Exhaling hard as I pulled the barbell up, I hoped that he was right. Maybe they weren’t all assholes. Maybe I could trust Red with his attempt to build bridges where they had been burned. Maybe I could just grab one of these weight plates and smash it into Bucky’s face hard enough to split open his skull, taking care of that problem once and for all.
Oh, a girl could dream.
Chapter 7
The next time we all congregated in the mess hall, I felt like something was different. Not a massive change, more like subtle currents slowly swaying in a different direction. I chalked it up to me seeing things—until I walked in on Burns and Tanner compiling a rather weird list. I’d hung back after lunch, hitting the head—and staying for an extended period of time; while my body was doing a great job burning a lot of energy, it also produced a lot of byproducts of that. When I finally made it to our quarters, I heard their voices through the partly open door, so I paused to listen for a few moments before entering.
“Murdock, Hill, and Carter are a go for the favorable list,” Burns remarked. “Maybe Parker, too, but he’s a tough nut to crack. Worked far too long with Hamilton to switch sides now.”
Tanner grumbled something I didn’t catch, then, “Aimes and Wu remain on the no-go list?”
“Stuck-up pricks,” Burns agreed. “Or else they wouldn’t have sent them to our camp back before Colorado.”
“Gita said she talked to that Rodriguez woman who was with them. Says she’s not quite such a hardliner.”
“Put her down as maybe then,” Burns advised. “How many does that make altogether?”
Tanner’s reply came a few seconds later, as if he was counting. “If you factor us in, that’s two more in favor of Hamilton. Odds could be worse.”
That’s when my curiosity got the better of me and I stepped inside, just in time to see Tanner make a crumpled paper disappear behind his back. “What’s going on?” I asked, not even pretending like I hadn’t been eavesdropping. “You should close the door if you’re trying to be super stealthy.”
Tanner laughed. “Nothing to do with stealth. Just trying to even the odds a little.”
“What odds?” It was a warranted question.
“That someone sticks a knife in our ribs,” Burns explained.
Way to bring my paranoia roaring back to life. “You think that’s a real possibility? I wouldn’t put it past Bucky to let us die if anything happens, but to have his people actively come for us makes no sense. Nate, sure. Me, maybe. But the rest of you?”
Tanner’s grin was a real one. “We try to see us all as a package deal, you know? And to answer your question, no, we don’t expect them to come after us. But if I’ve learned one thing over the past ten years, it’s that someone who you’ve gotten chummy with is much less likely to watch you die than someone who can’t stand you. That’s why we’ve tried building a few bridges over the past days. It’s not like we got anything else to do.”
I couldn’t quite refute that so I didn’t try. It was obvious now what Burns had been doing with our workout session—besides giving me a one-on-more-than-one therapy session.
“Why didn’t I notice any of that until now?” I muttered, mostly to myself, but Tanner still answered, giving me a somewhat uneasy look.
“You’ve been pretty out of it,” he explained, tone careful. When I gave him a blank stare back, he scoffed. “Lewis, watching you for the first few days was pretty much a nightmare. You were just lying there, unmoving—and I mean like a statue, not just trying to lie still to avoid pain. People fidget. You didn’t. And you were just staring straight ahead, without blinking. Not much difference when you were up and moving about. More than once I thought about asking one of the others to gently poke you to see if you were still alive.”
I couldn’t hold back a small laugh. “Oh, you know that you would have noticed it if I wasn’t.” This once, I was the only one who seemed to find that funny. “Guess I really was quite out of it.”
Burns nodded. “Yeah, but you evidently needed that downtime. Now you’re back to your pleasant, calm self.”
I flipped him off—that I could do with both hands still—and turned around to crawl into my bunk. Yet before I was halfway in there, the door opened fully again, Nate stepping in.
“What are you doing here, lazing around with those idiots? I told you to meet me at the armory.”
I tried to remember. He had said something, but I hadn’t paid much attention, distracted by… not really anything. Damn, my mind still wasn’t quite where it needed to be.
“Sure, was just grabbing my hoodie.” Now, of course, I had to go through the laborious process of getting out of my thick thermal and into the sweat hoodie, all while crawling backward out of my bunk.
Nate gave me a hard look, letting me know that he knew exactly what was going on, but for once passed up the chance to chew me out. “Come on, you two as well. We all need some extra weapon drills.”
“I don’t,” Burns complained, but at Nate’s growl got back up from his own bunk and followed along.
I hadn’t been to the forward sections of the ship yet, but it didn’t really look that different—except that I already knew I would get turned around should I have to make my way back on my own. Nate never seemed to have any issues finding his way, something I hated him for a little bit. That sentiment didn’t exactly lessen as we stepped into the designated armory—it seemed to have been something else before, judging from the paint of the stencil not quite fitting the others. Inside, two of the marines sat at a table, chatting casually—and a full ten of our fellow soldiers, busy oiling and polishing their gear. With a sinking feeling in my stomach I sat down at the empty smaller table in the corner when it became obvious that Nate wasn’t just going to grab some weapons to take elsewhere. The next surprise wasn’t too pleasant, either. Rather than hand me a pistol, he pulled one of the M16 assault rifles from the racks.
