He watched each of them fumble through the rifle once more. When that was over, Terry judged he had enough daylight to make it back to Margie Rose’s house. He gave the M16s to Mark and Devlin and the pistol to Jim, after making sure they were unloaded and no ammunition was available. Jim looked disappointed.
“You’ll get your chance, big guy,” Terry told him. “I don’t ever want to see these weapons unsecured, do you get me?” They shouted in agreement, and he waved to them as he headed out, not looking forward to getting home and seeing what was waiting for him.
He didn’t have long to wait. Halfway there, he could see the smoke from a fire, so he started running, then let his boosted body take over. When he sprinted into the yard, he found that Char had made a campfire and was burning wood. The venison steaks were on wood sticks that they’d just started roasting over the flames.
“I told you, Margie Rose. Men. All they think about is their stomachs, although that run was far more impressive than I would have ever imagined,” Char laughed and Margie Rose grabbed the young woman’s arm and giggled.
“I thought the house was on fire,” Terry said flatly, pulling up a log to sit on as he relieved Margie Rose of one of the steaks so he could cook it himself. He noted that Char was letting the flames lick her steak, but not enough to cook it. So she liked her meat rare.
Good to know.
CHAPTER NINE
“The saddles are done, boss!” the biggest brown-noser’s voice announced before the men even made it through the door.
“Saddle up, bitches!” Sawyer yelled as the door started to open, but the men never entered. They turned away and ran to do their boss’s bidding.
Sawyer hitched up his pants, checked his pistols, two nine millimeters, one on each hip. He strutted out, his well-worn cowboy boots thumping on the planking. “C’mon, Clyde, we got work to do!”
Sawyer held the door as the dog ran out and onto the dirt path they called a street. The town looked like something out of the 1800s, a grouping of ramshackle buildings used in a variety of ways. Sawyer’s home would have been the old jail. Maybe this had been the movie set for an old western. No one knew, and it didn’t matter.
Sawyer Brown thought it was perfect for his larger-than-life persona.
One of the early teenagers who aspired to be a lackey held Sawyer’s horse while he took a couple steps and tried to vault to its back. Even with his size, he didn’t get high enough. He slammed into the side of the horse, one shoulder bouncing off the hard seat of the saddle. He grabbed the pommel and pulled himself the rest of the way up, getting help from the young man. Sawyer kicked him away once he was up.
“Water?” he yelled. The eight other men held up a variety of canteens and metal containers. “No, dumbasses. Where’s mine?” he corrected.
The young lackey ran off, quickly returning with an old gallon jug, three-fourths full. He presented the jug, at arm’s length to stay out of range of Sawyer’s kicking leg. The big man took the jug and shook his head. It would do. There were a lot of streams and in the world twenty years after the fall, pollution was at a minimum. They’d find more water than they could drink along the way. He angrily waved the young man away.
“Let’s go, fuckers. East then north. Take the lead, Harold, you and Smeghead,” Sawyer directed. He didn’t know any of their real names. Whatever he called them when he first saw them was how they came to be known. And they didn’t know his real name either, so that made it a fair trade, Sawyer thought.
* * *
“Faster!” Terry yelled, exasperated at how Ivan held the others back. Jim and Devlin each grabbed an arm while Mark set the pace. Terry watched Mark closely, but hadn’t seen any duplicity. Jim hadn’t tried to attack anyone else, so Mark kept that part of the bargain, too.
Mark and Devlin carried the M16s. Jim had the .38 pistol tucked into a pouch that he carried. To Terry, it looked like an old fanny pack. He had to keep from laughing whenever he saw Jim wearing it.
Terry let the group pass him, then ran by, getting back in front where he set a blistering pace. Soon the group was far behind. Finally, they split up. Devlin bolted out front, then Jim. Mark hung back with Ivan for a little while before leaving him. Ivan stopped, bent over with his hands on his knees, and heaved.
