The Last Rebel: Survivor Read Free

thankful now for what his older brother, Ray, had taught him about guns. Thanks to Ray he had a good idea what automatic weapons were all about. Ray was surely a good teacher with a lot of experience. He had fought in two wars.
    Included in Jim’s inventory were a variety of handguns and two AK-47s, which Ray told him had been produced in larger numbers than any other rifle. Ray said that though precise figures weren’t available, it was estimated that over twelve million were made, and more were being made. The AK-47, popularly known as the Kalashnikov, actually had come out of research first developed by the Germans, finding that most combat situations involved fights at four hundred meters or less, so a new cartridge, a Soviet 7.62-by-39mm cartridge had been developed. A so-called assault rifle, it could fire its relatively low-powered ammunition—low-powered compared to conventional rifle ammunition—either on single shot or fully automatic to a maximum effective combat range of around four hundred meters. “It’s a great weapon in an assault situation,” Ray had said, “because you can use it single shot or automatic. It uses thirty-bullet clips, and it’s the kind of gun that’s easy to field-strip and can take a lot of kicking and keep on ticking.”
    Apparently so. It was the weapon of choice of guerilla armies all over the world.
    Yes, Jim, thought, but he never wanted to have to use it except to protect himself. Jim hated war. Ray had carried automatic weapons, and had gone to those wars, and now his thirty-five-year-old body lay in a plot in David Rook Rural Cemetery near Jaynesville. Jim’s father had been in another war, and he knew about guns too. And he had also lost his life in combat. He had died of shrapnel wounds at the ripe old age of thirty-three, and Jim’s mother shortly thereafter of cancer, so Jim had been raised by his grandfather and Ray, until he died too.
    There had to be a better way, Jim thought, to work things out with other people than to try to kill each other. He had read about war, and many times the reasons for the war were unclear. You needed a real clear reason to die. He was not about to die for some fuzzy political principle, or to grab some land that didn’t amount to a hill of crap. He remembered he had read once about McNamara, who had been secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, crying years after the fact because he later knew he was wrong for sending all those innocent boys to their deaths.
    That was a bunch of woodpecker crap. No way would he fight for that.
    Ben Rainses sounded like he had the right idea, but Jim would not have been willing to fight any wars for him either. You lost your father and your brother in war and it tended to turn you off on it. Way off. Talk it out. Talk it through. People had done that. There had been many wars, true. But many wars had been avoided because people gave in to each other.
    In addition to the AK-47, Jim also had an old-fashioned Thompson submachine, or tommy gun, which Ray had explained was the “weapon of choice of gangsters,” but eventually it became great and popular when modified for use in World War II, a formidable weapon that was not that easy to handle but could fire six hundred rounds a minute. Jim knew this was a favorite of General Raines and Jim had used it to dispatch two of four marauders he met while he was with Raines.
    Above all, Jim liked the Glock handgun, which was light, 9mm, and held sixteen shots. He had heard the story of why the New York City Police Department carried these pistols—because of a death. One NYPD officer had been in a Shootout with a perp and the cop was using a six-shot .38 while the bad guy was using a 9mm. When the bad guy knew that the cop had used up all his ammunition—he’d counted six shots—he just walked up and put two bullets in the twenty-three-year-old cop’s head—and had five left in the clip.
    Jim withdrew a cigarette paper from his jacket pocket, folded it