by Joshua Gayou
“Never mind,” she said, and moved back towards the other side of the table.
“Hey…wait-“ I began.
Whatever emotion had been painted across her face a moment before was now completely hidden, covered up by a perfect smile that failed to hide the tightness in her eyes. “I said it’s fine,” she emphasized. “Just never mind.”
She bent over her rifle and proceeded to scrub at it with an old toothbrush, the plastic head clanging aggressively against the metal edges of the receiver. I caught Gibs looking at me uncomfortably from the corner of my eye and shrugged at him in a “What?” gesture. He shook his head, clearly not wanting any part of the exchange, and sighed quietly as he began to organize the sundry parts lying along the table top. Thus arranging everything, he returned to the firing line and began to gather up all the spent shell casings into a bucket.
Nice one, I thought. Queen Bitch of the Year Award goes to yours truly, I guess.
19 – Radios
Gibs
Like most men of greatness, my best ideas tend to come to me when I’m sitting on the shitter. The inspiration to go looking for team radios was no exception.
I’d been thinking about the firefight in Denver again, playing it over in my head, wondering about things I could have done better or at least differently. Thinking about Jessica and Kyle. I remembered a specific point when I was running back to the bus with the others, hauling Jessica’s unresponsive body, with I don’t know how many motorcycles riding up our asses, when I thought how nice it would be to radio in for air support. Never mind air support; just being able to radio back to Davidson would have been a major advantage. We could have dug in at a building and call in some help, at least.
I thought back to how things were when the world made sense; when everything proceeded in a confident fog and all things critical to our survival were safely taken for granted. I used to see walkie-talkies everywhere. Security guards all had them; hell, even the cleaning staff for most moderate to large sized facilities carried the things on their hips all day long. Jackson wasn’t a large city by any stretch of the imagination but it still stood to reason that at least a few of these radios could be out there somewhere. All I had to do was go out and find them.
Feeling invigorated (and also a couple of pounds lighter), I finished up my business and tumbled from the outhouse in a rush to get back to the cabin and find Jake. Everyone else was out and about doing their own thing; no one waved at or called out to me as I advanced on the home. Jake never kept his door locked so I just walked in.
“Jake? Hey, Jake!” I called from the entryway. I stood there for several moments and listened for a response, with only the sound of an empty, dead quiet home coming back at me. I hesitated, trying to think of anywhere else he might be.
“Hello? Ja-ake? Sound off if you don’t want me to take the high-dollar scotch.”
I waited a little while longer before giving up, assuming that he was out somewhere working on any one of the dozens of ongoing projects that had to be completed before winter hit. I shrugged and exited back out the front door.
Out on the porch, I leaned against the railing and took in the view of the valley in a slow, sweeping arc. Progress on the Conex homes was just coming around to the finishing touches, with Oscar putting in the final internals including modified wash basins and some premade cabinetry that the group had managed to score out in the city; really, the stuff was intended to serve as simple garage wall cabinets but Oscar figured out how to install them side by side along the floor and cap them with a little countertop. For a guy who claimed to know jack shit about cabinet making or finish carpentry, he really stepped up to turn those containers into some really nice homes. He’d even added a dividing wall in the center of each unit, with a private bedroom in the rear and a common living area on the opposite end where the front door had been installed. It was a little jarring; outside, they still looked like shipping containers with water barrels stacked on the side, although they were all covered in a solid coat of fresh brown paint and had an assortment of windows along both sides. When you stepped inside, you got the disorienting experience of walking into a nice little bachelor pad in the city…well, you had that experience as long as you didn’t look too close at anything. Eventually, you noticed that there were no electrical outlets or switches, the plumbing looked a little off, and the walls had only been taped off but not painted (Oscar said the occupants could handle that themselves). Despite all that, Oscar and the boys had made some lovely homes for our people. With a little furniture, decoration, and TLC they’d end up a damned sight finer than the trailer and RV we’d managed to pick up, anyway.
Off to the right of the house and just outside of the tree line, Oscar had worked with Amanda to stake off a rough area for her future cabin. They’d done some preliminary work; setting up batter boards, running mason’s string (what Oscar called dry line) around the perimeter, and so forth. Greg and Alan had been out there to set it up with him along with Amanda. Oscar had appreciated their help on the containers so much that he kind of adopted them both as apprentices and was looking for every opportunity to teach them something new. Each time he could show them a thing, especially something that required a bit of math, he’d tell them, “You pay attention to this, you guys. There weren’t a lot of people who knew how to do a layout like this. This is what separates the journeymen from the laborers.” He was adamant that his boys would learn to be carpenters and not just ditch diggers.
I’m not exaggerating, either. I overheard him say at one point to them both, “There ain’t enough parents to go around anymore, so you boys are gonna be my sons now. I’m looking out for you two now like my little girl. You remember that.”
