skonen_blades | Entries tagged with gun

The airport wasn’t packed this time of night. I scanned the thin crowd for my audition.

Bingo.

She had a gold filigree tattoo printed onto her upper arm near the shoulder, the kind of tattoo that went away in a year but twinkled brilliantly like Egyptian history as it faded. Her forearms carried the whorls and puckers of burn scars; acid or fire, he couldn’t tell.

There’s two ways to live here. Under the radar or straight peacocking. Red vinyl Mohawk implants made from old records, chrome knucks, eye enlargements, antlers, kangaroo blades, whatever. Bright and cheerful. High profile meant you needed to be able to back it up. If you were easily recognizable, you were easily trackable. ‘The most dangerous care the least’ was the theory. Of course, it could also just be bravado, someone playing ‘fake it ‘til they make it’ but that kind of stupid was its own kind of dangerous as well.

Me, I go under the radar. Regular suits, a little rumpled, and I look tired. My implants are all subdermal. I try to be as tourist as possible. Just on a layover, sir. I try to look a little scared all the time and I try to go quickly from place to place.

It’s just bait. Anyone sees me for a mark, they follow me into an alley and then they die. I get ninety per cent of my scavenge that way and save the best for myself. I do alright.

But I was just about to turn twenty-five in a part of the world where life expectancy was twenty-three for solos. I needed to get connected. I need join one of the big gangs and get paid in policy. Independence was good for the soul but it was getting harder. I was good enough to join one of the middle guilds but I wanted to shoot for one of the top eight. The Terminotaurs.

I’d been given a time and a location. This airport concourse at 9:30PM. Even though I was qualified, there was always an interview. There was always a deadly test.

And Gold Tattoo there was mine. Armband twinkling in the flat, fluorescent lights. Scanning the crowd for me and she still hadn’t found me. Showtime.

I stood up and checked my watch and scanned the departure boards nervously like I was worried my fictional flight might be delayed. I caught the eye of an airport attendant just behind Tattoo and waved at him. I jogged over to him clumsily in a way that would take me within an arm’s reach of Tattoo. If I played it super straight, she’d see me as background right up until it was too late.

It didn’t work. She saw through the act and recognized her target.

The gun barrels that fanned out of her wrists swept under her snarl in an arc that hosed down the whole crowd, me included, with a staccato engine thunderstorm of plastic shrapnel. Commuters dropped like cut-string puppets and everyone else became a scream and fled. The conflict shutters slammed down over kiosk windows. Within five seconds, we were alone with the bodies of a dozen downed travelers and a wide radius of cowering people taking whatever cover they could. We had seconds before security took us out.

My armour soaked up most of it but blood was definitely being guzzled out of me somewhere. I tongued my incisors and front tooth in the sequence that puffed open the glands in my neck. My bloodstream sang murder and time stopped.

I felt my muscles tear as I moved. There was a price to this speed. She finished her sweep left with both her arms pool-cue straight, stopped and elbowed her hands to point at the ceiling before setting her eyes on me and straightening her hands in my direction. The motion took a millisecond of jerking muscle but to me it was a ballet. Not slow motion but clear. She was excellent. No wasted movement. A real artist. I was flattered they’d sent someone so good.

As she brought her barrels down, I stayed ahead of the sweep and crouched until my hips and knees popped open and sideways. I skittered like a spider towards her as, wide-eyed, the vector of her guns stayed above me no matter how quickly she lowered them, like the direction of her lowering arms was a broom sweeping me towards her. I was like the shadow of a diving bird. I felt the projectiles shred the air in a stream above me, nearly parting my hair as I reached her ankles and minnowed between them in a corkscrew.

Her arms had guns and mine had blades. I flapped my arms out once and brought them in again as I spun torpedo-style under her and past her.

I cut off her feet.

The resulting awkwardness from her and her screams of defeat were hard to watch. She even attempted to balance on the bone stumps. I had cut them cleanly so for a second she almost managed it, taking one, two, three skittering clops before she slipped and thudded to the floor, elbow, knee, shoulder, rolling back towards me for another shot.

