Chapter 53: In The Crossfire
The bullet went close enough that Simon felt it before he heard it.
He dropped flat behind a display unit and pressed against the base, heart rate elevated but thinking still running — which was the only thing keeping him from making it worse.
"Damn it."
The two Fulcrum operatives he was dealing with were working as a pair — one suppressing, one advancing, trading roles on a rhythm that was clearly trained rather than improvised. They moved well together. They communicated without speaking. And they were doing something Simon had trained for in theory but was now experiencing in the considerably less theoretical version: they were fine with killing him.
That was the gap.
Simon had good mechanics, good instincts, and a skill base that the system had built up to Advanced across most relevant categories. What he was still developing was the operational mindset — the absence of hesitation at the moment of execution that came from having done this enough times that the moral weight of the decision had been processed in advance rather than in real time.
He was processing it in real time.
Which was costing him fractions of seconds he didn't have.
Okay. Different approach.
He couldn't outshoot them in a static exchange. But he could change the terms.
He looked at the ceiling — the Buy More's standard retail ceiling, fluorescent tubes and drop panels and the infrastructure of a commercial building. Then at the shelving units around him — free-standing displays, eight feet tall, loaded with product.
He picked up the two handguns he had, pointed them both over the top of the display unit without looking, and fired until both magazines were empty.
He wasn't aiming. He was making noise and disrupting sight lines and burning through their attention for exactly as long as it took him to move.
He dropped both empty weapons, came out of cover in a sprint, slapped a fresh magazine into the one gun he'd kept partial rounds in, and covered twenty feet of floor while both operatives were tracking the muzzle flash locations of the guns he'd left behind.
He got behind the refrigerator display.
He came up and fired — three rounds, deliberate, toward the nearest operative's position. Forcing them to break cover to respond.
He moved again.
This was the game: move, disrupt, move again. Never be where they aimed last. Never stop long enough to become a static target.
He had two rounds left when he cleared the aisle and came into close range.
He jumped.
The knee strike caught the first operative across the side of the head — a Muay Thai technique that didn't require any setup if you were already moving at him at speed. The man went sideways. Simon landed, rolled, came up behind the refrigerator display again.
One round left. One operative still functional.
Simon came out fast — the operative's weapon tracking toward him — and got his left hand on the gun before the trigger completed. He pushed the weapon offline with his left and drove his right elbow into the man's jaw simultaneously. The grip broke. Simon caught the weapon with his right hand, reversed it, and hit the man across the temple with the grip.
Twice.
The man sat down with the careful deliberateness of someone whose legs had stopped receiving instructions.
Simon took the man's magazine, reloaded, and raised his head to look at the rest of the floor.
Sarah and Bryce — so it was Bryce, the confirmation landing in Simon's awareness as he clocked the second figure — were engaged with two more of Tommy's people in the center of the floor. They moved like people who had trained together, which made sense given what Simon half-knew about their history.
Tommy was running for the home theater room.
Simon went over the shelving unit.
Not around — over. One hand on the top shelf, momentum up and through, landing on the far side already moving. The shelving unit swayed but held. He covered the distance in four strides.
Tommy was reaching for the home theater room door.
Simon's kick caught him in the upper back and sent him forward into the door with enough force that the door didn't open — it got in the way of Tommy's momentum and stopped him from controlling the fall.
Tommy went down.
Simon put his weight on him before he recovered.
Sarah and Bryce finished their respective situations within the next thirty seconds. Then Casey and Chuck came out of the home theater room.
The floor was still.
Simon looked down at Tommy, who was pinned face-down on the linoleum with Simon's knee in his back and a weapon at the base of his skull.
"You're detained," Simon said.
No system notification. He'd half-expected one. Apparently Tommy didn't qualify.
Tommy's eyes closed. Whether from pain or practical decision Simon didn't know.
Simon stood up.
"Good work," Casey said.
Simon looked at him.
"Six of eight," Casey said.
