Dead end job

  Streetlights sprayed bursts of stretg dappled amber that fred on the windows and floated softly across the empty seat o him. The traffic had that Friday night feel ency. It broke through yellow lights and spilled into red, showed no care for speed limits or the slid flooded roads, and bulged at every interse, swelling until the green lights exploded into the shining darkness like gunshots and started it all off again. The city was bursting at the seams.

  Twice, a car horn bred just feet away as a would-be bar fly tried to rely on Sam’s hesitand found the Jeep unwilling to give a scrap of acceleration. She was an absolutely maniacal driver, but she kly how much road she could take down to the inch.

  After about half an hour, Sam turned dowereo and the amber swarmed sky gave way to a wide darkness where the lights flickered few and farther up, struggling against rain. The long shadowed face of the strip mall slid across the windows. Gradie thought of the Titanic, seen from that little diving pod, at the bottom of the sea. Still, dark, waiting. He had watched the videos over and over as a kid. Or had that beeher—

  “We’re good to ght girl?” Sam said.

  “Yeah, all clear,” EP said, industrial metal thumping behind her. “An, mask up, and if I call out cops, it means they’re turning i, and you have about half a mio get out and down the slope. Uood?”

  “Got it.” Gradie pulled the stog material out from under his beanie and down over his face.

  Sam killed the headlights and pulled around to the back door. The windshield was half solid darkness, half glittering distant lights h over the treeline.

  “Timer starts now. Move fast,” EP said. Gradie jumped got out into the rain and Sam took off before he had the door shut. The lights in the back alley were all dead and the Jeep seemed to melt into the darkness. He felt suddenly that she would never e back, but the thought of bei on his own was electrifyie being terrifying.

  He got the key out, freshly milled at the safehouse by some wizardry courtesy of EP and Philip, and tur smoothly in the lock. Water dripped down his mask and streamed between his leather gloves and his sleeves. The door opened into solid dry darkness, and he looked bae st time.

  Beyond the ft bess of the alley, where rainwater gushed out of the gutters and pooled in the drains, headlights moved in streams behind the trees and city lights smeared a glowing line half the humming charcoal sky. He took a humid breath, smelled the rusty st of the wet alley, and tried to preserve the feeling of being a shadow in the night, armed in all bck, a soul skating across universes, a real—

  “Get the fuside!” EP said. He stumbled in and closed the door. Ihe rainsound was hollow like it was making way for something. He stood there, trying to remember what to do. He had instantly fotten all the details and steps memorized at the safe house.

  “Please, don’t make this hard,” EP said.

  “Sorry.”

  The map came hazily to mind.

  Light swit the receiving bay had been, where?

  He got the fshlight out of his chest bag and waved a circle of light across the back door to the light switches and hit them all at once.

  WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP

  “Fuck!” Bag dropped, gun drawn, he blinked around at the bright room and the arm sound died suddenly. His brain caught up with him and he realized the sound had e from inside his ears.

  “You awake now?” EP said.

  “I almost let a round off!”

  “Is that code for something?”

  Gradie ughed. So, she did have a sense of humor.

  The adrenaline boiled over and jostled loose everything he had gone over at the club house. The maps and routes rolled out of memory and guided him through the receiving bay.

  The searg was monotonous, but the feeling of the gun haunted his hands and he was severely aware of every exit at all times. The intruders never solidified into a daydream, but remained as a prickly sensation somewhere behind him.

  At first, there was only the rain on the roof, storm sounds slipping through the door jam and shaking through the bay doors, and the shuffling of whatever Gradie was looking through, but eventually EP started helping.

  “Look behind it too.” “Ladders in the er to your left.” “The o the end of the row just got here.”

  Gradie rolled over the idea that a quarter stuck behind a box or wedged under a pallet in the back of a dist department store could be of lethal importao hyperdimensional Spirits with access to obse amounts of Otherworld wealth, until it was no longer novel enough to dampen his annoyance.

  “This is probably just me being new,” he said, when his gloves had gone from night assassin bck to dusty shelf-stocker brown. “But this seems like a huge waste of time. Is there any ce I actually find this thing here?” He popped open the sed vending mae and got the eism in his hand.

  “Yes, or we wouldn’t have you e here,” EP said. “We don’t know how far back he pushed possession of it, and he’s not what you would call a stable individual. Could be anywhere.”

  Gradie finished cheg the years on the quarters and moved down the dark hall into the break room. An unreasonable panic shook over him before he could get to the switch. The lights came on in patches, and the st row flickered for a breath, like the room resented being woken up.

  There was an eerio the p the stillness of night. The fluorest gre was different, somehow, this te. The chairs all askew like limbs locked in rigor mortis. The microwave and fridge held the light like dead vessels fated to stand unused for empty hours with the texture of tomb air. His implied refle stretched across the linoleum like a ghost in the er of a photograph.

  He remembered w te one night in the Real, the month of unlimited overtime. The rows of fluorest lights reflected off the floor-to-ceiling windows, creating a ghostly mirror double of the office that floated out over the dark parking lot towards the flickering highway. He had watched that mirror world slide by as he walked to the break room near midnight, and found the break room itself just as ied as the mirror office. A thing out of pce. Light shining where only dark belonged.

  The memory fred up and dissolved into another memory sm in the memory of his Self, another him, another office, ae night shift, and another humming break room, the same feeling in both, and here. It all felt like him. A Spirit seeing where there should be only blind ignorance, aire world that should.

  “So what are the odds of me finding it then?” he said, to drive it all away. “You think like fifty-fifty, or—”

  “Why, you want to bet or something?”

  “Yeah, sure. If I find it, we go dang in the Allclub, just you and me.”

