Soft targets, p.1
Soft Targets, page 1
Soft Targets © 2023 by Carson Winter and Tenebrous Press
All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form by any means, except for brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without the prior written consent of the owner. All inquiries should be addressed to tenebrouspress@gmail.com.
Production of this novel was made possible in part by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Visit https://racc.org/ for more information.
Published by Tenebrous Press.
Visit our website at www.tenebrouspress.com.
First Printing, March 2023.
The characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Print ISBN: 979-8-9859923-4-2
eBook ISBN: 979-8-9859923-5-9
Cover art and interior illustrations by Blacky Shepherd.
Jacket design by Matt Blairstone.
Edited by Alex Woodroe.
Formatting by Lori Michelle.
Printed in the United States of America.
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For everyone who’s assaulted daily by dopamine—or its sad absence.
1
I OFTEN THINK about what would happen if a gunman entered our building and started blasting away. I think we all do, it’s like a horror movie that way. Because really, it’s not enough to see it on TV. You have to duck under a table, hide in a cupboard, throw a coffee mug, and eventually feel the hot bullet spill your hot blood onto the company carpet. That’s what it takes, I think, to really give a shit about what the news anchors say. No talking head is enough. It’s just one of those things—the ultimate you had to be there, you know?
Me and Ollie knew this better than anyone, and that’s why we always took our lunches together, out in his car, to just talk like a couple of kids. You know an Ollie, wherever you work. He’s cool. Short, messy hair, glasses. Funny. He doesn’t threaten you as a man. He won’t tell anyone if you came in hungover. He won’t make a big deal about your anythings if you don’t make a big deal about his anythings.
We were drinking sodas in his car on an insufferable Tuesday—killing our lunchbreak with the same vigor that we killed ourselves.
“So, what happens if there’s two of them?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, two dudes with guns and they kick down the door and they go on either side of the office and they start with Melanie at the front desk and accounting on the other side. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, my man. Hard fucking place.”
“You think you can break those windows? Not with your hands, but like a chair or a stapler, or something?”
Ollie thought for a moment, rubbing his chin. “Yeah, maybe. I could see that happening. Let’s say you can break the window with the—uh, uh—with the copier. Yeah, you can bash it to bits with the copier.”
“I think I’d try to jump through the window, then.”
“Really? Damn.” He whistled. “That’s tough shit. That’s action hero shit. You think you’re not going to hurt your leg?”
“Tuck and roll, that’s what they say to do, right?”
“Yeah, but man, that’s like out of a moving train or something. This is two stories up, hombre. You’re gonna shatter your kneecaps.”
“Better than a bullet, though, right?”
“That may be. You’re saying the risk is worth the reward. You might be able to get interviewed after. ‘Dude who left his co-workers to die by two gunmen speaks on the benefit of crutches.’”
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s right. But I’m alive and they’re dead. So, who really gives a shit?”
Ollie nodded, mugging as if I’d just revealed some deeper truth on human existence. “Very true, my friend.” He toasted me with a bottle of soda as an alarm chimed from his pocket. Ollie reached down, killing the alarm. “Back to work,” he said.
We both groaned.
Really, part of the problem was that our job was boring as shit. Not in the normal way, the all jobs suck way—our jobs were literal tedium. We, Ollie and I, both worked in data entry, meaning we entered raw data into a spreadsheet all day while silently hoping someone would come in and kill us all.
This whole fantasy was a sort of bonding factor for us. It had to be, because around us, everyone else would say shit like, “Well, it’s a living!” or “At least I’ve got a job!”
I didn’t know about them, but I did it because I couldn’t do anything else. I’d given up on finding something to do with my degree and this was a last resort until my dream job sat on my lap, shook its ass, and told me it loved me. Ollie wasn’t quite in the same boat. I always assumed he was, until one day he told me that he had freelance assignments to do. After that, I managed to put it together—Ollie made most of his money elsewhere, but stayed on doing data entry as a means to keep health insurance. I didn’t ask much about that. He would call in a lot and I knew that, because for me to be able to withstand the work day, I needed Ollie to be there to liven me up. Needless to say, every day he wasn’t there was pure pain.
I figured he had an auto-immune disease or something, some sort of chronic illness. But nothing too serious, a pain in the ass that he didn’t talk about, nothing he’d want you to worry about. He was young and vital, normal. Sort of.
All that bullshit about this place being a stepping stone to better things just about killed us both though, we weren’t like that at all. We couldn’t be fooled into thinking our situation was anything other than pure shit. So, we talked about it. A lot. And that bothered some people, because not everyone can appreciate open-hearted pessimism. Some of them needed to pretend that it was okay, that life was fair, and that hard work paid off. Over time, we began to see ourselves as distinct from the others, and soon the others left us entirely alone. Left to our own devices, our jokes got darker, more pointedly cruel. Our fantasies showed their ugly heads and I think it was me, one day, who saw on the news that some office workers got blown apart by their colleague, and I smirked and said, “Lucky bastards.”
