Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  The results were pathetic, of course. The gunman didn’t fall immediately. He was too strong and limber. His feet went, one of his arms spasmed out, and he hung for maybe three seconds by one arm, and one of his legs twitched. Then his final four fingers yielded on the death grip, he slid off into gravity, the tip of his shoe hit a strut and flipped him backward, and he fell almost horizontally, striking the earth backside first so that his legs and arms splayed outward in the dust that rose from the flower bed whose buds he crushed.

  “Great shot,” said the spotter. “That’s three, or is it four?”

  “He was three, but it’s like prairie dog shooting,” said McElroy, “in that it gets thin fast.”

  Ray could see no one left to shoot. And by this time, from somewhere, SWAT operators had broken into the amusement park and were clearing. He’d watched them take down a big guy in a scrum of angry women, pursue another into a store, where a double burst of full auto suggested Game Over, and finally his vision was provoked by rapid movement on the periphery and he saw a gunman in midfall from the top of the roller coaster’s biggest hill to hit and bounce and then go limp in a flower bed.

  Yells reached him from the operators below.

  “Clear left, tangos down.”

  “Clear right, tangos down.”

  “Clear in center, I think all tangos down.”

  “Check tangos, be careful, shoot if you see movement.”

  The SWAT team moved through the melancholy ritual of mop-up, never fun for anybody, and then Nick heard, “We are clear, we are clear, many civilians down, get medical in here fastest.”

  Someone from Command came over the net.

  “This is Command. Clear for medical, clear for medical. Get those medics in there and begin to assist the wounded. All aid stations, wounded incoming.”

  “Okay,” Ray said to Lavelva as he reloaded a fresh mag in his Kalash. “Now I’m going into the place where I think this kid is hiding. You stay here, you stay down. Do not move fast, do not go down on your own. This is a tricky time, you could get shot by some hot dog real easily, do you hear?”

  “Ray, you don’t have to do this thing.”

  “Well, I’m closest.”

  “Ray, it’s over. Let them police take that boy. That’s their job, let ’em do it for once. You just sit here by me and rest. We get some french fries.”

  He smiled.

  “I hear you, yes I do. But that’s not how it works. I have to finish this thing, I’m closest. Maybe he knows secret ways out or places to hide, maybe he means to set up and kill a lot of people one last time—whatever, the sooner he is put down, the better. And as it has worked out, I represent sooner.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Lavelva.

  “Sweetie, this is tactical entry, close-quarters battle; you need to know what you’re doing and I can’t be thinking on you. I’m giving you a Marine Corps order: you sit down over there and wait till the good guys arrive.”

  He turned, went back to his iPhone.

  “McElroy and anyone else, I’m now going into First Person Shooter after this kid and whoever.”

  “Cruz, this is Memphis. Take off your scarf and whatever you’re wearing on the outside. You have a white T-shirt on?”

  “It’s Marine OD.”

  “Webley, you direct all first responders not, not, I say again, to engage an armed figure in an OD T-shirt.”

  “There’s a young African American woman here too,” said Ray. “Lavelva, she is tops, she was with me the whole way. She should not be engaged either. She will be sitting outside unarmed with her hands in plain sight.”

  “Get that, Webley?”

  “I’m putting it out now,” said Webley. “They should be up there soon. Ray, go get ’em.”

  “I’m off.”

  “Good luck, Marine,” said McElroy. “I’m on you with backup far as I can go.”

  Ray clambered up, but Lavelva tried one last time.

  “Ray, why are you such a goddamned hero? Heroes die young and hard and leave their girlfriends all swole up with weepy snot on their faces.”

  “Maybe so, but I have ancestors to answer to.”

  “From China?”

  “No, much worse: from Arkansas.”

  The shooting had stopped. Andrew turned to face the grave demeanor of the imam, who also realized that it was almost time. Andrew felt a little like another one of his heroes, Hitler, in the Führerbunker with the Russian peasant army up above.

  He rose, went to the game console, pushed a button, and a memory stick popped out, which he in turn dropped into a buffered envelope, already addressed and stamped. He sealed it and handed it over to the imam.

