The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel

by Joanne Macgregor

  “Of course I do. Would you be willing to share your skills with us, Jinx?”

  I’m surprised — pleasantly so. This is the first positive approach I’ve had from any of them.

  “Yeah, sure. I want to help, in any way I can. When do you want me to begin?”

  “Why not tonight? After dinner, perhaps you chat to us all about camouflage and hides and how to observe, and then tomorrow, perhaps we could have a more specialized session with a selected few?”

  A couple of the rebels seem interested in hearing what I have to say that night, though Neil pointedly volunteers to go wash the dishes as soon as I begin, and Evyan quickly offers to help him. The next morning Zonia calls Quinn, Nicky, Darius and me, and we set off in a group out of camp and down the faint path that leads to where the van is parked. It’s not long before I understand what Zonia meant by a ‘specialized session’.

  When we get to the van, Zonia unlocks it and slides open the door. Darius climbs inside, kicks aside Quinn’s sleeping bag and backpack, and drags a four-by-two-foot, khaki-colored metal locker over to the opening where I stand beside Zonia. When she opens the lid, I catch a glimpse of what’s inside: a shotgun, an assault-style semi-automatic pistol, and a brace of handguns.

  Well, I’ll be danged.

  Zonia removes a rifle-shaped nylon bag and several boxes of ammunition from the locker before carefully closing and locking it again. Then she leads us to a small clearing in a heavily wooded section of the forest and hands me the bag.

  “Open it,” Zonia says.

  I unzip the bag. Inside is an M24 bolt-action sniper rifle, day and night optics and a small cleaning kit. I remove the rifle, and hold it balanced across my arms.

  My scalp ripples tight. For an instant I’m back on a roof aiming down at an M&M limping in circles in the alley below.

  Stop it. Focus!

  I blow out a puff of breath and rub a slightly unsteady hand over my head where the stitches tug.

  “What?” I say to Zonia. “Now you want me to shoot?”

  “I want you to teach us how to shoot.”

  “Why?”

  I’m suspicious. I glance at Quinn, who looks back, stony-faced. What is he thinking?

  “Well, Jinx, I’ve decided that you’re right,” says Zonia, “We are being foolish to ignore the very real threats to our safety. We need to be able to defend ourselves. If a rat ran over my feet right now, I doubt I’d be able to kill it. You’ve told us more than once we need an armed guard, but it’s no good if that person can’t shoot the side of a barn. And you can’t personally stand guard 24/7.”

  Finally, she’s got it! I actually smile in relief. I don’t know when last I smiled — it feels unnatural, like my face might crack from the unfamiliar action of it.

  “Sure, of course,” I say. “I can teach you, but there’s a problem.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?” asks Darius. He hasn’t warmed to me at all.

  “Well, the report when the rifle fires will carry far in this silence, maybe even as far as that lodge on the other side of the mountain. I’m guessing you won’t want them to come investigating.”

  “Won’t they just assume it’s hunters?” asks Nicky. “There are some diehards who still go hunting in the woods, aren’t there?”

  “Probably, but I’m pretty sure it’s not hunting season until October,” I say. I learned a few things about the “sport” while listening to Bruce and Cameron compare notes on our ratting operations. “Besides, the odd crack of a hunter taking down a buck sounds very different to repeated shots from four people in target practice.”

  “There’s a pouch on the side there.” Zonia points to the rifle bag. “Inside is a silencer.”

  “Suppressor,” I correct automatically.

  “If you use that, surely they won’t be able to hear us,” says Zonia.

  “True enough.”

  Suppressors don’t entirely silence the sound of shots, but the remaining noise won’t carry to the other side of the mountain. Also, there are no earplugs or muffs in the bag, so the suppressor will help protect our hearing. I screw the attachment onto the end of the rifle, and Zonia hands me the telescopic scope to fit onto the top.

  “You won’t really need this,” I tell her. “We’ll only see the rats when they’re relatively close. The scope is for long-distance shots.”

  “I think we amateurs” — Zonia gestures to herself, Nicky, Darius and Quinn — “can use all the help we can get.”