This prompted a gut-busting laugh from Ollie, of course, who had tears in his eyes when he thought about it. Just imagine, everyone around you was preparing vigils, all sad and sure that you would’ve wanted to live, but there you were: it was a fucking Monday and you were sure that nothing in your life had ever been right; you were working a bullshit job you hated and it was only eleven and you knew that somehow, you had to last till 6 ‘o clock, because they added an extra hour to the workday; you were sitting there at your desk, brain dead and tired and depressed and suddenly—voila!—the answer to your prayers; Craig with the AR-15 came barging in, the timid little nerd from sales all done up in tactical gear, and that motherfucker might as well have looked like an angel. “Take me, St. Craig—blow my fucking brains out or else I’ll have to be here for seven more fucking hours.” And Craig, the messiah figure he was, granted your wish.
It started like that; we’d talk about all the shootings that happened. Analyze their methods and motivations. We’d place ourselves both within the role of survivor and antagonist.
But, I should be clear here—this wasn’t idolatry. What attracted us to the topic was the taboo that surrounded it. We liked the way others would wince when we brought up wanting to be gunned down in the parking lot. It was just a bit of dark humor, really. People said, “Kill me,” all the time, right? We just took it a bit further, made it more specific. We made trite hyperbole topical again. And, of course, this made us pariahs. But what could you expect, really?
But that was survival, for both parties. This was how we sublimated our brainless work into something we could at least joke about. It gave us something to look forward to.
So, yeah, I started it all, I guess. That part was on me.
2
OLLIE WAS A mysterious guy, but I accepted his mystery just as I accepted that snakes went somewhere during the winter and it wasn’t my business to know where. He was constantly busy, doing one thing or another, and when he invited me over, there was a distinct feeling that his schedule, miraculously, had been cleared.
“Come in, come in,” he said, exhaling. “It’s been a fucking week. Don’t mind the mess. These apartments collect clutter like nobody’s business.” Ollie always seemed to be conspicuously aware of the fact he lived in an apartment and frequently brought it up, as if he were apologizing. Sometimes, he’d go further still, and say he was saving for a house, too. I just shrugged. His place was fine, it looked like every other single dude’s apartment I’d ever been to. It was a little sparse, but not in a mechanical minimalist sort of way. Things just seemed to be spaced far apart. And Ollie was also aware of this too, and also anxious about what it said about him as a person. So, sometimes the “saving for a house” comment would also reach over and cover the “why I don’t have a ton of shit” question.
Again though, I didn’t care. Ollie’s place was painfully normal, but maybe for a guy like Ollie, that was the problem.
“Go ahead and take a seat,” he said. He disappeared into the kitchenette and came back with two beers. “You still like garbage beer, right?”
“Always have, always will.”
He tossed me a can. “Maybe don’t open that right away.”
I licked the dew from my fingers and sat the beer down in front of me. Ollie sat beside me and we watched junk television and bullshitted for a couple of hours. About life, girls in the office, job openings, and whatever else came to mind. I didn’t usually broach the subject of Ollie’s freelance work, because, I guess, for me, it felt something like an invasion of privacy. He’d never mentioned it before in more than passing, so I figured he didn’t want to talk about it. And that was it. But his laptop was sitting on the table and the words sort of just popped out: “So, how’s the side hustle going?”
I didn’t think Ollie would be surprised or annoyed or anything. He’s not the type to get up in arms about something like that. Still, I felt a little like I was needling into something I had no business needling into.
But Ollie just laughed. “Less than bueno,” he said.
I felt bad for asking. Maybe his insecurity about his apartment was also a reflection of his finances. “Sorry, dude,” I mustered, then tried to relieve the tension I felt with a joke. “If you ever need a place to stay, I have a couch covered in dried Hot Pocket guts.”
“Does it come with amenities?”
“Just a trash can that never stops smelling because the lid’s broken.”
“Well, gee,” he said, deadpan. “I’ll put down a deposit tomorrow.”
We laughed a bit, riffing on the idea of living together, but then slowly, throughout the night, the whole idea transformed into something that didn’t feel so much like a joke. We were each a six-pack deep and Ollie had brought out what he called, “the paraphernalia,” and we were both now holding in lungfuls of weed smoke. When we released, we both simultaneously fell backwards into his couch.
“Okay, but what about this—instead of me moving into your place, or you moving into my place—what if we got a place together?”
“How’s that gonna look?”
“Like we’re a couple.”
“Well, if that’s the case, we should definitely do it.”
He made a cheers motion with his beer. “But, check this, some quick math. So, our apartments, individually, are one bedroom shit holes, right?”
