by James, Glynn
As Ali came back out, Juice slithered around behind the cockpit on the starboard side, where he crouched down and made himself small. Handon, by contrast, stood and made himself visible as he steered the boat in. He looked over at Ali as she took a position beside him, also visible, but not obviously armed, her rifle resting on the deck and against her leg. Henno sat down heavily on the bench in the cockpit, sighing mournfully, and looked at nothing while tapping his rifle receiver.
Handon brought them in toward the other craft, which they could now see was totally blacked out. As they approached, Handon intending just to do a quick pass on their port side, the name of the boat stenciled on the stern slowly resolved out of the gloom and fog: Diablo. Handon frowned at that, then remembered the name of their own craft: Three Brothers. He paused to hope that didn’t augur any further shrinking of his dwindling band.
As they got really close, inside of twenty meters, Handon could begin to make out a figure on deck, a single shadow shape slowly taking human form.
And then a voice called out to them quietly across the misty expanse of water.
A girl’s voice, pleading.
Ah, shit, Handon thought. He killed the engines.
And they coasted slowly and silently in.
The Mission, the Men
Over America
The inside of a B-17 Flying Fortress in flight was goddamned rackety, and felt to Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick like being in a tin can full of rocks tied to a cat. But he had his Peltor ear protection in – which saved his hearing, already fading with age, from the ravages of close-quarters gunfire, while also piping in traffic from his team radio – so he was feeling pretty damned relaxed just sitting still and watching America go by beneath him.
He sat half inside one of the oval-shaped machine gun “blisters” that stuck out from the waist of the plane. These no longer had 50-cal machine guns in them, but the glass provided one of the very few views out of the rumbling, rattling dinosaur of an aircraft. One of the other such views could be had from the ball turret protruding from the belly of the plane, and would actually have provided a stellar view. But it was a damned tiny space, and it only sat fifteen inches above the runway on take-off and landing, so it required both a smaller and a braver man than Gunny Fick to ride in it.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot of elbow room as it stood, with him and his four-man fire team and all their gear stacked up down the fuselage in the belly of this beast. He didn’t much like to think of what it was going to be like with Alpha team piled in there with them. But he’d been assured that Chuckie – which was what this restored WWII-era heavy bomber was, absurdly, called – would take the weight. Just.
He’d also been told that two of Alpha’s men were already KIA – and God knows how few would be left when they finally made it, if any of them made it, to their extraction point at the civilian airport on Beaver Island.
And all of this was assuming Chuckie and its complement made it there themselves. These B-17s were certainly tough old bastards – many of them had taken atrocious punishment over the Rheinland, and occasionally over the Japanese fleet in the Pacific, and somehow stayed in the air. But this one had seen about two hours of maintenance since the fall of human civilization. And there was little getting around the fact that the damned thing was older than… well, it was even older than ole Gunny Fick.
On the upside, in addition to the two pilots and five Marines, Chuckie had also lifted off with an engineer aboard. Fick thought he was called Stan – short for Stanley, though whether that was his first or last name beat the hell out of Fick. What he did know was that this guy was said to be perhaps the best aircraft maintenance tech, and general engine mechanic, still breathing air. Evidently he used to spend all his days off working on his own light aircraft. Currently he sat perched behind the flight deck, looking over the pilots’ shoulders, watching the aircraft instrumentation like some kind of psychotic hawk for any signs of trouble.
“Beautiful view.” This voice, interrupting Fick’s reverie, came in through his team radio. The voice belonged to one of his guys, Staff Sergeant Brady, who was sitting behind Fick and looking out the other gun blister. Fick cast his eye down toward the thick forests that rolled by far below. Yeah, it was beautiful. With nary a walking corpse to be seen. But America had been like that long before the fall. When he’d met military personnel from other countries who had taken flights over the U.S., they always said the same two things. One: “It’s so fucking big.” And, two: “It still looks totally uninhabited.”
