Recoil

by Joanne Macgregor

  While we ate, pulling our masks down to take bites and sips, Sarge tossed us each a package with a luminous green STERILIZED sticker on the outside. Inside was a pair of protective goggles, a helmet and a disposable jumpsuit to pull on over our clothes. My jumpsuit was blue, Leya’s was green, Graham got yellow, and Bruce was given a red one. The bright colors would stand out in any game that involved finding and taking out targets. Sarge and the two other instructors kept their black suits on, which would give them a real advantage in the exercise, because Sarge had explained that we four would be playing in a team against the three of them.

  “You look hot in blue, Jinx. It makes your eyes, like, really blue,” said Bruce.

  I had no idea how to respond, so I said nothing. I pulled on my goggles, readjusted my mask, and fastened the strap on my helmet.

  The female instructor, Fiona, gave us protective vests to fasten on the outside of our suits. These, at least, were black.

  “They’re not proper body armor or anything,” she said, “but they’ll give you some protection — those peas sting! The rifles and the game arena are as sterile as we can reasonably get them, but you are advised to keep your goggles, masks and gloves on at all times during the exercise.”

  Finally, Sarge handed us our weapons.

  “Here, Blondie,” he said as he passed me mine, “or maybe I should call you Blue?” he said, pointing at my streaked hair and suit. And eyes, I suppose.

  I held the rifle between my knees while I quickly braided my hair and doubled up the loop to tie it up against my neck, so as to make it less conspicuous and keep it out of my way. Then I picked up the rifle and weighed it in my hands, testing the heft and size. Although it was about the same size as the simulation rifle of The Game, it was definitely heavier, and the metal grips were cool under fingers used to the plastic gaming weapon. I lifted it to my shoulder and looked through the scope, though it was meant for distances exponentially greater than the length of a locker room.

  All four of us were doing the same. I wasn’t sure if any of the others had ever held a real rifle before, but for me this was the first time. I was a real-rifle virgin about to fire my first real shot. Only, of course, I wasn’t.

  “What you got there,” said Sarge, “is what we call a pea-shooter. It’s a decommissioned M24 sniper rifle modified to fire paintball ammunition.”

  Beside me, Bruce groaned in disappointment. What had he expected — that we would be turned loose to fire live rounds at each other?

  “All the rifle scopes have been zeroed to fifty meters for you. Go collect your ammo from Juan. Three magazines of twenty rounds each, two for practice and one for the game, and in the same color as your suits. That way we know who took which shot.”

  “This is beyond radical. This is wicked!” said Leya.

  I fell in line behind the others and collected my perfectly round, pea-sized ammunition balls, then watched carefully as Sarge showed us how to click the magazines of ammunition into the base of the rifle. Bruce’s practiced movements told me he already knew how rifle parts fitted together, but I didn’t. In The Game, the magazines and the rounds had been virtual. You reloaded by clicking on an icon on the screen. I imitated Sarge’s actions, then tucked the spare magazines into the breast pocket of my suit.

  “You’ve got all the ammo you’re going to get, so don’t go wasting it.” Sarge fixed his eyes on Bruce as he said this. “As we used to say in Afghanistan: each shot a kill shot.”

  “You were in the war over there? As a sniper?” Bruce asked, keenly interested.

  “I was.”

  “Respect,” Bruce said.

  What a suck-up.

  Adjacent to the locker-room was a long shooting alley with black human-silhouette paper targets at the far end, about fifty meters away. For the first time in my life, I was about to aim a weapon at something that wasn’t merely a figure on a screen, and I couldn’t wait to try and see how I did.

  All four of us loaded our weapons and started shooting. I was startled by the kick of the rifle’s recoil into my shoulder and the half-deafening sound of its report, and surprised that the trigger yielded to less pressure than The Game console weapon. The scope was hardly necessary at this distance, but amazing. Looking through it, it was as if the targets were a mere arm’s length away, and it made shooting accurately as easy as the newbie setting on The Game.

