How's it going fellas, sorry I'm such a slow motherfucker, I've begun Uni and also have had a few personal issues as well (Everyone pls PM Chu10 and tell her that I love her) I won't be so long winded this time, just thanks for the positive feedback and I'd love if it continued. Keep the suggestions coming too.
The Prime Writer: I can confirm some of your speculation, as well as deny some of it ;) won't tell you which though
Commando64: Cheers for that, and same to you :) Not sure what you meant by similarity to games though
Shadow Walker of Fire: Like a novel.
Cheers: JJZ-109
CHAPTER 4. WELCOME TO KUNARRA
With that, 'Mick' as he called himself turned back away from Charlie and exited the tent casually.
"Good luck from here," he said gruffly and disappeared on the other side of the canvas.
For some reason that statement seemed to spook Charlie more than the simple fact he, a man she had known for a matter of minutes, was leaving. She was in a hot tent, possibly in the middle of nowhere, in what seemed to be some kind of hellish entrapping hostile land…alone. And this man had been her only hope so far. He'd saved her once, and had agreed to help her find her brother. Not for a noble reason, but agreed nonetheless.
Now that he was leaving, Charlie felt the same sinking vulnerability she had felt in the presence of Rogers.
"Wait, wait!" she called out, to no response from him. His footsteps crunching in the gravel, slowly becoming quieter just continued.
"WAIT!" She couldn't take it anymore.
Ignoring the throbbing pain in her head and arm, she groggily pulled herself to her feet and burst out of the tent, each footstep sending a shockwave of aches up into her skull. Mick was there alright, just casually stepping away through some trees.
Mick seemed to stop on the spot and exhale in annoyance.
"You can't leave me here, what am I supposed to do?" Charlie protested, making him turn around.
Shrugging, a sarcastic smirk swept across his mouth.
"I don't know, fantasize about one of those fuckin' boy band singers and pleasure yourself,"
"What the hell? I'm serious! You have to help me…" Charlie pleaded with him desperately.
Mick sighed again, and looked down. Charlie could tell he was deep in thought about something, although what that was exactly was just simply too difficult to read on an old man like him. The creases around his grey-blue eyes hid his mind's workings far too well for her.
Looking up, he stared her in the eyes and folded his sun-struck, yet still somehow muscular despite his age, arms.
"Look I can't just keep helping you like your baby sitter…you need to help yourself too. Come with me."
Charlie compliantly followed him, moving through the dry foliage onto what looked like a rusty coloured dusty road, quite wider than she'd expect out here.
"Tell me how to help myself…" Charlie insisted, murmuring after him as he walked.
Mick stopped again, rubbing his forehead in irritation. He removed the battered old Army slouch hat and slicked his grey hair back. Finally, he sighed yet again.
"Fine…I'll give ya a hand," He growled lowly and kept walking.
Charlie nearly felt herself smile, few things had gone right for her over the last 24 hours but Mick had finally broken the trend. Somewhere deep inside her, she felt something she hadn't felt since being knocked out hours ago. It was a glimmer of hope.
"I'll teach ya a few things, see how you go…ahh it oughta be a laugh though." Mick mumbled to himself.
Charlie felt deeply insulted and kind of hurt by his dismissive attitude towards her, but at this point she afraid to say anything that could remotely change his mind.
"Look, first thing's first." Mick circled around Charlie a little, not making eye contact but just looking ahead.
"Everything…in this territory is out there to kill ya. The animals…the conditions…the people." Mick lectured her loudly.
"Seems pretty much like it huh…" Charlie sighed, watching him.
"Don't interrupt me." Mick snapped, making her recoil. "You ain't seen nothing yet."
"What? Yes I have! These people are insane!" Charlie blurted out.
"YOU have seen Red Rogers conduct part of his routine. Big fucking whoop. You don't know a tenth of what he's done, or what he's capable of." The first word came off as a roar, making Charlie flinch a little.
Calming himself a little, Mick turned and started walking down the road.
"The place you're in now is one of the few breaths of sanity Kunarra has left…Lone Pine town."
