A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0031

Chapter 31

The glass shattered with a sound like lake ice breaking, a long, shrill scream, followed by a gentle rain of shards on the sidewalk, and all along the avenue, not a single head turned to look.

That was the part a man from another year would have noticed first. The crowbar came down a second time on the twisted door frame, and a third, and the lock came loose from its fitting with a squeak of twisted steel, and the eight didn’t lower their voices, nor quicken their movements, nor exchange the quick, guilty glances of men who expected to be stopped. They worked like porters, like a construction crew, openly, almost bored, because the city had taught them, during a long and difficult season, that no one else was coming. A black van was parked by the sidewalk with its side door already open for the night, no license plates worth reading, the engine idling, and the men went in and out of the broken facade in a leisurely relay, laughing softly amongst themselves, carrying the place piece by piece as if they had the deed.

“He’s lost his mind,” said the taller one, pausing amidst the wreckage of the door to adjust a flat-screen TV on his hip. His voice came out calmly beneath the mask, in a normal conversational tone. “The mayor. Whatever he still had in his hands a month ago is gone. He sits up there reading his little speeches, and the whole town can hear it’s a man talking to himself.”

The shorter man walked past him with a second television and a smile in his eyes. “You can’t blame him too much. They’d need three times the manpower they have to cover a city as destroyed as this. They send a patrol car to one place, and two other things catch fire somewhere else. It’s math, and math stopped working for them weeks ago.” He nodded at the empty street, the lifeless windows along it, the shop facades covered in graffiti on both sides. “A new appetite has awakened here, and they don’t have enough men to satisfy it.”

“Better for us.” The taller one let a smile creep into his own voice. “Better for everyone who isn’t them.”

Inside, the others were already in the long aisles, browsing the shelves with the practical economy of men who had done this in other stores, on other nights, and who would do it again before the end of the week. First, they grabbed the latest gadgets, the ones the size of doors, and then the televisions, the sound systems. They carried everything outside and stacked it in the van with a care they didn’t show for anything else, because the merchandise was the only thing in the building that any of them respected.

The tallest one made his way to the back, toward the small glass-enclosed booth where the manager kept his accounts and the safe under the table. He knew it would be heavy tonight. The man who tipped them, the patient, calm voice from across the stove line that had never been wrong once, had told them that the manager counted on the weekends, and that the weekend still had three days off, which meant that the steel box under that table contained everything that had been collected during the week. He whistled for the others to come closer, two of them, and they put their hands under the box and began dragging it across the floor toward the door, their feet leaving long, pale furrows in the tile, and neither of them looked up when the door toward which they were dragging it was no longer empty.

A figure stood in the space between the shards of glass and the piles of overturned crates, and he hadn’t walked there. He had simply arrived, like something that appears in a room you were sure you were observing, filling the only exit of the building that mattered. Tall, calm, and impeccable, a man in formal black that absorbed the light from the lamppost instead of reflecting it, dark lenses in his eyes so that nothing on his face revealed anything, hands crossed on his lower back, his entire posture composed in a stillness that, somehow, was more impactful than any noise the eight were making. He let them look at him for a moment, let the shuffling cease and the heads approach one by one, and then inclined his head slightly, out of courtesy.

“Good evening, gentlemen.” The voice sounded soft, light, dry, and almost warm, like that of a host welcoming guests who arrived on the wrong night. “I was wondering if you could consider putting everything back in its place. Anyone passing by on the street could easily get the impression that you robbed the place, and that would be terrible for everyone. You can imagine what that would be like.”

The leader straightened the safe. He placed it on the floor with a dry, metallic thud, his hand already moving, drawing the pistol from his waist and pointing it at the elegant shape of the door on the other side of the dimly lit shop. The others sensed the change in the air and stood motionless around him.

“I’m only going to say this once,” the leader said. “Get out that door while you still have the legs to do it.”

The man in black smiled. It was a small, polite, unhurried smile, completely devoid of fear, and somehow it was that smile that cast the first shadow of doubt in the air. “I see you take your work seriously. I respect that, truly. But there are people who need what’s on those shelves far more than your customers, and I’m afraid I can’t simply let it go.” His intertwined hands remained where they were. “So, here’s your last act of kindness. Put everything here, go home, and seriously reflect on what you’re really building with your nights. Do that, and you’ll maintain your integrity. It’s truly the best option. I would accept it, in your place.”

The leader’s response was the trigger.

Behind the dark lenses, the world distorted. The tug of the man’s finger, the first strand of hair sliding across the steel, registered as a slow, deliberate event, with a great deal of time embedded within it, and his head tilted a few degrees on his neck, unhurried, almost lazy, and the projectile passed close enough to stir the air in his ear and buried itself in a refrigerator at the end of the hall with a muffled, dry sound. By the time the bang had finished reverberating off the walls, his arm had already emerged from behind his back, and whatever was hidden there spoke once, and the leader spun partially and fell upon the safe he intended to take, the weapon slipping from his hand and sliding under a shelf, a dark stain already spreading across the flesh of his shoulder, where nothing fatal dwelt.

Then the room collapsed.

Seven guns appeared at once, and the figure in the doorway was no longer there. He used the half-second his eyes devoted to the fallen leader to throw himself and roll behind the nearest shelf, disappearing before the first of them could pull the trigger, and the hail of bullets hit the empty door frame and the stacked boxes around it, and nothing more. For an instant, they shot at a man who had ceased to exist where they looked.

