Florida Won Gun Day, So Nobody Believes the Only Kid Who Can Level Up novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Terms of Service
At 11:04 on Saturday, October 24, the first breach opens on Palm Avenue, a stray unowned bullet kills the oldest domino player at the bakery window, and Lalo reads the Terms of the Offer and accepts the liability.
On the morning the monsters came, the whole line at our window was laughing at a piece of paper.
The paper was mine.
It was taped to the steel door of the walk-in cooler at the back of our bakery.
I had laminated it Thursday at the library.
It said SHELTER PLAN in three colors of marker.
Rule one was that the cooler was the only room in the building with a steel door and no windows.
I was nineteen, five foot eight, skinny, with curly black hair, glasses and an apron with a guava stain.
I worked the ventanita from five to eleven every morning, and then I went to class at the community college.
People tell me I look like a famous rapper.
I stopped answering that in tenth grade, because the answer is no and nobody wants it.
The ventanita is the sidewalk window of our bakery, a steel hatch with an awning, and a cafecito there costs $1.25.
The bakery is Panadería La Caridad on Palm Avenue in Hialeah, and my grandparents opened it in 1984.
Fourteen people stood in line for it that Saturday, and at least eleven of them were carrying a gun.
Under the awning, at a folding table, sat the four domino men, who had been there every day since 1999.
Their pistols rode in belt holsters, and their tiles sat in rows between the coffee cups.
The oldest was the Judge, who was eighty-one and had been a court clerk.
He ruled on every disputed tile as if it were a case.
Behind the pastry case inside, my aunt had a Taurus under the croquetas de jamón.
She said the case was at hand height and the croquetas were not going anywhere.
Above the register, the TV had been on since I opened at five.
It showed São Paulo, where the morning had already gone wrong, and a ticker that said the same thing in two languages.
Here is what everybody in Florida knew by then.
On Thursday, October 1, a ring of white crust had appeared on the sidewalk at the corner of Palm Avenue and West 49th Street.
It was thirty feet across, and the geologists called it an evaporite crust.
The news called it the salt circle trend, and HOAs fined people for having one.
By Friday there were 118 of them in Florida, and I had put every one on a map for my Statistics project.
My class laughed at the map, because the circles were not doing anything.
Then, late on Friday afternoon, the first hole opened on a beach in Kiribati.
It opened at 11:04 in the morning, local time, and so did every hole after it, all the way west around the planet.
The wave came out of each hole, the wave died or didn't, and that same line moved on to the next time zone.
Florida was eighteen hours behind the start.
We watched Seoul on TV, and then Lagos, and then Manila, and we used the eighteen hours to buy ammunition.
By midnight the Walmart on Okeechobee Road had a purchase limit, a line and a man selling hot dogs to the line.
I used mine to print the Plan.
The Plan said that when the hole opened the nine people I had signed up would go into the cooler and shut the door.
I had counted the cooler by square foot and by oxygen, and nine was what it held.
I had told the line so at five, and again at seven, and again when Yosi came by.
"Lalo has a PowerPoint for the end of the world," my cousin said.
He was not in line.
He was on the roof of the tire shop across Palm Avenue, with a rifle across his knees.
A phone on a pole streamed him to a gun-store sponsor.
Yosi was twenty-four, a personal trainer and the Gate Watch captain for our neighborhood.
Gate Watch meant a few retirees with lawn chairs and a clipboard.
Since October 12 it also meant a phone number at FEMA, which was one man at one desk.
He was loud and handsome and not stupid, and he had never in his life been told no by a crowd.
"Seoul is not Florida!" he yelled down.
The whole line laughed, and even the domino men laughed.
I had shown them the numbers.
Forty-one percent of the breaches in Asia had killed more people than the first reports said.
Nobody wants a nerd on Gun Day, and we did not yet call it that.
I looked at Abuela.
She stood at the espresso machine beside me, five feet tall, with a steel bun and a rosary in her apron pocket.