And so it did. Much of America had remained undeveloped, even well into the twenty-first century, leaving millions of hectares of wild space populated only by birds, fish, snakes, and the occasional large mammal that might eat you. Of course, now even the cities were crumbling, skeletal wastelands. And they were home to much more dangerous fauna than bears or bobcats.
Brady spoke again. “It’s a shame the LT isn’t here. He would have loved this.”
Fick grunted and looked away. It was true. The Lieutenant, who had been the team’s commanding officer before he died, would have thought this was fantastic. But then that sonofabitch had always been an unapologetic esthete. He’d studied classics at Princeton, if Fick recalled correctly – then joined the Marine Corps in a bizarre fit of idealism. He’d decided it was either going to be the USMC, or the goddamned Peace Corps. Fick thought he might have been better off going with the other choice. Then again, he would have ended up in pretty much the same place in the end. Fick consoled himself with that. The LT had died badly.
But his death had meaning.
And that was damned well worth something.
Even if the manner of his death haunted Fick, who didn’t much like to think about it.
* * *
As Brady went silent and faced out his window again, Fick let his gaze wander across all four of the Marines riding in this flying steel relic with him. It was a hell of a group of young men, this fire team Fick had hand-picked to go out for this mission. Though not so young anymore, he thought. They were all pushing thirty, and some of them were already on the wrong side of it. There were no new recruits coming up to take their places.
And there was no longer any civilian life for them to return to.
Fick snorted once, quietly, at Brady’s big sloping back and shoulders. Brady was a damned strange one. If the LT had been an overeducated, wide-eyed idealist… well, Brady was an even stranger fit in the Corps. Built like a Greek god, from an upper-middle-class family in Maryland, metrosexual as hell – the sonofabitch actually waxed his chest – he was also a martial arts champion. Everyone in the unit suspected he was gay, from his refined tastes and cheery demeanor – but he could also handily beat the shit out of all of them, singly or in combination, so he was only obliged to take so much ribbing about it. This often came up on scavenging missions, when he would be seen scouting around for coffee beans. He was a major coffee connoisseur and always trying to top up. He said he didn’t think life was worth living without good coffee.
As if they didn’t all have a lot more important shit to worry about.
Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe good coffee was as good as it was going to get.
But Brady’s strange fixation on gastronomical matters, as well as his unashamed sweetness and good humor, strange as it was on someone so deadly, somehow kept everything in perspective for the Marines. Even on the worst days.
These men themselves actually weren’t hand-picked, but their fire team was. Fick wasn’t allowed to have favorites, but he did anyway, and it was this one. And since their survival and mission success depended on the perfection of their training as a team, he definitely wasn’t in the business of breaking up his fire teams. There was only so much, and so realistic, training that could be done on the carrier – the air wing guys kicked up a fuss every time he tried to set up a mock CQB village on the flight deck – and most of their skills were perishable. Fick had also had to do some shuffling after their l
osses in the mutiny and outbreak aboard the Kennedy. All this had necessarily resulted in some compromises.
For instance, next down the row from Brady was Corporal Chesney, AKA “the Kid” – young, largely unproven, a hardscrabble kid from Missouri, whose mother had raised him alone in the proverbial double-wide. Previously working in a support role, he’d now been put on this fire team, the best one Fick had, to get him trained up, and to balance out his limitations. Unfortunately, his lack of combat experience had become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Since he’d had none at the beginning of the ZA, first the LT, and then Fick, had kept him out of heavy fighting. And ever since the world fell apart, it had just never seemed like the time to be training people up. It had seemed like the time to survive – at all costs. But the casualties they took in saving the ship from the Zealots had finally forced Fick’s hand on this.
Full of testosterone, Chesney wanted badly to prove himself. He had the skills. He just didn’t have nearly enough experience.
God grant he’d live long enough to get some.
