At eight in the morning the next day, Jace took his bike, Super Soaker, and a water bottle to a quiet neighborhood intersection at the other side of his block. Wes had chosen to sleep in like he did on every Saturday, but had wished him good luck the night before. Jace rode in with confidence, however short the ride might’ve been for him.

“There he is,” Wessy said as he brought in the gang, all also on bikes and ready for the long, hot day ahead in their shorts and t-shirts. Once they dismounted at the corner, he asked, “You ready, Jason? Hey, just stick with me and you’ll do fine.”

Arthur removed the backpack he was lugging around, opened it, and began passing out walkie-talkies. “Looks like we got here first, so I might as well hand these out. We’re on channel four, guys. And be careful with them! I’ve never borrowed this many from my dad before.” He then checked his watch. “They should be here…”

Celeste grabbed her walkie and strapped it to her belt—which also held a dozen small balloons filled with red food coloring, while the others pumped their rifles.

“Remember, Cel…” Sadie spoke up. “Splash damage doesn’t count. You gotta land a direct hit with those things.”

“Yeah, I know. Won’t be a problem.”

“Are they really any better than rifles?” Colin wondered as he strapped on the knee pads he had brought for the occasion. “I’m sure you can aim, but, it’s just…”

“What? Not as simple? I sling, I shoot. I got better range and don’t need to keep up the air pressure.” She then pointed to her orange pistol. “Besides, I still got this.”

“Zach,” Wessy said and turned to him. “Try to take this a little more seriously than you usually do, okay? This might be a once in a lifetime game for all we know.”

He tapped his shades and mumbled, “Aw, what, you saying we can’t have fun?”

“Have fun, but don’t… go off on your own trying to be cool, maybe?”

Before Zach could offer a retort, they noticed the other group of eight kids walking their bikes to the corner on the opposite side of the intersection. All of them were older, and a couple were quite noticeably taller; a trait of being twelve and up.

Gavin gave them a smirk from across the street. With him were Stu, Mikey, and a couple of mean-looking girls—one with long red hair, and the other sporting a short, spikey style not unlike Jace’s. Towering above two shorter black boys was a kid even taller than Hutch, with a tooth sticking out and a dark shirt with the word “Korn” on it.

“Hey, you kiddos showed up,” Gavin scoffed. “Ready to get burned?”

“Ah, great, he’s trash-talking already…” Colin sighed. “It’s too early for that.”

The two teams got closer to each other so they wouldn’t have to yell, meeting in the middle of the empty road’s intersection with their bikes at their sides.

“So, do you all go to Cookton?” Wessy asked Gavin.

“Yeah, man. This is my crew. Stu and Mikey here I’m sure you’ve seen around already. Janice,” he pointed to the girl with spiky hair, “is Mikey-boy’s girlfriend.”

“Sup,” she responded, trying to sound like a tween badass.

“Dude, the kid with the braces has a girlfriend?” Jared whispered to the others.

“And that’s her friend, Dierdre.” Gavin gestured to the red-haired girl, who didn’t say anything but noticeably had two Soakers; like Zach, she also dual-wielded. “The gruesome twosome over here…” he turned to the black boys, who looked like they were the only ones in the group to have not hit puberty yet, “well, they’re Daron and Duvall. Best friends who do everything together, always have each other’s backs.”

Wessy and his group watched the two kids share a joke and then laugh about it hysterically, as if they were seemingly locked into their own little world.

Zach quietly commented, “… Huh, that’s creepily familiar…”

Gavin continued, “And this Hulk is a kid we used to call The Terror on our side of the neighborhood. Your typical bully menace, now trying to reform himself.”

“That is not a seventh-grader,” Arthur stated.

“He got held back. I’m his tutor, and I taught him how to redirect aggression.”

“Hey guys,” he said with a friendly wave, revealing the Super Soaker 300 water tank backpack he had strapped on—which, along with both his own size and his rifle’s, made him the ‘heavy gunner’ of the group. “Um… I’m, uh… Let’s have a good game.”

“Does he… have a name other than ‘The Terror’?” Celeste wondered.

Gavin laughed. “The one his mama gave him, but let’s just go with it so it makes you all scared of him and junk. All right. You guys ready for some Hydro Commandos?”

Jared swallowed a laugh and snorted, “Hydro Commandos…”

“Yeah. What? What do you call it? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Me and Wes agreed on the rules. Twenty-minute prep, our flag forts are on opposite sides of the block—the long sides—and we play until noon, even if we only get one big round in.”

Wessy added, “So, it’s two out of three, three out of five, or just one winner-take-all, depending on how long the game takes. Then we enjoy the rest of our Saturday.”

