Dogsoldiers

by James Tarr

  Ed grunted and raised the binoculars again. His heart rate was up just studying the city through the lenses of his binos. Technically they were in just as much danger where they were now as they would be once they crossed into the city proper. He knew it was more psychological than anything else. South of the border was enemy territory.

  “The city…it’s never the same,” Ed mused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every time we pop out of it and come back, it’s a little bit different.”

  “Worse?”

  “No, different,” Ed said quietly, still staring through the binos. He snorted. “I don’t think it can get any worse. It turns out one can simply walk into Mordor.”

  “Oh, it can always get worse,” George, just in earshot, felt obliged to add.

  Ed sighed, then motioned at George and Early. “You two first. Rifles down along your sides and walk, all casual like, don’t run. Talk to our entrepreneurs over there, and if nothing feels off, give a wave. We’ll stage up at that house past them,” he pointed.

  They were all sweaty with anticipation, but crossing into the city, as was often the case, was anti-climactic. No shouts, no shooting, and best of all no Growlers, IMPs, or Kestrels.

  George and Early strolled across the street, rifles held vertically at their sides, and struck up a conversation with the group in the parking lot of the gas station. Four men and two women, all thin and in dirty clothing, standing around a 55-gallon drum cut in half lengthwise. Both halves had been turned on their sides and were supported by metal frames that looked crudely handmade. Ed watched through the binos. The men eyed the rifles of the newcomers but that was about it. Ed knew there was a good chance every man there was carrying a concealed handgun. Or a knife. Or, more likely, both. After about a minute of conversation Early turned and gave them a wave.

  Ed crossed last, with Jason. He felt horribly exposed and, perpetually tired as his legs were, wanted to sprint across the cracked pavement. Instead he forced himself to make slow, steady strides, carbine pressed against his side. George and Early were still standing in the parking lot, the rest of the squad having gone past them for the cover of the nearby houses.

  “How many more you got in those woods over there, it’s like a clown car,” the man tending the barbecue said to Ed with a smile. “How about you, you hungry?” He gestured at the meat on the grill. Jason’s mouth watered at the smell. “I’d be willing to bet you gentlemen have something worthwhile to trade.”

  “Fella’s a born salesman, won’t take no for an answer,” Early said out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Or if you’re interested in satisfying another kind of hunger…” the man said, gesturing at the two women beside him. Ed looked at them. The two women were war skinny and had the haunted eyes of people who’d seen too much. One of them smiled at him, the smile not reaching her eyes, and lifted her shirt. Jason’s eyes bulged at the sight of her naked breasts. “The boy here seems like he might be interested.”

  “Appreciate the offer, but we’ve got places to be,” Ed said. He had to grab Jason by the shoulder and pull him along, to the accompaniment of laughter.

  “You didn’t want any?” Jason said to him as they walked across the lot. “The meat I mean. That smelled really good.” Although the sight of the woman’s small breasts were burned into his brain.

  “You see any cows around here?” Ed asked him. “Or chickens?”

  Jason blinked and looked around reflexively before realizing it was a rhetorical question. “Ummm…”

  “The city’s filled with all sorts of small game, squirrels, rabbits, rats, pigeons, pheasants, turkey, geese, even deer, but none of the locals know how to hunt for shit. What they do know is how to breed dogs, and that’s what was on that grill, since you didn’t notice. Puppy. Puppies.” He turned his head, his eyes boring into Jason’s. His voice became steel. “We do not eat dog.”

  A quick stroll across the parking lot and then they were in a neighborhood thick with one story brick-and-siding houses built in the 1950s. Most of the houses had wrought iron bars over the doors and windows for security, back when random street crime was the biggest worry of the residents.

  Almost all of the back yards were enclosed with either low chain link or tall wooden fences, often leaning drunkenly. The houses were set close to the street, which meant the front yards were small and very open, with few trees. Some of them were even mown, or at least trimmed. The squad moved as fast as it could, split into two columns on opposite sides of the street, feeling exposed. Two blocks south and east they moved into a community of smaller homes, in much poorer condition. Here the lawns were untended, and there were more trees, but still Ed led the squad south quickly, trying to put distance between them and the city limits just in case someone had spotted them crossing.

