by Riley Flynn
From here, he could see the room. It was a worn-out warehouse. Spray cans and paint had done their work on the walls. There were surfaces made to seem like corrugated iron, thick plastic mats placed on certain parts of the floor. The lights hung from heavy chains, swaying and unsteady, their yellow light littering and chattering.
Above the lights, the ceiling was far, far above. It was all cloaked in darkness. But there were people up there, waiting and watching. Deep down here in the belly of the machine, Alex was almost alone.
But he was only wasting his own time standing in the shadows. The gun was light, he knew, but he still had his fists. His elbows. Perhaps his legs, if these thick, heavy pants didn’t weigh him down. They were padded, protective. Restrictive, Alex now realized. But there was no denying that his heart was bellowing up out of his chest and into his mouth. The most excitement he’d felt in years.
The siren screamed again, beckoning Alex toward the end. This place had been a car factory once upon a time. The owners seemed aware of that: they’d left relics and burned-out shells lying around to hinder people’s progress. When it was everyone against everyone, he knew, the only way to progress lay through your opponents. Hidden away for the moment, he began to think.
There were a few essential truths: He needed to get across the room. He didn’t have many bullets. He didn’t know his way around, or how to shoot straight. His head was still reverberating and his mask only made things harder.
Timmy was nowhere to be seen. This wasn’t Virginia. Hell, this wasn’t even Detroit. One day, he might go home. Something deep in his bones told him he’d see the farm again. One day. But not today. His parents’ house had never seemed so far away. The pain in his chest was either nostalgia or internal bleeding. But it felt good.
With the blood was rushing through his ears and his veins, Alex noticed, and he was actually enjoying himself. So, he thought, time to act.
Alex dipped his head out of the shadows. The layout of the room was clear. He had fixed it in his mind. A wide-open space, about twenty feet across, punctuated by waist-high barriers, the skeletal car wrecks, and darkened corridors leading God knew where. Last time he checked, Timmy had been on the other side. Find Timmy. That seemed like a decent plan. Decent enough, at least.
Bursting out of the darkness, Alex ran to the nearest wall. Ducking down, he heard the siren once again. Time was running out. The light was glowing electric above, finally holding steady for more than a second. He looked up. Opposite him was a steel wall, polished and shiny. A mirror.
Lifting the mask, he stole a breath. The plastic had covered his whole face with a cheap, thin material. Protective gear made by the cheapest bidder. It felt good to rip it away, if only for a moment. The air wasn’t fresh. The fetid, dank warehouse interior hung heavily overhead. Peering deep into the mirrored surface, Alex saw nothing. He was lost.
Alex the unfamiliar clothes felt uncomfortable. Combat fatigues, basically. Rugged, rip-proof clothes a far cry from the worn jeans and T-shirts that had served him well for so many years. He’d have to get used to this.
But, Alex realized, if he could see himself in the mirror, then so could his enemies. This was a bad place to be. A more experienced man would have known that instinctively, he thought. Timmy wouldn’t be able to hold the laughter in. Life and its lessons.
Like a rat from a pipe, Alex ran from behind the wall. He ducked down, back flat, and ran across to the car.
A thud, thud, thud clanged near his head.
Someone was shooting. They must have been watching the mirror. Alex felt his breath heat up beneath the mask.
But they’d missed.
For now.
Lifting his gun above the hood of the gutted Chevy, he fired a shot, and then another. Alex had no idea where he was aiming. The modified pistol kicked against his wrist. The siren screamed again. What had been minutes was turning into seconds. He fired one more shot, felt the recoil twist his wrist, and heard someone lumbering on the other side of the vehicle.
They were close.
There was no choice. Alex had to run the last fifteen feet to safety. Reach the other side of the room, hope Timmy was near, and get his help. Or give help. Whatever it took to win: to survive.
An idea struck, arriving quietly and making itself heard over the clamor. He needed a distraction. Still crouched behind the car, he felt around in his pockets. Nothing. They’d emptied them. Something to make some noise, to put off the attacker. Anything.