“Yeah,” Gavin replied with another smirk. “Enjoy it while wallowing in defeat.”

“Ooh, we’re squeezing in some more zingers before the game, huh? Hey, Arthur, you want in on this?”

Arthur stepped up, nudged his glasses, and submitted for approval, “It could be a long game. Don’t worry, if you run out of water, you can use your own tears.”

The Terror snorted and chortled back, “Not bad.”

“Yeah, well…” Gavin began a comeback, only to have to stop so the sixteen kids could back away and let a car pass through. He then shouted his retort, “Tell your moms to keep their walkies on, in case you wanna cry for help.”

Wessy yelled back, “Whatever. We want this end of the block, by the way.”

With that, Arthur set his stopwatch for twenty minutes, and the two teams broke up, with Wessy’s red team heading to Jace’s place. As Zach dug into his backpack for their six resupply bottles, Wessy stopped them on the block’s short side.

“Hold on, Arty—you brought a camera, right? We should save this moment.”

“Oh, totally. Okay. We’ll do cool combat poses and stuff.”

“I’ll take the picture,” Jace instinctively offered, and held out his hand.

“Are you sure, man? Feels like you never get to show up in any of our photos…”

“It’s fine. I like taking photos. Besides, all your Soakers are cooler than mine.”

“Well, all right…” Arthur said and handed him his newest disposable camera.

Directed by Jace, the other seven stepped into the empty street and struck their best Rambo and Terminator poses. Celeste, near Sadie, pulled back her slingshot and aimed at the camera—worrying Jace that she’d let something fly, despite it being empty.

After the flimsy shutter went off, he returned the camera and they got together for a quick pep-talk, with Wessy suddenly looking like a fearless leader as he spoke.

“Okay, guys. We’re totally going to show them that just being two grades below doesn’t make us a bunch of pushovers. Zach! How many rounds you wanna win?”

He beamed. “All of ‘em, man! I’m thinking ten out of ten would be a good start.”

“That’s what I like to hear. All right, every game of Bullet Water has led to this.” He went for a good old huddle hand-stack, in which everyone participated. “Let’s rock!”

• •

Three and a half hours later.

Wessy’s team was exhausted and battered by water, their clothing doused by the blue food coloring that had gotten each of them killed repeatedly. They were running low on their liquid ammunition, and found themselves taking another breather at their base—in front of the shed in the small backyard of Jace’s new house. Rules forbid them from placing their flag inside a structure, so it was instead stabbed into the ground in the middle of a circle of stones that some time ago protected flowers. Like Gavin’s team, their pennant was a bright marker a cable company used to indicate buried wiring.

Celeste left the tree where she had been keeping watch, her last three balloons at her side. She was the driest, having only been hit twice since the marathon event began.

“Still don’t see anyone moving around out in the other yards,” she reported.

“Guys…” Arthur sighed and rubbed his sore muscles as he checked his watch. “We’ve been playing for over three hours. We have to score.”

“I tried,” Jared huffed tiredly, his nearly empty water rifle resting near him. “I actually managed to get their flag two hours ago… I was so close to scoring…”

“You didn’t even make it to the sidewalk before getting ambushed and losing it,” Sadie replied. “Ugh… eight players on both teams might just be too much…”

“Hey, at least they haven’t scored, either,” Zach said. “Maybe we can tie.”

“I don’t want to tie,” Wessy muttered. “Come on, guys, we can still do this.”

“We don’t even know where they are,” Colin groaned. “I think they’re just playing mind games with us, trying to psych us out.”

“Maybe they’re still mad we didn’t tell them one of us had a house on the block.”

Celeste yanked at her pigtails in an angsty way and replied, “What if they’re not even out there anymore, and they just went home to leave us hanging?”

“Nah, they wouldn’t officially forfeit just to get back at us.”

As they debated what to do next, Jace heard a noise from inside the house. He walked up to one of the open windows and saw Wes messing with wiring on the other side of the screen, out of sight from the kids using his backyard as a fort.

Wes noticed Jace looking in and stopped for a second. “Hey, bud. Still playing?”

Looking desperate, Jace answered, “Our water’s almost gone—even the refill bucket is empty—and no one’s scored yet. Ready to tell me how this ends?”

“I really can’t. The fort’s in a different spot, and there are different players. Still, the block’s the same, and if it’s deadlocked, maybe the result will be similar. By the way, do you still have the five bucks I gave you?” Once Jace pulled out the paper and showed it to him, Wes offered his only piece of wisdom before walking away, “Hold onto it.”