"Seven," Bryce said, from across the floor.
"Seven," Casey amended.
Simon looked at Casey and then at Chuck. "Guys. I'm going to say something and I need you to not take it personally."
"Okay," Chuck said.
"You're federal intelligence officers. There were eight of them. I—" Simon paused. "I'm an eighteen-year-old who works at this store part-time. I had to borrow weapons from the people I was fighting. And I still did more of the work." He looked at Casey. "I'm not upset about it. I'm just noting that this is a calibration issue that someone should look at."
Casey's jaw moved. He looked at Chuck.
Chuck looked at the ceiling.
Casey exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he looked back at Simon with the expression of a man choosing not to respond to something because no available response was adequate.
"Also," Simon said, "could you please give me some notice before running an operation in my workplace? I work here. I have a shift schedule."
"Lewis—"
"I'm serious. A text message. Anything."
The door burst open.
Six people in fire department gear came through it — except that none of them moved like fire department personnel and all of them were carrying the wrong kind of equipment for a fire call. They had their weapons up in less than two seconds.
"NSA — hands—"
"She's with us," Sarah said, stepping into their sight lines. She held up credentials. "Stand down."
The team leader processed this and lowered his hand. His team followed.
The cleanup operation began with the focused efficiency of people who did exactly this for a living — sweeping the floor, photographing positions, beginning the process of making the Buy More look like nothing had happened here.
Simon watched them work for a moment.
Then he looked at the store around him — the scattered merchandise, the shelving units slightly out of position, the evidence of a firefight that the NSA's cleanup team was going to erase in a few hours.
"The store's going to be fine," Casey said, reading his look. "Back to normal before close."
"I know." Simon looked toward the home theater room, where Sarah had gone with Bryce. "What's happening with—"
"Not your level," Casey said.
"I know that too." Simon looked at him. "But Chuck's going to need someone to talk to about whatever just happened. Be aware of that."
Casey looked at him. Then away. Then made the sound he made when he was absorbing something he didn't want to respond to directly.
Sarah came out of the home theater room.
Bryce came out after her, carrying a briefcase that hadn't been visible when he went in.
"New assignment," Bryce said to the group. He looked at Chuck specifically. "I've been briefed."
Simon took one step back from the circle.
"I'm going to—" He gestured vaguely toward the rest of the store. "I don't need to hear this."
He walked away.
Behind him he heard the conversation continue — Bryce talking, Sarah responding, Casey making occasional one-syllable contributions, Chuck mostly silent.
Simon found a relatively intact section of the snack aisle and sat down against the shelving.
He ran an inventory: two borrowed handguns, empty; various bruises accumulating toward interesting; one grazed sensation on the side of his head that he'd been not-thinking-about since the first near-miss.
He touched the spot. Came away with minimal blood. The bullet had missed by maybe half an inch.
He filed that under process later and sat quietly until the cleanup team had cleared enough floor for comfortable movement.
The conversation near the home theater room had ended by the time Simon circled back.
Bryce was gone. Sarah had gone back inside. Casey was in his operational neutral posture, watching the cleanup team with the patience of a man who had decided to be somewhere and was being there.
Chuck was standing by the Nerd Herd desk, looking at nothing specific.
Simon came up beside him.
"You okay?" he said.
"Mostly," Chuck said.
Simon looked at the desk for a moment. Then at Chuck. "If there's something you want to say to someone," he said, "say it before whoever the someone is leaves. That's my advice. All other considerations aside."
Chuck looked at him.
"I'm not telling you what to do," Simon said. "I'm just telling you that waiting for conditions to be perfect is usually a way of never saying the thing."
Chuck was quiet for a moment.
"It's complicated," he said.
"It always is," Simon said. "Say it anyway."
He left Chuck with that and went to find whether the cafeteria section still had anything edible after a Buy More firefight.
It did, marginally.
He ate a granola bar and waited for his heart rate to finish returning to normal.
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