by James Tarr
Jason looked up at Mark. The big man with his big belt-fed machinegun was smiling at him, no malice in the quiet question. Jason, hunkering in a dark corner between a fence and the back porch of a house as the light finished fading, nodded. He’d been walking through bad neighborhoods, rifle in hand, for quite some time before meeting up with the guerrilla fighters, but that had been an adventure. Whatever risk it involved seemed distant. However, after joining up with them, and then the confusing horror of the helicopter attack…suddenly the threat of death seemed very, very real. Still, he couldn’t be scared every second of every hour. For most of the last few hours he’d just been tired. The terror was intermittent.
Mark said to him, “Holding a rifle and feeling like a tough guy is a far cry from the reality of it all, which is that you’re out here hunting people…and people are out here hunting you. I’d tell you to not jump and twitch at every sound, but me telling you, and you being able to do it, are two different things.”
“I guess.”
Mark smiled down at the teenager. “It’s not that us old guys aren’t scared…when it’s time to be scared. But that’s when people are shooting at you. Worrying about when you’re going to get shot at, when it’s not happening, will give you an ulcer. Trust me. Been there, done that.” His smile got wider. “These days I’m just too old and tired and hungry to be scared unless someone’s actually shooting at me.”
Jason nodded, then realized he was nearly invisible in the gloom. “I just can’t believe there’s no water or electricity.”
“You had that, at home?”
“Water all the time, although you had to filter or boil it before you could drink it. Scheduled power blackouts once or twice a week. But that’s nothing like this.”
“Hell, there’s still a little water and power out here, in the suburbs,” Mark told him. “Maybe not predictable, but it’s there. In the city, there’s nothing, except in the Blue Zone. Hasn’t been anything for years.” He waved a hand around. “You think this is dark, just wait.” He nodded and wandered off, checking the perimeter.
Jason had moved around a bit since the squad had gone to ground. He’d looked out into the neighborhood and peered through the fence up and down Leprechaun (which he thought was a dumb name). Here and there he saw an electrical or battery-powered light, the flickering of a fire, and the glow of candles. Occasionally the sound of talking or laughing carried on the wind. There were people out there, living their lives, like the friendly old man, Russell.
Russell had offered them the use of his fireplace inside his house or the fire pit outside for them to cook the pigeons Weasel had caught, but Ed hadn’t wanted to risk the heat or smoke. After an hour of waiting for the roadblock to disperse, Weasel had slunk off and cooked the birds inside a nearby house which had been gutted by fire some years past, then distributed the food to the squad. It wasn’t much more than a few ounces of meat per person, but it was welcomed nonetheless.
As the sun sank toward the horizon the sky filled with clouds, and darkness approached quickly. When Ed could no longer see anything of the roadblock to the south other than lights he figured it was safe to cross the street.
“I know we normally go to ground when it’s dark, but I want to put some more distance between us and the crash site. And that roadblock,” Ed told George and Early. He saw their heads nod in the dim light.
They crossed Greenfield in pairs. The first two—Quentin and Ed—darted across, and spent five minutes checking the large building and the area around the parking lot, making sure it was clear. Then Ed cupped his hand around his flashlight and hit the button briefly. At the signal, two more figures broke from the fence line on the far side and dashed across the road. They were hard to see in the charcoal light of late dusk.
George dashed across last on his own. Then they closed up, arranged themselves in two columns, and slowly began working their way west through the neighborhood there. Backyards were more hidden from view, but climbing over fences in the dark was a great way to get a stupid injury, and maybe meet up with a pet dog, so they stalked along the front of the houses on either side of a side street, making good time. They stepped through tall lawn grass and hugged the overgrown bushes that decorated the front of most houses, but still felt very exposed even in the dark.
It was not late, and in the fresh dark they heard voices from time to time and saw twice the glow of fires in backyards reflecting off aluminum siding. The smell of cooking meat made all their mouths water.
The men moved quietly through the humid night air, working their way through one neighborhood into another. The houses grew larger, two story colonials, aluminum siding above brick, most with attached two car garages. There were very few cars visible on the street or in the driveways, and Mark, bringing up the rear with the SAW, his feet inside his battered boots hurting (as usual), wondered how many drivable cars were in the garages, and if any of them had gasoline.
After three quarters of a mile Ed brought the group to a halt, briefly consulted with George, and then turned the group dead south on the next street. Ed figured they were far enough removed from the Growlers positioned on Leprechaun, and the crash site now nearly two miles distant, to begin heading south once more. But, aside from all that, the main issue was Slash. Unlike the Ditch, Slash was still in use, one of the approved travel corridors through the city. It ran from the suburbs to the northwest all the way down to the center of the city and the riverfront. Not that it saw a lot of traffic, but its lanes were kept clear of debris. There weren’t a whole lot of bridges across it, and all of them would put the squad out in the open in the time it took to cross.
