In the produce section, more soft light from behind the deli floated over the tubs of steroid-grown avocados and tomatoes like a lighthouse spotlight over a lumpy sea.
Angel landed to his left and started scanning towards his back. Little over a second later, Luke dropped down like a game character being dragged by an unseen cursor and snapped into a crouch silently. He already had the monocular NVG fixed to his right eye by a strap. Gradie was getting the idea that having Luke here was like putting a tour de France winner on training wheels.
“Aight boys, on me,” Luke said in the comms, his voice like a soft thought floating under the muffled gunfire and engine noises. He led them through the clothes section towards the back grocery area and Gradie instinctively formed up on his left rear, checking shadows and rows without letting Luke out of his peripherals. A familiar feeling, like driving by your work on the weekend, rolled over him. He had done this a million times in the clubhouse, and Philip had even made a habit of running him through “live spaces” recently, which meant leaving the walls of the training development and staging late night or early morning drills through what Philip called “common spaces.” Clearing rooms and evasion and entrenchment in an empty office, a mostly built apartment complex, and at least one Wal Mart.
Which should explain the nostalgia ghosting up his back, but it didn’t. There was something else, some other memory he couldn’t touch or had misidentified, connected to not just the feeling of moving through the well-worn Wal Mart layout with weapon raised and allies in tow, but also the greater feeling of being in a wide open world with no hard objective other than “get the guns, get together, and have fun.”
It wasn’t a feeling he could match to training or the Hardworlds, where the mission was constantly pressed into his present thoughts by Philip or necessity, and it was something more than the friends at my side feeling of a multiplayer videogame. It was a distinct sensation that had sprouted at larval state in Colors, eaten and grown fat in Soulara, and was now bursting out of his ears. But he had never been to Gunmaze in his life. So what was it? Where had he felt this before?
“Hold. Down.” Luke said on the coms, and Gradie snapped into a crouch. A second later, Angel bent at the waist and leaned behind a coat rack. Gradie made a mental note to double check Angel’s angles when possible.
“I’ll cross first,” Luke said. Gradie realized he was treating the wide walkway between the clothes section and the pet supply shelves like a road they had to bound across. Luke checked to his right and Gradie aimed down the path to the left. Low and quick, Luke stepped across silently, then got in position and nodded.
“You next Swordsman,” Gradie said. Angel booked it across the path without looking either way and stopped next to Luke.
“Cover right,” Luke reminded him, and Angel aimed down the path. Gradie looked both ways anyway and crossed with his weapon pointed down the path towards his left. The path stretched out to the auto section in the back corner and he realized why Luke had treated this little crossing so seriously. Fifty yards of peekaboo waiting to happen.
Just before he made it across, the air exploded.
“Shit!” He leapt and slid on his right side between Luke and Angel then rolled up into a crouch with his gun raised.
It was about that time his brain caught up with his reflexes and he realized what he had heard.
Music. A very bass boosted possibly even chopped and screwed remix of some pop song he couldn’t place, a woman singing something about night and dreams but pitched up like nightcore.
Gradie was already on the verge of laughter and Luke was snickering into his gun when Angel broke it all open.
“Is that Taylor Swift?”
Gradie lost it and Luke managed between bitten down cackles, “How the fuck you know that?”
“What the fucks that noise?” Nova said on the line.
“Can you hear it out there?” Luke laughed.
“Yeah. Is that music?”
“Some of these fuckers running psy-ops on the loudspeakers. Let’s move before I decide to eat one of these grenades,” Luke said.
They moved, faster than before now that their footsteps were safely muffled under the music, to the back wall of the pet department and headed for the frozen food section. They crossed another long row, on one side of the grocery aisles that led right to the front door, in the same leap-frog method but much faster, and entered the dairy section.
“Back left door,” Luke said. He hugged the left side of the section, silhouetted against yogurt shelves, while Gradie moved to the right side and hugged the tall freezers where mini corn dogs and dinosaur nuggets flashed at him from behind glass. Angel took up the rear center and moved low on Luke’s side of the center chest freezers, ready to snap down on a moment’s notice.
They were three fourths of the way across when that notice came. Luke was aiming ahead at the long wall of eggs and sliced cheese that ran to the right all the way down to the produce section on the other side of the store. As more shelves of cheeses rolled out from behind Gradie’s row, Luke’s barrel flashed and the air cracked, the sound distinctly louder than the earbud muffled sounds Gradie was used to, though nothing else about Luke’s stance or pace changed at all.
In a single movement, Gradie dropped into a crouch so Luke wouldn’t flag him and swung his barrel to the right around the end of the freezers. One of the four gunmen was already falling, his weapon angled oddly and one knee jerking up. Gradie reflexively started at the other end of the group, putting three rounds into the collar bone, neck and face of the rear guy then moving to the next one up.
As he did, Luke’s voice broke over the comms.
“Contact right!”
It happened out of order. The last of the four started to fall, then Gradie looked to his right and saw nothing but freezer, then he realized that Luke had started to call contact while they were still shooting.
The last body settled and his adrenaline flared. And for the first time, he saw them.
At the time of the shooting, they had seemed dark outlines, silhouettes against the dim light of the door behind the deli meat section, and his mind, he realized afterward, had filled in a collage of all the figures he had ever shot, mostly Luke and Sam in the clubhouse, but also bodyguards and warehouse operators.
As they lay on the floor, he saw they were wearing everything from anime cosplay (A One Piece chestplate had exploded in gore) to jerseys and a matted half of a fursuit. Among the bodies were a few pistols and one MP5SD.
“God damn, please make it less obvious,” Angel said.
“What?” Gradie asked.
“Mums the word baby,” Luke said, and Gradie got it. Luke might as well be wearing a shirt that said Hardworlder.
“Can our comms be cracked?” Gradie asked.
“You should assume all communication outside the realms are compromised,” Angel said, like he was half quoting something and half scolding himself.
“You know how much Boss and I paid for our line?” Nova said. “Shit, if it’s not safe—”
“It’s only as safe as the end user,” Angel said.
They moved into the back dairy cooler and all the shelving and boxes spiked Gradie’s adrenaline again. In the near slow-mo pace of everything, he wondered at the persistence of such a physical reaction in a distinctly nonphysical place. The adrenaline spike during the shooting had felt familiar, but there had been hardly any dump afterwards, which normally would be handled by precise breath control, but in a world without breathing…
Echoes of his Hardworld shootouts flickered at the edge of his vision and awareness like fire in another room, calling to him, but something about the strange nostalgia of the Gameworld tempered it.
Luke finished cutting the wires on the fire escape door and aimed his rifle at the jam.
“Aight Quasar. Get ready to give it some gas.”