I was running ahead of her arc like a speed skater on the clean airport floor. I would try not to kill her. I looped around and her face twitched like a lizard to track me. Her arms were too heavy to go as fast as her neck and her frustration roiled off of her. I got to her head before she could focus her armaments on me.

There was a moment, then, when I think she considered surrendering. I had my blade to her head and she had not brought up her guns to shoot. Time hung still like dust in a sunbeam.

“I-“ I started and she twitched her arms up. I flexed my forearms and everything above the line of her nose blended. Her arms splayed out Jesus-wide with metallic thumps and that was the end of her time with the Terminotaurs.

And the beginning of mine.

Getting away from airport security was part two of the test. But that is a story for another time.

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Mordeck and Cheddar Plain were field-stripping their weapons on top of Concourse B. The hit was still two hours away. No one came by here. They talked and smoked openly. Eyes in the sky were a thing of the past.

They perched there, monkeys on an I-beam, ten stories up from the concrete graveyard.

The leaning broken teeth of the buildings around the two of them creaked in the wind. The rubbish of destroyed skyscrapers snuggled up to the corners of architecture too stupid to fall down. Cities like zombies. They didn’t know they were dead. Sunlight picked out the holes of shattered windows like hundreds of surprised but empty eye sockets. They leaned against each other like headless drunks.

The shattered glass was in the process of becoming sand. The concrete was becoming dust. The gyprock was becoming mud from the rain. The paper from office after office had taken flight That Day and settled whimsically around the town. Most of it was used for nests. Every intersection was a wind-shaped bowl extending down from building’s eroding corners. Dunes formed in places. It didn’t take a predicator to see that the city was being scoured from the Earth and it was being done quicker than one would expect.

Soon, within centuries, the red bones of rusted rebar would be all that was left poking up occasionally like treasure through the sand.

The buildings were crying dust and the wind sounded like their keening. No wonder the postborns saw the cities as haunted.

Preday survivors like Cheddar Plain and Mordeck knew better. They could go into the cities with no fear. Their mythologies were buffered by childhood memories.

The priests came into view, dressed in red cloaks. They were carrying the incense of their profession. Scavengers and Repopulists. Enemies of the pair squatting up in the shadows.

Mordeck and Cheddar Plain still had working implants from before when they were soldiers. Batteries were easy to find. Mordeck switched on his eye. Cheddar Plain carefully studded his firing arm to ‘on’. A supersonic flashbulb whine of readiness cycled up, muffled by the towel he’d wrapped around it.

Their job was to kill folks trying to come back and live in the city. The two of them patrolled the city. They were snipers that had to work as a pair. Most of the Polis Fors had implants that enabled them to work alone and they liked it that way. It was a grim business suited for sociopaths, nomads, and loners. Mordeck and Cheddar Plain were something of an oddity in that regard.

The Christ-Chins down there in red had dreams of a new future. They wanted to go back, not forward.

Vets like Cheddar Plain and Mordeck understood. Postborns were outnumbering the Preday survivors every day, though, and it was possibly a losing battle.

With a shrug, Mordeck hooked his visual cortex up to Cheddar Plain’s arm and looked down at the priests in red shuffling their way through the debris. The priests lit up in heat-vision, dark-vision, and sonics. The reds became greens, the grey dust became blue, and through the directionals, Mordeck could hear them as if he was walking with them.

Vitals were targeted.

Cheddar Plain drew in breath and bit his lip in anticipation. Mordeck nodded once, quickly. That was the trigger.

Cheddar Plain’s arm-tip flowered open. Six hunterstrikes winked forward in a puff of smoke and a slight recoil.

The priests exploded in an orange ball of plasmic flame seventeen blocks away. Today’s quota had been reached.

Cheddar Plain and Mordeck smiled in the shadows and waited for news of another gridpoint sighting.

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When I came home to find him sitting in the middle of my living room, I wasn’t alarmed.

He was dressed in a grey suit and sitting on the piano stool my grandmother had left to me after her death last year. That didn’t freak me out.

What scared me was that he was wearing latex gloves and had very messy hair. And the suit was too small for him.

