They took the elevator to the top. The elevator was clean and gray, the light was flat and strong and showed off how clean it was, how smooth the lines were, it was like riding inside a bullet, which was a little excessive but that’s what Kirenan thought as they rose up. They wore a white long coat and a white oxford shirt and a white tie. Their pants and leather shoes were white, even the belt was white, and their hair was white, too, thin and airy and hanging down to their shoulders. They looked like a thin and rarified spirit going back to God’s eyes, which was ignorant bullshit.
When the elevator door opened, Kire pulled a silver pistol from inside their jacket and looked at a man in a crisp white uniform (with a black belt, black shoes) and shot him in the face, then tossed a ribbon into the hallway, saw the returning fire from the right whizz down the hall in front of the elevator, then tossed a little silver ball in the direction of the gunfire. Kire waited until the floor rumbled and a roar sung through the concrete and made it sound as if a fighter plane was screaming overhead. A real person screamed, and Kire stepped into the cloud of smoke billowing out and saw a man lying on the ground and another coming out of a door on the left, pistol raised. Kire shot the man in the doorway so that blood sprayed out the back of his head and onto the doorframe, and then he shot the man on the ground, who was already missing a leg and lay in a pool of very brown blood. Kire went back into the elevator and saw gunfire flame across the hallway from the left. Seven shots rang out. Then Kire threw another ribbon out and three more shots fired. Kire waited, finger on trigger, eyes pale white, the gun warmer in their hand.
The elevator doors started closing with a clean hum and Kire triggered them open again by touching their toe into the boundary between the elevator cab and the hallway. The blood from the first man trickled down the wall across from them. The man’s face was a ruined mess.
Kire knelt down and leaned around the elevator frame and fired into a man’s leg four times. The man next to him dropped his gun, and Kire shot him in the neck. Then they shot the first man in the abdomen.
Kire stood up and ran right to the door with one of the men’s brains on it. They entered a dark room with banks of computers. On the right wall was a whiteboard with numbers written on it in red marker. There was a door with a small window in it across the room. Kire shut the door with the brains on it and wedged a desk under the doorknob and then went to the second door. They opened it and stood off to the side in the computer room, waiting in darkness.
There was nothing.
Then someone said, “Don’t kill me, please.” It was a woman.
Kire knelt down and leaned around the doorframe and a bullet whizzed over their head. They shot the woman in the belly, and she fell forward onto a desk, screaming. Kire shot her in the top of the skull and bone flew off. Kire crept into the room, then shut the door. They stood up and pushed the woman off the desk and wedged the desk under the doorknob. There was another door, without a window.
Kire opened it and stood off to the side and two bullets flew through, embedding themselves in the wall across from them. Kire kicked the woman’s shoe into the doorway and two more bullets fired. They kicked the other shoe over but there were no bullets. Kire pushed a second desk up to the edge of the door and then stood on it. They knelt down and picked up a book with the words Quantum Effect Systems and threw it hard around the corner into the other room, and three bullets fired. Squatting on the desk, Kire leaned around the door and shot another woman in the face, breaking up her teeth and jetting blood onto her glasses. There was a wide bay window behind her, looking onto a brightly lit room with metal tables and cabinets. The connecting room was dark, and Kire got off the desk and entered in a crouch, all their clothes still perfectly white. They shut the door behind them and wedged a metal chair under the doorknob and took the dead woman’s pistol, which used a larger caliber than the others. They reloaded their personal pistol and put it away and kept the one from the dead woman and released the clip to see how many rounds were left. Six. They slid open the glass door leading into the brightly lit room, and then pulled out the drawers from the table. There were vials of medicine inside, dark glass with orange labels covered in scrawled handwriting. Kire pulled a dark green drawstring pouch from the inside of their jacket and put the vials inside and then hid them in their jacket. Then the door in the dark room burst open and a man in dark armor with a clear visor fired a grenade that blew the chairs and desks up and lit them on fire and ripped them to pieces. The bulletproof glass of the bright room bulged inward, toward Kire, webbed white with cracks. Kire knelt down and opened the door and threw another silver ball towards the other door. Then they leaned back and watched the explosion through the smoke of the other man’s grenade. There was silence, and then the other man fired again. The grenade tore divots in the floor and turned the bay window into a mass of opaque white. Kire opened one of the lower cabinets and took out a plastic jar of acid and then pulled open another and took out a sheet of tinfoil, then rolled up a wad of foil and crammed it into the acid jug and held it for a few seconds. They pulled out a knife and ground a hole into the plastic cap and inserted a thin length of rubber tube through it and fed the tube into the bottom of the jug and screwed the cap on and then lit the free end of the tube on fire with a lighter, made sure the fire stayed, crept back to the door, and rolled the jug towards the door where the grenadier was. Kire waited. Then they gave out a loud cry of pain, followed by an agonized hiss. “Fuck,” they yelled in a voice that sounded like one of the dead guards.