She said nothing.
Abuela always has something to say, so when she says nothing it is a verdict.
A few minutes before the hole opened, nine people were willing to follow the Plan.
They were two mothers, four kids, a man who wanted the air-conditioning, and a woman with an oxygen tank and her nephew.
The Judge would not go in.
He said he had survived two wives and Hurricane Andrew, and he would finish his hand.
At 11:04 the crust at the corner began to hum.
The hum came up through the sidewalk and into my teeth.
The air above the circle split from the ground up, a tear as tall as a bus.
Its edge was black and wet, and it sagged and dripped on the salt.
Something came out of it on six legs.
The news had named them palmettos, after the bug, because they were the size of a beagle and had the same idea about kitchens.
It had a brown shell as thin as a roof tile, and it was fast.
"Cooler!" I yelled. "Cooler, now!"
Nine people ran, and I went after them with a hand on the oxygen cart.
Behind me the street filled with gunfire.
Eleven people in line drew at once, and the four domino men drew four pistols.
The first thing any of them said was an argument.
"That one was mine," said a domino man.
"You hit the ground," said another.
Abuela threw her chancleta at a palmetto on the counter.
It stopped.
Yosi's rifle cracked from the roof, and my aunt came out from behind the pastry case with the Taurus in both hands.
The palmettos kept coming, forty and then a hundred, and a hundred guns kept answering.
I shut the nine inside and stood with my hand on the chrome handle and a handwritten sign beside it that said Si Ocupado Toque.
Through the gap I could see the sidewalk.
The Judge sat at the table with his tiles lined up, not hiding.
A few minutes later he stood up to see what the shooting was about.
The bullet came from somewhere to his left or somewhere to his right.
I know there were two directions of fire, because later I would count the holes.
It hit him in the chest, and he sat back down.
Rule four of my Plan was that nobody leaves the cooler.
I broke it, and I broke it faster than I ever broke a rule.
I ran down the length of the kitchen and out the side door, and I got a hand in his collar.
He weighed less than a sack of flour, and I dragged him on his heels through the kitchen with his tiles still in his fist.
The nephew held the cooler door open, and I hauled the Judge over the sill.
The cold hit us.
I laid him on the floor mat between a rack of flan and the oxygen cart and pressed my apron on the hole.
"Don't tell the others," the Judge said. "I had the double six the whole game."
"Don't talk," I said.
"They'll want to see it," he said. "Put it face up."
He opened his hand, and the tile was the double six.
Then he stopped, and the apron had nothing left to press against.
I knelt there with his blood on my glasses.
Nobody was going to say whose bullet it was, because nobody knew, and nobody would ever have to.
A window opened in my head.
It was white, with plain black letters, and it did not care what had just happened.
[Applicant located. Accept / Decline.]
[Time to answer: 30 seconds.]
Everyone within a mile of that tear got one.
I did not know that yet.
I knew the clock was running, and I knew what I do with a clock, which is look for the print.
So I read, and the clock stopped on the number 27 and stayed there.
[Terms.]
[Territory standing: Unsigned.]
[Class: Deputy.]
[Authority: 25 rounds a day.]
[A Deputy signs for every round he authorizes.]
[LIABILITY: the Deputy's name is on every signed round.]
I read the last line three times.
It meant that if I put a bullet into a monster, the monster died and I got the credit.
It meant that if I put a bullet into a person, the person died and I got the name.
Nobody else would ever sign for a bullet at all.
I looked at the Judge's hand, open on the tile.
I looked at the street, where eleven people had fired and not one of them would be blamed.
A bullet with a name on it had not existed an hour before.
I wanted my name on every round I would ever fire.
I said yes out loud, with the Judge's blood drying on my glasses.
[Accepted. Applicants accepted worldwide: 1.]
Something heavy hit the cooler door from the outside.
Then I heard a chancleta, three times.
My grandmother was saying a word about the palmetto on the handle that I will not put on this page.
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