Jason frowned, but did as he was told, pointing the rifle at the far wall. George noted that the boy kept his finger off the trigger and didn’t point it anywhere near anyone. Without warning, he stepped in front of Jason, and watched as the young man instinctively lowered the rifle and twisted it to the side so that it wasn’t aimed at George.
George nodded. “Excellent. They said you had good muzzle awareness. Keep it up. If you never point your weapon at any of us, even if you fuck up in every other way, you can never shoot us by mistake.” He nodded at the battered lever action. “What is that, a Winchester? No, a Marlin. You shoot a lot of deer with that?” Jason nodded.
“Well, knowing how to stalk and shoot is good, so’s being familiar with the sight of blood, but we’re not out here hunting deer. What we’re going after shoots back, and a lever action rifle’s just not going to cut it. However, we don’t have any spares to give you. Still…” He hoisted his short rifle. “You know how to work one of these?”
Jason shook his head. “I think my dad owned one when I was little, but he turned it in when the government told him to.” He made a face at the memory, then nodded at the stubby piece in George’s gloved hands. “But that’s a machine gun, right?” It also had a metal tube screwed onto the end of the short barrel, which Jason was pretty sure was a silencer.
George snorted and looked down at the gun in his hands. There, barely readable through the three or four worn layers of spray paint—mostly tans—were the words SAINT EDGE etched into the right side of the battered magazine well. “Hell, technically, this is a pistol. Or at least it was, before the war. Now it’s somewhere between ten years in prison and an automatic death sentence they catch me with it, depending on their mood, and who’s doing the catching.”
“A pistol? But it’s…” Jason moved his hands two feet apart.
“Calling this carbine a pistol makes as much sense as forcing law-abiding citizens like your father turn in their guns for the sake of ‘public safety’, but it’s not about making sense, or reducing crime, it’s about taking control. That’s what this whole war’s about in a nutshell. That’s what most wars are about, really.” He sighed. “Okay, let’s get you read in on some of the hardware you’ll be seeing.”
“The camouflage rifles you’ll see the soldiers carrying are M5s. Actually, technically, I think they’re M5A3s, but whatever. They’re chambered in a new proprietary cartridge made just for the military, the 6.8x51mm, that was supposed to be great at punching through walls and car doors and other intermediate barriers, but it still won’t penetrate a chest plate.” He knocked at the one covering his heart. “And compared to the 5.56 ammo that all our rifles shoot, that new 6.8 kicks a lot more, and apparently it beats up the M5s something fierce. The cartridge is stupid and unnecessary, thought up by armchair warriors to justify their salary. Still, I wouldn’t mind having one, but battlefield pickups are mostly a thing of the past, because those M5s all have tracking chips embedded in the polymer stocks. So we can’t use the guns, and that ammo doesn’t fit into anything else, which means we’re always struggling to keep our mags loaded.”
George hefted the gun in his hand. “Most of what we’re running are standard commercial semi-auto rifles people refused to turn in, mostly AR-15s, and that’s true around the country. Mine’s a Springfield Armory, and legally, before the war, it was a pistol. There were a whole lot of AR pistols on the market, with arm braces on the back instead of stocks. After the war popped off most people said ‘Fuck it’ and swapped those braces with stocks, but the Maxim Defense brace on this works better as a stock than most stocks.” He glanced at the left side of the magazine well where there was an oval missing from the aluminum, revealing the side of the polymer magazine beneath it. “Put on stocks, and drilled out the serial number. Helps that the side of the magazine well isn’t required for structural integrity.”
“And that’s a silencer?” Jason asked, pointing at the tube.
“Suppressor, sound suppressor. You ever seen one before?”
Jason shook his head. “They’re illegal.”
George snorted. “They are now. They were legal in over forty states before the war.”
Jason blinked. “Really?” The news said only criminals and terrorists used them. And Army Special Forces.
“Lot of hunters liked to use them. Helped to save their hearing.” George hefted his Springfield. “How loud do you think it would be if I fired this?”
Jason shrugged and shook his head. He’d only ever seen them in movies. “Quiet.”
“Shit,” Weasel said with a snort.
“You ever shoot a .22 rifle?” George asked him.
“Yeah.” Jason had killed a lot of squirrels and other small game with a bolt-action .22. It was the only way they could get any meat, they certainly couldn’t afford to buy it. Of course, hunting was just as illegal now as possession of a firearm, but even his dad ignored those laws when the alternative was borderline starvation, which was why he’d held onto the Marlin lever action, the .22, and one shotgun, all of them kept inside a false wall in the mud room of their house.
“This thing, with this suppressor attached, is as loud as a .22 rifle. Maybe louder.”
“Really?”
“Suppressors are designed to keep you from suffering immediate hearing loss when you pull the trigger, but they are not quiet. Far from it. I pulled the trigger in here your ears would be ringing.” He hefted his gun, gestured to it, then around the room. “So, Springfield AR. Quentin’s got a Smith and Wesson, Bobby’s got SIG, Ed’s got a fancy Geissele… we’re mostly fighting this war with the guns they outlawed, which only seems fitting. Poetic. Ironic? Maybe poetically ironic.”
“It’s totally fucking predictable is what it was,” Mark’s voice floated out of the dimness at the back of the room. “The first shot fired in the American Revolution was at British soldiers trying to seize an ammo dump belonging to the colonists. There were actually too many guns for them to even think about confiscating those—sound familiar?—so they went after ammo instead, and that war lasted for eight years. Those who forget history are doomed to blah blah blah.”
“This war’s got that one beat by at least a year,” George observed. No wonder he felt so tired. He looked at the new kid. “This and most of the guns we’ve got are semi-auto, one round per pull of the trigger, which is all you really want most of the time. The only full-auto guns we’ve got here are Weasel’s MP5 subgun, Ed’s Geissele, and Mark’s SAW. Don’t mess with that, belt-feds are a whole ‘nother animal. But apart from the MP5 and SAW and Early’s big piece of lumber, all the rifles we’ve got or that you’re likely to see in the hands of doggies are ARs of one kind or another, and work the same way. And take the same magazines, which is important. Let me show you how to work the controls.”
“Okay. Um, why?”
“So if the guy next to you gets killed, you know how to shoot his rifle when you pick it up.”
As the rest of the squad sealed up their packs and shouldered their loads Ed wandered toward the rear of the former machine shop where Early sat patiently on a thick pipe, his big rifle across his knees.
“You know, ah had a thought this mornin’,” Early began.
“Yeah?”
“You evah consider maybe that Uncle Charlie was compromised and left that message f’us with a gun to his head?”
Ed sighed and shook his head. “You really know how to start the day off rosy. Yeah, I thought of it. Every single time we get a mission I think of it.”
“Jes’ wonderin.”
“He didn’t use any of the red flags, though.” If Uncle Charlie, or anyone for that matter, was captured and forced to send a message, they were supposed to insert any one of a half dozen innocuous words into the message, so the recipient would know he was compromised.