Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  And as if to punctuate my thought, the car chooses that moment to stall, and for a moment, through the silence, I can hear a warm sizzle on the cold concrete. I catch Xtian’s eye in the rear view mirror as she stands and zips herself up, blue denim shrouding pink cotton. Unafraid. I can no longer cover her scent with my own; she has marked her territory, and I will not be the one to try and challenge her for it.

  I will leave that to the others.

  First-Person Shooter

  12/15/2013

  Xtian sits on her left leg. Her right swings like a metronome, keeping time to the song in her head, mumbled lyrics dripping off her lips and into her salad, which sits uneaten but for a few unlucky croutons. I stare off into the distance and stuff a pinch of congealed cheese fries into my mouth. Not very healthy, but they will do, considering that there is practically nothing else on the menu here I can eat without dying. Even their mayonnaise comes with a side of mayo.

  She sighs, swishes her straw around in her Diet Coke, and glares at me as we both listen to the cacophony around us: video games, thudding bass, the gooselike burble of the slightly inebriated masses, screeches of sweat-reeking children like chalkboards dragged across a bed of severed fingernails. Beer and video games. What lunatic thought this up?

  “Eat your food,” I say. “Are you thirteen or three?”

  “Whatev … Dad.”

  “Do not call me that,” I whisper intensely. This line of conversation annoys me more than all this waiting. Three more months until our job? Intolerable.

  “Why not? Dad. Daddy.”

  “They do not need their assumptions reinforced,” I say. “They can believe what they like, but the less they know, the better. What d—” The waitress arrives with another drink, Xtian’s fourth, and another basket of breadsticks, so I change the subject immediately, mid-sentence.

  “—id you get on that math test?”

  Xtian grabs a breadstick before the waitress has set it down and gnaws on it, thoughtfully, ignoring the bowlful of lukewarm marinara sauce that came with, perhaps wisely.

  “Thank you, Melissa,” she says. The waitress gives her a dirty look, the same sort I imagine she will give later when she realizes we have no intention of leaving a tip. I wave the woman away from my half-empty glass of ice water and she flees. I will never understand the incessant refilling. There is a drought in California.

  “Can we go soon?” asks Xtian. I know how she feels; I am sorely tempted to take the place out. It falls well within my standard criteria for mass murder: mid-sized, enclosed, lots of people (why are they not at home playing their own games for free?), the sort of thing that nets you a high fatality-to-casualty ratio. Often you want more walking wounded, but there comes a time when you just want to smoke as many herring as you can.

  Of course, that would make it difficult for Xtian to practice.

  “You wanted in. This is in. So quit playing around and go play.” I slide her a game card.

  “Oh no,” she says, picking it up. “It has your fingerprints on it now.”

  “That would only matter if someone had a known print to compare it to,” I say as she sprinkles pepper on the card, trying to locate a thumbprint. “Now stop stalling. We are not going until you use that up.”

  “Why can’t we just do the real thing?” she whines. “The range is cheaper.”

  “They will get suspicious if we visit the range every day and stay there for five hours at a time. Here, evidently, they encourage that,” I say. “Plus, you are far less likely to draw attention to yourself here, surrounded by the other filthy little children.”

  “You’re filthy,” she says and kicks me in the shin. I move my foot to kick her back, but she is already on her feet and gone by the time my boot meets the booth. Signs of improvement.

  • • •

  I was glad to be rid of him. Though dressed entirely appropriately for the place—jeans, Sharks sweatshirt, sneakers—he stuck out like an infected thumb. His foul attitude seeped out from the bottoms of his legs and left a trail of awful behind him. I knew he could barely stand being there, but there was method and that meant risking a bit of madness. If he’d stabbed a waitress, though, we might have had to call it an early night.

  Edison believed anyone could master any art if they took things step-by-step, went slow, and practiced regularly. I think his theory was originally intended for violin students, so its application to other fields (such as killing people) was probably questionable. He insisted that I stop messing around with handguns and focus on the rifle, considering my failure back in Buffalo. I should be good at it, he said. I had more “slow twitch” capability, making me more precise while men had more “fast twitch” muscles, or something of that sort. I half-believed him.

  We both thought the range was more entertaining (and certainly more real), but as Edison had said this place was more “age-appropriate” and would suit us fine. Age-appropriate. Meh. I wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore. I could have passed for eighteen with the right makeup, the right hair. I could probably have ordered a beer if I tried. What was it going to take for him to stop treating me like a child? Another year? Another murder?

  I angrily swiped my plastic game card through the slot and the machine duly deducted several credits, asking me if I wanted to play the computer or go head-to-head with another player, a boy apparently about my age. If that other player had been Edison, it would have been a no-brainer, but on this occasion it was someone I didn’t know. Oh well. No time like the present to practice killing bystanders, I thought. Why not start with a child?

  • • •

  The sweep takes me just a few minutes, but I learn enough to know that it is relatively safe. No one obvious, no suits, no uniforms, save for a few scant security goons, flunked out of college, most of them at the front door watching the kids line up to wait their turn. Just looking at them, smelling them, listening to them, makes me want to go get some volatile chemicals from the convenience store. Perhaps later.

