Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
- Performer: 1440414793
Book online «Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗». Author Aaron Dunlap
“What’s going on?” Amy asked, standing in one place and turning at her hips to follow my movement.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Guys, guns, shooting. Just another Friday night.”
I crossed the room and looked out my window at the back of the house. There was nobody out there. I opened the window with the metal crank as wide as it would go, then I turned and stripped the sheets from the bed and started pulling the twin mattress off the frame. Amy watched incredulously, until I asked her to help. Together we spun the mattress on its edge and slid it through my open window. It fell and landed in the grass on the ground about six feet below the window. Not too bad, I thought.
I took the pistol from Amy, switched the safety on, and somehow fit it in my pocket.
The door to my room shook, the knob wiggled. The lock didn’t have a key; they’d have to bust it in. That’s what they started to do. I grabbed my car keys from my desk, and threw Amy her purse, then went back to the window. It was a tiny jump, but I still hesitated.
“Land like I do,” I said over the banging on the door. I stepped up onto the windowsill, and then stepped downward onto nothing.
The landing came immediately. I hit the mattress with my feet, felt my ankle sting, and rolled sideways to disperse the energy. I stood up and looked up at Amy through the open window, and waved her down. She emulated my movement well enough, but made a slight huff when she landed. I realized that I left the submachine gun, the “XM8” in my room. Great.
I drew the pistol and we crossed the back of my house together, staying tight to the wall. The corner to the side of the house was clear, so we followed the wall to the side of the garage. The side garage door was still unlocked from when I took out the trash earlier in the week, so I opened it slowly and we went into the garage. Amy started to ask what I was doing, but stopped before finishing. I went around my dad’s car and into the corner of the garage where the grill, the gas generator, the cans of gasoline, and the miscellaneous car stuff was. There was an older, metal gas can mostly full of gasoline. I grabbed that by the rusted handle, opened the cap and stuffed a cloth rag down it, and grabbed one of the butane stick-lighters from next to the grill.
Lucky for me, the van these guys came in wasn’t blocking my car. It was a black panel van, unmarked, with the back doors open, parked on the street against the curb. Inside of it were bench seats on both sides. Two men, not dressed like the others, stood outside of it, looking at the house.
Crouching down, we crept from the side of the garage to the side of my car. I unlocked the passenger door manually with the key, and told Amy that I would open the door and jump in and she would follow as quickly and quietly as possible.
I lit the rag sticking from the mouth of the gas can, waited for it to start to burn, then stood up and hurled it sideways over the top of my car and toward the van. The can wobbled oddly in the air, a streak of orange light from the flame on the rag. It landed on the street just short of the van and rolled sideways beneath the van.
No explosion.
The rag had fallen from the mouth of the can as it rolled, but gasoline was now pouring freely from the hole. The two men heard the metal can hitting the pavement and turned around to investigate. Gasoline flowed in all directions from the mouth of the can, eventually spreading to where the barely-lit rag lay on the ground.
The flowing gasoline soon turned to a flowing lake of fire spreading from all sides of the van. The two men yelled and ran away from the van. As much as I wanted to stick around and watch the show, I pulled my car door open and crawled over the passenger seat and settled into the driver’s seat as Amy got in and closed the door. I started the engine and backed out of the driveway, turning wildly to clear the blaze on the street, then put all of my weight on the accelerator and drove off. Behind me I saw movement around the house. As I turned onto another street, I saw a quick flash of light and heard what sounded like the gas tank of a black panel van exploding.
I wasn’t wearing any shoes, I noticed. That made me laugh.
Clarity fades. Bare feet against a rubber pedal. My right hand grips the emergency brake for some reason. The growing realization that my life is an absolute mess creeps through my mind and echoes its mantra louder and louder. There’s a girl sitting next to me, she asks what’s going on. I have no answers. No answers, never any answers.
Don’t ask questions.
My headlights reflect against a red stop sign, pulling my attention back to the world outside my head. I’d already run a few stop signs in the maze of neighborhoods and subdivisions I was navigating, but the hardwired reaction to the sight of this one overpowered whatever force was controlling me up to this point. Nobody seemed to be following me, but I’d taken the most complicated route possible just to throw off possible pursuers. Eventually I ended up in front of Amy’s house; I didn’t know where else to go.
