As the men continued walking down the highway and the threat passed, Dave made a mental note to bring up the subject again with Tony. And to offer his friend some weapons training. Perhaps if he was proficient in the use of firearms he’d be more accepting of them.
He checked his watch. It was just past two p.m. Had he really been out for two hours?
Dave listened for the now-familiar roar of Tony’s Polaris. He said he expected to be back by three. It shouldn’t be long now.
He used the tail of the black t-shirt he wore to wipe the sweat from his face. Two o’clock typically marked the highest temperature of any day, and he figured it to be in the low 90s.
If the passing men hadn’t awakened him, his sweating soon would have.
He rolled off the air mattress and from beneath the trailer, then stood on the shoulder of the road.
His back was cramping again and it occurred to him he was getting old.
No, maybe not. But he had a lot more aches and pains than he once did. Perhaps his new harsh life, living on the road, was taking a toll on his body. And he wondered how bad it would be ten or twenty years from now.
Then he banished the thought from his mind, as being too disheartening to think about.
Once upon a time he walked into the woods when he needed to relieve himself.
Now, though, people no longer saw the need to be discrete. Relieving oneself in public had become socially acceptable, and the call of nature was no longer necessarily kept private.
Well, among men, anyway. Most women still liked to cling to old societal norms, and preferred to urinate in more private confines than the open road.
Men these days tended to just whip it out and let loose, wherever they happened to be at the time, without regard to who might be in the close vicinity.
As Dave peed against the front wheel of the GMC tractor it occurred to him that he’d adopted a habit he needed to shed before he found little Beth. It didn’t matter that most other men did the same thing.
They weren’t Beth’s father.
Dave was, and as such needed to set a better example.
He resolved, when he was finished, that in the future he’d do it the old way. The way he did when he first hit the road and struck out from San Antonio.
God, that seemed so long ago.
In the future, he’d do what he used to do, and seek out a stand of bushes to hide in when he needed to use the restroom.
Or, in an urban setting, he’d go behind a building or other structure.
It had been well over a year since the EMPs struck the earth out of the blue and did their damage.
For well over a year, Dave hadn’t had to use courtesy or manners or etiquette to get by. He’d lived alone during that time and behaved more or less the way he wanted to.
He didn’t have to fill his role as a father, or to set an example for his daughters, because they were a thousand miles away.
He wasn’t sure where Beth was. She might be only a couple of miles from him at that very moment.
One thing he was sure of, though, was that he’d soon find her. He’d soon go back to being her daddy, and the one she looked to for protection and guidance.
In advance of that, he resolved that he’d rid himself of some of his bad habits.
He climbed back onto the trailer and was surprised to find there were a few cases of water left, although most had been removed from the pallet.
One case had been torn open, and he helped himself to six bottles.
Then he got the heck out of the trailer, as the afternoon sun had heated it to well over a hundred degrees.
The six bottles of water were also way too hot to drink. But that was no problem.
He placed them into his backpack and would drink them later after they’d cooled off. He took out two other bottles, cooler ones, from the bowels of the pack.
Dave took three large swallows from one of the bottles, then used an old Marine Corps trick to try to get his core temperature down a bit.
He took off the black t-shirt he wore and soaked it with the rest of the water in the bottle.
Once the shirt was soaked through and through he held his breath and put it back on.
It was always a shock when the wet shirt hit his chest and back. But the shock dissipated after a few seconds. And for the next two hours or so, until the shirt dried again, he’d be the coolest guy in the neighborhood.
Chapter 33
By four thirty Dave was starting to worry. He’d served two combat tours in Iraq. He knew that, despite the military’s wishes, campaigns sometimes didn’t go according to plan.
Sometimes unexpected obstacles jumped up and got in the way.
Sometimes the enemy combatants didn’t behave as expected.
Sometimes enemy reinforcements showed up and had to be dealt with.
Sometimes miscalculations were made.
And sometimes timetables weren’t met.
The concept that all operations in the United States Marine Corps were timed and conducted with precision, right down to the minute, was a myth.
Especially during combat.
Oh, a campaign might start dead on a pre-planned minute.
But after that, anything was possible.
The difference between a campaign the Marines were running in Fallujah, and the mission Tony was on in Albuquerque, was that the Marines were in constant contact with each other.
They could communicate by radio to let each other know as plans changed, as new threats emerged.
And, if comm was out, they could use runners or even colored smoke grenades to send coded messages back and forth.
The mission Tony was on was amateur by comparison.
Dave understood that odds were Tony merely let time get away from him. And he’d mentioned something about the Dalton gang keeping him longer than he wanted to be there to socialize.
Dave had gotten the impression from Tony that if the gang wanted to visit, one didn’t have the option of saying no.
And knowing that military excursions into enemy territory seldom if ever went as planned, Dave tried his best not to worry.
