Shooter.

 

He sat inside, in a room whose windows were blocked by curtains. Around him, indiscriminately piled, fast-food and junk-food wrappers mingled with overworn clothing, all covered in a fine and constant layer of ash and cooled smoke.

The blue glow of the screen illumined his face, lips down-turned, brows squatting low over his red-lined eyes.

The orange crackle of the Dunhill cigarette threw a diffuse light onto his fingertips and his nose for a moment, and he set it on the edge of the table, into a burnt groove made by uncounted previous smoldering housefires. He cracked his knuckles and began to type into the textbox embedded in the crisp, white browser window of the blue-logoed website.

"Humanity is doomed. Nobody cares about anything, they just suckle the government teat! They all leave messes wherever they go... I think someone should take care of it. Somebody ought to clean up the mess these moochers make."

Brenden himself was "on disability", which was as deep as his understanding of the hundred doctors' appointments and meetings with lawyers and tax men and all the rest of the government stooges had gone, at the time his mother dragged him to them, and now, five years later. He spent the money on luxury cigarettes, toys for adults, and guns. Lots and lots of guns.

He switched windows, and scrolled again through the arms catalog. This month, he planned to procure, with the monthly disability payment, another thousand rounds of .223 ammunition. Leaning against the wall, coated in the same cold smoke as everything else in the room, and with ash in the creases of its frame, an AR-15 waited for him.

He would show them, he thought. Soon he would do what nobody else was willing to do.

A harsh voice pressed through the crack beside the door. "BRENDEN!" He grimaced, grit his teeth. "Brenden, are you smoking in my HOUSE again? I told you to smoke on the porch, ONLY!"

The femoid. His mother.

"I swear, Brenden, I'm going to kick you out."

She wouldn't dare. He was too well-armed. He stretched his arms above his head; his shoulders pressed softly into his ears, drowning the angry voice of his mother out for a moment. Soon this effort winded him and he let his arms drop. She was still yelling.

"There are roaches coming out of your room all day and night! When was the last time you took out the trash? Did laundry? When was the last time you bathed!?" The doorknob rattled - locked, of course. The outside world wasn't safe.

He ignored her completely and clicked the purchase button.

She sighed, let go the doorknob, and turned away. The upstairs bedroom of her house had been a stinking mystery to her since her son had turned fourteen, fifteen years ago. She should never have let him move the family computer into his room, she realized, but it was far too late now.

She descended the stairs to her part of the house. She had long since allowed herself to see the upper floor as his - there wasn't much she could do about it, after all. Packages arrived every so often, marked with one ghoulish brand or another - "FREEDOM FUEL AMMUNITION", "PATRIOT ARMS" - how had this happened? Her only son had been a sweet child, she remembered, but that was before her husband had left.

Well, it wasn't her fault. Of that much she was certain, and that, she was sure, was enough.

She scrolled through her social feed, liking and commenting, until a thought stuck in her mind. Having scrolled back to the top of the page, she typed furiously, there in her sparkling-clean kitchen;

"The schools have failed the new generation. Somebody ought to do something about it. Millenials are lazy, entitled jerks. Don't have children."

She selected a black background for her complaint, and posted it. Within minutes, mothers of adult children - hundreds, out of the thousands of her “friends”, in the terminology of the site - were commenting, liking, and sharing.

She sighed, put the phone down, and got up, cleaning her clean kitchen in preparation to cook dinner for herself and the 'man of the house' upstairs. With the disposable cleaning towel, she smashed a wayward roach, one of thousands which had worked its way down from the airless bedroom over the years.

She shook her head, and changed her mind. She would take the boy out to dinner tonight. The poor thing just needed air, that's all.

***

Squatting on a half-broken milk crate, behind the restaurant where he worked, the dishwasher scrolled past the post, re-lit his Pall Mall, then scrolled back to the offending block of text. “Lazy, entitled jerks.” He grimaced. He marked the post with a red-faced 'angry' reaction to match, then tapped 'Comment' and began to type.