“Shit, that’s Franco,” someone said in the other room.
Someone stepped inside just as the acid bomb burst open and sent a wave of liquid and gaseous acid into their face and torso. The person screamed. Kire heard the man’s companion yell and smack at the fire, then cough as the acid reached his lungs. It sounded like he was calling for backup, but his throat was scorched.
Kire left the storage room and opened the third door across from them. The coughing didnt stop. They went in and shut the door behind them and flipped on the lights and wedged a chair under the doorknob.
Kire heard another grenade go off in the other room. Then more coughing. They continued on, past bookshelves and rolling tables, and opened the far door and stood next to it, waiting. They threw a ribbon in front of the door and someone fired. Kire looked at the hole in the wall. Then they pushed over a metal table and knelt behind it. They pushed it into the doors pathway and bullets clanged off it, one-two. Kire peeked over the tables edge and shot a young man in the chest, twice. He fell back against a bookshelf and knocked many hardcover copies to the tile floor. The door next to the shelf popped open and a man in a white labcoat fired a shotgun, which pinged into the table. Kire tossed a ribbon into the air and the next shot tore it apart, but by then they had already peeked over the table and shot the man in the lungs three times. The man fell and gurgled and rolled into the doorframe, lying lengthwise with his upper torso in the room he’d come from and his legs in the room with Kire. They walked over and tossed the dead woman’s pistol and picked up the shotgun and checked the barrel and counted four shots and stepped over the dead man and went to the lefthand wall with a forty-five-degree angle of approach to the next door and said, “Help,” in Franco’s voice, and two men with pistols burst through as Kire fired twice, spraying their white shirts with flechettes of biodegradable plastic and cutting up their intestines. One man went silent and fell, but the other screamed and leaned back against the doorway, firing wildly without looking. Kire shot him in the head.
The next room had metal cots in it with thin white mattresses and white pillows. Posters of rock bands in black leather and studded collars were tacked to the walls. Kire saw a bowl of half-eaten oatmeal with a spoon on a little fold-out table. They passed through and opened the next door and stood off to the side again, not entering.
“Holy fuck,” someone said and fired.
“Shut the fuck up and stop,” someone older said.
The gunfire ceased, and Kire lay down the shotgun and took out their pistol and then a second identical pistol. Both were silver with pearls. Their clothes were still perfectly white, and they looked like a god carved from ice.
“I give up,” Kire said in their regular voice.
“No you don’t,” said the older man in the other room.
“No, I don’t,” Kire said.
They heard someone in the room two rooms ago break through the blocked door, and Kire kicked the new door shut and stepped sideways over the corpse lying half in and half out of each room and squatted behind the metal table they’d used as a shield, but this time facing the top, so they couldn’t see the legs. They heard the grenadier enter just as the two men behind them in the other room opened their own door and came out. The grenadier yelled in a hoarse, agonized voice and fired into his two teammates, blowing them into a mass of crying pink meat. Then Kire peeked over the table and shot the man twice in the chest, once from each pistol, and then shot him in the forehead. Then they went around the table and put their pistols away and picked up the grenade launcher and checked the barrel and walked back to the room with the two exploded people. Then they looked in the next room and saw it was empty and orange with a big mirror directly across from them, gleaming. They looked at their own reflection and smiled quickly, privately.
“Your gender is totally cool and valid,” they said, and blew themselves a kiss.
Then a new man burst in from a new door in the room with the mirror, and Kire shot a grenade at him, blowing him up.
… CHAPTER CONTINUES
