The Gun Goes Click

[Aura]

((Yumi Nunes continued from That Sound is Your Soul Stirring))

The night had not been kind.  Yumi had hidden herself in a thicket of bushes on the opposite side of the lake from where she had met Soren and Tessa, and fallen asleep there.  Restful sleep evaded her.  Her thoughts were populated almost solely by her friends that she had found and lost.  Felicia and Ramona at the church.  Lyndi lying in the churchyard.  Panya left to rot in the field.  But at the forefront of her mind was Soren and Tessa, who she had rebuffed last night for reasons that she wasn't even sure she understood anymore.

With everything in such disarray both inside and out, her bag had acted as her only source of comfort, and she clung to it like a combination of a pillow and a security blanket.  However, there was one thing about the bag that did unnerve her, and that was the gun that she had found inside.

And now that morning had come, she held the gun in her hands, the bullets sitting in the bag at her feet.

She still didn’t like it.  She didn’t like the way it felt in her hands, and she didn’t like how dangerous it was.  Even unloaded, it was still a symbol of violence and death.  The old warnings from her parents and teachers kept playing through her mind.  Yet still, despite her wishes, she couldn’t abandon it.  Not only did she need to protect herself, but she needed to keep it away from people who would use it for awful reasons.

The announcements backed up those fears.  More people had started killing, some of whom did so more than once.  Even the killers were starting to get killed themselves, as she recognized a few of their names among the deceased.  But the one that stuck out most to her was Jay Harland.  Jay, the boy who had embedded a cleaver in Lyndi’s head.  Yumi had seen him kill someone right in front of her, and now he had been on the receiving end, apparently with his own weapon.

Part of her thought that she would have been happy to hear that he wasn’t around to hurt anyone else.  And in fact, there was a sense of relief, albeit one that was intertwined with a cold feeling of regret for even thinking that way in the first place.

But all of that aside, she needed to learn how to use her gun.  Reading the manual gave her a good idea of how she was supposed to use it, but she still had yet to even practice aiming it.  She could feel her fingers vibrating against the cool metal of the gun, and she closed her eyes and tried to find some calm within herself to counteract that.  When her hands were no longer shaking, she adjusted her grip and switched off the safety.

click

There.  The gun was live.  If it was loaded, then she would be one twitch of the finger away from launching a lethal shot of burning lead.  She had never held more power in her hand than she did at that moment, and it was pretty frightening.  She reached for the safety again to switch it back on.

click

All right, she now had a full understanding of the safety.  She moved it from off to on once again to make sure.

click click

Very well.  With that aspect mastered, she moved on to the next step: actually aiming and shooting.  She moved the gun in her hands so that the grip fell into the palm of her hand.  She wrapped her fingers amount the grip and placed her left hand on the opposite side of the grip, giving her a firm grasp on the gun.  She held it pointing downward and straightened her arms as much as she could, trying to emulate the way she had seen them wielded in movies.

She brought the gun to eye level and held her arms as steady as she could.  She made sure to keep the gun upright, not held at an angle.  Apparently whenever someone held a gun sideways, it was supposed to completely ruin their accuracy because they couldn’t aim properly from that position.  Speaking of aiming, Yumi was doing her best to try to aim down the sights.  It took some time to figure out where she was supposed to hold the gun and where to look from, but after a minute of adjusting positions, she figured that she had a decent idea of what she was doing.

There was only one step left until the potential release of deadly force.  Her feet froze in place and her hands held fast in the air.  She narrowed her eyes slightly, focusing on the area of space that her gun was trained on.  She kept her thumbs to the side, well away from the hammer, and placed her index finger over the trigger.  She felt a lot of resistance, both from her own body as well as the gun itself, but she fought through it and pulled the trigger.

click

The trigger was pulled, but the hammer did not move.  She quickly realized what she had done wrong: The safety was still on.  She quickly flipped it off once more, having familiar enough with the motion to do it offhandedly.

click

Okay, now she was ready to try again.  She imitated what she had done just a few moments prior.  Feet planted, arms stiff, eyes straight ahead.  Shrug off the tension, and pull.

CLICK

The sharpness of the hammer snapping made Yumi flinch.  That was the sound of a gunshot, minus the shot itself.  If it had been loaded, then any living thing in front of the barrel would have had a hole punched straight through it.  That realization washed away any satisfaction that she may have had about having some semblance of an idea on how to use her weapon.

She was done practicing for now.  With any luck, that would be the last time that her finger would have to touch the trigger.  But first things first, she needed to make sure that she wouldn’t have any accidents.  She quickly locked the safety back into place.

click

With that done, she grabbed a cartridge of ammunition.  She took a quick look at the manual to figure out how exactly to load the gun.  After a few reads and a bit of fumbling with the gun, she managed to get it just right and snap the ammunition into place.

click

There.  Now the gun was all ready to be used, just in case she needed it.  All it would take was a flip of the safety and a pull of the trigger.  Two clicks for a devastating result.  She moved to put the gun back in her bag, but her hand hovered over the unzipped space, the gun dangling from her fingertips.

Yumi zipped up her bag and returned it to its comforting position over her shoulder.  The gun remained in her hand, held tightly at her side.  She didn’t like it, but she knew the power that it had.  Not just destructively, but psychologically.  If she had a gun, then that was a major deterrent for anyone who wanted to hurt her.  That’s what it was for.  It wasn’t a weapon to her.  It was just going to keep her safe.

After all, that was all she wanted: To be safe.

((Yumi Nunes continued elsewhere…)