I Am The Local Atheist (16 page)

“
Really?” I was a little stunned because the inside wasn’t much
more than just ordinary. I took a look around the kitchen wondering
where the value was hidden.

“
It’s not what’s hanging on the walls – it’s how the walls are
constructed, the design, layout and where the property is situated:
top-class area, near a respected high school. This house would be a
primo buy, but I get the feeling that Lucy ain’t gonna be moving
out anytime soon.”

“
Just to piss the husband off?”

“
Well, she says it’s for the sake of her kid. I think she’s
gonna hang on long enough for him to cave in and just give her half
of what it’s worth. Easiest way for him to get rid of her, and
easiest way for her to get what’s legally hers.” Lucas sat down in
a chair and pointed at the sketches. “Alright, see where this line
meets this line? That’s where we park our car. This square box here
is the outside building and next to it is the dumpster. We leave
the car but can’t enter immediately onto the grounds of the bakery.
First we have to climb a fence here and traverse this paddock which
has absolutely no light shining on it. From there we’ll come to a
tin shed that backs onto the bakery property. It’s like a
completely left over thing from whatever was there previous to the
bakery, but the fencing wasn’t put up around it properly and now
there’s a gap that we can sneak through. Now, there’s only one
light outside – not counting the light in the drop-off area – and
it shines across the drive that the trucks use, but doesn’t reach
to the dumpster. However, and here’s the catch, all the light in
the drop-off area does reflect onto the dumpster so when the night
shift is dumping their waste, they can see what they are doing.
What we’re gonna do, is sneak along the side of the building and
underneath the outside light. We’ll end up by some barrels near the
entry to the drop-off area. No one can see us behind the barrels at
night, so we don’t need to worry if anyone comes out.”

“
You sure?”

“
Yeah, totally. Me and Jim already tested it a couple of nights
ago.”

“
Who’s Jim?”

“
He’s our inside guy.”

“
Can he be trusted?”

There was a
weary look in his eyes. “Well, he does do the can a little bit too
much, but other than that, sure!”

“
The can?” This didn’t sound promising.

“
Yeah. Y’ know – the aerosol can. Says he gets the most amazing
highs from it. And occasionally some decent trips as
well.”

I slapped my
hand against my forehead. “You’ve gotta be kidding.” I had heard
about kids doing the can. It was the sort of chemical high that
people resorted to after everything else had become really boring,
or they couldn’t afford anything else. “How long’s he been on it
for?”

“
Oh I’d say at least a couple of years.”

I wondered how
the guy managed to still be a functioning human being.

“
He’s a pretty funny guy when ya’ start talking to him
though.”

“
And he’s supposed to be the guy that’s gonna help us from the
inside?”

“
Dude, half the people who work there steal shit. Jim has been
working his way up to this moment himself for ages. I think he was
actually relieved to discover someone else that wanted to do a
full-on stealing mission instead of just random handfuls of food
here and there.”

I sat down
looking at the drawings he had made but couldn’t distinguish
anything that he had told me as something that was on the paper.
“Okay,” I said. “It all seems pretty clear. We go in like tactical
infantry.”

“
But without the weapons.”

“
We can pretend.”

“
And the camo.”

“
Not hard to come by.”

Lucas thought
for a moment. “And without the tactical training.”

His cynical approach to this mission was starting to piss me
off. “I said ‘
like
tactical infantry’. I mean it’s obvious that we aren’t, but we
can at least make a good go of it.”

“
Well, that’s true, I guess.”

“
And anyway, I’ve been training on Tom Clancy games for almost
two years now, and that guy knows his shit.”

“
Fair enough. By the way, part of the mission is to don the
overalls that Jim will bring out for us while he keeps watch on the
entrance from the factory floor into the storage area.”

“
Really? Can’t we just get in and then out while he keeps
watch?”

“
Look, if someone sees us, then we need to at least look like
we’re supposed to be there.”

“
Do we have to take the overalls off?”

“
Well, nah, not really. I say just bolt with them on. We’ll get
out quicker and have a free pair of overalls to boot.”

“
Boots as well?”

“
What?”

“
Nothing.”

Part II

–
Prep
–

I was highly looking forward to this mission. It reminded me
of
Ghost Recon
,
which I used to play when I got bored with longer games. There was
a briefing at the beginning of every mission which included a map
layout of the area that you could always consult, and then you got
to choose the soldiers that went on the mission with you.
Unfortunately all I was getting was Lucas and some can addict named
Jim who was supposed to be our inside man. I reloaded the game and
started getting into character of the 1
^st
Armoured Division.

One of the
first few missions is to rescue a POW at night on a farm yard. It’s
great because you start off in pitch-black and have to turn on your
night-vision goggles so everything turns bright green. And then you
have to direct your troops through some trees then down a gorge,
across the river and up the other side without being seen. Then
slowly sneak up on the barn while picking off the occasional guard
as he strays far enough away that he won’t cause a scene as he
falls. You get to be whatever officer you want, and could change
each officer’s position at any time by entering their view-point
and taking control of them. This essentially allowed more
flexibility in terms of where you wanted each officer exactly, but
if the officer you controlled at the time was killed, then you
would be transferred to one of the other remaining officers – this
kept happening until you occupied the last officer alive, and when
he went down, so did the mission!

Probably the
best thing about the game was the fact that you couldn’t seriously
charge into situations, because you only had six men, and the enemy
always outnumbered you, so you had to think about tactics: where to
position your team members so they could automatically pick enemies
off when in range; and when to hold fire so alarms weren’t
triggered if the enemy sees one of their own going down. Probably
the only game that I enjoyed this kind of challenge with.

