1:34 am

“Lock and load, gents, we’re movin’ out in five.”

There is clicking, the clattering noise of guns being assembled, loaded and cocked, of safteys being turned off, of ammo being packed. The room shivers with anticipation, a ripple of movement that sweeps around and then stills.

Marilyn stands somewhere near the corner; she is a short, vicious girl with dark hair and cold eyes, with an assault rifle and a set of knives. She doesn’t plan to get shot, but she wears a Kevlar-lined jacket, a bullet proof vest. Perched on a crate a few feet away is her business partner, Luke Sesson. He smokes a cigarette with long, draining breaths, as if it will somehow ruin him to inhale oxygen.

“Lyn, you got another cig for me?”

She turns, frowns at him. Pack of cigarettes, dug from a vest pocket, and she tosses them his way. She generally doesn’t smoke, not often, but Sesson smokes enough for three people so she carries them to be on the safe side. He’s a douchebag without nicotine, and she doesn’t like dealing with douchebags. So she provides.

There’s a knot of people nearby, three men and a tall woman, all in biker leather. They have pills, they each drop one in their mouth and bite down. One of the men winces, the woman laughs at him, hoarse and grating. She has a pair of occult symbols tattooed on her cheeks, strange formations of stars and circles that make her ominous, shadow her eyes like make up.

The men are Robert, Andrew and Colden, in that order. Robert was the one who winced; he’s younger than the others and the tallest, gangly and trigger-jumpy. His hair is bleached almost white, spiked tall around his skull. It washes out his pale face, so only high red spots of color remain on his cheeks, make him look pinched. And then there’s Andrew, who’s stocky, potbellied, thick arms surrounded with Jerry Sailor tattoos. Artful, really, the stockpile of mermaids and dragons and flames, some kind of collage that ends in half-decayed skulls. He wears sunglasses and a thick beard, hides his features so he’s just beard and glasses, so he’ll be unidentified when they find his body one day in a dumpster behind McDonald’s.

Colden seems to be with the woman. Sometimes he reaches out and pats her waist, sort of nervously, and she lets him, but she ignores it, too. He’s the sort of classical handsome-quarterback boy, hair combed back and honest blue eyes and he really doesn’t know what he’s doing here, surrounded by hitmen and mercenaries, except he knows that the woman, Jute, likes this shit. And he likes her, so he’ll follow along and get shot at. He’s not the brains of this, sort of an extra body for the final stockpile.

“All set,” Jute says, looking around. Everyone checks their guns again, double-checks. They nod. “Good. Let’s fuck those fuckers up.”

She doesn’t actually know what they’re shooting for, doesn’t really care. It gets her off, right, the whole danger game. So the mercenary army, when it was assembled, had her on the list to begin with. There’s money, too, and she likes guns and money, so she’ll splatter some blood on the pavement with a grin on her face.

“No one pansy out, right,” she commands, and double-checks the guns on her hips, and the guns under her arms, and the knives in her boots, the last resort.

Against the back wall of the warehouse there’s a man, smoking a cigarette, more relaxed than Sesson, more ready than the rest of them. His name is Runner, and he doesn’t have a first name, or a last name. He’s maybe thirty-five, rough looking. Everyone else is wearing leather and Kevlar and various other bits of body armor, and he’s wearing a stained wife-beater and jeans. Not even cold in the drafty warehouse, not looking at anyone else, not interested.

He hasn’t moved in half an hour, except to smoke cigarettes, didn’t do his gun check when the five of was called because his guns were loaded and ready when he walked in. No one quite knew who he was, or why he was there, and he likes it that way. They figure he’ll be a bullet-sponge, maybe take some shots, hell maybe take some of those fuckers down too. No one expects anything of Runner because no one knows what to expect from him.

Maybe he’s the only one here who knows what this is about, probably. Everyone else is on board for a good gunfight and a good paycheck. Runner is on board because he wants to be. That’s motivation enough.