  “You will be all right. I will take you to the doorway, you will go up, your pilot will land, and you will be gone. In the mess no one will even notice. It’s going to get way crazy around here. Then you drop that in a Canadian mailbox and it goes to a Canadian letter drop for WikiLeaks. They’ll know what to do with it. A little editing, a little tightening, add a timeline and some production values, and you have the greatest FPS game ever made. You have the greatest story ever told. It will live for a million years, do you understand?”

  “I do, my brother. But it is not too late. You can come with me.”

  “Nah, never in the cards. I always knew and I’m prepared: narrative rules. It needs a climax. We’ve got a hero, I’m the villain of the piece. We need a duel: he and I must fight to the death. Whichever one of us goes down, it’ll make the narrative complete. WikiLeaks will patch that stuff in from CNN and from all the cell phone vid, don’t worry.”

  “So be it, then, my friend.”

  “If I see Allah, I’ll say hello to him for you and hope there are some virgins left.”

  “I will see you in paradise.”

  “Or hell. Whatever.”

  The two men hugged, yet there was nothing left to say, and time was short. The imam turned with his treasure, exited the back door.

  Andrew picked up his iPad, checked to see that it was receiving wireless feeds from all the gun cameras, selected number four, and brought it up. He saw what the gun muzzle of the man stalking him saw, which was the steady progress down Rio Grande toward the FPS store, where he, Andrew, awaited.

  Andrew picked up his own AK-74, the one without the gun camera, and slung it. He turned and slipped into the interior corridor, raced past doorways, and finally pushed one in and stepped into the back of a Payless shoe store. A group of women crouched in horror nearby.

  “Are you the police?” one of them asked.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  Ray did a quick pass-by on the First Person Shooter doorway, saw that the store inside appeared to be empty. He ran a last check on the AK, making sure he was cocked and unlocked, then went in hard and low, CQB-style, gun at the shoulder, moving erratically, eyes dilated so wide in the scan for data you could have landed a plane in them. Posters of übermenschen with the latest in stylized assault rifles stood heroically on all the walls, like in some sort of Waffen-SS fantasyland, as well as a couple of bulletin boards that tracked I, Killer tournament progress, quotes from battle gurus like Napoleon, Bedford Forrest, Jeff Cooper, Sun Tzu, all very nerd technowar. The place, however, didn’t have that Marine smell of sweat but the scent of something else: plastic wrapping.

  Most of the free space—dark and shadowy without lights—was given to racks of games in the center of the room. He prowled around them, going in low, coming up in shooter-ready position, finger aching to fire at every shadow or hint of substance, but the only thing to behold were the games themselves, neatly racked cover out—not just FPSes, but every war game known to man, from every war known to man, for every style of computer known to man. No sign, no sound, no movement. He declared the place cleared.

  The door to some interior chamber stood behind the cash register counter, and he went to that, kicked it hard, went in low-profile, and again was met by silence and stillness, perceiving a gloom penetrated by t
he glow of electron light.

  It was the room of screens, the lair of the beast. It felt empty too, but Ray dashed from position to position to make sure. Yes, clear.

  Now he freed his concentration up to assess. This had to be the HQ of the mission. On the wall, security feeds lit screens that showed mostly empty corridors, except for the first level, where frenzy was the mode of the day: medics hustled, the wounded were attended to, SWAT guys offered perimeter security, and everyone tried to help and get a hold on what exactly had transpired, who were good guys, who bad, the whole law enforcement crime scene drill.

  But on the other wall, he saw an odd array of camera feeds displaying, well, nothing. All seemed still. The images were black or horizontal and meaningless, though occasionally there was the blur of boots and shoes hustling by or the nothingness of a wall a few inches away. What the fuck was this? One seemed more agile than all the others, number four, and he looked closely and saw a pair of shoes, New Balances, the same model he was wearing and—

  Jesus Christ! Those were his shoes! This little fucker had clamped a wireless camera on the rifles!

