Trigger Warning Chapter 15:
The bad guys discuss how to handle the Jake Rivers problem. This man is unstoppable! No amount of random attacks can thwart him!
“We need to take that son of a bitch out,” Jimmy said. He held up his left arm, which sported a bandage around the forearm. “He cut me pretty bad. I had to get a dozen stitches, man. If we didn’t have a doctor of our own, we’d have guys in the ER right now and the cops asking questions…”
Wait! Whose side are the cops on?? I thought they were in cahoots with the evil liberals? I don’t know what’s what anymore.
“He’s just one man,” Lucy said. “I don’t see how he can do any real damage to the plan.”
Same, but apparently we need to take this very seriously as Matthias Foster, who appears to be the leader, explains that Jake is a dangerous man. He forgets peaceable, but we’ll forgive him for that.
Goon number 1 asserts that he wants them to kill Jake, but Matthias reminds them that they’ve already attacked Jake twice to “test him and find out how much of a badass he really is.”
They’re not worried about anyone else in the student body. Foster explains,
“…They abhor violence. Just ask them, they’ll tell you. Oh, they can form a mob quickly enough, if anybody offends them and violates their safe spaces, but as long as we keep them spread out, they won’t do that. They won’t do anything unless the odds are on their side. They think they’re noble, but they’re just cowards.”
I know we’re not really supposed to know what exactly their plan is…but it seems like they oppose literally everyone else we’ve been exposed to in this story, so I’m automatically inclined to vaguely root for them. Rah rah?
“They’re about to learn a valuable lesson, though.”
“What’s that?” Lucy asked.
“In a world full of wolves, there are no safe spaces.”
MIND? BLOWN!
Meanwhile, back with Jake. He’s decided to visit a friend of his who owns a gun range. I feel it’s important to tell you that Jake has a flashback to an interaction with his friend’s twelve-year old-daughter.
He had gotten the revolver out one day while he was at the range, and Randall’s twelve-year-old daughter had looked at him with contempt and said, “I hope you’re planning on
throwing that at somebody, instead of shooting at them. You’ll do more damage that way.”
“It’s not the size of the gun, it’s what you know how to do with it,” Jake had responded, then immediately wished he hadn’t said such a thing to a twelve-year-old girl. He needed to watch his phrasing in the future.
If she’d been offended, though, she hadn’t shown it. She’d just snorted disgustedly, shook her head, and gone back to the AR-15 she was sighting in.
Damn. I bet she don’t need no safe spaces.
Jake and his friend catch up about all the happenings on campus. And again really really try to convince the reader that the true Nazis are the liberals.
“It was me against a mob, all right, but they’re not anarchists. Just the opposite, in fact. They want everything controlled by the government . . . and the government controlled by them.”
“That kind of makes them the Nazis, doesn’t it?”
If the point of this book is that everyone everywhere is terrible always, I am completely convinced.
The whole conversation is actually completely pointless because they just talk about Jake being attacked and Randall tells him to take care of himself. But later, while Jake is daydreaming in class he…flashes back to the scene we were just in and recalls how he spotted an older man at the shooting range.
When Randall walked by, Jake had angled his head toward the older man and asked quietly, “Who’s that? I don’t think I’ve seen him around here before.”
“His name’s Rivera,” Randall replied. “He’s been coming here to shoot for a few months. I don’t know a thing in the world about him except that he’s one of the best with a gun I’ve ever seen. He might be retired law enforcement. FBI, maybe.”
He might even be a new main character!
“He doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who’d appreciate anybody poking into his business.”
“I can’t argue with you there,” Randall had agreed. But since then, Jake hadn’t been able to get the man named Rivera out of his head,
OR NEW LOVE INTEREST???
or Randall’s comment about the possibility of him being a private security specialist. That sort of work appealed to Jake, or at least the idea of it did, anyway.
OR EMPLOYER? Wow anything could happen!
Jake considers dropping out of school to go into private security (wow this line of thought is so intense. I’d laugh, but I can relate too much to this), but there’s one thing standing in his way.
If he dropped out of school, though, more than likely he would never see Natalie Burke again, and the thought of that bothered him more than it should have, he told himself.
Jake…you went on like one date?
The chapter ends with Jake bumping into someone in the hallway, and the guy calls him a, you guessed it, a Nazi. Tune in next time to find out if Jake gets into another fist fight with this guy!
“In a world full of wolves, there are no safe spaces.”
I feel like if your antagonist’s dialogue sounds like it could be the protagonist’s dialogue you have maybe made a mistake somewhere.
I’m glad someone else thought this. I read this and started panicking that I had mis-summarized that the villains were (this book’s conception of) liberals. And I haven’t stopped panicking because… what does anyone want in this book anyway
… test him and find out how much of a badass he really is …
That sounds like each and every bad manga or anime in which the evil guy is somehow obsessed with some vague “combat power data” they have to get to do their evil stuff. Therefore from now on I’ll imagine this book in the most cutesy, girliest shojo-manga design I can imagine.
this would be more interesting if rivera WAS suddenly introduced as the new love interest. at least if jake’s randomly thinking about him in class instead of natalie you can make a semi-reasonable (by THIS book’s standards, which are admittedly very very low) argument for that.