“You ready, baby?”

Maybe five yards to Runner’s right side, maybe a little more, they’ve given his weird ass wide berth, there are two women. They talk quietly to one another, touch each other’s faces a lot. One is shorter, head shaved, she is stockier, muscular, surviving. Her name is Emma, but she calls herself Go, and her newest girlfriend is young and pretty and knows how to aim. Go checks the girl’s guns, pats her thighs down to check that everything is secure, stands to face her and smiles.

“Yeah, you ready.”

The girl doesn’t answer.

Near them is a scattering of boys and men; they watch the women curiously, the way men like to watch lesbians. One of the boys, he’s maybe twenty one, eyes dark with hangover circles, leans on his friend’s shoulder, nods in the girls’ direction.

“Think the pretty dyke goes both ways, huh?”

His friend laughs, rough deep voice that sort of skips through the various noises of laughter like a faulty LP. “Think she go down for anything but a bullet?” he answers.

The boy purses his lips, then grins, shakes his head. “Who you think’ll live through this shit?”

His friend shrugs. “Not you.”

The boy punches him in the shoulder, checks his bulletproof vest, his guns. Lights up a cigarette, because that rattled his nerves. His friend laughs at him, nudges his ribs cheerfully.

“Don’t worry, kid, I got your back.”

“Fuggin better, Hanson.”

The boy sits down on the cement floor, glances through the ten or more other men gathered around in their little group. Half of them are kind of grizzled, older, look like they’d been in the biz for a while. The rest are like him, young and stupid and nervous. He leans against the nearest set of legs, and Hanson doesn’t shift. And he wishes, suddenly, that he’d just stayed home tonight.

Half mixed with the group of men is a group of five people. They don’t speak to each other, just stand together, marked as a group. The taller of the women, the older one, lights a cigarette, and like a cue, two of the men light up as well. Everyone’s eyes meet. They check their guns idly, a sort of reflexive action that requires no thought. They are ready, like Runner, they are not afraid.

The tall woman is called L, which is short for Eloise, but she doesn’t like her birth name. She has long hair, red hair; it hangs braided and brilliant against her leather jacket. Beside her is Jeff Cord, the tallest man in the room, and next to him is little Dahmer, who’s nicknamed, yes, for the killer, blonde haired and quiet. The younger girl, Katya, leans against him; she is small and compact, has perfectly white hair cut to her chin, but otherwise she looks Asian. Across from them, on L’s other side, is Emery. He glares around his cigarette, watches the other people, calculates. Emery is the group leader, slumped slightly into his folded arms, guns peering under the hem of his jacket.

The group suspects what is going on, mostly Emery and L. But they are not sure, not precisely.

“Moving!”

The call comes over the crackling loudspeakers like the last one, a grating not-quite-psychotic voice. And then the door to the warehouse starts to slide open, and they’re in the shit.

2:13 am

L doesn’t remember much. She remembers seeing Jeff’s head explode, remembers feeling the blood and brains as they hit her chest, more powerful than the bullet that killed him. She remembers thinking it was a dumbass who would shoot so high, and then thinking she was gonna find that dumbass and tear their fucking throat out.

After that, things are just sort of dark, little bits of red splashing on particular moments. When she reached the front of the lines, the way the bodies jerked so much harder and fell so much faster. When someone grabbed her wrist and jerked her down. And now she doesn’t know where she is anymore.

It is moving, wherever it is she is. It is moving and dark. Not so dark she can’t adjust her eyes, and they do, gradually. They adjust. It’s some kind of vehicle. An armored truck she supposes. She is lying on her side, hands cuffed behind her. She can’t feel the weapons, the comfortable weight of guns and knives. Her clothes are cut up, like someone searched her very quickly, and she feels some sick ache in her stomach, in her crotch.

Very slowly, she starts to think again. She has been caught, has been separated from the group. She does not know who else is alive, only that her brother is dead. She does not know if she will be alive much longer, or if anyone will come looking for her.

