Free Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars by Cody Goodfellow

orderly society , thinks the driver, easing down on the accelerator to turn onto Victory Circle, in any one that really works, there’s got to be give and take, or everything just goes to hell .
    “God-dog-damned if I’m gonna let some hot-rodder holier-than-y’all motherfucker run me down,” swore the pedestrian, breathless, at the tiny, faraway car. Shook his red windbreaker over his head. He wandered away from Hinterland, down Warren, where the dark burns brighter than any light. Kicking a trail through scattered trash, fists balled in pockets. Into a hole in the wall to recover, regroup, and strategize.
    He felt his reflexive anger taking root in reason and unfurling to entangle his mind in red shoots of hate. He was alive, wasn’t he? A faceless stranger had tried to take that life, for no other reason than that he could, because he had a car. Sick mothers, every one of them foaming at the mouth, looking to get put down. He watched Hinterland out his barred window.
    He felt it swell into a tower inside him that night on Hinterland and Luddite, only to fall when he threw a brick at the next speeder was too important to let him stop at the crosswalk. He went home to get a beer, at peace with the world.
    His fiberglass bodywork was smashed to hell, remolded and repainted at stellar cost—the computerized custom paint-matching alone ate up a paycheck—that his insurance company deftly squirmed out of paying. The assaulted driver now saw the street’s camouflaged threats with new eyes. The meaningless blurs resolved when he slowed to pace them into sinister shapes brandishing weapons under coats and behind packages, pretending to buy drugs or forage for change in payphones, huddling, plotting to take their frustrations out on their betters. He cruised late into the nights down alleys and avenues in questionable areas to show he was not afraid.
    His new vision bore fruit during a night patrol on Hinterland and Conquistador, when the ped sent by his nemesis charged out in front of his car from behind a burning pay latrine, one arm cocked to seal his fate. His independent suspension bore out the impact without spilling his coffee. When they stopped him at Hinterland and Cassandra, it was all he could do not to bust out laughing.
    The injury to his grillwork and rightside turn signal would cost much less than the damage caused by the brick. He realized how much smoother it would go to play dumb and keep his motive to himself. They knew the score, and would only have to look him in the eye to know the truth, but no one did. An accomplice had removed the pedestrian attacker’s weapon from the scene before anyone had seen it, complicating any self-defense case he might try to make. He would ride out his probation and suspended license with a clean conscience and, most importantly, no fear.
    The slain pedestrian’s widower found himself aimlessly wandering the streets in the freezing rain coming back from the hospital. He studied the slick gray asphalt scrolling beneath him alongside the black tarmac, separate and supremely unequal, looking for chalk outlines. Upon reaching the northbound Conquistador crosswalk, he stopped cold and began to cry.
    This was where it happened. This was the scene. His grief eroded into panic as the gauntlet of idling automobiles, held back only by the blind blinking lights, honked their horns, daring him to step into the no man’s land of the intersection.
    “Got stage fright, asshole?” someone behind the headlights shouted and gunned his engine. After what seemed like days of chewing his lip the pedestrian waved them sheepishly on from the curb…

Saturday mornings, rain or shine, Jubal Gibbons and his son, Caleb, walked neighborhood rounds, spreading the Word.
    By age seven, Caleb had already deduced that very few of their neighbors had any real interest in God’s message, and nobody seemed to want to hear it from Father. At thirteen, he sleepwalked through the agonizing ordeal with the