Excemate?

Clarity fades. Bare feet against a rubber pedal. My right hand grips the emergency brake for some reason. The growing realization that my life is an absolute mess creeps through my mind and echoes its mantra louder and louder. There's a girl sitting next to me, she asks what's going on. I have no answers. No answers, never any answers.

Don't ask questions.

My headlights reflect against a red Stop sign, pulling my attention back to Earth. I'd already run a few of them back in the maze of neighborhoods and subdivisions I was navigating, but the hard-wired reaction to the sight of this one overpowered whatever force was controlling me up to this point. Nobody seemed to be following me, but I'd taken the most complicated route possible just to throw off any possible pursuers. Eventually I ended in front of Amy's house, for I didn't know where else to go.

Amy sneaked me into the house and into her room like an expert. I could hear her dad downstairs watching TV. I thought maybe he'd like to hear my story about how I'd gotten to use my Emerson on some guy, but I decided to save that for a time I wasn't inexplicably in his daughter's room after dark on a Friday night.

I sat down in her desk chair like I did the last time I was there, put my head in my hands, and wondered out loud what I was going to do. A familiar feeling was coming over me, the same feeling I'd had less than a week ago, the feeling I had as I abandoned my car in the woods up in Lorton, after I'd just killed someone and tried to get myself to feel bad about it. It was like trying to regret something that I wasn't sure I'd actually done, like apologizing for a dream. My shirt was wet then too.

There was blood on my shirt, I'd just realized. On my chest, my right. I stood up in a panic and knocked Amy's chair over, pulling the shirt from my skin and feeling for a wound. There was none; it wasn't my blood. I groped at the fabric and pulled the shirt off and threw it in a corner. I was breathing heavily while Amy watched wordlessly from where she sat on her bed. I felt weak, and tired, and sick. I started to pull the chair from the floor, but decided to just sit on the floor next to it. I wanted to scream or cry, but I knew both would be just as worthless as trying to talk about any of it.

"This is it," I said, looking at the carpet through the slits between my fingers sprawled across my face. "My life is over. Nothing is ever going to be normal again."
"Were those guys the Police? Like, SWAT team?" Amy asked.
"No," I said. "Not SWAT. I distinctly remember deciding that earlier."
"Ok, so then the Police should be at your house soon; since I called them. Maybe you should be there and they'll be able to tell you who they were."
"The cops will find this all very interesting after Lorton. The FBI won't be able to hold them off this time. That, by the way, is not a sentence a seventeen year old is supposed to say."
"Eighteen soon," she said, almost hopeful.
"In a month. Looking forward to a birthday isn't the consolation it used to be. I don't even know if I'll be alive in a month."
"Come on."

I looked up from the floor at her. "It's been a week and I've had to fight for my life twice now, not counting the other two fights that weren't for my life. Those were just for fun I guess. The cops, the FBI, the Marines, Interpol, and whoever that was at my house all have files with my name on them now. In another two days I could be on the run from the Navy, Coast Guard, Ghost Busters, and MI-6."
"Maybe you should call the FBI guys," Amy said, "they always seem to know what's going on before you do."
"Well, the I does stand for Information."

Amy laughed slightly, then pulled my cell phone from her purse and tossed it to me. I tried Rubino's number from the redial menu, got a recording. I found Bremer's card in my wallet and tried his number, another recording. Worthless. I dropped the phone, stood up, picked up the chair, and turned on Amy's computer.

"What are you doing?" she asked.
"My own investigation," I said.

I searched for "XM8", the name of the gun those guys were carrying. I found out it was the Heckler & Koch (the same brand as my handgun) XM8, a prototype gun that was being designed for the OICW "competition" where the US Army wanted a futuristic, modular assault rifle to replace the aging M4 and M16 rifles and every weapons maker tried to get the contract by coming up with the coolest gun they could. The XM8 was designed the be modular, meaning from the same body its barrel, handguard, stock, and magazine could be broken down and converted into a carbine, a compact submachine-style, a sharpshooter sniper rifle, or a stationary full-auto weapon. It looked like a rather novel idea, being able to convert the same weapon to suit your application by swapping out a few parts, like some kind of Transformers toy or something. From what I read, it looked like the version the men were carrying into my house was the standard "baseline" version but without the optical sight, but the 12.5" barrel could have been swapped for a 20" and a high-end sight installed to turn it into a sniper rifle, or the grip handguard replaced with one with bipods and the 30-round box magazine replaced with a 100-round drum version and it would have been an automatic rifle.

