Oh ye wandering souls

  Luke belly crawled and slithered over to the sedan, keeping somethiween him and the house windows and cameras at all times (one up on a power pole at the far end of the yard gave him the most difficulty) picked the lock, got the trunk open and slinked inside.

  The guside reached a frenzied level, like a fireworks show ing to an end, theo a scattering of pops and cracks. An engine roared out on the front street, and others respohen silence. Luke got his pistol in hand and quieted his breathing. It was a cold day in the middle of a Texas wihank God, otherwise he might have died in that trunk before the shooting stopped.

  The doors opened suddenly. Absolutely no voices. Professionals. The doors were pulled shut rather than smmed. The earted and it was shifted into drive an instant ter. Almost immediately they were turning and Luke steadied himself against the wheel well.

  A voice groaned, probably from the fro, then silehen the voice again. Talking on a radio. Probably on an earpiece. Luke rolled silently and pressed his ear to the ft back of the rear seat, and waited.

  Silehen the driver talking, still indecipherable. Then more silence. For a moment, he saw his pn colpsing, saw the trunk open, guards with guns at the ready, and a quick death in a fsh of fire that would surely bee the running gag of the Ace Tactical offices.

  Then, the sweetest sound, like a breeze of fresh air iale trunk. A whining, bitter voice, as full of emotion as the others had been robotid cold. ing from the ter seat. Still, Luke waited to be sure. The seds dragged on, but looking back there had barely been three of them before another voiswered, patronizingly, gently, but firmly.

  Bingo.

  Luke rolled back, pnted his feet firmly oher side of the back panel, aimed right where the pelvis should be, and opened fire.

  Light broke in through the bullet holes like a movie, in big beams of twinkling dust. The gs glittered briefly in the light, like things summoned ien the void. The car braked suddenly, and Luke flexed his legs and bounced into the impact, a firing. Halfway through his mag, bullets streamed iher way.

  Something punched him in the knee. Light broke through in big patches. Smoke whispered through the beams. His vision was cut in half as something flowed, warm and dark, into his left eye. Something tapped him on the elbow and his left hand fell off the gun. No big deal, the right kept squeezing the trigger, and a breath ter the Beretta locked open, smoking in the half darkness.

  “Shit! Son of a bitch!”

  The voices came in from the car clear as crystal, minus ohe whiney, slightly questioning eve was a statement voice Luke had bee so intimately familiar with just seds ago, was absent.

  He ughed silently, rolled back, pulled the emergency trunk open, and stumbled into the light.

  The e evening glow swirled and sunk into darkness at the edges. They were pulled over on the side of the road, and a cluster of onlookers watched from a nearby CVS.

  “All right, mother fucker. I’ll admit, that retty fug good.” The guard stretched he passenger door and smiled. Luke was getting ready to make some remark about the seats being armored ime, when the son of a bit the other side of the car putt a bullet in his head.

  The world broke open inte things that the Extractor let slip, as it always did after a death in the Hardworlds, the only time its all-seeing eye seemed to falter.

  Afterwards, Car-Crash had grumbled about it being bad etiquette to drop a guy out after the job was done, but Luke was more pissed off about its effects on the quality of his mem than of any perceived disrespect. Still, the scrape came out ok. Before he could fuck off to his Realm to enjoy it, however, Tenpound pulled him into his office.

  “Any reason you weren’t with your team?”

  “Uh, they were disposed of at the time sir. So I went looking for work.”

  Tenpound had just nodded. A.T. had taken the old Hardworlder slogan of “look for work” and tur into one of ten bullet points under some a Luke had fotten. Or maybe steltion had do and just hahe shit dowher way, Tenpound excused him and that was the end of it.

  Or so he thought. The ime he dropped in, something seemed off, and it didn’t take long to figure out what.

  “They’re not here. Just you aoday,” dispatch told him when he called in, asking about his team.

  “And you’re in your own car this time.”

  His Self’s car was a geeked-out Civic. Everything but the underglow, with a thick coat of dust all over the paint. He got the idea. Look inspicuous and pauscle. He got it gassed up while the lone dispatch agent gave him the scoop.

  “You’re on Spiritwalker duty today. Crash dummy didn’t drop out. Op happewo days ago.”

  That expihe push notification news articles and i memes he had been seeing about a wild shootout. Luke found it uedly uling to be in a Hardworld after an Op like this. Like being in a store after closing or staying up so te the ercials started getting nonsensical. While on a job, it was easy to believe the whole world existed only for him to make the kill, that it dissolved like a bad dream the momeepped out, but now, reading and hearing about how a bunch of “seemingly normal, ued people” had gotten together to shoot each other over an “unemployed help desk worker”, seeing all the theories, the memes, the weeping families and solemn press releases, it felt impossible that this world was anything other than solid matter poputed by real live people.

  He wanted, desperately, for the first time in his career, to get back to the Other. Luckily the target wasn’t hard to find.

  He had, apparently, jumped ship before his crash team got active, leapt from a truck going 40 mph down Meacham and rolled through Texas thistle into a sprint behind some hotel dumpster. The crash team had been advised tet him.

  It was an eerily familiar story, down to the hotel, and as down there Luke wondered if he would see Kibbles looking up at him when he made the kill, up there supreme Luke wondered, not for the first or st time, just how accurate the scraped mem A.T. gave him actually was.

  Down there Luke found his target sitting outside a er store, drinking a Yoohoo of all things, with a half empty family size bag of Hot Cheetos saggio him on the curb. From the expression on the guy’s face, Luke would have thought he was nursing bat trauma with whiskey and heroin.

  Luke walked up and the guy locked eyes with him immediately. It was not Kibbles, but something about him was very Kibbles-esqe. He stood up, wide-eyed, and dropped the gss bottle to the ground.

  “No man! Please, it’s not fug real!”

  Luke never got a good answer on how exactly the guy knew who Luke was and what he was there for, but he tried, after that, to practice moving like any other person and not like a Hardworlder, in case he had to make another close kill, which seemed a certainty if his advaook the path he had pnned out.

  A separate scrap of memory floated in by association. Another Hardworlder, face hidden and voice scrambled from the rec needle of the extractor, telling Luke “Some of em see it in your eyes. Like weird lights. It's why you’ll see a lot of sungsses.”

  Maybe it was Luke’s brain trying to draw the extractor away from that moment, but it didn’t work. The guy kept on begging, each word like a dick kick, as Luke raised his Beretta, which took forever. At st, as he got the barrel up, the guy emptied the hot Cheetos in his fad Luke shot him through the empty bag and didn’t stop till the slide locked open.

  People screamed. Luke ran, trying not to notice the oppressive reality of it all, the absolutely not-dreamlikeness, and squatted down behind the store's dumpsters and got out the drop-out kit with uncharacteristically shaky hands.

  As he went through the Dreamworlds, he felt a presence chasing him. His training told him it was his Self, desperate to be saved, but Luke couldn’t shake the feeling that it was the man, the real man, he had just killed, now an uhered wraith bent on revenge.

  After the scrape, Luke bought the mem almost relutly, and was called into Tenpound’s office for a debrief.

  “Good work. You might have a future with the reapers.” His smile was so sticky sweet, his tone and posture ying on the sarcasm so thick, that Luke really sidered going right there, but decided against it at the st sed.

  He decided to make the son of a bitch pay in another way. He would climb that fug board and shit on Tenpound and the rest of A.T. from the top of it.

  Some jobs in the Hardworlds aren't worth the pay. ime, Luke asds, but is he just chasing anht? episode, Rising Star.