Chapter 52

"What's on for today?" Jessica asked, refilling their coffee cups.

"Preparation." said Alex. "Harry seems to be a guy that knows what he's about. Did you notice him once in a while seeming to revert to a hick talk, I guess you'd call it?"

"Yeah, I catch it now and then. He's been around for sure, and probably mixed it up with a lot of different people. At all levels of society. But here in Arkansas, a lot of people move from a rural background into a professional career that exposes them to the upper classes, I guess you'd call them. Especially in law enforcement. You grew up on a farm, and even though your family was the more affluent in that business, you were exposed to rural life. More than a doctor's or lawyer's kid in town."

"Funny how we keep coming back to doctors and lawyers." Alex said. "They have a pretty big impact on our lives."

"Throw in bankers," Jessica said, "and that mostly covers it. Where the money is, the power is, and where the power is the money goes. Most politicians are lawyers or some other sort of prosperous business people."

"Yeah. Money and power, hard to have one without the other. And those who lust for it, are generally rotten before they get any."

"Since there doesn't seem to be an immediate solution," said Jessica, "what do you have in mind? Preparations-wise?"

"This whole thing, big money people willing to kill to keep from losing it, and to stay out of prison, looks serious to me. We need to be getting set up for trouble, in case it comes."

"I agree. It's a little scary to tell the truth. We need to have a plan, prioritize our needs. We need to get you back in shape, defense-wise. And it looks like that means getting your shooting skills back in shape.

"First thing, I think." Alex said. "Let's have a look, see what's available.

The arsenal was in a stack of wood crates stacked along a wall of one of the two small upstairs bedrooms.

"Lucky you rented a big house," Alex said. "As much stuff as I've got."

"I suspected we might be here a while, so I figured we might as well be comfortable. This is one of the larger houses around here, and fortunately it was available."

"Where do we start?" Alex asked. "Did I have some kind of inventory?"

"Got it here." Jessica picked up a folder on top of the nearest box.

I must've liked guns.

There were about a dozen pages in the folder. Alex began looking through them, Jessica looking over his shoulder.

"OK, I was pretty organized," he said. "Let's see, shotguns, rifles, handguns. Simple enough. Which is in which box?"

"They're a little mixed up, I'm afraid. We'll probably have to open all the boxes to see what's where."

"Looks like we got plenty of room. Let's go sit down and let me look through them. Get the important stuff first."

They returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table.

"Handguns first," Alex said. "Let's see what we've got."

The first three pages were all handguns. After scanning them he put them down.

"That helps some," he said. "I'm starting to get some pictures in my mind. I see I had several .45s, some 9 millimeters. I see a couple of Glock .40s in there, I guess I was beginning to go that way. Probably would be a good idea to find those .40s, since Scott said that's the way it's going these days. Let's see if we can dig those out."

He picked up the remaining pages and looked through them.

"Quite a few shotguns and rifles. What's this miscellaneous stuff?"

"You had a few unusual things, like derringers. Several of those for some reason. You also have a considerable knife collection. Knives, swords, even some axes. You were interested in medieval and science fiction and fantasy things."

"You said we practiced with them. What kind of dirty tricks was that?"

"We, and Scott, are part of a prepper organization. Kind of a loose group, not a formal structure. Just a few groups of family and friends mostly. Some of us are former military, and some law enforcement. Some of us used to work out with a couple of guys, ex-military, special forces types. We need to get together with them, see how much or your training has survived. You seemed to get comfortable with guns pretty quickly."

"Yeah. What they call muscle memory. I don't know where I got that from."

"That's the common term," Jessica said. "Brenda says it's separate, because of the way it's formed, than your conventional memory. So it might come back sooner than your others. And it seems to have done so."

"Guess that could come in handy. I can shoot people if I need to. Let's see if we can find some to take up to Scott's place, get in some practice."

A couple of hours later they had found the ones they wanted. Jessica called Scott to set a date.

"He says any time's good, just call and see if he's going to be there." she said.

"Probably a little late today," Alex said. "Let's plan on tomorrow, get an early start. I need to get some work done on the website."