Alex undid the buckle on his mask. It was all steamed up, at least he’d get some use out of it. The flat transparent face stared back up at him. He weighed it in his hand. It was light. Plastic and mesh, mostly. Hardly designed to block much. Couldn’t stop a fist. They just gave them out for the sake of it. He held the mask in his hand, scraped it against the side of the Chevy, and then rolled it along the floor, away from the wall.
A flurry of shots followed. They lit up the wall above the mask. But Alex was already running. He was gone, out and away from the car, his legs opening up. It was ten feet. Then seven. Then five. He was almost there, his eyes scanning the wall for any sign of his friend or any place to hide before the siren let out another, final scream.
The man’s shoulder caught him full in the gut. The impact knocked the breath out of him. Alex dropped his gun. Together, the two of them rolled across the plastic floor. Not as hard here. Hard enough to hurt.
They tussled, tangled up, arms and legs locked together. Alex hit out with a fist. It found the man’s mask. Only hit the buckle. Didn’t do much. The man caught a wrist, wrapped one leg around Alex’s neck and leaned back. It was a tight grip.
Choking.
The assailant pulled back hard on the arm, his thighs locked around Alex’s collar and shoulder, squeezing. Every drop of blood began to crawl to a cold stop and he feel the edges of his eyes darken.
He flung his free arm against the man’s shins, against his ankles and legs. Nothing. The man tugged tighter. Alex flailed, twisting and struggling. The man had him in a lock.
It was impossible to escape. There was nothing he could do. He felt around, finding only the floor. Then: there it was. The pistol. Alex’s own. Light on ammo. But enough, maybe.
Alex turned the gun into his grip. He was losing sight. Losing breath.
He lifted the gun up, over his face. He fired. Once. Twice. A third and a fourth time. A red splurge burst across the man’s chest, dripping down onto Alex’s face.
But the man would not let go. Alex felt himself falling deeper and deeper into unconsciousness. His body was light. He fired the gun again. He couldn’t feel anything. Squeezed the trigger again. It was empty. Nothing left.
The lights went up. The siren screamed for the last time. The man’s legs loosened, and Alex’s eyes widened as he lay on the floor, relishing each breath. Applause was sputtering into life above, the hasty patter of busy feet moving around the warehouse toward them. He drew a deep breath, feeling his mind creep back to the real world. Then, piercing it all, came Timmy’s voice.
“I told you: never take off the mask, man,” he laughed. “They don’t like it.”
Timothy ‘Timmy’ Ratz was standing above, his own mask perched atop his head, his crooked teeth barely containing the cackling rattle of a laugh as he stretched out a hand. Alex allowed himself to be dragged upright. Timmy was slightly taller and thinner. His skin was a pasty white, immune to any sort of sunlight, and near-translucent compared to Alex’s own. They were wearing the same clothes, still holding the same weapons. Around them, others entered the room and began to clean up.
“It’s like this every time?” Alex asked. “I don’t think I could handle it.”
“You did good, man,” Timmy said, gesturing with his gun and handing Alex his discarded mask. “Well, mostly. I did tell you to get more ammo. We all saw you running out.”
Alex waved away his friend’s comments and turned around. The man who had tackled him was talking to a judge, pointing to a fierc
e bloom of red paint dashed across his chest. The man was still wearing his mask, but Alex could see the anger in his arms and body. There was an argument brewing.
“What’s his problem?” Alex asked his friend.
“Oh, Freddy? He thinks he had you, says you shot him after the final siren. What did I tell you, man, people take this stuff seriously.”
Timmy took both paintball guns, one in each hand. Using his thumbs, he flicked the safety switch, holstering one weapon and carrying the other. With deft fingers, he began dismantling his own pistol, raising it to the light and staring down the barrel. As Timmy turned, Alex could see a wash of smudged blue paint spread over his friend’s back.
“They got you,” he said. “I thought you were the pro.”
