Flicker Fade Gone By Carljoe Javier He brought the pistol up to shoulder level, let his right hand fingers wrap smoothly around it, put the palm of his left hand on the butt for support. The gun was light in his hand as he swung it from left to right, clearing the perimeter while he zoomed into the grocery store. He’d been through this before, but he still tensed as he slid through the store’s shattered glass door. He went over the mission’s specs in his head: at least 30 perps in the store, plus three employees still inside. Bang,bang, bang, three to the chest. Reload. One had jumped in front of him as he stepped through the diaper aisle. Next aisle, canned goods, three perps, one holding a knife to a hostage. His arm glided from left to right, bang bang, two in the chest, perp down. Bang, headshot. Reload. Last crook on the right with the hostage: one to the leg, hostage runs, bang, headshot. Reload. He went through the rest of the grocery in the same methodical manner. Bang, bang, bang, reload; bang bang bang, reload: bang bang bang, reload: it was a rhythm that he’d developed over the years. Cutting down the perps gave him a rush, but his adrenaline got pumping whenever there was a hostage to save. As he went through the cashier’s counters he could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears and feel the pistol getting slippery from his sweating palm. One more hostage, he thought. ALL HOSTAGES SAVED. He smiled, put the pistol back in his holster and wiped his palms on his pants. He watched onscreen as his statistics were tallied: Hits Taken: 1; Hostages Saved: 3; Shots Taken: 105; Hits: 97; Accuracy: 92%. Not bad, he said to himself. He left the machine and paced around the empty arcade trying to decide what enemies he’d face next. He took the nylon string necklace that served as a key chain off. In his right hand he played with the master key, sliding it through his fingers. With it he was the master of the arcade; with one turn of the key he could become Spiderman or Cyclops, a World War II pilot, an F-1 racer; or he could take up a gun and shoot down secret agents, terrorists, terminators, zombies, dinosaurs. He played almost all the games, and the games where there were people to save drew him most. He felt that he came alive only after a turn of the key, when he was in a game. He could feel himself fading, knew that people were looking past him, seeing only the key that hung around his neck. So he waited until there was no one left in the arcade. He waited until he was alone so that he could turn the key and come alive again. This wasn’t the world for him, and as he turned the key he knew which one was. He stared into the screen, watched as his face began fading away, waited until it had disappeared. And as he saw the game start and he wrapped his right hand fingers around the pistol and put his left hand up to the butt he felt himself coming alive. As he approached the grocery store and started firing, bang bang bang, he could feel himself gaining substance, not being blank anymore. In the morning the guard came to find a gun hanging from its arcade machine. A copy of the arcade’s master’s key was stuck in the machine’s slot. He figured the last man working the night shift had forgotten it so he returned it to the arcade’s owner. The owner asked if the guard had noticed the late shift worker leave, the guard said he hadn’t. He assumed that the boy hadn’t shown up for work, shrugged his shoulders, and thought to himself that it was time to call up the agency for another guy. He thought about the boy who’d worked for him these past years. The peculiar thing was that he couldn’t even remember what the boy looked like. Later that week, the owner had to replace one of the machines in the arcade. Since that night the boy hadn’t shown up he’d been having a problem with that machine the guard had found the master key in. It wouldn’t accept tokens, and the game would go on start to end, with the display following a distinct rhythm: bang bang bang, reload.