He appeared at the back of the store, beside them, a discreet apparition next to the man standing near the shelf of sound systems. The thief turned and drew his pistol, and a single shot knocked the weapon from his hand before it was even level, the metal shattering against his palm and flying towards his face, and in the instant the man gaped, staring at his empty, ruined hand, the figure was already airborne. A knee descended from that heel with the quiet certainty of something obeying gravity and something heavier than it, and struck the man squarely, and there was a wet, dry crack as the bones of his face buckled inward, and he fell straight onto the tiled floor without even moving afterward.

Six.

The others turned toward the noise and opened fire, and he was gone again, a low somersault taking him into the next corridor as the shots tore an irregular crack in the wall where he stood. He didn’t crouch, waiting to be cornered. He rose. Three clean meters from his static position, a single fluid impulse with nothing visible behind him, and he landed balanced on the top edge of a tall bookcase, the entire battlefield stretched out below him, the men splitting up to attack the corridor from both ends. In the darkness of his lenses, the important details silently illuminated. The longest weapon in the room was the rifle, and the rifle was the one that would cause real damage if it found him, and so it was the rifle he hit first. The projectile struck its wielder in the shoulder and knocked him back among the scattered crates, the weapon breaking loose with a bang, the man pinned to the ground by a pain that wouldn’t kill him, but also wouldn’t let him get up.

There were five left, and now all five were firing, their barrels pointed at the figure on the high shelf. He gave them nothing to keep. A backflip ripped him from the top of the structure and threw him into the parallel corridor behind it, out of everyone’s line of sight at once, and the spot where he had crouched a moment before shattered into pieces.

The aisle where he fell was the tool aisle. Tools hung on hooks and in boxes, their honest, heavy weight, and he already had a wrench in his hand before he’d even finished standing, feeling the mass in his palm, reading the approaching footsteps by sound alone—two men rapidly approaching from the opposite side of the shelf that concealed him. He calculated the rhythm of their steps and the height of the barrier between them and launched himself, forcefully, upwards and over, in a flat, brutal arc that cleared the shelf and descended with all the weight he had put on it, and the steel struck one of them in the head, knocking him down instantly with a dry, resounding clang that ended both the man and his run at once.

Four.

The second man rounded the edge a moment later and stopped abruptly when he saw his partner lying there with the wrench beside his head. The half-second his face spent in bewilderment was the half-second that cost him. One shot damaged the gun in his hand, and a second struck him in the knee, causing a sharp cry and making him fall to the side. As he fell clutching his joint, a heel crossed his head in a short, precise arc, silencing the cry abruptly.

Three.

He turned, and two of them stood paralyzed in the entrance to the opposite cross corridor, weapons half-raised, the will to use them visibly fading from the soles of their feet as they contemplated the wreckage of everything that had been their crew sixty seconds before. He gave them no time to rise. His arm swept across them with a speed the eye couldn’t distinguish in separate acts, and two shots struck them almost simultaneously, shoulder to shoulder, and both gave way, rolled, and lay where they fell, alive, bleeding, taken from the fight without ever having participated in it.

One.

The last of them had abandoned the safe, the merchandise, and everything else, and was three steps from the broken door when the final shot hit him in the upper back, at shoulder height, causing him to spin and fall on the other side of the threshold he had almost reached, his outstretched hand closing in the night air, empty inside.

Then the shop fell silent in that peculiar way a place falls silent after so much noise, a hollow, resonant silence hovering over the low chorus of groans from the men lying there. He stood for a moment in the middle of it and let his breathing calm down, his lenses scanning the floor and finding eight shapes, none of them rising. He hadn’t come to kill. He could have done it many times over without much effort, and the awareness of that didn’t weigh on him at all, because the line he followed wasn’t about what he was capable of doing. A bullet in the shoulder is a cruel thing and hurts in a way a man remembers for the rest of his life, but it leaves him with a life to remember it by, and that was the deal he had offered each of them at the door, and which they had all refused.

He walked slowly through the corridors and collected the weapons. The rifle, the pistols, that short, ugly thing one of them carried on his belt—everything, sweeping the weapons from the floor and from careless hands, because each one had come from somewhere and was destined for a worse place, and a city already drowning in steel of exactly that kind didn’t need it returned to the men he was leaving on the ground. He carried the whole load through the broken door into the darkness of the street, where a second van had stopped on the sidewalk with its side door open, and he threw the load inside with a bang and climbed in behind it.

The van started moving even before he had fully settled into the passenger seat.

Kevin had one hand loose on the steering wheel and his eyes on the mirrors, eighteen years old, broad-shouldered and completely at ease now behind the wheel, driving them away from the scene at a speed that didn’t attract attention. He glanced to the side once.

“Good?”

The figure beside him let the tension gradually dissipate from his shoulders and allowed himself a slight smile. “Calm down.”

Kevin nodded, watching the street unfold. He already knew the answer before even asking, as he’d been knowing most things lately: sooner than he should have, and from a distance that made no sense. “I saw the first shot several blocks away,” he said. “Before you even got inside. The inside of that place is going to smell like gunfire for a week.”

The blonde head turned, and behind the dark lenses there was something akin to affection. “Your senses are truly becoming something extraordinary.”

Kevin just grunted, as he did when he received a compliment and had nowhere else to express it, and drove them around the corner, away from there. Behind them, the ruined store remained open for the night, its men scattered and the safe untouched, and somewhere ahead, in the darkness, the bigger thing they had finally decided to look for was still there, still patient, still insistent, and neither of them said anything about it for a while. They drove on, and the city slid back, and the avenue swallowed the van in the same way it had been swallowing everything else.