"So, hey, those ones are for sale?" Mike pointed at a spread of guns on the wall, with prices underneath them. They ranged from ten to twenty dollars each.
"Those are rentals."
"Oh, right. Yeah, rentals. I was going say, at that price, I'll take one of each. But, yeah, rentals. That makes more sense."
"Let me ask you," Trevor jumped in. "Is it worth a lot? My gun?"
"Naw, these Smith & Wesson Model 10s are a dime a dozen. She's a good ol' gun, though."
"Well, we need bullets. I had some old ones. I forgot to check what kind."
He slapped a box onto the counter. ".38 specials. Anything else?"
Trevor looked back at us as if we'd know. We didn't.
"I guess we need five, uh, tickets."
"We just rent you a booth." He recited rates while slapping down waivers on the counter for us to sign. We signed them as if we knew just what they were. Jude made a show of reading his first.
"We have a special on these." The gun counter dude pulled out a paper target with a picture of Osama bin Laden on it. "They're normally three dollars each, but they're a dollar off today."
"Do you have any just bull's-eye ones?"
"Suit yourself. Booth eight. You need any help?"
"We're cool," we lied.
He sprawled out a bunch of gear on the counter on top of our paper targets. There were fat plastic earphones that looked like they belonged to some 1970s hi-fi sound system. An orange one. And there were huge clear glasses like you might wear in wood shop. We each took our headphones and glasses, donning them, a little disheartened at how dorky they made us look. We looked like dudes who were going to wave a 747 into the gate and then operate a table saw. The only way we could have looked any dorkier would be if the guy were to hand out bicycle helmets. We kind of stood around expecting that to come next.
"Booth eight," he repeated, turning back to watch Tom Sizemore take a hostage and get shot by Al Pacino.
We shuffled off in the direction he indicated. A pair of doors led into the shooting area, but we didn't realize it was an airlock for sound until we were strung out in a line filing through both doors. The counter dude called out "one door at a time, please" with an exasperated look. We somehow heard that as "one person at a time", so we backed out and laboriously went through one at a time, letting each door shut.
There were only a couple other guys in the dark cool room, futzing around with their guns or talking to each other. They didn't look at us. They didn't need to. We had the stink of guys who had no idea what we were doing.
We looked around for booth eight. And then a gun went off. It was a sudden piston of pure percussion entering my skull. I jumped and looked around, embarrassed, to see who saw me jump. The other guys were looking around to see who saw them jump. We sort of grinned at each other and shook our heads. Our heads shut up in orange and clear plastic.
"Okay, who's going first?" I said, and then said again a little louder when I realized I could barely hear myself.
To be continued...
***
Tom Chick has been writing about videogames for fifteen years. His work appears in Games for Windows Magazine, Yahoo, Gamespy, Sci-Fi, and Variety. He lives in Los Angeles. Shoot Club appears in this space every Thursday.