He reminded me how much growing Greg and Alan both had left to do. I kind of made it a point to get right with those two when I saw how Oscar interacted with them; made it a point to let them know they were still cool with me and invested some one on one time with both of them at the range. I don’t know if I ever told Oscar how I learned from watching him with the boys. I guess I’d better before too much time goes by.
Jake’s voice came from behind me, unexpected: “Were you looking for me, Gibs?”
I about jumped out of my skin; turned on my heel to see him standing in the open doorway of the house. “Where the hell did you come from? Jesus Christ!”
“From the house.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called? I must have been standing in your doorway for a minute.”
He nodded as he held up a paperback book that looked like it’d been beaten halfway to death and said, “Sorry. I was trying to learn how to build a smokehouse…meat preservation and all. I have to concentrate pretty hard when I read. I tend to tune everything out.” He rolled the book up and mashed it into his back pocket. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I want to organize a trip into town. I’ll take a small team and go looking for radios.”
Jake scratched his chin and looked out into the field. “I suppose you’re not looking for new music…”
“No, two-way radios,” I said. “FM or something like. There are all kinds of places out there where we should be able to find them. I want everyone to be able to stay in communication with each other when we’re out scavenging. It’s essential for coordinating activities or calling in help if we get into some shit. I can think of a few times already where they would have made a pretty big difference for me.”
Jake lowered himself into one of the chairs on the deck and asked, “What’s the effective range on these things? Do you think they’d reach from Jackson back here?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “With an unobstructed line of sight, I suppose we might get four miles or so over UHF. Twice that with VHF. But again, that’s best case with a clear line of sight. There are a lot of mountains around here. I don’t think the signal would make it. I wouldn’t count on anything better than a two mile range. Good enough for a couple of teams working through
an area, though.”
“Yes, I agree. You know, I never thought I’d say this but I really miss cell phones.”
I laughed and said, “No shit.”
“When will you go?” asked Jake.
“As soon as I can get a team together. I’d like Amanda to come along, if that’s alright.”
“Sure, as long as she’s good with it,” Jake said. “Out of curiosity, why her specifically? I would have suggested her anyway, certainly, but I’m interested in what you’re seeing as well.”
“Because she’s a hell of a shot with that ass-backwards rifle of hers. She can hold a group as tight as I can at a hundred yards from a standing position and I’ve been doing this for decades. And, from what I understand, she keeps her head in a fight. So I want to take her and a less experienced person out when I go. I’ll feel better if there are two people who know their shit.”
“Yes, well, she does seem to have a natural aptitude. You know, her husband wanted to be a Marine, yes?”
“That’s what I hear,” I said.
“Maybe the wrong person wanted to sign up.”
I shrugged and glanced back over my shoulder into the valley. Davidson was hauling water in a couple of buckets over to the four new homes, probably charging the gravity tanks. He stopped long enough to wave at me. I nodded back. “You never can tell,” I said. “I met plenty of people who dreamed about being Marines who made fantastic Marines. Then there were ones who should have excelled but didn’t do so well. There’s just no telling who’ll keep their head when you hand them a rifle and order them to go fight. Trying to guess is typically just a waste of time.”
Ultimately, I took Wang out with Amanda and me. I had a feeling about him. I’d never actually seen him in a serious fight; the ugliest one we’d had so far had him hunkered down in a bus along with everyone else while Davidson and I shot rifles out a back window. There were little things he did, though, that suggested he could be one of the good ones. He was smart and cagey, for one thing, which is always a bonus when combined with other abilities. Additionally, he’d expressed a desire to fight against numerically superior forces in defense of his group’s territory out in Colorado Springs, rather than just bugging out to hide until they went away. I was well aware of the possibility that all of this could have just been Wang talking big, of course, but I had no indication yet that Wang was all talk. One never knew who might end up being a secret hard ass. If I had been pressed to make a bet, I would have put my money down on Wang, despite what I told Jake about the futility of guessing.
We went out in Amanda’s jeep because it was the most agile and capable small vehicle we had. She drove since she knew the area better than either of us; I sat in the front passenger seat trying to clock everything at once, suppressing the urge to call out every little bit of trash in the road, and Wang was in the back. I was feeling pretty good about our loadout. With a small three-man team, there were enough weapons to go around such that we each had a rifle and sidearm. I was carrying my MR556 (the M4/M203 having become Davidson’s weapon after I had the necessary time to get him up to speed on it) along with my Beretta M9.
I equipped Wang with a rifle from Jake’s cabinet o’ goodies; yet another AR variant of some sort. There were so many different manufacturers of these after Colt’s patents expired in ’77 that it became damned near impossible to keep up with all the different brands. There were a few manufacturer names where you just knew you’d be able to trust the weapon with your life, of course, and then there were the ones out in circulation that you learned to run from. The rifle I settled on for Wang was made by PWS (or Primary Weapons Systems). I’d never fired one of these personally but I had read good things about the company in general so I took Wang out to the range and we both ran a few hundred rounds through it. I liked the way it operated but the manufacturer name wasn’t what drew me to the weapon; it was the barrel length. My rifle as well as Davidson’s M4 were both outstanding weapons but they had shorter barrels, having both been designed to function well in CQB scenarios. The issue with a short barrel is that you’re sacrificing a lot of muzzle energy, which becomes a problem when you’re shooting 5.56 rounds.