  At first, Jason had found it odd. The men of the squad would be walking together, sometimes for hours, and never say a word. Only communicate with hand signals. When there was talking, it was whispering and murmuring, the men’s heads nearly pressed together. But he’d very quickly gotten used to it. More than used to it, he understood it. Absent the white noise of vehicular traffic, the city around them, apart from the sounds of nature, was shockingly quiet. A human voice at normal conversational volume carried on the air a surprising distance, as did any loud sounds—an engine, shouting, gunshots.

  A mile south they crossed over “Lucky” without incident. They left the shelter of houses and entered a large, quarter-mile-square section of undeveloped land that was nothing but waving grass and thick tangles of trees and brush.

  Ed had no idea if there used to be something on the piece of property, or if it was land set aside for a project that had never come to fruition, but the chain link fence around the periphery was so old most of it hung like ripped shower curtains from the supporting crossbar. They jogged across the four lanes of Lucky, slipped through a split in the rusty chain link, then strode through a line of mature maples just inside the fence line. Past the trees were a hundred yards of open grass, knee high, and beyond that a thick patch of woods.

  The squad moved through the grass quickly, at five-meter intervals, their pantlegs swishing. In less than a minute they had all moved out of sight under the trees. Inside the tree line they tightened up their distance, and George took the lead. He knew from studying the map that a thousand feet ahead of them, through the patch of woods, was the border of another neighborhood. An old one, with tree cover so complete the houses were nearly invisible to passing aircraft or satellites, at least to the naked eye.

  They were weaving between trees, moving up a slight slope in an arrowhead formation, the first house just visible in front of them through the wild green tangles—an attractive edifice with a fieldstone exterior—when Ed abruptly raised a fist. Everyone froze.

  Ed cocked his head. He’d heard something. Something bigger than a squirrel. Something close. He gave a quick gesture and the men quickly and quietly moved to cover behind tree trunks, raising their weapons. Weasel happened to be standing in a slight depression and he slowly sank to his belly, disappearing into the grass and ferns.

  Ed exchanged a look with George, forty feet away. George had heard it too. Both men shouldered their rifles and peered around the trees they’d chosen for cover. The ground between the trees was not open but rather snarled with bushes and saplings and clumps of grass, all of it deeply shadowed by the canopies of leaves above.

  Ed peered into the foliage, hearing a faint snuffling. His thumb moved the selector switch on his rifle from Safe to Fire, and he felt fresh sweat pop out all over his already damp body.

  Leaves swayed, a dead branch crunched, and then a furred snout emerged from a thick tangle of raspberry bushes twenty feet ahead. Ed blinked, at first not sure what he was seeing in the dim light under the trees. The fur was various shades of brown, giving the animal a kind of natural camouflage, and its snout was wide. Not an enemy soldier, then. Breathing easier, Ed was just starting to
wonder what kind of dog it was when the animal pushed the rest of its body through the thorny bramble with a loud grunt. Everyone on the squad froze at the sight of the massive bear.

  Its head was the size of a basketball, and there was a big hump above its shoulders. The light under the trees had disguised its size at first, but as it emerged from the bushes the immense size of the animal was unmistakable. It was chewing something, and its big head swayed from side to side. Then its nose shot up and sniffed. After a half second pause, the animal stood up on its hind legs and swiveled its head to look directly at George, who was closest to it. A sound halfway between snort and growl crawled its way out of the animal’s throat. Its fur was long and thick and medium brown.

  Ed’s mouth dropped open. On its back legs the bear had to be ten feet tall, and looked as wide as a garage. His mind quivered in place for a moment. He had no idea what you were supposed to do when confronted by a bear. Not run away, he was pretty sure bears viewed that as an invitation to attack.

  Making a decision, George stepped out from behind the tree. He didn’t want to be seen as trying to hide. He gestured with his hand still behind the tree; show yourselves.

  Taking a deep breath, Ed stepped out from his tree. The giant bear swiveled its eyes toward him, startled, then toward Mark farther back as the big man moved out from behind the two-trunked oak he’d been behind. Then it saw Jason, and Quentin. Then Early. When Weasel slowly rose from the grass, seemingly out of nowhere, the bear made a loud sound, almost a bark, of displeasure. It sank back down to all fours and slowly, insouciantly, turned around and padded off, stopping several times to look over its shoulder at the squad. For as huge as the creature was it made almost no noise pushing through the underbrush.

