by Rick Tippins
David always excelled in school and, although he played some sports, they were not the driving force in his life, as was the case for many of the children he grew up with. David started a hardware store in town after college, where both he and Shannon worked long hours together to make a decent living for their family. After Jared was born, the two parents worked so hard, they simply never had the time to plan for another child, so Jared had no siblings.
Growing up, he went to school and worked in the family business on the weekends. David would give Jared a task and later find him tinkering in the back of the store with some sort of electronic contraption that Jared would swear was going to change the world. David was a patient, hardworking family man who would artfully guide Jared back to the task at hand without crushing his explorative spirit.
David and Shannon worried about Jared on a social level, talking at length about the lack of friends and the time he spent by himself, working on all his projects. Brilliant as some of Jared’s creations were, his parents were not only hardworking, they were social. They didn’t understand and they worried about their son. When Jared was old enough, he would reassure them, telling his parents that what he did made him happy, and wasn’t that what they wanted for him? Shannon and David couldn’t argue with this logic, but still they worried.
Jared grew into an intelligent young man, joining several academic groups and making quite a name for himself with the teachers from several high schools in the area. Jared went to his senior prom alone, and his mother was beside herself. Jared consoled her by saying he was going because it was an expected part of high school, and he was going alone because he didn’t have the time to court a young woman with all the things he had going on in his life with school and preparing for college.
The following year, Jared went to the University of California at Berkeley on an academic scholarship. He began at Cal where he had left off in high school, working hard and impressing the staff with his outside-the-box thought processes. Jared worked best when left alone, but in his junior year, he worked with a female student named Monica, who had many of the same personality traits Jared possessed. This, for some reason, worked, and the two would spend hours in the lab working out issues with whatever project they were laboring on at the time. Monica was from the Bay Area and had grown up with an academic-minded set of parents, who pushed her from the time she could hold her head up.
Her father told her a million times—no, more like a billion times—that Chinese and Japanese families were pushing their children harder than any American family could possibly comprehend. He told Monica these people would be the educated people in the country, and the result would be they would get the jobs while all the American kids who stopped their education after high school or went to a junior college would be left out in the cold. By cold he meant washing dishes and digging ditches. Monica knew no other way than studying and then studying some more.
Learning came easier than most to Monica and, although she had a few friends, they were neatly placed in her life so as not to interfere with her studies. During high school Monica had her friends organized into neat little groups. There was Nancy, her friend from biology, whom she saw every day during her senior year, but she didn’t know a thing about Nancy outside of the biology world. Then after high school, Monica never so much as spoke to Nancy again.
Then there was Bradley, a nice boy from her junior year who had actually asked her to a dance, which she declined because it conflicted with her study schedule. What Monica didn’t know was Bradly had gone way out on a limb as a young insecure sixteen-year-old to ask her out and, when she rebuked him, he was crushed, devastated and embarrassed. Monica never knew the devastation she caused him.
She had treated the invitation like a meeting: she checked her schedule, found she wasn’t available, and even looked into rearranging an event or two, but her de-confliction efforts never came through, so she declined the invitation and that was that. No malice, no thought of the effects her actions had on the boy, and sadly no awareness of Bradley’s change after the fiasco.
Monica was on a mission in life and directed zero energy towards anything that wasn’t part of her mission. In college, Monica and Jared were a perfect couple who co-existed like two coins in a pocket; there was no human connection and no feelings for one another that weren’t related to the other person being able to further a project. They would celebrate each other’s lab success, but had no idea when the other’s birthday was.
They both finished school and went on to a master’s program, Jared staying at Cal and Monica leaving to attend school at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Although they had each other’s phone numbers, they never called. There was no reason to call, their studies were in different fields at this point, and the projects they worked on were in completely different areas of engineering exploration.
Since graduating and getting a job at the company, Jared had thought about Monica, which he found strange at first, wondering what she was working on, and he even contemplated calling her to see how things were going, but thought it might be a little weird to just call out of the blue with no real reason other than nosey curiosity, so he never called. He knew she lived in Orlando through friends at work who had gone to Cal and knew people who worked with Monica, but other than that, they had lost contact.
Jared finished telling Bart his story by relaying everything he’d seen and gone through since the event knocked out all the power. He told Bart about the dead woman and the dog, the cops who seemed indifferent about the whole affair, how he saw two kids murdered earlier that day, and generally how fucked up the whole world had become in less than a week. Bart sat silent for a long while before talking.
“You got your ass beat pretty good, it sounds like.” Jared nodded and Bart smiled sideways. “Not as bad as you’d think it would be though, right?”
Jared thought for a moment then shook his head.
“Worst part is right before something bad is about to happen.”
Jared kept nodding as Bart spoke, thinking to himself how unbelievably frightened he’d been. He’d been unable to move or react, frozen in place until it was too late and they were on him.
“The trick, my boy, is to control that initial fear. Problem is you have to take a few beatdowns before you realize this.” Bart took a long swig from his cup. Jared stared at his own cup, then gave in and did the same.
