Chapters (68)
The machete was not primarily a weapon. She had grabbed it to cut a path through the thickets of scrub and wild grass that strangled most of the city. But in a pinch the honed edge could be useful against man or beast. She gave the blade a polish, but nothing more. She was not an obsessive. For Sofia, guns and knives were simply tools. Having grown up on a farm, she’d been taught to think of them that way, and nothing had changed her opinion in the intervening years. Not even the hard necessity of having had to kill men with a firearm. They remained tools; implements for taking life.
Because she wasn’t obsessed with guns, there was much about the other weapon in front of her that she didn’t know – its name for instance. She was sure that something as particular as this would’ve had a special name. She recognised the gun, an assault rifle, as a variation of the kind she had seen some road agents and individual bandits carry at various times. An AK-47, they were known as, although this one looked like a much nastier and improved version of the old wood-and-stamped-metal machine gun preferred by peasant armies the world over. It may have come from China or somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps even Pakistan before the recent war there. She neither knew nor cared. What had drawn her to this weapon the moment she saw it was its reputation for reliable lethality.
During the long trek north in the spring, she had often listened to the men discussing their firearms. Adam, too, had been an invaluable teacher in this regard. Like many teenage boys, he was fascinated by guns and had studied them in much greater detail than she would ever have bothered to. Something he used to say that seemed to amuse him greatly had impressed itself upon her memory.
‘AK-47. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room . . .’