The Rabid Brigadier

by Craig Sargent

  At last one huge fellow, nearly as large as the sergeant, stepped forward. “I might just give that offer a try,” he said with a swagger that suggested he had seen his share of fights—and had won them all.”

  “Well, mightn’t you, now?” Sergeant Zynishinski replied with a happy little smile on his thick-lipped mouth. “Well, please be my guest.” He waved his hand at the ground in front of him as if bowing and stepped back a few feet. “What’s your name, my brave idiot,” the sergeant asked. “So’s I can know who I’m about to knock down?”

  “Name’s Gatlin. But back where I come from they all just call me ‘Bull.’ Cain’t even remember my first name. Ain’t nobody called me it for a long, long time. Now I ain’t gonna get in no trouble, is I?” the six-four brute asked with narrowed eyes. “That is, when I sets you on your ass?” He glanced around at the recruits with a smirk on his face. They looked at him as if he were insane.

  “When you—?” The sergeant laughed with true amusement at the question. “My dear boy, if you can knock me down I guarantee you’ll have the thanks and appreciation of most of the men in this fort. No, I promise you,” he said, letting his ham-sized hands hang loosely at his sides, “whatever goes on between us, nobody else ever knows about it. My word.”

  “Well, I guess yo’ word is good enough for me.” The two of them squared off and the recruits watched with something approaching awe. As each of the challengers weighed in at two-fifty to three hundred pounds it was akin to watching some kind of sumo match. Both had a lot of bulk, but it was the kind that was more muscle than fat. They looked as if they could be hit by a truck and the metal would come out the loser. They circled around once, the challenger throwing out a few quick punches just to see what the reaction would be. But Sergeant Zynishinski didn’t even bother to block them, just stepped back an inch or two and the fists stopped inches short of his flesh. Just from the catlike way he moved Stone could tell the man was a fighter of extraordinary dimensions. Nothing extra, just enough movement to get the job done. It was the style of fighting his father had taught him for five years when they were holed up together in the mountain bunker. Only this guy was a master.

  Suddenly the recruit made his move, charging in with a series of lefts and rights that would have flattened a rogue rhino. The D.I. blocked them with amazingly fast windshield-wiper-type motions of his arms and then stepped inside the flailing recruit. He brought his right knee up suddenly between the other man’s legs—and it was all over. If the recruits had been hoping for a heavyweight boxing match they were disappointed. “Bull” fell to the dirt with his eyes bulging and lay there sucking in hard for air. Elapsed time of battle: 3.6 seconds. After about a half minute the sergeant reached down and helped him up. The still gasping recruit rose, rubbing his affected parts, his eyes still not quite focusing right.

  “If I’d wanted to, I could have stopped your family line right then and there,” the D.I. said with an almost fatherly expression. “I pulled the blow at the last second. No hard feelings, huh?” He held out his hand and the recruit shook it limply, more out of fear than anything else. It was the first fight he had ever lost.

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  THE SUN rose high into the afternoon sky, the first really bright day they had had for a week. Fort Bradley was alive with squads of men rushing around; trucks and jeeps tearing this way and that, carrying munitions, food, construction supplies… At the northern end of the camp heavy construction was under way to enlarge the borders of the enclosure—more warehouses, more training fields, more electrified barbed-wire fences. In the center of the main parade field, the recruits were learning about the weaknesses of the flesh, the body points to attack, every way that a man could be immobilized—and destroyed.

  “These are all combat techniques.” The sergeant addressed them as each man squared off with a partner. “This ain’t no fisticuffs or karate or any of that bullshit. All we learn here is how to fuck up a man fast. ’Cause there ain’t no rules out there—except to survive. And the way YOU survive is to kill the other guy.” He showed them all the major points of the body to attack—using fists, feet, knees, elbows—and using Bull as his somewhat reticent practice dummy. Then each man faced his adversary and tried to imitate the move. The sergeant went up and down the rows, bending a knee here, showing how to move in fast by taking a big step, teaching them all the little tips that made the difference between taking someone out and just making them madder and meaner.

