“That’s a number one buckshot load,” he said. “It contains fifteen pellets, all of which are about .30 caliber. They certainly don’t travel at the speed of your 5.56 round, and they don’t have the range, but at a hundred yards or so, they dominate your rifle for muzzle energy. Your rifle makes, I don’t know, maybe six-or-seven-hundred-foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. It depends on the round; 5.56 has a little more ass behind it than .223, but call it around seven-hundred-foot-pounds just for shits. This shotgun produces anywhere between two and three thousand foot pounds of energy; that’s how much wallop is transmitted into the target on impact.”
An appreciative grunt was the only response I could come up with. I handed the shell back over to him. I must have been making a face because he chuckled when he looked over at me to take it.
“That’s right,” Billy agreed. “Now, that energy dissipates pretty quickly over distance, which is why the effectiveness of buckshot drops off a lot after about fifty yards. Again, your carbine has my shotgun easily beat for distance. But up close, you’re still shooting high powered, high speed, tiny little .22 rounds. What I’m packing will turn you into a god damned canoe.”
“Okay, okay, hang on,” I interrupted. “You’ve still got to get to me. If we’re coming at each other down a long stretch of street—say two-hundred-fifty to three hundred yards or so—you actually have to get to me in order to get me. That’s a pretty long distance you have to make up while I get to take free shots at you.”
“Well, yes, if I’m not seeking cover and just running straight at you like a dumbass, I suppose you get to light me up at your convenience. The thing about cities, though, is that there’s a lot of shit to get behind. Also, there’s this…” He held up another shell, extracted from yet another pocket. “This is a slug—essentially a big-ass bullet. This is something like .69 or .70 caliber. It’s basically artillery. Now, you really have to know what you’re doing if you just have a bead sight, but you can hit targets reliably at two hundred yards with this thing. I don’t think I could make that kind of range with a bead (not while the target is moving, anyway) but with some kind of a scope or a decent optic on this thing set for that distance, it would be very doable.”
He handed me the slug, and I looked down at the front of it. A huge, lead dome stared back up at me in place of the usual plastic starfish of a normal shotgun shell.
“The other good thing about a slug,” he continued, “is that I can use it to get through a door that doesn’t want to unlock.”
I looked over at his shotgun with new respect. I knew they were nasty, but that last bit sounded excellent. There had been plenty of doors that I had to pass by because they were locked and I just had no way to get in.
“The only real drawback besides the range thing is the shitty capacity.” He held the 870 out in front of him. “I had to modify the magazine on this just to hold eight rounds. These guns are pigs. You always have to feed them ammo. You are always, always reloading them in a fight. It’s why most defense shotguns have these side saddles,” he noted, pointing to a line of seven shells mounted on the side of the gun. “No matter what’s happening, you’re going to be reloading very soon. You might as well have your extras right by the receiver.”
“It still sounds pretty good,” I mused. “I’ll make sure to keep my eye out for one.”
“Well, as to that…” Billy gave me a sly grin out of the side of his mouth. “I’ll just say it’s damned convenient that your folks live on Decatur. It turns our route into a straight line, more or less. There’s this place I want to check out along the way. It’s not a storefront so much as it is a shipping warehouse. I have this theory: most of the outdoor places like Big 5 and Turners are going to be stripped bare. Hell, you can see the firepower on the racks right through the front windows plus people would be turning the place over for camping gear and other stuff like that. A warehouse, though, well…it’s still possible that the place is picked over, but it won’t be obvious what it is, I hope. There’s a chance we find many good things.”
“Make strong like bull, huh?” I asked.
“Hey, there you go, Whitey!” he said with approval. “I’ll be teaching you the secret handshake before you know it.”
As we entered the main drag of the city, we took an abrupt left and started making our way towards Decatur. It amazed me how much congestion dropped off as we moved away from that main drag. The 15 is really the dominant artery into and out of that city, so it makes sense that traffic would be absolutely jammed along this channel, but I had a hard time imagining what the owners of all those cars were actually up to sitting in all that mess. If they had just moved a little off the beaten path, they would have found a multitude of options for getting around in the city. Perhaps they found themselves locked in and immobilized in the press of the traffic; I certainly saw plenty of cars and trucks with no bodies in them—just abandoned on the roadway. Some of them had doors that were left open, completely and utterly discounted by their owners.
We spent the whole morning and midafternoon first locating and then fueling two vehicles. The first became Billy’s vehicle; a blue Ford Transit van. The second, a white Dodge 1500, became my ride. I had argued for smaller vehicles, perhaps even motorcycles, to help us navigate the really bad areas, but Billy eventually sold me on the idea of the larger trucks. They both had the ability to go off-road (the truck more so than the van) in the really nasty areas; as long as we kept out of major choke points and took our time circumnavigating cities and major congestion areas, our mobility would be maintained. The main point was the ability to haul gear, he said. You couldn’t beat what we had found. Fueling them became the main problem.
There had been a run on gas in the final days, so we weren’t going to find any fuel at actual gas stations. Moreover, there was no power to pump it up to our tanks. Even so, we did go to gas stations and auto shops to get our hands on any gas cans we could find. In this regard, we did well. They were empty, but we managed to load a respectable collection of various sizes into the truck bed. We would be able to keep ourselves topped off reasonably well assuming we could keep the cans filled.
Finding actual gas was much easier than I originally suspected. There was about a half a tank in the van and less in the truck when we found them, so we were initially able to move them around and get them to those places we needed to be. We found a Pep Boys just off of Jones Blvd and invited ourselves in. Surprisingly, there were quite a few useful things in the tool category left in the shop. We grabbed a socket set, some jumper cables (I berated myself silently for leaving the set of cables in the old sedan I abandoned), and an extra tire for the van and truck each, even though I was pretty sure that they both had full sized spares. When I stated that I had no clue how we would get the tires on a rim, Billy noted while picking out a can of spray sealant that he’d show me how to do it with a crowbar if the situation presented itself.
The whole collection was rounded out with some rather large drip pans, funnels, a mallet, and ¼” taper punch (what amounted to a big, metal spike). When I asked him if he’d like to include floor jacks, stands, and spare water pumps he stopped to consider it, and I really couldn’t tell if he was toying with me or not. He asked me to take the first round of goodies out to the truck, which we had backed right up to the door along with the van, while he continued to look around. He went to a corner of the store and righted an overturned shopping cart, much to my chagrin.