Dogsoldiers

by James Tarr

  George answered. “The last two generations of ballistic helmets for the military have had tracking chips, locator chips, embedded in them just like the soldiers’ rifles.” His eyes tracked up to the brim of his baseball cap. “A helmet would be a pain in the ass in this heat, but I’d surely appreciate some Kevlar up there when the bullets start flying.” He cocked his head and eyed the baby-faced new member of the squad. Jason was staring intently at the energy bar in his hand. “When was the last time you had something to eat?”

  “The pigeon yesterday.”

  “You don’t have any food of your own in that pack?”

  Jason shook his head. “I ate up all my food looking for you guys.”

  George made a sound, and held the bar out to Jason. “Here, finish this, I don’t want you collapsing on us.”

  Quentin was in the other room, heating up several pots worth of water carried from the nearby river. They had the time, and boiling the water wouldn’t tax their already overwrought water filters.

  Weasel and Early returned to the house within a few minutes of each other. Weasel had his pockets stuffed with edible greens including dandelions and daylilies, and Early had a squirrel and a rabbit that he’d shot with the suppressed .22 he carried. The gun was so quiet none of the men in the house had heard it go off, but then again the woods stretched almost half a mile south from the edge of the golf course in a point-down narrow triangle shape.

  Early looked at Quentin, boiling the water, at the greens Weasel had, then at Ed. “Well, Cap’n, I was gonna clean these critters and stick ‘em on a fire, but it looks like we got us all the makings of a soup pot here.” There was a question in his statement. Ed looked at Weasel, his eyebrows up.

  “Yeah, some of what I brought would do for soup,” Weasel said. “The dandelion leaves and wild carrots will taste better after a boil.”

  “Then cut ‘em up,” Ed told the two men. “Looks like we’re having rabbit-squirrel vegetable soup for breakfast.”

  “I’ll see if I can find bowls or cups or something,” Mark said, standing up.

  “See if you can find any herbs as well,” Weasel said to him. “Maybe salt. I’d kill for some salt.”

  “I think we’ve picked the cupboards pretty clean,” Ed cautioned him.

  “And rice. Dry rice lasts forever, if you can keep the bugs out of it, and it’s perfect for soup.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Mark told him.

  “Should we follow the river south?” George asked Ed as the squad—minus Weasel and Early, who were on watch—ate and drank the soup from a motley collection of bowls and cups Mark had salvaged. Mark had also found a small plastic bag of uncooked white rice in a house two doors down. Not much more than a cup’s worth, but it was unspoiled and went into the soup, providing some desperately needed carbohydrates. Looting was stealing what you didn’t need, and was not something they ever did. Salvage, on the other hand, retrieving unused items that you needed to survive…that was something they did as often as they could. Still, they were very careful not to take anything from houses that weren’t clearly unoccupied. “Then turn east once we get far enough south and head to the general store?” Ed had his map of the city laid out on the table before them, and George used a finger to suggest a route.

  For most of its southward wend through the city the river was bordered by narrow city parks or just strips of undeveloped land thick with trees. Not quite two miles south of them it meandered through a large cemetery.

  “I like that it’ll keep us away from prying eyes, but it also keeps us away from cover,” Ed replied. “A Kestrel rolls over us we’re going to want more than tree trunks to hide behind.”

  “Haven’t been on this side of the city for a while now,” Mark observed. “I’m curious how much of that land around the river is gardens.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s a good point,” George admitted. “Ready source of water…we could be tromping through tomato plants and dodging scarecrows. If there’s anybody living in the area, they’ll be getting water from the river.”

  “There’ll be people living there,” Mark told him. “There are people living everywhere. Still. I don’t understand it.”

  “They just never left,” Quentin said. “It’s their home.”

  “But no power, no water? War zone?”

  Quentin shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t say they were smart. The military still runs the distribution centers, handing out just enough food. Those are keeping a lot of people in place, and dependent, just like they like ‘em.”

