Yours is not to ask why, yours is to shoot and die

  Kibbles looked like the car ride might kill him. Luke sidered asking him what else he was on besides the weed, and if he had eaten anything with it, in order to gauge his own ces of getting puked on in the five minutes, but decided against it. Backdraft was smiling at the blurring highway and ft t ndscape like it was all dang for him, and Luke didn’t want to put Kibbles in his crosshairs pointlessly.

  Despite his best efforts, Luke felt sorry for Kibbles. Didn’t help that the little scraggly-bearded pot head kept looking over Whisper’s shoulder at Luke with a strange pleading look, like only Luke had the ao whatever illness was bugging him.

  That should have given Luke a clue what was going to happe, but it took him pletely by surprise. Probably because he was too busy looking for any indicator that Kibbles was about to hurl.

  They exited onto the access road and stopped at an interse between the bridge and a gas station, and Kibbles got very still.

  “Shit, here it es,” thought Luke. But a few moments ter, they got moving again, and Kibbles swore under his breath. Whisper looked at him, then looked at Luke, with a kind of “you seeing this shit?” gnce. Luke still didn’t get it. At that moment, he was vihat Kibbles was about to shit himself.

  Whisper leaowards the fro and cleared his throat.

  “Hey Backdraft.”

  That did it. Kibbles threw open the door and tried to unch himself at the street, which was going by at 40 mph. He didn’t get far. Whisper shot off the seat and got him by the jeans with one hand and the back of his hoodie with the other.

  “Get the fuck—” Backdraft started. Daytona smmed on the breaks. A car behind them honked, and Kibbles lifted up one foot and Mule-kicked backward right into Whisper’s face. The kick slipped across his and smmed into his shoulder, sending him backward into Luke. Suddenly, Whisper was very loud.

  “Fug bitch ass—”

  Kibbles shot out of the car and crashed over the hood of a sedan that had squealed to a stop in the ne. Impressively, he didn’t even lose that much speed. He just rolled and smmed and bounced off the bumper then off the street, and running again, filing his arms like he was being chased by bees or something.

  Whisper had some fug bees for his ass. He raised his APC9K towards the street without getting up off Luke’s p.

  “No! Shut the god damned door!” Backdraft boomed with fire in his eyes. Whisper sighed and grumbled as he got up, but lowered his gun and smmed the door shut anyway.

  “Man, do not put me on a job with that mother fucker again. If he—”

  “Shut up!” yelled Backdraft. “Tona, tell dispatch we got a fug code blue.” He took the suppressed G30s out of the glove box and wagged it like a finger out the window.

  “And ask if I o drop him out.”

  Daytona shook his head in a kind of “why the fuck ’t you do it?” way, and tapped on a flip phoh one hand while the other steered them through traffic at fifty miles an hour. They turned right on the main road that came out from uhe bridge, and Kibbles was already sprinting through a Malds parking lot fifty yards from the interse.

  “The rest of you watch for cops!” Backdraft said, like they had all spired to make this happen.

  “Why?” Hamstar asked. “I thought our job was to make—”

  “Not halfway across the state from the fug target!” Backdraft spat at the dash.

  Kibbles had gotten some brain cells activated and took a sharp right turn towards the back of the Malds and disappeared behind a dumpster. Daytona sighed and sped ahead, then turned right just past the end of the parking lot. It was a dingy part of town, nothing but massive hotels ging to the highway for dear life. Unfortunately for Kibbles, the one spot of bare nd was the massive empty field just behind the Malds, which he was now running into. He looked to his left, ready to sprint across the road, and saw the squad ing up behind him. He made a weird kind of half jump, like something had shocked him, and then sprinted across the field in the general dire of the highway.

  “You think he’s going for the Cracker Barrel?” Hamstar said with a smile in his voice. Luke had to admit, the sight of Kibbles running and tripping across ay grass field, in the dire of a Cracker Barrel sign floating above the highway a quarter of a mile away like a bea of safety, retty fug ridiculous.

  Backdraft squeezed the pistol in his right hand aed his wrist on his left forearm.

  “Get past the curve and stop.”

  The road they were on curved to the right back towards the highway, giving Kibble’s chosehe shape of a headsail with the wind in it. Luke was just thinking that Backdraft's master pn would only work if Kibbles kept running forward in a straight line like a zombie, when Daytona’s pho off with an arm chime, and he g the s.