The residential street dead-ended at a cross-street, and directly across from them was the long narrow parking lot of a former elementary school. The school was long since abandoned, every window broken, the parking lot empty. To the west the lot bordered a small residential subdivision. George took the lead and the men, in single file, followed him along the grass verge between the parking lot on the east and the back yards of the houses to the west. Most of the yards had chain link fences separating their property from the school, but bushes growing out of control and untended for the better part of a decade had swallowed the fence line. Where the chain link was visible it had been distended by the wild foliage into a twisting coil resembling a DNA strand.
The parking lot ran for over five hundred feet, and beyond that was waist-high grass covering several flat acres, the site of an adjacent school that had never been built. The men hugged the overgrown fence line, their legs swishing through the grass, walking slowly, looking in every direction, listening intently.
As they made their way toward the end of the fence line the moon came out from behind the clouds. It was still a slender crescent but bathed the open field around them with cool light.
Just beyond where the fence ended, south of the small neighborhood, a small rise blocked their view southward. The rise was a man-made ridge, about fifteen feet tall, and ran east to west.
Ed planned to leave the squad in the shadows of the overgrown bushes and trees behind the houses to head up the slope for a peek south. Then he heard the gunfire. One gunshot, then a second, then several. Then a brief burst of automatic weapons fire. All of it quite distant. He cocked his head, then looked at George. George looked back at him and shrugged.
Using hand signals Ed had the squad spread out, then advance into the grass and up the slope. Going prone wasn’t an option, the grass was too tall, but Ed took a knee just below the top of the rise and peered over, George on one side of him, Mark on the other.
The ridge they were on ran along the northern edge of a sea of grass. The patch was nearly square and a quarter mile long on each side. At the very southern end of the square was a large building, formerly the home of a TV station before the government shut most of them down. There was a massive, thousand-foot antenna on the northwest corner of the building in front of them, and sabotage early in the war had brought that down. It lay
crumpled on the ground like the accusing finger of a witch, pointing west. When the resistance started posting home addresses of politicians online, and several were murdered, a few in front of their families, the government mostly abandoned the concept of free speech. The only local media source still in operation was a combined TV and radio center located inside the Blue Zone and it only broadcast government-approved news.
North of the building was a drainage pond over one hundred feet wide. Presumably to hide the unsightly station from the residents (as the station didn’t generate any noise that needed to be blocked) there were man-made ridges running along the west, north, and east sides of the property, with clumps of trees here and there. Thanks to the bright moon and their elevated position the men of the squad could see across the vast expanse of grass, the drainage pond, and beyond.
“Where…?” Ed murmured.
After a brief pause, George pointed. Ed looked down the man’s arm, then grabbed his Czech-made Meopta binoculars.
Even though it was dark his binoculars collected light and he could see better through their eight-power magnified lenses than his own eyes in the dark. The TV station sat on the north side of a major east-west road, codenamed Felix. On the far side of Felix was another vacant field and past that some parking lots. Standing proud and isolated past that flat earth were what everyone called The Twins, but was officially The Sapphire. Two matching 18-story apartment buildings with a connecting ground-floor café/convenience store. There was another single and even larger apartment building a quarter mile to the northeast, but that building had burned early on in the war. Many people had died in the vicious fire. The Twins, on the other hand, even at this late date, were still full of residents. Just a handful compared to how many had lived there before the war, but those who had remained had forged a cooperative existence. There were gardens on the balconies and roofs.
From where they crouched on the grassy slope The Twins were half a mile away and clearly visible in the crisp moonlight. The Growlers Ed had spotted earlier at the intersection of Felix and Leprechaun were in the parking lot below the towers, and the gunfire they’d heard was rising in volume. Through the binoculars Ed could see muzzle flashes. Isolated shots out of windows halfway up the western tower, presumably down at the Army vehicles. Heavy return fire, some of it on full automatic. In the otherwise quiet night the gunfire reports rolled over the dark suburbs like thunder.
“The hell’s going on over there?” Mark said quietly, squinting to make out details.
“Why does it sound wrong?” Jason asked Early. He was staring at the scene half a mile away, and his young eyes allowed him to clearly see the details of the Growlers, and the muzzle flashes, but the sound of the gunfire didn’t match up.
“Sound wrong? Oh!” Early said, suddenly understanding. “It’s science, actually. The sound of the gunshots don’t match up to what you’re seeing because the light from the muzzle flash travels at the speed of light. The sound from the gunshots travels at the speed of sound, which is something like a thousand feet per second. Speed of light is a couple hundred thousand miles per second or something crazy like that. Close up, say from across the street, you won’t notice anything, but the further away you are from the fighting, the more of a difference you’ll see. You’ll see the shot before you hear it. That’s also a good way to tell if the person shooting at you is close or far, as bullets travel faster than the speed of sound. If the sound of the bullet hitting nearby comes at the same time as the gunshot, they’re close. If the bullet hits and you have to wait a second or more to hear the gunshot…well, then you know you’ve got a sniper to deal with.”
