Florida Won Gun Day, So Nobody Believes the Only Kid Who Can Level Up novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Twenty-Two Minutes

Palm Avenue's wave dies in 22 minutes to a block of armed neighbors while Lalo fires his first signed rounds, learns what the Registry counts, and reads the Terms to his grandmother.

Five minutes into the wave a palmetto was standing on the outside handle of the cooler, pulling down with all six legs.

The latch was a steel lever, and it was winning.

I held the inside release up with both hands and my whole weight, and the oxygen lady's nephew grabbed my belt.

Behind us the Judge lay on the mat, and nobody in that box was looking at him or looking away.

The chancleta came down on the other side of the door three times.

Then the weight on the lever was gone, and Abuela's voice said, "Abre, mijo. Es solo uno."

I opened the door a hand's width.

The palmetto lay split down the shell, and Abuela stood over it in one shoe.

Her eyes went past me to the mat, and she crossed herself with the hand that held the chancleta.

She said, "Después," and closed the door on all of us again, gently, from the outside.

That was my grandmother's whole speech on the death of a man she had served coffee for twenty-seven years, and it was correct.

The nine people in the cooler started to breathe again, in the order of how afraid they were.

I wiped my glasses on my sleeve, and the window opened a second time in my head.

[Lázaro Quesada. Deputy. Level 1.]

[XP: 0 of 100. Health: 80 of 80.]

[Body 8. Speed 9. Wits 15. Nerve 7.]

[Authority today: 25 of 25. Deputies: 0 of 0.]

[Liability: 0. Territory standing: Unsigned.]

Wits 15 was the highest number anyone had ever given me for anything.

It was also the one number in the block that could not stop a palmetto.

Under it sat four skills, each a single line.

Appraise, Authorize, Fine Print and Forecast.

I had read Fine Print already without knowing its name.

It meant that while I read a Registry window, the Registry's clock waited for me, and the real clock did not.

I opened the Terms to the table of classes, and I read it standing in a freezer with a dead man at my feet.

There were four classes.

In Class I, a bullet works.

In Class II, a bullet works at a Seam, which is the joint between plates, and nowhere else.

Classes III and IV had a few lines each, and I read them twice and did not like them.

Then I put my hand on the lever and said to nobody, "I need a gun."

"You need a license," said the man who wanted the air-conditioning.

"Mijo."

My aunt stood in the kitchen doorway when I came out, with her mouth tight and the Taurus held down along her leg.

She had just emptied half of it into the street.

She looked at my face, then at the blood on my glasses, and she held out the Taurus without a word.

"Fifteen and one," she said. "Don't point it at the croquetas."

I had fired a handgun twice in my life, both times at a range, both times because Yosi thought it was funny.

I went to the ventanita and looked at Palm Avenue.

The tear was still open, and it was still leaking.

The wave came out of it on six legs, and the sidewalk and the street had turned into a shooting gallery with no rules.

Domino men fired from their chairs, and the line fired from where it stood.

Retirees from Gate Watch fired from lawn chairs they had carried to the curb.

A man in flip-flops fired from the open door of a minivan.

A woman who had been buying flan before the hole opened knelt behind the ice machine and reloaded in a few seconds.

Nobody in that crowd needed a permit explained to them, and I had never been so glad to be a statistic.

The palmettos did not make it past the curb.

They came off the salt in ones and twos and dropped.

The next ones climbed over them and dropped too.

A palmetto looked at me through the heat shimmer, and I thought the word Appraise.

[Palmetto. Class I. Health 6 of 6.]

[Condition: Carrying. Seam: none.]

It was carrying a lump of white crust in its jaws.

I did not know what the crust was for.

I thought the word Authorize, and the Registry asked me one thing.

[Authorize one round? Authority 25 of 25.]

I raised the Taurus, braced it on the ventanita sill, and fired once at the palmetto.

It flipped over and lay still, and my window put the number on it.

[Signed. +4.]

[Authority 24 of 25. Liability: 0.]

Nobody looked at me, because forty other people had just done the same thing.

In the corner of my window another number was climbing too fast to read.

[Unsigned: 212.]

It was counting every other round on Palm Avenue.

I decided it was boilerplate, the Registry's idea of a joke, and I filed it.

I signed two more before the wave thinned, and my hands shook less each time.

The whole wave took twenty-two minutes.

The breach opened at 11:04 and the last palmetto was down before the half hour.

When it was over there were 311 of them on Palm Avenue.

The tear folded from the top down, and the crust ring went from dirty white to dry gray.

Nobody on the street had taken a scratch except from their own brass.

The silence was enormous, and then the argument started.

"That one was mine," said a domino man. "I had the shell cracked before you shot."

"You were reloading," said another.

Yosi shouted from the tire shop roof, "Thirty-one confirmed!"

His phone on the pole turned slowly to show the view.

Near the end the oxygen lady's phone buzzed in the cooler, and she read it aloud to the dark.

It was her HOA, and the text said, "Reminder: structures in the setback require approval."

The structure was a breach.

Someone had probably sent it from the pool.

On the TV above the register, the ticker had stopped talking about São Paulo.

It showed Seoul the night before, and then Lagos, and then Manila.

There were no guns in any of those streets.

The numbers under the footage were the first I had ever seen with five digits in them.

Before noon the Governor appeared on every channel to say that Floridians were handling it, which was the whole statement.

The man at FEMA's gate desk asked on the radio that people stop calling the gate desk.

Hialeah police sent one patrol car to Palm Avenue, and the officer parked it and asked if anyone needed a report.

Florida had a different problem.

The Medley husk yards on Okeechobee Road opened at noon and paid forty dollars a carcass, and there was already a man with a wheelbarrow.

Ammunition had tripled in price within the hour, on a radio ad, from a store that was out of ammunition.

I counted my own score in the window.

[XP: 12 of 100.]

Three kills, and the whole street had been shooting.

I opened the top of the Offer again, because a number sat above the Terms.

[Offers extended within one mile of a breach: 31,812,406.]

[Accepted: 1.]

Thirty-one million people had seen the same window in the same thirty seconds.

Some swiped it away as a phone alert, some shot at it, and some were busy with a palmetto.

Reading it was a habit of mine, nothing more, and the habit had just paid off.

I stood in my grandmother's bakery with a borrowed pistol, and I understood that the Registry only counted bullets that had somebody's name on them.

Abuela stood in the doorway to the cooler.

She had put on her second chancleta, and she was reading over my shoulder, or trying to, in a window only I could see.

"Read it to me," she said.

I read her the six lines of the Terms, and she listened the way she listens to a customs officer.

She did not say anything until I got to the end.

"Territory standing," she said. "Unsigned. Qué quiere decir eso?"

"It's boilerplate," I said. "Every contract has a header."

"Every contract has a header," Abuela said. "And a footer, and a diablo con letras in between."

She looked at the man on the mat through the cooler door.

"Who pays when somebody dies?" she said. "In this paper."

"The person who signed for the bullet," I said.

"Y quién firmó por el del Juez?"

"Nobody," I said.

She nodded once.

She went to the kitchen and began to take down the big pots, because a death in that house means food.

I stood at the ventanita holding the Taurus.

It was nearly noon.

My window lit up with one more line, small and flat, in the voice of a county clerk.

[Forecast: Class II, Okeechobee Road, 11:48 a.m.]

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