“Yes, agreed.”
“Now, a two bedroom shit hole is, on average, only what a one bedroom costs plus a couple hundred dollars.”
“Sure,” I said, although I thought that sounded low.
“So, what do you pay now? A thousand a month?”
“I prefer to call it a ‘k,’ but yes.”
“So, two bedrooms is only about $1200 a month. But that’s a shit hole, we don’t want a shit hole, so how do we transition from shit hole to semi-decent and livable? Tack on another couple hundred bucks, motherfucker!”
“Fourteen-hundred,” I said, already knowing where he was going.
“No, not $1400, but $700. Because we split the rent. And that means two things: we each now have an extra $300 a month, to do whatever we want with. Invest in crypto, build wealth, save it, spend it, develop a pill habit, who cares? And two, we have a better living space, which will benefit our mental health and make us infinitely more fuckable.”
“Well, only if we can convince anyone we bring home that we aren’t fucking each other.”
“Hey, man—why grab a hamburger when you have steak at home?” We laughed about that a bit and smoked more and drank more and diverted our conversations around and around and around, until Ollie, his eyes red and nearly glued shut, said, “Seriously, man. Just think about it.”
“I will, I will,” I promised. And why not? I liked Ollie. We kept each other sane. And somehow, this was all making sense. But also, I expected it to be forgotten in the morning, when we both went to work, and fell into the same rhythm of malaise we always did.
Except, that didn’t happen at all.
The morning after, I’d gotten to my desk before Ollie and I was really praying that he hadn’t called in sick, because I was going to have a rough nine hours otherwise. But, to my surprise, he came in just a couple minutes after me, holding something.
“Morning, beautiful,” he said.
“Hello, gorgeous.”
He laid one of those cheap real estate papers filled with grainy pictures of housing on my desk. “Check this out, man,” he said. He flipped through three pages before finding the listing he wanted. “Right here, dude. Check this out. Luxury two-bedroom. Do you see the price?”
It was the first thing I saw. “$1200”
“Incredible, right?”
I had to recalibrate for a moment, because I realized, suddenly, that this would be a reality soon and that if I didn’t want it, I would have to put my foot down now. But, when I thought about it, I realized I had no real reservations. The idea excited me. I wanted to move in with Ollie. The idea of new surroundings jolted me out of the depression of another work day. “That’s fucking amazing,” I said, amping my enthusiasm to match his.
“I’m going to pull the trigger. You’re on month-to-month, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good, me too.” He sat down across from me, taking the paper with him. “This is gonna be great,” he said, half to himself.
And what could I say? I believed him.
3
AT WORK, our misery took a backseat to planning our move-in. For once, we were no longer outsiders. Coworkers began to talk to us, because suddenly, we were talking about something less grotesque than our own glorious demise.
“Moving on up, eh, boys?”
“Don’t go to the Eastside, for your own good. My favorite bike got stripped for parts by tweakers in broad daylight.”
“Palatial Living—my cousin has an apartment there. Nice place.”
And when we weren’t nodding and saying, “Ah, yeah, gotcha,” to the continued commentary, we were figuring how our two lives would end up fitting together.
“Are we keeping your couch?”
“No, I like yours better.”
“How big is your TV?”
“60 inch.”
“Fuck, okay. Let’s go with that.”
Through all of our combined worldly possessions, we created an optimized amalgam of our intertwining lives. We were the very best of two people who hated everything.
On the way to the apartment, for the first time, Ollie drove and we played our favorite game.
I started. “So, if you were going to do it, where would you start?”
“What do you mean? Like, would I plan it?”
“Sure. Let’s say, you’re at step one—you’ve decided you want to commit an atrocity. What do you do next?”
He thought on this for a minute, turning the wheel. “I think I’d decide what day of the week I want to do it—that’s Monday, by the way.”
“That’s obvious. Everyone hates Mondays. I’d go for Friday though, for maximum trauma. Everyone wants to be killed on a Monday, but no one wants to die on a Friday.”
He slapped the steering wheel. “I knew I kept you around for a reason. So, yeah, let’s say Friday. But more important than day of the week is time of day. I’m thinking it’d be better to do it early in the day, as it’ll create this sort of meta-narrative of all the world’s drones empathizing with the poor bastards who got blown apart at their shitty jobs on a Friday.”
“And not to forget the media coverage.”
“That’s true too. There’s a lot of benefits to creating a tragedy during working hours.”
“It primes everyone for a Long Hard Talk on Gun Violence.”
“Or Mental Health.”
“Or both, really.”
“And they have all weekend to talk about it, to really stew in it. Marinade themselves in the crying mothers breathlessly telling their shit-tier memories of their sad sack kid who got his spine shattered by a stray bullet.”
