by C. A. Gray
I shifted on my bed of concrete, cushioned by an old bedspread that smelled of mothballs from one of the nearby abandoned houses. I was disoriented for a moment when I blinked my eyes open—the sun was already high in the sky, and I was sweating under the blankets.
Beckenshire.
My location came back to me at last. We’d arrived in the late afternoon, however many days ago that was. Most of us could barely stand at that point. We ate what little food we’d carried on our backs, and most of the group just crashed on the concrete of what once must’ve been a parking lot.
How long did I sleep? I sat up, stretched, and looked around. About half of the makeshift beds were still occupied. At least I wasn’t the only one.
I heard footsteps and turned to see Will approach behind me.
“Good afternoon. Feel better?”
I nodded, but noted that his eyes were still bloodshot. “How long have you been up?”
“Couple hours.” He produced a small electronic circuitboard, and handed it to me. “It works.”
I gasped. “Is this the jammer? You built it already?”
He nodded. “Jackson and I did. He got up at the crack of dawn and gathered food for the rest of us too. I came to see if anybody else was up and hungry.”
“He got up at dawn?” I groaned. “How is that possible?”
Will shook his head. “No idea. The guy’s a machine.”
I noted the admiration in Will’s voice, and my heart sank for some reason I could not identify.
Why should I want him to be jealous of Jackson?
Aloud, I said, “Well, I’m definitely hungry.” I stood up and brushed myself off, prepared to follow him.
Only Molly, Brenda, and Nelson stood around a little makeshift stove: sticks and fire with a pot of oatmeal suspended above it from a chain. Presumably old camping gear scavenged from the houses. Molly served me in a real ceramic bowl, albeit chipped, and sprinkled in some fresh berries from the forest, and cinnamon powder from a shaker.
“Today, we feast!” Molly said, winking at me as she gave me an actual spoon.
The other three were deep in conversation when we approached, so I chose a seat further off to the side so as not to interrupt them.
Will sat beside me, and volunteered, “So on the way here, Jean had a great idea. The control center sends out signals in their district, but the districts are too big for the signal to reach to its outskirts. They use repeaters to amplify the signals. So instead of destroying the control centers directly, we can break the repeaters—all it’ll take is cutting some wires.”
“Really?” I didn’t know anything about this, so wasn’t sure what else to say.
Will nodded. “But first we have to find out where the repeaters are located. Which means going on the grid yet again to access a netscreen and collect the information. As soon as we have enough of these babies,” he turned the jammer over in his palm, “that’ll be the next step.”
I sat up straighter. “Oh yeah? Who’s going with you, and when?”
“The usual,” Will said, “Jackson, Nick, Alec, and Jean. We’ll go as soon as we’ve found the parts and built five jammers. In case we’re not all standing right next to each other, each of us will need our own.”
“So you need a team to go look for supplies to build more jammers then?”
He shook his head. “Jackson, Jacob, and Alec are already off looking for them, and then Jackson and I made the first one together, so he knows how to do it and can show the other two. Nick wanted me to stay here with him and strategize the best path to get to Friedrichsburg, the nearest inhabited town from here. It’s still a few days away, though.”
I shoved the last spoon of oatmeal into my mouth and stood up. “I’m going to find the others and help build jammers, then.”
Will seemed almost confused by this announcement. “Why? They don’t need any help—”
“Because I’m useless just sitting here. I want to do something. Which way did they go?”
He looked a little hurt, but Will pointed. “They headed off in that direction.”
I returned my bowl to Molly, who set it in a pile of dishes and smiled at me. I turned back to Will. “Great, thanks. And thanks for telling me about breakfast.”
I set out in the direction that Will had indicated—it was an entire subdivision of houses, but the hunters weren’t bothering to keep their volume down. I spotted the house they’d entered pretty quickly, as the door was wide open and all the windows, too.
