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.
As I was loading the tires into the pickup bed, I noted to myself that we would need some way to pressurize them. I just turned to poke my head back into the store and tell Billy when I saw movement across the street out of the corner of my eye. I immediately dropped to a crouch behind the bed of the truck and started cursing at myself for leaving the rifle against the window inside of the shop. I pulled the Glock from my waistband (a weapon I was totally unfamiliar with and had yet to fire) and crept around the side of the bed to look across the street. There was nothing. I must have sat there for a good five minutes, barely willing to breathe and looking for any hint of movement whatsoever. Presently, my knees started to ache horribly, and I was just beginning to consider relaxing when Billy’s voice issued from directly behind me, unexpected.
“What’re you doing, there, Whitey?”
I jumped in place. My outraged knees collapsed as a final “screw you” to my unreasonable demands and I plopped down directly on my tailbone.
“See something out there?” he asked. He had his shotgun up to his shoulder and was scanning all around.
“I can’t be sure. I thought I saw some movement, but it was just peripheral. I might just be jumpy. Seeing a completely deserted city takes getting used to.”
“I get yah,” he said, offering his hand. I took it, and he levered me up to a standing position. He pulled rather effortlessly, I thought, and my feet may have left the ground a little at the top of the motion.
“Strong for an old man,” I mentioned.
He chuckled modestly. “Yeah, training for general strength is a thing you do at my age if you want to be able to wipe your own ass past a certain point. A thing you do at any age, really.”
“Why do I get the impression that you’ve been practicing for everything to fall apart?”
“Oh, well…” he muttered, going back to the shopping cart inside, “I don’t know that I was practicing for all of this, but I’ve always been a bit of what you might call ‘a prepper.’ It was one of the things I always focused on in my tribal council days… when I still had a tribe. Self-reliance in all things. Being in a position where you don’t have to rely on anyone else makes you stronger. From the perspective of our tribe, that meant achieving self-reliance in our sovereignty from the U.S. government. That was where all the gaming came from—we wanted a genuine and powerful mode of income on whatever scraps of land we had left that didn’t rely on the sufferance of outside forces or governing bodies. Gaming casinos were an outstanding way to realize that dream—a self-contained, little ecosystem of revenue generation that relied very little on outside sources or suppliers. No manufacturing, no supply chains to consider. It was beautiful.”