The Liberty Box Trilogy

by C. A. Gray

  “Beckenshire was a really big city once upon a time,” I pointed out. “So if that was the Potentate, and if he is looking for us, he’s still got a lot of territory to cover. But I don’t know how much he can see from up there.”

  Jackson looked worried, but took the soldering iron and fused his connections. Then he handed it to me. I copied him, and watched as he used the screwdriver to turn the frequency of his jammer.

  “All you want is the 7 to 12 hertz range,” he told me. “Will said that was the frequency of the control center signals, the same frequency as a kind of brain waves called alpha, which are sort of between peak consciousness and sleep. He said that’s the range for maximum suggestibility.”

  I bit my lip, nodded, and did as he said. Then I asked, “So you and Will are friends now, huh?”

  Jackson glanced up at me. “Yeah, I guess.” Scrape, scrape, scrape. Then he added in a tone I couldn’t read, “I was a little surprised too. He’s a really good guy, though.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Are you?” he probed.

  I thought for a minute. Then I said sincerely, “Yeah. Yeah, I really am.”

  Jackson nodded and said nothing.

  I turned on the jammer, tuned the frequency to the right range, and smiled. “Excellent. Thanks for the tutorial.” I stood up abruptly and brushed the dirt off my pants. “I think I’m going to go try to kill something for our dinner now.”

  “Whoa, whoa!” Jackson looked up with an incredulous laugh. “By yourself?”

  “Sure. I can’t have you holding my hand every single time, can I?” I lifted my chin a little. “I can figure it out.”

  Alec, who must’ve been listening to this, called as he approached, “Not a matter of ‘figuring it out,’ Princess. Hunting is a skill. You either got it or you don’t.”

  “And how does one cultivate new skills exactly?” I shot back, hands on my hips. “Practice, right?”

  I felt Jackson’s eyes on me, and turned my defiant expression upon him. But he actually looked—or did I imagine it?—a little bit admiring.

  “Look, I never even gave you a proper shooting lesson,” he said. “Let me finish the last of these, and then I’ll take you out.”

  “Nah, go on,” said Alec. “Jake and I can finish up. We’re all gonna be hungry again in a few hours anyway.”

  As Jackson lowered his head to push himself up to standing, I surreptitiously glanced at Alec to make sure he wasn’t watching me either. Then I slipped the jammer I’d made into my pocket.

  Chapter 16: Jackson

  Kate didn’t think I saw her put the jammer in her pocket, but I’d been waiting for it from the moment she showed up to “help”. I thought about confronting it directly and asking what she intended to do with it, but I was pretty sure I already knew: she was going to go find her brother Charlie. That’s what she’d said before. She had that forced nonchalance about her, which told me that no matter what I said or did, Kate was going and I couldn’t stop her. I could try to protect her, but there were no guarantees that I would succeed.

  So she needed to be able to protect herself. The least I could do was teach her that much, and hope she was a quick study.

  “Leave the bow this time,” I told her as we reached the weapons stash, a makeshift pile near where we’d slept. “Of the guns, rifles are best for hunting, but why don’t you grab one of the pistols. It’s more versatile, and the recoil isn’t nearly as bad.”

  She didn’t argue with me and reached down for a smaller caliber, the one I thought she’d pick.

  “No no,” I told her, picking up one with a 14 inch barrel and handing it to her instead. “These are more accurate.”

  She took it, turned it over in her hand, and frowned. “It seems so much clunkier.”

  “Only because the barrel is longer. But you want that—the longer the barrel, the straighter the bullet’s trajectory. Plus it’ll fit your hand better. Try it.”

  She gripped it and aimed at the trees, turning back to me and shrugging. “Ok, and bullets…” She crouched down to inspect the types of ammo on the ground which we’d both brought with us from the caves and found among the houses of former hunters in Beckenshire. She grabbed a 750 grain.