"Kunarra…" Charlie found herself looking ahead of him, and true to his word there was a town.
Right where the trees and bushes ended, old wooden and corrugated iron houses and small buildings began, lining either side of the red dusty road. Charlie had been so focused on Mick she had forgotten to take in her surroundings. The village ahead looked old and worn down, yet still somewhat alive despite the rust and heat waves rising from the road. Around her was the bushland, The Outback in the purest sense of the word. Rest dust and gravel beneath her shoes, and flanking either side of her was the thick brown and green foliage. Towering Jarrah trees with sun beating down through their leaves, little Balga trees with their short black stumps and grassy heads, and somewhere a Kookaburra cackling in the background. Crickets and insects chirping all around her, even though it was still daylight.
"Some shithole mining site this is…" Charlie grumbled to herself as she walked, kicking the dirt slightly.
"Mm? No this place hasn't been mined since the 80s."
"What?" Charlie looked at him, wide eyed.
"Kunarra is the one tiny speck on this overgrown excuse for a nation that the Australian government has let slip right under their nose. Guess you can't monitor and control that much desolate land, huh?"
Charlie could not believe what she was hearing. Did her country, the first world, affluent, and almost certainly safe country she had been brought up to believe she was lucky to be in…have a place like this? She didn't know what to make of it yet, but she knew the danger and lawlessness of it already far exceeded anything she had dared to previously imagine about Australia.
"You were probably invited up North by Rio Tinto, right?" Mick continued.
"Right,"
"Yeah well they run the most remote, and by that I mean stupid bus routes to their sites, I'll tell ya you're not the first load of people to be brought here. A company that size though just has the money to cover it up when they lose people like that."
Charlie started to feel her face flush more and more in despair, and she felt her stomach rise up inside her.
"W-what did I get myself into…" She whimpered to him.
"Yeah, a hell of a lot. I'll explain later darl'…actually have you heard of men named Vaas Montenegro or Hoyt Volker? On the news a couple years back?" Mick replied.
Charlie just shook her head in response.
"Well you got a lot to find out about, then. Anyway I said I'd explain later. For now, do you wanna have a chance of coping out here?"
"Y-yes…" Charlie nodded clumsily.
"Remember what I said about everything here wanting to kill you?"
"Yeah…?" Charlie raised her eyebrows slightly.
"What do you do when you know something…or someone can kill you?" Mick circled around her slowly, like a coach.
"Avoid it?" Charlie guessed.
"Fuck no." Mick condescendingly growled at her. "You leave it…it can always kill you later. The right thing to do is fuckin' kill it first, ay,"
The two of them had just about reached the edge of the dusty town, before Mick stopped them at the beginning of the main street running down the middle. Grabbing Charlie's wrist, he yanked her arm out and slapped some notes against her palm.
"And you can't do that without the right tools. Now…go buy yourself a firearm,"
Charlie's first instinct was to see what had been slapped into her hand, as it turns out; it was a $50 and a $20 AUD note. She hadn't even quite processed what she had been instructed to do yet.
"Wait what? A gun?"
"Yeah, a bloody gun. There's a gunsmith a few buildings down. You said you wanted my help, didn't you?"
Charlie didn't respond and just nodded sheepishly. In response, Mick just folded his tanned, muscular arms and raised his white eyebrow, waiting for her impatiently to move herself.
Gulping, she finally did, making her way down the wide dusty road dividing the two halves of the desolate town. She was going to buy a gun.
A gun.
An object she had never handled before, let alone ever thought she would handle. She'd hated them as a teen, seeing the incidents involving them in the United States on television and associating them with unnecessary, evil violence and dumb rednecks. And now she needed one to survive.
She knew nothing about them, how to work one or even how much they costed. She just looked down at the money given to her in her hands, and stared into the eyes of Prime Minister Curtin, almost glaring at her judgmentally for what she was going to buy.
I'm sorry, ok?
She passed a bar, and some other brown, boarded up box of a building before finally reaching a store with the outline of a rifle painted onto a faded white sign hanging from the gutter.