  Stone was paired off with a recruit nearly as large as Bull, with a squashed-in nose that looked like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. The man was tremendously strong, his muscles bulging through his brown jacket, but he didn’t seem like a bad sort and whispered to Stone as they started, “Name’s Bo. Let’s not try to kill each other, okay pal?”

  “Name’s Stone,” Stone replied. “Sounds like a good idea to me.” They each tried out all the moves on one another, careful to not actually use much force—strangleholds, sweeps, throws, and light strikes to the vital pressure points. Stone knew most of the concepts—having been trained by the man who invented some of them—but even he paid close attention, picking up moves here and there that he had never seen before.

  The hand-to-hand went on through the middle of the day until at last Sergeant Zynishinski looked at his wristwatch and called a break. “You get a ten-minute break. No food, as much water as you want.” He pointed to three buckets of sloshing water that some troopers carried onto the field. “Don’t bust a gut.” The men hit the precious water like desert animals after a drought. They slurped it up fast so that most of them quickly got stomach cramps and lay back down on the ground moaning.

  “All right, enough napping,” the D.I. said after exactly ten minutes to the second. “Now, you’ve learned a little bit about how to fight bare-handed. Forget all of it! Because every son-of-a-bitch out there has a weapon, and so will you.” He pulled a huge double-edged commando knife from its sheath by his side and hefted it in his hand. “This is my baby,” the D.I. said with something like affection. “It’s seen the insides of a lot of men’s guts—and sent them all into hell. Bull, you want to come here for a minute.” The huge recruit slowly rose with a look of terror on his face.

  “You ain’t gonna cut me up, is you, Sarge?” he asked with a pleading little-boy tone that was almost comical on such a mashed-in face. But no one laughed.

  “Now would I do that?” the sergeant asked with a harsh laugh. “The officers would have me eating pigshit out of a trough if I was to be slicing up all these nice young bodies here.” He demonstrated on his somewhat less than enthusiastic “volunteer” the many ways that a blade can do a man in. How to cut an artery, how to strike a disabling blow with a single thrust, coming up from behind and grabbing the head and slicing the throat all in a split second. The recruits saw every bloody way that steel can carve flesh, and then got to try it all out on one another. Two more were lost here—with stab wounds, one to the shoulder, the other right into the cheek. Both would live, but the blood pouring from their wounds meant they were out, finito, washed up in the NAA before they had ever begun. Patton wanted only the cream for his forces. And those who survived getting wounded in training were more likely to do the same in combat, as far as he could see. At any rate, he ran the show and thus all of his training concepts were implemented.

  Then it was staffs, which the sergeant was clearly as expert with as every other goddamned weapon. He poked and swung away at Bull, showing countless lightning-quick moves that could send a man to the ground like a falling tree. Again, the recruits got to try it all out on one another: a few bloody noses, cracked elbows and wrists along the way. After an hour or two of the practice, the sergeant called a halt to the action and searched around for some subjects.

  “Now, let’s see what the hell you’ve learned—if anything. Let’s see, how about you, Bull.” The man rose and stood next to him, fearing another onslaught of one kind or another. “And”—he glanced around
and saw Stone’s unflinching eyes staring right back at him while everyone else was looking down at the ground, pretending not to exist. He had noticed that Stone seemed quite adept at all the weapons, unusually good for a raw recruit. “And you!” He handed them each a long oak staff and stood back. “Okay boys, go to it.”

  Bull looked happy for the first time that afternoon. At last someone whose ass HE could kick. He circled around Stone, holding the stick above his head like a baseball bat looking for a nice round object to smash.

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you… much,” the big man snickered and Stone could see dark cruelty in the eyes, a desire to fuck him up bad, a chance to earn back some of the macho that had been stripped off him like a veneer of cracked paint by Sergeant Zynishinski.