  “Nope, those are for rifles,” I said. “Heavy bullets like those are more accurate for longer ranges. We should start with shorter range, so you need lighter bullets. Go for the 115 grains, here. Do you know how to load it?” I showed her once, dumped the bullets into my hand again, and handed both of them to her to try.

  “Mmm-kay,” she murmured to herself, her brow knit in concentration as she copied me.

  “Bring the bullets with you,” I said, grabbing a weapon myself and shoving it into my waistband. I led the way out from the concrete where we’d slept into a wide open, grassy plain. “Now we need to come up with something for targets…”

  “We’re not hunting for dinner?” she asked.

  “We will, but one gunshot that misses will scare off all the animals in the area. Gotta make sure you’re accurate enough before we take you in there.”

  “There were posters of the Potentate and a couple of Tribunal members in both houses we raided,” Kate grinned at me impishly. “We’d have to find some way to prop them up, but…”

  I chuckled. “Ha. That’ll work… why don’t you go grab those and we’ll see if we can prop them up with some sticks or something. I’ll go back to the cookout site and see if I can collect a few empty cans to throw up after that, in lieu of clay pigeons. Since most of what you’ll be aiming at in the future will be moving.”

  About ten minutes later when I returned with the cans, Kate had already retrieved a grinning poster of the Potentate, his dark hair slicked back, his teeth whiter than anything I’d seen since arriving in the Republic. She affixed it to a pair of long metal brackets she must’ve found in a junk pile somewhere, and fastened it with duct tape.

  She was resourceful, I had to give her that.

  “If you’re good, you’ll rip that thing to shreds pretty quick,” I observed.

  In response, she held up a paper roll, presumably of more propaganda posters. “That’s ok, we can just swap it out!” She jogged back to my side, but I moved our distance up to about 15 yards away from the poster.

  “This close?” Kate asked, sounding disappointed.

  “Just to warm up,” I told her. “You’re right handed, so stand at shoulder width distance, but put your left foot forward, right foot back—” I adjusted her stance with my hands. “Good. Right hand straight forward now, elbow almost locked but not quite, and steady it with your left arm. Bend that arm at about 120 degrees, with the elbow pointing at the ground… yep, that’s it. Okay, so your right arm will control moving up and down—” I stepped in toward her, close enough to move her arms with my hands around her wrists, “while your left will control moving side to side.” I demonstrated again. “Good. Now tilt your head just a little to the right—” I gave her head a little nudge with my fingertips, “so you can line up your view with the barrel. Good. Now don’t focus on the target directly; focus somewhere in between the front sight here and the target. But in the future if you don’t have time to do all this, just focus on the front sight directly.” I nodded at her. “Ready?”

  “What, we just start? No meditation first?” she teased, raising an eyebrow and casting a half glance over her shoulder at me.

  I suppressed a smile. “Shooting itself is kind of meditative, once you get into a rhythm. It’s all eye/hand coordination so it doesn’t require a lot of brainpower once you know what you’re doing. I’m hoping you’ll get there soon. All right, take a deep breath in—good—and let it all the way out. Empty your lungs completely. Okay—fire.”

  The gun exploded, and the bullet went through the bottom edge of the poster, missing the Potentate’s image entirely.

  “Not bad for a first try,” I said. “I saw you move the barrel down at the last second just a bi
t—I assume you were anticipating the recoil and correcting for it. Try again, but concentrate on squeezing the trigger really slowly…”

  This time the bullet landed just next to the Potentate’s ear.

  “Look at that!” she crowed, turning to me.

  I grinned at her. “Nice! Keep going!”

  I stood back and watched as Kate fired, one round after another. Most of her shots landed pretty close together, and she got several through the image of the Potentate’s head. She was a natural.

  Fortunately. My admiration gave way to worry again. I took a deep breath. If only there was a way I could stop her.

  She turned to me, her cheeks flushed with exhilaration. “I’ll swap out a new poster,” she volunteeered, jogging over to remove the tattered image of the Potentate and replaced it with what I assumed must be one of the Tribunal members. When she jogged back to me, she said, “I don’t think I’m meditating yet though, I’m still concentrating pretty hard. I would’ve thought you’d say that would make me worse—I’d miss details or whatever, because I’m focusing too much on one thing.”

