The Summer the World Ended (23 page)

“I’m not a little kid anymore.” Out of ammo. Pistol time.

“No… I suppose you’re not.” Dad crossed the room behind her to sit on the bed.

Despite her mood, she leaned back until she rested against his knee. Soldier after fake soldier came at her in the same way, always a few seconds too slow to get a shot off before she killed them. Head shot, groin shot, head shot, head shot, body shot. When they started spawning with heavy armor and riot shields, she whipped out the claymore mines and chokepoint tactics.

“You’re rather good at that.”

“Mmm.” She wasn’t having fun, this was venting… and even that wasn’t helping much. She couldn’t make the AI rage-quit a match.

“Guess you played this a lot back home?”

“Can we get Internet? I’ll probably need it for school… you know, to do research.”

“I already called. I was going to surprise you when they showed up.”

She paused the game. “Really?”

He smiled. “Yep. I hope the wireless net has enough bandwidth for your game.”

“I…” She jumped up and hugged him. “I wanted it more to talk to Amber.”

He squeezed her.

“Thanks, Dad.” She sat on the bed next to him, shooting a guilty stare at the rug for sniping at him over a childhood nickname.

The resigned expression that spread over his face at her declaration of non-kid-dom remained. He glanced at the TV screen frozen in the image of an over-the-pistol view of muzzle flare and a man taking a slug in the cheek.

“You played that game a lot?”

Riley crossed her legs on the mattress, grabbed the controller, and un-paused it. “Yeah. Every night… usually with Amber. After we got good at it, we’d get in matches just to piss people off. A lot of old people play too, and they get all kinds of foamy at the mouth when they think little kids beat them. Some of the stuff they say is hilarious.”

She took out another ten opponents, and ducked into an alley for a breather between waves.

“Do you think you could kill a man to protect yourself?”

Pause.

“What?” She whirled around.

Dad, his expression still blasé, got up and walked out. She stared at the doorway for a moment.
Freaky.
After two breaths, she resumed playing and planted a couple of claymore mines on her way up a staircase. Sniper rifles sucked for botmatching, but this was getting boring. She wanted a challenge.

Plop
.

Something heavy enough to feel landed on the mattress behind her. Riley paused the game again and twisted around to find a black handgun lying there. The sight of it filled her with the fear that the police would batter through her door any second and arrest her for laying eyes on a weapon.

“Dad… is that a―?”

“Beretta 92FS, Military Police model with a 15-round magazine.”

“I-is it loaded?”

“Always treat an unknown weapon like it’s loaded.”

She gawked at it, afraid to move, as if the Grim Reaper himself was a foot away from her ass.

“If someone was going to hurt you… could you protect yourself?”

“That’s real, isn’t it?” Riley lifted her gaze from the weapon to her father’s unfazed, calm, blank face. “Dad… you’re like, seriously freaking me the hell out.”

“S’pose we’ll have to fix that.” He slurped coffee.

iley leaned on the counter listening to the soft, rhythmic
thrush-thrush
of the dishwasher operating, trying to decide how she felt. Too much happening at once had left her numb.
Mom… Yeah… Mom.
Dad had gotten a little spooky last night, and she was still a bit ticked off that he’d left the gun on her bed. She didn’t want to touch it, afraid of hurting herself. After staring at it for heck knows how long, she risked a two-fingered pinch of the handle and set it on the floor so she could sleep.

Then, there was Kieran—and the embarrassed, eager, lonely, happy, skeptical morass that churned in her gut. The last time a boy had shown her any interest, he’d been bait in a cruel prank. The ‘dark room’ they’d gone to make out in turned out to be the middle of the football field, and the entire crowd saw her standing there, blindfolded, kissing empty air.

Getting stuffed in a locker was better. At least no one could see me.

A snarl escaped her at the memory of Robbie Zimmer’s smug grin.
As if one of the football jocks would have really liked me.
For an instant, she was back under the floodlights, wanting to burrow a hole into the ground and hide. She shrank in on herself, hair tickled her bare right shoulder. The oversized white shirt hung lower than the hem of her shorts, but had a huge neck opening. This time, she hadn’t made the same mistake and had a tube top on under it.

I hate Robbie Zimmer.
She daydreamed about Kieran fighting him. Robbie was thicker, but Kieran probably had an inch or so height advantage.

“Come on, Riley.” Dad’s voice came through the kitchen wall from the back.

She pushed away from the counter and scuffed her flip-flops to the sliding glass door. Dad waited about twenty yards from the ‘patio’ by a folding cafeteria-style table. To her left, a large grey-white box sat on wood blocks thick enough to be railroad ties. It was almost as big as a Prius, and had four one-inch metal pipes running up to the roof. A cap at the right corner bore the label: Diesel Only. Lettering along the side read ‘New Mexico Solar.’ Naturally, the ‘o’ in solar was a smiling cartoon sun.

After pulling the door closed, she walked over to him, waving her foot every so often to get sand out from between her sole and the foam rubber. The table had a few boxes of bullets, three handguns, and that rifle Dad waved at the idiot plus two others and a pump shotgun. Riley froze in place, as if one wrong breath would cause a horrible accident.

