Vox Mentis

You walk toward the burger place until soldiers move onto the road to intercept you. Then you change course for the real estate office. You clamber through a space that once held a plate glass window, collect the rifle from where you left it on the counter, and jog toward the back offices. You’ve been here a few times while dating Cecilia, the real estate agent. Enough to know the layout, anyway. You take position in Cecilia’s office and wait.

A few minutes later, a soldier shuffles in. You wait until the second appears, then put a bullet into his faceplate. Both men vanish like smoke. You pull the bolt, reloading as you jog out into the corridor. You go right instead of left, ease open the rear door, and then you're in sunshine. You trot around the side of the building to the air-con vents and peer through. The second soldier is moving away from you in a crouch. You raise the rifle and shoot him in the back of the head.

When you reenter the building, you're surprised to find both guys still alive. You wouldn’t have credited a helmet with being able to stop a high-powered .28. But you guess that momentum has to go somewhere. One of the soldiers has pulled off his helmet and is vomiting down his chest. The other is crawling weakly toward the front door.

You raise the rifle. The helmet-less solder raises a hand. You shoot him. You walk around to the other one, reloading the rifle. A man unexpectedly appears outside the window, a young guy in a cheap suit and tie, stringing together nonsense words, and you shoot him through the window. You look back. The crawling soldier has stopped crawling.

You reload the rifle. You can hear a chopper approaching. Soldiers will be coming from both sides, you guess. They'll be jogging slowly, like these two guys, since they're encased in forty-pound armored ovens. They've been lumbering around in the noonday sun for about an hour. You can’t really imagine what that's like. You've seen people drop dead out here, trying to do too much. They have the idea that the worst the sun can do is make them uncomfortable. They apply their sunscreen and their hats and head out and just fall over.

You go into the bathroom and slide open the window. There's a low fence offering cover to the adjoining building, and from there you think you can make your way unseen to pretty much anywhere you want. You climb out the window and begin to crawl.