by Shows, Greg
“Sir,” Blakely said, “I’ve got the hostile sir. I need back-up. This guy needs serious help.”
He expected to hear Titman order someone into the alley to assist Blakely. Instead the general said: “Get your ass back here, Blakely!”
“What about the prisoner, sir?”
“What the fuck do we want with a goddamn prisoner?” Titman yelled. “Get rid of him.”
“Motherfucker!” Blakely said, fighting with all of his might to keep himself from breaking into a sprint back to the convoy, dragging the old man out of the Humvee, and smashing his face to a pulp with his rifle butt.
The man was a goddamned idiot. But he was in charge, and he could get Blakely’s men resupplied—which was an absolute necessity at this point. So as he was trained to do, Blakely followed orders. He pointed his rifle at the marching crazy man and prepared to pull the trigger. But to his astonishment, as much as he had wanted to kill the man three minutes before, now he simply didn’t want to. He raised his rifle and fired three rapid shots into the air.
The crazy man didn’t flinch or look away. He kept marching back and forth across the alley singing “Sleeping Bag.”
“Jesus Christ,” Blakely said, and backed away from the marching man. He kept his M4 pointed and ready to fire.
When he got to the mouth of the alley, he noticed the empty blue wrapper that had once covered a Rice Krispie treat. It lay on the ground, flapping like an injured bird when the breeze passed over it.
It was an odd thing to see, since it meant that someone had eaten the treat out of it and thrown it down--probably in the last few days. Otherwise, gray dust would have coated it, weighing it down and hiding it from sight.
Blakely took one last look at the crazy man in the alley to make sure he was no longer a threat. Since the guy had stopped marching and was now down on his hands and knees, crawling around and around his bike as if he was looking for something he’d lost, Blakely assumed he’d gotten too distracted to focus on the convoy.
Blakely stepped out of the alley. The danger had passed for the moment, so when he turned and trotted back toward the damaged convoy what he saw registered fully and enraged him.
Sakris was on the sidewalk, unmoving. Blood had soaked his uniform and even now was draining out onto the dust, quickly soaking in and forming a black, crusty scab over the top of the powdery surface.
But that wasn’t the source of Blakely’s rage.
Titman was.
“Goddamn it!” General Titman screamed. He was stalking up and down the road next to the lead Humvee, his holster empty, his shiny .45 in his black-gloved left hand. On the ground the driver, Mateo Navarro, lay on his back, screaming. He’d been hit in the shoulder when the bullet-resistant glass shattered.
“It hurts!” Navarro yelled through his respirator. “It hurts.”
“You stupid fuck!” Titman shouted, leaning over and pointing his gloved finger in Navarro’s face. “We are not in fucking boot camp. You do not stop your vehicle in a hot zone! You do not decelerate your vehicle in a hot zone! You roll the fuck over anyone stupid fucks enough to get in the way. Now we have an eleven percent reduction in effective manpower and assault vehicle capability!”
“Sir?” Blakely said, choking down his rage to make his voice flat and calm. If he could project calmness into the situation, maybe he could steer events away from where Titman was driving them.
Titman ignored Blakely.
“You’ve jeopardized the entire mission by not following protocol,” Titman screamed. “Do you think the life of some crazy puke on a bike has any importance to the acting interim President of the United States?”
“I’m sorry sir,” Navarro said.
“Everyone on me!” Titman bellowed, and the rest of the soldiers in the convoy, some of whom had taken up positions well away from the Humvees to avoid being in close proximity to Titman’s rage, complied.
“Sir,” Blakely said again, trying to figure out some way to point out how incompetent Titman’s command was—without getting himself shot with the .45. If Navarro had violated battlefield protocol by stopping a convoy to avoid killing a possibly hostile civilian, Titman was slaughtering protocol by calling in the sentries and leaving the entire unit exposed to an undefended attack. They had an enemy less than a hundred yards away. “Sir, Navarro needs medical attention.”