“You remember how to field-strip one of those?”
I glared daggers at him, my hands still folded on my lap underneath the table top. “I’m not a fucking imbecile.”
“Then start,” he taunted. “Ten times should be enough. We’ll take it upstairs later if the sea remains calm enough that we can shoot on deck. Depending on how you handle it, you’ll either take one of those, or one of the M4s.”
“What’s wrong with my carbine?” It had taken me long enough to get really comfortable with it over the shotguns. I didn’t quite get why he needed me to switch again now.
“Because the M16 shoots farther, and I’m not sure how well you’ll do with your sniper rifle—and the overall weight of the gear we’ll have to carry.”
“I did well enough last year, and that was before I actually learned how to fight.”
Nate hesitated, briefly glancing at the soldiers, but they didn’t even pretend not to listen in. “Bree, we had you carry a quarter of what everyone else was lugging around. Besides, we never had enough food for it to really weigh us down. Same for weapons and other gear. You have absolutely no idea what’s waiting for you when we leave this ship.”
That was a more sobering answer than I liked, making me drop my protest. And three seconds later, the M16, as my grip slipped spectacularly as I started taking it apart. Gee, didn’t that start well?
A few minutes later, I knew why he had me start on the big, heavy things—there was a good chance I might have just chucked a pistol at him the tenth time I managed to fumble, or completely drop, the dastardly thing. It wasn’t that the weapon was too heavy for me—with the exercises of the last few days, my grip had started to strengthen once more and was doing okay—but it was as if someone had exchanged my fingers for tree trunks, and clumsy ones at that. My right hand kept slipping whenever I held on to something, relying on the strength and stability of two fingers that weren’t there anymore. My left was doing better on that account, but I’d seldom before realized how much my fine motor functions relied on my index finger.
It took me w
ell over five minutes for the first round. As soon as everything snapped back together with a last push, I dropped the damn rifle and shoved it away from me with disgust, not caring any longer to suppress the curse that had been burning on my tongue for the entire time. Someone laughed at the other end of the room, but when my head snapped around and I glared at the lot of them, they were suspiciously silent, and mostly focused on their cleaning.
I closed my eyes and counted down from ten, then grabbed the M16 once more and started over. And over. And over again. On the tenth round, I was down to three minutes—abysmal time, but at least I hadn’t lost any of the smaller parts this round. Nate nodded at the cleaning supplies in front of his perch opposite me, so I opened up the weapon one more time to—needlessly—take care of lint and signs of use that weren’t there. Someone had already taken care of that in the days before, but that, of course, needed a lot more fine motor control that had me gritting my teeth again. At least those didn’t hurt anymore, as small blessings went.
Nate consequently had me clean all the other weapons on the table as well, before he pushed my M24, still in its case, at me. I was more careful with that, deliberately slowing down my motions not to damage the sniper rifle we both had way too much emotional bonding going on with. I knew that it wasn’t that delicate, but trading possible speed for accuracy made me fumble around less, and my ego needed that right now. When that was over and done, Nate pushed an entire heap of handguns at me. “Ten minutes. Go.” And this time he kept the stopwatch in his hand, leaving me no chance to check on my progress.
Oh, there was fumbling involved. And cursing. Of course it had to be my Beretta of all things that went flying under the table, much to the amusement of the peanut gallery. And, just my luck, it had to happen just as Bucky came strolling into the armory, not missing a moment, including my scrambling around underneath the table. I knew a stupid comment was about to hit me in the face as soon as I resurfaced—very likely about what possible activities I could have conducted underneath there—but what he flung in my face was worse. “Stumpy, that’s actually pathetic.” Just four small words, without much inflection in his tone. Sexual innuendo might have made me mad, but that shit stuck. I dropped my gaze back to my Beretta, resuming where I’d had to stop, my cheeks burning, my throat tight.
Shit, but he was right.
Nate’s utter lack of a reaction didn’t help much. I could read the neutral look on his face well enough as he tried to pretend that Bucky didn’t exist—on some level, he agreed with him, but he was smart enough not to mention that. He was also close to losing his composure over anyone demoralizing me like this when that was his designated job—to incentivize me to get better, not put me down. But overwhelmingly, there was fear in his eyes that I was really trying, but this was about as good as I’d get. It was one thing to pick up the slack when I was still recovering and not quite back at fighting strength, but quite another when I’d always remain a liability from here on out. That thought sobered me enough that it got easier to ignore that idiot’s taunting.
My spirit didn’t exactly pick itself off the ground as we went topside after lunch, bundled up in enough layers that I felt like a giant fluffy ball. With three pairs of socks, I’d foregone padding the front of my boots, but I quickly realized that wasn’t the way to go as I continued to slip inside my boots even when the grip of my soles on the ocean-sprayed deck was secure. I’d brought gloves—hating how the three empty finger parts flopped around—but took them off before getting my Beretta out. The cold bit mercilessly into my hands, but it was worst at the remaining stump of my right ring finger, making me grit my teeth before I’d even managed to fuck up anything. I’d wisely brought a full ten already loaded magazines to spare myself having to reload them out here, but the way Nate plonked the ammo box full of 9mm rounds at the table next to us didn’t bode well for that. At least it was just the two of us, Hill, Red, and one of the soldiers whose name I still couldn’t remember.