  “ive. Get to marker ASAP,” he read to Backdraft. He put the pedal down and followed the curve back towards the access road. Out on the field, Kibbles rotated at the ter of their trajectory like a frontman in a 90’s music video, and Hamstar snickered into his hand.

  “Shit, might as well pop him first,” Whisper said, again in his usual low-volume purr.

  “Fuck him,” Backdraft said, putting the pistol ba the glovebox. “Dropping outs too good for him. Let him bake in that fug field till the Spiritwalkers e for him. Maybe then he’ll quit food.”

  They got bato the access road and sped onto the highway, and Whisper kept his eyes on Kibbles until he disappeared behind the barrier wall.

  As they got on the highway, Backdraft lit up a pstic-tipped cigar and cracked the window. After a few minutes of scowling at the highway, he picked up the flip phone and started texting. Luke watched him, w if it would be worth it to ask where they were going, until he spped the flip phone shut and barked at the roof.

  “Hamstar, hand Bottle the 5K!”

  There was some rummaging in the back, and then a tap on the side of his seat. Luke looked down to his left and saw Hamstar’s big hand him an MP5K between the seat and the door. He grabbed it and held it between his knees. It looked well-worn, to say the least. Tape on the frip, tape on the sling. Hamstar tapped again on the seat and handed him a tool pouch of some kind with three extra mags in it, none of which looked the same.

  “Boss wants a big to-do on the mixmaster at a quarter till,” Backdraft announced. “Ham, I’ll drop you there and we’ll split. Take a hostage if you . Shit starts to look final, surrender and start telling tales about all the bombs you stashed. Got it?”

  “Yeah bro, all right.” Hamstar o himself out the window, clearly trying to psych himself up. Luke realized, for the first time, that even the professionals might have trouble believing a parallel life was waiting for them oher side of death.

  “The rest of us will stay mobile. Whisper, you and Bottle will be team two. We’ll be following chase at that point, if it es to that, so no telling where you’ll get dropped.”

  “Uhey move us to kill team,” Whisper said hopefully. Backdraft smiled back at him and talked like a dad whose kid had mentioned going to six fgs on a school day.

  “Now don’t go getting your hopes up for that. Murder squad already popped lucky guy number o night, no issue. Probably this one up pretty quick.”

  “But the defense will be looking out now,” Whisper said mostly to himself.

  “You might be right, Whisper,” Backdraft said like the kid was now talking about Santa Cus. “Keep the dream alive and your chambers loaded, as they say.”

  After that, the ride got quiet again. Luke squeezed the MP5 and watched the same metroplex he’d spent his entire life in float by, but now under a different sun. In the silend the white noise sery, his mind wandered. He wondered if all his jobs would be here, and thought that it would be darkly funny if even when projected through dimensions and beyond his own flesh, he still couldn’t move out of the fug area.

  As his thoughts wao Kibbles and attempts to theorize his fate, that old train of thought sous horn and he could only watch it smash through.

  Rory had been right about people like Kibbles. This pce really did drive them insane. Hell, she might have been right about half the people in the car with them. Maybe they just had gotten to the point where experience masked insanity. He saw that a lot in the stru biz.

  He was thinking about her dang, and w who with, when another arm tone screamed from Daytona’s phohis time, it kept screaming.

  “Oh shit.” He flipped it open and held it to his ear. “Hello?”

  Backdraft was still as death and watched Daytona with wide evil eyes. The car got breathlessly quiet, and Luke could hear someone half yelling oher side of the call, dishing out their words like measured punches.

  “Ok. Yeah. West? Ok.” Daytona sounded like the guy was telling him how to defuse a bomb. Backdraft leaned in hungrily, but kept quiet.

  “Ok. Uood. And— Hello?. Shit.” Daytona spped the phone closed and got into the fast ne.

  “What—” was all Backdraft got out.

  “Shit went south!” Daytona squealed. “Point squad knocked out. Targets ing down 183. Gold Camry. Oh Seven. Wants us to park at some bank and wait. Call the moment we see them and follow behind. Far behind.”

  “We’re gonna fug hit them,” Backdraft said like revealing a secret.

  “No, they said just to follow. Other teams dropping in—”

  “Fuck that! TP is being a bitch cause I called him out at the Quarterly!”

  “Look man,” Daytona said in a suddenly measured tone. “I'm just following him. Ok? You know the fug game by now.”

  Backdraft didn’t even look over, and not a single hair on him moved food five seds, until,

  “We’ll see.”

  You work with what yiven in this biz. ime, the team hits the thread head on, but buddy, it's what's in those heads that matters. episode, Crash Dummies.