The 5.56x45mm is a flat-out devastating round…provided it has enough ass behind it when it hits you. If the bullet strikes you with enough energy, it tends to yaw inside of you, fragments into shards, and dumps every bit of its energy into your soft tissues. As it passes through you, it creates a temporary cavity inside of your body that expands rapidly out from the center; there is basically a little kinetic bomb going off inside of you when it impacts. This temporary cavity can and will expand to the size of a bowling ball; even larger than a bowling ball, in some cases, if the bullet strikes bone, which seems to sharpen impact and transfer energy more violently. Anything in the path of this expanding bubble (your muscle, organs, and any other soft tissue) is ripped to shreds in the violent displacement and will bleed out rapidly after the temporary cavity collapses in on itself and everything slams back into place.
The catch is that the bullet has to really be moving for this to happen reliably; about 2,500 feet per second or better. Bullets lose speed over time. They start losing speed, in fact, as soon as they exit the muzzle of the rifle. When you have a longer rifle barrel, muzzle velocity is maximized and the bullet will travel for farther distances at a faster rate.
When you’re dealing with an M4 style carbine having a barrel length of fourteen and a half inches, you’re giving up a tremendous amount of muzzle velocity over distance. You’re basically creating a situation where the bullet isn’t getting the energy it needs to do its job, cutting the effective range from around five hundred meters down to maybe three hundred or so. This was the primary criticism of the 5.56 round by the way, which I always felt was foolish. If a bullet requires a certain barrel length to perform properly (twenty inches, in this case, for best results), you don’t cut five and a half inches off the barrel and then claim the round is a piece of shit when it doesn’t behave the way you’d like. That’s just moronic.
Wang’s new rifle, incidentally, had an eighteen inch barrel. I’d personally seen Wang perform better than everyone else in our group at distances in excess of three hundred yards on open iron sights; he was the right man to carry the long gun.
Amanda had her ever-present Israeli salad shooter with her as well as her Glock 17 in a leg holster. Along with these items, I was wearing my plate carrier and rig while the others had some sort of concealable ballistic vests which I had been informed would stand up to at least a .38 round at close range. I hadn’t seen this myself nor was I aware of them being tested for any higher caliber but I still felt better with my buddies wearing them. They were bound to be more effective than just t-shirts and good intentions.
Before we left, Oscar offered the tip that any large scale construction site would most likely have a collection of two way radios. They had apparently used them all the time when he was in the business. Some of those buildings he worked on got up into the tens of thousands of square feet with the work crew spread out over the whole area, so it made more sense for the guys to communicate over radios than it did for them to hoof it from group to group to have a chit chat. We all thanked him and later cursed his name when we drove all over Jackson and the surrounding area looking for anything that resembled a moderate to large scale construction site.
In the grand scheme of things, Jackson is goddamned small. A Kmart is about as big as it gets in this town.
Now, I don’t know how it happened, but at some point (a point that transpired some two hours after rolling all over the place) we realized that we’d completely forgotten why we were out there. We were looking for radios. We’d ended up searching exclusively for anything that looked like a large construction site.
“Look around for heavy equipment,” I said after Amanda commented that it didn’t appear as though we would find something anytime soon. “Earth movers, cranes…a backhoe.”
“I think it’s time we give
up on the construction angle, guys,” Wang said from the back.
“What?” I said, turning in my seat to look at him.
“Oscar was being helpful by giving us options but construction sites aren’t the only place we’ll find radios. Where’s the closest bank? Banks had security guards, remember? They probably have a whole stack of radios wherever it is those guys had their break room.”
I faced forward and sat for a moment with my mouth open, crafting a sufficiently toxic insult to apply to myself while Amanda began to laugh. “Well, I’m glad we brought him!” she said.
“What is it? What’d I do?” asked Wang.
“Nothing, man,” I said. “She’s just laughing at how stupid we seem to be. Amanda, do you know where the closest bank is from here?”
“Yeah, there’s a Wells Fargo just off Buffalo Way. I’ll have us there in ten.”
“Good deal. Hey, Wang?” I said.
“Yeah, Gibs.”
“Thanks for setting us straight. Not to be an ass or anything, but do you think you could do that before two hours go by next time?”
“Sorry, man. It had only just occurred to me, really. I had tunnel vision, too.”
“I suppose that makes me feel better,” Amanda said, still laughing.
“God, I sure don’t,” I said. “Remind me to slap Oscar the next time I see him.”
“It’s not his fault,” Wang said. “He was just being helpful.”
“Stop being reasonable, damn it. I really want this to be Oscar’s fault.”