THE WAREHOUSE DISTRICT.

The warehouse district was labyrinth of cold concrete and corrugated steel, a place where the city’s heart stopped beating and its people took over. It was quiet, interrupted by the ugly cracking of gunfire every hour or so. Speaking of them, the other guns.

They felt different. Not like any of the others held by the police. These ones were not right. We didn’t speak much, only seeing each other in our owners’ hands. And even then, we spoke with our rounds.

There was a reason the city abandoned this place. People fought here for “territory.” Crews claimed territories the way rust claimed steel. Silas led such a crew called G45.They were a scattered collection of men: mean-looking, rarely-showered and twitching with violence that had nowhere productive to go.

In warehouse district there were two dominant crews. G45 and the Serpents.

It took only a week to meet the other crew.

Until then, I lived in —beneath a pillow while Silas slept and tucked behind his shorts when he woke. Cool to the touch. Constantly ready.

We were carving a path through Serpents territory when brass began to fall like breadcrumbs. Two of the G45’s people dropped, one of them named Xander. That started what can only be defined as pandemonium.

Silas drew me, his grip absolute.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.
Boom.

The air fractured. The sound wasn’t loud so much as invasive—pressure waves slapping against concrete and bone. Bodies dropped everywhere. Silas broke cover and ran. Rounds grazed his shoulder but he didn’t slow until he reached a group of Serpents behind a truck.

He fired.

Four fell instantly, but one dropped with hands clamped uselessly at his throat. Silas stepped over the dying man, boots splashing in blood and levelled my sights between the boy’s eyes.

Four pounds of pressure.

Crack

The recoil barely registered as blood sprayed across my slide, hot and sticky, obscuring my serial number. After that, everything blurred in mechanical repetition.

Press. Recoil. Reset.

Shells carpeted the ground as G45 advanced. Serpents tried to answer back but they were buried by more shells. Silas slammed a fresh magazine into me—hollow points seating with a violent click—and something inside me finalized. I no longer cared where he aimed.

Out of the corner of my sights, I saw Giggs. He had a small build but was clearly older, marked by a clean Goatee on his face. My attention however, was on his fingers twitching in a rhythmic, five-count sequence against his thigh. I could swear I’d seen Miller do something similar during high-stress drills.

“Xander!” Silas barked once the noise died down . “Xander!”

Giggs approached slowly. “Xander’s dead.”

“Oh,” Silas glanced at the bleeding ground. Then casually: “Giggs….You got a hanky?”
“Hanky?”
Silas turned to him, deadpan. “Never mind. Scrub the blood off this thing. It’s starting to smell.”

Giggs caught me from Silas’ throw. His hands were calloused, but the marks were in the specific pressure points of a shooter. He used his shirt to scrub the blood off me, then removed my magazine.

Empty.

He let the trigger forward until it clicked, measuring the travel with a frown of professional disapproval.

"Nice piece," Giggs mumbled, his thumb lingering on the serial number.

"Yeah, yeah," Silas dismissed him. "It’s a lucky charm."

Giggs handed me back keeping the muzzle away from himself. Silas never cared where I pointed but Giggs moved with a discipline that was unlike anyone in the G45 crew.

Afterward, Silas sat on a crate, tapping my slide against its edge.

Clink.
Clink.

“Check the crates,” he ordered.

He pushed aside a tarp with my muzzle.

Beneath it waited rows of others—dozens of my kind, still slick with factory oil, stamped with the same logo I’d seen in the evidence vault. The guns Vance had “lost.”

Silas picked up one of them, weighted it in his left hand while keeping his right vice-grip on me.

“Lighter than a feather,” he laughed. “Doesn’t have much character.”

I looked at the others lay around, silent and still.

Were they like me?

Did they have previous owners?

Had they known hope? Or were they always meant to arrive here, untouched until the moment they were needed?

“Yo! Giggs…. you got a phone?” Silas asked.

Giggs jogged with a small button phone. Silas smiled.

“Call Vance and tell ‘im his info’ was on point.”

Time passed quickly after that.

I was being fired more in a week than I had been in my entire existence. I grew hot—physically, the friction of lead through my throat causing my polymer skin to expand and pulse.

Press. Recoil. Reset.

I never knew the world could be this mad. This cold.

With this new life, I had acquired new labels.

To be a siphon for the city’s endless reservoir of life.

I had become Death.

With Miller, only time a person died, they were playing a role but with Silas, people got their life siphoned so often.

A man in an alley. A woman behind a dumpster. A rival in a basement.

I learned quickly that Miller’s way of thinking, his hope didn’t work here.

It wasn’t easy living life here trying to be righteous when someone like me might leave you lifeless for something as simple as high-tech devices. In the district, the only thing we offered dreamers is a wake and a coffin.

That’s just statistics, don’t mistake me for hypocrites. I never relished it. But as for feeling bad? How could I? I was made right. It was my function to perform perfectly.

At the factory, they spoke of "tolerances." They measured the gap between my slide and my frame in microns to ensure a perfect fit. But there is no measurement for the weight of a soul as it exits through a hole I’ve punched in a chest.

It was just physics. 

We clashed with the Serpents two months later in an alleyway behind a burned-out apartment weeks later. This time we didn’t have any casualties. When it was over, a man in a green hoodie was crawling, leaking from the thigh where I’d marked him earlier. He looked at me and cried.

“Please,” he whispered.

Silas answered with pressure on my trigger.

“Code Red.”

The words hung in the air like a terminal diagnosis. Giggs came in, his face a wall of flat, unreadable stone. He didn’t look at Silas who was on top of a woman. The third one that day. I doubt Silas knew her name but then again, neither did I.

“Yo! Can’t you see I’m busy?” he said.

Giggs gulped, looking at the woman whose back was filled with scratch marks.

“Uh…uh,…”

“What?” Silas asked, irritated.

“Vance wants to see you.”

Silas turned back and grabbed the woman’s waist. “Tell ‘im I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Twenty minutes passed before Silas met Vance, who was pacing around a room with no windows. He was sweating, his face pale, his uniform crumpled. He wasn’t wearing a holster.

“They’re onto us, Silas,” Vance yelled, wringing his hands. “Internal Affairs have doubled down on the Miller thing. They are demanding a head on a plate.”

Silas removed me from his side and set me on the engine block desk, sitting down on a broken rotating chair.

“And you think your head is the one they’re going to take?”

“They’ve…got.. a mole,” Vance stuttered. “A rat! It’s the only thing that makes sense… how else would they know about the shipments and the night Miller died? I ...I got suspended, man. We…we….we got to go, out of the country or something until this all dies down.”

Silas sighed, touching Vance’s shoulder. “Whoa, whoa.... Just calm down. Everything’s fine. Tell me more about this rat…slowly.”

“I don’t know the name,’ Vance said, sweat pouring down his face. “But I heard that they are making raids all over the warehouse district tomorrow.”

Silas didn’t flinch. A cold smile spread across his face. “That’s good, we’ll be prepared.” 

He turned to Giggs, who was texting on his phone. “Tell the others to gear up. I want everyone holding a piece.”

Silas eased off the chair, his movements fluid and feline. He walked toward Vance, his thumb tracing the smooth curve of my grip.

"Relax now, Vance. See... we got it handled from here on. Thanks for the info, brother."

Vance let out a shuddering breath, a weak, grateful smile breaking through his terror. He reached into his pocket to pull out a crumpled handkerchief to wipe his brow.

Crack

The sound in the windowless room was deafening, a physical blow that sent Vance spiraling backward. His eyes lost their light as life slowly leaked out of him onto the floor in a dark, rhythmic pulse.