  He looked, and behind the muzzle of his Kalash he saw a neatly milled unit connected to the barrel by some kind of clamp, and the unit held a lens. Among all the tactical geegaws mounted on the AK—vertical foregrip, a receiver with a Picatinny rail, new iron backup sights—he hadn’t even noticed it. He pointed it at the screen and got that infinity of mirrors thing—where the camera records itself recording itself over and over again and the image diminishes in size as it sinks toward nothingness—but kept it moving, so if Andrew was watching, he wouldn’t tumble to the fact that Ray had tumbled to the fact.

  The game! Lavelva was so right. In his sick mind, this strange genius boy had invented in real time and space the biggest first person shooter in the world and had recorded it with wireless video for some editor in some bunker to put together some giant cyberdeath tournament based on imagery from today’s adventure in slaughter.

  But now he realized, For the first time, I know something he doesn’t. I know that he knows where I am and what I’m doing at all times. That’s how he knew I was coming through that door. Even now, on the move, he’s receiving my feed. He’s laughing at me, waiting for me to come.

  He set the rifle down, pointing to nothing, and moved to a central chair in a mesh of Star Trek consoles wired into everything by a jungle of cord hanging behind them, and went and crouched at the big screen of what appeared to be the mother computer. The image still seemed to hold the security system main menu, and he quickly slid the mouse around until he’d nested it on ELEVATOR ACCESS, punched enter, saw some flickers and heard some clicks, and finally an icon lit up explaining ELEVATORS ENABLED, then ESCALATORS ENABLED. But, he noted, the doors had already been opened. Huh?

  The phone on the desk rang.

  He paused, waited, finally picked it up.

  “You’re the hero,” someone said.

  “Is this Andrew?” Ray said. “You’d better give yourself up. The place is full of cops. They’ll shoot you in a second. I’ll take you alive.”

  “God, you are a hero. You are fucking John Wayne. This is so cool. I could never have written this.”

  “Look, kid, you’re going to ride the needle for sure, no lie. But that’ll take years and for all those years you and I both know you’ll be god to millions of people as fucked up as you are but not nearly as resourceful. You’ll love every second of it and you’ll love the hatred everyone else pours on you and you will have the time of your life. Don’t pretend that’s not what this is all about.”

  “You’ve got it wrong, Duke. It’s not about that. I’m shallow but not that shallow. It’s about the game. And the game needs a big bang finish. So you better come for me before all those Minneapolis ice fishermen get up to this floor and shoot me to Swiss cheese. It’s so much cooler if you kill me or we kill each other and give the thing a gleam of mythic tragedy. By the way, if you want to find me, here’s a subtle hint: I’m in the movie complex.”

  “Give yourself up!”

  “I can’t. We’re at the hyper level of the game. I have to see who wins.”

  8:47 P.M.–9:35 P.M.

  Andrew was disappointed in the popcorn. It had gone cool and stale and had toughened somewhat. Now, a good employee of the Regal Theater chain, a true professional, would have stayed on station, keeping the popcorn hot throughout the massacre, because you never could tell when somebody would want some fine, freshly popped popcorn. You just can’t find good help these days.

  He sat in one of the megaplex’s fifteen auditoriums down the hall a quarter-mall rotation over to Mississippi from First Person Shooter, watching a flow of images above him. It was an old favorite, and he was happy to see that the robo-screening mechanism had kept the images on-screen even if the human part of the system seemed to have failed, though you wouldn’t want to judge a whole program on just one example. In this movie, lots of gunfire, lots of dying, lots of smart, snarky talk, the hero in an undershirt with a Jersey accent. It was pretty good, maybe the best in the series, even if some of the conventions of audience appeal—the cute, rotund black cop, for example—were by now a tiresome trope. He would have fast-forwarded through them if it were possible.

  Now and then he looked at his iPad, which still received the camera feed from number four, that is, the gun muzzle view of the hero who was now stalking him, giving Andrew the man’s precise location. He doubted he would show up in an undershirt. No, no, Andrew imagined some SWAT captain in a black combat outfit, maybe with a wool watchcap and one of those mikes bent around his face. Probably a dad, never done this before, scared to death the whole way, yet in the obdurate squareness of mind-set utterly committed to the Rules. “Give yourself up!” Yeah, right, you have the right to remain blah blah blah and blah.

