119,000 words | Literary Fiction
Synopsis: A young woman, recently graduated from Bryn Mawr and with no job prospects, moves to Nebraska to help out her aging grandmother. She soon befriends a group of twenty-something para-military types who call themselves "The Assassins": Lee Harvey, J.W., and Squeaky.
(Chapter excerpt)
They all kept yelling “Squeaky’s gonna shoot the .50” as if it were some sort of chant of a secret religious order. All I could think about was how often did ketchup bottles get refilled at the Big Plow restaurant and to what ends Ricky Mango would go to try and get in my pants. I'd never kissed a man with a pencil-thin moustache and I really didn't want to start any time soon, especially with Ricky Mango or anybody with the name Ricky for that matter. I looked over to see Squeaky being hoisted up into a cammo-painted pickup truck which had a bullet-riddled windshield and a machine gun mounted to the bed. The machine gun looked huge, twice the size of Squeaky. Just being near the huge gun made her voice even squeakier. I’m pretty sure it was a .50 caliber because, well, why else would everyone keep saying “Squeaky’s gonna shoot the fifty.” The gun was black and oily and even from a distance you could smell it. The aroma or fragrance was exactly what I would have imagined a black and oily machine gun would smell like if ever in my life before this moment I would have needed to imagine the smell. It smelled like impending death or at least disaster. You knew something serious was going on when you smelled that smell, sort of like the smell of sex or the smell of death, both of which register in the lower parts of the brainstem where all the other animalistic functions reside. I’m still not sure what caliber means or even how to spell it, but I think it has something to do with the diameter of the bullet that a gun shoots. So, in non-Metric terms, a .50 caliber would shoot a bullet that’s a half inch in diameter. See, you learned something that may be useful to you some day if you ever get involved with paramilitary types or revolutionaries or assassins from your state or city or district. You never know when you might need this information. I mean, look at me. I was just a smart-ass girl from Bryn Mawr and here I was getting a real education. Everyone started whooping and hollering once she got herself in position behind the big .50. She put on some yellow goggles with a Tweetie bird sticker on the left lens and let out a squeal then yelled “Fire in the Hole!” She squeezed off a burst of bullets into the night. It was so loud it felt like my jawbone was resonating. The tracers looked just like you see on television where Marines are blasting the hell out of some poor third-world country, like magical phosphorescent fireflies that could move at the speed of light. They were beautiful. She kept shooting and suddenly something exploded in the distance. An orange ball of flame lit up the black sky and for an instant the energy warmed my face from the cold. Somebody had planted a gas tank or something out in the field. After she ran out of ammunition, she ran back over to me. She and Lee Harvey didn’t seem to be talking a whole lot. She seemed drunker than before, maybe a little high on something—meth I figured. Firing the .50 caliber had gotten her jacked up even more. Her body was quivering with strange energy.
She grabbed me and shook men then yelled, “Your turn.”
“My turn what?”
“To shoot the fifty!”
One of the guys yelled something about reloading then smiled excitedly at me as he got the .50 caliber ready..
“They’re gonna load you up with some Raufoss rounds.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Raufoss. You know, armor piercing. They’ve got steel core primers. They’re anti-matériel, high-explosive, incendiary.”
“Is that good?” I said.
“Raufoss is badass as you can get. You’ll see,” he grinned.
Another of the men grabbed the gun and started to load it with some funny looking bullets that seemed bigger than the ones that Squeaky had shot. She shoved me toward a couple of huge men and before I knew it, they’d hauled me up into the bed of the truck and sat me on the lawn chair they had duct-taped to the bed of the truck. Somebody stuck a Grain Belt beer in my hand before I knew what was going on.
“You gotta shoot it first.”
“What?” I said, not understanding.
“You gotta shoot the beer then you can shoot the .50!”
"Huh?" I said.
“You know, shoot the beer. You open it with the can opener, hold it upside down, then pull the tab and shoot the beer down your throat.”
I nodded then stuck the point of the can opener into the soft aluminum and opened up a hole in the aluminum then turned the beer upside down like I was preparing to shoot a mortar shell down my throat. I took a deep breath then pulled the beer tab and the beer shot down my throat like the Colorado coming out of the Hoover dam. Well, let’s say some of it went down my throat. Most of it ended up going all over my face and down my shirt and in my ears. I could hear whoops and hollers through my Gran Belt-filled ears.
“See if you can hit that sign.”
She pointed to a big metal green and yellow John Deere tractor sign.. Nebraska was full of John Deere tractor signs of all sizes and shapes, but this was the biggest one I’d ever seen. It looked like it weighed a couple of tons. It didn’t look very far away and was full of holes.
“It looks pretty close,” I said, a little worried.
“Don’t worry about it. Just pull the trigger like this.,” she said.
She put her hand on the trigger and accidentally squeezed it. A couple of round shot out of the gun barrel and into the night, arcing over the John Deere sign. One of them was a tracer. It looked beautiful as it arced over a line of pine trees.
“Shoot it!”
I aimed at the sign. I looked around me. It was strangely silent. Everyone was ducked down low behind something, farm equipment, stumps, trees, cars. Squeaky was behind the truck.
“Yell fire in the hole before you shoot” she squeaked.
I took a deep breath and adjusted the Tweetie bird goggles that they’d put cockeyed over my face then and took one last aim at the big John Deere sign and then closed my eyes.
“Fire in the hole!” I yelled.
I squeezed the trigger and I felt the recoil immediately and hear the big BAM! BAM! BAM! sounds. I looked out and could see the sign still standing but a tree about forty yards behind it was on fire. And then, the tree toppled over. They all whooped and yelled again and told me to pull the trigger again. I watched the poor tree explode again for some reason. I felt really bad for the tree. It was burning like crazy now, lighting up the whole scene like some sort of crazy midnight ritual. The guy was right about the Raufoss bullets. They blew things up and lit things on fire and generally made whoever was at the other end have a very bad day. Poor tree. That poor tree. I apologize. I hope there’s a tree heaven.
I was sort of liking the .50 caliber. I guess it kind of grows on you even though I’d never shot a gun in my life before. I pulled the trigger again even though I felt really bad about that innocent tree. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! The Raufoss ordnance lit up half of central Nebraska. Ordnance is what they liked to call things that blew up other things. I’m sure all that ordnance was showing up on military radar screens somewhere. But on the last bullet was a loud sound and then an immediate ricochet sound just like in the movies and then I felt a weird tingle in my lower leg. I could hear everyone whooping and hollering for me to do it again, but the tingle in my leg was now turning into something that was feeling like a weird itch and that soon turned into something that started to feel warm and that then started to quickly turn into something that really burned and that quickly turned into something that began to hurt like fucking hell.
I could feel something warm on my leg and when I looked down, I realized I’d been hit with what they call flyback shrapnel. It was a growing feeling, the pain that is. You know how when you stub your toe, it takes time for the signals to register with your brain. It has something to do with the distance from the extremities to the brain. There is a finite amount of time for the information to travel. It’s not instantaneous. With the shrapnel, I had some time to think about the pain as it blossomed. I knew it would get worse, a lot worse, a whole helluva a lot worse. All I could think about was how often did ketchup bottles get refilled at the Big Plow restaurant and what Ricky Mango's moustache would feel like it I kissed him or if by some odd quirk of the natural world, he got between my thighs with that hairy little black sliver clinging to his upper lip . And then I passed out.