Re-edit #4008, 4015, 4022
into #4025
As Angelique took her position as a full member of the team, training became very different. It was no longer as focused, intense and four instructors to one student. Everyone taught and that included Angelique. This was strange to her and even scared her a little but as a member of the team she was going to do her part. Each would teach according to their area of expertise. One day it could be medical, another working with radios or shooting techniques with practices offset with tactics and survival.
It was such a change for Angelique, she was often the first one up, ready to go. The training and learning was fun. Until it was her turn. She was nervous, anxious and not sure what or how to teach people older than her. She really didn’t know what she had to offer them. She wanted to impress them but could not think of how.
Late one evening when she couldn’t sleep she was wondering through the kitchen looking for a snack when she heard a sound in the work shop.
“Garen is that you”
“Come on down Angelique, I am just finishing up a few projects.”
Angelique finished getting her glass of milk pouring one for Garen.
Arriving at the bottom of the stairs she hands Garen the glass of milk “You got a minute”
“Sure, you having problems sleeping?”
“Yeah, you got me on the schedule but I don’t know what I can teach you guys. I know you made me a full member of the team. You know I would fight to the death a long side but you guys still know so much more than I do. I don’t have the experience you guys do. I don’t know what to teach. I want to do my part.”
Garen pulled up a chair and motioned for her to sit down. “ You know more than you think you know. Yes, we have more experience in some things but you have experience or learning in others. How many days did you survive with just what you had in your pockets and the jacket when I found you? You were hurt, scared, confused, didn’t have much more than a half-remembered direction to go, a name of a stranger you met once and, like I said, the stuff in the jacket and your pockets.”
Garen gave her a few moments to think. “You used your brain and lived off the land, scrounged things, and made things out of nothing. You have taught yourself primitive skills that you can share with us. You may not be an expert but you have used them where we have not. Do not sell yourself short.”
“I only know what I have read, taught myself and what my father and I did when I was out in the back country with him.”
“More than most of us. Don’t try to be perfect. Have fun with it. If you screw up too bad, we will just dress you in tank top and loin cloth, tie you up, blindfold you, throw you out in the woods, with a pack of items each one of us gives you and let you find your way home. Boy would you be messed up with what we would give you. It would give you plenty of time to practice.”
“Thanks I think”
With a renewed vigor, or sense of intimidation if Garen wasn’t kidding, Angelique started her first day of teaching primitive survival techniques to the crew. It was hard at first but her confidence grew as she saw how much attention each one was paying. She was giving them the tools to do things when they don’t have tools.
Another advantage? She taught them how to carry less by instead using things found in nature or scrounging from trash. Carrying less appealed to Kara. She remembered her recent reconnaissance trip in the park. With some of the newer things Angelique was teaching them, she could have cut her gear load by at least a third. She was reworking her own gear for the future in light of it.
One of the newer training events to everyone was short sword training. Kara was as strict a taskmaster as Garen was about medicine. They conducted the training sessions in the garage or the big bay in the training building to give them room to move and swing.
The short swords were actually WWI era 16” bayonets. These were in poor shape when Garen found them in the back of John’s connex. They had a layer of surface rust and the wood handles were all chewed up. He had them in a pile in the big bay at the training building when Kara saw them. She immediately latched onto them. She had a penchant for long blades and spent many years learning a whole host of techniques from different styles of combat to use with them.
Kara stripped the surface rust and found the underlying steel to still be solid. These blades were so far from collectable condition, she didn’t mind modifying them for her own goals. These were designed for trench warfare, when trench warfare was staking bodies like cordwood day after day. Long, strong and lethal, the steel had a feel to her rarely seen these days.
A smaller square handguard replaced the bayonet’s mounting loop and finger guard. They had no rifles they would carry to mount them on anyway and the square handguard would be more secure and protective. The latch slot in the rear was the next thing to go, replaced by a one inch ball bearing welded into place for a pommel and counterbalance. An old composite countertop provided the material for new handle scales. The edge was reprofiled slightly and the blade sharpened and oiled.
When Kara was done with her project, these old warriors were ready for another hundred years of work, defending their owners in close quarters combat.
“Alright everyone. Before we get started, there are a few things I want to cover. I know you did a bunch of close quarters training with knives. With knives, there is a lot of body involved and the knife is only a small part of the fight, although a key focus. When you get to swords, even short ones like these, the idea and focus changes. These give you reach and additional leverage. Where a fighting knife might make a nasty slash on a forearm, a properly wielded sword, even something this short,” Kara held up one of the new swords, “you can remove the limb.”
Kara turned quickly and with a deceptively powerful swing, sheared through several ribs of a free-hanging rack of ribs next to her. This wasn’t the last such demonstration against meat. That first day with the swords, there was quite a bit of meat hacked up, all to go into the stew pot later.