As soon as our “range” was cleared—the area in front of the already rather shoddy wooden targets empty after Red had tacked new paper targets onto them—the soldiers started their practice, while I went through switching my grip around for a good minute before I lined up the sights and fired. Thirty feet, and I didn’t even hit the outer frame of the target, let alone the center of it. Exhaling slowly as I centered myself, I checked my stance, then fired again, this time pulling the trigger five times in quick succession—still not as fast as possible, but without giving my body too much time to jerk around. The muscle memory kicked in quickly, the last two shots finally getting close to the black center of the target. When I started a new sequence, the first shots again went wide.
Mentally steeling myself for his verdict, I looked at Nate once I’d emptied the magazine. “You don’t need me to say it,” was all he offered.
I sighed. “My grip is shit and I keep jerking every time I pull the trigger.” Somewhat self-conscious, I looked over to the others—all hitting dead-center, of course, but none of them was paying me any direct attention as they reloaded the third or fourth time already—before going on. “It’s not like I’m afraid. I just can’t keep my hands steady.”
None of the expected scorn showed on Nate’s face as he held out a new magazine to me. “Then relearn how to.”
As I continued wasting one magazine after the other, I realized that it wasn’t just the lack of strength in my hands and resulting involuntary action. The problem was my entire body. Because of the scars on the right side of my torso, standing straight wasn’t actually straight but a slight slouch to the right. Whenever I tensed in preparation of the recoil, my toes did funny things that further messed up my stance, and only after I incidentally switched my right foot for my left in the forward position did I realize that I was still trying to keep my weight off my left thigh. Shaking my entire body from time to time to try to do a reset helped, but only gradually. On the last two sets that I split the last magazine into I still had about a third of the shots go wide, but at least it only took three now to lock my body so that it was doing what it should have done from the start. Better, but still not good enough.
“Let’s try again tomorrow,” Nate suggested, awfully neutral—likely because I was gritting my teeth hard enough that the enamel should have made a cracking sound. As much as I hated the constant nagging he sometimes had going on, this was worse. Things were always bad when he started coddling me.
Even knowing all that, I was more than ready to throw in the towel, but when I saw Red reach for the M16 he’d brought along, I hesitated. “Mind if I give that a go?”
“Be my guest,” he offered as he handed it over, without a doubt swallowing the taunt that it would be hard for me to miss at this distance. A good thing, because the spray I produced as I got a little too comfy with the trigger from the get-go was indeed embarrassing, but a little adjusting, and the next few—single, this time—shots were centered enough that if I’d been shooting at a shambler, their combined force would have at least made it stagger back. Not one of the juiced-up ones, but it was progress.
“Do a twenty-five meter zero,” Hill advised, then waited until the other soldier had stopped shooting to be heard better, adaptive noise-cancelling headphones or not. “If you hit the target at that distance, the shot will be good at two hundred, too.”
I knew he was just being helpful, but I wasn’t in the mood to appreciate that. “Gee, think I would have managed such a stellar job shooting your asses out from under you before if I didn’t know that?”
Hill laughed, but for once, Red wasn’t so lenient with my jibes. “From what I heard, you didn’t really do much of that in the few tousles you’ve had with our forces. What my guys told me, you hit shit-all at the factory, and shooting people in the back in zombie-overrun corridors doesn’t really speak of stellar marksmanship.”
I didn’t need to hurl a “challenge accepted” in his face as I picked up the rifle from the table again and turned around to walk th
e distance to the next set of tables, right by the doors of the helicopter hangar. The left-most target was still pristine as Nate hadn’t even picked up a gun and I’d done little enough damage that switching targets wasn’t really worth the waste. With impatience I waited for the four of them to clear the shorter distance before I got ready, doing a few dry exercises before I loaded the magazine. I would show him marksmanship.
Because anger made me stupid, the first three shots barely hit the target in the left lower corner, but after some adjustments of my stance—and telling my ego to go fuck itself—I did much better. Much, much better than before, in fact; more than twenty of the thirty rounds hit the two innermost rings of the target, and virtually all of those clustered. When I lowered the assault rifle, I found Red giving a satisfied nod, while Hill and the other soldier had a good time laughing—for once with me, not at me. “Did you picture Richards’s face there, or Hamilton’s?” The third soldier called over, still grinning.
“Something a little lower, if you must know,” I jeered back as I returned to them, handing Red his rifle. “Satisfied? Shall I get my sniper rifle out next? But you’ll have to build us a floating target for that.”
“This will do,” Red replied wryly, accepting his weapon. “Have you decided whether you want to go for the assault rifle or the carbine?”
“It’s not like I’ll run into ammo issues if I switch,” I joked, but only had a shrug to answer his question. “Let’s see how I do with either in the next few days. My preference is still my shotgun, but seeing as you all think I’ll just fumble and drop it, I won’t even bother.”
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