  The guy should have warrior-pure thoughts at this time. He should be thinking, Kill this little motherfucker. But no, not in modern America. He was probably thinking, Will I get in trouble because I snapped at Commander Jackson a few minutes ago, will this count as overtime, will I be so hung up in paperwork I’m not free to go on my Caribbean cruise with the unit next week, should I hire an agent for the movie version, or should I write a book first, and if so, where would I find an actual writer to put the words on paper? That kind of thinking could get you killed.

  Andrew checked again. The guy was outside the movie theater, running his gun muzzle over the box office. Now the camera bounced hard as he made a dash to that structure, took cover behind it, and tracked the gun muzzle through the door, scanning the vast but abandoned refreshment stand, peering hard into the darker “lounge” areas where sofas and chairs had been set up in pathetic imitation of the typical American living room. Then another dash as he moved into a position to scan the corner closet where the maintenance people ran their operation, seeing a few tipped-over garbage cans on wheels, dumped sweeper brooms, stacks of toilet paper for the johns, and vats of soap for the sinks. No paper towels, though. This theater complex clearly had those awful blow-dry things.

  Nothing there, our hero crept around the corner and at last confronted the long corridor off which each of the auditoriums was sited. The guy had to know that he, Andrew, was in one of them. Would he get it right? Would he go by trial and error? Would reinforcements arrive? Would he call for backup? Hmm, probably he’d go straight ahead, because he had to realize that Andrew knew the mall forward and backward, and might know all kinds of escape routes and could even yet, this late in the game, make a getaway. So he had to move fast and close the distance, make the arrest or the kill.

  Andrew chuckled softly. This was really cool. It was working out so much better than he’d thought, even if the kill number looked as though it would be the one disappointment. He’d thought those kids would do a better job, but it seemed that so many of them had been secretly taken down that the remaining guys could never get any heavy fire going, and the few that were left sort of wimped out at the en
d and weren’t willing to aim and kill systematically, as they had been instructed. No, you really couldn’t get good help anymore.

  His back to the wall, Ray slid down the corridor, under art deco golden-movie-age affectations, posters of improbably beautiful human beings, another abandoned garbage can on wheels, to the first door. In one of the auditoriums before him, the kid Andrew lurked, probably set up behind the seats, waiting for someone to pop in, silhouetted in the glare of the door, lit from the front by the glow of the screen. Andrew would blast him down, then maybe escape by some predetermined route only he knew. Yet if Ray didn’t press, the boy might vanish just the same, and the little bastard was so smart and had all this stuff so wired, maybe he’d actually have figured out some way to beat the game.

  Ray looked at the signs jutting into the hallway, each a mini-marquee bearing the name of the flick on display inside. Sure, Junior might play on that too. That was him: nihilistic but in a “funny” way, hip, ironic, thought everything was a joke, even saw himself as a comedian as he took down the system on its biggest day. It wouldn’t be worth it if he had to do it as some little Arab commando type, cornily shrieking his allegiance to Allah; no, Andrew was too cool for that. He’d do it, but the trick was to do it insouciantly, with some kind of snarky comedy element, so that no matter how it turned out, his followers—there’d be millions, in the way these things worked—would get the joke, smile at it, and hold a special regard in their heart for the great Andrew Nicks, cool to the end, cooler than Dylan and Eric, cooler than Cho, cooler than Jared.

  Ray heard movie music blaring from the theater he was closest to, looked up, saw it was some Disney family comedy. No way Andrew would be caught alive, much less dead, in such a travesty of happy-fam cliché.

  Ray realized, It’s become a pop quiz on movie irony. To have a chance at him, I have to know which theater he’s in. To know that, I have to decipher the names and meanings of the movies and decide which one would best express his sensibility. Too bad Roger Ebert isn’t here to advise me.