  My rifle was fantastic, well balanced and accurate, and after a quarter of an hour of practice, I was hitting the dead centers of the targets, as were Graham and Bruce. Leya’s green splashes were a few inches outside the tightly clustered red, yellow and blue splats, but otherwise there wasn’t much to choose between us.

  “Right, looks like you’ve got your eye in. Follow me now, and listen while I explain the rules of the exercise,” said Sarge.

  Graham fell into step beside me, muttering about how basic the rifles were and how he’d hoped to be using more advanced equipment, and computerized scope-dopers to fine-tune our aim. I nodded, but my mind was on the game ahead. Would I be any good? Would any of us? If the practice rounds were anything to go by, then all the “shooting” of my last three years as a game sniper had trained my eye, but it was time to test myself in “real-life” shooting.

  “Here we are — the urban arena,” said Sarge, as we emerged from a short corridor.

  I gasped. I mean, I knew we were actually on a constructed set like a movie back lot, located entirely inside a massive warehouse, but you could have fooled me. We were standing in a long, narrow alley which ran between the rear of two tall buildings. Above us was a blue “sky” brushed with clouds turned pink as if by a setting sun. The alley was dark with shadows in the dim, late-afternoon lighting. Old posters of rock concerts clung to the walls of the building on the left, and the steel ladder of a fire escape hung unevenly off the red-brick wall of the building on our right. My eye was caught by a scurrying movement between the overflowing trash cans and dumpsters which lined the alley. Were there repbots in this game? The alley ran straight down for a few blocks and then ended in a T-junction. Through my scope, I could see the distant shop-fronts and parked cars in the section of road visible from where we stood. The noise of distant traffic competed with shouting voices, dull thumping music and even, from somewhere close by, a chirping cricket.

  “This is awesome!” I said. It was like I’d run away from home and been turned loose — with a rifle — in the back streets of a faraway city.

  “It is, Blue,” said Sarge. “It could be downtown anywhere USA.”

  He gripped my shoulder with one of his hands and gave it a firm squeeze. A very firm, almost painful, squeeze. I suspected he might be flashing me another fast smile, but the corners of his eyes above the respirator didn’t crinkle.

  “Right, listen up, y’all,” said Sarge. “This is how it goes down. Juan, Fiona and I are your enemy. We are going to get a five minute head start on you four, but you may enter the field of action and begin your mission when you hear this sound.” He pulled a small air horn from his pocket and pressed the button on top of the canister. The loud siren blast made three of us jump. “Your goal is to drop us before we drop you. A kill shot is a head shot, or one that hits within the golden triangle — nipple to nipple to throat and back again.” With the hand not holding his own rifle, he sketched a triangular target over his chest and neck. “You get hit with a kill-shot, you’re out of the game, even if you’re only two minutes into it. This experience is meant to be as real as we can make it for you. If you get hit anywhere else, you can keep playing. At the end, I’ll sound the siren again. We’ll tally up the shots and the top scorer among you wins bragging rights. And fifteen thousand dollars.”

  We all looked excitedly at each other. I’d thought the prize was the opportunity to play in such a fantastic game, but 15K was a real sweet cherry on the top.

  “Any questions?”

  I was surprised when Graham, who hadn’t yet even made eye contact with Sarge, let alone said anythi
ng to him, asked, “Do we get any scope calculators or laser range-finders?”

  “No you do not. This is a game for snipers, boy, not a class for programmers or code-breaker geeks. But since you kids may not have had any shooting experience with real distances, I will give you one clue for yardage. From where we’re standing to the end of the alley over there is a distance of 525 meters. Y’all will have to extrapolate to the rest of the arena based on that.”

  I immediately calculated the distances of objects and landmarks between where we stood and the end of the alley and memorized them.

  “Any other questions?”

  “Once we’ve taken out you three,” Bruce indicated the team of instructors, “do we then become targets for each other?”

  I exchanged a glance with Leya. Bruce was gung-ho to the point of unsettling.