  The breakroom was dead quiet as he got the lock open on Cooper's locker and dumped the stuff on the floor. Did he piss her off again?

  “All right, but when you don’t find it, you have to give me half your pay.”

  “Fine. I don’t do this for the money anyway.”

  “Don’t let Boss hear you say that. Then you’ll really be w for free.”

  “I mean it. I don’t know what the fuck I’d buy in the dreamworld anyway.”

  “Careful calling it that. If you start to think of it as a dream, you might drop out.”

  “Tsh. I don’t think I’d ever dream that fug pce.”

  More quiet. He got the lock off the other lockers on the list, then started digging through the pile.

  “You really telling me you haven’t found anything worth paying for on the ball?”

  He thought about it. All the flying, watg.

  “Maybe like a really nice craft.”

  “There you go. People spend fortunes on those.”

  The sileretched until he couldn’t stand it.

  “I still don’t uand why anyone ever buys anything there.”

  “To experiehings they ’t in the Real,” EP said in that expining tone she loved to use. “To see—”

  “I’m doing that now.” He meant it, but EP saw him digging through the trash and ughed.

  “Oh yeah. You’re living your best life.”

  Gradie looked up at the security camera and scratched his mask with one finger.

  “I was agreeing with you. I see you pouting through the mask.”

  Gradie left the trash on the floor and moved to the fridge.

  “I meant like the shootouts and all the life ah shit. Oh but I guess you wouldn’t know about that, being a desk jockey.”

  He liked it whe mad, but she didn’t rise to the taunt.

  “Oh yeah. You’re irenches. Hey, I think that ranch might have gone bad.”

  He had most of the lunch boxes dumped out and realized the fridge robably pointless. Cooper didn’t seem like the kind of guy to pack a lunch. He went out in the hall and started pig the lo the office door.

  “So, what do you buy iherworld?”

  “None of your business.”

  “That dirty huh?”

  “Just because the extent of your imagination is getting a nut, doesn’t mean everyone else is so simple.”

  “What? How is that a dig against me? I was just saying I ’t uand why, in a pce where you fly and make things appear from nowhere, you would pay anyone else for anything.”

  He got the door open and the lights on and found the dingy office waiting there with half of its walls covered in file ets like a fug punch line.

  “What if you wao do something crazy, something impossible,” EP said.

  “I’ll just imagi.”

  “You actually think it’s that easy?”

  “Yes,” he said, thinking about how hard it had been to make the mask. He was too far in it to turn baow.

  “Is that why you spend all your time flying around aing scammed by Ray’s?”

  He started going through the drawers.

  “You sure do keep tabs on me. Why don’t you just e aloime?”

  He thought the pause was a bit on the long side this time.

  “To eat some bullshit burgers?” she said.

  “Yeah. Yonarving after I get dohrowing you around the Allclub.” He let the smile slip into his voice.

  “Now I’m really gd you won’t find it.”

  A muffled thundercp broke behind her voice.

  “It’s raining there too? Are you close by?”

  “Don’t be a creeper.”

  “Maybe I swing by tonight.”

  “I’m tempted to give you the coordinates. Be funny to watch you trip a cymore.”

  “Might be worth it.”

  “Really?” Her voice came out like an answering mae, and he wondered if she was trying too hard to keep something out of it.

  “Depends. What are you wearing?”

  A loud fast busy signal screamed in his ears.

  “All right! Jesus! Worth a shot.”

  The sound didn’t let up.

  “Ok, Zoey. You got me.”

  Still the fast busy. He popped the earbuds out and put them, still screaming, in his inside coat pocket.

  The office was stripped open around him. All that was left was the safe. He found the bination iel folder on his phone and ope.

  Cash and slips. No quarter. He ran his hand through all the bills. Hundreds, twenties, all there in crisp reality. He ted out eight hundred dolrs and held it in his hand. More than a full week’s take home in the real. The numbers on the paystub, remembered as if through fog, wavered, and the memories of the Self flexed their gravity.

  Here, his Self made that mu a day. The amounts and shapes of his bance sheets floated in is mind with more crity than anything remembered from his Real life. He remembered all the options he should have sold or exercised today, all the charts he should have checked, the earnings reports ing up week, and panicked. What was he doing thumbing cash in a fug retail safe? At a crime se?

  The thoughts fell short, their energy wasted against a wall of another idea: “This isn’t the real me either.” The Real felt unsubstantial because of its hazy distance, but this life failed to hold him because of some unnamable quality. It just felt wrong.

  The pull of the Self faded back to a whisper beh the sand, and he was left alone in the dusty quiet.

  Wow. All that talk and warnings about him dropping out, the draw of the Self, and here he was looking that other him dead in the eye and feeling nothing.

  Is it me? Ann of my Spirit being abnormal? More evideny hopelessly separated retionship with reality. Even among dimension-hopping assassins, I’m the odd o.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket. The s said it was Kate.

  “Hey, I’m still looking. Nothing—”

  “Holy shit dude! Did you take your earbuds out?!” Sam yelled.

  “Yeah, Zoey—”

  “She’s w on April. Cops rolled up on the apartment. I’m watg your drones. Good thing the cops didn’t drop in on you while I was trying to call you!”

  “One sec, I’m putting them in.”

  The earbuds beeped in his ear when he sealed them and the quiet again.

  “Kate?”

  A long, dead pause, then a burst of driving and rain sounds.

  “Tulling into the lot! Get the fuck out!”

  Gradie looked around, for a moment fetting where anything else, including the exit, was iion to the office, as if the universe outside the peeling walls was just a void dotted with cops.

  It's not all gunfights and armored cars, dreamer. But the dull hours make the electriutes that much sweeter. ime, an escape, and a fall. episode, Slipped.