“Shut the fuck up, Sergeant,” Titman screamed. “I’ll have no more of your insubordination. You are not in charge anymore, and henceforward you will stop coddling these men. Now form up!”
The soldiers formed two rows of seven men. Missing from the rows were Sakris and Navarro.
Blakely stood at attention slightly behind and to the right of Titman, still fighting the urge to kill the general. A murder fantasy played out in his head, and he saw himself taking the general’s nickel-plated, pearl-gripped .45 away from him and pistol-whipping him to death with it. The fantasy was replaced by a nightmare vision of starvation and cannibalism among his men.
“Get out from behind me,” Titman said, wheeling on Blakely. “Line up with the rest of these screw-ups.”
Blakely’s face reddened, and his desire to kill the general exploded with the intensity of a supernova.
“Do it now,” a little voice in his head said, and as he moved to stand with the rest of the men, Blakely remembered a captain he’d known from a nearby unit during his deployment in northern Mexico. It had been during the crisis caused by the narco war with the cartels. Captain Swinburne, a glory hound with a penchant for getting his men killed in useless firefights had been fragged with a grenade one night while he slept.
Titman continued yelling, his face red, his eyes glazed over.
“Ignoring battlefield protocol has cost us time, equipment, and personnel!”
It took Blakely a couple of seconds to realize the order Titman had placed the costs in, and it began to register with him exactly how little the general cared about the people under his command. He was still pondering the general’s language when without warning, Titman wheeled around, stalked over to where Navarro was lying next to Sakris. He bent over and put his gun to Navarro’s temple.
“Please, no!” Navarro wailed.
When Titman pulled the trigger the .45 boomed, fracturing the silence for a few seconds until the all-encompassing dust swallowed up the sound of Navarro’s demise.
“And now we really do have an eleven percent reduction in effective manpower,” Blakely mumbled, then cursed himself for speaking out loud.
The soldier standing closest to him, an eighteen year old kid named Jake Smith, had heard. He glanced at Blakely with tears in his eyes. Navarro had been his best friend. Smith had his hands clenched and his whole body was shaking. His hands began to creep up toward the rifle slung around his shoulders and neck.
“Steady, Son,” Blakely said. He wasn’t sure that Titman’s mission was as important as he said it was, but if it could salvage what was left of the United States--as Titman had claimed--he thought he’d better try to help Titman get it accomplished.
The question was, “would Titman get out of this mission alive?”
Blakely wasn’t sure of the answer. Titman seemed to be miscalculating the outcomes of his actions at a rather higher percentage rate than had been his norm over the previous week. Without anyone around to enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice to back up the power and authority of officers, there was nothing to keep a grunt with a grudge like Smith from gutting Titman and stringing his intestines around a tree.
“Listen up!” Titman shrieked as he spun back to face the remaining members of the unit. “Who’s the limp dick who shot up my Humvee?”
Nate Clark, the corporal who’d been atop the third Humvee gave a visible sagging shiver but got enough control over himself to say, “Um...me...I...I...am...sir.”
“Corporal Limp Dick,” Titman said, stalking over to stand in front of the terrified soldier. “If I didn’t need all my goddamned corporals right now your name
would be Private Limp Dick.”
“Um...Thank you...sir.”
“Don’t thank me,” Titman said. “You’ve now used up eight of your nine lives, son. You fuck up in any way henceforward and I will personally relieve you of the last one. Are you receiving me, son?”
“Y-y-yessir,” Clark said, on the verge of passing out in.
Titman turned and stalked back to stand in front of the assembled men.
“Things have changed, boys,” Titman said. “We’re on the most important mission in the history of this country. More important than Paul Revere’s ride, more important than Sherman’s march, more important than Ike’s invasion. We cannot fail here, boys, or the terrorists and America haters will have won. That’s why Corporal Limp Dick here, and three other volunteers are going to remain behind to repair this assault vehicle. The rest of us will move on to the objective.”