But if he didn’t, Fick figured, that would at least shut him the hell up about the rap-rock band he used to be in back in Missouri, and the time they opened for Limp Bizkit. Chesney said, enough times that everyone knew the line by heart, “We sucked, but so did they. The difference was they went big, and I went to Afghanistan.”
Just beyond Chesney sat Sergeant Reyes. This was the man Fick had seen gabbing with the Brit in Alpha, the ex-SAS guy, at their joint pre-mission briefing back on the carrier. Reyes used to be a bounty hunter in L.A. – before ending up on the wrong side of a manslaughter verdict, at which point he’d been obliged to choose between the Marine Corps and San Quentin. He picked the former, where his toughness and native intelligence took him through boot camp at Parris Island, selection and training for Force Recon – and finally recruitment by MARSOC, the Marine Special Operations Command. Over the course of these postings, he’d seen action in 2nd Iraq, in Syria, and in a variety of threatened and beleaguered U.S. embassies and military installations around what was even then a fairly fucked-up world. At the time of the fall, he’d been deployed with Fick’s outfit – Team 1, A Company, 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion (MSOB) – having left his wife and young daughter back in California. He was still here, and they were still there.
Though in what state, no one could know.
Fick figured there were a lot of reasons none of them talked about the old world much.
Finally, at the end of the line, was the one they called Graybeard. He was a grizzled Master Sergeant, impossibly old even by local standards. After a long and distinguished military career, he had left the Corps at the end of the Iraq counter-insurgency, going back to Arkansas to teach high school. This he did for four years. But when he was caught having an affair with a student who was, as he insisted to this day, hours away from turning eighteen, he lost his job and wife in rapid sequence, and promptly re-enlisted to escape all of that. Whatever one thought about his morals, his accumulated combat wisdom was pure gold, and he was totally unflappable no matter how bad things got. The way Graybeard saw it, he should have been killed a dozen times over already, so one more wouldn’t make any difference.
One way or the other.
As Fick knew, each of these men had climbed to the very top of this here United States Marine Corps – which all Marines firmly believed was already the finest fighting force in the history of warfare. They’d also survived two years of scrapping and scavenging in the Zulu Alpha. Whatever waited for them on this island in the middle of Lake Michigan… well, if anyone could take and hold that airfield, it was these guys.
There was the small problem that a four-man fire team was about a tenth of the force one would ordinarily deploy to take down even a modest-sized airfield. But the hell with it, Fick figured. Everybody in the ZA was making do and getting on with it and making it work, and their small numbers just meant there’d be more and better opportunities for them to get some.
And “getting some” was a big deal in the Corps. Whether it meant running up a mountain in full combat load, firing off heavy weapons, braving a lethally dodgy bar in Thailand, or gaining combat experience in the middle of a hostile continent, “Get some!” expressed the emotional and physical exhilaration of confronting extreme challenges.
But it was more of a thing for the younger guys, who didn’t have such heavy responsibilities. Fick put his helmet on his knee, rubbed his hand through his graying crewcut, and stretched his neck out. The two deep scars on the right side of his face looked more severe in the half-light from outside. It was true that he had been cooped up at sea for too long, and could hardly remember when he’d put any brass downrange in an actual fight. So, sure, he needed to stretch his legs. But, on this one, he also needed to personally make sure there were no fuck-ups.
Because it was too important to fail.
He pulled out his map pack of the target area and went over it yet again – making sure he had everything relevant committed to memory, along with much that didn’t seem immediately relevant. Slightly surprisingly, this 13-mile long island actually had two airports: the bigger public one, which was their target; as well as a tiny private one, more of an airstrip, not far away. Fick was glad of this, and studied their relative positions, as well as how to get from one to the other. In special operations, where they were usually poised on the razor’s edge between success and failure, and where the unexpected happened without fail, redundancy was standard procedure.
As their old adage had it: “Two is one; one is none.”
Finally, Fick put his maps away, levered his combat-loaded body up, and tottered down the narrow aisle of the plane. He was going to use the powerful radio on the flight deck and see if they could get Alpha on the horn. With their current altitude, and all the ground they’d already covered, he rated their chances as pretty good.