She knows she is moving, she is a prisoner. She knows she has no weapons, knows she has been raped, knows she has been injured.

And she knows, in a distant, accepting way, that she is deep in shock. That her brain has stopped functioning on any emotional capacity, that her survival instincts are at their fullest. That she will fight or die, but she will not lie down.

And so, weakly, she pulls herself into a sitting position. And she stares at the dark.

2:19 am

Hanson had gotten shot, one of the first ones. The kid had watched the spray of blood and felt sick, like he never had before, like he didn’t know what was going on. He’d kept shooting, kept moving forward, dropped clips when they emptied and finally collapsed behind some crates. He sat there, head against the crate, waiting for a bullet to whiz through. He’d never see it. Never know, just spasm and die.

His face is wet. He doesn’t know why it’s wet but it is, and he is scared, feels like it’shard to breathe. Why’d he gotten into this, anyway? Cause you don’t need to worry about too much else when your job is shooting people. Cause the money’s good, the balls are big, and the drugs are plentiful. And he doesn’t want to worry, but now he is, because this is worse than will-I-be-able-to-pay-the-cable-bill-this-month, this is waiting to die.

He gets sick, after a few minutes sitting there, he leans his head forward and pukes on his boots. There’s no substance to it, just bile that leaves a stinging aftertaste in his throat, and he whimpers, lets his head hang forward. Unseeing, he watches the yellow-gray fluid drip down his boot, puddle in a fold of his pants. There it will crust over, leave a film of smelly grime to flake off when he moves again.

And the gunshots, gradually, stop. He doesn’t recognize it at first, but then the silence starts to scare him. He waits, shivering, for that final gunshot, for the other guys to do a final sweep. He huddles in on himself and wonders how many headshots you can shoot, how many knees you can blow, before it comes back to you. Before it’s your head that’s someone else’s headshot tally, your knee that won’t ever work again.

He waits, and he waits, and even though it’s barely five minutes, he thinks it’s been hours. And then he hears boots, slow, limping. Picking their way over the bodies of the fallen. Sometimes the boots stop, and he tenses, and then they start again and he tries not to cry.

“Check for survivors,” he hears. It’s a man’s voice, and it’s rough, sounds like its in pain.

“Fuck them.” A woman. Her voice is even, distant, detached with mild panic.

“Check.” More insistent, this time, and he shivers. It sounds angry, sounds like the man is pissed at the woman who won’t look. He hears a click, it echoes through the silent loading dock, and then he hears boots.

Boots moving toward him. He lowers his head, buries his face in his knees, bites into his hand to muffle the sobbing. His hand stings, and he tastes something wet, warm, warmer and wetter than saliva.

Something pokes him and he gasps, releases his hand to twitch upward, sit up.

The pretty lesbian is staring down at him. Her face has blood smudged on it, and makeup smudged on it, and she’s limping. He watches, stunned for a minute as she shifts her weight, and blood runs out of her pant leg, runs in a thin line toward his puddle of vomit.

She doesn’t speak, just stares at him sadly. He doesn’t think she’s pretty anymore, not in a sexual way, now she looks like a little girl, as scared as he is. He wants to hug her and cry into her shirt but he doesn’t think she would know how to do that, and he wonders at his impulses.

“Get up,” she finally whispers. The woman’s voice. The detached sound of panic and loss.

And he gets up.

2:23 am

“Your wrist is broken.”

Sesson peers over his cigarette at the kid in front of him, covered head to toe in blood, eyes flashing with some sullen angry light, blond hair caked to him with blood.

“How the fuck is everyone else fucking shot, and your fucking wrist is broken?” he asks.

The little Asian girl next to him stares, evenly, at Sesson. Or she would be Asian, but her hair is completely white, and her eyes are blue. She reminds him, sort of, of Marilyn. But not. Marilyn hates things. This girl doesn’t care enough to hate.

