Prospero's Half-Life by Trevor Zaple

complete
rest.
    He crashed
into the corner, scrambling wildly to get a grip on it. He felt
it’s cold, businesslike grip enfold into his hand and he clumsily
spun around into an unsteady crouching position, holding the gun
forward with a white-knuckled grasp. Ronnie stumbled backwards,
“holy fuck!” coming out of his mouth in a strangled gasp. Callie
had leapt backward when Richard had punched Mark, and she had
knocked into one of the pool players. Her expression was shocked.
Annie stood topless with her hands in the air, her face pale and
fearful; it looked as though she were about to fall over. Richard
let her run through his mind for the barest of instants before he
decided on his course of action.
    There was a
window directly opposite him, and he was running towards it before
he could even properly think about it. If they were going to come
in through the front of the building, they would have to go out
through the back. He just hoped that there was something to break
his fall on the other side.
    “ Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” Callie screeched but he
ignored her existence. He saw Samantha goggle at him as he sped by,
and he turned his head to her as he went.
    “ WITH ME!” he screamed, going hoarse to be heard over the
music. Joey Ramone was singing about going on down to Rockaway
Beach. Samantha jumped and began loping after him.
    Several feet
from the window he had a vision of slamming full on into the glass
and knocking himself out. He turned as he ran so that his shoulder
would be the first thing going through the glass, and he lowered
his head so that he was going into his charge. He’d seen the form
in an action movie, or was it a football game? He wondered stupidly
about the banality of the question for fifteen milliseconds and
then hit the window. The glass shattered forward on impact,
catching the lowering sun at a perfect angle and causing a thousand
points of light to burn themselves into his vision. The window
splintered around him in a stretch of time that had the consistency
of molasses, and then he was through, into free fall.
     

TEN
    The Chili Pepper was a bar with a rather unsavoury tradition
in the city’s lore. It was one of those locations that go through
various owners in regular succession. Some young entrepreneur would
pick the spot, intent on making the hotspot nightclub of the crowded bar district, and
buy the spot off of the beleaguered owner. The place was nice
enough inside, if a little tawdry, and anyone with a bright spot
for design and a flair for self-promotion could make a go of it. A
problem invariably arose, however: an attempt at creating a hip
atmosphere for a fashionable young crowd in a blue-collar town
always invited cocaine, and the steadily growing cocaine problem
would cause worsening offshoot-problems that would inevitably lead
to the young entrepreneur becoming the beleaguered
owner.
    One of these
offshoot problems was a lack of availability of funds for
maintenance. Once the young entrepreneur was spending a lot of time
pulling back lines in the downstairs office with specific patrons,
money for things like replacement glasses, dishwasher repair, and
pool table re-velveting begins to mysteriously disappear. So, if
one of the thick, older windows were to be broken by a university
kid amped up on coke and draft beer throwing chairs, the
replacement pane would not be to the same quality as the original.
It would likely be much thinner, less resistant to the elements,
and more likely to become completely shattered upon the slightest
impact.
    When Richard
threw himself through this cheaply-acquired pane of glass it did
not give much resistance. He tumbled through and landed roughly
onto his side two feet below on the other side. He lay there,
stunned for a moment, and then stumbled his way to his feet.
Instinctively he brushed himself off with one hand, gingerly trying
to avoid embedding chunks of glass into his hands. He looked
inside, trying to look for