  Spread across the city, the three distribution centers operated by the government handed out food, medicine, and bottled water to the residents, but they never seemed to have enough. They didn’t charge for anything, it was a “humanitarian” gesture, but the foodstuffs and antibiotics had always been in short supply, and from everything they’d heard and seen the supply seemed to be drying up. There’d been reports of near riots.

  ARF had never attacked the soldiers guarding the distribution centers, or the centers themselves. If there was one sure way to turn the citizenry against you, it was disrupting or destroying the one government organization that was trying to help them as opposed to jail them or kill them…

  “I wonder if there are any fish in it,” Ed mused.

  “The river?” George blinked. “That’s a good question.”

  “I’m thinking we keep to the neighborhoods on the east side of the river. Quarter, half a mile out from it, far enough that we won’t be bumping into anybody that lives near the water. Once we cross into the city it’s, what, six miles south and a little east to the general store?”

  “More or less.”

  Mark knew the area well and pointed at the map. “For the first couple of miles there are houses galore, no vacant lots. Even though there are a lot of people still living in those hoods, only maybe a tenth of the houses are occupied, so we’ve got lots of places to bail if we hear a chopper. Every house has a basement. Pretty much all the blocks are rectilinear.”

  “Rectum what?” Quentin said with a smile. George snorted.

  “Rectum? Damn near kilt ‘em,” Early added.

  “Rectangles, they’re fucking rectangles,” Mark said, rolling his eyes with no little bit of exasperation. Then he paused, and got quiet.

  “What is it?” Ed asked, seeing the look on the big man’s face.

  “I grew up in that neighborhood,” Mark said, pointing. “I mean, it was kinda shitty back then, suffering from decades of high taxes and high crime, people being paid to do nothing, which kills your soul slowly, and then taught in public school that the country sucked, that it had never been great, all our heroes and founding fathers were racists or whatever, but at least it was a neighborhood, you know? Now…” He got an ugly look on his face, and glanced at Jason. He wanted to make sure the young man understood.

  “Humans need government kid, get more than four of us in the same place at once and you need somebody to take charge. But government is a necessary evil. Both necessary…and inherently evil. Government cannot exist, cannot function, without restricting the freedom of the people it governs. But that’s the agreement that we as a society make, setting up a government to do what individual people can’t, with that famous ‘consent of the governed’.”

  “But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” George said.

  Mark nodded. “When the government stops trying to govern and help the people and instead starts trying to control them, that’s when wars start. Or genocides. The two things governments do best. Perhaps the only two things they’re good at. Our government stopped trusting us decades ago, treating us like misbehaving children instead of citizens with rights. And then we weren’t stupid kids in their eyes, the government started acting, starting passing laws that made it clear it considered us all incipient idiotic criminals who couldn’t be trusted. With guns, with our money, choosing our doctors, plastic bags, plastic straws, gas-guzzling cars…wi
th freedom.

  “They’ve been putting people on our side in jail for years for violation of this or that law, none of which had any effect on public safety, and for years, maybe even decades, we just took it. And took it. Until we didn’t. It wasn't until police, federal agents, politicians, prosecutors and judges started getting shot that most people woke up to the fact that there was a war on. Had been going on for decades actually, but for most of that time it was a cold war. And most everybody in the country except those in the middle of the fight had no idea it was even going on. Until the shooting started.”

  “There was more going on than just that,” Quentin said, cocking his head. “But…that was a lot of it.”