“He wasn’t in the back.”

Sesson stares back at her, kind of shocked. He’s just found these two kids, just encountered them sheltering behind a row of machines, hooded eyes not frightened. Just waiting. He checked them, because they were young. They had to be hurt, or shocked, or something. He isn’t sure anymore. They might just be fucked up kids to start out with. Psychos or something. Starting out in the biz cause there’s not many other jobs out there hiring psychos.

“What’s all the blood from?” he asks. It occurs to him that the kid might be wounded worse, might just be reacting like a frightened animal. Maybe he can help them. Maybe they can help him, too.

The boy’s mouth opens, and he can see that there is blood on his teeth, too, under the cracked red lips and chin. He smiles, vivid red teeth.

“Them.”

His voice kind of makes a croaking noise, like he hasn’t talked in years.

Sesson leans back, looks at the kids and then throws his cigarette away. The ashes arc, bright orange sparks, and then they fade out into the shadows between the fluorescent lights and the crates.

“You two come here by yourselves?”

First questions first.

The girl shakes her head. She has no injuries, only bloodstains on her clothes, and seems entirely unfazed by the night.

“Who you come with?”

“Emery, L, and Jeff,” she answers. “You know them?”

“Jeff’s dead,” supplies the boy. His voice still has that stale sound of disuse.

Sesson shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know them. What they look like?”

“L has red hair. She’s tall. Jeff was very tall. Emery… is Emery.”

Sesson looks between them, and then fishes the cigarettes out of his pocket and thinks, involuntarily, of Marilyn. He lost her somewhere in the fray. He thinks she might be dead, but he’s afraid to check much more. She was his sister, sort of. She was a bitch, but he liked her anyway. He doesn’t really have friends, just Marilyn, and he doesn’t really know anyone else to be friends with.

“So Emery will be instantly recognizable because of his Emery-ness,” he says flatly, sucking on the filter.

The girl isn’t looking at him anymore, she’s looking up. Then he feels a boot press into his back, a sharp nudge, and turns his head slowly.

A woman is standing there. There is a streak of blood across one cheek, obscuring strange star tattoos. Behind her there are two men. One looks young, young as the boy in front of him, but scared like that boy isn’t. The other one is stocky, heavy with muscle and weight, the beard-and-sunglasses biker type.

“Are you guys gonna shoot me?” he asks. His voice kind of grates the only stutter of fear.

The tattooed woman raises an eyebrow. Her eyebrows are completely black, and her hair is bright pink, short and messy.

“Should we?” she asks, and then she grins. He sees there that she’s as psycho as the kids, she’s just the kind of involved psycho who lights up with mania.

“You wouldn’t even have time to aim.” A voice, quiet, and everyone looks to see the girl, staring, even and unafraid.

Beard-and-sunglasses chuckles, crosses his arms. The boy with them laughs louder though, the sort of shrill noise that borders on hysteria. His left arm hangs at his side, limp and useless, and Lessen notices the bullet hole in his jacket belatedly.

“I could fucking snap your neck with my teeth, kid,” he says. Sesson gets the impression, as the girl shifts, very faintly, just the creak of leather, that he should have shut the fuck up.

He is surprised, almost, at how fast she moves. But then it also explains how she’s not hurt. He supposes it is reasonable, then, her sudden speed. He doesn’t really react to the sound of the gunshot. But he’s used to the sound of guns anyway. The kid screams, eyes bulging huge, and then vomits.

Just below the first bullet hole there is a new one. The leather of his jacket sizzles with the newness of the bullet. He screams, and screams, and screams until he can’t scream anymore. Sesson just watches, unamused, finishes his cigarette and tosses it aside.

The tattooed woman looks at the girl and grins. “Nice shooting,” she says. “What’s your name?” she says.

The girl slips the gun back into place at her hip. She’s standing now, propelled forward by the speed of her attack, no longer crammed in a crouch beside her friend.

“Katya.”