  “And I promise the same, pal,” Stone said quietly back to him. He waited, holding the staff at loose readiness in front of him. Suddenly Bull charged, swinging his staff like a club, as if he were out to split a log in two at the first stroke. But Stone was faster. And when it comes to combat, speed always wins. He parried the strike with what looked like a quick flick of the wrists and then lowered the stick between the huge man’s knees. Lumbering forward, Bull didn’t have time to stop and, becoming entangled in the staff, fell to the ground with a loud thud. Stone stood back and stared down.

  “Told you I wouldn’t hurt you.” This enraged the bear-sized man to such a degree that his face turned a blazing red and he leapt up again, charging with frantic strokes. This time Stone stepped to the side at the last second as the stick whizzed by his head. He slammed the end of his pole into the big man’s stomach, and as Bull whooshed air, came down with the side of it on the back of the man’s neck. He struck with minimal force—he didn’t want to kill him—and Bull hit the dirt face first, out cold before his nose dug into the ground.

  “Jesus, that’s pretty fucking good,” the D.I. said, stepping over the prone body. “Where the hell did you learn all that stuff?”

  “My dad was a Ranger,” Stone said with a thin smile. “He taught me a few pointers.” Bull came to, shook his head and then realized what had happened to him. He rose again, his face even redder than before if that was possible and started at his adversary again, unable to accept that a shrimp like that could take him down.

  “Easy, easy, big fellow,” the sergeant said with a laugh. “This guy could’ve killed you if he wanted. You’ll get your chance to let blood out there”—he swept his hand past the fence surrounding the fortress. “Enough of this for now. It’s up to each of you: what you learn, what you remember. I won’t be out there when you face the bikers and the cannibals and all the other slime that live out in the wastelands. If you do it wrong, you’ll find out.” He pushed Bull and Stone back into the ranks. Stone saw the man he had just knocked down give him just about the coldest look he had ever seen and heard a whisper through the bloody lips his front teeth had cut when he went down. “I’ll kill you, motherfucker—bet on it.”

  “Now, from hands and knives to the real thing—the things you’ll be using ninety-nine percent of the time you’re out there fighting: firearms,” the D.I. told them. He had another of the recruits who had been pretty badly banged up sent off under escort of guards, and then led them across the parade grounds to another large field with firing ranges, trenches and a shitload of weaponry—rifles, automatic weapons and even a few cannons.

  “Later you’ll be given—those of you who make it through—specialized training in your assigned weapons. But for now we want all of you to have at least a working knowledge of all our basic firepower. You never know when you’ll be out there and your weapon will jam, and some cocksucker will be coming at you with blood in his eyes. You’d better be able to fire anything that has a trigger. You understand?”

  “Yes sir,” the recruits shouted back, bleary eyes weary of the hours they’d already put in. But there wasn’t the slightest chance for rest as the sergeant started demonstrating the firing, loading, stripping and cleaning of a wide assortment of firearms used by the NAA—M-16A’s, Colt AR-15’s, Mossberg 12 gauge pumps, Colt .45 combat pistols as well as the NATO 9mm Beretta. They followed suit, taking apart and putting together an assortment of pistols and rifles on tarps on the ground, all under the watchful eye of the D.I. The sergeant strode around, constantly pointing out the correct way, cursing the dumb “lobotomized cows that God had sent him” to start getting it together. After about three hours they were led to the firing range and lay down side by side in a long row. It was already starting to get dark again and there were no lights on the field, just what filtered from the lights of the fortress itself about a quarter mile off. A truck rolled up and a squad of troops jumped out, carrying what looked like bodies.

  “We strive for realism here,” Sergeant Zynishinski said. “So we ain’t got no lives ones, but we do got some dead ones for you to try out on. There ain’t nothing like shooting at real flesh—even if it’s a little on the rancid side—to give you a feel for what bullets will do to a man. And if it’s the first time you’re shooting at human flesh, you can do your puking now and get it over with.” The recruits blanched, and even Stone felt a little queasy as the corpses were carried out and tied up to poles about a hundred feet from them until there were a dozen of the dead bodies in various states of decomposition tied up and staring back at them through flat dead eyes. Stone wondered but didn’t ask where the leftovers had come from, though the pockmarked, ugly faces of the recently deceased didn’t look like they had been people you would want to invite home to dinner even when they had been alive.