“Ugh,” I gagged as I entered, pulling my shirt up over my nose. My shirt at this point was none too clean either, but the house smelled intensely of mildew. The walls were rotted, and floorboards warped.
I rounded a corner in the hall and ran into Alec. He scowled at me, as usual.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to help you guys look for parts,” I told him.
“Well, we don’t need you. You’ll just get in the way.”
“Let her help if she wants to help,” I heard Jackson’s voice from another room. “The jammers were her idea in the first place.”
I gave Alec a superior look, and he huffed as he ducked away.
I followed Jackson’s voice into what must’ve once been a living room, and found him sitting on the floor with parts strewn around him and a textbook open. He used the blunt edge of a knife to scrape a circuitboard clean.
“Where did you get that from?” I pointed at a tiny metal object, and consulted the textbook. “That’s… the trimmer capacitor, right?”
He nodded. “Right. Got it from the inside of a watch. You just pry them open with this.” He indicated a tiny set of screwdrivers they must’ve found too.
I scrutinized the text and the supplies. “Mmm-kay. I can find this stuff.”
“Why don’t I just show you how to make this one? I think Alec and Jacob will have enough for five soon anyway.”
I shrugged, and said as casually as I could, “I know. But it’s always good to have an extra, right? I mean we’ll probably all need one eventually.”
Jackson shrugged. “I guess you’re right. That’s fine, go for it.”
I turned away from him to hide my smile. I actually just lied to Jackson and got away with it!
Around forty minutes and two houses later, I’d returned with all the supplies I needed. Jackson and Jacob had moved outside, presumably because they couldn’t stand the smell anymore, and Jackson was showing Jacob how to solder the connections together.
“So the soldering iron doesn’t need power?” I asked, pointing at it.
Jacob shook his head and grinned at me. “Nope, solar powered, how neat is that?”
“Ok,” Jackson told him, “let it cool and then go test it. Just use a screwdriver to turn it to the right frequency.” He handed the jammer to Jacob carefully. I sat down beside Jackson once Jacob wandered off, and dumped my supplies on the ground next to him.
“Go on and build yours,” I said, gesturing at the next set of parts strewn around where Jackson sat. “I’ll just watch what you do and copy you.”
“Ok. Scrape your circuitboard clean first,” he said, handing me a blunt knife as he took one for himself. I obeyed, cringing with the noise. I watched as he extracted his FM transmitter chip from an old radio and mounted it on the circuitboard. I copied him. He extracted a trimmer capacitor from his old watch and mounted it beside the transmitter chip; I did the same. I watched as he connected the battery leads…
Suddenly he stopped working, looking up and around. The movement alarmed me, even though I couldn’t hear anything. “What is it?”
A few minutes later I heard a distant rumble. It grew louder, and then it faded away.
Alec poked his head out of the house. Frowning, he called to Jackson, “That’s not good.”
“What was it?” asked Jacob from somewhere else inside the house.
“A plane again,” Alec called back, his tone ominous. “Pretty su
re.” He looked at Jackson and said, “What do you think the chances are that the Potentate suspects we’re here?”
Jackson breathed out slowly. “Slim, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Beckenshire was a really big city once upon a time,” I pointed out. “So if that was the Potentate, and if he is looking for us, he’s still got a lot of territory to cover. But I don’t know how much he can see from up there.”
Jackson looked worried, but took the soldering iron and fused his connections. Then he handed it to me. I copied him, and watched as he used the screwdriver to turn the frequency of his jammer.
“All you want is the 7 to 12 hertz range,” he told me. “Will said that was the frequency of the control center signals, the same frequency as a kind of brain waves called alpha, which are sort of between peak consciousness and sleep. He said that’s the range for maximum suggestibility.”
I bit my lip, nodded, and did as he said. Then I asked, “So you and Will are friends now, huh?”
Jackson glanced up at me. “Yeah, I guess.” Scrape, scrape, scrape. Then he added in a tone I couldn’t read, “I was a little surprised too. He’s a really good guy, though.”