“Once you’ve come to terms with these high-stress situations, they become easier to manage, and you, my friend, become a dangerous motherfucker. I see a guy getting ready to fight and he’s hopping all over the place, I know I’ve already won. Now I see a guy standing still, chin down, waiting for an opening, well, that’s a cat I’m gonna be extra careful with.”
Again, both men sat in silence, Jared staring into the cup of brown liquid, thinking about being scared and trying to control it and all that bullshit Bart was talking about.
“Now getting shot is as bad as you think it is, my friend. Gunfights are fucking more than a little hectic. Just know that you have to overcome that fear, or you will get shot, and it will suck a lot of ass, and you probably will die, especially nowadays with no hospitals or meds to help you through those hard times.” Bart finished his drink, stood up, capped the bottle, and stretched. “I’m about done here. I drink any more and I’ll start getting all emotional talking about gunfights; they have that effect on me.” Without another word, Bart turned and left, leaving Jared alone with his somewhat drunken thoughts of gunfights and God knew what else.
“Turn the lantern off when you’re done,” came Bart’s raspy voice from the hallway as he sauntered off to bed.
Chapter Sixteen
Jared felt a little groggy the next morning as he sat up, holding his hands to his aching head. Coffee was what he needed and needed fast. He stumbled out into the hall and immediately smelled food and coffee. He found Bart in the workshop, sipping a cup of coffee, an empty plate resting on the table in front of him.
Bart was reading a book, not just a book, but a romance novel. It was a novel by Jennifer Haymore called Secrets of an Accidental Duchess. Jared stood staring until Bart drew his pistol and laid it on the table without so much as a glance in Jared’s direction.
“I don’t want to hear a goddamn word,” was all the old man said.
Jared pivoted wordlessly, returning to his room to forage for some breakfast packets. When he returned to the workshop, he briskly walked in, greeting Bart without making eye contact, and set about heating his breakfast on a small stove. When Jared finished cooking his breakfast, he moved to the table. The book was gone, the pistol secured in its holster, and Bart sat quietly sipping his coffee as if nothing had happened.
Jared glanced about the room for the book then caught himself. He’d been beaten to a pulp once this week and didn’t care to make it twice, so he dropped into a chair and dug into his breakfast, deciding to leave the Fifty Shades of Grey thing alone in the interest of self-preservation.
The rest of the second day consisted of a lot of the same training Jared had experienced the first day.
“Repetition,” Bart kept saying as he ran Jared through drill after drill. “A man will always revert to his training in a time of crisis,” Bart barked.
Jared didn’t even fully understand what this meant, but nodded dutifully and kept at the drills.
Bart had converted one of the small rooms into a makeshift firing range. It was small, but most gunfights, Bart explained, happened within feet of one’s assailant. After lunch, Bart took Jared to the firing range again, and they fired a few hundred rounds before setting to cleaning the weapon.
“Cleaning this weapon is the most important thing you will do. Keep it clean and it won’t fail you in a time of need.”
Jared nodded again as he scrubbed at the built-up carbon in the weapon’s slide.
Bart took a step closer. “I’m serious about this, boy, this isn’t one of those things you nod your head to and store the info somewhere in that pea brain of yours for later. A dirty weapon will get you killed.”
Jared thought about this and tried to equate it to something from his old world and couldn’t. If he didn’t run updates at his old job, no one would die, especially him. He would get a nasty-gram from IT, and that would have been that. Bart had explained to him the difference between a deep cleaning and a field cleaning.
If Jared found himself in a prolonged battle and could get to a place of reasonable safety, he could down one of his weapon systems to give it a cursory cleaning before re-engaging the enemy. This was only in a long and drawn-out fight lasting hours or days. Bart emphasized that he was never to down both weapons at the same time and that the cleaning would have to be the fastest of his life.
What the hell am I doing here with this old guy? What has happened to the world and, more importantly, my little world? His whole world had revolved around the computer industry, and now that simply didn’t exist. It seemed so unfair, like an Olympic sprinter losing both legs in a freak accident. Jared sat in silence, cleaning the weapon, looking at the parts, taking in the engineering genius that went into creating this firearm. It was really a very simple concept wherein the weapon used the ammunition to cause the action that reloaded the gun and kept it in a constant state of readiness. The springs were like the starter in a motor vehicle, and the exploding ammunition was like the engine. Combustion, it drove everything in this manmade world.
After the weapon was cleaned, Bart brought out a box and dropped it on the table. He really is one for dramatics, thought Jared as Bart stood looking at Jared as if waiting for a response to the presence of this mysterious box.
“Open it.” Bart nodded at the box.
Jared leaned forward, lifting the top to the box, exposing two additional Glock 19 handguns. He looked up at Bart, with a quizzical looked etched on his face. “And?”
Bart grabbed one of the weapons and handed it to Jared. “And---it’s an Airsoft version of the gun you’ve been shooting for the last couple of days, good for force-on-force training.”
“Force-on-force?” Jared asked.
