Yuli stands naked in front of his full-length mirror and wonders how he let it get this far. His arms are thin, pale, and grayish. His belly doesn’t pouch out much, but the skin is slack. He has tits like a twelve-year-old girl. He keeps slouching. He’s getting a little bald, a little gray, but that’s just time. His teeth are yellow from cigarettes and coffee, because that’s how it goes. But he’s weak and slow, and that is his fault. Complaisant is another word for stupid, and he is finished with being stupid.
The cigarettes go first. He breaks each one over the toilet, dusting the piss water with tobacco so that he can’t go back and fish one last cigarette out of the trash. Next is the alcohol. Then the sugar. He can’t believe how much shit he’s been eating: frozen pizzas and chocolate candies and bread so white it looks like slices of snow. Now that he sees it all clearly, it’s amazing that he isn’t in worse condition.
Next is the guns. Those, anyway, are still in good condition. Three pistols—two matching Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer P220 that had been given to him as a present by an old girlfriend. He also has a Bushmaster M4 semi-automatic carbine that he has carried for almost a decade. There are people who think more guns are better. Yuli thinks that’s wrong. Someone who has used ten thousand guns once is an amateur. Someone who has used one gun ten thousand times is an expert.
He puts a clean towel over the kitchen table to keep the oil off it, then cleans them, assembling and disassembling them until all the parts find their familiar places in his fingers. He spends hours dry firing them, aiming at the microwave, the kitchen faucet, the people passing by on the street. Click click click, training his hand not to anticipate the kick, practicing like a pianist playing scales. When the boy sees the guns, his eyes get wide. Yuli doesn’t talk about them, and boy doesn’t either.
When the boy is at school, Yuli runs up and down the stairs, pushing himself. The first time, he only manages four trips down and up and down again before his heart is tapping on his eardrums and he’s shaking. He has to sit on the bottom step and put his head against the wall, a long, slow trickle of Russian profanity dribbling out from his lips. Weak old man. When he gets his breath back, he runs up and down two more times, pushing until he is literally incapable of doing it again. The next day he hurts like someone has beaten him, and he does it again. The third day is worse. The fourth, he does ten rounds before he has to stop. He wants a cigarette. He wants a drink. He feels sick from the pain and the craving, and he revels in his suffering. It is his strength coming back.
He would like to find a boxing club. Someplace he can hit someone and be hit. A way to remind his body what violence is. He should have been doing this all along, and the impulse to do it now is as bad as the nicotine withdrawal. Tactically, going out to a gym is a mistake. He doesn’t know where the enemy is, and every trip out of the house is an exposure. Instead, he strips his bedroom bare and works there. Push-ups, sit-ups, lunges. He finds a couple of old cinder blocks half buried in the alley, and brings them in for weights. He starts getting biceps again. He starts seeing gains, and the gains come faster.
He was a predator for many years, and his body remembers what it was like. Wants to return to that way of being. Is hungry for it. He keeps his suffering constant, and his body rewards him. He loses more weight. His dogshit blood gets worse. The synesthesia and the flashbacks come every few days now, though they are brief. There are a few times he gets dizzy and faint in the morning. He decides to get down to zero percent body fat if he can. Clean away all the drugs. Purge himself of all his old sins.
He leaves the house rarely. When he does, he shifts away from his old habits. He goes to groceries he doesn’t like and has never gone to before. He gets gasoline in his car on corners he has to travel to find. Even taking the boy to school, he varies the routes. Drops the boy off behind the gym one day, a half block away the next. Always, part of his attention is on the street around him. Who is where, what they are looking at, who they are talking to. Where the lines of sight are. Where there is cover, and where there is only concealment. He thinks how to flank the fat customer-service man at the bank, if he should need to. He knows what sidewalks he could drive over, what parks he could cross if he were escaping pursuit. Or if he were pursuing. He is aware of the space around him as if it were part of his body. His hypervigilance is almost paranoia.
At night, when the boy is asleep, he stands naked before the full-length mirror, and he sees the alteration in his flesh. He has bulk in his shoulders. He doesn’t slouch. His skin has color again. His face is sharp.
Part of him knows that the wise move is to vanish. Pack up his things in the back of the car, take the boy, and drive away to a new city, a new name, and a new life. It wouldn’t be his first time, or his second either. He doesn’t do it.
He tells himself that it is better to hold to familiar territory and keep his home-court advantage. They will follow him anyway. The truth is that he wants them to come. He is waiting for them.
He feels better now than he has in years.
Everyone roll your stealth.
I wish I’d kept that heroic action point.
Did you blow it?
No, I’m okay. Made it exactly.
Everyone else good? Okay, you manage to slip past the stone barrier. The hall you’ve stepped into is huge. The cave is bigger than a cathedral. A river of lava is running through it, and the air is really hot. Hurts to breathe kind of hot. And the whole floor, where it’s not lava, is covered in gold. Coins and goblin bars and jewelry. It’s everywhere. And sitting in the middle of all of it is Aufganir. He’s huge. His body’s forty feet long, easy. Green scales and black wings.
Is he awake?
He is. He hasn’t seen you yet, but he’s sniffing at the air like he can tell something’s wrong.
This is it, then. We attack.
Roll initiative.
Yuli is at the Walmart when it happens. The day is warm and pleasant. He drives over after dropping the boy at school and circles the parking lot twice looking for anything suspicious before he parks. He prefers shopping at Target, but at Walmart, he can carry his guns. He has one of the Glocks in an ankle holster, and the other at the small of his back. He doesn’t like the ankle holster. It means he has to wear pants wide enough that they feel like bell-bottoms. It doesn’t look stupid, but it feels like it does.
He walks in, stopping at the store’s mouth to look back. Two young black men walking together. A blond woman with a pink scarf and yellow skirt. An old woman struggling with an ugly oversized purse. He thinks how he would kill each of them, but only as practice. None of them takes notice of him. He turns back. The fingers of his left hand tingle, and he shakes and makes fists until the feeling comes back.
Inside, the air is cool and scentless. Generic air, the same now as it will be at the height of summer or on Christmas Day. Nothing is different in here. Yuli takes a cart and heads in among the other shoppers. He has a list in his head. Chicken breasts and frozen vegetables to make dinner with. Some Muscle Milk to drink after he works out. And he needs socks. He’s thinking about throwing out all the ones he has and buying a dozen identical pairs at the same time he’s noticing all the exits.
Someone coughs, and the sound is wrong. Someone coughs the way you cough when you’re used to speaking Farsi. Yuli turns, and it’s the blond girl with the scarf. Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second. Her eyes widen a millimeter, and he knows.