  I easily spot Xtian by her two long bleach-blonde pigtails; clearly those will have to go, as they are too distinctive. She has attracted a small crowd of onlookers, mostly boys, her age and—disturbingly—older. Her clothing itself does not warrant the attention—a muted gray-green shirt that matches her scuffed sneakers (no socks, ever, lately), tucked into faded jeans—so much as the fit of it does. Even from a distance I can see not only that she is on the scrawny side, but that she has at least two good reasons for attracting male attention, even if she has not yet figured that out yet. Probably she has. It is not something we discuss.

  I wander right through the middle of the crowd and stand directly behind her, watching her moves, blocking their view. There are a few snarky comments, but nothing worthy of a quick death. Slow, perhaps.

  “This is what you get for quick scoping all the time,” I say.

  “The sight’s all goofy,” she says as the sniper from the other side of the machine takes her out. He crows and peers around the machine as she curses.

  “Ooh, she’s gettin’ salty,” he says. Smartass little pubescent fast-twitcher, most likely to be involved in a school shooting before graduation as one of the victims. Perhaps I will enroll Xtian in school after all—so she can thin the herd.

  We have at least another hour of this. I hope I make it.

  “Give me room,” she says, elbow intruding my thigh as she digs into the right pocket of her jeans for the game card. She slides it through the slot, and the machine counts down, and ten seconds later he has scored a hit on her. She should be better at this, but I decide to give her the benefit of the doubt and blame the prop rifle. Still, there are things she can improve.

  “No. Don’t use the scope right away,” I say. “Back away, look at the whole screen. Watch where he is, predict where he will be. Then go there and wait for him to come to you.”

  Ten seconds later she nails him with a headshot. She then proceeds to kill him four more times in a row. Cheating now, of cours
e. The game has a limited number of entry points, and she has died often enough now that she has the pattern memorized. All she needed was one hit, and now the rest is inevitable. However, I do not point this out to her for three reasons. First, my hatred of her opponent. Second, her ability to detect patterns and exploit them is a skill in itself and worthy of attention. And finally, because she is learning the proper mindset for this sort of thing, whether she knows it or not.

  Humans are creatures of instinct and habit. They do something over and over, it becomes second-nature. Reflex. This is especially true with violence, which is why my view of these games has evolved since Buffalo. I even read that now they make soldiers play games like this because it makes them less hesitant on the battlefield. It makes better killers. Xtian does not necessarily share this view, but she is not naïve. She knows this is why we are here. And why we are not hunting, instead. Hunting is all about thinking. You sit still for eight hours and fire a gun once, then drag a dead thing back to your car. What she needs to do is stop thinking and just act, especially among distractions.

  For now, practice is finished. Her opponent gives up.

  “Wanna try Skee-ball?” he asks. Xtian looks at me expectantly, but I just shrug. Rolling balls up a ramp to earn fistfuls of paper tickets you can trade in for fistfuls of nothing. Mindless amusement, sound and fury signifying nothing but a plastic whistle and a rubber ball fit for dogs. But as long as we are here she is theoretically learning. Watching people, crowd movements, learning that people like to cluster around food, excitement, and exits.

  Wordlessly she runs off, not waiting to see if I will follow. I do not. Instead, I slide my own card into the slot of the sniper game and prepare to play the machine, just to see if it is really as “goofy” as she claimed. I am stymied when a request for head-to-head combat comes up. When I do not immediately respond to the game request, someone leans around the machine—another filthy lamb, older and pimplier than the last one.

  I accept the request and lift up the prop rifle, wishing it were real.

  “Bet you can’t kill me before I kill you,” he says.

  “How much?” I ask.

  • • •

  Skee-ball was a bust; some kid had watched a YouTube video about how to clean them out of tickets and they needed to be refilled. Someone was going home with a metric ton of plastic whistles. Instead, my new friend Denny and I migrated back into the hallway that led to the restrooms where it was quieter. He had said he wanted to talk, but it didn’t take long for him to “coax” me into the unisex “family buffet” style restroom. The one for people with babies, and also apparently for making out, if I was reading the signs right (the signs mainly being how paired-off teens kept filing in and out of the room). Initially, at least, Denny was more interested in getting his iPhone positioned at just the right angle on the countertop than he was in me. I hadn’t made this easy for him since I’d immediately sat down between the two sinks. He’d have preferred me on the floor, no doubt.

  “Whatcha doin’?” I asked, legs swinging as if I had no idea what was going down. I’d been sizing him up since we came in here. He had a few inches, a few years, and about fifty pounds on me, but it was mostly flab. Not the sort of person I would let push me into a snow bank, much less whatever he had planned.

  “Just a selfie,” he said. He came a few steps closer, putting his hand on my leg. I admired the confidence, but not much else. “So, uh, you’re pretty hot, y’know? I bet you’re a real freak.”

  Well, I never.

  “You like that?” he asked, taking a glance at his iPhone to make sure it still had us both in frame. He slid his hand up further. At least he wasn’t wasting time.

  “I’d like to put something in your mouth,” he said.

