Others Like Me - Hotline Miami Fanfiction

Chapter 5

Mark clicked the buckles of his olive green kevlar vest, pulling the straps tight against his bulging frame. It was similar to the one he wore in the Hawaiian conflict. The vest should stop anything short of a rifle round. It'll hurt like hell, like taking a hammer blow to the chest. He'd be sore for awhile, but at least he'd get a chance to be sore, rather then dead.

Mark knocked on his vest and brushing his hands along the areas of his shoulder and upper chest, where the vest did not protect, as well as the large gap of protection for his lower stomach, courtesy of his big gut. "...Unless they shoot me anywhere the vest isnt covering."   He thought. Still, being a large man with an extra layer of blubber between his internal organs and the vest reduced the change of being knocked out of the fight from broken ribs or deep tissue damage.

All of this was assuming he didnt get shot by a rifle round, which would punch right through the vest like it wasnt even there. He rubbed the large pouch in the front where the ballistic plates should have been, where they would have been if he hadn't put off ordering them. It was to late to do anything about that now. Even without the layer of steel, the vest could tip the balance of life and death in his favor... At least long enough to take another Russian or two with him, and that was all that mattered.

He took two boxes of 9mm rounds from one of the back shelves and set it on his work bench. His fat fingers popped open one of the thin cardboard flap one of the boxes and slid out the plastic tray. Fifty brass bullet cases gleamed up at him as he reached down and plucked one of them up. He turned the 9mm around, and stared listlessly at the simple bullet itself.

He placed the 9mm round in the vice grip attached to the work bench and tightened it in place. After fishing his folding knife from his pocket, he flipped it open with his thumb before pressing the blade against the soft metal of the bullet. He took a rubber mallet from the tool rack against the wall and tapped the back of the blade a few times. He pulled the knife away from the bullet and ran a finger across the small line he indented into it. He switched hands and placed the blade against the bullet again and repeated the process. When he was finished he loosened the vice and pulled the bullet from it, holding it up to his eyes.

The thin X he had indented into the soft metal was something he picked up, back from the war. More specifically, it was something they picked up from watching bad grind house movies, which gave him and his fellow soldiers the idea to implement it in real life. The little X in the bullet was to encourage it to break apart into four smaller fragments inside of the targets body, each piece a jagged, ripping chunk of metal liable to tumble its way into a vital organ or tear into an artery.

He repeated the process, until all one hundred bullets had marked. After that, he went through the process of feeding the modified rounds into the two magazines of his weapons, as well as two spares. As his fingers preformed their reptitive tasks, he kept his eyes glued on the small TV hooked up to the security camera overlooking the store.

When he finally finished, he sank down down in the folding chair behind him. He watched the live camera feed as it peered down at the glass display counters, and gun racks along the sides of the store. The feed was black and white, and pretty low res, a distortion on the side of the screen would occasionally cause half of the screen to appear as squiggly black lines. He checked his watch. It was a quarter past six. An anxious breath escaped his throat.

He glanced at the backpack, resting in the now empty gun case. He wasnt lying, when he admitted his violent fantasy in front of Ash. He kept a mask here at the store, with his submachine guns within arms reach. Why? He had no clear answer for this. If he had to guess, he kept it close by as a perverted sort of comfort, that no matter how much shit he took from customers or how manipulative his acquaintances were, he always had the option to escape into the back room, and emerge as his inner animal... and bathe the streets in blood.