  “Once we’ve taken out you three — listen to him. Not lacking in confidence, are you, son? It may interest you to know that I’ve never yet been taken down by one of you gamer punks. And I was never hit in my tour of duty either. But you’re welcome to take a shot. Just remember, the aim of the exercise is to take as many of our lives as you can, while keeping your own. You get hit by a kill shot, you’re out of the game, no matter how fancy your shooting until then. And no, son, you are not to shoot each other. You hit one of your own team members, that’s an own-goal and you’re immediately disqualified. A sniper does not jeopardize the lives of his fellow soldiers. Squad before blood, comprehend?”

  “Huh?” I had no idea what the phrase meant.

  “In war, your squad, your fellow soldiers, comes before everyone and anyone, even including family. Get it?”

  I nodded. But looking at Graham fidgeting and Bruce cracking his neck, and thinking of Mom and Robin, I figured it was a good thing this was only a game. Family would always come first for me.

  Leya looked hopefully at Sarge and asked, “Can we begin now?”

  Chapter 5

  Rats

  Sarge consulted his co-instructors. “I forgotten anything?”

  “The rats,” said Juan.

  “Ah, yes, the rats.”

  Graham, who had been fiddling with his rifle, setting the safety catch on and off and on again, looked up at this.

  “We have some rats in the arena, and you get bonus points for hitting them.”

  “Real rats?” Graham swallowed hard.

  “Well, they ain’t stuffed toys, boy.”

  “But are they plague rats or ordinary rats?”

  Plague rats were disgusting mutants, genetically modified crosses between Gambian Pouched rats from West Africa, Argentinian Nutria, and a few other things the scientists were still trying to figure out. They were as big as cats, the biggest weighing up to twenty pounds and measuring over three feet in length, nose to tail. They had been carefully bred by the terrorists who launched the contagion, and then infected with rat fever and released into towns and cities across the nation. Naturally aggressive and themselves apparently immune to the virus, they spread the contagion to people and other susceptible mammals with their vicious bites. They made lethal and efficient carriers, and they bred faster than they could be trapped or poisoned. Every mutant rodent was potentially death on four legs. Everyone hated them. They freaked me out big time, and I’d never even seen one except on T.V. Good thing they hadn’t mentioned rats in the letter to Mom, or she would never have let me come.

  “They’re plague rats, but they’re lab-bred and ain’t infected, so don’t you worry about that. But they add an element of realism to the exercise, and they’re a good measure of your skill — big enough to hit, small enough to be a real challenge, and likely to be moving. Right, that’s it,” said Sarge, hoisting his rifle onto his shoulder and turning to go. “Good luck, and may the best man win.”

  “Or woman,” I said softly to his back.

  He turned around and looked at me for a few seconds. Then he suddenly pulled down his mask, flashed me a manic grin and said, “I stand corrected. May the best man — or woman — win.” The smile was gone before he returned his mask into position. He, alone of all of us, left off the protective eyewear and helmet. Cocky? Or just confident?

  The three instructors took off down the alley at a jog.

  “Are we going to play together as a team, or separately as individual snipers?” I asked the others.

  “Together,” said Leya and Graham.

  Bruce shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “We can split up later, if we want to,” suggested Leya.

  “I’m good with that.” I checked that the safety catch on my rifle was engaged, adjusted my goggles and said, “Let’s go.”

  From somewhere down the alley, the siren screamed, echoing strangely off the painted sky roof.

  We set off, dividing into pairs and clinging to the walls on opposite sides of the alley as we made our way deeper into the game arena. At first I was surprised that Bruce chose Leya to be his partner — until now, he’d been keen to stay as near to me as possible — but then I realized he’d made a smart decision. This game would not only be about accuracy, it would also be about strategy, and it was a piss-poor strategy to be paired with Graham. He must be a top-scoring online player in order to have qualified for this prize, but he was a liability as a partner out here. He twitched and fidgeted, focused more on the gun than on searching for targets, and seemed mostly oblivious to the need to stay behind cover. Before we’d crept ten feet up the right side of the first block in the alley, I had to shove him back into the shadows cast by the building.

  “Keep back, right up against the wall,” I told him, speaking as softly as I could.