  “You will miss other details of your environment,” I admitted. “But you still have to start by learning basic skills before you can tune into everything else. There will come a point in mastery where your muscles know what to do without direction, and when consciously attending to your movements actually causes you to be less accurate, not more. Only then will you be able to expand your awareness, and then it will make you better.”

  “So it’s kind of like playing the piano,” she said.

  That caught me off guard. “You play?”

  She nodded, as she got into position again. She fired, ripping a hole through the Tribunal member’s upper right clavicle. “My family had a piano, from before the crash. It was horribly out of tune, but I taught myself how to play when I was young. I’m good too.” She cast a glance over her shoulder as soon as the words were out of her mouth, suddenly self-conscious. “Not that I’m bragging or anything—”

  I smiled. “Don’t be embarrassed, I hate false modesty. If you’re good, own it!”

  She shrugged, still blushing. “I just meant, I remember the feeling you’re talking about—being swept up into the song, like my fingers were playing on auto-pilot and I wasn’t doing anything to direct them. But as soon as I’d stop and think, ‘how am I doing this?’ that’s when I’d mess up.”

  I didn’t reply right away, and she turned around to catch me watching her.

  “What?” she asked.

  I shook my head., smiling. “Nothing, just had to update my mental image of you to accommodate that new information.”

  She seemed pleased by this. She relaxed for a moment, and wiped her brow. “Now that I think about it, piano might be the only part of who I was that was real, post-brainwashing. I just… came alive when I was playing.”

  She turned back to the poster, firing again—this time right between the Tribunal member’s eyes.

  “You’re ready to move on,” I told her. “Normally if you’re shooting clay pigeons, you’ll use a rifle, but I won’t be throwing these too far out in front of you, so the pistol will do. And keep in mind, this is really hard, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t get it today. Shooting big game is a lot easier than this, because it’s bigger and usually not moving as fast.”

  She nodded, eyes wide and eager. I grabbed the cans and jogged about fifty yards ahead and to the side of her.

  “When I release, don’t look at me—if you do, you’ll miss it every time. Choose someplace to the right of me and up in the air, and keep your focus there, waiting for the can to come into your field of view. Same stance as before. As soon as the can enters your focus point, follow its trajectory with your gun barrel, pivoting your whole body to trace it. Fire when you think you have it in your sights, but make sure after you fire that you continue to follow through with the trajectory of the barrel.”

  “Got it!” she called.

  She missed the first two, then three, then four. Her enthusiasm waned, and I could see frustration mounting.

  “You can close your non-dominant eye too, that’ll help you focus,” I called, jogging over to the other side of the field where all the cans had landed. “Remember, this isn’t easy.”

  “I know, but I don’t—” she stopped herself abruptly. I watched her, waiting to see if she’d complete the thought. She didn’t. I threw up a fifth can, and she hit it.

  “Nice!” I cried. “Again!”

  We went on like that for another half hour or so, until Kate was hitting about every other can.

  “Time to go get some dinner,” I said, gesturing to the forest.

  She fell into step beside me, and I cast a sidelong glance at her. She was biting her lip, suppressing a smile. I smiled too.

  “You’re really good at this,” I told her.

  “You think so?”

  “For a newbie, amazing.” I paused, adding pointedly, “I hope you never need to use it except to hunt, though.”

  She didn’t reply.

  I was just on the point of asking, Anything you want to tell me? But I glanced at her again; she’d locked her jaw, an expression that indicated she’d already shut me out.

  Just as we entered the outskirts of the forest, Kate said, “So when are you guys going back on the grid? You and Will and the others?”

  So she’ll be going while we’re gone. Of course. That was the part I hadn’t known. It would make things harder for me, though.