  They each got themselves in a comfortable position approximating the way the sergeant had demonstrated and sighted up their M-16’s. The rifle was the more advanced 9mm model, but Stone didn’t really like the feel of it. It had always had a bad rep, but this was what the Third Army had to use, so he used it. He sighted up the corpse directly ahead of him, getting a bead right between the eyes. Then he corrected for what he sensed was a slightly downward push of the sights. The other men all squinted madly down their barrels.

  “Remember what I told you about vital points,” the sergeant said, stepping back behind the recruits who lay prone on the dirt, elbows on the ground. “Shoot the motherfuckers!” he yelled. And the firing squad of recruits opened up with everything they had. Stone pulled the trigger and the rifle jerked with a satisfying recoil. The head of Stone’s corpse seemed to suddenly have a rather large hole missing in the center of its chalky face—where the eyes and nose had once lived. Then other parts of it took hits as the men fired again and again. Fingers blasted off, teeth and ears flew into the air, spiraling from the hit of the 9mm slugs. Arms and legs seemed to jump and whip around in the air, as if they were dancing to some tune inaudible to human ears, as bullets tore into them. Slowly they were ripped apart as whole sections of them disappeared from their bodies. After five minutes there was hardly anything left except a pink gruel that coated the stakes, and various unrecognizable red things lying around the ground.

  “Excellent, excellent,” the D.I. said, as he halted the rifle practice and moved them along to the grenade range about one hundred feet to the right of the corpse targets. He showed the proper holding, arming and throwing of the grenade, of which the fort had a surplus. Each man was given one and then lined up behind a sandbagged protective wall that shielded the whole team. Then, one at a time, they threw them. The grenades were live, and every throw was followed by a sharp snapping explosion and a little spray of dust that trickled back to them through the now dark sky. Stone armed and threw his and ducked down. He had used them before. He liked grenades. Anything that could take out five guys at a time was all right in his book.

  One idiot—one of the very last—apparently didn’t quite get the message. He pulled the pin and then turned to the sergeant. “Now what the hell… I supposed to do next?” The straw-chewer asked with a puzzled look. Even the D.I.’s face drained of blood and he stuttered to throw the fucking thing away. The kid got the message
at the last second and heaved the pineapple out over the wall. It went off six feet from his chest. Somehow he lived. But the grenade had sent out a veritable wall of minute shrapnel—and it had almost skinned the thrower alive. The whole right side of his face, shoulder and chest had been razored down to a bloody layer of muscle tissue. “Gosh sorry, Sarge,” the kid kept mumbling over and over as he lay on the ground. He kept mumbling it even as medics carried him off on a stretcher, a trail of blood dripping all the way across the field like a highway stripe to hell.

  “That’s what happens to assholes,” Sergeant Zynishinski said, addressing the recruits. “Always know where your weapon is, where your asshole is, and don’t confuse the two.” He stopped and counted how many were left after the various accidents of training. Eighteen out of an original twenty-five. “My, we’re losing men tonight. Well, let’s see how many more we can lose. It’s beddy bye. Let’s go.”

  “Thank God, we get to sleep,” Bo, the man he had been working out with earlier, said to Stone as they jogged side by side across the field.

  “Somehow I think sleep is going to be a very tiring experience,” Stone answered dryly. The D.I. led them to a stretch of muddy ground along the inside of the fence. The recent rains had make it thick like taffy so that the men could walk on it but if they stopped for very long they started slowly shifting around as their feet corkscrewed down into the giving surface. A truck was waiting for them at the far end of the swampy field, and two NAA supply men handed out a shovel and a tarp to each man.