“I’m glad.”
“Are you?” he probed.
I thought for a minute. Then I said sincerely, “Yeah. Yeah, I really am.”
Jackson nodded and said nothing.
I turned on the jammer, tuned the frequency to the right range, and smiled. “Excellent. Thanks for the tutorial.” I stood up abruptly and brushed the dirt off my pants. “I think I’m going to go try to kill something for our dinner now.”
“Whoa, whoa!” Jackson looked up with an incredulous laugh. “By yourself?”
“Sure. I can’t have you holding my hand every single time, can I?” I lifted my chin a little. “I can figure it out.”
Alec, who must’ve been listening to this, called as he approached, “Not a matter of ‘figuring it out,’ Princess. Hunting is a skill. You either got it or you don’t.”
“And how does one cultivate new skills exactly?” I shot back, hands on my hips. “Practice, right?”
I felt Jackson’s eyes on me, and turned my defiant expression upon him. But he actually looked—or did I imagine it?—a little bit admiring.
“Look, I never even gave you a proper shooting lesson,” he said. “Let me finish the last of these, and then I’ll take you out.”
“Nah, go on,” said Alec. “Jake and I can finish up. We’re all gonna be hungry again in a few hours anyway.”
As Jackson lowered his head to push himself up to standing, I surreptitiously glanced at Alec to make sure he wasn’t watching me either. Then I slipped the jammer I’d made into my pocket.
Chapter 16: Jackson
Kate didn’t think I saw her put the jammer in her pocket, but I’d been waiting for it from the moment she showed up to “help”. I thought about confronting it directly and asking what she intended to do with it, but I was pretty sure I already knew: she was going to go find her brother Charlie. That’s what she’d said before. She had that forced nonchalance about her, which told me that no matter what I said or did, Kate was going and I couldn’t stop her. I could try to protect her, but there were no guarantees that I would succeed.
So she needed to be able to protect herself. The least I could do was teach her that much, and hope she was a quick study.
“Leave the bow this time,” I told her as we reached the weapons stash, a makeshift pile near where we’d slept. “Of the guns, rifles are best for hunting, but why don’t you grab one of the pistols. It’s more versatile, and the recoil isn’t nearly as bad.”
She didn’t argue with me and reached down for a smaller caliber, the one I thought she’d pick.
“No no,” I told her, picking up one with a 14 inch barrel and handing it to her instead. “These are more accurate.”
She took it, turned it over in her hand, and frowned. “It seems so much clunkier.”
“Only because the barrel is longer. But you want that—the longer the barrel, the straighter the bullet’s trajectory. Plus it’ll fit your hand better. Try it.”
She gripped it and aimed at the trees, turning back to me and shrugging. “Ok, and bullets…” She crouched down to inspect the types of ammo on the ground which we’d both brought with us from the caves and found among the houses of former hunters in Beckenshire. She grabbed a 750 grain.
“Nope, those are for rifles,” I said. “Heavy bullets like those are more accurate for longer ranges. We should start with shorter range, so you need lighter bullets. Go for the 115 grains, here. Do you know how to load it?” I showed her once, dumped the bullets into my hand again, and handed both of them to her to try.
“Mmm-kay,” she murmured to herself, her brow knit in concentration as she copied me.
“Bring the bullets with you,” I said, grabbing a weapon myself and shoving it into my waistband. I led the way out from the concrete where we’d slept into a wide open, grassy plain. “Now we need to come up with something for targets…”
“We’re not hunting for dinner?” she asked.
“We will, but one gunshot that misses will scare off all the animals in the area. Gotta make sure you’re accurate enough before we take you in there.”
“There were posters of the Potentate and a couple of Tribunal members in both houses we raided,” Kate grinned at me impishly. “We’d have to find some way to prop them up, but…”
I chuckled. “Ha. That’ll work… why don’t you go grab those and we’ll see if we can prop them up with some sticks or something. I’ll go back to the cookout site and see if I can collect a few empty cans to throw up after that, in lieu of clay pigeons. Since most of what you’ll be aiming at in the future will be moving.”