Amy snuck me into the house and then into her room like an expert. I could hear her dad downstairs watching TV. I thought maybe he’d like to hear my story about how I’d gotten to use my Emerson on some guy, but I decided to save that for a time I wasn’t inexplicably in his daughter’s room after dark on a Friday night.
I sat down in her desk chair like I did the last time I was there, put my head in my hands, and wondered out loud what I was going to do. A familiar feeling came over me, the same feeling I’d had less than a week ago, the feeling I had as I abandoned my car in the woods up in Lorton, after I’d just killed someone and tried to get myself to feel bad about it. It was like trying to regret something that I wasn’t sure I’d actually done, like apologizing for a dream. My shirt was wet then too.
Then it was milk, now it was blood. On my chest, my right, was a small red circle of it. I stood up in a panic, knocking Amy’s chair over, and pulled the shirt from my skin and felt for a wound. There was none; it wasn’t my blood. I groped at the fabric and pulled the shirt off and threw it in a corner. I was breathing heavily while Amy watched wordlessly from where the edge of her bed. I felt weak, tired, and sick. I started to pull the chair from the floor, but decided to sit on the floor next to it. I wanted to scream or cry, but I knew both would be as worthless as trying to talk about it.
“This is it,” I said, looking at the carpet through the slits between my fingers sprawled across my face. “My life is over. Nothing is ever going to be normal again.”
“Were those guys the police? Like, SWAT team?” Amy asked.
“No,” I said. “Not SWAT. I distinctly remember deciding that earlier.”
“Okay, so then the police should be at your house soon; since I called them. Maybe you should be there and they’ll be able to tell you who they were.”
“The cops will find this all very interesting after Lorton. The FBI won’t be able to hold them off this time. That, by the way, is not a sentence a seventeen-year-old is supposed to say.”
“Eighteen soon,” she said, almost hopeful.
“In a month. Looking forward to a birthday isn’t the consolation it used to be. I don’t even know if I’ll be alive in a month.”
“Come on.”
I looked up from the floor at her. “It’s been a week and I’ve had to fight for my life twice now, not counting the other two fights that weren’t for my life. Those were just for fun I guess. The cops, the FBI, the Marines, and whoever that was at my house all have files with my name on them now. In another two days I could be on the run from the Navy, Coast Guard, Ghost Busters, and MI6.”
“Maybe you should call the FBI guys,” Amy said, “they always seem to know what’s going on before you do.”
“Well, the I does stand for Information.”
Amy laughed slightly, then pulled my cell phone from her purse and tossed it to me. I tried Rubino’s number from the redial menu, got a recording. I found Bremer’s card in my wallet and tried his number, another recording. Worthless. I dropped the phone, stood up, picked up the chair, and turned on Amy’s computer.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“My own investigation,” I said.
I searched for “XM8”, the name of the gun those guys carried. I found out it was the Heckler & Koch (the same brand as my handgun) XM8. It was a prototype gun designed because the US Army wanted a futuristic, modular assault rifle to replace the aging M4 and M16 rifles. Every weapons maker competed for the contract by coming up with the most unique gun they could think of, adding futuristic and untested features such as computerized “smart” targeting and night-vision cameras for scopes.
The XM8 was designed to be modular. From the same body its barrel, hand guard, stock, and magazine could be removed and replaced to convert the weapon into a carbine, a compact submachine-style gun, a sharpshooter sniper rifle, or a stationary full-auto weapon with a bipod and 100-round drums of ammunition. It looked like a rather novel idea, being able to convert the same weapon to suit your application by swapping out a few parts, like some kind of Transformers toy. From what I read, it looked like the version the men brought into my house was the standard “baseline” version but without the optical sight.
I really wished I hadn’t left that gun in my bedroom. It seemed like the ultimate toy.
I kept reading and, according to some articles, the weapon’s development was put on hold when the Army didn’t give them the contract. The gun’s development would probably be canceled because of the cost and more readily available alternatives.
That meant that the guns were rare, very rare. Prototypes of in-development weapons wouldn’t just slip onto the black market like weapons made by the tens-of-thousands. Prototypes are numbered and sent to the military for testing and training on contract, the inventory tracked carefully. To carry them, then, you’d have to be either military or very friendly with the military.
That means it wasn’t the Boy Scouts breaking into
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