Gunsmith and Ammo
Oddly enough it was the best maintained building in the entire Outback village, probably due to the nature of the region Mick had described, it probably got plenty of good business. The windows were clean, and it's wooden structure seemed oddly devoid of decay unlike every other structure the town had within it.
As she opened the glass door, she almost felt herself gasp in relief.
Air conditioning.
The air around her had probably dropped from 115 degrees Farenheit (45 C) to about 75 (23 C). She nearly let out a moan as the cool air engulfed her body.
Finally opening her eyes after the brief moment of pleasure, she felt herself gulp again. There were guns of all types and sizes mounted on the walls. Not just hunting rifles or handguns, the only real weapons she had seen in Australia before, but assault rifles, rocket launchers, machine guns, among several other exotic and highly dangerous looking instruments of death.
One particular one caught her eye, a very large looking machine gun mounted on the wall behind the front desk. The tiny emblem on the side was unmistakeable. The Nazi Eagle and swastika.
Whoa…
"That one's an MG-42. A beaut, ain't she?" Charlie just about jumped in fright as the shop keeper suddenly appeared next to her.
"My grandpa rescued it in WWII, Hitler's buzzsaw they used to call it," The shopkeeper told her, admiring it by her side. "Anyway, how can I help you today?"
Charlie felt his tone with her was far too casual given the merchandise he was selling. What did he think this was, a supermarket? She hadn't the gall to say that, of course.
"Umm…anything for seventy…" She mumbled a little, cringing at herself as the words escaped her lips.
"HAHA!" The shopkeeper chuckled loudly at her, before slowly turning her away from the MG-42 on the wall.
"If that's your price bracket I suggest you stop looking at that…anyway you're in luck, there's something I wanna get rid of. I'll give it to ya for 70 exactly." The shopkeeper moved behind his front desk, reaching into one of the draws under his register.
He pulled out an average looking, yet dusty handgun and placed it upon the countertop.
"Browning HP nine millimetre…that good enough for ya?" Charlie had no idea how to answer that question. She knew nothing about guns or their usage whatsoever.
"Umm…can it kill an animal?" She asked, cluelessly.
"It'll drop most things bar a croc…it'll do most of Rogers' boys if that's what you're after." A cheeky grin swept across the shopkeeper's face and he winked at her.
Charlie felt sick all of a sudden. "I wouldn't kill anyone…"
"Pfft…you're not from around here are you?" He looked at her with a belittling disdain.
"No…Mick sent me and-"
"Wait, who?" The shopkeeper suddenly interrupted her.
"Mick…old guy, he looks like Crocodile Dundee." Charlie told him, and he started nodding very nervously and quickly.
"Ok look keep the seventy bucks…this one's on the house. As a matter of fact here…."
The shopkeeper reached under his desk and pulled out several full magazines of ammunition for the pistol she had just acquired.
"Here uhh…I'll even throw these in," He produced a brown leather holster for the gun, as well as a pair of M26 hand grenades.
"As long as you tell him how much of a nice guy I was to you, ok?" The shopkeeper grinned nervously at her.
"Okay?" Charlie gingerly took her the gun as well as the supplies, trying not to think about what she was carrying.
Initially she thought she could just carry everything but soon with how she felt her arm aching, she found herself needing to apply that holster to herself.
The feeling that struck her as she walked back outside was akin to walking into an operational oven. The air conditioning ceased to be, and Mother Nature started beating down upon her skin from above again. The air burned against her throat and lungs as she inhaled it, not too humid, and actually rather clean, but it was hot air nonetheless.
She started making her way back down the main, and only road of the dusty town. Despite her sore arm throbbing she felt the weight of the dreaded weapon on her hip far more. The pain of her arm, and the weight of the elegant but intimidating knife on her other hip seemed to not even be there when the gun was on her person. She could see Mick exactly where she left him at the end of the road, although this time he was sitting on a crate.
He seemed to just stare at her as she walked over, watching and examining with great intrigue. She wondered what she looked like to him. A blundering ditz? She decided she didn't want to know. All she knew was how she looked physically.
