Chapter 31: A Taste for Blood — Part 5

Aside: Nita at the Break — Part 1

Nita would normally be going crazy, trapped in a house with three men, and truthfully, the busy pace of a farmer’s life is not in the slightest her calling. If not for the recent stress of house and barn repairs, her mind might have snapped with the lack of effort needed to live on a ranch whose output needs are approximately three and a half mouths, several hundred horses, and a growing tribe of unruly chickens. Several months back, they had discovered quite by accident, that much of the metals around them were failing, and by keen observation, they managed to create a list of which metals were not failing. It had been quickly determined that certain alloys of steel were susceptible to accelerated decay, and that some, but not all of the house had been built with these alloys. Lips and Kodiak spent a great deal of time working the house from top to bottom, finding and replacing any bad metal with heavy brass fittings, screws, and nails.

Nita, as usual spent this time busily organizing her men. This took weeks to accomplish, and the men were often working against a deadline, even though the vast majority of the house had been built with metal that seemed unaffected. Since the repairs, they all know what metals are safe to work, and with the rare bit of day-to-day drama, things have settled into a calm state, the four of them working their independent jobs, coming together at meals, talking about the days’ events as if such things are exciting and interesting.

Now, with nothing but the day-to-day tasks to keep her occupied, Nita is starting to crack. Lips is the horse and pasture keeper, and her son, now in a skirt virtually every day, is the house mouse in charge of feeding the chickens. He is always cleaning and tending to the fire. Kodiak, still needing a cane, spends his days tending to food in the fields and in a green house, taking down the occasional rabbit for the pot, either by trap or by sling. Nita cooks meats and vegetables when she’s not tending to people’s wounds or working what Kodiak calls her ‘dangerous little hobbies.’ That her hobbies might be more nostalgic in nature has not occurred to Kodiak, and the glint in her eye as she works on her new designs is simply put off to the craze of boredom, genius, and wit.

Nita misses her pistols, misses the ability to unload lethal bits of lead from a clip with the click of a finger. She misses the scent of blood and burned powder, the race and rush of justified death that came with her pulling the trigger, ending a life. Before she had been placed on the prison ship to work as a sex slave, before she had developed the catch phrase, ‘fuck that shit,’ which seemed to turn the Johns on and got them out of her cell quicker, Nita had been a quiet killer, moving among the most powerful players of politics and crime in all of Asia, her careful aim and stealthy nature proving instrumental in changing the course of history, because she was a creature who chose which corrupt soul governed the demons of commerce and politics.

Now, with history at an end, old habits are put to new tests. Gunpowder, too unstable to manufacture, much less use for propellant, has to be replaced with something else. She’s working on a number of odd contraptions, testing them, trying to find the best way to store energy in a way that will deliver a deadly blow at pistol range, and allow her to reload as quickly. So far, her efforts have been humorous at best. Some of her inventions are deceptively simple. A three-bow pistol grip crossbow is one, and it is good for the distance of a room. Three quick shots, one after the other, tend to fall an inch apart when she pulls the trigger back in the necessary increments.

Another is a standard pipe gun, much like the one Arpie invented. This one is currently on the back burner, because even though it will throw its bolt six inches into a horse flank at fifty feet, it isn’t able to reload and it’s really only good for close range hunting. She has acquired six bows she’s become proficient with, ranging from Japanese longbows, and a traditional hunter’s bows, both of which are as tall or taller than she is, to a compound hunting bow made for taking down large game. Daggers, darts, atlatls, and various blowguns fill in her killing accessories. In the short time since the storm, Nita has amassed enough range weapons to sate the needs of a small army of killers.

The killer in Nita, however, is not satisfied with daggers, swords, bows, crossbows, spears, atlatls, blowguns, pipe guns, or anything of the sort. She wants power, preferably power with a multishot capability. So she spends an afternoon perusing the yellow pages, looking for sporting goods stores in the nearby cities, wondering at what she will find if she takes the time to look. Today, bow at the ready, Nita sets out with two of the horses, leaving the men to their own devices, list of stores in hand. She won’t be gone but a day or two, though she knows Kodiak will complain upon her return. Nita passes several burned down stores on the list, finding only crossbows and the like, and deciding to collect what she might need from them on the way back. She isn’t at the end of her list when she comes to a store that sells hunting rifles, still standing, relatively uncharred.

To Nita, this is a seeming contradiction, since anything highly flammable and encased in metal ended its life with the coming of the Storm. The sign, having been damaged, gives her no explanation.