  I shrug and mount the scope. It will probably make things easier, and they’ll definitely benefit from using the night scope when standing guard for rats after nightfall.

  “Then let’s get going,” I say.

  “Don’t you first have to tune the gun, or something?” asks Nicky.

  I grin. “Or something, yeah.”

  In a practiced movement, I lift the rifle up to my shoulder and cradle it against my cheek. The smooth curve of the wooden stock against my skin, the weight of the weapon in my hand, the cool steel sickle of the trigger under my finger, all feel like the embrace of a familiar old friend. I click off the safety and squint through the scope, aim the cross of the reticles at a pinecone on the ground about thirty meters away and in the opposite direction of the camp, and gently squeeze the trigger. There’s a dull click. I pull back the bolt and peer into the chamber. Empty.

  “We’re going to need the ammunition.”

  Silence.

  This, apparently, is the moment of truth. Darius looks deeply doubtful about the wisdom of giving me live rounds while I have a rifle in my hands. Zonia not so subtly pulls back her vest to show me the handgun tucked into her waistband. Does she even know how to use it? Even Nicky just studies me silently. Surprisingly, it’s Quinn who snags a handful of rounds from the box and hands them to me.

  “Thanks,” I say softly. My fingers tingle where they touched his.

  I open the bolt, load three rounds into the internal magazine and shove the rest into my jeans pocket. Pointing the rifle away from the group, I slide the lever forward and down to chamber a round, then I aim at the pinecone again and pull off a shot. It’s a miss.

  Darius gives a dismissive little laugh. I ignore him and go systematically through the process of zeroing the rifle — shooting, adjusting the scope, reloading. Soon, I hit the cone. A few more adjustments and practice shots, and I’m hitting tiny targets at three times the distance. With my last two shots, I score snake-eyes — two overlapping holes in the target.

  “Impressive,” says Zonia, looking very pleased. “How soon will we be able to do that?”

  Does she think anyone is capable of becoming an ace marksman with a couple of lessons?

  “It takes some practice,” I warn, in the understatement of the century.

  “Then let’s not waste any more time.”

  Chapter 29

  Stone cold

  I start the rebel shooting lesson by asking if any of them have ever shot before.

  “Never,” says Quinn, sounding proud of the fact.

  Zonia and Darius shake their heads, but Nicky says, “I’ve been hunting twice, with my uncle. That was way back, though, before the plague began.”

  I give an overview of the bare basics of theory — weapon safety, the different parts of the rifle and how it works, how wind, weather, altitude and temperature can affect the speed and trajectory of the round moving through the air. Nicky listens with interest, but Quinn looks uncomfortable. I wonder why Zonia invited him — she must know how he feels about guns and shooting. Maybe that’s why she did. He’s a rival in the leadership stakes, and I’ve noticed she likes to keep him off-balance. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to leave him back at camp while she’s away. He might convert some of her followers to his way of thinking.

  I draw circles and crosshairs in the dirt with a stick and explain how to use the scope, then take them through the basic differences between shooting stationary and moving targets, and explain how you have to compensate for m
oving objects, as rats will likely be, by leading the target.

  Soon Zonia is yawning, and a bored-looking Darius asks, “Can’t we just have a go at shooting?”

  “Sure.” Let them see for themselves that it’s not as easy as they seem to think.

  “I’ll go first. Jinx, come show me how to hold the rifle,” says Zonia, removing her red beret and tossing it to Darius.

  I stand behind her and show her the proper grasp. Her movements are too rough and awkward for her to be accurate — her whole hand convulses when she pulls the trigger. Every time the weapon fires, the recoil knocks her back a pace. A dozen shots later she still hasn’t come close to hitting anywhere near the closest target — a dense shrub about twenty meters away.

  “Here, Darius, you try,” she says, holding the rifle out to him. “My shoulder is already aching.”

  When I try to adjust Darius’s hands on the weapon, he says, “Don’t touch me. Just tell me how.” There’s been no thawing of suspicion here.

