Herring

Ten Feet

The first gunshot punched through the rear window and showered me in safety glass. Little f*****g cubes of it, raining down on my hair like the world's most hostile glitter.

Leo: "EVERYONE DOWN!"

I was already down. Face pressed into the back seat, arms over my head, the universal posture of please don't let me die in this shitty sedan. The car swerved hard left. My ribs slammed into the door. Pain—white and hot and f*****g blinding—exploded through my torso. I screamed something. Not words. Just noise. Animal noise.

Manny, from the front seat, twisting around with eyes the size of dinner plates: "Who the hell are those guys?!"

Tubby, in the driver's seat now—when did that happen, when did they switch, I didn't see, I didn't see anything—gripping the wheel like he was trying to strangle it: "Doesn't matter! Shut your damn mouth and let me focus!"

Deia: "Oh it's because I'm a woman huh?! You didn't tell HIM to shut his mouth!"

Tubby swerved again. A bullet punched through the headrest two inches from my skull. I felt the wind of it. The hot little whisper of almost.

Tubby: "She's f*****g crazy!"

Deia: "THIS IS f*****g CRAZY!"

Leo, in the passenger seat now, twisted around with a gun in his hand—where the f**k did he get a gun, did he always have a gun, does everyone have guns except me—and fired twice out the shattered back window. The sound was deafening. My ears rang. The world went muffled and sharp at the same time.

Leo: "Less talking! More not dying!"

Manny: "Why am I even here?! I was supposed to be on vacation!"

Leo: "SHUT UP MANNY!"

The car fishtailed. Tubby fought the wheel. I should ask his We were on a service road now—gravel, potholes, the kind of road that existed only to be escaped from. Behind us, headlights. Two sets. No, three. No, four. f*****g four sets of headlights gaining fast.

Deia: "Why are you even here?!"

Manny: "WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE?!"

Deia: "I ASKED YOU FIRST!"

Tubby: "BOTH OF YOU SHUT THE HELL UP! She's here because she's dead weight and we needed a warm body and Anders has a soft spot for strays apparently!"

Dead weight. The words landed harder than the bullets. Dead weight. That's what I was. That's what I'd always been. A body to be used. A stepstool for Varietta. A punching bag for Daisy. A warm body for a criminal crew that didn't even want me.

Fuck that. f**k all of that.

I opened my mouth to say something—something cutting, something cruel, something that would prove I wasn't just dead weight—and then, the world flipped.

The other car came from nowhere. A dark shape emerging from a side road, no lights, no warning, just metal and momentum and murderous intent. It hit us broadside. The sound was a symphony of destruction—crunching steel, shattering glass, the scream of tires losing their grip on the world.

We flipped over.

Once. The ceiling became the floor. The floor became the ceiling. My body became a pinball, bouncing off seats and doors and other bodies. Someone's elbow caught my jaw. Someone's knee drove into my already-fractured ribs. I couldn't scream. There was no air. There was only motion and violence and the certain knowledge that this was how I died—not in water, not on a bridge, but in a shitty sedan on a shitty road doing shitty crimes for shitty people.

Twice. The world spun. Glass shattered. Metal screamed. Leo was shouting something—words I couldn't hear, sounds that didn't matter.

And then—stillness.

The car landed upright. I don't know how. Physics shouldn't have allowed it. The angle was wrong. The momentum was wrong. Everything about that roll should have ended with us on our roof, crushed and bleeding and waiting for the bullets to finish what the crash started. But we were upright. Wheels on the ground. Engine sputtering but alive.

I was alive.

Tubby, gripping the wheel, breathing hard: "Everyone okay?!"

Leo groaned. Manny made a sound like a wounded cat. I tasted blood. My blood. Copper and salt and the familiar flavor of I'm still here, goddammit, I'm still f*****g here.

Deia: "I thought you said there was basically no company!"

Tubby: "Well that should've been the case!!"

Deia: "Holy s**t dude what do we do?!"

Tubby: "This ain't good."

Deia: "NO s**t IT AIN'T GOOD!"

Headlights. Surrounding us. The other cars had caught up. They were circling now—slow, deliberate, the way wolves circle wounded prey. Two guys from the first car. Four from the one that hit us. Six total. Armed. Pissed. Ready.

Tubby tried the engine. It coughed. Sputtered. Died.

Tubby: "Fuck."

He tried again. Nothing. The engine was dead. We were dead. This was it. This was the end of the stupidest criminal career in the history of Seattle.

Tubby looked at Leo. Leo looked at Tubby. Some silent communication passed between them—the kind of communication that only exists between people who have faced death together and accepted it as a workplace hazard.

Tubby: "We're going out. You stay here. Stay down. Don't move. Don't make a sound. Don't be a hero."

Deia: "I wasn't planning on it."

Tubby: "Good."

He opened the door. Leo opened his. Manny, trembling, opened his. They stepped out into the headlights. Four of them—Tubby, Leo, Manny, and the other two from the warehouse who I still didn't have names for. Five total. Against six.

The shooting started.

I couldn't see it. I could only hear it. Gunshots—not like the movies, not clean and sharp and dramatic. Real gunshots are percussion. They're noise that hits your chest before it hits your ears. They're chaos made audible. They're the sound of the world ending one bullet at a time.

I pressed myself into the footwell. Made myself small. Made myself nothing. My ribs screamed. My hand—the one that had been stitched, the one that was supposed to be healing—throbbed with every heartbeat. The ring was warm. Too warm. Burning warm.

I shouldn't have come. I should've stayed home. I should've stayed in my apartment with Aldy and the crack in the ceiling and the bean water. I should've let the rent increase win. I should've let Daisy win. I should've let the void win. At least the void didn't have guns.

A bullet hit the car. The window above me shattered. Glass rained down. I didn't flinch. I was beyond flinching. I was in that place beyond fear where everything goes still and quiet and you realize you're already dead, you just haven't stopped moving yet.

What would I have done if I stayed home. Suffered. Shouldered the entire rent alone. Lived a horrible life at school. Let Daisy spit on me. Let the world grind me down until I was nothing but dust and bad memories. That's not living. That's just dying slowly. That's just giving up without the decency of actually quitting.

A scream. Outside. Not one of ours—I didn't know their voices well enough to be sure, but it didn't sound like Leo. It didn't sound like Manny. It sounded like one of them. One of the wolves.

Something heavy hit the ground.

I refuse. I refuse to live so weak anymore. I refused to die in the water. I refused to die in the alley. I refused to die in the bathroom. I'm not dying here. Not in this shitty car on this shitty road. Not like this. Not f*****g like this.

I looked up.

Through the shattered window, I could see shapes moving in the headlights. Muzzle flashes. The silhouette of a man—one of theirs—staggering. Clutching his chest. Falling. His gun clattered to the ground. Skidded across the gravel. Stopped maybe ten feet from the car.

Ten feet.

I know what I have to do.

The thought arrived not as courage but as math. Simple. Brutal. Inevitable. There was a gun on the ground. There were people trying to kill me. The distance between those two facts was ten feet of gravel and a lifetime of being afraid.

I opened the door.