When Rick woke, it was to the delicious smell of cooking cheese, tomatoes and peppers. He rolled out of bed quickly, threw a pair of fatigues on over his shorts and didn’t even bother lacing up his boots before rushing out of his tent. He grinned when he saw Paige and Morty, sitting side-by-side with a large pan of pizza in front of them, eating the first slices.
“Yes,” he breathed and jumped onto the chair across from Paige. He grabbed a slice and shoved the end of it into his mouth. “Love this stuff,” he sighed around his first mouthful and started chewing contentedly. “It’s really good, Morty. Better than usual. Hey—is this real tomato in the sauce? You should get cut up more often.” His eyes widened when he saw the disgruntled look on Morty’s face. He took a closer look at Paige. She was wearing an apron over her fatigues. Morty wasn’t. The front of her apron was dusted with flour, Morty’s tan t-shirt was clean. “Oh. Um, sorry Morty,” Rick apologized. “I promise I won’t tell.”
Their cook shot him a look but, eventually, gave a jerky nod of thanks and helped himself to another slice.
Rick glanced around. “So how’d you learn to cook?” he asked Paige quietly.
She flashed Morty a shy look. “My Poppa’s a chef.”
“Son of a...” Morty blurted out and his fork, along with a few spinach leaves and a sliver of toasted almond, clattered to the table.
Paige shrugged. “Hey—Zach always said I’d be good at recon. I can shoot, cook and I’m a medic. Beyond that though, I’m pretty much hopeless,” she added diplomatically and took another bite of her pizza. She stood and checked on the next batch in the oven just as the flap opened on one of the two enlisted sleeping tents and yawning, stretching, hulking men lumbered over to the table.
That afternoon, the platoon took a ten-kilometer run then spent an hour hitting the weights. Under a huge tarp, stretched taut between poles, they set up a rudimentary gym with a few benches, a rack of heavy dumbbells, and weights...lots and lots of weights.
Paige excused herself early to help with dinner. Spotting Rick—a Rick without his shirt on while he was pressing one-hundred fifty kilograms like it was nothing—surrounded by gleaming, ripped, testosterone-rich male flesh, was enough to send her libido into overdrive. She retreated to the cook tent.
Paige was pleased with the dinner she’d put together with Morty’s help. Beef braised in a red-wine reduction with wild parsley and onion...the wine courtesy of Morty’s stash of secret ingredients. Fingerling potatoes, squash, baby peas, broccoli soup with tarragon. She even whipped up a peach cobbler for dessert. It was made with canned peaches unfortunately but there was nothing she could do about that. Peaches wouldn’t be in season down here for another few months.
For the next three days, they carried out pre-dawn raids on criminal strongholds. They rounded up the worst offenders first, according to the Keanes’ information, then moved down from there. All but one—a man known only as Viper. He wasn’t local but he’d muscled his way in recently and now controlled the flow of gas and diesel through Edenton. He rolled into town in an organized, heavily armed convoy about once every two weeks. Arriving with an overhauled fuel tanker, he charged exorbitant rates which varied depending on how much his two men who manned the town’s lone operating gas station liked you. The other gas suppliers around Edenton had shown a tendency to leave town quickly or die prematurely.
The lieutenant assigned Paige to drive into town on the morning of the fourth day. She pulled up to the pump just before the place opened, killed the ignition on the unit’s big four-by-four and hopped out pertly. Paige walked up to the bunker that served as the station’s office and living quarters and pounded on the door.
“Dammit. Why’d you go and feel a need to wake a man at this hour?” a sleepy voice inside rumbled, then drew closer. The door flung open violently. “Well hello, darlin’,” he said, his tone changing suddenly. He slipped the handgun he was holding into his pant pocket. His face brightened as he looked Paige up and down, taking in her long red hair, her breasts and the endless length of her legs beneath her short, denim skirt. He focused on her red high heels for a moment before looking back up. “You’re new in town,” he said with rising heat and tried smoothing his oily sleep-mussed hair. “I’d remember legs like that.”