  Jason nodded. “They did that with my dad, and our farm. Since they nationalized all the ‘food producers’ five years ago, because of the wartime food shortages, every day there was a new regulation he’d have to follow. He couldn’t keep up with them. He was doing all the work, and yet all the corn and soybeans belonged to the government. They decided what we could keep, even though we grew it.” Even though they needed a tractor to work the farm, his dad could barely afford any gas for it due to all the taxes and carbon offsets being levied, not to mention the reparations assessments. Government agents who’d never in their lives planted a seed walking the rows of corn, telling his father what percentage of the crop he was allowed to keep. And no matter how mad it made him his dad just took it. And took it. He’d never had much fight in him, and what little he’d had left had disappeared after Jason’s mother had died. The cancer should have been survivable, but she’d had to wait eight months for treatment under the national health care system, and by the time they scheduled her surgery…it was too late for surgery. And his dad just took it. Didn’t even seem to get mad about it. Jason had never forgiven him for that.

  Mark heaved a big sigh, then went back to the map. “Mile or two south of the border the place was a war zone before there was a war, and less than half of the houses are even still standing. Great thing about those blocks is the almost complete lack of fences. We can walk through the yards between and paralleling the streets, and with all the trees and bushes no one’ll see us.”

  After the soup was finished Ed sent Quentin and Weasel back to the river to refill all the pots. “I want everyone to drink everything in your canteens, then we can refill them.” To Jason’s questioning glance he explained, “The best place to store water is inside your body. It’s not bad right now but it’s early. It’s been hot and humid all week and likely to stay that way. Before we leave here I want everybody so hydrated they’re pissing clear.”

  Jason didn’t have a sling for his rifle and couldn’t carry it and a heavy pot of water, so Ed detailed him as security for Quentin and Weasel.

  “What kind of gun is that? Where’d you get it?” Jason asked Weasel quietly as they walked through the trees to the water. His black submachinegun, if that’s what it was, was slung across his back as he carried the big pot.

  Weasel looked at him and thought about how to answer. “When the war started, it wasn’t a ‘war’,” Weasel told him. “We weren’t soldiers, we were just violent criminals, according to the police and the news media. At first, the military wasn’t involved at all, it was just cops. Cops doing the house searches and riot control, federal agents shutting down the websites they didn’t like because they were criticizing the government and exposing the truth. National Guard only got called in when the riots got out of control and cops were getting ambushed. Then, for a while, military and the cops were working together. Because it still wasn’t a war, we still weren’t soldiers, we were murderers. Domestic terrorists. Fundamentalist cultists. They called us all of that, and worse, not just the cops but everyone in the media and all the useful idiots that were happy to believe the shit they were being told. Then came martial law, and they suspended habeas corpus, which meant they could lock up anybody for any reason, for as long as they wanted, which is about as wrong as it gets.”

  “Hell, you ask them, we’re still terrorists,” Quentin said. “Have the government or military ever, officially, called this a war? We’re still criminals to them. Because calling us soldiers would maybe force them to admit that we’re actually fighting for something, we’re not looters or crazies or murderers.”

  They reached the water. There was no way to do it without getting wet, so Weasel jumped into the knee-high water and dunked one pot under the flowing stream, then the other.

  “So the long story short is that this is an MP5,” Weasel told Jason, touching the gun on his back. He climbed out of the water. “It’s a nine-millimeter sub-machinegun. Police SWAT teams used them.” He lifted the full pot of water with a grunt. “It’s not as powerful as an actual rifle, but I earned it. I fucking earned it. And I’m not giving it up. They’re gonna have to take it.”

  “It fires a pistol cartridge, right? So it won’t go through their armor?”

  Weasel snorted and said defensively, “Neither will your rifle, or any of the rifles we’re carrying, not even Early’s boat anchor. It maybe doesn’t hit as hard, but it doesn’t have any recoil. In the time it takes Early to fire three rounds I can do a full mag dump, and I like not blowing out my eardrums every time I fire a shot. And it seems like it’s easier to find pistol ammo these days than rifle.” He had thirteen 30-round magazines…the only problem was he only had enough ammo to fill three mags and change. “I’m not the only one on the squads to feel that way, there are a number of guys running guns like this, subguns and 9mm ARs and even one pistol-caliber AK. So fuck off.”