The men lined up along the ridge saw a long staccato flash from the Growlers, and after a pause the deep bass of the heavy machinegun firing reached them.
“Somebody got pissed off,” Quentin observed.
“That a .50?” Weasel asked.
Quentin nodded. “Roof mounted on a Growler, I’d bet.”
“Kestrel!” George hissed. He’d heard it a second before he saw it, swooping in from the south. The helicopter was running dark. It came in low over the giant abandoned mall to the southeast, circled around to the north side of The Twins, and then suddenly there were flashes and contrails. The front of the apartment building exploded. Bricks and glass showered the parking lot from the missiles impacting the sixth and seventh floors. Then the Kestrel let loose with its minigun. At 2000 RPM, with every fifth round a tracer, the bullets leaping from the six-barreled cannon looked like a reddish-orange laser beam running from the front of the aircraft to the face of the apartment tower. When the sound hit them it sounded like a giant ripping a phone book in half.
“Time to go!” Ed said, biting back more profanity. They wouldn’t be heading south for a while, not with all that activity. He jabbed his hand toward the west. The men slid backward down the hill, got to their feet, and headed through the grass.
Jason looked back wistfully, wanting to watch the action, but couldn’t see over the hill. Instead he followed Early through the tall grass toward more dark houses.
There were more houses past the grassy TV station property, as well as a condo complex filled with duplex units. Past that…Ed wracked his brain, trying to remember the map he stared at so often. The entire area to the west of the sunken freeway was residential. Wall to wall houses. There were a lot of old neighborhoods two miles west of where they were now, choked with mature trees that hindered aerial observation. The squad had one…no, two houses in the area they used, as well as a couple of rainwater catches. If they were in place and undisturbed. Of course, they still weren’t heading south, but they also hadn’t been spotted by any Army units either. At that thought he heard the sound of the Kestrel’s minigun letting loose again.
PART II
THE CITY
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
The Gift Outright
Robert Frost
If some foreign government had done to our major cities what we have
done ourselves, their capital city would still be a glowing sheet of
radioactive glass.
—Patrick Sweeney
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They’d stayed on the move until after midnight. Every time Ed wanted to rotate south the squad heard a Growler in that direction, a Kestrel flying low, or more gunfire. They were forced back north even as they moved west, making their way slowly through old neighborhoods which had been woody before the war had broken out; now they were downright rustic.
After several hours of careful trekking through backyards and small city parks and down tree-lined streets the squad was finally able to turn south. Through the light of the bright moon they hiked through treelines and parking lots and fields overgrown with waist-high grass, and finally crossed the 18-hole golf course of a now-defunct country club. They spooked two deer bedding in a thicket between two high-grass fairways. The animals bounded away silently, beautifully, moving as if they existed on a planet with lower gravity.
On the south side of the golf course were a few residential streets. Before the war the houses there were a bit secluded, sitting on large, heavily treed lots. Ed didn’t c
are about the tree cover as much as he did the river winding its way south through the golf course. Well, technically it was labeled a river even here, but it didn’t rate the name. Ten miles south it grew into a true river, but here it was just a large muddy stream…but it was only four hundred feet from the back doors of those secluded houses. One of those houses had burned and then been abandoned. Or abandoned and then burned—Ed didn’t know exactly the order of what had happened, all he knew was that the house was vacant, secluded, blessed with great tree cover, and a stone’s throw from running water. It had served them well on past patrols.
A quick search showed them the house was unoccupied, and after establishing a watch schedule the exhausted squad went to sleep in the half of the house untouched by fire, although everything still smelled of smoke and mildew.
“Nobody thinks of there being streams or even rivers in cities and neighborhoods, but there are,” Ed told Jason the next morning. While they’d been diverted from their route they were nowhere near behind schedule, so he’d let everyone sleep until eight. Rest while you can, he’d learned that lesson years ago. “Some of them are sealed away, or walled off, but they’re on most maps, and easy to find.”
“And when in doubt, head to a golf course,” George said, chewing on an energy bar. “There’s always ponds, and usually a stream or two. The nice neighborhoods, you can find swimming pools every block.”
“Now, none of it is safe to drink, untreated,” Ed went on, “but cities aren’t nearly as dry as you might think.”
Jason looked between the two older men, then around at the rest of the squad. “How come none of you wear helmets?” They were all wearing what he’d learned were “plate carriers”, vests which held armored plates front and back to cover their vitals, but unlike the military, he hadn’t seen a single dogsoldier wearing a ballistic helmet. Half of them were bare-headed, the rest wore baseball caps. The ball cap snugged onto George’s head bearing an Olde English D was so sweatstained, faded, and dirty it was impossible to tell its original color. Which meant it was nicely camouflaged.