Prepare For The Zombie Wars

Just a buncha regular guys blastin’ targets and battin’ the breeze.

I’d guess that’s what others saw on a crunchy-cold day at the Rat Canyon Range. I dunno; maybe they could sense something different in our gimpy movements, stiff with old wounds. Under the heavy clothes they couldn’t see the tapestries of scars. “What a bunch,” I thought; “Broke-down ex-cops, an’ shot-up old soldiers — with four outta six of us gettin’ it both ways.” I guessed between us, we had enough metal, plastic and scar tissue to make a whole ’nother dude. But it was good just to have us all together in one place — and cool that in this group, I qualify to be called “the kid.”

During breaks in the range-house warming frozie-fingers around the woodstove, naturally we yakked about Been & Done stuff. I figured we had worked, fought, operated on about every sizeable land mass except Madagascar and Antarctica, and scrapped with everybody from the Soviet Army to Sendero Luminoso; the Pathet Lao to the PLO, plus domestic dirtbags and miscellaneous multi-national mutts.

“We prob’ly killed more men than smallpox,” Uncle G observed kinda pensively, creaking on his artificial knees and massaging the hand pierced by a ChiCom burp-gun slug on the Yalu in ’51.

“Well, they all needed killin’, didn’t they?” MacKenzie chirped brightly. Uncle G laughed then, but the group had gone quiet, seeing old sights, old fights inside their eyes …

They were bored, too. The action-shooting bays were under repair, so we’d just been bustin’ bullseyes. That’s when I broke out some of Joe Quinlan’s Zombie Targets and got exactly the reaction I expected.

“Wait,” said VZ. “Seriously, we have fought these guys.” It’s true. We’d fought people stoned outta their skulls on everything from khat to crack, hash to meth; wild-eyed religious fanaticism to Wild Turkey with an LSD chaser. And who’s more dangerous than a scumbag so brain-fried on PCP he’d snap the links of handcuffs, fracturing his wrists in the process, and still try to strangle you or stab you with his own protruding splintered bones?

Thugs and suicide bombers soaked in stimulants and painkillers are already epidemic in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. We had all had to shoot some whacko right down to the deck and keep shootin’ ’till his clothes caught fire; delivered guaranteed-fatal wounds on loony-goons who were clinically dead but hadn’t got the telegram.

“Jeez,” Canfield muttered, “We’ve been fighting zombies for years and … and it’s gettin’ worse all the time.”

They all looked at those targets a little differently then. Oh, they were still funny in a silly laugh-your-butt-off way, but as the guys thought more about the proto-zombies in their pasts — and the more they mused on What’s next? from the rapidly-mutating, intertwining worlds of drugs, pathogens and social psychoses, those targets got “funny” in a dark, slitty-eyed black-chucklin’ way …

Two Good Reasons …

Fighting drugged-up, body-armored psychotic mutants? That’s already happenin’. Zombies? Not much of a jump, huh? Fighting schools like Gunsite have long been teaching “shoot to failure” drills, sorta along the lines of my own philosophy: You don’t shoot a man until you think he’s dead — You gotta shoot him until HE thinks he’s dead. (Or the PC version: “Until the threat is neutralized.”)

And there are two other good reasons to train to fight Zombies: First, in this oh-so-sensitive society, shooting virtually any other kinda anthropomorphic-lookin’ target will get you accused of bein’ racist, sexist, or lethally prejudiced against some color or flavor of cretin or crackpot — and prob’ly get you sued someday. And there is no movement or group, or even a big law firm representing The Undead and filing discrimination-against-zombies lawsuits.

Second, nobody from government will take you as a serious threat to the Glorious New World Order. They already think you’re a threat, but now they’ll just dismiss you as another nutcase. I’m okay with that. Maskirovka, y’know? In America today, folks, crazy could be the new “smart.” Connor OUT.

Subscribe To American Handgunner