A barely audible groan went up, but Blakely jerked his head around and the soldiers snapped to attention.
“When you have repaired this assault vehicle,” Titman said, “you will follow the exact route indicated on the map you were provided with. Is that clear? You should be able to catch up in a couple of hours, since we’re clearing the path.”
“Yes sir,” the men said without enthusiasm.
Ordinarily, Blakely would have stepped in and disciplined the unit for their show of disrespect to Titman, but since Titman actually deserved their disrespect, and since there was no threat of punishment from up the chain of command, he remained silent.
“What about the bodies, sir?” Blakely asked.
“Leave them and follow me,” Titman said, and though every part of him wanted to refuse, he obeyed his training.
“Yes sir,” Blakely said and fell in behind Titman.
Chapter 9
Four hours later, Blakely was in the lead Humvee, watching Duck jerk the wheel back and forth as he bounced their vehicle along the edge of Highway 62, knocking cars out of the way as they progressed slowly westward. The general had shifted Blakely forward as what Titman had claimed would be a stabilizing influence over the young soldiers.
Blakely didn’t mind. He really didn’t want to kill the jumped up general, and if he had to sit next to him, the man’s murder might become inevitable.
Now he could ride with his men, who actually needed stabilizing. All of them but Blakely had been Army Reserve, so despite their boot camp training, they were green. They’d spent the last ten months at the training base in Meadville, virtual prisoners who were barely surviving as rations went short and roving bands of desperate men and women and children repeatedly tried to attack the base and take those rations away.
Blakely had tried his best to maintain discipline as they waited for orders that never came. And he’d attempted to train the men to be full time soldiers. It hadn’t been easy. By his estimation he had two pill junkies in the crew, three casual tweakers, and half a dozen alcoholics.
All of them were rootless—with little or no family, and no girlfriends or spouses. What Command would have called the “bottom of the barrel” if Command still existed.
Blakely glanced out the window. He was amazed the convoy had made it as far as it had—two miles across Meadville—before the first mishap split their force and slowed them down to a crawl. Titman had launched the convoy too late to make the rendezvous on time, refusing to listen to Blakely’s input, and thus miscalculating the travel time like he’d miscalculated nearly everything else since his arrival.
At this point they’d already had to backtrack five times to get around traffic jams, and in a few places they’d wound up rolling over barbed wire fences and slogging through narrow trails that wound through dust-choked woods or empty pastures now dotted with the long-dead carcasses of dead horses or cows. The going had been rough, and they’d been bounced and jarred and slammed around so much they were going to have bruises from it.
Blakely rolled his shoulders, trying to release some of the tension, but failing. He was getting mentally exhausted from the trip. Several times they’d had to stop and leave detour instructions for the third Humvee to follow, since they’d quickly lost radio contact with Nate Clark and his crew. Blakely wouldn’t be surprised to find out the men had turned the Humvee around and headed back across town to the base. After all, who was going to do anything about it? If Titman even tried, he was liable to find himself being carved up and barbecued. There was only so much Blakely could do to keep the men in line, and Titman hadn’t helped that reality with the summary execution of an inexperienced rookie.
Out in the distance, lightning strikes danced along the tops of hills, a subtle reminder that this new world they lived in could kill or maim them at anytime. Shock and awe was probably no longer the best policy to pursue, but that wasn’t a lesson military brass learned easily. Already the convoy was three hours late to the rendezvous, and their tardiness was driving Titman mad. He kept getting on the radio and shouting “move your ass, son” and “pick up the pace and don’t be a pussy,” and “act like you give a shit about something, boy.”
And they still had another twenty miles to go. They’d be six hours late by the time they arrived—provided nothing else went wrong.
But Blakely knew something else would go wrong.
Things always went wrong.
When you were dealing with the end of the world, how could things not go wrong?
As if to punctuate his thought, a streak of lightning ripped down in front of them. Seconds later the thunder boomed.
