Author Games: Ace of Spades

Semifinals: Adam Burke

Gunshots are far louder in real life than they sound in movies.

It's something they never tell you, something people think you should never have to learn. If you hear a gunshot, you're either a police officer hopefully doing their job right, or you're in trouble.

Or you're shooting the gun.

I'd never heard a gunshot before tonight, never seen someone's fingers pull the trigger without the slightest hint of remorse on their face as they ended someone's life with just the tiniest movement, but it would haunt me forever.

"Get down!" someone shouts as glass sprays everywhere, crystal breaking into a million pieces as the first bullet hit a wineglass. I can feel shards of it rip through my suit and through my knees as I crawl under the blackjack table, and my hands seek the table leg for any kind of support. I meet eyes with another under the poker round doing the same thing, her shaky hands clutching the wooden leg like it's the last lifejacket on the Titanic.

Her eyes are utterly terrified, and I am certain mine looked just the same.

"Morty, put the gun down!" One of the Aces shouts it, but I wasn't sure who. Voices filled with terror sound the same whatever gender they belong to, or whatever lack of gender.

"No one can leave, do you hear me?"

Another gunshot. This one makes me flinch. It's strange - somehow, they seem realer with all the chaos, all the shouting, than they have when the Aces were calmly shooting people for going bust in blackjack. When the person with the gun didn't seem to care, it didn't seem real, like it was a movie, and they were just shooting blanks or hitting fake blood capsules. The bodies that fell were stunt doubles, all the games were planned, scripted perfectly so the canned laughter could be edited in.

When you're hiding under a rickety, already-blood-stained table, with the eyes of a madman staring at you as he aims a guns at your shaking body, that's off-script, and I've never known how to improvise.

I hear a scream from my desperate hiding place and can't help but lean out from under the table, barely wincing as my legs come into contact with more glass. Someone sprints for the door, but the gunman spins faster than I would have thought possible and shoots, barely missing their heart. The man screams still, though, and blood begins to pour through his fingers, staining the fabric of his shirt.

I want to tell him it could be worse, that he could be dead, but I retreat again, hoping desperately that someone will hear the gunshots, come save us.

Then again, they've been shooting people for hours. I just haven't cared until now.

It's more personal now.

I lean back against the table leg, swallowing hard, my side aching from where a sharp corner has been poking it for the last ten minutes, reminding me of why I'm not in a limo home with a million dollars in hand. I chose to save these people just so we could all be killed, and if that's not the sort of delicious irony I would have loved twenty-four hours ago, I don't know what it.

I could have done the Burke thing by taking the money, done my father's deed with a silver briefcase in hand, but I did the Adam thing instead, and now the crazy person who orchestrated this whole affair is doing the insane thing, just as we were all cast to do, just as is expected.

I am Adam.

My father is my father.

And whoever is still shooting isn't going to stop until everyone in the casino is dead, including me, including everyone I chose to save, everyone I sacrificed my new beginning for.

More thudding sounds above my safe haven, someone wrestling with the gunman. I can hear a door slam, and wish I were the one leaving, but at least someone will leave, see their family again, perhaps rebuild their life. Maybe they'll find help for the rest of us in here before it's too late - before we all get shot.

I let out a scream as something thuds right onto the table, a strangely familiar thud. I heard it before in blackjack as my partner went face-down on the table with the back of their head blown out, heard it in poker as my team lost and the pretty blondes were shot, two in a row, heard that same sickening thump when roulette turned into a deadlier version of the game. A dead weight falling can't stop itself, so the sound is always the same, never the soft groan of someone getting the wind knocked out of them, not the crunch when someone puts their arms out the wrong way and breaks their wrist, but the sound of a body that can't lighten the fall.

It takes all the energy I can muster to crawl out from under the table, even more to keep myself from looking back at the body. I don't want to see another corpse, don't want to recognize the bright red hair of Sushi or the wrinkles of old Callahan. If I never saw another dead body, I'd have seen too many for a lifetime.

It's still chaos, still loud. The Aces surround the shooter, desperately trying to wrestle the gun from him and talk him out of killing everyone in the casino. People still try to run, but the doors are jammed, probably from what looks like the shot lock. Perhaps after one person escaped, the gunman decided no one would.

Shattered glass litters the floor, matching the bloodstains and dropped cards. They seem to be mocking me, the cards - the kings of heart, the king of spades, the king of diamonds. Matching me, then, prince of screwups. Destined to take the throne of the kingdom of idiots if I make it out of this casino of lies.

Glass crunches under my feet as I join the girl yanking desperately at the door, her screams mixing with the ones of the Aces and the man who was shot and the girl who sobs over a body on the ground, desperate caterwauling. It feels good to join them, to let my throat go raw as I shriek and pound on doors and don't care that the picture falls from my jacket and shatters on the ground.

"Morty!" someone shouts, and I look back, watching the gunman punch an Ace and shoot another, who gasps and clutches their stomach.

"Mort?" they whisper, mouth hanging open, eyes aghast at the thought that someone they trusted, helped, took orders from could be so cold, so wild, shoot a bullet through their organs without so much as a blink.

I turn back to the doors and keep screaming, let myself release what might be my last breath and gasp in another to continue pounding on the door and jiggle the door handle desperately.

It seems all I do is desperate.

More gunshots sound, this time closer to me. I wince as a picture frame on the wall breaks, a perfect circle left it in, the framed painting marred with the bullet hole. Monet would have been upset, but he was dead, and I would be too if I didn't get out.

Another gunshot.

Another scream.

"Nobody move!"

I ignore it. The door is starting to feel looser, or perhaps I'm just imagining it for my own well being. Still, I think I feel something shift as I slam against it.

Just once more.

"I said don't move!"

The bullet hits just above my head, and I thank god that Mort isn't a better shot. The glass panes are destroyed by now, but the tiny panels keep me from simply slipping through to freedom, to safety, away from the gun.

I raise my hands above my head and turn away from the door.

"That's right, boy. Get with the others."

Just once more.

I don't get with the others, the others I tried so hard to save. Sometimes, trying isn't good enough.

Instead, I slam against the door once more, just enough for it to yield, enough for me to slip out and run faster than I ever have before, faster than anyone's ever run in a ripped, blood-stained suit that carries the weight of what you've done and the faces of those you've left behind.

It doesn't carry that anymore, though.

I pat my suit jacket gently, wasting time, halfway expecting a bullet to rip through my spinal cord. The picture is gone,and I can remember it falling, shattering as the heel of a dress shoe, my dress shoe, shattered the glass, sending fragments into each of the faces I saved once, and condemned once.

It's too much to hope than anyone else escaped, and instead, I keep running, leaving behind the corpses and the remains of the night.