When Devlin arrived, Terry put him in the front leaning rest, the pushup position. Then Jim and finally Mark. When he had all three of them, he tore into them.
“What the FUCK did you just do?” he screamed. No one answered. “You left a man behind, and that’s something we never do. Do you get me?” A chorus of “yes, sirs” followed as they scrambled to their feet and sprinted back to Ivan. They berated the man and dragged him back to where Terry was standing with his hands on his hips. He wanted to send them into the mountains, feed them all to the Werewolves.
But that was a kneejerk reaction, fun, but wrong.
They stood at attention and waited as Terry paced back and forth, trying to think of what to do. He looked them over, one by one, and they avoided looking back at him.
“Bring it in,” he told them in a low voice. The men broke their position of attention and stepped closer, but stayed out of arm’s reach, wary about what would happen next. “This is called a teachable moment. I may have pitted you three against this man, in the hopes that he would come along faster than he has. But look at him. He ran until he puked, that means he pushed his body to the limit. Did any of you?”
They shook their heads and looked at their feet.
“I was in the Marine Corps, a lifetime ago, and the worst thing you can possibly do is leave someone behind. We fight and we fight hard because we know we’re not going to get abandoned. Our brothers are there for us.”
Terry wanted the men to understand, take ownership for the success of their small unit. If he was going to grow this into a force that would bring and peace and stability throughout the area that used to be Colorado, he needed these men to believe and then sell it to the next bunch of recruits.
Pride was hard earned. And once they had it, they’d have to fight every day to keep it.
“Ivan, tell us, what are you good at?” Terry prodded, having not taken the time to talk with the man. Ivan shuffled his feet and shrugged. “Come on, there has to be something you do that others don’t. Can you read?”
“I can read. It’s what I do at night. I sleep better in the daytime,” he said, barely above a whisper, as if embarrassed.
“Bingo!” Terry shouted. “Being able to stay awake through the night when all you’re doing is standing watch is no easy feat, my man! We can use that unique ability of yours. I expect you can see well in the dark, too, since that’s what your body is used to.” Ivan nodded, lifting his head to meet Terry’s sparkling eyes.
The larger man clapped Ivan on the shoulder.
“Nightwatch. Muscle. Speed. Smarts. Don’t we have it all. This is what a team is all about. No one is great at everything. Know your strengths and don’t let your weaknesses hold you back. That’s what we are all about. Although I’m disappointed none of you asked what FDG stood for. Well, I’ll tell you. It stands for Force de Guerre and what do you think that might mean?”
Mark started to raise a hand, as did Ivan. Terry pointed to Ivan.
“Force of war,” he stated.
“Why do you think I’d call it that, Mark?” Terry turned his attention to the oldest man of the group besides himself.
Mark pursed his lips and looked to the other men before speaking. “We take the battle to others. If someone wants war, let us bring it to them. New Boulder is a place where people need to not just feel safe, but be safe. That’s our job. It’s best if we protect them as far away from our town as possible. They don’t need to know that we’ve fought our mutual enemies on their behalf. They need to go about their business, enjoy their lives. Then we come home and continue ours, just until the next time,” Mark told the group.
Terry didn’t immediately respond to that eloquent answer. It was exactly
as he envisioned, the overarching reason that such a force should exist.
“FDG, gentlemen. Mark, you are, from this point forward, my corporal. The rest of you are privates. If we’re going to be a real military unit, we need to be a real military unit. Do you get me?” he asked.
The men smiled and shouted a hearty “Oorah.”
“And now we shoot, gentlemen. To the hills. I saw a cut that would make a good shooting range. You each get to take two shots. We will need to make them count. Follow me, for all you’re worth, you useless maggots!” Terry took off running and the men cheered as they followed.
* * *
Sawyer wasn’t pleased. There was a lump in his saddle that didn’t mesh with his backside. Every step the horse took exacerbated the pain, but he wouldn’t show weakness in front of his men.