A slim figure of average height, wearing khaki coloured cargo pants and hiking boots, the two weapons clipped onto either of her hips, a dirty white tank top with dark brown blood smears on it, a bandaged right arm, a grimy and dirty face with contrasting and striking emerald green eyes, and brunette hair in a side tie.
She finally made it to him. As it turned out he was drinking a beer, while sitting on that crate. Charlie never had really been a beer fan, but she found herself licking her lips while looking at it. There was condensation dripping off the sides of the glass. It looked cold.
She gestured to the Browning 9mm pistol on her hip.
"I got one…"
"Good on ya darl, let's teach ya how to shoot it." Groaning, Mick got up, cracking his back.
"Wait…how do I do that with a busted arm…" Charlie felt herself rubbing it again, but flinched in pain as soon as she touched it.
"Practise," Mick said bluntly and started walking into the bushland casually.
Charlie followed, but they hadn't gone very far in before she found herself in man-made clearing. It was a tiny target range, with a small clear space and some targets set up towards the back of that space.
The central target was a scarecrow, in a small red jacket and a pirate hat/tricorn made from old newspaper. The scarecrow had an angry face with sunglasses painted onto it.
"He isn't popular here is he…"
"Rogers? Course not. Anyway, go on…what're you waiting for?" Mick hurried her impatiently
"Huh? Oh right," She quickly pulled out the Browning pistol from her new holster and aimed it with her one good arm, the other aching too much to even move that high.
In a burst of adrenaline, she aimed the pistol in that general direction, and pulled on the trigger.
Nothing.
"Umm…it's not working…" She glanced at Mick, who had taken a seat on a log and was now smoking.
"Having a magazine in it usually helps…" He shrugged sarcastically.
Charlie felt her face flush out in embarrassment. "Right…I knew that, umm…how do I put it in?"
"Figure it out." Mick instructed her bluntly, taking another puff of his cigarette.
Charlie fumbled with the weapon, eventually figuring out how to insert the magazine into the bottom of the grip.
The slide clacked forward. CLICK!
Then her nerves came back, as the haunting new weight of the weapons in her hand felt like a power she wasn't ready to handle. In her hands she held life and death.
"Go on then…" Mick nodded down range.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Charlie pulled the trigger.
BANG!
She nearly got knocked over in recoil, and the shot zipped into the trees above her. Birds started squawking loudly and several exotic looking parrots and others flew out in fright as leaves fell. Charlie nearly dropped the gun in fright, and her ears rang in her head.
It was so loud.
"Use your left arm only," Mick advised from behind her.
"I can't it's not my writing arm…" Charlie protested.
"Are you writing?"
"No…" Charlie sighed and raised the handgun again, this time using only her left arm.
"Turn your body sideways, it absorbs the recoil better plus makes you a slimmer target for an enemy…" Mick gently turned her and shaped her posture as she aimed.
"Keep your arm strong and steady…don't close your eyes this time."
BANG!
This time, as much as the shot rocked her to the core, she kept control of the weapon, and more importantly kept her eyes open.
Mick gently lowered her arm, and rubbed her back a little calmingly.
"That one's clean through the noggin. Well done."
Scarecrow Rogers had a smoking hole between his eyes. Charlie couldn't help but feel herself smile, it was only her second every shot with a gun.
"Now also…when the situation permits…" Mick grabbed her wrist, the arm that was holding the handgun.
He poked her finger through the trigger guard, and bringing her arm up, he suddenly jerked her wrist, so the gun was spinning on it like a wheel.
"Oh!" Charlie instinctively caught the grip.
"That might seem like a stupid Hollywood trick…but truth is it's way more than that. It's a display, a posture, like a lion's roar or a gorilla thumping his chest." Mick winked at her.
"Also it's got to be the most American stylized handling of a weapon in history, it shits Red Rogers when he sees things like that."
The images of that man…that monster started flooding through Charlie's mind again.
"I'm not going near that psycho." She said firmly.
"You might not get a choice…" Mick warned her.
So how was that? If you have any questions don't hesitate to PM me or Chu10. In the meantime, don't forget to review, favorite, sub and all that good shit.
This has been JJZ-109, and as always...have a nice day.