  “Chill,” I say, and give him instructions from a yard away.

  I suspect he’s one of those guys who doesn’t like being told what to do by a girl. Especially when that girl is way better at a skill than he is. Especially when that girl is Jinx E. James.

  He’s not much better than Zonia and gets frustrated easily. He’d be better with the shotgun. Now that I think of it, it would probably be a better weapon for everyone — they’d be much more likely to hit a rat with it. I make a mental note to mention it to Zonia tonight.

  Nicky is better than both Zonia and Darius. She stays calm, can stand and lie as still as even a sniper needs to, and has the requisite fine motor control to move the trigger back slowly and gently without simultaneously moving any other part of her body.

  “You’ve got real potential,” I tell her.

  “You’re a great teacher,” she replies, grinning in delight and reloading.

  Just then I hear a loud rustle in the bushes behind us. I grab the rifle out of Nicky’s hands and swing it up to my shoulder as I spin around. Ross’s face, seen through my scope, is tight with fright, his eyes wide and round.

  “Whoa!” he says, stopping dead on the spot and holding up his hands.

  “Sorry,” I say, lowering the rifle and easing the safety back on.

  “Try not to shoot any of the good guys,” Darius says. “Again.”

  I sigh. I don’t know how much more of the sniping the sniper can take. It’s exhausting. I’m even losing the spirit to tease Evyan with designer water names.

  When Ross reaches us, he tells Zonia that Neil wants her back at camp to see something urgently.

  She tosses Quinn the keys for the van and weapons locker and orders me to put him through his shooting paces then leaves with Ross and Darius.

  A few moments later, Nicky follows them, telling us, “I think I’m done for the day, too. And I’m on lunch duty.” I’m pretty sure she’s not. “See you two later.” She gives me a quick wink which tells me she hasn’t given up her matchmaking hopes.

  Quinn and I stand in awkward silence, watching them disappear down the faint path.

  “Um,” I say eventually, “should we start?”

  “Yeah, let’s get this over with.” Quinn hoists the rifle up as he’s seen us do.

  “You don’t seem too enthusiastic,” I say. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “Sure, we do. Zonia’s orders an’ all.”

  “Right. Okay. Well, first thing, you need to brace the stock against your cheek here, and move this hand to over here, and hold your finger ready like this.”

  His skin is hot under my fingers as I move him in minute adjustments. All at once that indefinable something, like an electric charge in the air, is back between us.

  He raises the barrel too high. I move to stand right behind him and cover his hands with my own, gently easing it back down.

  “And then you close one eye and look through the scope, yeah, like that.” My voice sounds breathy, and I’m aware of my chest pressing into his back. “And then you just gently squeeze the trigger — with the pad of your finger, not where it bends.”

  I release his hands and step back.

  He fires. Way wide.

  “So this time, don’t pull back so hard on the trigger. It’s more like a caress than a pinch,” I say, and when I hear the words, I feel a blush rising up my neck. It’s the same phrase Sarge used back in sniper boot-camp at ASTA. Back then it sounded sensible, maybe the slightest bit amusing. But here, in this quiet place alone with Quinn, it sounds suggestive. I take another step away and to the side of him.

  “And breathe. Breathe out just before you squeeze.” Now my voice is high.

  He fires again, misses by a mile again, rolls his eyes.

  “Devil a bit,” he mutters.

  “Quinn?”

  “Yeah?” He meets my gaze. His eyes are the deep bruised gray of a thundercloud. I forget what I was going to say.

  “Well?” he asks.

  “Um … That bush isn’t alive. I mean, you’re not going to kill anything by shooting it,” I babble on. “And one day you might need to shoot, to save your life or something.”

  He winces. Then turns and tries a few more times before giving up.

  “I can’t do this. I don’t know how you can.”

  “If you practice —” I begin, but he interrupts me.

  “I don’t mean the skill of it. I mean the fact of it. The intention. The coldly calculated aiming at someone and then firing a gun at them.”

  “Once more for the record: I. Didn’t. Know. Okay? I didn’t know I was killing people!”