I split my
team up into three groups with the specialised sniper on his own
lying somewhere close by and picking off lone enemies as they came
into range.

I had a half
smoked spliff sitting in my ashtray, so I lit it up while the
mission loaded. A minute later I was sneaking around the back of
the barn while my sniper picked off enemies from a far-off
distance. We had to be careful not to get too brave because they
had our intelligence man strapped to a chair on the barn floor and
it was too easy for stray bullets to hit him and end the
mission.

With all the
Russians who had been guarding the man lying on the floor in bloody
heaps, we moved on to our next target: the com-house across the
field where another hostage was being held.

It took a
while to get across the field – I’m not too sure why, perhaps my
attention was wandering, I did feel the spliff kicking in though,
but not really in a big way so most of my senses were still
available to me. My sniper guy kept getting shot while I was
commanding A-squad towards the building and I had to keep pushing
the F7 button to reload at my last quick-save point so that I could
keep the sniper through the whole mission. I managed to get A-squad
to the house finally with my sniper still alive and repositioned
near a window ready to shoot anybody who dared stick their heads
out.

I took another
big suck of the spliff, feeling the nicotine hit my head, but the
pot wasn’t really doing anything. I grabbed the bong that sits on
my computer desk top shelf. The water inside was relatively clean
and I hadn’t finished off the pot from last time, so it was
basically ready to go. I lit the pipe end, blocked off the air-hole
and took a big fat suck as smoke dragged itself down my throat and
the water bubbled away. The hit wasn’t as big as I had hoped, but
it was enough to start numbing my senses.

I left C-squad
crouching in the field we had crossed giving us cover from any
Russians who might be heading towards the house. I commandeered the
head riflemen of A-squad and entered the building picking off the
first guy as he came into sight from around a corner; second guy
was shot by one of the computer controlled soldiers as I passed the
stairs to check the rest of the ground floor – the enemy had made
it partially down the stairs, not far enough to pass across the
window where the sniper outside would have shot him, but far enough
for the guy behind me to see and quickly pick off. With him down we
began climbing the stairs, step by step it seemed, with each step
taking longer to pass than the previous one. I thought perhaps
something was wrong with the game – theoretically, it shouldn’t
take this long to climb just a few stairs. I don’t think it ever
felt this long the other times I had played it.

We rounded the
corner of the staircase but there were more steps to climb and yet
I was only going to the first floor because it was only a two story
building. I looked up the stairs, amazed at what could be waiting
for me up there, amazed and intrigued even though I knew because I
had played this game a bunch of times before anyway, yet still I
looked forward to going up there. Up there where the captured com
officer was, up those stairs, up those stairs, up them, up I went,
my guys following behind. I took my time, as gravity tried working
against me, pulling me back down through the stairs, but I was
determined to make it up. So I struggled onwards, boot by heavy
boot, feeling as though I was going to fall through the steps at
any moment and come crashing down in a pile of broken timber as the
ground continued sucking me downwards into its heavy burdensome
hole. But it didn’t, and I managed to climb the rest of the stairs
until the room above came into view and I saw a Russian standing
there with a gun – looking at me, real weirdly, so I shot him. He
went down. Hit the ground. Made a sound, body hitting floorboards.
The hostage stood up and looked at me. He looked at me for ages,
expecting something, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Weird.
Again. All so weird.

I just stood
there staring at this guy’s face for ages, his terribly expectant
green face, but he wouldn’t look away, and it became really
uncomfortable but this hostage just wouldn’t look away. I turned
around looking at the guys around me, but they just stared back
through their night-vision goggles with rifles pointing upwards. I
wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. I moved to the side and
turned back to the hostage but he just looked straight at me again.
This was crazy! Why was he looking at me? What did he expect? I
noticed a mark on his forehead. I moved closer to get a better
look. It seemed to grow, and get really big, like a massive scar
across his whole face. Shit it was huge, and it wouldn’t stop
getting bigger. Then it seemed to grow to encompass the whole
screen but I couldn’t look away. It had me in its grip. I wondered
if it was some trick, but ultimately I was just really fascinated
by this scar/mark thing. It was so massive and big, like a huge
canal in the earth cut and ripped into the soil by the natural flow
of earthquakes that jolt and tear at the world every now and then.
And you could fly down those canals in an X-Wing fighter or
something, maybe some crazy Martian surface skimmer but you’d have
to be careful because a surface skimmer ain’t too good on rugged
terrain, but the X-Wing, yeah, totally. I wondered how far it went,
I mean, I couldn’t really see the end of the canal, but it was
certainly wide enough to get my X-Wing down and have a look around.
It was like grass though, coz it was all green. But not really like
grass because it was too Martian, kinda like what Mars would be
like if it were green instead of red. Like those three books I
never read. Man they were big. And Mars is big too. And that’s what
this canal was like. Huge! So huge that it took up my entire
vision.

Big. That’s
what it was.

Real big!

Like looking
through the porthole of your spaceship as you traverse this new
found planet that you and your crew have discovered…

“
David!”

Woah, what was
that?

“
David!”

I took my face
away from the screen, not realising that I had been eyeballing the
monitor up close – practically kissing the thing.

The com
officer was still standing there waiting for me to secure him.
There was no mark on his forehead; it was just a line in the
program that had crossed over into his head. I felt my eyes
dilating back to their normal state.