I’d rather be in some dark holler
On the slanted dark land below them, the jet fuel fire bloomed across the runway in soft blue and smoldering orange, reflecting in the glass and metal and setting the concrete glowing. The smoke smeared in the air, hovering like a dark smudge on the sparkling haze of everything else. Muzzle flash sparked on the far end of the terminal’s concrete curve, but the rounds must have cracked too far away to hear over the roar of the helo.
“Should we drop some ’nades on them?” Nova suggested.
“Nah fuck that. Let em sit and seethe,” Luke said. “Let’s go hit some mother fuckers that don’t know we’re coming.”
“Let me text Leo and see if he’s got anything marked,” Angel said. “Maybe he’s got some barrel bombs or something we could load up.”
“Fuck that,” Nova said. “Remember Crunch had one in that tour chopper? He tried to drop it on the stadium guys and got blown out of the fuckin sky.”
“Just drop us on a tower downtown,” Luke said. “We’ll clear it from the top down and yall two feed us intel from the outside.”
“We should look for a pop-up base,” Angel said. “Get some bigger hardware maybe.”
They went back and forth about their next move and where to farm the most kills and Gradie let them talk, getting the outline of their rich and storied history with the game, which reflected in Luke’s suggestions as a playful optimism and in the twin’s as calculated caution. As they spoke, the city rolled below, dark and glowing in equal portions.
It felt like a carnival ride. Nova’s turns banked the helicopter sideways so that Gradie’s feet were pointed halfway between ground and horizon, and the roofs flowed beneath him like booths and rows seen from a swing ride on a grand scale. Butterflies chewed in his stomach. Wind pushed his non hair out of his face and chilled what the Other was trying to convince him was skin, and he felt suddenly that it all desperately wanted to be real and was counting on him to make it so.
The City screamed its cityness. The night muttered about its undayness, and everything from the helicopter roar to the shape of shadows on the twin’s shoulders made him sure that all of it wanted to be real. Simulacras just on the edge of being, trying to jump the final hurdle, but unable to do it without every observer saying “ok, I believe you.” It was the same sensation, which had since been forgotten and hidden under route familiarity, that he had felt his first day on the Ball before Michael had whisked him away to his new life.
He wondered, would he eventually stop noticing it all together? Would the copy become the world? Would they have already done so, had Michael not saved him? And were the Hardworlds, brilliant as they were, anything more than very convincing, very responsive, copies? He suddenly felt, strapped into someone else’s trajectory, suffocated by the absence of real life, hovering false miles above a false world, that he was just as lost as he had been that first day, and all the rules and knowledge he thought he’d gained since then were just as thin as the hologram skin of this gameworld, and underneath, the void still ruled. The familiar voice, weak though it was now, softened into a cliché, told him again, “It’s all in your head,” and he—
“Fuck! Missile!” Nova said just as an alarm flashed off the dash and rang in the roof. The world rolled below his feet and Gradie found himself looking up at the half-clouded sky as Nova threw the little bird into sharp evasive climbs and dives and turns.
“I got it,” Luke said calmly, his voice like a dad joke heard amidst the hellish sounds of war.
“The fuck you mean you got it?” the twins said.
“I mean hold this bitch still real fast dumbass!”
“What?” The twins turned in their seats and stared at Luke just long enough for the helo to maintain a consistent trajectory.
“Thanks bro,” Luke said flatly. His AR snapped and the suppressor spit a burst of sparking light in Gradie’s goggles. An instant later, something exploded in the sky just out of sight, illuminating the rest of the helo interior in strange orange light.
“What the fuck!” “Holy shit!” The twins yelled.
“I know, I know, I’m the shit,” Luke said. “Now fly me to wherever the fuck that missile came from.”
“Shit I didn’t see it.” “It was behind us.”
“West it is!” Luke adjusted in his seat and passed Gradie the sniper.
“Here. In case you see any other guys with launchers on your side.”
Gradie took it and scanned the scenery. They were flying over the highway, and downtown was mere miles away, dead ahead. To their right was a cluster of office towers, and the left side of the highway sprawled with industrial parks.
He aimed down the scope and concrete and dark trees rushed blurrily over his eyes. One of the “quality of life” tweaks of the game world was the ease with which you could aim any scoped rifle with any night vision goggles, but the speed of the scenery made him pull his head away reflexively and turn on Luke.