Kara’s sword fighting style was a unique blend of European Medieval, Japanese, Escrima, sport fencing, and who knew where else. She taught them as many different aspects she could of her boiled down style. The main focus was usually disabling mobility and offense capability first more than outright killing blows.
“Remember, these aren’t death rays. Killing someone with a blade takes time. A person cut or stabbed or even shot will take quite a bit of time to lose enough blood to become combat ineffective. There are plenty of cases where someone was hit multiple times with a .45 and kept going long enough to still cause mischief. With the blade, work on their ability to get to you or do harm to you. Those will be your primary objectives.”
Part of their training was a heavy amount of sparring against one another. For this, Kara had whittled some tree limbs to the right length. Each session produced a whole new set of bruises. She didn’t confine them to only facing someone with the same size weapon either. Knives, clubs, barehanded, bigger swords, they all were used in the scenarios.
The new hand to hand training was in the rotation every other day. After the first two weeks, Garen added hand axe or tomahawks to the potential tools. He knew Kara was amazing with multi-weapon use and wanted to learn more. Garen was fairly good with the tomahawk but wanted to learn using it in conjunction with another hand weapon, something he was still struggling with.
Kara was able to work with everyone, developing their multi-weapon skills.
“You guys aren’t in the movies. If you are in a straight up knife fight, you screwed up everything you were doing since you woke up that morning. Fighting with a weapon in each hand is primarily something for the movies or intimidation because most people don’t have the skill or practice enough to do it effectively. However, if you look at it as fighting with a spare weapon in your other hand, and fight one at a time as they come to bear, then it starts to make more sense.”
Kara helped each evaluate which ‘backup’ weapon matched what they could use. Garen, with his familiarity with the tomahawk could make passable use of it in his off hand while using the short sword in his primary hand. Surprisingly, this also worked for Angelique. Bekka and Allyson were better with a second shorter knife in their off hand.
The tomahawk appealed to Angelique. It was one of those classic tools of the mountain men and the Indians in all the old books and tales she had read for so long. Garen had several modern riggers axes which gave more leverage and cutting area than hatchets but she kept gravitating to his old school true traditional, wood handled tomahawk. It just felt better in her hands.
Most days they tried to get outside for at least part of the day. It felt good to feel the sun on their faces even though winter was here. It had been a long time since most of them were of the disabled list. One of the new skills they were working on was winter moving which meant cross country skiing or snowshoes. Cross country skis were in short supply. Garen, Bekka and Allyson had to settle for snowshoes. Improving these skills made daily patrol assignments easier.
Each day, depending on what other training they were doing, at least two people went on a patrol, either around the inside of the compound or, sometimes, in the forest beyond. The longer patrols tended to be Kara and Angelique once she was comfortable on the cross-country skis. This let them combine physical therapy and patrol.
Night patrols were usually three people, especially if they went outside the compound. This was also something new to Allyson in the woods. Frequently Bekka or Garen would take Allyson and Angelique on snowshoes so they could move slower and more deliberate in the dark. Moving in the dark, especially without using night vision was taking on more and more importance as the days got shorter and the nights got longer.
The group was in a comfortable rhythm now. Everyone was focused on learning and training to give them a purpose, something to do in a positive way. This helped offset the worsening news they heard each night on the radio about how the country was coming apart, fracturing in ways eerily familiar to Bekka, Garen and Kara, and something unbelievable to Allyson and Angelique.
The patrols took on more and more seriousness and focus if possible. The news from outside was grim and had no hope of improving. With everything going on, it was decided to double up on patrolling. Most of the time Bekka, Garen and Allyson would work the areas towards town and the road. Angelique and Kara would work the back and side of the property bordering the forest since they could cover the larger areas faster on their skis.
A couple times, Garen or Kara would move farther out at night to check the perimeter from a distance with the eyes of an enemy or an opportunist. Bekka was spending a lot of time on the radio s and setting up game cameras in elevated locations to look for intruders they might have missed. Allyson was evaluating things close in to the perimeter, trying to look at things like a thief would. She normally would take Angelique or one of the others so she could teach them what she was looking for.
On one of the nighttime checks, Garen went across the road in front of the house to check on his other closest neighbor. It belonged to a retired military couple who traveled the country in their RV. He hadn’t seen hide nor hare of them since the quake. In the first few days after the quake, he had looked over that way from up on the hillside and didn’t see their RV. He assumed they were away when everything happened. Now he wanted to confirm their absence. If they had been away this long, they probably weren’t coming back any time soon.
The house was empty, the RV was nowhere around. Garen made some mental notes about things around this property they could secure. They weren’t raiders but, just like with the other property, they could make sure things were safeguarded and when or if they returned, given back to them. One more winter project for the group.