Paige smiled sweetly and tipped her head to one side, hiding the small earpiece she was wearing. The transmitter wire was hidden beneath her hair and disappeared down the back of her skimpy shirt. “I need some gas. Can we trade?”
“Well, I don’t know, darlin’. What you got to trade?” He leered at her openly then yelled back at the open door. “Hey. Troy! Get out here. We got a visitor.” The man was maybe a few years older than her but small. His hair was already receding.
“I can cook,” Paige said hopefully, hoping they wouldn’t suspect something was wrong. She hadn’t thought to have something on hand to barter with. When the lieutenant had laid out this plan, he’d assured her he and the platoon would already be in position before she pulled up to the station. All she had to do was get one and if they were real lucky, both men out into the open. The unit would take care of the rest.
Troy stumbled out into the early morning sunlight, scratched his belly and stretched voluptuously. He caught sight of Paige and his pale, bleary eyes fixed on her crotch. He was taller but even skinnier than the first man and smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a week. “Today’s your lucky day, sweetheart,” he blurted out happily. “We’ve got a special on. A quarter tank for a blow job...depending on how good you are.”
He and his friend laughed uproariously and Paige stepped back when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Six recon soldiers collapsed on her position, tackling the bad guys and trussing their hands and feet up with plastic ties.
The members of her unit were dressed in ordinary fatigues, wore their full insignias and had their hair tied back. These two gas runners represented the last of the criminals in Edenton. They’d been left for last because their disappearance would be noticed more quickly than the other groups. With them now in custody, the unit could operate in the open. In fact, two locals on horseback, coming down the street, stopped, watched open-mouthed, then smiled broadly.
Paige felt Rick’s shoulder brush hers as he stepped forward, his assault rifle trained on the bad guys. He tipped his head to her. “You all right?” he asked. His voice was tighter than it should have been.
She’d seen the look on his face when he and the lieutenant had come out of the CO’s tent to explain the morning’s mission to the unit. Rick hadn’t wanted to use her as bait but was too professional, too disciplined to protest a good plan. The best plan they had. He’d let her step up and become a fully functioning part of the unit. He just didn’t like it, obviously.
Paige nodded curtly. The heat between them had no place here, just like her instinct to treat his wounds before anybody else’s had no place in a mission. She copied his example and used humor to defuse his anxiety.
She walked up to Troy and looked down at him with disdain. “A quarter of a tank?” she blurted out in disgust. “Only a quarter of a tank! Baby, I’m worth at least half a tank,” she huffed and walked back to her vehicle with the sound of the unit’s laughter ringing in her ears.
Around midday, Lieutenant Pembroke and Rick met with the members of the ad hoc town council that had petitioned the Army for reclamation. The easy part of their mission was completed. The local criminals who’d had a choke hold on the community were gone, shipped to a military stockade for trial and sentencing. Now came the hard part—looking these people in the eye and laying out their responsibilities for raising their community back up.
The Army wouldn’t do that for them. If these people had the will and worked hard, the Army was more than happy to provide the tools. But they had to accept responsibility for making their own reclamation happen and for sustaining it.
If they failed to step up, the lieutenant and Rick would list them as not warranting reclamation and move on to the n
ext community.
The lieutenant and Rick laid out the next step in their plan. The man they knew as Viper would return in three or four days. The reconnaissance unit would take him and his men down but the LT made it clear they expected the town’s help...and not just the men on the council. No, the council would have to organize other men, pick the best ones for the job and make sure their parts were carried out. If this group wasn’t capable of identifying and utilizing their resources, they couldn’t lead Edenton out of the dark ages. And, again, Eaglebird Recon Unit would move on.
Outside the building that had, twenty-two years ago, been a primary school, things were simpler. The other ten members of Eaglebird were playing.