“Force-on-force, like you going against me using Airsoft to determine deficiencies in your tactics.”
Jared hefted one of the Airsoft Glocks. “Do they hurt?”
“Fuck yeah, they hurt. Wouldn’t be a damn bit of good if they didn’t.” Bart snatched the second gun from the box, sighting it across the room. “It’s called positive reinforcement. You fuck up, you get hit, it hurts like hell, and you stop fucking up in order to stop the pain, repeat if necessary. Today we work on clearing a building, getting into a room without getting killed, and basically learn how to survive inside a structure against an opposing force.”
Bart spent the next few hours working with Jared on moving inside a building, teaching him how to search a room without ever stepping through the door. Bart slowly moved across the doorway, visually clearing the interior of the room as he went. Bart described a dynamic entry versus slow and deliberate entries. Bart stressed that Jared only use a dynamic entry in the most serious of situations.
The dynamic entry was fast and caused the person searching a building to process a tremendous amount of information in a split second. There was serious room for error, Bart said, and it was the way most of the guys in that business got shot. Dynamic entries were used for rescuing hostages in cases where the good guys had reason to believe the bad guys were intent on killing the hostages and therefore had to be dealt with swiftly in order to thwart the hostage killing.
Bart further explained how an operator could slip in and out of the two types of movements depending on the circumstances. Bart told Jared that he would most likely never rescue a hostage but would instead use the dynamic style in a situation where he was in a building running for his life. He’d have to clear corners of rooms as he traversed through them during an escape, and it was good to know how.
Bart’s favorite way to clear a building was to do it slowly, using his pie method, as he called it. He would clear most of the room from outside by viewing the interior of the room from outside the doorway before setting up to enter the room. Once he performed his visual inspection and was ready to make entry to a room, he explained, there were only the two hard corners left that he wouldn’t have seen from the outside. When he entered the room, he would first focus on the two hard corners and then reinspect the areas of the room already seen from outside in the hallway.
Bart worked Jared as a solo operator and then taught him how to work in a team of two. The lessons Bart taught in the two-man work were based on not being in a position where you shot your partner by accident if all hell broke loose. Jared learned where his weapon should be pointed and how his feet should be planted. He learned to keep his finger off the trigger unless he was shooting. Stumbling or being surprised with a man’s finger on the trigger was sure to end badly. He learned how to glide and not walk so he could shoot while moving. Bart explained that this little talent would separate the live guys from the dead guys.
“It’s easier for a moving man to shoot a stationary man than it is for a stationary man to shoot a moving man,” Bart said, and it was his experience that under stress, a trained man would miss a moving target seventy-five percent of the time.
After lunch, the two men began working with the Airsoft pistols, Bart placing stationary targets in the room at first and then transitioning himself into the aggressor role. All the morning’s lessons were put to the test as Jared entered room after room and was peppered with the small but painful shots to various areas of his body. Bart only allowed him a light T-shirt, citing the pain would help Jared remember his mistakes. Jared found the slower he went, the less he was shot and the more he was able to shoot Bart. He liked this…a lot. By the end of the day, Jared looked like a leper, his flesh dotted with dozens of bruises.
The next few days found Jared either on the live-fire range or clearing rooms, trying not to get peppered by Bart’s accurate fire. By the end of the
fourth day, Jared was moving through the gun store, sometimes clearing the entire structure without Bart placing a single shot on him.
That evening they sat eating in silence, drinking bourbon for the first time since that first night, Bart having set a hard-and-fast rule that they would not drink on school nights, as he called it.
Bart broke the silence. “Tomorrow you go out and start getting my supplies. You’re ready as far as being able to point that thing at something and hit it. I’m just worried about whether or not you can shoot a human being.”
Jared stayed quiet as he looked up at Bart’s very serious face.
“In this new world there will come a time when it is either you or the other guy and, if you decide you can’t shoot a man, then it’s gonna be you. There is no second place in a gunfight. As Ricky Bobby said, ‘If you’re not first, you’re last.’”
Jared cocked his head, question written on his face. “Huh?”
“Talladega Nights, you never saw it, did you?”
Jared slowly shook his head.
“Jesus, mother, and Mary, boy, you should have got out more.” With that, Bart threw his hands in the air, got up, and walked out of the workshop.
Chapter Seventeen
The following morning, Jared found Bart sitting at the table in his workshop, only this time, there was no romance novel. The romance novel had been replaced with maps and a notepad, which were strewn across the table. Bart looked up, went back to his scribbling, then laid the pencil down and stretched.
“I have maps and notes here detailing where you need to go and what routes to take. Once you’re there, you can go off the list, load up, and pedal on back to unload, and go back out. Figure you can get three maybe four loads in a day. Once it gets close to sundown, we shut it down—too dangerous out there at night.”
Jared took a deep breath, thinking this had all happened too quickly. He’d been swept away by the man, lost control of his life. He could simply take the gun and this crazy old man’s list and ride off, never to return. He blinked and tried to clear his head.