About ten minutes later when I returned with the cans, Kate had already retrieved a grinning poster of the Potentate, his dark hair slicked back, his teeth whiter than anything I’d seen since arriving in the Republic. She affixed it to a pair of long metal brackets she must’ve found in a junk pile somewhere, and fastened it with duct tape.
She was resourceful, I had to give her that.
“If you’re good, you’ll rip that thing to shreds pretty quick,” I observed.
In response, she held up a paper roll, presumably of more propaganda posters. “That’s ok, we can just swap it out!” She jogged back to my side, but I moved our distance up to about 15 yards away from the poster.
“This close?” Kate asked, sounding disappointed.
“Just to warm up,” I told her. “You’re right handed, so stand at shoulder width distance, but put your left foot forward, right foot back—” I adjusted her stance with my hands. “Good. Right hand straight forward now, elbow almost locked but not quite, and steady it with your left arm. Bend that arm at about 120 degrees, with the elbow pointing at the ground… yep, that’s it. Okay, so your right arm will control moving up and down—” I stepped in toward her, close enough to move her arms with my hands around her wrists, “while your left will control moving side to side.” I demonstrated again. “Good. Now tilt your head just a little to the right—” I gave her head a little nudge with my fingertips, “so you can line up your view with the barrel. Good. Now don’t focus on the target directly; focus somewhere in between the front sight here and the target. But in the future if you don’t have time to do all this, just focus on the front sight directly.” I nodded at her. “Ready?”
“What, we just start? No meditation first?” she teased, raising an eyebrow and casting a half glance over her shoulder at me.
I suppressed a smile. “Shooting itself is kind of meditative, once you get into a rhythm. It’s all eye/hand coordination so it doesn’t require a lot of brainpower once you know what you’re doing. I’m hoping you’ll get there soon. All right, take a deep breath in—good—and let it all the way out. Empty your lungs completely. Okay—fire.”
The gun exploded, and the bull
et went through the bottom edge of the poster, missing the Potentate’s image entirely.
“Not bad for a first try,” I said. “I saw you move the barrel down at the last second just a bit—I assume you were anticipating the recoil and correcting for it. Try again, but concentrate on squeezing the trigger really slowly…”
This time the bullet landed just next to the Potentate’s ear.
“Look at that!” she crowed, turning to me.
I grinned at her. “Nice! Keep going!”
I stood back and watched as Kate fired, one round after another. Most of her shots landed pretty close together, and she got several through the image of the Potentate’s head. She was a natural.
Fortunately. My admiration gave way to worry again. I took a deep breath. If only there was a way I could stop her.
She turned to me, her cheeks flushed with exhilaration. “I’ll swap out a new poster,” she volunteeered, jogging over to remove the tattered image of the Potentate and replaced it with what I assumed must be one of the Tribunal members. When she jogged back to me, she said, “I don’t think I’m meditating yet though, I’m still concentrating pretty hard. I would’ve thought you’d say that would make me worse—I’d miss details or whatever, because I’m focusing too much on one thing.”
“You will miss other details of your environment,” I admitted. “But you still have to start by learning basic skills before you can tune into everything else. There will come a point in mastery where your muscles know what to do without direction, and when consciously attending to your movements actually causes you to be less accurate, not more. Only then will you be able to expand your awareness, and then it will make you better.”
“So it’s kind of like playing the piano,” she said.
That caught me off guard. “You play?”
She nodded, as she got into position again. She fired, ripping a hole through the Tribunal member’s upper right clavicle. “My family had a piano, from before the crash. It was horribly out of tune, but I taught myself how to play when I was young. I’m good too.” She cast a glance over her shoulder as soon as the words were out of her mouth, suddenly self-conscious. “Not that I’m bragging or anything—”