But now it was sixteen thirty hours. Tony said he should be back at fifteen hundred. He was an hour and a half late.
It was hard not to worry.
His t-shirt was almost dry now and he was getting uncomfortably hot again. He thought about re-wetting it, but looked for the tenth time at the southern sky.
A storm front was building to the south and the skies were darkening.
And it appeared to be headed his way.
Dave didn’t particularly like the idea of riding back to Tony’s place on Tony’s ATV, a driving rain in their faces.
But at least it would cool things off.
The storm looked to be an hour or so away. He could tough out the heat until then, and chose not to waste water to soak his shirt again.
He hated idle time. Always had.
If he had a rifle, he could shoot the good sized rabbit eating grass on the opposite side of the highway.
If he had his fishing gear, he could hike down to a small playa lake a hundred yards away to see if there were any fish in it.
If it wasn’t so damn hot inside the trailer, he’d crawl back inside and rummage through the leftovers to see whether there was anything left worth taking.
He was limited to three options while he waited: he could eat.
Or he could try to doze off again, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to. His stress level was rising ever higher as each minute went by with no sign of Tony.
The third option was to worry.
But he knew he’d do that anyway, regardless of whether he was lying down or eating.
So he might as well eat.
And that made good sense anyway. For if they were holding Tony against his will, and he had to go to war later to rescue him, Dave would need his strength. And he probably wouldn’t be able to eat later.
In battlefield etiquette, it was extremely
bad form to hold up one’s hand and say, “Time out, I need to eat.”
And probably a little bit dangerous as well.
Chapter 34
Dave climbed over the door of a Mustang convertible and sat in the passenger seat while popping the lid off a can of clam chowder.
He always used disposable plastic spoons when he ate canned food. That way he didn’t have to wash his utensils. And the plastic dinnerware was easy to find. It was all over the place, in pretty much every Walmart trailer he’d ever crawled into.
Especially the knives. Highway nomads frequently helped themselves to the forks and spoons for their own use.
But nobody ever took the knives.
As he ate the cold clam chowder, Dave envisioned a world five years in the future, when virtually everything of value had been liberated from such trailers. And in his vision of the future, only two things would be left, scattered about the floor of each trailer:
Plastic knives and kitty litter.
To occupy his thoughts and reduce his stress level Dave looked around the interior of the Mustang. The top had been opened when it died more than a year before, and it had suffered extensive water damage from passing rains. And even more damage from the sun.
But it was still in surprisingly good shape.
It reminded him that he’d always wanted a Mustang convertible.
His parents wouldn’t let him buy one in high school because… well, they knew him too well. They knew he had a lead foot and would show off to his friends.
They knew him as a rather inattentive driver as well, distracted by every pretty girl in a skirt walking down the street.
If he’d succeeded in talking them into the convertible, his parents feared he’d eventually wrap the car around a tree.
And they were rather fond of their only son, so they told him no.
After high school he still wanted one, but couldn’t afford it. College was taking pretty much all of his money, barely leaving him enough money for a ramen noodle diet.
Still, he had to get to and from classes. So he took a second job until he scraped together enough for a 1963 Ford Galaxie 500.
It was a Ford. It was a well-built, if not so attractive machine.
But it wasn’t a Mustang convertible.
Dave finished his clam chowder and said what the heck. He opened up the second can and ate that too. If he were going to war later in the day he might not be able to stop and eat again for awhile.
And besides, going into battle with less weight to carry on his back was always a positive thing.
Dave was good at rationalization. At making excuses to justify doing things he wanted to do anyway.
The truth was he ate the second can simply because he liked the taste of the first one so much he wanted more.
By the time he finished the second can, Tony was way overdue.
Dave tried to keep calm. He was well aware that wartime missions frequently took longer than expected.
And make no mistake about it.
Tony had gone into a heavily armed camp. Full of hostiles with a bloodlust and a tendency to kill first and ask questions later. A group who frequently killed even those they should have considered friends.
They were thousands of miles from Fallujah. But Dave recognized this was as difficult and dangerous a mission for Tony as Dave ever went on.
And he was two hours late.
Dave tried his best not to worry. But it was getting harder and harder as each minute went by.
He tried to occupy his mind, not with thoughts of what might have gone wrong. But of more pleasant thoughts.
He climbed out of the Mustang, careful to place the two empty soup cans upright on the floorboard so they didn’t soil the seats.
Like it mattered.
But hey, it was a Mustang convertible.
He popped the hood and suddenly remembered the joy of working on a car in simpler times.
This was a 1970 model. A classic. It was manufactured at a time before cars became mostly plastic. It was heavier, with a very powerful engine that drank gas like it was water, but by God, it was built to last.
He looked down at each side of the Boss 302 engine and could see the ground beneath the car.
