The Final Battle

  Chapter 14: Male Bonding

  After Jimmy and Nick raided Wal-Mart for every gun they had, Jimmy led the two of them to the police station, where they picked up several more pistols and rifles. Nick suggested that they head to his house to find his dad's guns. Jimmy agreed, and they were inside by the time the sun began to set.

  "Nice place," Jimmy told Nick while climbing the stairs into the drafty loft.

  "Thanks," Nick replied while flipping on the lights. "I think he keeps them in a gun case somewhere," he continued while poking around the room.

  Jimmy sat down on a stack of boxes and took out his hypercube. He tossed it in the air for a moment before shoving some of Nick's old clothes and a box of baby toys out of his way. He dumped the contents of the cube onto the floor.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Nick shouted while spinning around and staring at the mountain of guns and ammunition on his floor.

  Jimmy pickup up a pistol and set it aside from the rest of the guns. "You look for your dad's guns. I'm going to figure out how many of each type of firearm we have."

  "Fine," Nick muttered while picking up an old third-grade yearbook that was in his way and gently placing it on the floor behind him. "Just don't make a mess. My mom's going to kill me for raiding my dad's guns anyway," he muttered while rummaging through the boxes.

  Jimmy smiled at Nick's pointless worrying. "Yeah, I'm sure that will be one of the first things she says to you." Jimmy cleared his throat. "Oh, thank you son!" he said in his feminine voice. "You risked your life to save me and all the other parents, and we thought we would never see you again! But you're grounded for using your father's guns!" Jimmy chuckled as he counted the boxes of ammo in front of him.

  "You know," Nick said while struggling to pull what looked like a large suitcase out from under a pile of cardboard boxes, "you're really not as funny as you think." He paused for a moment to let go of the case and wipe his forehead. "Mind giving me a hand?"

  Jimmy got up and helped Nick pull the case out. After a few moments of struggling, if finally flew out from under the boxes. "These the guns?" Jimmy asked him.

  Nick nodded while struggled to open it. "Damn it, it's locked," he angrily told Jimmy while kicking the case.

  Jimmy looked around the attic. "Do you have an axe to break it open with?"

  Nick nodded. "Yeah, right next to the pile of firewood and the little blind girl from Little House on the Prairie. No, I don't have an axe!" he shouted.

  "Fine, just asking!" Jimmy defensively shouted back while digging through his pocket. "We'll just use my pen laser," he told Nick while bending down and burning through the lock.

  Jimmy stepped out of the way so that Nick could open the case. "Well, there you go," he told Jimmy while staring at the guns.

  Jimmy looked down into the case. Two expensive shotguns lay there, gleaming underneath the attic's one light bulb. They were on the left side of the case, aligned vertically. Four boxes of ammo lay in the small column of space between them. Two rifles were laid down horizontally next to the shotguns, every bit as expensive and beautiful as the shotguns. Five boxes of ammo lay in between those. Beneath the rifles were two pistols, with two boxes of ammo beneath each one of them.

  Jimmy slowly and carefully went to pick one of the rifles up. "It's ok, dad doesn't keep them loaded," Nick told him. Jimmy nodded and picked up the gun.

  "They're semi-automatic," Nick explained to him, unaware that these were one of the few words that Jimmy couldn't define. Jimmy leveled the gun in his hands and closed his right eye while looking over the barrel.

  "I feel so rugged," Jimmy said with a smile while setting the rifle down.

  Nick dragged the case across the floor to Jimmy's pile of weaponry. "Hey, I've wanted to ask you something," Nick told him while taking the guns out and placing them down on the floor.

  "Shoot," Jimmy said, smiling at his pun.

  Nick wasn't amused. "You said that I'm the only one who knows how to fire a gun and stuff. But Cindy said that when you were on the moon a couple of days ago, you shot some robots or something crazy like that?"

  Jimmy nodded while separating the pistols in his mound of firearms from the rifles and shotguns. "Yeah, I started keeping a specially designed pulse rifle on my rocket after I fought that Twonkie a couple of years back. I never used it until a couple of days ago, though."

  Nick started placing the shotguns in a different pile as well. "So you know how to fire a gun? Cindy said you had some pretty good aim."

  Jimmy shrugged. "It was mostly the adrenaline. But even if I knew as much about guns as you, which is highly unlikely," he began to explain.

  "Those aren't the same," Nick interrupted while pointing to the rifle in Jimmy's hands.

  "What?" Jimmy asked.

  "You're putting that rifle in the pile with the others," Nick explained. "The one in your hands is fully automatic. The others are semi-automatic."

  "What?" Jimmy asked again, clearly confused.

  "Never mind," Nick said while shaking his head. "You were saying?"

  Jimmy tried to remember what he was talking about. "Oh yeah. Look, I used a gun once. I was pretty good, I'll admit, maybe I have a natural inclination for this. But you've been raised with them and used them more than me. Besides, I only used a gun that I designed. You know all about, well, normal guns. And even if I was as good as you, which I doubt, I have too much stuff to do to train the other kids."

  "Fair enough," Nick told Jimmy while organizing the boxes of ammo. "Ok, let's tally these up," he told Jimmy.

  Jimmy nodded and counted the various pistols lying around him. "Ninety-two pistols," Jimmy told Nick. "Guess there were a lot at the police station."

  Nick nodded while moving his index finger over each shotgun. "Forty-five shotguns," he noted. "And," he continued while quickly counting the rifles, "twelve semi-automatic rifles. Two automatic rifles. That's it."

  Jimmy quickly multiplied the boxes of ammo by the rounds inside them. "Around four thousand pistol rounds, nine hundred and sixty shotgun rounds, and six hundred ninety rounds for the rifles," Jimmy said while closing his eyes. He suddenly opened them and stared at the huge amount of firearms in front of him. "That seems pretty damned good," he said with a smile. Nick agreed.