I really wished I hadn't left one in my bedroom. It seemed like the ultimate toy.

I kept reading and, according to some articles, the weapon's development was put on hold and would probably be canceled because of the cost and more readily-available alternatives.

That meant that the guns were rare; very rare. Prototypes of in-development weapons wouldn't just slip onto the black market like how container 201 of a 400-container shipment of M16s can mysteriously vanish. Prototypes are numbered and sent to the military for testing and training on contract, the inventory tracked carefully. To be carrying them, then, you'd have to be either military or very friendly with the military.

That means it wasn't the Boy Scouts breaking into my house and possibly trying to kill me.

After some more searching, I read that outdated prototypes were being sold to the military wholesale. One article said that the Marine Corps had bought the largest share of them, because a lot of officers really liked them for training and other uses.

"Great," I said, "another big flashing arrow pointing at the Marines."
"Could those have been Marines in your house?"
"I don't know. They weren't wearing any markings."
"The military isn't allowed to operate within the US without a Presidential order or something," Amy said. "The.. Posse Coma-something act. Ever since the Civil War."
Since I was in a web-searching mood, I looked up "posse civil war" to see what she was talking about.

The Posse Comitatus Act, I found, was passed in 1878 and indeed restricted the use of the federal military within the United States in effort to prevent the Army from being used as law enforcement. After the Civil War, people in Confederate states feared that the northern Army would come in and generally "occupy" the South. Posse Comitatus meant policing had to be done by local law enforcement mostly. This means that the Army, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard aren't allowed to do things like breach homes and try to kill teenagers.

Amy got up and stood over my shoulder, reading the screen along with me.

"God, what is this scar from?" she said suddenly.
"What scar?" I asked.
"On your shoulder, here." She poked my shoulder blade quickly.

I tried to reach my arm around and feel it but I couldn't reach. I stood up and went to her bathroom and tried to look at it in the reflection over my shoulder. It hurt my neck, but I could barely see a long scar, maybe three inches long, on my back near my left shoulder blade. The skin was raised slightly, just a bit lighter in color than the rest.

"I've never seen it before," I said, my head still craned sideways. I turned around and faced the mirror, looking at myself and trying to remember why I would have a scar like that on my back. "I can't think of anything that would have caused it."

Amy was standing behind me, looking at it. "It looks old," she said.

She held out a finger and lightly circled it. The touch was light, but it made my heart leap. I could feel the warmth of her body through my back. She ran her finger over the scar again. I couldn't remember the last time someone had touched me, when I'd felt another person connected to me. My breathing was slowing. In the wide bathroom mirror I watched her behind me, looking over the rest of my back. She placed her palm softly on my other shoulder, her heat spread across my body and I felt my skin tighten. The muscles on my back went taught, along with my chest and abs. She pulled back on my shoulder slightly and I turned around and faced her, she went over my chest and stomach, as if looking for another scar or some other imperfection. She touched the middle of my chest, my sternum. There was still a slight discoloration from the bruise left by the seatbelt from when I crashed my own car into another.

"Things must be confusing for you," she said. "Your life, I mean. All of it."
I just nodded, slightly.

She looked up at me in silence. She was only a few inches shorter than me but my eyes fell naturally to hers. The bathroom light was dim, casting shadows from her hair across her face. She stepped ever so slightly toward me, her hand lingering still on my chest. Her eyes were deep, her mouth just barely open. She just looked at me. I said nothing.

