“I will do my part, Chief Foxtail,” the younger man said, nodding before he walked away to gather the others.
CHAPTER TWO
The platoon was waiting in front of the barracks for the colonel, the major, and all the others. The Weres all carried the rank of warrant officer, but it was a honorary rank. They never directed anyone in the Force without Terry or Char’s approval. The sergeant and the squad leaders had more influence than any of the Weres.
Ted and the Weretiger preferred other duties and were allowed to do them. Char gave the rest of the pack no other choice because she needed them, almost like the Praetorian Guard of Rome. They were her special forces, existing to protect her, to fight for her when she so directed.
And she wanted them to be well-trained. Ted earned a reprieve because power was critical to the long-term viability of the city and Aaron fought only as a Weretiger who then remembered nothing about his time as a big cat.
Timmons and Shonna were pulling double duty—training and then to the power plant where a small but dedicated group were working to bring the plant back to life. They were making progress with the help of power from the fuel oil-fired generator on the base.
They needed power to make power, and they had it.
Sue had her work with the mayor and as their numbers increased past six hundred, the aspect of managing the town and its assets was becoming more and more time consuming.
Adams and Merrit were given special duty, much to their chagrin.
“Timmons and Char, light contact warmup match. One minute,” Terry called as the group surrounded the sandpit. The platoon was breathing hard from the calisthenics they’d been doing when the colonel and his group arrived. They welcomed the breather.
Char cracked her neck and stretched before assuming her fighting pose, light on the balls of her feet, arms up, hands loose. Timmons mirrored her pose because Terry had taught them the same forms.
They came together quickly in a flurry of blows, neither landing anything substantial before they jumped back and stretched a little more. Timmons launched himself with a flying roundhouse. Char stepped into it and caught Timmons midair, spun with him and slammed him face-first into the sand.
She tossed him from her, giving him the opportunity to get up.
“Thirty seconds,” Terry called.
Timmons shook the stars from his vision and flexed again. He dodged left, right, then left, before trying another roundhouse. Char’s foot caught in the heavy sand and she didn’t back away quickly enough.
The glancing blow caught her in the ribs and sent her spinning toward the sand. Timmons pressed his advantage, but Char twisted and kicked out, driving her foot into his unprotected groin.
She flipped to her feet, but the sparring match was over. Timmons was on his knees, holding his battered manly hydraulics. His lips moved but nothing came out.
Char dusted the sand from herself and helped him up.
“My nuts hurt,” he whimpered, eyes glistening as he struggled through the pain, wishing the healing process would speed up. Char bit her lip to keep from laughing.
“Next victims, Jim and Gerry,” the colonel called. Gerry held his hands up.
“What the hell?” he blurted before remembering that he was talking with the colonel.
“Excuse me?” Terry replied, his expression darkening. He walked forward. “We don’t always get to pick our opponents. Sometimes they’re bigger, sometimes they’re not. Stand aside, Privates,” Terry ordered as he removed his uniform shirt and stepped into the sand pit.
“Gene. Care to join me?”
Leaping Deer walked up with six others following him. Char intercepted them. “Welcome to the show. Sparring is part of our daily training. You’ll get used to it.”
“But…” The man ran out of words. He should have known that Foxtail had already talked with the leaders of the FDG.
“Sergeant, give our new recruits a front row seat and afterwards, find them space in the barracks. Integrate them into the squads,” Char directed.
“But I thought I’d lead these men as our own unit,” Leaping Deer stuttered, lifting his hands in confusion.
“That’s not how we do things,” Char told him, trying to sound encouraging. She didn’t need to crush him on the first day, but it was important to establish boundaries and expectations. “We have a bunch of individuals working as a single unit, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. You may be a squad leader or higher someday, but that day is not today. Squad leader is a position that has to be earned. Now watch this little bit of entertainment and see if you can learn something.”
Char nodded to Terry and he smiled back, taking his eyes off his opponent. Gene hit him in the stomach with a fist the size of a battering ram. Terry flew through the air and landed in a heap.
