Herring

F*ck It We Ball

The door swung open and the world became noise. Gunshots aren't like the movies. They don't go pew pew. They go f**k YOUR EARS AND YOUR SENSE OF SAFETY. Each one was a fist slamming into my chest from the inside. I tasted cordite and rain and the copper penny of my own blood leaking from somewhere I hadn't catalogued yet.

Ten feet. The gun was ten feet away. Ten feet of gravel and chaos and the very real possibility of getting my skull ventilated before I made it halfway.

Fuck it. We ball.

I ran. Not gracefully. Grace was for people who hadn't been rolled twice in a sedan and beaten half to death in a bathroom. I ran like a wounded animal—all desperation and no dignity—and I hit the gravel on my knees beside the dead man's hand. His fingers were still warm. That's a detail I'm going to keep forever, apparently. The warmth of a dead man's fingers. Lovely. Add it to the trauma scrapbook.

I grabbed the gun. It was heavier than I expected. Heavier than it looked. Cold and solid and real in a way that made my palm itch and my brain go very, very quiet.

Okay. Okay. You've done this before. Not in real life. In real life you've done nothing but survive and bleed and make terrible choices. But you watched those videos. Two in the morning. Couldn't sleep. Hyperfixated on firearms for two solid weeks because your brain is a pinball machine of niche obsessions and you couldn't stop watching disassembly videos and ballistic gel tests and some guy with a handlebar mustache explaining the difference between cover and concealment.

ADHD? Maybe. I'll get checked someday. If I survive this.

My hands moved like they'd been waiting. Magazine release—click. Check the chamber—loaded. Safety off—thumb doing the work while my conscious mind was still buffering. I'd never held a gun before tonight. I'd never fired one. And yet here I was, racking the slide like I'd been doing it since birth, like my body knew something my brain had only bookmarked and forgotten.

Being a shut-in finally paying off. Grandma, if you can see this, I'm sorry and also please don't look.

I rose from behind the car like a specter. Like something that should have been dead twice over and simply refused. The nearest attacker—shaved head, neck tattoo, the kind of face that had never known a moment of self-doubt—was fifteen feet away, firing at Tubby's position behind the wreckage. He didn't see me. They never see me. That's the gift of being invisible your whole life. You learn to move in the gaps.

I aimed for the fuel tank of their lead vehicle. Not the man. The machine. I wasn't ready to kill a person. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I could kill a car. Cars were easy. Cars didn't have families. Probably.

Breathe out. Squeeze. Don't pull. Let the trigger surprise you. Mustache guy said that. Mustache guy was right.

The shot was biblical. The recoil slammed into my already-fractured hand and I felt something give—a stitch popping, maybe, or just another piece of my sanity—but the bullet found its mark. The fuel tank erupted. Orange and black and blooming, a flower of fire that swallowed the front end of their vehicle and sent two attackers scrambling backward, screaming, patting flames from their clothes like they'd just discovered fire was hot.

Huh. That worked. Okay. Okay okay okay. What else is in the mustache guy playlist.

I was already moving. The second vehicle—the one that had rammed us—was thirty feet to my left. The remaining attackers were using it for cover, firing at Leo's position. I aimed for the engine block. Two shots. The first went wide, kicking up gravel and making one of them duck. The second punched through the grille and found something vital. Steam hissed. Fluid leaked—dark and thick and smelling of burnt oil. The engine coughed once, twice, and died with a sound like a dying whale.

Deia: "ANYONE ELSE WANT TO f**k AROUND AND FIND OUT?!"

The words came out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them. My voice was a thing I didn't recognize—louder, harder, belonging to someone who had stopped being afraid and started being pissed.

One of the goons noticed me. Pointed. Shouted something I couldn't hear over the ringing in my ears. I fired in his direction. Not aiming. Just there. The bullet hit the car door beside his head and he dove for cover like I'd thrown a grenade.

Half precise. Good enough.

I fired again. Tires this time. The front driver's side exploded with a satisfying thwump and the whole vehicle sagged like a disappointed parent. Another shot. The rear tire. Done. That car wasn't going anywhere except the scrapyard.

Tubby, from somewhere behind me: "WHAT THE FUCK."

Leo: "IS SHE—IS SHE DOING THAT?!"

Manny: "SHE'S DOING THAT!"

Tubby: "NEWBORN! GET OVER HERE NOW!"

