Sudden Prey

can’t believe these guys in government.” He shook his head.
    Dave took them to the lower level, where a row of Remington gun safes lined one wall. He didn’t have any ARs, AKs, ranch rifles or anything else that Martin was interested in, but he did have a rack of beautiful bolt-action hunting rifles—“Hunting’s coming back in with the yuppies, I’ve been selling used Weatherbys like hot-cakes. You see any Weatherby Mark V’s in three hundred Mag or less, in good shape, think about me.”
    “I’ll do that,” Martin said. He was looking at another rack, short little rifles, and said, “What’re all the Rugers for?”
    Dave shrugged. “Just regular demand . . . jump-hunting deer. Can’t hardly find them anymore.”
    “How much you get?”
    “Upwards of four-fifty, for a good one,” Dave said.
    “Jeez, they only cost half of that, new.”
    “Well, they haven’t made them for ten years. If Ruger doesn’t come out with them again, I’ll make a mint . . .”
    They talked more guns for a while, Sandy standing silently behind them, and Martin finally bought two used .45s for seven hundred dollars.
    “Wish I could help you more,” Dave said, as they left.
    To Sandy, Martin said, “Two more stops.”
    At the first stop, a sporting goods store, he bought four green-and-yellow boxes of .45 ammo, a Browning Mantis bow, two dozen Easton aluminum arrows, two dozen Thunderhead broadheads, an arrow rest, a fiber-optic sight, a release and a foam target like the one they’d left in the Frogtown house. They waited while the guy at the store cut the arrows to thirty and one-quarter inches, and seated inserts in the tips, so Martin could screw in the Thunderheads.
    Martin looked at a Beretta over-and-under twenty-gauge while they waited, then sighed, put it back, and said, “Not today.”
    At the second stop, he bought six more boxes of .45 ammunition.
    “Do you know where all the gun stores are?” Sandy asked.
    “Most of them,” he said. “Most of them from . . . well, from the Appalachians to the Rockies . . . and Salt Lake and Vegas and Reno. I don’t know the coasts. Well, some in Florida, if that’s a coast.”
    And a moment later, she asked, “Have you thought about getting out of this?”
    Martin looked at her. “Have you?”
    She shook her head: “No. I’m stuck with Dick, I guess. I just think we oughta move on. Mexico. I really don’t want to die.”
    “Huh.” Martin didn’t relate well, but for the first time since she’d known him, he started to talk. “I’m like Butters,” he said. “Running out of time. All the people like us are: they’re coming to get us, there’s no way we can win. We just make a stand, and go.”
    “Who’s they?”
    He shrugged. “The government—all of the government, the cops, the game wardens, the FBI, the ATF, all of them. And the media, the banks, liberals, whatever you want to call them. The Jews . . . They’re all in it together. City people. They don’t all want to do us harm—they just do.”
    “The blacks?”
    “Ah, the blacks are more like . . . poker chips,” Martin said. “The government’s just playing a game with the blacks. I mean, they might use the blacks to get us, but the blacks themselves won’t get anything out of it. Never have, never will.”
    “That’s pretty bleak,” Sandy said.
    “Yeah. Well, you know, the people who run things, they want power. And they get power by writing laws and making you depend on them. They can do anything they want to old people, because old people gotta have Social Security and Medicare and all that. And if you try to be independent, they get you with laws. Like Dick. No way he was ever gonna be able to run that bike shop. He screwed up one time with his taxes, and they came after him forever. Never let him go. Makes a man crazy.”
    “You think Dick is crazy?”
    He grinned and said, “We’re all crazy. You can’t help it. I was thinking about it the other day—you know how you used to burn leaves in the fall? In all the small towns? And how good it smelled, the burning leaves in the air. Can’t burn leaves anymore, because they won’t let you. No reason for it, in the small towns anyway. You ain’t polluting nothing . . . They just make the law to train you. I mean, it starts with the small stuff, and it goes all the way up to the big stuff, like lettin’ the Mexicans in, so people like us can’t get good jobs no more . . .”
    Sandy nodded. “Okay.”
    “I used to