It didn’t matter what he tried not to show, his constant squirming in the saddle told the men everything they needed to know. He would be surly and angry and take it out on them. They buried their heads and continued plodding forward, because at the end of the day, those on Sawyer Brown’s side got to eat and got to sleep in relative peace. And those who weren’t on his side? They died, hideously. The route took them some twenty miles to the east before they turned north on a back road through what used to be farm country.
Not long after they turned north, Sawyer called the group to a halt and sent four of the eight hunting. The other four set up camp. Sawyer walked around the area, trying to stretch out. He was miserable and found a variety of ways to take it out on his men.
They cowered as he approached. He hated it when they ran from a beating, which always made things worse. Everyone gets their turn in the barrel, he thought. It makes them tougher.
Sawyer heard the sound of the 12-gauge shotgun, once, twice. He hoped that meant two kills and not one miss. His man Stonehands was a good shot, and that was why he carried the scattergun. Birds and small game were plentiful in the overgrown fields. They’d found a big stock of the shells and had been milking them for the past ten years. Sawyer didn’t know what they had left, but he expected his men to tell him if they were running low. The big man smiled, thinking that it was his genius that made everything possible. From weapons to horses to men. He had been lucky, but since he didn’t believe in luck, he reasoned that it was because he was good.
When the hunting parties returned, one had a small deer, while Stonehands had three rabbits on the ground by the quickly-dug fire pit. “A new record, boss! Three with two shots,” the man said proudly.
“Well, I’ll be, Stoner. Next up is four, huh?” he said plainly, not getting caught up in the man’s excitement. Sawyer waved them away to clean their kills elsewhere. “Hey! I didn’t hear your shot. How did you get that buck?”
“He was caught up in a bush. Smeghead held him while I cut its throat,” the man said, showing his knife.
“Good thinking, now get the fuck away from me,” Sawyer Brown growled, feeling the pain from standing in one place too long. He sat down, but that hurt far too much, so he laid by the fire, resting his head on his backpack.
As he was falling asleep, he heard the men yelling at Clyde to stay back as the dog barked, hoping for something to fall his way. It was soon quiet, and Sawyer thought of the dog muzzle deep in a pile of deer guts. Venison sounded good. He’d wake up when it was ready. Serving him was his men’s reason to live. If it wasn’t, that was why he slept with his pistols and one eye open, Clyde by his side. He drifted, fighting it until the dog returned. When Clyde laid against his side, Sawyer Brown fell soundly asleep.
* * *
The four men waited patiently while Terry watched them. Finally, Devlin held out a hand, palm up as if Terry was supposed to give him something.
“What? We’re going to shoot, but when you finally pull the trigger on a live round, you are going to be so comfortable with your rifle that it won’t scare you. We dry fire for two days before we finally pull the trigger for real. Then we take another day fixing whatever the hell you did wrong. If I feel it’s fixed, then we send our second bullet downrange. Is that clear, gentlemen?”
They nodded. Terry set up the range, estimating a distance of one hundred yards where he put four targets of various sizes. He returned to the men and sat them down. He went step-by-step through the Marine Corps marksmanship training program. Of course, he had it memorized, because he had read it, from cover to cover and that was how his memory worked. He even knew the date he read it, but dates didn’t matter anymore, only daylight and seasons.
They learned about sight alignment and sight picture. They each took turns squinting through the sights of the M16. A peephole in the back that they looked through, focusing their vision on the front sight post, then centering that in the middle of the rear circle and setting the focused front sight post in the middle of their target. Terry shook his head as he watched Ivan’s contortions. He was right-handed but left-eye dominant, so he fought to get his face over the black stock of the rifle so he could focus with his good eye.
“Give the rifle back, Nightwatch,” Terry said, giving the man a nickname with less baggage than Ivan or Smashmouth. “Here.” He dropped the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber, then handed Ivan his .45, but told him he wouldn’t be shooting it, not unless they found more ammunition. Terry would let him fire one shot from the .38 as a consolation prize.