The first impression I got from him was that he was a puppet with the strings cut. His head lolled to the side and his eyes stared past my right shoulder. A string of drool attached his lapel to his lower lip.

It was a cheap suit. The kind a person wouldn’t mind burning later.

The door slowly closed behind me. I was rooted to the spot with indecision and fear as time sped by.

At the sound of my door’s latch, the man’s head jerked up like he’d awoke from a bad dream. With a hissing intake of breath between clenched teeth, he surveyed his surroundings. His eyes landed on me.

With a jut forward of his head and a squint of his eyes, he found recognition. Whatever he was doing here came back to him in a flash and he smiled, putting one hand behind his back.

“Jake MacPherson?” he asked politely, almost playfully. A ruse of a smile danced across his lips as he gave me a sidelong glance. A lank of his messy hair fell forward across his left eye. He raised his eyebrows in a prompt for me to confirm or deny the name.

The hand behind his back terrified me.

“What?” I asked, genuinely confused. My name was Peter Llewellyn.

With a sigh and an eye roll towards the ceiling as if pleading for God’s help with my obvious stupidity, he dropped the smile and looked back at me with the intensity of a hunting dog. Jovial Stranger had left. Here was the killer. The hand that wasn’t behind his back opened and closed, opened and closed.

“I asked you if your name was Jake MacPherson. Failing that, do you know who or where he is?” he repeated in clipped syllables.

“My name is Peter Llewellyn.” I said flatly, surprised at my own eloquence under the circumstances. “I, uh, I moved in here last month. I don’t know who Jake is.”

The man in the middle did something then that scared me more than anything he’d done so far.

He sniffed the air.

“Hmm.” He said. “Seems honest. Kick your wallet over. That’ll be the end of it.”

I slowly took my wallet out of my back pocket, placed it on the floor, and kicked it along the hardwood floor in his direction.

He leaned down and picked it up without taking his eyes off of me, opened it one-handed, and lifted it up into his peripheral vision to check the ID.

“Looks like it all checks out, Pete. Sorry to bother you. You understand.” He said with a shrug.

He flipped my wallet over his shoulder, brought out the gun from behind his back, and shot me in the chest. My scream died in my throat as I crumpled against the door.

I woke up with a neck cramp in the dark. It was eight hours later. My leg had gone to sleep underneath me. The yellow tuft on the tranquilizer dart stuck out of the front of my shirt. Slowly, I regained full conciousness, took a shower, and went to bed.

Something told me not to call the police.

I moved to a different apartment.

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The thing about top level athletes is that their sport equipment becomes an extension of them. Tennis racquets become, in the mind of the player, a 'furthering' of their own arms. Their hands become giant paddles with which to hit the ball. Golfers at the top of their game couldn't tell you where their arms end and the clubs begin. Polo mallets as well. Basketballs. Even race cars. They get absorbed into a athlete's personal energy field and mindset to the point where the equipment becomes part of the human body.

The thing about top level musicians is that their instruments join with them in a hybrid form that equals more than the sum of its parts. It's a true mixing of artistry, equipment, craftsmanship, and talent. A separation between the person and the musical generator becomes impossible. It's obvious to viewers. Musicians themselves will talk of a trance. A sort of disappearance takes place when the music is played flawlessly and with passion. The person combined with the piano or the guitar or what have you become a synergistic union that is both here and not here.

The thing about top level assasins is that they become extensions of the tools of thier trade. Their relationship with the tools is the opposite of the relationship that athletes have with their tools. The assassin's art is unlike the art of music. The killing weapon, be it a knife or a rifle, bleeds its stillness and coldness into the user if he or she is proficient. A sniper knows that when he shoots, he cannot breathe. In effect, he must mimic death in order to provide the stillness that will make him capable of making a gift of death to his target. An assassin frequently has to wait for hours or days before his quarry affords him a moment of opportunity. A passionate kill usually causes mistakes and evidence. A good assassin must be cold, methodical, ruthless and above all, patient. The plan, the tool, and the execution use the talented assassin as an extension of themselves.

