by James Tarr
On the far right corner of the intersection ahead sat a small, low-roofed bowling alley. There were two cars in its lot. While they appeared empty, both vehicles looked driveable. George pointed his rifle at them and the bowling alley’s front door as the SUV slowed for the intersection.
The street signs, as was so often the case, even in the suburbs, had been ripped down. The north-south surface street they planned to turn onto had been nicknamed long ago The President. Whenever possible nicknames and euphemisms were used for street and site names, leftover when the dogsoldiers were using radios, thinking it was probably safe since they were encrypted. That had turned out not to be the case, but the habit remained.
The Pres had a narrow median running down its center, with two lanes on either side. The grass on the median was tall enough to partially block their view of the far lanes as Quentin nosed the SUV into the intersection. George stayed focused on the cars and bowling alley while everyone else looked about.
“There’s a car moving up north!” Bobby said excitedly. “Way up there, almost half a mile away.”
Ed squinted. Damn, the kid’s eyes were good. All he could make out was a tiny blue blob. “Keep going,” he told Quentin, who’d kept the SUV rolling. As Quentin turned south onto The Pres Ed lifted binoculars to his eyes and peered out the back of the Ford. What he saw was a small, battered blue car, with two or three people inside. Coming their way, but slowly. Too far away to tell who they were or if they had weapons.
“Early, you and Mark keep an eye on them,” he said as they began accelerating, southbound once again. “You tell me if they’re getting closer.”
“You got it Cap’n.”
George twisted back straight in his seat and peered forward once more over the hood of the Ford. Small houses lined this stretch of The Pres, tiny, one story ranches close to the road that had suffered quite a lot of damage, but it was hard to tell whether it was from vandalism or combat. A pickup truck was upside down on the median. As they passed they could see the grass growing through the rents in the rusty body; it had been there a while.
Half a mile up was the next in a quick succession of major intersections. Once past the first, where the traffic lights appeared to be down on the pavement, The Pres curved right and then crossed the widest thoroughfare they’d find until they hit the Interstate; a boulevard, ten lanes total, plus a wide median.
“Heads up everybody, this is where it gets hairy,” Ed called out.
“Watch for choppers!” George threw over his shoulder. Once they hit the first intersection they’d have no overhead cover, absolutely none, for almost half a mile.
The tiny houses to either side vanished. A park appeared on the right, swingsets and slides rusty with disuse. Batting cages, then a baseball diamond popped up on their left. Two boys in their early teens stood where home plate would have been. Both were painfully skinny, wearing clothes that hung on them like sheets. One held a bat, the other a ball, but finding the energy to play seemed beyond them. They turned and watched the SUV roll by with eyes sunken deep into their skulls but made no move to hide or run away. They’d seen carloads of rifle-toting men before.
Quentin took his foot off the accelerator and steered around the crunched hulk of the traffic light on the concrete in the middle of the intersection. On the ground they looked a lot bigger than when they hung above the passing cars. The whole squad leaned as Quentin took the sharp curve to the right. The small blue car was way back there, apparently stopped on the road.
A hundred feet up the wide boulevard nicknamed One Way loomed. The intersection was vast and empty. Once they were out in the middle of it they’d have a much better view both north and south, but they’d also be visible to any aircraft in the area. They weren’t in a restricted area yet, but any moving vehicle close to the city limits always garnered attention and unless the pilot was blind he’d see their weapons. The secret to survival was to drive as fast as possible where you could and get the hell out of sight.
Jason caught glimpses of gas stations, a car wash, and a drug store, all abandoned, then they were rolling through the huge intersection as fast as Quentin could get the Ford to move. One Way was four lanes on either side of a wide boulevard spotted with small trees and topped by grass three feet tall. The men stared out the windows intently, peering over their rifles, sweating even as the cool morning air poured through the car.
There was a bump bump from the undercarriage and then they were through, shooting by a gas station on their left and a tire store on their right, both long abandoned and wantonly vandalized.
“I saw something flying way the hell north of us,” Weasel said. “It was just a dot, too far away to tell what it was. I doubt he saw us.”
“It’s the one you don’t see you’ve got to worry about,” George muttered.
Not quite half a mile to the northwest loomed the big square bulk of a hospital. A handful of dedicated doctors and nurses still worked there, doing what they could under horrific conditions. Hardly any water, even fewer medical supplies, and more than half the time without power. Ed didn’t know how they did it. The Red Cross had been providing limited amounts of food and medicine, not to mention intermittent foreign aid from the few allies who had proven to be true friends, and a few new “allies” who were hoping for a piece of the pie when the war finally wore down, but those humanitarian shipments had dried up inexplicably six months before. Rumor was the Army had cut them off to drive people away from the city. The patients they helped paid with whatever coin they had, whether that was food, clean water, scavenged wiring, electrical components, sometimes even good old-fashioned sex.
