Pilliars in the Fall by Ian Daniels Read Free Book Online Page B

Eastern nations, places nowhere near to us, and I wondered if it was by design.
    Clint listened to the shortwave and Ham radios, and through him I caught snippets of reports and conversations a little closer to home. News of our neighbors, Mexico and Canada, was a laughable notion, and personal communication was a joke. Depending on how the radio waves were bouncing, we could go weeks on end without hearing from people we used to know who lived in our own region, let alone our own country... if we even were still a country.
    How long would there still be a president, a congress or a government people wondered. I wondered how long it would take for the decisions made by big named political positions to trickle down to us.
    I actually hadn’t stopped caring or completely cut myself off, a long time ago I had just stopped paying much attention to the national matters and concentrated on things that could and would directly affect me or insulate me from the indirect effects of national matters. So to me, not knowing what was going on in the outside world didn’t mean a whole lot in my everyday life. It didn’t help me to know what tree would be good to take for next year’s firewood stash. It didn’t inform me on how the pheasant flocks in the fields were doing or where the deer had been hanging out. I had more important things to occupy my time than worrying about politics and a bunch of bureaucrats doing bureaucrat things.
    “So when do we get to see this house you’ve been building?” Blake asked once we had come inside and washed up to sit around the wood stove and get warmed back up.
    “Yeah, I haven’t even seen any pictures of it,” Danielle added.
    “There’s not much to see. Tomorrow if you guys can give me a lift I’ve got some stuff to work on over there so you could check it out.”
    “Sure, we’ll drive you over. I want to take a look at some of those things you’ve piled up for this 308 build you’re dreaming up too, “ Clint said, then got up to check on Kathy who had gone to bed early. She had said that she could feel a cold coming on and wanted to get some rest to help ward it off.
    “I bet the gun room was done before anything else, am I right?” Blake kidded me.  
    “Well…”
    “Ha! I knew it. Speaking of which, check this thing out,” he ducked into his bedroom and came back out with a full sized pistol in his hand. Dropping the magazine and checking the chamber, he held up his prize.
    “Is that a damn Raffica? ” I exclaimed.
    “Kind of but not really; it’s not a true 93R anyway. It’s built off a standard 92 and doesn’t have a burst option, so it’s either full auto or single shot. A buddy of mine built it and was getting deployed so he slipped it to me for safe keeping. Pretty awesome huh?” he handed over the big handgun for me to survey.
    “So it only breaks like every single one of the federal laws then?” I asked somewhat hesitantly.
    “Coming from a guy that punched out two cops a couple days ago…” Blake retorted.
    “I never threw one punch and how the hell did you hear about that?” I asked him, wondering just when it was that Clint had found the time to tell him about that little escapade.
    “Whatever man. Look I’ve got two twenties and one thirty round mag for it, plus a handful of the standard capacity ones,” he proclaimed, opening the top of his backpack to showoff the supporting gear for his cherished, completely illegal, machine pistol.
    It really was a beautiful and deadly looking gun. All matte black except for the dark wood grips, I felt like I was holding something with a soul, and somehow that soul was dark and ominous. The thing looked like a coiled snake or a pining horse before a race; an attack dog just waiting to be let off its leash.  
    “My buddy put on the compensator and milled a fore grip but never got around to doing a butt stock. I like it like this better anyway,” he said extending both hands to mimic a shooting