“Holy crap, Dad. Where’d you get all these guns?” Riley blinked. “You planning on taking over a small South American country?”

He shrugged. “Picked them up over the years. Most came from this guy who runs a shop in T or C. Army Navy surplus place. I get a lot of stuff from him. ‘Course you also have the occasional gun show.”

“Those are assault rifles…” She shivered. “Aren’t they illegal?”

Dad smiled. “Oh, you poor brainwashed child. Second amendment. That federal assault weapons ban died in 2004, and New Mexico didn’t enact any replacement… not that I’d give two craps if they did. The government’s afraid of a population that can defend themselves.”

Riley tucked her hands under her armpits and took a step back. “Mom would drop dead if she saw these. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Go put on some real shoes,” said Dad, without turning. Evidently, he’d heard them snap on her approach.

“Why? It’s hot. What does it matter what kind of shoes I wear to… uh, shoot. Not like sneakers would stop a bullet.”

The
click, click, click
she’d been hearing turned out to be him putting rounds into a pistol magazine. “No, and I’m hoping you’re not so uncoordinated that you shoot yourself in the foot. I’m thinking about hot brass.”

“Hot brass?” She blinked.

Dad held up a bullet. “I’m not sure what you see in those games, hon, but only the tip goes flying. The ass end is a casing, and after you shoot one, it’s hot enough to burn. If that falls on your foot, it’ll hurt and likely leave a mark.” He glanced down at her feet. “Go put your sneakers on.”

“Okay, okay… fine.” She took three steps.

“And a top with a more closed neck. Brass loves to get under your shirt. At least you don’t have any cleavage for it to get stuck in yet.”

“Dad!” Crimson.
What the hell is wrong with him?

Riley grumbled. Bad enough she had to touch guns, did she have to be uncomfortable while doing it? She ran inside, changed to a snug white tee with dark blue quarter sleeves and a Nike swoosh on it, and traded the flops for her black Keds, skipping socks. She wondered on the way back out if it was some kind of conflict of interest to wear competing products.

When she got back outside, Dad was a distance from the table setting up a couple targets. Two paper cutouts with a silhouette of a man on them as well as about forty empty SpaghettiOs cans.

Okay, those I might be able to shoot.

She didn’t dare touch anything on the table.

Dad walked back over and picked up the gun he’d left in her room. “Okay. This is a Beretta 92. It’s got the least amount of kick of everything I own. It’s stable, reliable, and if you load hollow points, has a decent enough punch.” He pointed at another gun with simpler lines. “I prefer the .45 myself, but I don’t want to rush you in over your head.”

“Guns, Dad? You already are.”

He set the Beretta down and grasped her by the shoulders. “If something were to happen out here… or with the world, how long do you think it would take the cops to get here? They’d be coming to investigate a murder scene, not save your life.”

She gulped, thinking about the creepy guy who delivered Mom’s car. What might’ve happened if she told him Dad wasn’t home? “O-okay.”

“First.” He picked up the Beretta, popped a magazine out of the handle and locked the slide back. “Unless you see a gun like this, with the slide back, always assume it’s loaded and can kill.” He glanced at it. “On second thought, amend that. Even if it looks like this, respect it like it can kill.”

“Okay.”

He handed it to her. She held up her hands and he laid it across her palms. It felt heavy and warm, and smelled like the table in the dining room. Oil.
Oh, crap… that table’s full of gun stuff.

“That’s the magazine release.” He pointed at a little button on the handle. “If you push that, the mag falls out.” He held up an empty magazine. “This is the slide lock button. Hold that down and pull back the slide, and it will stay open. This here”―he pointed at a small lever at the rear end of the slide―“that’s the safety. If you see the red dot, the gun can go off.”

She stared at it for a moment before finding the nerve to grasp the handle and look it over. “What’s this other lever?”

“Push the button on the other side, swing that little lever down, and the whole slide will come off the front end so you can disassemble it for cleaning.”

“Oh.”

“Here.” He handed her an empty magazine. “Load it.”

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. She slid the magazine into the handle and slapped the bottom like they do in all the cop shows. It felt nothing like the game, but looked sort of similar when she sighted over it.

“Line up the three posts, right?”

Dad grinned. “Yep.”

“How do I let the slide go?”

“Thumb switch.” He pointed.

She fumbled at it for a few seconds and found the thing to squeeze. The slide racked forward with a click. Dad moved behind her, wrapping his arms around and tweaking her stance before adjusting her grip on the pistol.

“Be careful of your thumb here, hon. Use your left hand to support your right. When you shoot, the slide will come back hard. You don’t want it to bite you.”

“Okay.” She aimed at some of the cans, dry firing.

“Trigger.” He pulled her index finger out of the guard, and held his own hand up with his finger curled back against itself. “Put the very tip on the trigger so when you pull back, it’s a linear motion without side-side jerkiness. Aim and squeeze. Don’t anticipate the shot. Let the gun surprise you when it goes off. If you anticipate the shot, you’ll get into the habit of pushing.”