I ran. Not toward them. Toward the dead man. His gun was empty but he had a spare magazine on his belt. My hands found it. Loaded it. Muscle memory from a thousand YouTube videos. My brain was screaming WHAT THE f**k WHAT THE f**k WHAT THE f**k but my body was doing the work, and right now, my body was the only thing I trusted.

I reached the crew. Tubby was bleeding from his forehead. Leo's eyes were the size of dinner plates. Manny looked like he'd just witnessed the Second Coming and wasn't sure if he should clap or run. The other two—still nameless, still alive—were staring at me like I'd grown a second head.

I shoved the spare gun into Leo's hands.

Deia: "SHOOT. NOW."

Leo: "I—what—"

Deia: "SHOOT THEM LEO I SWEAR TO GOD—"

He shot. The bullet hit one of the remaining attackers in the shoulder. The man spun, screamed, dropped. The others hesitated. That moment of oh s**t, they're actually fighting back that changes the math of a firefight.

I dove into the driver's seat. The engine was dead. Tubby had tried it twice. Nothing. But I'd watched a video once—three in the morning, couldn't sleep, some guy with a Southern accent explaining how to hotwire a car in case of emergency—and my hands were already moving. Wires. Twist. Spark.

The engine coughed. Sputtered. Caught.

Deia: "GET IN TUBBY!"

Tubby: “WHO THE f**k IS TUBBY!”

Deia: “GET THE f**k IN. EVERYONE. NOW!”

They got in. Tubby in the passenger seat, bleeding and baffled. Leo and Manny and the other two piling into the back like clowns into a car that was definitely not designed for this many felons. The doors weren't even closed when I floored it.

The car lurched forward. Gravel sprayed. The remaining attackers fired after us—one bullet punched through the rear window, another through the trunk—and then we were gone, tearing down the service road at a speed that made the whole frame shudder and my ribs scream and my heart do things that hearts probably shouldn't do.

I drove. I don't remember learning to drive like this. I don't remember learning any of it. But my hands knew the wheel. My foot knew the pedal. And the road—the road was just a thing to be eaten.

We burst out of the industrial district and into the city proper. Streetlights. Other cars. Normal people going about their normal lives, completely unaware that a sedan full of bleeding criminals and one girl with a stolen ring and a YouTube education had just escaped a shootout by the grace of God and gasoline.

I slowed down. Blended in. The adrenaline began to fade, and in its place came the shaking. The deep, bone-level trembling of a body that had just realized it was still alive and wasn't sure how to process that information.

Silence. For a long, heavy moment, no one spoke. The only sounds were the engine, the rain on the windshield, and five people breathing like they'd just remembered how.

Tubby, finally, in a voice I'd never heard from him—something almost reverent: "Dang, lady. I didn't know you could move like that."

Leo: "That was insane."

Manny: "Everything was insane. Everything. I think I saw God and He was also confused."

Deia: "Yeah, well. Me neither. I just kinda... moved. Didn't wanna die."

Tubby: "Well. We owe you a big one. Thanks."

Deia: "Yeah."

Silence again. The weight of it settling. Five people in a bullet-riddled sedan, driving through the Seattle rain, not dead. Not dead. I turned the ring on my finger. It was warm. Warmer than my skin. Warmer than the rain. Warmer than anything had a right to be.

Leo: "Where's the drop-off location again?"

Tubby: "Warehouse off Harbor Avenue. Near the terminal."

Deia: "Oh. I know where that is."

Everyone turned to look at me.

Tubby: "You do?"

Deia: "Kinda. I did a lot of walking around when I first got here a few years back. Wanted to know the city. Didn't have friends. Had time. Harbor Avenue is west of here. We take the next left, follow the water."

They looked at each other. A silent conversation passed between them—the kind of conversation that happens when people realize they've misjudged something fundamental.

Manny: "What are you?"

I thought about it. The fish. The bridge. The water. The ring. The bathroom floor. The gun in my hand that had felt like it belonged there. The way my body knew things my mind had only glimpsed at 2am.

Deia: "Just some random misfit weirdo, I guess."

Leo snorted. Tubby almost smiled. Almost.

Heh. Points for me, I guess.

I turned the wheel, guiding the battered sedan toward the water, toward the drop-off, toward whatever came next. The rain kept falling. The city kept being grey. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a small, ridiculous voice whispered:

Look at me, Grandma. I'm one of the cool kids now. Teehee.