Florida Won Gun Day, So Nobody Believes the Only Kid Who Can Level Up novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Bodega Rules

At a bodega on Okeechobee Road, Lalo signs 22 palmettos while the owner's shotgun gets the credit on the news, and a Class II slabback walks toward a gun show.

I told my grandmother what the Forecast said, and she heard it the way she hears a delivery order.

"Okeechobee," she said. "The bodega buys forty pastelitos every Saturday and he is not answering his phone."

"Abuela, a Class II is going to walk past his door in eight minutes."

"Then he will want something to eat when it does," she said.

She was already packing the trays.

The bakery owns one van, a white Ford with LA CARIDAD on the side and a dent in the bumper from 2019.

Abuela loaded forty dozen guava pastelitos for the gun show coffee tent, and a smaller tray for the bodega.

She had a standing order from the gun show every Saturday, and she did not see why an invasion should cancel it.

My aunt put the Taurus into my hand again and said, "Bring it back with fifteen in it."

Abuela said, "Bring the van back with all of its wheels."

She said nothing about me, and that was her blessing.

Yosi was still on the tire shop roof.

He did not look down when I drove off, because his phone was telling him how many people were watching him.

Okeechobee Road is six lanes of dealerships, bodegas and tire shops, with the Medley husk yards next door.

The county has always parked there whatever it did not know what to do with.

That Saturday every curb also had a lawn chair on it.

People sat in them with a rifle across their knees and a cooler beside them, facing a ring of gray salt in a gravel lot.

It was the husk yard's own breach, and it had spent itself before noon.

The men around it were arguing about who got forty dollars a carcass, which is the bounty the yards pay for a palmetto.

The yards also paid nine dollars a pound for the crust each palmetto carried out of a ring.

Somebody in the citrus groves had found that ring salt cured greening.

They did not yet know what to pay for a plate off the big ones, because nobody had gotten one.

I counted forty people in the bodega's parking lot, and behind them a news van from a Spanish-language station was raising its mast.

The bodega owner stood at his door with a pump shotgun against his shoulder and a white apron over a guayabera.

He called the shotgun Mister Receipt, because it was what he showed customers who asked for a refund.

"Lalo," he said without turning around. "Is that the pastelitos?"

"Yes, sir. Abuela says you shouldn't leave the store."

"I have a hundred cans of coffee and no ammunition," he said. "I am not leaving anything."

In the corner of my window the counter I had filed away had changed.

It no longer said 212.

[Unsigned rounds today, Florida: 3,114,022.]

I read the number twice, and then I told myself that it counted, and that counting was what registries did.

The van door was open, and the smell of forty dozen hot guava pastelitos rolled across the lot.

Palmettos like sugar.

I learned that in the next thirty seconds, and I learned it along with forty other people.

A second wave came out of the husk yard's ring, low and fast across the gravel.

Nobody had counted on a second wave.

Every palmetto in it was aimed at my van.

"Get behind the van!" I yelled, which was stupid, because the van was the bait.

The bodega owner racked Mister Receipt and fired, and the first palmetto in the line came apart.

Forty guns started up behind him.

I braced the Taurus on the open door and thought the word Authorize before every shot.

I was nineteen, and so far I had killed three living things, and now I was about to do it as a job.

My hands wanted to stop, and my head told them there were forty people behind me.

[Authority 22 of 25.]

The Registry asked me each time, flat and polite, and I answered by pulling the trigger.

[Signed. +4.]

[Signed. +4.]

By the fifth round my ears were gone.

The gravel threw ricochets back at our ankles, and one tore the van's side mirror off.

The reporter screamed something about live television.

A woman in line went down with a palmetto on her calf.

She was the first person I saw bitten.

The shell on the thing was as thin as a roof tile, and her leg was open to the bone.

The bodega owner put a boot on the palmetto and the barrel on its head.

Then he pulled the dish towel from his apron and tied the leg without looking up.

"Pressure," he said to a man holding a phone. "Put your hand there, not your camera."

I fired again.

[Signed. +4.]

[Authority 11 of 25. XP: 56 of 100.]

Every time the owner's shotgun roared, the corner of my window printed one small line.

Every time I fired, it printed a different one.

[Unsigned.]

[Signed. +4.]

[Unsigned.]

[Unsigned.]

The owner killed about sixty palmettos with Mister Receipt, and the Registry wrote down nothing for any of them.

I thought about that with the Taurus bucking in my hand.

The news van swung its camera onto him.

"The owner of this Hialeah bodega is holding the line with a twelve-gauge," the reporter said into the lens, "while his customers stand by him."

His customers stood by him with pistols.

Nobody on camera looked at the kid behind the van door, which is what a kid behind a van door is for.

At Authority 4 the Taurus clicked empty.

The owner threw me a box of 9-millimeter without turning his head.

"Sixty dollars," he said. "It's triple. I'll put it on Abuela's account."

I reloaded with shaking hands.

I did the sum while I did it.

Four rounds left in the day, and four points to make a hundred.

Four kills would make the number, and any miss would leave me with an empty day and a van full of bait.

I signed the first one.

I signed the second one, and the third.

The fourth palmetto was ten feet off and coming for the boy with the bitten shoe, and I put the round through its head.

[Signed. +4.]

[Authority 0 of 25. XP: 100 of 100.]

The window flashed white, and for a second I could not see the lot.

[Level 2.]

[Authority today: 40 of 40. Deputies: 0 of 2.]

[Deputize unlocked. A Deputy fires a signed magazine for you, and you sign what he fires.]

Leveling up had put the day's Authority back in my hand, and I stood there understanding that this was not an accident.

It was a rule, and a rule is a thing a person can plan around.

The second wave went down in the next ninety seconds, under forty guns and one Taurus that counted.

When the last palmetto fell, the lot cheered Mister Receipt.

The reporter shook the owner's hand on live television, and he accepted it as his due.

Over her shoulder he gave me a look that said he knew what he had done.

It was almost noon.

The Class II from the Forecast did not come to the bodega.

It crossed Okeechobee Road at the far end of the block, and forty people with rifles had a clear view of it.

It was the size of a UPS truck, with gray shingled plates that overlapped down its back.

I thought the word Appraise.

[Slabback. Class II. Health 400 of 400.]

[Condition: Following noise. Seam: left forward hinge.]

Everyone near me opened fire, and the rounds sparked off the plates and whined away into the sky.

The slabback did not look at any of them.

It went north, toward the loudest place in Hialeah, and the radio in the news van told the rest.

"We are receiving reports of a large creature entering the grandstand lot at Hialeah Park," the reporter said, out of breath.

"The Sunshine Gun and Knife Show has four thousand buyers on site."

"Every one of them is armed."

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