“How the fuck did you hit that missile?”
Luke winked at him. “Gotta believe bro.”
“I’m telling you, stop making it so obvious—” Nova was cut off by Angel.
“Holy shit those little bitches put a bounty on us. Ten thousand fucking tokens.”
“What?” Nova said. “What’s the blurb say?”
Angel cleared his throat and began reading from something.
“These Ballhairs hired some dusty ass runner to hold lanx for their Fisher Price sky tour and he one shot our SAM like a fucking try hard. I’m seething so hard right now I’ll pay a month’s C.S. to see these PGs meet Jesus.”
Angel was in full blown hysteric laughter by the time he finished, and Nova was bent over in his seat chortling.
“In English bitch!” Luke yelled.
“A ball hair is someone from the ball, an Allworld normie,” Angel said, between breaths. “A dusty runner is you, bitch. A Gunmaze pro who sells his time. By Fisher-Price they—”
“Yeah I got that one!” Luke snapped. “The fuck’s a lanx?”
“Phalanx,” The twins said together.
“Oh, like a CIWS. Cute. So what’s C.S. and P.G.?”
“Child support,” Nova squealed. “It’s what they call tokens spent to stay in a section of Gunmaze. P.G. is a pro gamer, someone who takes the gameworld too seriously.”
“Ok, so I shot their missile so now they think I’m some salty ass old head, and they just offered a bunch of no life tokens to anyone who can show us a good time?”
“Yes!” The twins laughed.
“Aight baby let’s do it.”
The helicopter swerved and Gradie let himself swing out the window on his harness as he scanned the grounds for anything that might tell him where the next missile was going to come from.
“You see anything?” Nova said after about ten seconds of engine drone.
“No.” This time it was Gradie and Angel that answered in unison.
“Aight fuck it, let's bait 'em out.” The helo climbed and distant fires glittered in Gradie’s NVGs. Downtown bled smoke and spat flying things that might have been helicopters or circling planes. A wheel rim shot sparks like a roman candle as a car barreled down the highway and exchanged gunfire with two others. An explosion boomed softly from somewhere below or behind him, and he saw another ring of firefighting quadracopters pouring water on a blackened patch of residential roofs in the suburbs.
Then they were flying over office towers and parking garages in a wide circular flight path.
“I know the mother fuckers are in there,” Nova said.
“I don’t see shit,” said Angel.
Like a punch line, barrels flashed out one glass side of a tower but the rounds fell somewhere unheard.
“That them?” Angel said.
“Fuck no,” said Nova. “Some dudes trying to claim the bounty probably. Our guys gotta be higher and have more range to throw a missile at us from as far away as they did. Probably on one of those towers.”
“Why the fuck haven’t they shot another one then? Maybe they ran out.”
Another joke. A bright orb shot up from one of the farther towers, and Gradie saw in the ambient light of the missile that the roof had been reinforced with barrier pallets and tents and some kind of netting.
“Oh this fucking PG nest is gonna pick up the bounty for real?” Angel said.
“Bank left and hold her steady please,” Luke said.
“Bro, please tell me you didn’t get lucky the first time, ok?” Nova said. “Like be honest. Cause if so, I can start evasive—”
“I’m always getting lucky, bitch. Quiet on the range please.”
The orb shot towards them at an angle, drawing a line of smoke nearly parallel with their flight path out Luke’s window.
“Perfect.” Luke’s rifle snapped and the orb flashed in a brilliant bloom of white heat. A second later the boom rocked the air in the cabin.
“Jesus dude,” Angel said. “I actually can't fucking believe it.
Nova sounded less impressed.
“Well I think the trick is that when it comes to minute-variable conflicts, Killcity tends to side with the user.”
“The trick is that I’m the shit and you’re fucking coping,” Luke said. “If whatever nerd shit you just said is true, why’d that MG graze my fuckin ear in that Star Wars ass—”
“I said Killcity, not Gunmaze in general. Soulara is extremely high-res. And anyway, that wasn’t minute-variable because the observer, you, were closely involved. It’s all about distance from the nearest—”
“Hey shut the fuck up real quick,” Angel said.
But Gradie heard it before he was done talking. Muffled roar bouncing off the side of a passing tower, skipping across the ground below.