Morty had set up a big grill and was handing out free food to people who wandered downtown, drawn as news of the Army’s arrival spread. He served grilled chicken on buns, made hamburgers, roasted vegetables, and dressed up kabobs with fresh fruit and cheese.
Corporal Benny Weston charmed the children effortlessly and made animals out of balloons. He seemed to have an endless supply of them in his fatigues. Privates Samuel Rutherford and Wolf Abrams strolled around the square introducing themselves, meeting and greeting.
Children and adults with obvious injuries or illnesses were directed to the tent where Paige had set up a field clinic. Two other members of recon stuck close to her side, assault rifles held casually in their arms. Right now, their medic was their greatest and most vulnerable asset. They’d been in communities that had mobbed the clinic. Communities where all the bad guys hadn’t been identified and they’d blended with the crowd, looking for a chance to take out that ray of new hope embodied in the person who was finally bringing medical care to them after twenty-two years. Paige would be a kidnap target until a reclamation division arrived, if one did. Crime bosses would try to use a medic to extort even more from a community because there was nothing people wouldn’t give up for a chance to have someone they loved healed.
Paige didn’t have to treat any serious cases that day. The people who came were ambulatory and most of the cases she saw were chronic complaints. Treatable, yes, although some would have to wait until a fully staffed reclamation unit arrived with surgeons and operating rooms. Fractures that had healed badly and would have to be re-set. Hernias men had lived with for months.
The sad truth was that, in unreclamated areas, if you got sick enough and if you couldn’t get out to a reclamated area, you died. Nobody died on Paige’s watch that day.
When the council meeting broke up and Rick and the lieutenant walked back to their unit, they found Paige standing out front of the temporary clinic wearing regular fatigues and combing through a child’s hair with a fine comb, checking for head lice. She was chatting animatedly with the boy’s mother and dispensing medicated shampoo.
Gregory Alton, Flora Keane and her two sons walked behind Rick and the LT.
When Paige was finished, Flora hugged her feelingly. “How can we repay you?” Flora whispered, stroking Paige’s bound hair.
“Well, do you remember a little thing called taxes?” Lieutenant Pembroke said teasingly, leaning over them. “If Edenton is reclamated, after two years, you get to start paying them again. That’s what pays for all this,” he added, waving his hand around Paige’s temporary clinic. He winked at Flora then grinned crookedly. “Some things are constant.”
Shaking her head and chuckling, Flora took his arm and they and Mayor Alton continued on.
“You’re looking better,” Paige called out happily when Flint stepped up to her. He was limping, yes, but moving under his own steam with the help of a cane.
“All down to you,” he answered, leaned into her and hugged her, holding her longer than necessary and dipping his head down to breath in her scent. When he moved aside his brother, Sam, took his place.
Rick glared at them then deliberately moved away.
An hour before sundown, the unit packed up and returned to their base.
Things happened quickly after that. The next day, Paige was back at the clinic before dawn. People were already waiting for her. More came, drawn by the first electric lights the town had seen in decades, powered by a portable generator. She didn’t see many old people. The old didn’t survive in unreclamated areas.
The town council organized work crews to set up a temporary school while it was decided if the crumbling one could be repaired or whether it should be torn down and a new one built. The unit dropped off a large, canvas tent to use in the interim and helped the town knock together temporary outhouses on site. The first organized classes began the next morning. The council set plans for a census to take stock of how many children they’d have to accommodate and exactly what their people’s skill-base was. Did they have mechanics? Power workers? People who’d had trades before the Great War. People who had skills they could pass on.
Paige’s initial blood screens showed the town had the expected infectious diseases running through it. Whooping cough and chicken pox had left their marks on most of her patients. She knew there was an outbreak of rubella not two-hundred kilometers away. Beginning the second day of school, she started an inoculation program for anything and everything she could. Children first, adults second. The council arranged for water samples to be brought to her from every available source. She taught two locals how to run the tests for her and contaminated wells were filled in.
