Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

He walked back to her and held the large, silver gun out in front of her. “Don’t hold it like the Glock; you’ll screw your hand up. Just keep ’em wrapped around the wood. Go ahead…”

She reached up gingerly and took the smooth wooden grips of the pistol in hand, marveling at the weight of it. The Glock was feather-light compared to this monster; she felt as though she could beat someone to death with it. She settled her left hand onto the grip briefly before Gibs tsked and began adjusting her positioning. As he did, he muttered absently.

“You don’t want your hand up by the cylinder. Some of the explosion comes out the side. Hurts like a bastard. There… hold there. Yeah. Now, you can roll double-action, but I’d just as soon you cock it between each shot. You’re more accurate that way, okay?”

She didn’t understand half of what he said but, for the moment, she had a hot weapon in her hands. She took a note to ask him about the meaning of double-action later. For now, she understood that she was to cock the hammer before pulling the trigger, and that seemed good enough to proceed with. Gibs removed to a position just behind her and said, “Six shots, Lizzy. Make ’em count.”

The first shot was an eye-opener for her. Even with the ear protection, she could tell she was dealing with something more powerful; she could feel the concussive force of it in her sinuses. Another hole had appeared in the target, halfway between Gibs’s double-taps and her belly shot.

“Go ahead,” Gibs urged.

She did, and the second blast was just like the first. She discovered she had to adjust her grip after each shot; no matter how she squeezed, the revolver bucked in her hand like a living animal, and she knew instinctively that she should give the weapon more leeway to roll rather than try to overpower it, as she did with the Glock. She pulled the hammer back a third time and squeezed the trigger. Instead of the wild jump, she was met with the dull, apologetic click of a hammer dropped on an empty chamber. The nose of the weapon jerked down a good six inches.

Lizzy’s eyes went wide while her heart rate quickened, rattling against her ribcage. She firmed her grip on the weapon and held it out steady, anticipating a follow-on detonation at any moment.

“You don’t need to keep it out there; it wasn’t a misfire,” Gibs said.

“No?” she asked, voice quavering in alarm.

“Nah. In most cases—most, but not all—there would have still been a pop on a misfire from the primer. Did you hear a pop?”

“No!”

“That’s right. There was no pop because the chamber’s empty.”

She glanced at him, a little startled, then lowered the weapon and fiddled with it a bit, attempting to drop out the cylinder.

“Pull that tab back,” Gibs suggested.

She did, and the cylinder dropped right out, showing four bullets and two empty holes.

“What the hell?” Lizzy barked.

“Watch that mouth. Never mind the load. Did you or did you not see your barrel drop on the empty?”

She played the last few moments back in her head; realized it had, in fact, dropped quite a bit. Bemused, she said, “I… I really didn’t think I was flinching. For real…”

“Of course not,” Gibs said. “Nobody intends to flinch; it just happens.”

“Well, how do you stop?”

“Exposure,” Gibs said promptly. “You have to shoot a lot, especially with handguns if you want to be any good. It’s a perishable skillset—”

“What does that mean? Per-ish-able?”

“It means that it goes away if you don’t practice regularly. Even me; if I don’t work the pistol on a consistent basis, I’ll have a good twenty rounds or so where I blink and flinch like crazy before I get used to it again and clam down.”

She looked at the unfired rounds, wearing an aggrieved expression. She spun the cylinder with her left hand and then locked it back into the frame before it could slow down. She lifted the pistol, cocked, and fired, again hitting the target low. Grinding her teeth, she repeated the process. This time, she hit an empty chamber, and the barrel dipped a few inches.

“Ugh, crap!” she said.

“You’re concentrating on it too much. If you’re putting all of your will into not flinching, it’s almost a sure thing that you will. You need to go the other direction. You have to relax your mind as well as all the little muscles running up your neck, into your face, and over your head. Generally, it works like this: if you can stop blinking when you fire, you’ll stop flinching.”

“I didn’t think I was blinking.”

“Heh, no, you were.”

“Well, why didn’t you say something!”

Gibs reached in front of her and gently grasped the revolver, which she carefully released. “One thing at a time, okay? If I coach you on too many points at once, it’ll all become a confusing mess. Your grip is looking good for the most part. You’re not limp-wristing it. Flinching is really just something that’s solved through the application of a few hundred rounds.”

He shuffled back over to the table through his own muddy tracks in the snow, unloaded the revolver, and put it back in its holster. He didn’t spend a great deal of time with the old-fashioned weapon personally, but their utility as a teaching tool was indisputable. That and the fact that the heavier calibers were capable of caving chests and cantalouping heads; if they could be found, of course…

“Hey, Gibs?”

He turned to look at her, noting a sudden thoughtfulness in her voice.

“Yeah?”

“What did my mom say when she asked you to teach me?”

He sighed and thought very hard about his answer.

“Did I ever tell you about my father, Lizzy?”

“No…”

“Yeah. Mostly that’s because there wasn’t so much to tell. You’ll excuse my language, please, when I say he was a despicable wad of shit, and that’s putting things in the best possible light. Guy thought he was a real romantic, see? He liked to go out late at night, set up little girlfriends on the side. He walked out on us when I was pretty young. So, it was just Mom with her waitress job trying to raise me and my two brothers up.”

“I didn’t know you had brothers,” Lizzy said.

“I don’t,” said Gibs, and she fell silent. She thought about this a moment and, when realization dawned on her, she said, “Hey! That… doesn’t that mean that your dad should still be alive?”

He shrugged in disinterest. “Maybe. It’s nothing to me, honestly. He never had a lot of time for me, so… you know. Anyway, it was just her and three testosterone-fueled idiot sons. Swear to god, Lizzy, if we weren’t retarded we were borderline. We got into all kinds of crap we shouldn’t have; were even brought home more than once in a police car—”

“Oh, wow, what did you do?”

“That’s… that’s not the point-look, just accept the fact that we were pains in the ass, okay? So sometimes, The Kraken had to come out and lay into us a bit—The Kraken is what I called her when she had to beat on us, see? She wasn’t strong enough to make it hurt with a hand, so she had to take a belt to us.”

Lizzy, who had never rated anything more than a raised voice and a firm swat, tried to imagine a situation in which her mother was so infuriated that she lashed out with a belt, and failed. Just the thought of such a thing, of how angry her mother would have to be to do it, made the girl feel weak through her knees.

Gibs continued on, completely oblivious to her thoughts. “Sometimes, I think she may have taken it too far—or at least, she took it farther than she intended. She got really sweet after. She’d get up early to make us breakfast… or sometimes she would take us out for ice cream, though she certainly couldn’t afford it. Do you understand where I’m going with this?”