The Suppressor by Erik Carter (best free novels .txt) 📗

snow. He also saw his bare feet. Which had turned blue.

Nakiri put her hand on his shoulder for a second, and the ice-pain surged through him, both warm and frigid. She quickly took her hand back and pointed to the briars he’d been studying.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Like I told you before, I’m not that mean.”

She pointed again, farther way, to a small path in the woods.

The trail was less cumbersome on his feet than the cornfield had been, but it wasn’t exactly like walking on a cotton rug.

And walk they did.

For probably another mile.

Until the woods opened up into a crude shooting range—a cleared-out section with a row of wooden stands spaced evenly against a berm.

Nakiri didn’t stop them until they were about twenty-five yards away from one of the stands.

“Stay here,” she said.

As she walked to the stand, she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. After she’d affixed it to the wood, Silence saw that it was nothing more than a sheet of white printer paper with a rough black circle sketched in the center.

“Firearms qualifications,” she said with a smile as she returned.

Silence’s teeth rattled. “Haven’t shot once.”

“You’re right,” she said. “All our firearms training has been bookwork. And this will be your one and only qualification. You can go train with guns on your own time, like the reading list I gave you. I’m here to harden your body, but more importantly to harden that dummy mind of yours. I keep telling you, Suppressor, the mind will be your most valuable weapon.”

Silence was just about sick of her head games. He looked away from her, to the empty, skeletal branches above.

“Where are we?” he said.

He swallowed. His voice was even hoarser than usual, the frigidness amplifying the pain.

“We don’t work for the government; we correct its mistakes,” she said. “But we do work within the government. We work where we can, when we can, and one of our Specialists was able to find an open day in the schedule of an undisclosed CIA training facility in rural Virginia.” She gestured broadly, dramatically at their surroundings. “Aren’t you a lucky boy?”

Silence pulled his arms tighter around his chest and looked at the rifle propped against her shoulder.

“Shoot in cold.” He swallowed. “I get it.”

Silence reached for the rifle, and Nakiri took a step back and laughed.

“Well, thanks for setting up your next lesson so well, Suppressor. Because this,” she said, holding the Remington out on display, “is part of your training on preparedness and dealing with disappointment and lack of resources in the field.” She twisted the gun in her hands, looking it over. “I’m just carrying this around because it’s so darn pretty. Nice, isn’t it? Do you know what it is?”

“Remington 700.”

“It’s a Remington Model 700P, to be exact. A beautiful weapon. Too bad you won’t be shooting it today.”

She reached into her pocket and retrieved something small and metal, something that fit in the palm of her hand.

“This’ll be your firearm, dummy.”

She held a tiny, rusty, derringer, something obscure, possibly even homemade. A single-shot, break action .22.

Now Silence saw why the target was only twenty-five yards away—he’d be shooting a tiny, inaccurate, rusty, single-shot while his body shook violently.

He took the small gun from her, cracked it open. It was empty.

“Round?” he said.

Nakiri smiled at him. “Sure, you can have all the rounds you want.”

She reached back into her pocket and took out a Ziplock bag filled with shiny new .22 LR cartridges. She unzipped the bag then smiled and held it high, shook it, the rounds jingling inside.

As Silence reached for the bag, she swung it upward. All of the rounds flew out, their brass casings twinkling in the muted gray light.

They landed in the snow.

And vanished.

“Oh, and by the way,” Nakiri said, “you’ll be shooting from the prone position. Might as well get down there and find your first round.”

Now Silence fully understood.

This was going to be even worse than he thought.

As he got on his knees and lowered himself to the ground, he thought that he couldn’t possibly feel any more pain in his numbed body.

He was wrong.

The cold hit his chest and stomach like a blast, and he shuddered as it stole his breath. His wet fingers trembled as he saw a tiny glisten of brass in front of him, peaking out of the snow beside a twig.

He plunged his pink-blue hand into the snow, pinched the cartridge between two half-dead fingers. His hand shook harder as he brought the round into the snapped-open derringer, inserted it, and snapped the tiny gun back together.

Nakiri propped the Remington against her shoulder, then shoved her other gloved hand into her pocket and used it to pull her formfitting coat in even tighter. She shivered.

“Begin,” she said.

The target had five holes in it, none in the black center. Silence’s hands had become so numb now that he couldn’t feel the cartridges nor the gun, couldn’t feel any of it as the derringer barked out another small crack and left another hole in the paper.

Two inches away from the black circle.

He’d spotted another cartridge a few moments ago, this one a foot away from his shoulder. It was the last one of which he knew the location. He would have to start hunting for them soon.

He reached into the snow, squeezed his hand numbly around where he knew it to be, and retrieved it, then inserted it into the derringer and snapped the gun back together. His arms shook, and for a moment, he wanted to let the desperation roll over him, to fuse with the cold and consume him, swallowing him into the muddy forest floor.

But then he thought of C.C.

She would have a way to get past this obstacle. She always knew the right ways to break through issues of the mind.

C.C. would tell him to breathe. From the stomach. Diaphragmatic breathing. She would say that he should visualize heat, that he should use his mind to substitute