As for their chances once they hit the ground… well, they’d find that out when they got there.
A Redneck’s Last Words
Lake Michigan
As the Three Brothers slipped through the mists of the endless lake and came alongside the bigger boat, Handon realized: Yeah – that was definitely a girl’s voice. Weak, afraid, and a little too quiet to carry across the twenty meters of open water that separated them. Handon nailed the approach, coasting them into position abreast of the other craft on its starboard side, and their port. He reversed the engine at the last second to bring them to a stop. And with no wind, and no current on the lake, they didn’t need to drop anchor.
Nor did the dark and silent vessel beside them move.
The eastern horizon consisted only of perfectly flat lake surface, so dawn was coming on quickly. The early-morning chill seemed to lift, though this could have been a psychological effect of the light. In the blanching morning air, Handon could now make out the other boat. It went 110 or 120 feet, a pleasure craft – a cabin cruiser like the Three Brothers, but a lot bigger. And a hell of a lot nicer. More of a yacht, really. Whoever sailed this thing had done well for himself back in the world.
Or, more likely, the current owners had simply taken it off someone who had.
Handon’s deep voice carried, where the girl’s had not. “Repeat your last.”
The fragile figure of a young woman or girl came to the railing. Handon could make her out now, not least because the light of dawn was behind him, illuminating the vessel before them, while silhouetting theirs. This was not an accident – Handon had put them there for that exact reason. But everything was still ghost-like and sepulchral in the mist and very faint light. The female was young, thin, and pretty, if a bit feral-looking, with long and somewhat scraggly brown hair with blonde streaks. She wore denim overalls over a baby-doll T-shirt, and a black puffa jacket over that, hiking boots below – some kind of apocalypse waif chic. To Handon’s eye, she also looked afraid, with pleading behind her eyes.
But afraid of who or what?
She cleared her
throat weakly. “Who are you?” she repeated, her voice audible now. It was middle-pitched and husky. She might be a smoker; or perhaps had just been yelling a lot lately. “Please, can you help us? We’re floating out here, out of gas… and my sister is hurt.”
Handon took this on board. “What’s her injury?”
The girl shook her head. “Nothing like that. Please, none of us are sick or dead, we’ve been on the water for weeks. I’m scared for my sister. We don’t want to die out here…”
Handon considered this as well. And while he hesitated, another figure appeared on the deck beside her, from down below. It was a man, carrying another young woman or girl in his arms. He wore a side arm, a pistol in a belt-slide holster, as Handon clocked instantly. Solidly built, he had a biker mustache and heavy stubble, and wavy hair that was none too short. He looked like he could handle himself. And he was strong enough to carry the girl and neither tremble nor stumble.
He seemed to look at the other boat in mild amazement, perhaps at seeing other living people, or maybe just seeing them out in the middle of Lake Michigan. Handon nodded to acknowledge him.
“Thank God,” the man said. He gestured at the leg of the girl he carried, which Handon could now see was wrapped in a dark-stained bandage. “Broke her leg in a fall.” The man’s voice was gravelly, definitely a smoker’s, and with a hint of southern accent. To Handon’s ear, it wavered between country welcoming and biker-bar threatening. “Bone broke through the skin. Now we think she’s got a blood infection. Bad fever, tremors. Delirium. Poor girl’s out of her head. Have you got any antibiotics? We’d be in your debt.” He shifted his grip on the girl, who appeared conscious, but didn’t speak.
And with that, a second man appeared on the other side of the deck, way off to Handon’s left, back near the stern. Skinnier, this one wore a tank-top with some kind of biker bar logo on it, despite the cold, as well as jeans and boots. He also had a fair bit of facial hair going on, heavy sideburns, and a single thick tuft just below his lower lip. He also wore a side arm, and a sheathed knife. He smiled across at Handon, looking like he was trying to appear non-threatening.