Since he’d assumed command of the squad Ed had had to leave over a dozen wounded men at the hospital, knowing that if they survived their wounds the Army would probably take them prisoner. The men were always stripped of their gear and uniforms but the soldiers stationed in the emergency room usually could tell the difference between battle-hardened veterans and random victims of violence. It killed Ed to do it, but he refused to let a wounded man suffer, perhaps die, just because there was a chance he might be captured. Some had died anyway, others had never fully recovered from their wounds, either physically or emotionally, disappearing and leaving the fighting to those who were still whole or, if not whole, still motivated. The Army had its own medical facility downtown, but only soldiers and the rare captured guerilla ever benefited from its services.
The Pres took another sharp curve to the left and they were pointed south again. The hospital tower quickly dropped from view behind them. The street grew a little friendlier; trees lined both sides and hung over the curb lanes, providing some concealment from flyovers.
On the left a chain link fence ran unbroken for half a mile. On the other side of it was a cemetery hidden behind a row of trees and leaning seed-topped grass that hadn’t been mown in years. To the right, concealed behind fences, hedges, and mature trees, were the backyards of a small secluded neighborhood, mostly two-story colonial homes. On the straightaway Quentin got the Ford up to forty miles an hour before he had to brake. Another intersection was coming up quickly.
Although they’d yet to meet up with any trouble, Ed had had enough of traveling on major surface streets. Even though it was faster it was always a bad idea. At the intersection Quentin took a right turn, accelerated, braked, and turned south once again onto a residential side street.
The houses were small, one and two stories, most with small covered porches. Almost all of them were clad in aluminum or vinyl siding which had weathered the years well. Mature, fifty- to sixty-foot silver and red maples lined the narrow street, meeting far overhead, throwing most of the street into deep shadow.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Ed murmured.
There were more cars here, because this neighborhood still had residents. Here as in most areas ringing the city the remaining people had banded together to survive. Behind the fences and blank faces of the houses they’d find communal gardens, catch basin
s for water, perhaps chicken coops, all guarded by residents who knew their neighbors by name and had developed a healthy distrust of anyone just wandering by. It was in neighborhoods like these that the squad usually hid to heal and re-equip if they didn’t head out into the country. The locals, those part of the ARF Irregulars’ “Underground Railroad”, provided them food, water, and funneled them ammunition and medical supplies, sometimes from the strangest sources. The same was true of the unoccupied safe houses throughout the region—the squad would show up and find the cabinets freshly stuffed with antibiotics from Spain and Poland, ammunition from South Africa and Turkey, batteries and binoculars from the Czech Republic, ghost guns, water bottles, baby wipes, vitamins—they’d seen it all.
The SUV coasted along, bristling with rifle barrels and filled with nervous faces. The street was quiet and for the most part clear; here and there scorchmarks marred the pavement, but the vehicles that had burned had all been towed away. Sold for scrap, most likely, before the scrap yards were closed down.
They passed an old man, shuffling north along the sidewalk with a plastic bag swinging from gnarled fingers. When he heard the car coming he looked up, revealing dark haunted eyes. He stopped, and as the SUV drew close he raised a quivering hand. George lifted a hand in response, and the two men stared at each other until the vehicle rolled by. Then the man began shuffling northward again. George’s hand clenched into a fist, then relaxed and settled around the pistol grip of his carbine.
Jason looked left and right out the windows. Block after block of houses, small, neat, many obviously still occupied. “People live here?” he asked.
“Not nearly as many as used to, but more than you’d think,” Ed told him. “A lot of the people who fled the city had relatives or friends living in the suburbs.” Ed peered down each passing street. Bedroom communities like this one, with absolutely no businesses except on the busiest through-streets, had fared the best in the fighting.
Quentin slowed as they reached the next mile road, and everyone in the SUV looked right and left. They saw a few scattered people on foot, and a short line in front of what was probably a store of some sort, but nothing that looked threatening. Sure, the guy leaning against the front of the store had a shotgun poorly concealed behind his leg, but he was store security, not Army. The old vehicle surged forward across the avenue and continued southward along the same residential street.
Ed bent forward over the seat. “Things seem quiet today. Is gang activity down?” George shrugged. He didn’t know.
They rolled by a small beige brick community church, hardly bigger than a house, then a narrow boulevard with a grassy median narrow enough to jump across. As soon as they passed it Jason noticed the increased alertness in the men around him. He felt the big vehicle slowing down.
“Quentin, you kill the engine before we turn the corner.” George looked over his shoulder into the interior of the car. “I want four on each side when we un-ass the vehicle. Make that three on the left, Quentin’ll stay with the car. Early, you grab the cherry, keep him close.”
“Gotcha.”
“I’ll take right point, initiate the approach,” Ed said. “Watch the houses on either side just before, if there’s going to be an ambush that’s where they’ll be hiding.”
What was happening? Jason realized everybody knew but him. “Where are we going?”
“OP. Observation Post near the Ditch,” Ed told him. “Might be empty, might be occupied, might be hot, might be blown, no way to tell ‘til we get there.”
Ahead, the street they’d been on for almost two miles without incident—Thank God for small favors, Ed thought—rolled through to a tall red brick wall. The residential street dead-ended at the westbound service drive of the Ditch, which was what everybody called the sunken interstate running east-west for twenty-five miles, several miles north of the city limits proper. The wall had been erected to block the noise of the cars zooming by below. Jason could just make out the empty space beyond the service drive where the once busy freeway had been carved deep into the ground in an attempt to make it both safer for the residents and quieter. The effort had proved only partially successful.