Gene clasped his hands together, danced, and cheered his victory.
Terry crawled to his feet. “Nice, big man. Important lesson, people—never take your eyes off your opponent, some of them will make you pay for that. In combat, you usually don’t get a second chance so we train until we get it right, then we train more until we can’t get it wrong,” Terry lectured as he circled the Werebear, who easily outweighed him by a couple hundred pounds.
Terry feigned an attack to judge Gene’s reach, but the big man was quick, making the colonel dodge away before learning how close he needed to get. He danced and taunted the Werebear, wanting him to charge recklessly, but Gene was an Olympic gold-medal winner. He knew how to work an opponent, so he waited as Terry continued to circle.
“Thirty seconds,” Char called out.
The crowd cheered for some action.
Thirty seconds—how bad can it get? Terry thought. He attacked with all the speed he could muster in the tenuous footing of the sandpit. He made a wild swing at Gene’s face, turning one hundred and eighty degrees to back-kick the big man in the knee and trying to knock him down.
Terry’s move was like kicking a tree trunk and just as effective. Gene landed on Terry’s back, expecting to drive the smaller man to the ground, but with a grunt, Terry took the full weight of the Werebear and held him on his shoulders.
Terry took two steps and heaved Gene over his head and out of the pit.
“Time!” Char called.
Terry staggered across the sand. “The bigger they are, right?” he panted.
Gene was on the ground trying to work a dislocated shoulder back into place with Bogdan the grizzly cub licking his face. Gene couldn’t fight him off with one arm, so redoubled his efforts to put his arm into place.
“That’s it?” Leaping Deer asked, shrugging off the match as if it wasn’t anything.
“Corporal James. You and Leaping Deer… We’re not going to call you all that. L.D., your FDG name is Eldie,” the colonel declared. Char snickered and shook her head.
“But I don’t like that,” Leaping Deer countered.
“I don’t care what you like. Corporal, Eldie, into the sandpit, one minute on my mark,” Terry said, giving Eldie a helping push that sent him stumbling forward. Corporal James had mastered the Marine Corps Martial Arts and was the best to run the newcomers through their paces. He also ran the training when Terry or Char weren’t available.
Eldie squared up and James dipped his chin in greeting. Terry thought the corporal looked overconfident. The natives had a fighting style all their own, a martial arts of sorts. Terry knew that the match would be a good lesson for both of them.
James moved in first to deliver a chest punch. Eldie easily blocked it, feinted one way and spun so quickly that James didn’t move. Eldie’s foot seemed to fly in slow motion as it whipped toward the corporal’s head.
But James was frozen and could only watch. Time returned to normal when Eldie’s foot connected with James’s temple. The corporal went down and rolled away, coming up to a knee. Eldie smiled as he danced in the sand, waving at the corporal to come back into the fight.
James shook his head, trying to c
lear it, but he still saw two of his opponent. He stood and faced both of them, squinting to bring one into focus.
He was more cautious the second time, while Eldie was more aggressive. The older man jumped forward on one leg and attempted a straight kick, but James charged as soon as he saw the move coming. He turned aside, caught the leg, and dropped straight down, driving an elbow into Eldie’s quadriceps.
James maintained his grip on the leg as he stood and rolled his shoulders from left to right. Eldie flopped over helplessly. James moved forward, pinning the man down as he drove blow after blow into Eldie’s back.
“Enough!” Terry called. James stopped instantly, then helped Eldie to his feet.
Eldie didn’t think it was over. He took a swing at James’s face, but the corporal was wary. He blocked the punch and followed with a backhanded counterstrike. The impact rocked Eldie’s world, toppling him like a lightning struck tree.
“Excellent technique, Corporal James,” Terry offered, nodding to the young man who was still dazed. Terry held the corporal’s face in his hands and looked into his eyes. “No more sparring for you until I say so. Get this man up.”