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Two dots underneath The Stumble’s jaw meant that it was time to duck. Quite the gamble on Darren’s part, betting that The Stumble wouldn’t pull the trigger with a brain wound while the barrel of The Stumble’s cannon was pointed at my head.

Seeing the red dots fish around underneath The Stumble’s jaw, I closed my eyes. I think I even prayed.

I could feel the impact of Darren’s bullets core the air before I felt a hot rush of liquid on my upturned face that I could only assume was The Stumble’s organic CPU.

I opened my eyes. The gun was still trained on my left eye but the stump of a neck said that The Stumble had turned into a statue. Darren’s gamble with my life had paid off.

I guess I knew where that put me, expendability-wise.

Darren came up through the shadows in the back of the warehouse.

“Hey G, how’s tricks?” he smirked.

Slowly, I got out of the way of The Stumble’s gun. I knew better that to try to get it out of its massive purple hand. Most of their weapons had owner traps that liked to pretend to be functional until they were around a large number of humans or involved in a firefight.

Lessons like that were expensive in human life and well-learned.

“Not bad, Darren. Guess you’re a pretty good shot, huh?” I said back, hands in my pockets, willing my heart to slow down.

“You worry too much, G. Those things don’t have the reflexes God gave a code frog. You were never in any danger.” He walked towards me.

The Stumble’s gun went off at that moment, tunneling a hole in the floor. The recoil caused the massive body to lean back and then fall over onto the floor. It sounded like an elephant wrapped in mattresses. The impact echoed around for a while.

We froze.

After the dust settled, Darren shot me an embarrassed chuckle.

“See? Lots of time.” He said. “Heh heh.”

I left. We were even as far as I was concerned.

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It ends like this. I’m surrounded, pinned to the pavement by the helicopter searchlight. Newspapers and coffee cups are spiraling around me, running from the downdraft out of the light and into the darkness like I wish I could. I’m bleeding and I’m on my knees. I’m slouched, looking down and crying. My empty gun hangs loosely in my hand. Caught and starkly targeted for the cops around me. I notice the details of the pavement. The way it’s cracked and sloppily repaired in this part of town. It’s a poverty street. They’re still yelling at me to drop my weapon.
I glance up and I can’t see a thing beyond the edge of the spotlight stabbing down from the nighttime sky. I think back-

-to when I was twenty six and full of promise. Best in the business. I’d be in and out before anyone even knew I’d been sent for. ‘Not bad for a girl’ became ‘pretty damn good’ period which became professional jealousy which became just plain fear. I was devoted with no percentage left over for downtime, drugs, or recreation. I was a myth now like Mr. Thirteen Per Cent or Pedro Sunshine. I became my generation’s bogeyman. If I was a scientist, I would have been Einstein.

Full of promise might be a stretch. Twenty six is old age at this level of the profession. Everyone under twenty is full of promise. I think I was keeping retirement at bay with willpower. It sure wasn’t easy anymore, that’s for sure. I wanted to give it up but what else would I do? I suppose I could have quit and had kids but I gave up on that idea years ago. I’m all hard edges and reflexes. I’m barely here in terms of conversation and other stuff that normal people do. Food is fuel and this week’s mission is all there is. I’m a phantom with more names and faces than I can count.
I’m so good at hiding that I’ve forgotten how to be seen-

-and here I am. In plain sight for the first time in four years. At least twenty people (sorry, I mean officers) looking at me. I know I’ll never see the courts. Hell, some of the work I’ve done for the Big Three is so sensitive it’ll be a toss up on whether or not to kill me or free me. I’ve even done federal work.
But I can’t risk it. I’m barely human anymore. This isn’t living. This is why the young slow down. They realize that there’s a lot of life to be lived that has nothing to do with being the best in your career choice.
I bring up the gun and point it out to where I hear the bullhorn coming from and they tear me to pieces. I wheeze out a last breath and my throat clicks closed. I’m on my back staring up at the spotlight. It looks like what I hear it’s supposed to look like when you-

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Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: far away from the flashpoint
Current Music: Johnny Cash - Cocaine Blues