Story code: ST-000362
Part 3: The Syllabus
The snap of Mac’s holster retention strap releasing echoed through the quiet gun shop like a firecracker. Mac didn’t fully draw the weapon from his hip, but his heavy hand clamped down on the dark grip. His eyes were no longer on Elias; they were locked onto the glowing screen of the phone resting face-up on the linoleum floor.
“Step away from the counter,” Mac ordered. His voice had lost its grating, slow cadence. It was sharp, clipped, and entirely devoid of patience.
Elias stumbled backward, his dress shoes squeaking violently against the polished floor. His shoulders hit a heavy metal rack of camouflage hunting apparel, sending a cascade of thick jackets sliding on their hangers. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from his phone. The blurry image of his own silver sedan sat there on the screen, a silent, glowing promise that his time was up. The monster was in the parking lot.
Without taking his eyes off the dark front windows, Mac moved with a terrifying, fluid speed. He reached beneath the counter and flipped a heavy switch. The red neon OPEN sign buzzing in the window instantly died, plunging the front half of the store into shadow. Mac then sidestepped down the aisle, keeping his massive body angled behind the reinforced display cases, until he reached the front door. He threw a secondary steel deadbolt into place with a heavy clank and dragged a slatted metal security grate halfway across the glass before retreating back behind the main counter.
“I knew it,” Mac muttered, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the darkened parking lot through the blinds. He turned his imposing glare back to Elias, who was hyperventilating against the jacket rack. “I knew you were bad news the second you walked in here. What did you do?”
“I didn’t… I didn’t do anything,” Elias gasped, pressing his damp hands against his temples. The room was spinning. The metallic smell of gun oil was making him nauseous. “They followed me. I told you I needed the gun to survive.”
“Save the innocent victim routine,” Mac scoffed, leaning his thick forearms against the glass case. He looked Elias up and down, his lip curling in undisguised disgust. “Look at you. Oxford shirt, tailored slacks, soft little hands that have never swung a hammer in their life. What are you, some university lecturer? A professor?”
Elias blinked, his chest heaving as he fought for air. “I’m a teacher. Please, you have to let me buy-”
“A teacher,” Mac interrupted, laughing darkly. It was a cruel, hollow sound that bounced off the racks of rifles. “Let me guess. You sit in your safe little faculty lounges, sipping fair-trade coffee, preaching about how the police need to be defunded and how guns are the root of all evil. You people spend all day mocking our values, calling us paranoid gun nuts. But the second your progressive little utopia cracks? The second you wander into the wrong neighborhood and piss off some street thug? Suddenly you’re in my shop, sweating on my floor, begging for the Second Amendment to save your skin.”
The words slammed into Elias, hot and suffocating. The sheer, towering arrogance of the man’s assumptions left Elias temporarily speechless.
“You poked the bear, didn’t you, professor?” Mac continued, his voice dripping with condescension. “You went to some protest, threw a brick at the wrong truck, or you bought drugs from a cartel runner, and now you realize the real world doesn’t care about your college degrees. You hypocrites are all exactly the same. You want to strip away our right to defend ourselves, right up until the big bad wolf shows up at your door. Now you expect me to hand over a loaded weapon so you can go play cowboy and make a mess I’ll have to answer for.”
Elias stood frozen against the rack of jackets. The absolute terror that had been paralyzing him for the last six hours was still there, but as Mac’s political mocking echoed in the shadowed room, a new, jagged emotion violently pierced through the panic.
It was absolute, blinding rage.
Elias’s eyes drifted from Mac’s sneering face to the thick, embroidered patch on the right breast of the man’s work shirt. He hadn’t noticed it before, blinded by his own anxiety. It was a black shield with a coiled snake wrapped around a colonial rifle. Above it, thick white letters read: *The Valley Vanguards*.
Elias recognized the logo. He recognized it because he had spent the last forty-eight hours staring at it in waking nightmares.
“I didn’t piss off a street thug,” Elias whispered. His voice stopped shaking. The tremor in his hands vanished, replaced by a rigid, white-knuckle tension.
Elias reached his right hand into the inner breast pocket of his blazer.
“Hand out of the jacket, right now!” Mac barked, his thumb snapping the retention strap off his holster entirely, drawing the heavy pistol halfway out.
Elias didn’t care about the gun. He pulled out a thick, crumpled stack of printer paper. The edges were stained with sweat from where he had been clutching them in his car all afternoon. He marched straight up to the glass display counter, completely ignoring the black muzzle that Mac had just leveled at his chest, and slammed the stack of papers down next to the steel lockbox.
“Read it,” Elias snarled, his voice cracking with fury.
Mac kept his pistol raised, his eyes darting between Elias’s flushed face and the papers on the glass. “Back up.”
“Read it!” Elias screamed, the sound tearing violently at his vocal cords. He shoved the papers an inch closer to Mac’s side of the counter. “You want to know what I did? You want to know the terrible crime I committed? I assigned a book! I put a memoir about the civil rights movement on my high school history syllabus! That’s it!”
Mac frowned, his heavy brow furrowing. Keeping his weapon angled at Elias’s chest, he slowly lowered his gaze to the top sheet of paper.
Elias stood completely still, his heart hammering against his ribs, watching the store owner’s eyes track across the bolded, printed text.
Elias knew exactly what the words said. He had memorized every horrifying line. *We know what room your seven-year-old daughter sleeps in, professor… We are going to string your wife up with wire while you watch… We are going to gut you like a pig for poisoning our kids with your Marxist history syllabus…*
Mac’s eyes tracked down to the bottom of the page. The massive man’s jaw suddenly went slack. The color rapidly drained from his face, leaving his weathered skin a sickly pale.
At the bottom of the printed email, perfectly rendered in high-resolution ink, was a black shield with a coiled snake wrapped around a colonial rifle. It was the exact same logo stitched into Mac’s shirt pocket.
The heavy pistol in Mac’s hand wavered, dipping an inch toward the floor as he stared in stunned silence at the signature block. The men waiting in the dark parking lot weren’t street thugs. They were his people.