Charlie and Mark hurried into the pit and lifted Eldie to his feet.
“I’m only going to say this one time.” Terry looked to the others who had arrived with Leaping Deer. “Orders are to be obeyed without question. If you need clarification, ask. If not, follow. Is that clear?”
The new men mumbled, but the old hands shouted in unison. “Yes, sir!”
“You will learn self-discipline, attention to detail, loyalty, and how to work as a team. This was one of many, many lessons that you’ll get. From this day forward, there is nowhere to go but up.” Terry looked at his new recruits. He needed them to understand the ground rules. “Sergeant, put them in the squads and have the squad leaders start bringing them up to speed.”
They saluted and Mark pulled them into a small circle with the squad leaders. He assigned them in three seconds flat. The squad leaders talked briefly with their new additions, even James, but he was slurring his words, so Mark filled in.
Then the group returned to the side of the pit.
With James out of action, Terry led the individual combat training. They rehearsed upper body forms until they thought their arms were going to fall off. Then they switched to kicks and leg blocks. Even the Were folks were challenged and by the end, the humans had their hands on their knees as they gasped for air.
“Geronimo and Jim! Into the sand pit for the day’s headlining match,” Terry announced. Both the men’s faces dropped. Terry wiped the sweat from his own forehead. The others were drenched. Terry screamed, “Fuckers!”
The men found the energy to run for the pit. Geronimo struggled to get his arms up. Jim stumbled around as his legs cramped. “One minute, go!”
They danced around and Gerry took a couple feeble swings, before Jim waded in and secured the smaller man in a headlock. Gerry pushed the arm forward and was able to wriggle out.
“Well done!” Terry called. “One more minute. Come on, gentlemen, put some heart into it!”
Gerry wasn’t sure he could last for an extra minute. He dropped and swept Jim’s leg, knocking the big man down. He vaulted to his knees where he laid into Jim with a flying atomic elbow to the gut.
Jim puked gloriously, arcing a stream away from his face and across the sand. Gerry dodged out of the way.
“Help him up and clean this sandpit. Corporal James,” Terry was going to put the corporal in charge but the young man’s eyes were still dilated. “Corporal Lacy, you’re up. Take charge of this mob and clean the pit. Get chow and head to the plant for the afternoon. There’s a lot of work left to do.”
Terry looked at the Werewolves and the Werebear. “That’s all I have for you. Go do what you need to do, except for you two.” Terry pointed at Adams and Merrit.
“What did we do now?” Merrit asked. Adams shrugged. He’d been on the base a grand total of three days. He figured he hadn’t done anything yet. He barely knew where the outhouses were.
CHAPTER THREE
“Did you have any idea they were going to do this to us?” Merrit complained to Adams for the thousandth time. “Two months. Terry’s had us out here for two ass-blasting months!”
“I don’t know about you but I’m hungry,” Adams grumbled. “When are they going to take this thing out?”
“Tomorrow, bitches!” Terry yelled from the shore. “We need our fishing fleet and this ship that you’ve been working so diligently on is the first in a variety of efforts to help relieve our food problem. Just like I told you every day I stopped by. Do you goofy fuckers ever listen to me?”
“The bees are out early this year. There’s this annoying buzzing that I can’t get out of my ear,” Merrit said smoothly.
“I know, right?” Adams answered before tightening the new bolts holding the metal guides for the ropes coming from the sail. “She ain’t pretty, but she’ll work like she’s supposed to.”
Merrit offered a hand to help Terry aboard the fifty-foot sailing ship. “Thank you, guys. I know what a monumental pain in your ass this thing was, but damn, this beast is going to bring home some fish! It better, anyway,” Terry told the pair. He toured the boat, like he’d done almost every day for the past two months.
Sometimes he brought his baby, and other times he came alone.
“Where’s Char and our niece?” Adams asked.
“They’re at the sewage treatment plant with Shonna. You think you had a crap job cleaning this boat up…” Terry delivered his pun on a silver platter.