They continued training with both the pistol and the rifle until they could no longer focus. They’d been contorted into various firing positions for most of the day. Terry told them to stand and shake things out. Then, he ran them through a long series of calisthenics to help them stretch. Terry ended by running them the five miles to the first greenhouse. He deposited Devlin first, then Ivan, then Jim, dropped Mark off, then ran to the last greenhouse. He had a promise to keep to the good people who supplied the food. He’d told them they would help and that was exactly what he made his boys do.
Work in the hope that the farmers could part with some of their crop that the men could take back to the barracks for Mrs. Grimes.
Which reminded him, Terry thought he’d have to go hunting again, since the venison was disappearing quickly with a Werewolf in Margie Rose’s house. He avoided that place as much as possible, even though Margie Rose and Char were getting along famously. He needed to get some venison to Mrs. Grimes and the barracks, too.
Margie Rose was starting to get angry with him for his extended absences. Terry suspected that she was upset that her matchmaking was bearing no fruit.
He hoped an armload of fresh vegetables would placate her.
So he put himself to work along with his people. They worked for a solid hour and then he went back one by one to collect them. Each came out carrying their prizes, rewards for their continued work. The greenhouses were starting to deliver and the last few weeks of help took the edge off for the farmers. They’d developed the crops and nurtured them over the years, but finally, things were shaping up as they’d hoped. The men worked the greenhouses and in the surrounding fields where much was transplanted.
Next to the greenhouse that Terry chose was a healthy-sized field of barley and wheat. The farmers had planted it with the help of their cart horse and then did little with it besides getting rid of the weeds between the rows. Terry looked at the barley hungrily and was devising a plan to turn it into beer. He was still working on the farmers who didn’t want to part with too much of their precious grain. They wanted it all for bread.
Terry wanted it for liquid bread.
He expected that they would compromise and that was why he always worked at their greenhouse, building credits to call in with the fall harvest.
Terry had fans. The farmers across the board were more than pleased with the help he provided and the change that had come across Billy Spires.
Terry always smiled and more importantly, although he wasn’t a farmer, he seemed to be able to answer any of their questions regarding the history of the crops and optimal fertilization techniques.
He had read a couple books on the processes way back when.
He recalled the charts that said when to add nitrogen, a little lime, or even horse manure. No one element was the golden egg. It was the balance that mattered.
The farmers were seeing more of their crops turning green and less dying. Terry was in good standing and he hoped to barter that for the opportunity to turn barley and wheat into mash as the first stage in brewing beer. He didn’t have hops and that wasn’t a bar to brewing. He accepted that his first stuff might not be great, but decided it would be the best that the world had to offer.
He was good with that.
In his head, he built a list of materials that he’d need for the brewing process, a large copper pot for boiling the wort and sparge water, those liquids that contained the sugars that would create the beer and then give it the alcoholic kick, a couple other vats for fermenting, some tubing, a screen for filtering out the hard bits, and then bottles to bottle the brew. He wondered if he could cap it or if he’d have to fashion soft wood into corks.
So much to do, but even a bad beer was better than no beer.
When he arrived at the house with his armload of vegetables, Char was waiting. She’d been lounging on the porch in a chair that had appeared during one of his absences. The Werewolf made a beeline for him, intercepting him while he was still in the street.
“What gives, big man?” She smiled, turning her head away just enough to highlight her perfect profile.
Let the flirt games begin, he thought, but he wasn’t a player. “What do you mean?” he asked, knowing full well what she meant.
“It’s like you’re deliberately avoiding me. You eat, do the dishes, and rush to your room, locking the door behind you. I’m not a stranger, anymore, am I, TH? Can’t we be friends?” she asked, tracing a single finger down his bare arm, then sliding it back up until she tickled the inside of his elbow.
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