  Bruce was monitoring our exchange, and judging by the crinkle of his eyes above his mask, he was grinning at us. He’d deliberately let me go with Graham, probably hoping the fool boy would get us both spotted and taken out of contention, leaving him with only Leya as his competitor. Bruce might be annoying, but he wasn’t stupid.

  I had just eased forward a few paces to take cover behind a high metal dumpster reeking of rotting garbage, and motioned to Graham to get behind me, when Leya whispered from across the alley.

  “There!”

  I saw it at once, a small movement between the trash cans about halfway down the left side of the alley. I lifted my rifle to my shoulder, brought my eye up to the telescopic eyepiece, and studied the scene. The rat — if that’s what it was — had disappeared behind the bins.

  It looked like the others were all going for a shot at the rat, but I hesitated. This game would be more easily lost than won. Hitting a target might score you points, but it would also reveal your position. Getting hit bounced you out of the game immediately, so surely it was more important not to be seen than it was to hit a rat. Taking the risk that I might be losing out on the chance to score a few bonus points, I lowered my rifle and looked around. Bundled against the bottom of the peeling green paint of the dumpster’s side was a length of discarded cloth. It may once have been a brown bath towel, but now it was a ragged, dark cloth, patched with dirty stains. Perfect.

  Forcing myself to ignore the stink, I pulled it over my helmet and braided loop of hair, and around my shoulders. Later I might drape it over my rifle to camouflage that, too. Then I scraped my hand into the dirt at my feet, and smeared the muck in rough stripes and patches across my face, mask and the rim of my goggles, breaking up the distinctive face shape to anyone who might aim their scope in my direction.

  I picked a spot at the corner of the dumpster that jutted into the alley, and sat down, angling my body to keep most of it hidden behind the protective metal. Next, I fished the spare bagel out of my pocket, browned it all over with dirt and then balanced it on my left knee. As I’d hoped, it made a perfect brace for my rifle to rest on.

  This was it. I was actually going to try shoot something real and moving. Something alive. Finally. And I found I didn’t like the idea of hurting an animal, especially just for the sake of a game. The paintball probably wouldn’t kill t
he critter, but it would hurt it, surely? I didn’t know the muzzle velocity of the paintballs from these rifles, but it would be enough to bruise. It was a weird moment. I’d spent years playing The Game as a marksman, but I’d somehow never connected the gaming to actual shooting. The enemy soldiers and repbots and explosive devices that I’d taken aim at on the computer screen had simply been targets — some easier and some harder to hit, a fun challenge for my skills. This was real.

  A quick glance to either side confirmed that the other three each had their rifles trained on the target, and apparently they had no second thoughts about paintballing a live animal. Maybe I was being silly. Head in the game, Jinxy.

  Across the way, Bruce and Leya tensed up, signaling that they’d spotted the rat again. My scope was at my eye just in time to hear a shot and to see the end of a tail disappear behind an old oilcan which lay in a small pile of rubble in the center of the alley. If my ammo was real I could have shot it through the can, but paintballs wouldn’t penetrate metal. Heck, the target practice had shown they couldn’t penetrate cardboard. I’d have to hit any target directly. I sat still, doing my tactical breathing, scanning the alley.

  Graham, however, was incapable of sitting still or staying quiet. A sudden fizz of escaping gas startled me. I glared over my shoulder at him. He stared back at me guiltily, his hand frozen in the act of twisting the cap off a bottle.

  “You brought sparkling water? Sparkling?” He was beyond help. “Just sit still and be quiet,” I hissed at him.

  I was probably being very rude, but I didn’t know how to tell him tactfully. He might be a genius at the math and science of The Game, but no way was he a natural sniper. He lacked any semblance of patience and control. I had a sudden mental flash of him behind his PC, thinking up formulas and doing calculations to while away the downtime of stalking and observation. As soon as I could, I needed to peel away and play my own game. It was only a matter of time before Sarge, Fiona or Juan spied Graham and took him down, and I needed to be far away from him when that happened so that he didn’t give away my position, too.