Sheila, certain of everything and positive about nothing, found herself at a loss. Death would find them, that much, as far as she was concerned, was heading for them at the speed of an old Land Rover with aftermarket lights and huge mud tires that had once been unnecessary but were now prescient. Of all the things that had happened to her since It Starting Happening, her least favorite was that kind of reversal of competence, where something dumb became something smart through no fault of the beneficiary. And yet, what could be done?
Rob seemed to think running would help, since he was doing that. Steve and the dog were impenetrable, but probably not from any sort of mysterious cloaking, and so she dug into her own brain, considered the situation, and decided to open her trunk of guns.
Consider the concept of a trunk of guns. We know the idea is already a part of life, a relatively normal thing to think about from several different potential angles. But for a moment, we ask that you step back- zoom out as it were- and consider the abstract nature of it. A person who has a trunk of guns: are they rational? Are they irrational? As with most things, it depends on motivation, which we think you are not in any position to discern… unless, obviously, you have a trunk of guns. Their safety and utility in a normal state are certainly concerning. How is one person going to use the number of guns which might, to paraphrase the scholars, necessitate an entire trunk?
And yet certainly there must be scenarios in which a trunk of guns is precisely the answer, since there are an infinite number of scenarios and a trunk of guns is a finite response option. The question, we are positive you pose, is whether or not any of those scenarios is likely enough to make having a trunk of guns- on balance- a positive factor during all the other given scenarios. We think this is fair, while still missing the point somewhat. The question, really, isn’t so much whether or not the trunk of guns is going to be a net positive. We would argue that when necessary the positive effect of a trunk of guns is near limitless, whereas the drawbacks to said can be mitigated by things like locks, not having children around, and a positive absence of speed in the surrounding environs. So as with most things, this is a relative question. There is no hard answer. But it pretty much always sounds crazy, within the bounds of normal utility though it may become.
Sheila opened the closet door and looked at the trunk sitting in the back against the wall. A green steamer, she had found it in her neighbor’s apartment or in the local Tuesday Morning at some point generally considered after the height of all the changes and subsequently used it for a variety of things. Currently it was filled with weapons and their various accoutrements, organized by type in some inserts she’d managed to scrounge up from some person’s mostly abandoned house, and with which she had achieved a very novel accordion effect that pleased her no end. She opened the trunk, pulled at one rack, and smiled as the rest of them slid forward in her own personal stairway to something slightly less than heaven. She heard Steve creak in behind her.
“I guess it wasn’t crazy,” he said, a small smile in his voice.
“Well,” she replied, as she pulled out a handgun, checked the magazine, replaced it, and handed the whole thing to Steve. “So is being chased by a militia because of some refined trees.” He nodded. “Shoulder still hurt?” He snorted. “Yeah, I thought so. OK, take this one.” She handed him a small machine pistol and then turned her attention to the larger items. There was a physical ideal to this scenario, which Sheila had considered many times, but none of them involved Steve being one-handed. She recognized the oversight and made a mental note to plan for that in the future, then grabbed a huge, heavy rifle from the rack and kicked at the bottom shelf. The accordion slid in, and she slammed the door behind it.
The two of them wound their way through the house, Sheila noting as they went that the dishes needed to be done and the last of the goat wrapped and put in the refrigerator. It might eventually make good sandwiches, though given that they didn’t have any wheat or bread the prospect was slim. The great hope over the years had been to meet some passing trader who was connected to a person who could produce either but so far it had been to no avail. Still, food didn’t need to go to waste, which also reminded her that there was compost to be added to the bin. She’d try and take care of that after she killed as many of the invaders as was necessary, and to that end she stepped through the back door into the cool evening air.
Rob was waiting for them, alongside the dog. They faced opposite directions at a distinct forty-five degree angle, like they gotten in a fight while Steve and Sheila were inside the house and didn’t want to acknowledge it. Makes sense, she thought. Enough going on right now without anyone having a domestic. At the first crunch of foot on gravel, both straightened. Sheila watched Rob look them over.
“Too much.”
“No such thing.”
“Incorrect,” he said, stepping forward and putting one hand on Sheila’s rifle and the other on Steve’s shoulder. He pushed gently with both hands and the clatter of weapons hitting the ground made Sheila flinch. “Too much,” Rob said, then turned his back and walked towards the front of the house.
Sheila felt her gall rise, slow but in an increasingly emergent pattern through the course of her workings. How dare he. It was her home. She’d defend it how she wanted, and with that she leaned down to lift the rifle from the ground. She felt Steve watching her and, with purpose, failed to look at him in return before stalking off after Rob. Steve and the dog crunched after her, grass and dirt and detritus beneath uncareful feet. This was her home, and she’d be damned if anyone was going to come up the driveway against her wishes without having at least part of a skull in the yard, she thought, seeing Rob against a tree and settling into one adjacent. He looked at her, frowned, and shook his head. She responded by aiming down the sight towards the unseen road.
Consider the confidence of amateurism. We wonder whether one sign of expertise is the ability to analyze a situation and subtract maximal responses, to dial down complexity, to pinpoint the precisely correct reaction to an action and then to use it, rather than to, say, throw a grenade into the water barrel in the hopes of killing a spider.
Who is to say that Sheila, assassin or admiral in a previous life, is an amateur? We can, and are not, simply to drive home the point that actions have consequences and that if you are taking lessons from someone on a thing adjacent to a subsequent task, considering their advice may be for the best.
We do, of course, acknowledge the role that natural talent may play in elevating a one-time amateur beyond the advice recieved. But this raises two questions: why, in this scenario, was the teacher necessary and why, in this scenario, was it not blatantly obvious before the fact that you as a student were on the kind of accelerated curve that might make clear and major tactical revision necessary? We simply ask you to consider whether, having asked for instruction, recieved it, and not blown past it, other people might still know best.
A head popped up in her sights, vague and silvery. Sheila pulled the trigger. A crack resounded through the moonlit evening air, disturbing literally everything within the circumference of the sound’s radial dispersion. The head, for its part, disappeared in a misty haze of silver vapor that almost certainly would have been some other more visceral color under a different light source. Sheila waited, staring down the barrel of her weapon, for more heads, which did not come. Rob, seeing this play out, abandoned his cover and trundled back to the house with clear disconcern for anything which might be happening behind him. She watched out of the corner of her eye until she couldn’t see him anymore.
Steve and the dog, meanwhile, stood just at the edge of her periphery in a kind of extended flinch, making her angry hy dint of their clear timidity. This, their home, was under attack. She, Sheila, had pulled out the big guns to stop it. And there they stood, doing nothing. It was a singularly fabulous reaction, one on which she might have counted but was nevertheless in her view wrong and underwhelming.
After a few moments, Steve and the dog turned and exited her periphery. She sneered internally and waited for the rest of the bastards at the end of her driveway to come try their fucking luck and end up like their now-irrelevant friend.
