Shoot Club: Shot Club, Part One

"No way. What kind of idiot do you think I am?"

Mike reached in to touch it. "Don't you need a license?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe."

"Can I hold it?"

"Sure."

Mike lifted it out of the case.

"It's heavy."

"Aren't there laws about these things?" Peter asked.

"No, that's only if you're a, I dunno, an escaped convict or something. Otherwise, it's your Constitutional right to keep an arm."

Mike handed it around. It was heavy. It was smooth and cool. It smelled like oily wet metal. The handle was made from textured wood.

"Where's the safety?"

"I think that's the safety." I fumbled at a sliding latch on the left side.

"No, no, that opens the round part where the bullets go."

Sure enough, the round part rolled out and, for a brief moment, I thought I'd broken Trevor's dad's gun. I spun it, which is pretty much what you do, and then clicked it back up into the body of the gun. I tried to pull back the hammer with my thumb, but it wouldn't budge. I had to use both hands to cock it. In the movies, you casually cock the hammer back to show you mean business. That's when the bad guy talks.

'All right, all right, I'll tell you,' he stammers.

Having to use both hands wouldn't have the same effect. You'd come across like the rookie who's not as tough as he thinks he is or the chick who manages to get the bad guy's gun while he's scuffling with the good guy. Still, it felt great in my hand. Just aces. The wood against my palm. The heavy steel gleaming hearse black. Like it had a mind of its own, my index finger tucked around the trigger. The relentless thrust of that long barrel, like the finger of God for me to point where it needed pointing. This was how you took out bad guys and enforced justice and sneaked through the villain's heavily guarded compound.

I didn't realize it at the time, but thinking back, I probably looked kind of silly holding a laboriously cocked Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 revolver. It was the gun that would shoot my friend Trevor two days later.

To be continued...

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Tom Chick has been writing about videogames for fifteen years. His work appears in Games for Windows Magazine, Yahoo, Gamespy, Sci-Fi, and Variety. He lives in Los Angeles. Shoot Club appears in this space every Thursday.