Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  Sirius hauled in an extra chair. Barney recounted everything he could remember. And then he told the three men what he wanted to do.

  Nobody left.

  Barney barely saw the fifth Bleeding Room thanks to the benefits of modern anesthesia. His body first had to be strong and adjudged fit enough to withstand the rigors of induced unconsciousness, and there was no way the dual procedure could be performed by Dr. Brandywine with a local.

  More forms. More time.

  Barney’s hands were butterflied like lamb shanks so Dr. Brandywine could get at the interstitial bones — the ones no longer required due to the missing-inaction index fingers — and remove them. Resectioning to close up the gaps. Nerves and blood vessels were reconnected with microfilament too small to see with the naked eye. Bones never meant to be neighbors were brazed together. The remaining healthy skin now gave enough surplus to fold closed and suture. They would leave very interesting scar patterns. The shortest of these multiple surgeries was a ten-hour stretch.

  Add plasma, antibiotics, painkillers. Mix well and let set.

  Serves one.

  The result was an adequately proportioned, though decidedly bizarre-looking three fingered hand so natural in shape that your eye was deceived into wondering what was amiss at first view. It was something you had to devote time to noticing. Freakish, maybe; odd, yes. Barney was re-evolving from near-useless flippers to a tri-taloned Martian hand from War of the Worlds, or what Mickey Mouse actually hid beneath that three-fingered glove.

  But no bump, no stub, no disproportion.

  Now all he had to do was learn to work with these new tools.

  A finger stump would have necessitated special handgrip grooving for stabilization. The stretch of hand minus a finger would have to be accommodated by an extended handgrip, and the trigger, modified for a middle finger wrap — the middle finger was almost a whole knuckle too much for a proper pull. Gross gun weight, and therefore felt recoil, would have to be factored into the smaller overall palm area.

  Karlov was working out that problem right now, somewhere else, leaning over a gun bench, probably wearing his double-magnifying specs for close work. Concocting new mutant forms of firearm. Making them evolve.

  Armand was dealing with ballistics — what kind of rounds, how many grains of powder per cartridge, range, kick, bullet type. The swage die was his alchemical furnace. He had always manufactured his own ammo.

  Sirius commenced a round of interviews with Barney that led to a pile of pencil sketches in slow layers of accumulation. It was all about strategy. Penetration routes, exit schema, logistics. Drills on backups, backstops, Plan Bs, contingencies. Who, what, and how many. Room plans. Terrain. Things that could not be recalled or anticipated had to be imagined. Best guesses. Smartest options.

  Barney commenced therapy on both hands as soon as the seams set and they were sure not to burst under stress like wet piñatas. Squeezing, lifting, isometrics in an agonizingly slow but progress-oriented crawl.

  The first red-letter day came when Barney could cycle the trigger on Armand’s Magnum through one complete double-action pull. Snap.

  Thirty-nine to go.

  For nearly a month and a half both his hands were imprisoned in nylon cross-lace braces with metal supports, like corsets for his wrists.

  Red-letter day Number Two saw Barney feeding himself without a drop of spillage. His fingers and thumbs were beginning to get to know each other again.

  Karlov brought him a rebalanced SIG Super .40 with a whisper trigger; Barney managed five pulls.

  Which hung him up for another week when his hands started to bleed.

  Barney’s goldfish croaked eight days after he set up housekeeping at the gun range, with the benediction of owner/manager Neil Takami, who secretly appreciated the extra nighttime security. Barney awoke to find the fish floating sideways, dead as roadkill, nobody’s fault, these things just happen sometimes. Following a brief unspoken encomium, Barney gave his late fish a burial at sea with honors, if you stop to consider that every sewer pipe and outflow system in Los Angeles eventually empties into the Pacific Ocean.

  Barney had never watched television while on his own. He had watched the fish. From what he had gleaned of television while immobilized in the hospital — at least, the noisy and idiotic programs Armand subjected him to during their mutual convalescence — he wasn’t missing a thing of worth. Mano had not had a TV, either, and Barney didn’t have one here.