He listed off the myriad frustrations of his long-day, low-pay job, then moved to the desperations of his minimum-wage life. He was twenty-nine, and had been working since sixteen. Six paragraphs later, his cigarette long-gone-out, he jumped as the back door of the greasy restaurant slammed open.

"WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU!?" The kitchen manager bellowed, his eyes habitually narrowed against the smoke of cooking steak and the shade cast by lazy workers. "I GOT NO FUCKING PLATES!"

"FUCK!" The dishwasher jumped up, locked the phone, threw down the extinguished cigarette, and swiftly returned to his station - the clunking, roaring Auto-Chlor system which had been his personal Hell for three years going.

"I swear to God, Mike, you go over on your break again and I'm gonna fire your ass!", the manager spat on the way back to the grill. Ten tickets hung over the window between kitchen and bar, each indicating a table of two to four guests.

The three cooks worked furiously - in the sense that each was, for his own reasons, furious. A stack of plates clanked onto the assigned shelf, and Mike hurried back to the dish pit, loading and unloading, scraping and stacking. He would be here for another six hours. The line cooks would be here for four - leaving behind the pans, pots, and utensils for him to wash.

Out on the guest floor, dimly lit for the restaurant owner's intended 'romantic ambience', dozens of small screens lit the impatience of their handlers' faces. They scrolled and tapped, liking and sharing one post after another.

"The service in this restaurant is too slow. My food was cold by the time I got it. The kitchen staff seems stressed. My plate was wet. It's too dark in here."

The owner, in his office, scrolled through reviews, his brow furrowed. "What the fuck is going on in my kitchen," he muttered. "What the fuck is wrong with these people." This had been his daily mantra, and it was the reason, though he wasn't aware, for his kitchen's endless stress.

In a corner of the dining room, a divorced mother and her adult son sat across from each other. Each held a little screen, each scrolled through vastly different territory - in the same color schema and font, the same block-after-block of meme, video, text, and link, with the same blue banner up top.

Her screen scrolled cat videos, Bernie Sanders, recipes, and motherly complaints. His scrolled over much darker ideas; dreams of invaders, conspiracy theories, ads for tactical gear and weapons.

The mother's purse rested on the booth seat next to her. She carried with her the standard protection; a make-up kit, a can of mace, her wallet bulging with credit cards, long-stale snacks for the boy.

Directly across from the black leather pouch, similar but subtly different in cut and stitch, Brenden's bag also rested on the pleather seat, also loaded with protection; two pistols, three knives, each over the legal carry length, and, in three pieces, the carbine-length AR rifle, broken down into upper and lower reciever and bolt assembly.

This was the first time he had been out in public this year. His eyes shifted around the room, searching for threats. Loaded as his mind was with the countless manifesti of shut-in sons like himself, he expected at any moment to see a terrorist, a Communist, someone who should not be there; his body, soft from long sitting, was ready, he imagined, to take down any threat. Certainly, his bag was prepared.

Under his loose-fit clothes, body armor - ordered online, and, though he did not know it, useless against even .22 ammunition - kept him sweating, even in the air-conditioned environment of the restaurant. He shifted in his seat, whining to his mother.

"Mom, it's been a long time. Maybe they're holding our food back. Maybe they hate us. It's probably a bunch of immigrants in the kitchen."

His mother sighed. "Brenden, I'm not going down this road with you. There are a lot of people here, honey, and they're all hungry too." She was used to it. This conversation hadn't changed much in almost two decades as a single mother.

He, as ever, didn't listen. "I bet they singled us out because we're white! Maybe this is secretly an ISIS base! What if they come after us? What if the food is poisoned?" His mouth kept moving, but she didn't pay attention. There wasn't much she could do to stop him when he got like this, and she had long ago learned that her attempts only made it worse.

When the food came, he would calm down. Every other customer in the restaurant was just as pale of skin and entitled of mind. Steak and potatoes always put the boy to sleep, just like his father - that lazy sonofabitch, wherever he was tonight.

Quietly, un-noticed by his mother, by the other customers, by the server hustling by with a tray of drinks, the grown boy had drawn the parts of the AR out of his bag.