Nothing in my life made sense, but when I was with her it all seemed to have some glimmer of hope. She kept me grounded, I realized. All I'd ever done, though, is put her in danger. Danger and death follows me like my shadow, I carry them with me wherever I go. Here she was, sticking through the bullets and the fire, and all I can do is bring her more of each. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to take in the warmth of her touch for as long as I could, and sighed. I opened my eyes again, looked at her again.

"When this is over with," I said. She nodded, seeming to understand. She stepped closer and pressed her head against my shoulder. My right arm went around her waist, and I remembered the parking lot of the gun store in Lorton. When a stranger called out to me, I instinctively grabbed her waist and pivoted her behind me. I looked over at the mirror, at the both of us, then just at myself. I was beginning to see someone else whenever I looked at myself. I just kept looking, and wondered for a while how much of what I was becoming was the product of instinct, and how much was really me.

I woke up the next morning in a bed that wasn't my own and quickly ran through a mental checklist that every guy must have hard-wired into his brain for these situations. I had pants on, and that told me enough. I sat up and waited for the rest of my brain to wake up, and looked around. Soon enough I remembered the night before. I'd offered to sleep on the floor but Amy's bed was huge so we decided it'd be fine. I was unsurprisingly exhausted and fell right asleep. I'd slept until noon the day after Lorton, and I slept through my flight after Vienna. It seemed that whenever Instinct Chris took over and got me out of dangerous situations, I slept like a rock that night. I ran a hand over my head, and willed myself to stand up.

Amy was sitting at her computer doing something. When she heard me she turned the chair around and watched me try to pull myself together.

"You talk in your sleep, you know?" she said. She was dressed already. I tried to find a clock, gave up, and looked at her with tired-squinty eyes.
"I do? What do I say?"
"I couldn't tell. Sounded like you were reading a grocery list or something, all monotonous and stuff."
I shrugged, and started walking but stopped when I realized I didn't know where I was going.

"I have some mannish t-shirts if you want," she said, pointing at her closet, "and I got some of my dad's sneakers from downstairs."
I nodded. "We or I should walk over to my house and see if anybody's there still. If it's clear, I can get some of my stuff and try calling Rubino or Bremer again."
She nodded. I found a concert t-shirt that fit me and put on a pair of Nike cross-trainers that looked reasonably new.

A few minutes later, we set off together towards my house. The Spring air was crisp, but not too cold. It felt good in my lungs, like breathing new life. It smelled like someone was burning leaves. We cut through the lawns and climbed that small brick wall and slowly got closer to my house. Someone could have been there waiting, so I edged around a house across the street from my own so I wouldn't be seen. I heard trucks running; big, diesel engines like garbage trucks. I stopped for a second to yawn and leaned against the wall of the house. I should have gotten some coffee, but it was enough work sneaking out of Amy's house without her dad seeing me or the car. My brain still felt foggy. Amy got tired of waiting and went the rest of the way around the house to the opening between it and its neighboring house. She stood in the clearing and looked across the street toward my house in silence.

I just kept thinking about coffee. My brain is like mashed potatoes in the morning until I get some caffeine. I listened to the truck engines and smelled the air again, and remembered just then that it's the Fall when people burn leaves, not Spring.

"Chris..." Amy said.

I walked to her to the clearing and said, "Hmm?" She wasn't looking at me, though. I followed her eyes across the yard and across the street to my house. The mashed potatoes in my brain suddenly froze into a slush and pain shot from my skull. My house had burned down.

All of it. My house was gone. There were blackened walls and a charred lawn, and between them were mounds of black wood. Fire trucks lined the street, with Firemen walking between them -- a few rolling up hoses. Some men were climbing through the burnt remains and poking at the piles with long sticks. Amy said nothing.

I wasn't breathing. My house had burned down. I couldn't speak. I opened my mouth but nothing happened. My mind could not produce a valid thought. My house had burned down. My legs felt weak. I slumped backwards and sat down in the grass. Amy looked down at me, then back at the direction we'd come from. She grabbed my arm and tried to pull me up. She said something, but I couldn't hear her. The grass was wet. My butt was wet. My house had burned down.