  “Even if that’s true, you knew you were darting people. People who would be hurt.”

  He spins on his heel and heads back in the direction of the van. I grab the rifle bag and boxes of ammo and run after him.

  “I thought they were being brought in for treatment, or questioning. I told you that.” I stumble over roots and rocks and branches as I run beside the path, trying to keep pace with him. “I didn’t know about the torture until you showed me it that last night!”

  “Sure and it didn’t stop you darting Connor. Letting him be taken in for torture.”

  “I’ve already explained that I —”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard all your explanations, thanks, and I don’t want to hear them again.” He opens the van, stows the rifle and ammo in the locker, locks up and turns back to me. “It doesn’t change the fact that you’re a stone-cold killer. If I think about —” He cuts himself off, and his face is almost bleak as he meets my gaze. “Don’t you feel any guilt?”

  “I feel nothing but guilt! All the time. But I can’t change what I did in the past. And right now, I’m more concerned about the future. Haven’t you noticed that your little band of merry men and women are planning something, Quinn? Did you even see what’s in that weapons cache? Here’s a clue — it wasn’t a damn printing press! Zonia and her red berets are getting ready for war. This is like ASTA all over again. You’re prepared to trade in the getting and giving of information, but you wash your hands of the inconvenient consequences of how that information will be used.”

  He says nothing, merely turns and heads back in the direction of camp. I follow, cursing as I knock my shin on a protruding branch and go sprawling onto the ground. He pauses for a moment, maybe to check I’m okay, maybe because he’s tempted to kick me in the head while I’m down in the dirt.

  “Besides,” I say, getting up, wiping my scraped hands on my jeans and following after him again, “I’ve watched you practicing with those knives. What’s that about if not weapons training?”

  “As you just said, I might need to defend my life or something.”

  “So knives are okay, but guns aren’t?”

  When he spins to face me, his face is a scary mix of rage and something else. It couldn’t be … fear?

  “There’s a difference!” he yells at me. His eyes are silver now. They always go pale when he�
�s angry. “There’s a difference between defending yourself, or your … your buddy, in the heat of battle, and sitting somewhere off at a safe distance, waiting for the perfect moment to annihilate an unsuspecting person.”

  “I thought we were going to shoot rats?”

  “Or — or dressing up like a little girl so you can get close enough to dart them. One is self-defense, and the other is just … wrong.”

  “Wow, okay. Thanks for explaining. I might have missed the moral subtleties of taking preventative action versus defensive action, given that they can both be used to save your ass! But now I think I understand. Basically, if you or yours do it, it’s justifiable self-defense and protection. If I do it, it’s ‘just wrong’ and unforgivable.”

  He opens his mouth to say something, but this time I don’t want to hear it. I’m feeling battered and bruised and drained, and the stinging in my eyes tells me I’m about to cry. So I push past him and run back towards camp, diverting to the ladies’, where I hide out in a toilet stall, silently yelling at myself to stop crying and have some pride.

  Chapter 30

  Fork in the road

  I’m back in the restrooms after breakfast the next morning, trying to cut the stitches out of my scalp with Robin’s mini-multitool. I can’t see much in the cracked and chipped mirror above the basin, so I’m doing it by sense of touch. I’ve already jabbed my scalp twice and I’m cursing when Nicky and Kate walk in.

  Kate, who is holding a towel and a toiletry bag, ignores me completely and heads for a shower, but Nicky says, “I’ve been sent to find you. Zonia wants another shooting session.”

  “Sure. I just need to get these out, they’re driving me crazy and should have been out days ago,” I say, trying and failing again to wedge the edge of one of the blades under a knot.

  Taking pity on me, Nicky offers to help. She moves me over to stand in a puddle of sunshine under a hole in the rusted roof, and clips the knotted stitches with gentle, steady hands. She gives the first stitch a light tug and then a firmer pull.

  “Uh-oh,” she says. “The skin has grown around the base of the stitches, and I don’t think they’re going to come out easily. It’s going to hurt.”