He slid the bolt into the upper receiver, laid the two halves of the rifle together, slid the pins into place.

Now he could calm down. He pressed a magazine into place, half-expecting the sound to be noticed; but the clatter of dishes covered the click of metal on metal.

The busser sidled by, stacking empty and half-empty plates into a bus bin. He was by far the least-paid employee of the restaurant; according to the mountain of paperwork in the owner's office, he wasn't an employee at all. Still, he was smiling.

This was better than living in the fearful darkness of the narco-state; he had even managed to bring his wife and child with him into the free heaven they called the United States. A few dollars an hour to listen in on English conversation, to work a job too easy, even to eat - when, a few times a night, an untouched plate was left behind by a guest, he would sneak it past the kitchen line and hide by the dish-machine, then return to pack it up to take home to the family. His wife could stretch a steak for one American out into a pot of beans fit to feed the kids and even their parents, even the cousins in the house. The dish guy understood. He was all right.

The kitchen manager, though, if he caught Manny stealing from the bus pan - well, Doctor Manuel Francisco Ruiz y Flores would have to find another job, but there were plenty if you would take pay under the table.

Brenden's brow furrowed. There was one! Right in front of him! An invader, an illegal immigrant! How dare he come here - taking jobs from citizens - probably stealing - probably a rapist - his hands leapt to the rifle, and smoothly pulled back the slide - the dining room heard the sound now, metal-on-metal, as a round slammed into the chamber of the military-grade weapon -

Manny heard it first. The young, unwashed man was struggling to his feet. Yes, that was a rifle, too clear. He dropped the bus-tub, in which several plates smashed, sending ceramic shards into what would have been a nice, if cold, steak dinner for the father of five.

The imagined invader was not frightened by the fantasizing crusader - he had been up against plenty of narcos before he gave up his medical practice south of Ciudad de Mexico, and packed what his family could carry. He took a step back as the blood-shot eyes swam into focus on his face.

The middle-aged woman across the table from the boy finally looked up from her phone, alerted by the sloshing of her beverage as the table, jostled by her son's sudden rise to his feet, shifted a few inches. She gasped. "Brenden! Put that away now! What have I told you about toys at the table!" This was no toy, of course - but, in her son's hands, it seemed to her that it might be one.

Distracted by his mother, Brenden turned away from the busser long enough for Manny to retrieve the loaded tub. Ay, chingalo. He threw it into the bearded child's belly, knocking him back into his seat, cracking the cheap toy "armor" as the force of it landed. The rifle clattered to the concrete floor beneath the booth table, in a shower of ceramic plate-shards, leftovers, and beard-hairs shaken loose by the fall.

By now, the rest of the dining room had begun to respond. Guests were huddling under their tables, or quickly standing and moving away from the scene of the sudden confrontation; the boy spluttered in useless fury, covered in dishes and half-eaten food, his mother trying and failing to placate him. The dining-room manager huddled with his staff behind the bar.

The kitchen had continued to work, not noticing the scene in the back corner of the dining room, and so the lead cook was now beating on the order-up bell. "What the fuck, guys - I got food dying in the window!"

Manny was fired, he knew it already, so he turned and headed for the kitchen, stripping off his apron on the way. "Bai Miguel," he called to the sweating dishwasher. "Lo siento por the broken dishes, man -"

By the time the police arrived, Manny, hero of the hour, was long gone, thanking God that he had never told anyone in the restaurant where he lived. Safe for now. He didn't tell his wife or kids anything about it. Too bad about the half-a-week's pay he had to leave behind. Too bad about that steak, too. That was fine. His wife was humming an old favorite song as she stirred the pot of beans; the meal would lose none of its warmth for the lack of meat tonight.

Brenden and his mother were sent home after a few minutes of police questioning. They left without his weapons, but with a coupon for a free entree on their next visit. The mother had insisted. The least the manager could do, after all, to compensate Brenden for the damages.

The sergeant recorded the event as a disturbance caused by an illegal alien, still at large.