  “In the morning,” I said. Then I added as casually as I could, trying to make it sound like I was changing the subject, “So what part of the Republic did you say your family lived in? Same part as you?”

  She shook her head. “No, they were about an hour inland from me by bullet train.”

  “Your parents, you mean?”

  “And my brother. He lived right down the street from them.” She shook her head and muttered to herself, “Lives, I mean. No reason to think he’s dead or anything.”

  I nodded. So far she’d still given me no specifics. I tried to figure out how to get her to tell me where that was in relation to Beckenshire.

  But Kate volunteered, “Beckenshire is the extreme edge of the Republic—from here on out there’s nothing but wasteland.” She gestured west. “Will said you guys are going to Friedrichsburg?”

  “Yeah.” I paused. “Do the bullet trains reach all the way out to Friedrichsburg?”

  Kate nodded. “They’re all over the Republic, in every city.” There was a distant rustle, and Kate stopped talking abruptly, looking around. “Is something nearby?”

  I raised my eyebrows, impressed. “Yes, very good. Which way?”

  Kate closed her eyes, and pointed northeast. “There? No. There?” She swiveled her arm around so that she was pointing northwest. Then she sighed, and pointed to the entire north side of her body. “Somewhere over there.”

  I chuckled softly. “Yeah, it’s in that hemisphere. Let’s stay quiet. I’ll follow you. Just course-correct as you get closer.”

  Kate moved north, very slowly. I followed behind her, and was just about to nudge her to her left, when she began to move that way herself.

  “Step on earth only when you can, not fallen leaves or branches,” I whispered. “Earth will absorb your footsteps best.”

  She stopped, saw the doe, and pointed at it excitedly, looking back at me. I nodded, amused by her enthusiasm.

  “Just like with the posters,” I breathed, leaning in. “She’s not moving yet; you’re not going to get a clearer shot than that. Aim between your front sight and your target—”

  “I got it, I got it,” she waved me off, positioning herself perfectly. She closed her left eye, and said to herself, “Right between the eyes.” She hesitated for a moment, but then she fired. The doe just started to move before she did, so Kate caught her in the chest, but it was enough. She fell hard.

  “Nice shot!”
I raised my hand to high-five her. Kate grinned and slapped her palm against mine, though I could see she was trembling. I tilted my head to the side. “You okay?”

  She nodded, too vigorously. “Yeah! I just…” she shrugged. “It’s a big creature to kill. That’s all.”

  I nodded. “And it’s good that you take that seriously. Kill only when you absolutely have to.” I moved toward the doe, and Kate followed. “Come on, I’ll show you how to clean it again.”

  “I think I remember from the bear,” she said. “You make a long cut up the belly, but not too deep. Sever the diaphragm, and cut the ribs apart. Open the chest cavity, and make sure you remove the intestines and the bladder intact… then remove the rest of the organs. Right”

  I raised my eyebrows, pulling out the knife I used for the purposes she described and handing it to her, handle first. “You want to do it and I’ll just direct you?”

  I saw the hesitation flick across her face, and she might have gagged a little. But she swallowed it down and gave me a brave smile, taking the knife. “Sure.”

  I laughed. “I’ll do it if you want.”

  “No, no, I have to learn this. See one, do one, teach one, right?”

  “Right, although I’m not sure who else in our company that isn’t already a hunter might want to learn… ah, Nelson might. Brenda might too,” I amended. “They’re both pretty tough.”

  She took a ragged breath, kneeling beside the doe’s abdomen and positioning the knife for the first incision. “Am I tough?” she asked without looking at me.

  I folded my arms across my chest, watching as she sliced the belly open in short shallow strokes, her nose wrinkled.

  “I’m amending my assessment of that all the time.”

  She looked away from the gore for a moment to catch her breath, and then resumed her task. More than once I thought she might be sick, but she trudged on.

  “You want to use this to separate the rib cage and the pelvis,” I told her, handing her a hatchet I’d brought with me. “Let me show you.”

  “No no, I’ve got it.” She reached for the hatchet.