/lit/ - Literature

If you opened to the first page of this in a bookstore would you continue reading beyond this:

One thing most people don’t know about video game journalists is that, as a rule, we double as competent sharpshooters. With real firearms, I mean—not that the reason for this is altogether separated from gaming: publisher junkets in the industry are often themed around the content of the game being promoted, so an event for a fight night title might be held at a gym where journalists can spend a few rounds in the ring being battered by D-list professional boxers; a week ago I previewed need for speed: retribution from the backseat of a nitrous-equipped 240sx. Given the market’s still-fiery love affair with military action shooters, over half the pressers your average journo attends in the year 20XX take place on firing ranges in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I’ve personally clocked over 19 hours behind the M4 alone, to say nothing of my multiple encounters with M249s, AK-74s, turret-mounted .50 cals—all military-grade weapons, for those unversed in gun-slash-gaming parlance. And so my aim is true . . . smoke rises in a wisp off the barrel, through which I can see the word applebee’s—LED letters still dull and unlit at this sad hour between afternoon and evening—at the far end of the strip mall, outside the blood-splattered classroom windows that fenestrate Mr. Sanderson’s CW 404 here at Everest Colege, where I am a student. Or was. Todd crumples to the floor but to be safe I put a few more in that soft, round body of his, enjoying it even; then I train my pistol on John, finally, the only other person in this room whose breathing doesn’t yet rattle with impending death.