“Et tu, Adams?” Merrit asked.
“I think Terry Henry Walton has made a most excellent point. We worked with our shirts off, improving our tans and hanging out on the water, mostly. Scraping the hull was a shit-show, but outside of that, we could have had a really crappy gig.” Merrit laughed.
Terry agreed.
“Who’s taking her out?” Adams asked.
“Ted and I will, along with a couple of the oldsters from Cheyenne Mountain who knew how to sail. If she rides true, we’ll have to train some folks. We need Ted and Gene to get that Mini Cooper up and running, so whoever it is is going to have to learn fast.” Terry walked around the cabin and worked his way up front.
He stood at the bow and looked out of the old Waukegan harbor at the lake beyond. He’d already seen that the fish were healthy and plentiful. All they had to do was find the rich schools and bring a share of them home to help the mayor and the people.
Billy Spires was barely holding things together. The town had to butcher a couple of the cows and one of the horses, an older nag that was getting close to passing away. It wasn’t the best meat, but it was survival food. Fish were critical and the fishermen who worked the shore weren’t able to bring enough in.
They formed a net weaving group that had the first fishing net done and were working on a second, larger one. These would make the sleek sailing boat a commercial fishing vessel.
To survive, the town’s people would keep doing what they had to based on what was best for all.
Terry spent long days running from group to group, keeping them motivated, while training with his platoon, always training. The nights were filled with the baby being awake and needing to be entertained.
“I need to tell you this, because I care,” Adams said as he walked forward with the agility of a sailor to join Terry at the bow. “You look like crap, man!”
Peals of laughter came from the aft end of the sailing boat. Terry looked back to see Merrit doubled over.
“Very funny, you snot-gobbling, ass-hugging, ferret-faced shit-gibbon!” Terry yelled, even though Adams was only a foot away. Terry wrapped Adams into a man-hug and they struggled briefly as Adams wasn’t sure if Terry was trying to throw him overboard or not.
“I feel pretty good, just tired, all the time, tired,” Terry lamented with a smile.
“If no one has told you, Werewolf babies are rare. I
mean really rare, so you should be proud that you were gifted with one.” Adams looked Terry in the eye to cement the seriousness of his support.
“You know that Cory is a Werewolf? Char won’t come clean with me.” Terry waited impatiently for an answer as he grabbed Adams by his shoulders and stared without blinking.
“Dude! Char will have our hides for throw rugs if we told you what we know.” Adams looked around before waving Terry close so he could whisper in his ear. “We won’t know for sure until she turns four or five. Char’s not holding out on you. She doesn’t want you to know that she doesn’t know.”
Terry was stumped.
“Don’t you dare let her know that you know that she knows that you know that she doesn’t know. Got it?” Adams asked.
“You are both shaggy gray, right? That would look nice on the floors, be warm in the winter,” Terry taunted them. “You are both fucking lunatics and that would probably rub off through your pelts, so no, your secret is safe with me.”
Terry shook Adams’s hand.
“What secret?” Char asked from the rough dock.
“That you don’t know whether the baby’s a Werewolf or not,” Terry said matter-of-factly, then turned to Adams. “I’m sorry, man. I tried like hell to keep your secret.”
“I’ll talk to you two later,” Char threatened. Merrit threw his hands up before pointing at Adams.
“It was him!” he dodged.
“And for the record, the baby is most assuredly not a Werewolf. We have no external manifestations of being a Werewolf and look at her ears!” Char tipped Cory’s head, but none of the others needed to look. They’d all seen the baby’s ears because they were so unique.
“Silver streak in your hair?” Terry asked.
“Oh, that. Well, maybe the baby is a Werewolf. Honestly, I can’t tell,” Char conceded with a smirk and small shake of her head.
Merrit snickered.
Adams breathed a sigh of relief.
“Is there anyone here who isn’t fucking with me? Bueller? Anyone?” Terry asked, shouldering his way past Adams on his way to the small gangplank.
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