I understood him in a way that Kat and Scott had never quite come around to. It made sense to me. Probably because my mom had the same philosophy, and we had trained every day, on martial arts, on weapons, on fighting.
I found my feet carrying me past the newly rebuilt science labs, past the gym, to a nondescript building tucked at the far side of the sprawling Directorate campus. The gym housed workout equipment, suitable for employees to exercise and maintain physical fitness. But this was the training center, a three-story boxy building of concrete and metal. It housed a gun range, a full martial arts studio, and a dozen classrooms with materials suitable for any lesson you wanted to learn.
I walked through the double glass doors and into the gray-carpeted hallway. The carpeting was thin, like it was just barely stretched over the concrete floor. I entered a drab hall that was all glass windows on both sides. I looked through the windows, which were bulletproof glass, down onto the firing range below. The stalls where the shooters stood were all empty, the range quiet.
I pushed open the heavy door that separated me from the range. All was quiet; I walked down the staircase, my tennis shoes squeaking against the rubber-plastic substance coating each stair. When I reached the bottom, the smell of gunpowder greeted me, the sweet smell of fired bullets. To my right was the rangemaster’s armory, and I pulled open the door and walked in, drawing a raised eyebrow from the man behind the counter.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Glen Parks said, his lips puckered, giving his rugged face a skeptical tilt. “Being newly discharged from the medical unit, I assumed you’d have other things to do.”
“I didn’t enjoy being shot,” I said, “and maybe some practice will help keep it from happening again.”
“Not losing your gun next time would probably help more than target practice.”
“I didn’t just lose one, I lost two. And a backup knife.”
It was hard to suss out his reaction, his face remaining masklike even as his fingers drummed out a steady rhythm on the counter in front of him. “Good girl. You’ll be needing some new ones, then?”
“I’d like to stick with my Sig and my Walther,” I said, sidling up to the counter and leaning on it with my uninjured arm. “And I’d like to get some practice in; a couple hundred rounds with the Sig at least.”
“And the Walther?” he asked.
“Fifty or so,” I said, and he pulled boxes of bullets off the back shelves and set them on the counter, then walked to a cabinet behind him and opened it, rummaged around for a minute before coming back with two gun cases. He opened the first to reveal a Walther, then the second to reveal a Sig Sauer that was exactly like the one I had lost.
I took both pistols, their cases, and the bullets, along with the ear protection and eye protection, and went out onto the range. There was something therapeutic about having the gun in my hand. I pulled targets out of the bin in the corner; they were all black and white outlines of a vaguely man-shaped person. I hung the first from the clips and sent the target downrange with the little button that caused the hanger to zip along the cord. The paper target waved, fluttering along until it was a good fifteen feet away from me.
I put in ear plugs, then slipped the muffs over my ears. Having been exposed to a small war’s worth of gunfire and explosions over the prior few days, I wondered if this would make any difference. I put on the eyewear, then pulled the Sig out of the sleeve. I smelled the unique hint of gun oil as I brought the slide up to my nose and took a deep sniff. I know it sounds weird, but I’ve always thought that after a while, the faded smell of gun oil smells just a little like curry.
I fired through a hundred rounds pretty quickly, stopping a few times between magazines to change the target. I looked at my results every time I reeled in the silhouette outlines. I visualized James Fries as the outline in the targets and it seemed to help. There could be no doubt I needed more practice with a gun. Even though I felt fairly confident I could put a severe hurting on someone, my mother would have viewed anything less than flawless results as an indicator that we needed to practice more. Flawless results only meant you needed to maintain your skills in this area, and focus on becoming better somewhere else.
The next hundred bullets went smoother, and I felt the kink in my shoulder dissolving. Whatever scar tissue was left from my encounter with the Omega gunman was disappearing thanks to my meta healing. I thought about Zack, still lying in the medical unit, unable to heal anywhere nearly as quickly as me.
I missed the next shot completely, didn’t even hit the target.
He was weaker than I was, no doubt. His human physiology made him more prone to injury and less likely to shake it off. I’d had occasions where I’d been beaten nearly to death and twenty-four hours later there wasn’t a sign I’d even been hit. He, on the other hand, scarred. He bled, heavily, and for longer. I wasn’t sure if I was even still thinking about his injury. Now I was thinking about the look on his face when he found out about James.
I missed two more shots in a row, and didn’t bother for a third. I set the gun on the counter in front of me and took a deep breath.
I was reeling in the target when I heard gunfire from the stall next to me. Absorbed in my own problems, I hadn’t even noticed someone else enter the range, which was sloppy on my part. For the girl who always seems to have an Omega operative chasing her, paying zero attention is the fastest way to an ugly end. I stepped back from my spot, my booth, I thought of them, even though there was just a divider between me and the next positions on either side – and looked left. Someone ran through an entire magazine, fast, fifteen shots in rapid succession. I looked downrange and saw their target; it was fresh, and holes were appearing in it, most outside the silhouette of the human body at the center. In gun terms, that’s what we like to call ‘whoops’. That might not just be in gun terms, actually.
I caught a glimpse of curly, sandy blond hair as the shooter stepped back for a minute, rolling his shoulders as though trying to work some tension out of them. I didn’t want to offer unsolicited advice, but it wasn’t going to do a thing to improve his accuracy if he didn’t slow down and stop trying to blast through all fifteen rounds in ten seconds. I might have said it, too, but I knew better in this case. Hiding behind the clear plastic glasses that were supposed to protect him from stray shell casings was the face of Scott Byerly – solemn, determined and serious.
I approached Scott slowly from behind, taking my time as he ran through another magazine, managing to land only his first couple shots inside the silhouette. The most he could have hoped for was that the proximity of his fire would cause the perpetrator to suffer from a fearful case of soiled pants, because the bullets were unlikely to stop him unless he somehow leapt in front of one of them in a panic.
When he was finished, Scott stepped back and laid his gun down on the counter in front of him, barrel pointed downrange. If he’d known much about how to use a firearm, or if he’d been paying more attention during Parks’ lessons, he probably would have treated it more gingerly. He didn’t, though, and his face was stormy as I approached. He heard me, I knew, because his shoulders slumped as I came up behind him.
“Hey,” I said, pulling my ear protection down to rest around my neck. I pulled the ear plugs out and put them in my pocket, the little pliant pieces of foam only slightly larger than the first knuckle of my pinky finger. “How are you holding up?”
He didn’t answer, but stepped back to the gun, slapped another magazine into it and ran through the whole thing in about ten seconds, one shot after another. I barely had time to get my earmuffs back on before he loosed it, and when he was done, he still gave no indication that he’d seen or heard me. Of course, I knew he had. He was tense, his posture unnatural, stiffer than the usually laid-back Scott. He never took anything seriously. Or almost anything, I thought, remembering back to the time we’d met and clashed because I’d been responsible for the deaths of friends of his, then members of his family.