The 15 became more clogged with stalled and abandoned vehicles as we came closer to the edge of the city. Weaving my way through became an exercise in patience as I was forced to zig-zag back and forth with the bike trailer. Billy never commented on this; he just patiently moved along next to me. I noticed that his head was always moving. He was always trying to see all directions at the same time, always had his hand on his shotgun. If we got into tight areas where visibility was reduced, he would even hold it in a high ready position (presented out in front of him with the butt down and barrel up on the level with his eyes). Despite his apparent focus on our surroundings, he was still perfectly happy to chit-chat as we made our way in. This was absolutely fine with me as it felt less like he was standing around waiting for me to get a move on, which he was.
“So you were going to explain the superiority of shotguns to me…” I prompted.
“Oh, I don’t think they’re superior,” Billy said. “They’re just the right tool for the job when you’re close-in or in the city. That M4 is outstanding when you need to reach out and touch someone at distance, say four hundred yards or so. You have to aim and take your time, but you can do it reliably with some practice. When you’re in the city, you don’t often get uninterrupted stretches at that distance. Everything becomes a lot closer.”
“Okay,” I said, struggling around a bumper with teeth grinding, “but you’re not spending all your time in cities, right? What happens when you’re out in the open on the road?”
“Everyone that I’ve run into so far has been in a city or on the outskirts of a city. Everyone is gravitating to them doing the same thing we’re doing right now: looking for supplies. You’re the first guy I’ve run into out on the open road. You actually had me sweating a little—I didn’t know you had that rifle, but I knew you had some kind of long gun. I kept waiting for a bullet to hit me. Damned unnerving.”
“Sorry about that,” I muttered. “I guess I could have raised my hand up in a salute or something. Give some kind of indication that I wasn’t out to get you.”
Billy straightened up at that, looked directly at me, and raised his hand up in the air, palm out, and said “How,” in a voice even deeper than his natural rumble. He then bugged out his eyes, reversed his hand, and flipped me the bird while sticking his tongue out, surprising a belly laugh out of me.
“Forget about it,” he said. “There was really nothing you could have done at the time to settle any nerves. We’re both walking and talking right now, which indicates that everyone did everything correctly, more or less.”
I don’t remember saying anything in response to this, but I may have grunted.
“So, yeah,” he continued, “Having both the shotgun and the carbine would be nice in a perfect world, but you have to make choices when you’re traveling light and on foot. My experience has been that the carbine has been required a lot less than the 870 out here, so shotgun is what I went with. It’s not just the weapon, you know. You have to carry the ammunition to support it. Shotgun shells are, unfortunately, about as big, nasty, and heavy as it gets for small arms but I can still lug quite a few around with me. It would be a lot worse, though, if I had to lug both 12 gauge and 5.56. I’m getting too old for that shit.”
That earned a look out of me. Though not old, I wasn’t exactly in the prime of my youthful vigor, and Billy had at least another twenty years on me. Even so, his physical strength was easily apparent. You could see leg muscle through the denim of his jeans, which you’d maybe expect from a twenty-year-old gym rat. Likewise, he was wearing a bulky jacket that looked like a cross between a military-style utility jacket and camping or hiking attire (despite the fact that we were just entering into the warm part of the year) that was incapable of masking the breadth of his shoulders or the stability of his back. It’s true he carried a bit of a gut under that barrel of a chest, but it didn’t bother him in any way I could see. He certainly didn’t breathe heavy or even huff carrying his own weight plus all that gear on his back. He could certainly joke about his age, but I wasn’t buying it.
He continued on oblivious to my appraisal. “There’s more call to fight in the city than there is out on the open road, therefore I stuck with a shotgun, which was my choice for home defense anyway, okay? This Remington was mine before the shit hit the fan; I didn’t lift it after the fact. It was just ready to go.”
“So what is it that makes it better close up? I’m guessing you just don’t have to aim it due to it firing shot?”
“Oh, no, you still have to aim it,” he said, extending his hand in a “slow down, tiger” gesture. “It’s true that the shot spreads out as it flies but not massive like you’d think. The pellets might spread out to the size of a fist at fifty yards. That’s a pretty big pattern, but you still have to aim to get that to hit your target. It’s just that it’s so damned fast to put it on target. Here, look at this sight…”
He held the shotgun out to me; pointed in the direction we were walking and rotated it so that I could see a small, brass nub out on the tip of the barrel.
“That’s a bead sight. That’s all you get on your average shotgun. No rear sight component. So you put your cheek on the stock, put the bead on what you want to hit, and pull the trigger. You don’t have to spend time lining up the front sight with the rear sight, making a perfect little picture and all that shit. Close up, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re not one hundred percent perfect because what you’re shooting at is up close. Two or three inches off of center mass still hits center mass. And, the nature of the shot tends to correct for a lack of accuracy at a distance because the pattern spreads out. It’s pretty forgiving.”
“So how far can you reliably shoot that thing?” I asked.
“All depends on your ammo. This is the other reason I’m such a fan of shotguns. Assuming I can find it, there is a long list of ammunition types I can fire that are all useful for different things. I can load birdshot into it and go hunting for small game. If I’m fighting someone, I can load buckshot, which is devastating. Look, that M4 fires 5.56, right?”
I looked down at my rifle and shrugged like an idiot. “If you say so.”
“It does,” he nodded. “Also, you need to start memorizing this kind of stuff. It does you no good to carry a rifle if you don’t know how to feed it. Anyway, 5.56 millimeter, which is equivalent to .223 caliber…” He looked at me pointedly.
“Okay?” I prompted.
He made a face. “Are you any good with math?”
I found this question a little insulting, but I let it go. “I’ve been known to math from time to time,” I told him sarcastically.
“Okay, then stop thinking about what the bullets look like and start thinking more about what those numbers mean. .223 is the diameter in inches of the bullet and 5.56 is just the metric equivalent of that measurement. And, when you think about it, .223 is really just .22.”
I stopped in my tracks. I wasn’t a gun guy, but I was never opposed to them either. I knew enough to know what a .22 round looked like. I popped the magazine out of my rifle and looked at the round exposed in the top. “That’s a .22 round?”
“Yap. I know what you’re thinking. It’s certainly a lot longer than a .22 long rifle bullet, and the shell and powder load is a lot bigger, so it has way, way more force and inertia behind it and better range but essentially, that’s a .22 round.”
I was shocked. I almost wished I had a .22 rifle there so I could poke a bullet into the barrel to see if it fit.
“Now look at this,” he said as I inserted the magazine back into my rifle. He reached into one of the pockets on the front of his jacket and pulled out a shotgun shell. He handed it over to me. Feeling the weight of it, I realized how heavy it would feel to carry many of them at once.