Where did paintball go?

The McAllen Paintball sign still hangs from the storefront, but the city's only specialty paintball store has closed.

The vendor shut its door earlier this year, much to the dismay of some players on the local scene.

And it hurts, said JC Limon, 17, especially in an area starved of paintball stores and fields.

• GOT FOND MEMORIES OF PLAYING PAINTBALL? TELL US!

But he and other paintball gladiators are used to it. They've forged their own practice fields and found outside distributors to deliver premium equipment. Still, he worries that playing on official fields and venues in the area won't be possible much longer.

"People have already quit playing," JC said. "A lot of people have gone back to woods ball."

For JC, playing woods ball with no nearby place to buy top notch guns is a familiar situation.

He started playing paintball with his brother about seven years ago. His brother, Javier Garcia, now 20, continues to play with him to this day.

The sport hooked them easily. They started as youngsters, running around their family's rural front yard in Progreso, wielding crude pump action paintball guns every weekend.

"Shooting somebody with a paintball - it's just cool," Limon said. "It's beyond words, seriously."

The brothers upgraded to semi-automatic weapons after six months. They intensified their arena as well, adding wooden pallets, old doors and mattresses as obstacles.

JC and Javier's battleground attracted other wannabe warriors from the neighborhood, but none could compete with their dedication to the sport.

"Every weekend, no matter if it was rain, shine, negative 100 degrees, we played," Limon said. "We got hooked on it. It was just me and my older brother playing."

Still, they were frustrated by the lack of shops and playing fields in the Upper Valley. Then out of the blue, they happened upon the brand-new Livewire Paintball shop in Weslaco. They started chatting with the owners and helped them move in. By chance, a fellow paintball fan named Eric De Leon stopped by to lend a hand, too.

And so begins the story of the Thrill Kill Kult.

Staying true to their humble beginnings, the paintball team shuns uniforms in favor of mismatched T-shirts. No matter: The victories have piled up just the same.

"We all don't have the same masks," Limon said. "We don't have the same guns. We all don't have the same underwear, probably. We go in there and come out with the first-place trophy, and for some reason they hate us for it."

But Lady Luck doesn't spoil them. With soaring gas prices and competitions located far across the Valley, reaching for new victories isn't always practical.

The sign for McAllen Paintball still hangs, the gravestone of the sport's golden days.

That's a battle JC can't win with paint.

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Zack Quaintance covers features and entertainment for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4447.