Lieutenant Pembroke and Rick were on especially high alert. This was a dangerous time for their unit. Everybody in the community was celebrating and wanted to thank the Army. Embrace them as their own. It meant a lot of temptation for a group of high-testosterone adrenaline junkies who spent most of their time isolated. The men knew the drill but it was hard for a twenty-one year old man, being worshipped as a savior, to say no when women were so caught up in the spirit of liberation they offered themselves willingly.
It was too soon. The question of reclamation for Edenton hadn’t been resolved yet and taking anything, be it food, resources or sex, created an expectation in the town’s collective mind. It compromised the Army’s integrity and diminished the unit itself.
That was why the unit stayed together and hid themselves away in a secure location after dark.
On the morning of the fourth day after the gas station takedown, civilian check-points outside of town radioed in that the man they knew as Viper and an armed convoy were moving toward town. Paige closed up shop quick and she and her unit jumped in their vehicles and raced north. Their ambush site was a good one—a curve in the road surrounded by a patch of dense forest. The pavement was so badly crumbled vehicles had to drop down to twenty kilometers an hour or less.
Soldiers and pre-chosen locals took up positions and waited. Everyone knew their assignments. Private Samuel Rutherford, their best marksman, would silently take out two of the fuel tanker’s back tires just as it eased into the curve. With luck, they’d think they had a flat and that would bring the lead and the rear vehicles to a stop as well. If they got real lucky, bodies would begin drifting out of the vehicles to look and the unit would ambush them. If not, they’d have to take them out in a gunfight. Not an optimal choice with a tanker of flammable liquid in the middle of the fireworks.
Again tucked safely within the tree line, Paige heard the approaching vehicles then the high-pitched squeal of old brakes as they slowed for the curve. Some instinct told Paige to open the long, silver case at her feet. Without thinking too much about it, she pulled out the sniper rifle, fixed the scope in place and used it to get a better view. The tanker lurched suddenly and the squeal of brakes intensified. The noise stopped entirely when the big rig jerked to a stop. Sure enough, the driver got out, followed by two other men.
Focusing on the rear vehicle, Paige saw doors open on the reinforced four-by-four. A man stepped out onto the running board, pointing at the truck. In less than a minute, the back of the truck was surrounded by eight men, milling around, talking, gesturing and swearing, scratching themselves absently and stretching their b
acks. One wandered away from the others, approached the trees near her position and started to unbutton his fly. He was tackled, a hand clamped over his mouth, and dragged into the underbrush without the others noticing.
Men, recon and locals, collapsed on the location. Two of Viper’s men managed to get their weapons out and Paige held her breath as one squeezed off a few rounds. One of the locals dropped to the ground, clutching his arm. Paige spotted Morty’s distinctive, pale blond hair swinging across his shoulders as he spun. He cracked his elbow with brutal accuracy across the nose of the shooter. The man and his weapon dropped to the crumbling pavement. Two soldiers and one local tackled the other armed thug.
Another flurry of movement caught her eye. The lieutenant, with Corporal Benny Weston hot on his heels, jumped on the front bumper of the lead vehicle and leveled their assault rifles at the driver. Benny leapt again, landing nimbly on the hood but the bumper crumbled, snapping drunkenly to one side, sending the lieutenant sprawling just as he was about to make his second leap. The passenger door flew open and a man holding an assault rifle barreled out, crouched low and ran. He leveled his weapon at the lieutenant.
Lieutenant Ed Pembroke’s intense, gray eyes widened when the man jerked upright with a look of disbelief on his face. From somewhere in the woods, they all heard the single, sharp crack of a high-powered rifle. Viper’s man looked down at his chest stupidly, touched the spreading blood on the front of his shirt and crumpled to the ground.
Any of Viper’s men who weren’t already subdued looked around nervously, giving the soldiers and the locals the second they needed to tackle them. A tense cry went up from the melee: “Got him! Head man’s down.”
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