“I’m no judge,” Timmy replied, his tongue poking between his lips in concentration. “But I’m certain the aim on this is off. Should really invest a bit more in my own gear. The rental stuff they give you is crap.”
The pistol clicked mechanically as Timmy lowered it from the light and reassembled it without looking.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get changed and head out, before Freddy accuses you of anything.”
Leading the way, Timmy motioned over his shoulder. Alex turned. The man was shouting, now, the mask barely containing his fury. Even now, he remembered the way the darkness had been setting in, the way the corners of his vision had edged toward the center. It had been exhilarating.
He felt like he should shake the man’s hand. But he knew better. That same hand was now pointing in his direction.
Alex stepped lightly and caught up with his friend.
Timmy had a knack for escaping danger. Alex still had a lot to learn. The world was full of threats and there was no place quite like home.
2
The warehouse corridors were spartan: long, thin concrete tunnels which twisted around the arena like an ant’s nest. The innards of the warehouse had been painted up like the end of the world. The walk to the changing rooms from the arena was short but strewn with all the artefacts of some post-apocalyptic, burning Hollywood vision.
It wasn’t hard to find burned-out cars in Detroit, but hoisting them up on the walls must have taken some effort. This new sport was where the money was, Alex figured. He hadn’t paid tonight, just tagged along as Timmy’s guest. His skin still tingled, remembering the rush to beat the final siren. They gave you the first hit for free.
“You liked it?” Timmy asked, holding the changing room door open.
“I’ve never done anything like it,” Alex replied, following him in.
Even the changing rooms were riddled with the same aesthetic. Someone had taken to the metal lockers with red paint, giving them a rust flavor.
“I remember my first time,” Timmy replied. “Feels like only yesterday.”
Timmy turned on his best thousand-yard stare. “You kids today,” he said, “you don’t know how good you got it. Back in my day, we had fights and paintball separate. Two whole different things. Why, I went to an MMA match with one of my pals and we didn’t see a firearm all night. Could you imagine? What kind of hellish past was that?”
Alex jerked open his locker, throwing in his mask and finding the holster ready for the pistol. It was well-organized, this place, and well-funded. Start with an internet video spreading round the world like a virus, he knew, and soon you’d have everyone infected. They had franchises all across America now.
Timmy had been bugging him for months to try this out. Every day, his head poking around the cubicle, that mess of red hair arriving first, passing through some leaflet or printout, the word ‘GUNPLAY’ splattered everywhere.
There was a mirror in the back of the locker, coated in the filth of a thousand rounds of underground paintball fights. Peering through the grime, Alex he could see himself. Six feet on the dot, beard barely trimmed, though no more than two days old. Black hair short and cropped, anything long on top pushed to the right side but now muddled with sweat. The green of his eyes was being joined by the purple-blue of a bruise swell right above his cheekbone. It’d be shining bright by morning. Tough one to explain to the boss.
Alex began to remove the heavily padded clothing. As he eased off the vest—Kevlar-lined, the advertisement assured—he felt a twinge in his neck and his shoulder. That man had turned something, had twisted a muscle in a way it was never meant to be twisted. Even to raise his arm up brought a world of pain crashing down on Alex’s shoulder.
“Maybe I should have tapped out,” he suggested. “Do they still call it that?”
“You got him in the chest though, man. Final shot. Boom. Then the siren. It was poetic. Honestly. Never seen anything so cool. Wish I’d done that well on my first time.”
Trying his shoulder again, still expecting the pain, Alex didn’t have the heart to tell his friend that the so-called poetic shot had been a last, desperate move, the product of not knowing what to do. Terror was not a good look, not these days.
In the locker were his familiar clothes, blue jeans and a shirt fixed with the faded logo of a company he couldn’t remember. Someone else’s store-bought nostalgia. Normality was rushing back to him, the pain in his shoulder and the rolled-up pair of socks tucked neatly into his sneaker a pointed reminder to Alex of why he was destined to sit in an office all his life.
“You coming for a beer later?” Timmy asked. “We can stop by my place. Got something I want to show you…”
Alex shrugged. A mistake. Wincing, he shook his head.