Disappointed by the lack of any real assistance, Jace returned to the others, who sounded like they were already deep into strategizing a last-ditch effort.

“It’s that Terror kid that scares me most,” Jared said. “Remember when he took down four of us in just one spray? He’s like a T-1000. And his pack’s still a third full.”

Colin replied, “He’d never sneak up on us, so we just can’t give him a clear shot.”

“Crazy idea,” Celeste spoke up. “We still have one last reserve bottle out there—the one we stuck in the very back of that for-sale house. If we go right down the middle to their base on the far edge of the block’s other side, we could grab it on the way.”

“What do you mean… ‘down the middle’?” Zach asked her.

“Think about it. All this game, we get killed on the sidewalks, because for some reason we keep getting yelled at if we try to spread out even a little into people’s yards. Why don’t we just avoid those death zones and use all my shortcuts in one run?”

Sadie stared at her. “What’re we gonna do? Run on top of fences and stuff?”

“We can make it to their flag in three minutes flat if we run. And we’ll take ‘em completely by surprise. We get it and bring it back before they can even take ours.”

“Hold on, who’s guarding our flag?” Arthur wondered.

“Not me, man,” Jared grumbled. “I’ve been on flag duty six times already.”

“No one,” Celeste answered. “All eight of us go, broken into two or three groups. They’ll never expect it. They could take down seven of us, and then, surprise! It’s Sadie!”

“No one would ever abandon their flag, leave it unguarded…” Colin noted.

“Exactly! Besides, aren’t you tired of ‘protect the flag’ backyard skirmishes?”

Wessy rubbed his chin. “I dunno. What do you think, Jason? Is it worth a try?”

Jace didn’t know why he was suddenly the decider, but saying no to such an insane gamble, especially after nothing else had earned them a point, seemed wrong.

So, at ten minutes before noon, two separate groups hopped the short chain-link fence around Jace’s house’s backyard, and then split off running across all the backyards that followed, each of them determined to get to the other side of the block.

On the west side were Wes, Jared, and Jace. Separated by a tall wooden fence that ran alongside the older chain-link were Sadie, Colin, Zach, and Arthur. On top of the chain-link itself was Celeste, guiding them from her vantage point. For Wes’ team, she was behind the wooden fence, with everything below her shoulders obscured.

“Wes and the ‘J’s—I’m protected on your side,” she said as she used the wooden fence as support, her sneakers rattling the other fence’s overlapping metal strands. “Eyes open, keep moving. Sadie, fall back and do your thing in case you need to save us all.”

“Got it,” Jace could hear her say. “Switching to stealth mode.”

“Can you still hear me?” Wessy spoke into his walkie. “Hello, copy?”

“Their batteries must be really low,” Jared said. “I don’t think she’s gonna let us get too far apart. anyway. But when did Celeste become the captain?”

Wessy shrugged once he had checked the back corner of a yard’s house. “Hey, none of our strategies have gotten us a point. Got any better ideas? Because I ran out.”

Celeste stopped where four yards and their fences intersected and watched over her teammates as they climbed the next set of chain-links, exclaiming, “Come on, climb over, I got you covered! I don’t see ‘em over on this side, either…”

Her tall wooden shield ran through the middle of the next residences, again keeping Celeste from being able to fully aid Wessy’s group, but at the same time still providing the three with cover from anyone waiting to ambush them from the east.

Halfway across the next yard, as they were crossing through some dried-up shrubbery, shouting erupted on the other side of the big barrier. Jace recognized the voices of those instigating the firefight—that of the girls, Janice and Dierdre, who had frequently paired up over the day. Wessy and Jace went quiet and looked through a hole in the fence. The blue team ladies had gotten the jump on the group, likely springing out from behind a garden trellis. Even Celeste had been hit before she could react.

She groaned, crossed her arms, and turned to their attackers, keeping her back against the wood while her feet remained firmly planted on top of the chain-link.

Jared whispered, “Did they get all of them? We might have to leave ‘em behind.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” Janice asked the others. “Sneaky, sneaky.”

“You can get down from there, you know,” Dierdre told Celeste with a laugh.

She replied, “Nope, I’m frozen. I take this game very seriously. And so does she.”

Sadie had managed to sneak up on them by climbing up onto a low-hanging tree limb, walking across it, and then leaping onto a garden shed attached to the house. By the time the girls turned to her, it was too late, and both got blasted in the face.

“Ugh!” Dierdre responded and spat out water. “Sadie! You again? Seriously?”

She smirked, jumped down, and unfroze her buddies. As the Cookton girls had been tagged by headshots, they weren’t allowed to radio a message out, and the other half of the blue team began moving again.