It was followed up by a blinding cluster of lightning strikes that swept along the line of dead trees to the left of the road they were on.
“I hate this lightning,” Duck said as he bashed into a Buick and rolled it over the edge of the road into the ditch. “But not as much as I hate this mission.”
“I got something!” Kane yelped over the comm. “The transponder came through.”
“Where?” Titman barked.
“West. In Youngstown, or not far from it.”
“Hot damn!” Titman said. “Come on private. Move your ass up there. We’re late.”
“Yes sir,” Duck said, and held up a middle finger.
Blakely tried to make himself care about the tardiness of the convoy, and about the importance of reaching the objective in a timely manner.
He failed.
As far as he was concerned, the mission was bullshit.
A pointless waste of time.
He’d come to realize that all that remained of the U.S. government—for which he was supposedly undertaking this mission—was a bunch of civilian pukes fighting over a shitheap no longer worth having. The Constitution that he’d sworn to uphold was a dead letter.
After the big Blow Off in Yellowstone took out a quarter of the population and nearly all of its farmland, and after D.C. was obliterated with a nuclear weapon nobody claimed credit for, no one took the claims or actions of the surviving members of government very seriously. But when the nuclear plant workers started walking away from their jobs and the nuclear waste stockpiles started boiling away their cooling ponds and releasing deadly radiation, it was fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that the U.S.A. was D.O.A.
The elites in California and the Eastern Seaboard had sure as hell been paying attention. They had taken their slow boats to Brazil, or Argentina, or Chile—since flying was right out of the question. Even Hollywood had folded up its tents and caravanned to Caracas, Venezuela, the leftist losers.
As for the boat-less Americans unfortunate enough to be outside the pyroclastic zone and heavy ash fall areas...their lives had gone about like you’d expect—if you’d ever seen a zombie movie or played a post-apocalyptic video game. Most Americans had suffered—were likely still suffering—a long, slow death by starvation. FEMA had been woefully unprepared to deal with the Crisis, and in the absence of any ability to restore order, things had gotten FUBAR fast. They’d managed to evacuate only two million Americans before the ability of the U.S. gov
ernment to maintain order had collapsed and the country had descended into chaos.
Two million. Out of three hundred and eighteen million. Not even one percent.
It was a monumental miscalculation of what would be needed in a major emergency by the federal government. Or a gross dereliction of duty whose punishment should likely be the severest penalty possible.
Blakely snorted out loud.
No one would ever be punished. Everyone knew that.
“Something wrong, sir?” Duck asked.
“Nothing,” Blakely said and stared ahead. Here he was. A year after the Crisis. Chasing around the dead gray landscape. Playing soldier with an outfit of cast-off kids who’d had no one to go home to when everybody else had deserted.
Not that he’d had anyone to go home to either. Not anymore.
It was pretty goddamned pathetic, if you thought about it, but since Blakely didn’t like thinking about it, he didn’t.
“Easy,” Blakely told Duck as he was about to take them down into a ditch to get around a smash-up. “The general will have our asses, we lose this Humvee.”
“Yeah, right,” Duck said. “I don’t think the general’s going to be with us long.”
The three men in the back grumbled in agreement.
“Stow that,” Blakely said. “Eyes on the environment.”
“There’s no one out there,” Duck said, and jammed a foot down on the accelerator, driving the Humvee hard up the slope of ditch beneath the highway, sending it rocketing up onto the dust-covered blacktop above. “Not anymore.”
“Probably not,” Blakely said, “but we’ve lost enough people today, so let’s remember our training, all right?
“Yessir,” Duck said, and gave a long, Daffy Duck quack that got swallowed up by the rumble of the Humvee engine.
Three hours later, when the two-vehicle convoy arrived at the 7-11 on the corner of Matilda and Burke, Duck drove the lead Humvee over the curb and into the parking lot. Just for fun he slammed the front bumper into the rear end of a Prius, which went sliding into the gas pump island where it crumpled against the concrete barrier that protected the pumps.