  Jason changed the obviously touchy subject. “Rouge means red, right?” he asked Quentin quietly as they were working their way back from the river with the freshly refilled pots. It was quiet underneath the trees and the gurgling of the wide stream behind them was soothing. “Is it called that because it’s muddy?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. You know, it caught fire once.”

  “What did?”

  “The river.” Jason assumed the man was messing with him and made a sound. “No, seriously,” Quentin insisted. “Back before I was born. They used to dump all sorts of chemicals in it, and it caught fire one day.”

  “And we’re drinking it?” Jason said, aghast, staring at the water sloshing in the big pot Quentin was carrying.

  “They cleaned it up before the war ever started.”

  “You see a lot of industry around here likely to pollute the water?” Weasel asked the kid, grunting with the effort of carrying a cast iron pot that had been heavy before he’d filled with two gallons of water. “This whole city’s turning green.”

  “Where’d you learn about which plants you can eat?” Jason asked him.

  “Some from Early, but most from Todd. He was a landscaper and ran a greenhouse before the war.”

  “Todd?”

  “Caught a round in the face. Years ago. Four years? Jesus, has it been that long? This fucking war, man. This whole city’s a graveyard.” Filled with a sudden anger Weasel marched past Jason toward the rear of the house, his subgun bouncing on its sling. Jason looked at Quentin, who just shrugged.

  It was nearly noon before they left the shelter of the smoky, collapsed house and began picking their way south through the stand of trees. The belt of trees narrowed to a mere fifty feet wide as it approached the next major road. Just to the east was a large, defunct auto salvage yard.

  As the squad took up a defensive perimeter Ed glassed the auto salvage yard (he saw nothing moving but a cat), then turned his binoculars to the massive road in front of them. The border between the suburbs and the city to the south, The Border, was a wide surface street running directly east/west. There were four traffic lanes in each direction, separated by a grassy median as wide as four lanes of traffic. Including the easements and sidewalks on either side of the road, the squad was faced with two hundred feet of open ground to cross. Actually, directly south of their position was a gas station that had been torn apart in an explosion followe
d by a fire, and there was no real cover there. To make it to the dense neighborhood south of the gas station was another hundred feet.

  Before they’d left the house that morning he’d pulled up a fresh overhead photo of the area, but saw nothing that warranted alarm. No roadblocks, no patrolling Army units or armor, no columns of smoke large enough to attract military attention. Still, the battery on the drone jammer was fully charged, although it only reached fifty meters or so. It worked great on the small surveillance and infiltrator drones, bird and bug size, but didn’t do a thing against anything big the military had circling at altitude.

  They all heard the sound of a motor, and Ed raised his glasses to see a motorcycle with one helmeted rider appear to the west. The rider—it appeared to be a man—was doing about forty miles an hour, which was about as fast as was prudent given the poor condition of the road and the likelihood of encountering lane-choking debris or abandoned cars in the middle of the road.

  “Rice burner,” Mark said derisively, going off nothing but the sound of the exhaust. He was a Harley man himself.

  Ed spotted someone walking on the sidewalk a few hundred yards to the east, and some sort of activity in front of a partially collapsed building not quite half a mile to the west. He couldn’t make it out, but it didn’t look dangerous. Some sort of fight between several of the city’s al fresco denizens. Or maybe it was a midday open air orgy. He’d seen stranger things. What concerned him were the figures in the parking lot of the gas station directly south of them.

  Ed waved Mark up, and pointed. Then he handed the big man the binos. Mark studied the group carefully.

  “What do you think, cross here, or go around?”

  Mark handed the Meoptas back to his squad leader. He shrugged. “They’re just doing a bit of private enterprise. Most neighborhoods we go through, we’ve got eyes on us even if we don’t see them. And it’s not like the locals don’t know there’s a war on, but the ones left are professionals at not getting involved. Weren’t there, didn’t see shit, even if they get splashed with blood…. I know you don’t like crowds, but cross here and we’re just more potential customers to any eyes in the sky.”