Jane walked around Dave in order to leave the room that played the role as an armoury and froze in the doorway.
"What is it?" whispered Dave.
"I don't believe it," said Jane at a normal volume.
She walked forward and reached under the counter to pull out a simple bolt action rifle. She pulled open the bolt and visually inspected the empty magazine and chamber.
"It's a cheap piece of rubbish," said Jane, "and the optic is cheaper yet."
With the bolt still open, Jane put the rifle on the top of the counter and knelt down. She started peering through the various desk related detritus. She reached in and pulled out three small boxes.
"How lucky can we be," said Jane standing up and putting the boxes on the counter top. She quickly opened the boxes and looked at the contents. Dave just saw clean rows of bullets. "We've got basically three full boxes. With fifty per box were looking at about one hundred and fifty rounds of twenty-two rimfire."
"That's nice," said Dave unsure.
Jane smiled at Dave. "It looks like my plan for you can actually happen."
"I'm totally lost."
"I want you to have a weapon to defend yourself."
Dave looked dubiously at the boxes. "Those bullets look too small to do any real damage and will three small boxes be enough? When the Army guys were trying to defend this street junction they clearly went though thousands of rounds of ammo."
Jane nodded. "You're not going to be using this rifle to fight. How much do you know about firearms?"
"Effectively nothing. I found a book on firearms but it was too difficult to understand without having a firearm to practice on."
"Exactly. Which is why I'll be using this little rimfire to teach you how to use a firearm. And use it safely. Once you learn that then we'll get you a more serious weapon."
Dave looked back into the armoury. "Do you really think that we can crack that safe open?"
"Not in the slightest. I was hoping that as the crisis of the outbreak was sweeping about, that some officer who worked here would try to arm up and open the safe and leave it carelessly open for us. So we kind of lucked out to find a rifle hidden under the counter. I guess that the staff here were just in too much of a hurry and it got forgotten."
"Maybe that rifle is what was in the safe," suggested Dave.
"I hope not. That would mean that our police were completely unprepared for the outbreak. If our police are being armed with shitty little twenty-twos then they would be next to useless in a real crisis. And this counts as a real crisis."
"Was anyone prepared?" said Dave quietly.
Jane didn't respond as there was no way to respond.
* * *
Dave and Jane had returned to the roof of the supermarket. Jane was holding the twenty-two rifle in her hands while the boxes of ammunition were in one of her pockets. About each of their necks was a pair of ear muffs.
"Okay," said Jane. "Brace yourself for the fastest crash course in firearm usage."
Dave nodded.
"Notice that we have hearing protection," said Jane touching her hearing muff with her free hand. "For something like a twenty-two it's not absolutely important, but learning good safety habits is always helpful. As long as you internalise safety routines then you shouldn't even notice them. It's just that internalising knowledge takes a lot of practice."
Dave nodded again.
"On the way back here from the police station I told you four firearm safety rules. Let's see if you remember them."
Dave raised a fist and flicked out his pointer. "Always assume a firearm is loaded, even when it isn't."
"That's the most important one of all. You can derive so many safety practices from just that."
Dave flipped out another finger on his fist. "Don't point a firearm at anything that you don't want to shoot."
"It can help to imagine a laser coming from the barrel of your firearm. Imagine that laser cutting everything it touches to pieces. A safe place to point a firearm is a place that you don't mind being shot."
It wasn't really a fist anymore, as Dave flipped out another finger. "Keep your finger off the trigger until you want to shoot."
"Some old rifles and some badly made newer rifles can discharge if you drop them, but nearly all decently made modern rifles will only fire if you pull on the trigger. So learn finger discipline."
Dave now extended all his fingers while his thumb was turned in towards his palm. "Be sure of your target and the area around the target."
"It's nice if you can hit what you are aiming at and it absorbs your bullet. But people make mistakes, or the wind might blow, or the target might move, or your bullet might pass through the target, or a whole bunch of other things can cause your bullet to go flying off in some manner. Make sure that the potential area where your bullet can go is actually a region where you don't mind your bullet going."
"That's four," said Dave sighing.
"Don't worry about it," said Jane. "It might be tough remembering them at first but soon they'll be engraved into your brain and they'll be a part of your life."
"I'm sort of surprised that there aren't more rules."
"There are plenty of rules, but often they are situational. For example, some people say that you should carry a double barrel shotgun with the action broken. But how does that rule apply to other firearms that don't have actions that can be left open? Some situations might even contradict the previous rules, like trying to use a firearm in a dusty or sandy area. In that case it might be actually dangerous leaving a firearm action open.
"As long as you know the basic rules and are familiar with firearm usage you can usually figure out or learn rules that apply in different circumstances. And in our current situation we could probably ignore a lot of firearm