A hundred feet before the brick wall, still coasting along at twenty miles an hour, Quentin cut the engine, then swung a hard left onto an east-west side street. It looked no different from any of the other three dozen streets they’d already passed, lined with small houses on small lots. A few derelict cars were in evidence.
They coasted a third of the way down the block, until the Ford had slowed to walking speed, then Quentin pulled to the curb. Before the SUV had even stopped men were bailing out of the car in every direction. Jason frantically slid across the seat and out of the open door, not wanting to be the last man out of the car. He was, except for Quentin, who crouched behind the wheel. Early was jogging heavily across the street, heading for the gap between two houses, and Jason scrambled after him, rifle in hand.
CHAPTER NINE
The houses were single story red brick pillboxes with white siding trim, most with attached one or two car garages. Many of the lawns had gone unmowed for years, and the bushes had grown wild. In their neutral clothing the squad disappeared as they moved into the long grass. Early pulled Jason close in behind him as he hugged the corner of a house and peered up the street. The other members of the squad had also ducked in-between houses and were watching and listening. They could hear birds, and someone talking loudly a very long way off, and the soft chug of the Ford’s exhaust.
After a minute, Ed broke from the shadows of a massive yew bush and slowly moved forward, carbine up. He kept close to the houses, moving from shadow to shadow, swishing through the long grass, his eyes darting back and forth. He would have preferred to traverse the backyards of the houses toward the OP, but just about every one was enclosed by chain link. Climbing over fences was slow and usually noisy, and fences trapped you.
George began paralleling the squad leader on the opposite side of the street. He was more exposed to the early morning sun, but there was nothing he could do about that. At least they had some overhead cover; maples here and there leaned over the narrow street. He kept to the thigh-high grass and used whatever overgrown and gone-to-seed shrubs and ornamental trees he could find for concealment as he slid east. Mark, Early, and Jason silently moved out and began following him, keeping at least a house length interval between each man. Bobby and Weasel shadowed Ed, watching the far side of the street as much as their own.
At least a quarter of the houses on the street were maintained to some degree, and Ed could feel eyes on him as he picked his way across overgrown lawns and cracked driveways. He tried to ignore the crawling sensation on the back of his neck every time he went on patrol. There was no real way to predict or protect against snipers and so he did his best not to think about that one bullet. If it happened, it happened.
It was a long block, but he finally drew within five or six houses of the end of the block, The Pres, and the OP. Ed knelt behind a browning arborvitae and studied the remaining length of the street. He dug out the binoculars and examined the front of each house, each window and door, and the short section of The President where it passed in front of their side street. He saw nothing amiss. His had been the first boots in days to walk through the overlong front yards of the houses, but this far north that didn’t really mean anything. Everyone used the sidewalks and streets in this neighborhood. It was a lot different in the City.
At the corner of The Pres was a two story cube of red brick and white siding, the first of four stretching from the side street nearly to the service drive along The Pres. Ed didn’t know if they’d originally been rental units or privately owned homes, and didn’t care. He only cared about who might be inside them, especially the furthest one south. Its second-floor window provided a great view of the Ditch, both service drives, and The Pres for over a quarter mile past the expressway.
Ed signaled to the men behind him and across the street to gi
ve him more of a lead, then stood up and carefully moved forward once more. He had no doubt many of the closed garages he was passing contained cars, but nobody parked a car with gas in it—unguarded—where it could be seen. Gas was in perpetual short supply, but siphon hoses were not.
Ed reached the last house and paused underneath the gnarled branches of a flowering crab tree. Ahead of him was an expanse of grass and beyond it the row of four block houses. The fire-gutted hulks of two cars sat on their frames near the brick edifices, weeds growing through the ragged holes in their bodies. The rear doors of all four houses were gone or splintered into uselessness, and most of the glass was gone from their window frames. Ed couldn’t see anything in the shadows within the houses, but he was on high alert; parked between the center two houses, hidden from casual observation, was a battered full-size Toyota pickup.
The north-side lookout was in the second-floor window of Number One and had spotted George about ten houses away from the corner. Word had been passed, and by the time Ed paused at the last house and stared at the dark interior of Number Four half a dozen weapons were trained on him.
Standing well back from the empty window frame, the tall man peered through his binoculars at Ed. The lenses brought the squad leader’s thin face into sharp focus. The man made a sound and let the binoculars fall on their strap around his neck. With one hand on the carbine slung over his shoulder, slowly chewing a piece of turkey jerky, the man stepped forward and stopped in the open doorway in full view of their visitor.
Ed blinked as the man, wearing a plate carrier and magazine pouches, appeared suddenly in the doorway, looking right at him. The two men stared at each other for a second, then he was gone, sliding back into the shadows of the house. Ed signaled for his squad to stay put and slowly rose. He looked around once more, then, keeping both hands on his carbine but pointing it at the ground in front of him, carefully walked across the open grass to the house.