Free Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle by Jerry Ahern Page A

raise them since his earliest memories, so he wasn’t at all upset that one of them was barking in the predawn hours. A dog might bark because it sensed danger and sought to raise an alarm, or because it experienced some sort of distress, or simply because it felt like barking.
    But since his dogs didn’t usually bark at this hour, he pushed aside the covers and started out of bed, just in case.
    “Thorn?”
    “Some barking; I’m gonna check,” he told his wife, Ellie. There was another practical concern, of course. Their nearest neighbors were better than a quarter of a mile away, but their children were light sleepers-a good trait, he’d always thought-and might be awakened.
    He pulled on a pair of shorts, stepped into his slip-on deck shoes and did one more thing. From the nightstand on his side of the bed, he took up his shoulder holster. He was not a firearms afficionado, but as with most people these days, carrying a gun was for him as natural as breathing, and a fine insurance policy for continuing to do so.
    Although never “into guns” as a hobby, he took his marksmanship seriously and was quite careful in his selection of the firearms which he did possess. All were cartridge arms reproductions from Lancer; energy weapons had always seemed like overkill to him and required more maintenance than did cartridge arms. The charge had to be frequently checked and the contacts in this high salinity climate of Hawaii, although
    sealed of course, had to be kept scrupulously cleaned.
    When he had purchased his guns, he’d consulted with “expert” friends, then read the literature, shopped wisely for price against value and, at last, made his decisions. All his purchases were Lancer-made reproductions. The gun which was carried in his shoulder holster was the SIG-Sauer P-226. The gun which he kept primarily for home defense was ideally suited to other needs should those arise; it was the Heckler & Koch SP-89. The design had intrigued him on an intellectual level. It was a semiautomatic shoulder stockless pistol version of the MP5 submachinegun (Lancer reproductions of these were still in use by some SEAL Team and Honolulu Tac Team personnel).
    He had read that in the declining years of the twentieth century, when the SP-89 was developed, civilian ownership of selective fire weapons was frowned upon and all but impossible; these days, such was not the case, of course. If a civilian wanted to own the state-of-the-art plasma energy assault rifle that was current issue to United States military forces, or a Lancer reproduction of the Browning .50 caliber machinegun, all that was necessary was the money to buy it.
    There was considerable crime, as there had been throughout history, simply because some men and women did not like to work; but, very little crime was violent, and a miniscule portion of that directed against individual citizens. Home burglaries were a novelty, as were robberies of stores, banks and the like; with virtually everyone armed if he or she chose to be, violent criminality had little chance for success.
    The opposite was supposedly true in Eden, where possession of any sort of weapon by a civilian was punished with horrible severity; in Eden, cries of violence against the general population were nearly the rule rather than the exception.
    Although the SP-89 was only semiautomatic, he felt no need for anything more than that, as was his prerogative. The firearm his wife carried in her purse was at once equally as eclectic and equally practical, a Taurus Model 85CH, a snubby .38 Special revolver with an exposed but totally spurless and profileless hammer.
    He was not a hunter, so he owned no rifle, but kept a shotgun for emergencies, this also Lancer-made, a reproduction of the Remington 870 pump.
    As he started downstairs, he looked in at the children’s bedrooms. Trixie tossed and turned a bit as the barking persisted; Daniel seemed undisturbed as yet.
    He took the stairs as silently as he could,