Chapter 2

This time, it was dozens of harpies bearing down on us. Sam shouted, “QUICK, EVERYBODY, INTO THE BANK! THEY CAN’T GET TO US ONCE WE ARE INSIDE!”

There was a stampede for the door, but everybody got in before the harpies arrived. My God, those things were BIG! I fired what I had loaded into my shotgun, and most of the hogloads hit one of the creatures. Part of that was because there were so many that if I missed one, I usually hit the one behind it.

I ran out of shells after eight shots, so I switched to my pistol. Dammit, I was having the same kind of problem that Sam had. I was hitting the creatures, but my bullets did absolutely no damage to the harpy. I said, “Jake, can you give me some of your shells? I am completely out.”

Jake handed me a handful of shells, and I reloaded my shotgun. I had seven shots, and that was it. As luck would have it, the harpies gave up while I still had one shot left. We let them go because had we not we would have been completely out of shells. Jake had no more beyond the two that were currently in his shotgun. We absolutely had to get back to the shop before any more of the monsters showed up.

I had two boxes of unmodified shells and about a box and a half of hogloads in my truck. Sam said, “Jim, come with me to the station. I have something I need to talk to you about.” I certainly had nothing better to do, so I followed Sam’s patrol car to the police station, such as it was in our small town.

Inside the station, Sam said to me, “I heard about the stupidity at the high school today. The word is that the principal will resign if her ruling on you shooting while on school grounds is overturned. There is nothing that I can do about that situation, but I can do something to take advantage of the situation. What I want is for you to take a job as my assistant. You have to be 21 to be a full police officer, but you can be an assistant cop at any age. Therefore, I would like to hire you until you go back to school or until we can get rid of these monsters. Are you willing?”

“Hell, yes. If you can pay me enough to equal what I make by hunting wild hogs, I would call it a breakeven deal and be happy to help you.”

“Great, Jim, that’s what I needed to hear.” We started talking actual money, and I was actually going to get a slight raise out of the deal. The best part, though, was that I would be eligible for the benefits package, and that would take some of the burden from Dad’s shoulders.

“Okay, now for the icing on the cake. Take a look at this.” Sam pulled a mint-condition AA-12 style shotgun from a storage bin. “This combat shotgun was issued to every cop in the state a few years ago, but I could never master it. Jim, you are a natural with a shotgun, so I want you to take it to use. This is the version with the 20-round box magazine, and I have four extra magazines to give you a total of five, or enough for a total of 100 rounds.

“The town of Lookout Ridge will pay for your ammunition. I have 150 rounds of 12-gauge shells in the storeroom, and you can take that with you today. If you run out of shells before you can get more from me, just have Jake put it on the town’s tab. Now, raise your right hand, and I will swear you in.”

Sam swore me in as a deputy patrolman and gave me a badge. He also gave me a pair of magnetic signs that I could stick on the doors of my pickup to let people know that it was an official vehicle.

Sam looked startled when I laughed as he handed me the signs. I explained, “I just thought of putting these on my pickup and driving back and forth over the coach’s holy of hollies practice football field.” That was enough to break up Sam, too, and we got a good laugh out of my little joke.

I told Sam that I was taking the AA-12 out to a field where I could practice with it. I never wanted to commit my life to something that I had never tested on my own. I stopped by home to tell Mom that I might be late for supper, but I was definitely coming home for that before dark. I also told her about what had happened at school and about being hired as Sam’s assistant until my situation changed.

My brother Jeff wanted to go with me, and I did feel safer with a backup along. Jeff knew how to shoot my shotguns, so I figured that he could do a good job of taking care of my ass while I learned to use the AA-12. We went to an unused field that I had used before for trying out guns. The farmer was friendly and had no reservations about me using his field for testing and practice. In exchange, I had made a point of keeping the wild hog population down on his property.

I loaded a couple of the box magazines, one with regular shells and the other with hogloads. The AA-12’s barrel was shorter than the barrel on my shotguns, not by much, but possibly enough to make a difference. That was one of the first things I wanted to settle. I started off with hogloads since I was very familiar with them. It took only a few shots for me to know that I had a winner in the AA-12.

The AA-12 was a little heavier than my conventional shotgun, but again not enough to make a significant difference. The reduced recoil sure made up for the added weight; this was going to save me some aches and pains after a hard day of shooting.

I was quite happy with the results when I shifted to regular shells. There was not enough difference between the two shotgun styles to be important, so I was quite happy with the AA-12’s overall performance. Frankly, it was stupefying when I tried automatic fire. There was very little muzzle climb and I quickly learned to control that. All in all, I was ready to make a permanent shift to the AA-12 if I could manage it.

Jeff had earned it, so I let him take a few shots with the AA-12, and he was as impressed as I was. His first question was, “Where can I get one?”

We made it back home in time to eat supper with the whole family. I told them about my day and how I had been thrown out of school. Both Mom and Dad hit the ceiling about me being suspended indefinitely. That was better than being expelled if you were concerned about technicalities, but that nicety was not much real help. Dad was going to call the Board of Education tonight and start his campaign of raising hell until I was reinstated or, at least, I was allowed to graduate.

The second thing that I brought up was the question of why the shotguns were instant death to the monsters, but the pistols did nothing. Dad was hired as a computer programmer, and he was very good at it, but his real job was finding and fixing bugs in software that other people wrote. Anyway, I expected him to come up with the answer to my question why one bullet worked and another one didn’t.

The funny thing was, it was Jeff who said, “I got it!” before Dad had finished considering all of the angles. “The shotgun pellets are all steel, but the pistol bullets are an alloy that replaced the lead that they used to use. Maybe the monsters are allergic to steel, and that is what kills them.”

Everybody but Dad was a little dubious with Jeff’s solution, but Dad thought a little while longer and said, “I think that Jeff has found the key to the problem. The question is in running some sort of test to verify the hypothesis. (We were used to Dad’s use of big words, and actually tended to copy him that way.) Jeff, do you have a way to test your idea?”

“No, I don’t know ... Wait a minute, I do have an idea. Jim, you use hollowpoint ammunition in your pistol, don’t you?” I agreed, so Jeff continued. “In that case, what would happen if you gave up on having a hollow point and, instead, filled the cavity with a BB?”

“The idea is good in theory, but BBs are coated in copper, so we would have to use something else. Hey, that’s no problem, now that I think about it. A hardware store would have little balls of steel in a lot of sizes. All I have to do is to go to the hardware store and try pushing steel balls into my bullets. I am sure that I would get a good reception if I explained first what I wanted to do. I’ll give that a try tomorrow.”