  I was pretty sure I’d watched this same video a few weeks ago on one of the PornyTube sites. Time to change the script.

  “You know what I’d like?” I said.

  I took his other hand, placed it on my other thigh, and smiled. Then I yanked his head down into the edge of the counter, splitting his face open right above his nose. He blubbered for a moment and pulled back, which was perfect. I added momentum by pushing off against his chest with both legs. He tumbled back into the stall opposite us and hit the toilet with his lower back.

  “What the fuck?” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “With me?” I replied, grabbing his iPhone, verifying it was recording. It was. I held it up to show him. “Where were you gonna post this? Facebook?”

  “Nowhere,” he said. He slid up onto the toilet, legs too wobbly to stand, blood running down his face. “Gimme that, you crazy bitch.”

  “Not yet,” I said, hopping off the counter, watching him through the cell camera now. He finally stood and took a step towards me. Which is when I pulled my 3032 from the small of my back and pointed it at him. The safety was still on, but he didn’t know that.

  “Why, hello there, Mister Tomcat,” I said. “Say hello to Denny.”

  I never knew people pissing themselves was a real thing until then.

  “I’m-I’m-I’m sorry …” he blubbered. “Please. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Shut up, Dennis,” I said. “Shut up and get on your knees.”

  He silently complied as I scrolled through files on his iPhone, confirming what I’d already figured out. I was number five or six just tonight. And there were more than that. How was he not in jail? Then again, how was I not in jail? Fair enough.

  “What was it you said before?” I asked, considering the barrel of my gun. “‘I’d like to put something in your mouth’?”

  • • •

  Xtian comes back strangely flushed and, thankfully, hungry from whatever exertion she has been engaged in. She doesn’t even sit down, just digs into my second order of cheese fries, congealed though they might be. She will be sick later, in the car. And I will make her clean it up.

  “Hey,” she says. “We should maybe go.” She’s a little nervous about something. I should not pry; if I need to know, she will tell me. But I press for information anyway.

  “You break up with your new boyfriend already?”

  She brushes it off, not taking the obvious bait.

  “I haven’t seen him in a while,” she says, too quickly.

  “You finish off that game card?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Let me see it.”

  “Can we just go?” she asks. “Please?”

  Please? Who is this girl, and what did she do with Xtian? But I can see by the look in her eyes that she means it, that she really wants to be out of here, and I cannot disagree with that. So we immediately head out the front door and begin the long walk across the parking lot to where I parked. She checks over her shoulder a couple of times. But no one is following us.

  “So what did you kids do?” I ask as I unlock the car, “Did you win any tickets?”

  She doesn’t respond, just gets inside and slouches down in the passenger seat. I double check the lot before I get in myself, but there really is no one else around.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?” I ask as I start the car. She says nothing, but when I don’t put the car in gear, she looks over at me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  I gesture towards her lap with my head.

  “Not moving till you ditch that SIM,” I say. She has herself an iPhone, by the telltale outline in her pocket, so she can’t just pull the battery.

  “I already did,” she says. “Want to see?”

  I shake my head and pull out of our spot, heading towards the highway. I am not quite sure what she learned tonight, but she clearly learned something. And that is progress.

  Field Trip

  03/03/2014

  We are atop a peculiarity of geography, a steep and sudden hill at the end of a long stretch of highway with eighty-five-mile-an-hour traffic heading towards us for ten long seconds, just yards before a curve and a dip in the road and an exi
t that—at this hour—is eternally, perpetually backed up with traffic. Eighty-five to zero in less time than it takes to reach down for your Frappuccino, to turn and yell at the kids, to text “LOL.” It is a miracle humanity has evolved to drive at these speeds, a further miracle people do not die here by the score every day.

  Today some will.

  It is a bit before rush hour peaks, a long half hour before the sun crests the hills across the highway. The latest boom here in Silicon Valley is, as we watch, sending a bunch of millennials off to a twelve-hour work day so they can afford the next thousand-dollar car payment or the ass raping they know as a mortgage. Sheep, lining up to be eaten by wolves, and one of them isn’t even going to make it to dinner, thanks to us. In the back of my head, I keep mulling over the strangeness of this job—planned six months ago, yet relying on a specific person being in a specific place at a specific time. It seems too … well, specific. But then I have no specific reason to second-guess the logistics of it, and at any rate I have other things on my mind.

  Joe is lying in the grass beside Xtian, the blanket beneath them spattered with dark fluids, still preferable, albeit barely, to the grass beneath us, wet with morning dew and animal waste. Xtian has her eye to the scope, and Joe sees twice as much, half as magnified, with a pair of binoculars glued to the same patch of freeway, an eighth of a mile away and straight ahead.

  This time, this arrangement is Joe’s doing. He is supposed to be the trigger man, being the most seasoned among us at this sort of thing. And, as far as Nick knows, he is still the one who is going to do the dirty work today. It was only when we got here a few hours ago that he decided to change things up, suggested—nay, insisted—that Xtian be the one to do it. She looked at me. I shrugged. She agreed. We had been practicing, after all, so she can shoot while Joe spots. That leaves me as a lookout, and Josh to work the phones and drive the car on the way out.