“Is that a fucking jet?” Luke said.
“Yeah and their missiles are a lot fucking faster,” Nova said. “So let’s hope—”
The alarm rang in the dashboard again.
“Shit!” said the twins.
“Just relax lil’ dudes,” Luke said. “It’s coming from straight above, so I need you to let it gain on us a bit then swing the—”
“Mixmaster!” Angel snapped.
“Got it.” Nova cut the wheel hard and Gradie and Luke swung to the left on their harnesses.”
“I’m fucking two for two over here, and yall—” Luke snapped.
“And third times the fucking charm!” Nova swung the bird around a tower so close Gradie could see their reflection in the glass. When they came around the other side, Nova brought the nose down and aimed the windshield right at a sprawling mixmaster that would have made Dallas blush.
“Aim above it! Above it!” Angel said, pointing. “Pass it once then flip a bitch and go under!”
“Ok bro I got it. I got it.”
“Aight I’m gonna take a nap then,” Luke said.
“Good!” The twins snapped.
Gunfire flashed on the highway and the twins dropped down in their seats.
“Shit!”
The two clusters of dueling muzzle flash were completely unconcerned with them, centered around a crashed semi half in a ditch. Another fire raged deeper in the cluster of office parks, and a red flare sent a smoke plume up from the top of a strip mall a quarter of a mile away. The game kept on going, ignoring them it seemed, as the distance counter on the dash counted down, bleeding decimals by the second.
“It’s too close! I’m going in now!” Nova said.
“No wait! Wait! We got ten seconds!”
Gradie glanced out the back. A single flickering orb was growing without moving to either side. Dead on the money.
“Fuck it!” Nova said up front and suddenly Gradie’s stomach dropped out of him. The bird sank like a rock and Gradie’s attention was drawn violently back to the front. The reaching arms of two ramps flew up past them on either side and they zipped into the mesh of concrete curves that passed so close and fast that it seemed a good chance if the missile didn’t get them, a concrete impact would.
But Nova was a really good pilot.
“God damn!” Luke whooped as they weaved between the ramps and pillars with mere yards of clearance.
“Yeah take a nap now bitch!” Nova yelled.
The alarm reached a fever pitch.
Gradie tried to lean out the side and see if he could spot where the missile was, but was thrown around too much by Nova’s needle threading flight path to do anything but hold on as the world shook itself into a blur.
“Up! Up!” Angel hissed.
“One fucking second!”
The world went sideways, then shot upwards, then became all shadow under concrete, then sunk down again as they shot up, nose and windshield turned toward glowing night sky and more ramps, within the span of a single second.
“Shit dude!” Angel squealed in laughter, and Luke made a very loud snoring sound.
“Where’s it—” Nova shouted, fear in his voice, and was cut off by a sudden explosion.
It was so loud and so close Gradie was sure they had been blasted out of the sky, and felt a surge of panic in half a second, until the bird pivoted on a dime and the fiery plume of vaporized concrete passed him as they shot over a ramp.
“Good shit bro!” Angel whooped.
“What happened?” Luke said sleepily after a fake yawn.
“Nothing bitch. Go back to sleep.”
“Okay baby. Wake me up when Top Gun shoots the other missile.”
“Oh fuck,” Angel laughed.
“Fuck that,” said Nova. “I’m landing on that PG campground. Let them eat the deflect.”
“Hell yeah,” Luke said. “I want some fucking smores.”
As they flew out of the mixmaster, Gradie was on the verge of pointing out that at some point during the missile fiasco they had abandoned their internal comms and were now speaking out loud, when something jumped in front of his words.
A memory, or the flash of one, or a trick of the mind, slipping out of that same undetectable peripheral zone that had sent shivers of nostalgia running up his spine in the Wal Mart, of flying under another mixmaster, in another night, but one closer to dawn with shadows and sounds unsoftened into the near-real simulacra of Gunmaze, the details hard edged and purely physical.
Then it was gone, and the gameworld city flew by, tirelessly washing the memory away from him like swift water taking something discarded.
He was suddenly aware that something was trying to reach him, and the only way to make contact was to go somewhere far away beyond the noise of the Otherworld, beyond the loud presence of others.
But before this awareness could fully form in his mind, the cabin and everything in it was ripped to pieces.