  This left Barney with nothing much to do when he was by himself, surrounded by armament he was incapable of utilizing professionally, and amateurism grated his psyche. He hung with his crew: Karlov, refining his modifications to a variety of firearms; Armand, checking in to test his latest cartridges; Sirius, to pursue an overall mission objective. It was Barney that was the albatross here, his slow healing, crippled movement and nearly insurmountable pain deftly yoking an anvil to any concept of forward motion.

  These were the classic ingredients for genuine despair.

  He could head-butt the pain. He had to; there were three more operations on his hands after the first one, and each of those came with mandated recovery periods with too much time spent awake and luridly aware of the pulsing of blood through throbbing fingers, even the ghost fingers.

  He could rationalize the slow-motion of healing. At least it was goal-oriented.

  He could become a fast-food zombie, staring glassy-eyed at a TV until his brains dribbled out his ear. No, scratch that.

  He could discover or innovate adapted forms of movement to replace outmoded or restricted ones. That was forward-thinking and resourceful.

  But he could not beat the sulfurous ebony cloud that swaddled his emotions, because that was the area in which Barney was least prepared for combat. He had kissed the despair in Mexico — sideswiped it — then had head-butted the emotion while imprisoned, but it had never loomed as skin-crawlingly imminent as it did now, when he was supposedly free. He saw himself as a drained vessel of exhausted resources, no surplus tanks, running on the memory of fumes. His bodily energies had been sunk into tissue regeneration and the mass production of antibodies and white cells. His brain felt as if it had been dry-cleaned, sandblasted and re-shelved, empty.

  Even as mundane an activity as going to the market — once he could locomote — seemed off-kilter to Barney, as though he had rematerialized in a parallel world and was faking his way through the most ordinary moves so the natives wouldn’t notice and lynch him for being an outsider. He developed a fondness for an energy drink called Primer Pop, but apart from that and the booze in his miniature fridge at the gun range, he had seemingly lost the ability to discern foodstuffs. He generally ate with his crew, or ate something they bagged along. He found himself standing in an overlit aisle, his ears assaulted by Beatles muzak, unable to determine exactly which flavor of Ape-Os cereal to buy. Orangutan flavor? Gorilla Granola? It was as though some essential program in his head had been deleted.

  He had to fill himself back up with something, and all he had was a dormant vein of raw hatred.

  They took Erica; they got her, man, grabbed her ass right out from under me, I haven’t got a pot to piss in... there’s nobody else I can trust in a shitstorm like this... will you help me?

  It was an art, that kind of simulated feeling. Hysteria helped sell the mark. The best users always advantaged a ticking clock and ego — help is needed now; you are the only candidate, and a yes vote means they’ve just hooked their latest sucker. Your utility was the outer limit of friendship.

  In Iraq, Carl had performed a long spiel about who might live and who might die and who might keep in touch, after. About the kind of friends you don’t see for years, then pick up right where you left off. That had sounded warm and inviting, all right, an ideal to wish for in the face of daily death. But — all cards down — it was about using people.

  Carl was usable, so Felix Rainer had used him. Erica had probably played them both. Wasn’t that how the food chain worked
? The big ones got eaten by the bigger ones, who got gobbled up by the biggest ones, and it didn’t matter how big or bad you were, there was always some carnivore bigger or badder. If they couldn’t make you chum, then they made you a chump. True predators could whiff this vulnerability with a surety that gilded their genes all the way back to caveman days. The ground rule of predation: eat instead of being eaten.

  The theory of the mark was that you invited usury by being too eager, greedy, gullible, or all three. Barney’s ego image of himself as fixer for the halt and clueless had doomed him.

  You had to not care about anything. Sacrifice anyone. Scoot with no baggage. And keep breathing — that was the end that justified any means.

  One trick of psychology was to disempower your tormentors. That mate of yours who fucked you over? Think of them as decayed, diseased, repulsive. Stop tacitly forgiving them and go on the offensive. Barney realized with an acidic jolt that he was still cutting slack for Carl Ledbetter based on events of years past. Carl was not that guy now. He had to be a new guy, somebody Barney could despise enough to kill.