“Smarts, does it? One evening here and you think you’re in Korea. You should see it when a blackout hits. Twice the fun. Kids these days, I tell ya.”
Timmy was a year older than Alex, he knew. They both knew. But in certain worlds, in certain ways, Timmy seemed two hundred years old. Ask him about the news, the wars, the state of the world today–as Alex knew all too well—and Timmy would take on a morbid tone.
No one else at work made that mistake any more. No one but Alex. To him, Timmy’s well-ripened pessimism was a soothing break from the grinning idiots who anchored the news, splashed across every screen.
It was nice to have a little doom and gloom in the world once in a while, even if most of Timmy’s answers fell apart under any scrutiny.
Adjusting his socks, sliding into his canvas sneakers, Alex felt a rush of air as his locker slammed shut. He looked up. A weathered hand was holding the door closed, pressing so tight that the knuckles and joints were white. He followed the hand, up the wrist and the hirsute arm, past a faded green tattoo and over a gnarled shoulder, all the way up the turkey neck to see a man, seething, staring down.
“What the hell was that?” snarled the man. “What the hell?”
Words stumbled on his tongue.
Alex, his hands still trying to tie a shoelace, found his thoughts had deserted him. He felt a twinge in his shoulder. He understood. This must be the man from the arena. Wordless, he dropped the laces and tried to stand, but the man pushed him back down, finger pointing right into the aching shoulder.
“I had you down, maskless, and wrapped up. You should have tapped out. Given up. I shoulda won.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Alex.
The red paint was dried, speckled across the man’s chest. His mask hung from his hip, his pistol holstered. It wasn’t the regulation, company-owned kind that Alex had tried. The metal gleamed, he could see, even when it was tucked away. It was twice the size of the regulation-issue guns, fitted with an extra-long clip and all sorts of bells and whistles.
“You know damn well. Now, what are you gonna do about it?” the man said, leaning down hard and close in front of Alex’s face.
A hand split the air between them. It was Timmy, insinuating himself into the conversation with the care and guile of a drunken lover.
“Freddy, buddy, listen. This was Alex’s first time. We know you got this.” Timmy dusted off the man’s shoulder, “That was a hell of a hold you put on h
im there, nearly wiped him out. Just telling me how close to tapping out he was. You been practicing? I know you weren’t that good last time we played.”
The anger fell off the man, like fall leaves from the trees. The rushing red skin gave way to a gentler auburn. Freddy blew a long snort through his nose. He cocked a head.
“Well, you know, Ratz,” he said, “I been thinking about the service again. Got to get myself in shape.”
Timmy patted the muscle on the man’s arm. “Looks it, my friend. They’d be lucky to have a man like you. I’ve never seen you in such good form.”
Smirking, Freddy turned away from Alex. Timmy slipped an arm over the man’s shoulders, guiding him away and out of Alex’s orbit. Even from here, Alex could overhear them talking. They’d switched into gun chatter, regaling each other with weapons and specs. Soon enough, Freddy had his pistol out of his holster and Timmy was turning it over in greedy fingers.
Now that the man was out of his face, Alex could see him as a whole. The arms might have been strong, the fury potent and fresh, but there was a sag about Freddy which had set in for good. A paunch hung over his tactical belt, and there was a slight limp when his attention slipped. The tattoo on his arm was real, probably from the service. But if the forces were welcoming back vets like Freddy, then things in the world must have taken a turn.
They’d nearly recruited Alex once. See the world, they said, get out of Virginia. For a farm boy with a broken heart, it had been more than tempting. Alex got all the way to the parking lot in front of the recruitment office when he’d overheard something on the radio. All the news came out of China and Korea, even back then.
But it had been enough. The sharp slap of awareness hit him hard across the face. People were dying out there; it wasn’t a game anymore. Alex had driven home right away and packed up his possessions. It had been a long drive to Detroit, but the flight to the far east would have been much longer. They tried to recruit everyone, eventually.