This car was built in the days before the EPA required a myriad of vacuum hoses and catalytic converters and emissions control crap that weighed the cars down and made it impossible to crawl into an engine compartment and become one with the engine.
It was simple, it was fast, and it was easy to work on.
In a single word, it was beautiful.
Oddly enough, he could still smell the burned wiring that was so potent as it permeated the air on the day the EMPs struck. It came wafting out at him when he opened the hood, as though he needed any reminder of the hell the EMPs had brought upon the earth and its people.
He looked at each of the vital components, wondering what it would take to make this beast run again. It was folly, and he knew it. For even if it could be repaired, he had no time to look for parts or try to overhaul them. And even if he did get it running, he couldn’t drive two vehicles at the same time. And the Explorer was much more suited to his needs.
The battery was fried, that was obvious. The positive cable was melted to the point the plastic covering had dripped into a gooey red mess which still adorned the pavement beneath the battery.
The starter was equally destroyed. He could tell because its outer casing was blackened with soot at the ventilation ports.
The alternator appeared to have survived.
There was no electronic ignition, not back in 1970. No electronic fuel injection system either.
Surely the fuses were all blown, the wiring for the lights and wipers and other stuff probably worthless.
But Dave wondered if he found a new starter at an auto parts store somewhere, and was able to replace the battery, whether he could get this old girl running again.
It was a nice thought and a pleasant way to get his mind off the situation at hand.
But enough was enough.
He had far more important things to think about.
Chapter 35
Tony had told him that if he wasn’t back by five, something was wrong. It took all the strength Dave could muster, but he dutifully waited.
Now it was five o’clock. Seventeen hundred hours.
Time to head out.
As he walked at a brisk pace toward the part of the city Tony called “Crazy Town,” Dave cursed under his breath.
He was going into battle naked. No weapons at all, thanks to Tony’s insane assistance that guns were dangerous.
It was something he and Tony would never agree on, even if they were friends and partners for a thousand years.
A gun in the hands of someone who knew how to use it was dangerous, sure. But only for the men who would challenge him. And they deserved no quarter if they were posing a threat to him.
A gun in the hands of the good guys wasn’t just smart, it was necessary.
Ordinarily Dave wouldn’t have let anyone talk him into giving up his weapons. Not even temporarily.
But Tony had been adamant. He’d agreed to help Dave only under his own rules. In his estimation, going in unarmed was a better and safer tactic.
Dave ceded that Tony knew the men they were dealing with better than he did. Perhaps there was an unwritten rule Dave didn’t know about which said that visitors who showed up armed were shot on sight.
And indeed, the Crips and the MS-13 sentries both insisted on patting Dave and Tony down.
Still, Dave had wondered whether there was more to Tony’s point of view than met the eye.
In his experience, strict anti-gun people usually had a story to tell. A little brother shot and killed himself because some fool left a loaded weapon within his reach. Or a parent was shot and killed by an armed robber. Or… something.
Most of the anti-gun people Dave had met over the years had a reason they were so anti-gun. Perhaps Tony had his ow
n reason. Dave had never gotten around to asking, and Tony wasn’t exactly a man who was forthcoming about his personal life.
It was a question which had gone unanswered and now Dave kicked himself for not prying a bit more. If Tony had an innate fear of guns because of something which happened in his past, Dave could have addressed it.
Dave could have explained that guns don’t just take lives. That far more often, in the right hands, they save them. They can be the most valuable tool ever invented for protecting a man’s loved ones and property.
And in a case of kill or be killed, it’s the man with the gun who’ll win out over the man armed only with words.
Every single time.
Yet Dave let himself he disarmed, even though he knew better. He hadn’t expected to like Tony. Going in he expected Tony to be just another drug dealer bent on infecting as many people as possible with the scourge of addiction. Just to maximum his profits.
But Tony was more than that. Tony showed Dave that it was possible for a drug dealer to be a decent human being. Maybe it was a contradiction. But Dave was convinced Tony was more good than evil.
Dave had been swayed because he yielded to Tony’s experience in dealing with the people they had to deal with.
And Tony’s assurances they’d have much better success going in under the factions’ terms.
After all, it boiled down to needs.
Dave needed Tony’s help to go in and find the red pickup.
Tony needed the factions’ help to help find the pickup.
So against his better judgment, Dave allowed himself to be swayed.
Now he had to go into the lion’s den with no weapons at all. Most of his weapons were in a canvas Army mobility bag, hidden next to a dumpster beneath a mountain of garbage some twelve miles east of them.
Even his sidearm and AR-15 were in the bag.
He was in a hell of a pickle.
He shouldn’t have given up his guns.
Chapter 36
Dave’s first excursion into the enemy’s camp would be a recon mission. If he came across any weapons and ammunition he could easily liberate and use for his own benefit he’d do so.
On Desert Sands: Alone: Book 6 Page 10