  As for the repulsive part, well, Barney had worn that suit already. It wasn’t his, didn’t fit him, and wasn’t it time to pass it on to somebody who really deserved it?

  He could be like the Old Assassin, immune to feeling, his emotions shut down and turned off, all human sympathy on mute. Or he could be like he was now, a victim, a mark, a schmuck. There had to be another option, a middle ground, and Barney found its boundaries when he allowed himself the luxury of pure hate, unadulterated by self-pity or misplaced notions of fairness.

  It took ten months before he felt as whole again as he was going to be for the rest of his life. By that time he had reconnected with the art of the true gunman. He had re-learned everything, traveling back beyond novice to start as virgin. The grip, the stance, targeting accurately, knowing your loads, sensing how many rounds remained from the weight of the firearm in your hand, it was all an uphill climb on a mountain of shit, hoping that when you found the single rose at the summit, you hadn’t lost the sense of smell.

  It was a rebirth.

  Newly born, Barney found that only the hatred had endured, and now it was purer than ever.

  Part Three

  Gun Work

  “Now, this here is a beauty for close-ups,” said Karlov. With a showman’s flourish he displayed a Smith & Wesson revolver with an eight-inch barrel. From the side it looked like a real hand cannon.

  “Twenty-two caliber, ten-round cylinder, the trigger is a feather and it shoots like a horny teenager. No kick at all.”

  Superior caliber did not always mean bigger, fatter bullets. With a .22, you could put all ten rounds into someone without killing them, and usually by round five they would tell you whatever you wanted to know. It was all in the application.

  “Moving to slightly larger armament...” Karlov opened his jacket to reveal a complicated web holster of his own design. It held four pistols, two on each side, revolvers on top, semi-autos below. He enumerated the guns: “A .357 Magnum... Super .40... 9-mil... .45. The spine rack holds three mags each for the semi-autos. Speed loaders for the revolvers up here.”

  “Damn,” said Armand, stroking his chin.

  “Body armor,” said Sirius, laying out what looked like a floppy, lime-green wetsuit top on the gun range counter. “Standard Kevlar is comprised of thirty or forty layers of synthetic fabric. It’s bulky and restricts movement. This is some new shit they came up with for the Army.”

  “The liquid armor?” said Armand.

  “Yeah. This is a sandwich of Kevlar fabric encasing a polymer infused with nanobits of silica. Basically, polyethylene glycol and purified sand. It’s called ‘sheer thickening liquid’ and it stiffens instantaneously into a shield when hit by a bullet. It reverts to liquid state when the energy from the hit dissipates. Even a top of the line bulletproof vest can’t protect you from stabbing, say, or shrapnel. This can. It’s lighter, more flexible, allows maximum mobility.”

  Barney just whistled silently. “It’s a science fiction suit,” he said. “No way this is legal.”

  “You didn’t say anything about legal,” said Sirius with a knowing grin.

  “Yeah, that’s right, I didn’t. Hmm.”

  “Let’s see your hands,” said Karlov to Barney, who displayed them.

  The thumbs flowed toward the (former) middle fingers with a natural web of skin. Except for the fact that each hand was one digit shy, they appeared normal. When Barney made a fist, you could pick out a white webwork of scar tracks. That Dr. Brandywine wasn’t an artist; he was a sorcerer.

  Karlov handed him the customized .22. “Let me see your reach.”

  Barney extended the gun in the general direction of a paper target about forty feet downrange.

  “Okay, now hold that extension for five minutes.”

  And the end of three hundred excruciating seconds — which Sirius had to count off individually — Karlov said, “Now do your trigger pulls.”

  Barney managed nineteen out of forty. His hand started to bleed and he blotted it with a paper towel.

  “Thought so,” said Karlov. “I have confabulated a little assist for you.” He produced a pair of one-inch-wide strips of nylon that resembled dog leashes. “Thumb hole at this end,” he said. “The other end loops around your neck.” He threaded Barney into the contraption and bade him hold the pistol up again. “Now, lean forward. Push with your arm as though you are stretching. You see?”

  The strap provided a stable hand-arm-eye link through very gentle tension. It was like a built-in bench rest. Karlov showed Barney how to adjust the tiny buckles he had installed for a snug fit.

  “How’s your trigger wrap?” He was referring to the surplus reach afforded by using his middle finger to trigger.

  “Feels like I’ve got a Vienna sausage spliced onto the end of my finger.”

  The next gun he handed Barney was a Beretta .92FS Brigadier in 9-millimeter. “Try this with the strap.”

  Barney’s hand wrapped the butt and his fingertip kissed the groove of the match trigger. Karlov had replaced the commander-style hammer with a skeletonized Beretta Elite. “What did you do?”

  “Machined the frame myself. Fattened the grip to make up for the distance in your finger reach. Enlarged the backstrap and made a set of palm swells out of rubber with recessed screw mounts; you can feel out the different sizes and pick what feels natural for you. A four-pound pull in single action. Made the slide heavier. There was too much trigger travel so I put in a speedbump. I think it’s beefy, but the bulk should give you more control. Oh, and it will take hi-cap mags now — 22 rounds.”

  “I’d lose those crappy sights,” said Sirius. “Put some Tritium night sights on it.”

  “Not for close-quarter,” said Karlov. “Discrimination is more important for speed shooting.”

  Sirius nodded. They had all seen men who could shoot faster than they could think. You spot a weapon in the hands of what you think is a hostile, your eyes zap to center mass, your finger pulls the trigger, and a round is flying before your brain catches up and informs you that you have just launched a bullet at a friendly instead of a gunner or at a hostage who turns out to be unarmed.

  Armand rummaged in his bag for a rack of cartridges and loaded Barney’s clip. “Shoot these and tell me what you think. One hundred and twenty-three grain, full metal jacket.”

  “Not hollow points?” said Barney.

  “Might cause it to jam.”

  Armand’s slugs rocketed from the muzzle at 445 foot-pounds and 1,280 feet per second. With the strap, Barney kept all his tags in the main torso grid of the target at twenty-five yards.

  Most gun work took place close-up. Ninety percent of gunfights occur at distances of nine feet or less. Of that ninety percent, eighty percent happen within three feet. Amazingly, defensive shooters tended to score one shot in ten at those distances, because you had to factor in bad light, sleepiness, surprise, or compr
omised placement. A ten percent hit rate when you were shooting for your life was not acceptable.

  “Coat those with Teflon,” said Armand, “and they’ll grease through a vest like butter.”

  “Shotguns?” said Barney.

  “Full size Benelli M4 semi-autos with a stock, a pistol grip, and a combat muzzle. Every load from buckshot to flechettes.” The M4 had originally been developed for Marine Corps and SWAT use. Pumpguns were for showoffs, or the movies.

  “Smoke?” said Barney.

  “Them smoke grenades are the only military ord we have,” said Sirius. “They’re not exactly what you wanted, but—”

  “Do they smoke?” said Barney.

  Sirius decided to put his explanation on hold. “Yeah, they smoke just fine.”

  “Shipping?” said Barney.

  “Already taken care of,” said Sirius.

  “Jesus... anybody want a pizza?” Barney was surprised at how quickly he had run out of questions. These three men had him covered.

  The reason they had thrown Barney their unconditional support was a bit dicey. They all possessed superlative gun expertise and none had cause to casually risk their lives. They all had been in life-or-death situations involving gunplay and the use of firepower. They all had known combat, urban or wartime, usually from a defense posture. What Barney had offered them was the kind of opportunity that comes rarely, and is almost never planned — a tactical assault on superior forces where each man’s knowledge and experience would determine the outcome. No safe fallbacks and no guarantees. You can talk for a lifetime of conviction to certain absolutes, but rarely do you get the chance to purposefully acid-test those maxims in a real-world context. This was a chance for these men to find out if what they knew — or what they thought they knew — was worth anything.