  Keeping his eyes and his rifle trained on the spot in the brush where the bear had disappeared, Ed waved for the squad to move. He heard them behind him, heading for the house. After waiting another minute Ed began heading that way too, walking backward, rifle butt still against his shoulder. He found George next to him, and the duo backed up together, slowly, carefully, all the way to the house, where they found Mark covering them with the belt-fed SAW.

  The house was empty and smelled dusty. The squad collapsed in the main room.

  “Jesus fuck, I need a minute,” George gasped, his face white. “I nearly had a goddamn heart attack. That bear was big as a car.”

  “What do you think that thing weighed?” Jason marveled.

  “I think that was a grizzly,” Quentin said.

  “Eight hundred, a thousand pounds,” Early estimated. “I think it was a grizzly too.” He had more experience hunting prior to the war than the rest of the squad combined.

  “We could have killed him easy, right?” Jason said, looking around at all the weaponry.

  “Not before he made at least one of us into a chew toy,” Mark said with a grim smile. He looked over and saw Ed’s hands quivering. “You okay?”

  Ed shook his head as he pulled out a canteen and took a sip. “Years ago somebody told a story about how they’d run into a lion patrolling the east side, but I always assumed it was horseshit. I think I might owe him an apology now.”

  “You think it walked all the way down from up north?” Jason asked.

  “You mean like you? More likely it escaped from the zoo. Like that lion, if that story’s real. Zoo’s only ten miles from here.”

  “Man, I haven’t thought about the zoo in years,” Mark said. “I know it’s shut down now, but did they close it, or just abandon it? You think they let all the animals loose?” He couldn’t believe the vets and everyone else who worked there tending the animals would just leave them in their pens to starve. “Anyone know?” He just got shaking heads and shrugs.

  “Could a lion survive the winter? The snow?” Jason wondered.

  “Like we didn’t have enough shit to worry about in this shithole,” Weasel said. “Now it’s lions and tigers and motherfucking bears. Oh my.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Combat made you expect the unexpected, to make plans but assume they would fall apart at the first gunshot, but still, a bear? Ed had thought he’d seen it all, after nearly a decade of fighting, but the bear had been something else entirely. For some reason it made him remember one of the first “unexpected” incidents of the war, or at least his part of the war. When he really hadn’t known anything, but still, apparently, had been very lucky…

  The street had been quiet and nearly empty all day. A few pedestrians had scurried down the sidewalks as fast as their legs could carry them, obviously aware just how dangerous their neighborhood had become. Most of the homes looked undamaged until you got close and saw how few of the windows sported whole panes. Half the houses were bungalows and half were a full two stories, almost all of them clad in brown or red brick, and it was difficult to see bullet holes in dark brick from more than ten feet away. More than one fierce firefight had swept through these streets. While the conventional battle was long over, almost none of the area residents had returned, even though their homes (compared to some in the city) were relatively undamaged.

  At the far end of the block squatted an ugly two-story house of brown brick. From the outside it appeared unremarkable, except perhaps for the fact that it was surrounded on all sides by shorter bungalows. A person looking out its second-floor windows would have an unrestricted view in every direction.

  The men inside the house had arrived just after dark the night before and were getting tired of waiting. There were twelve of them in the house, for the most part bloodied veterans of the guerilla war not yet eight months old. The night before they’d sent out two eyeball drones and kept a quiet watch in shifts, peeking out past the sheets tacked to the inside of the empty window frames. Once the sun came out they could move around a bit inside the shadowed rooms, but no one was about to relax south of the border. They still kept watch, but now it was for their informant. He wasn’t late, not yet, but the waiting wasn’t doing anybody any good.

  The twelve-man team was the lead element in what really was the first organized probe of Army-occupied territory since the combat at the start of the ground war. The two sides had been trading fire every day since the shooting began, but organized groups larger than one or two six- to eight-man squads were something the Army hadn’t really seen since their decisive victory in the eight-day city-wide battle at the beginning of hostilities. Up-armored pickup trucks had proved no match for the military’s tanks and armored personnel carriers.

  This, however, was a recon in force, numerous twelve-man teams moving south in a loose arrowhead formation, going slow and quiet, avoiding contact, gathering intelligence, their ultimate goal a hit and run on the armory/fuel depot near the city’s geographic center. The men were organized into squad-sized cells but the official ARF Irregulars designation, much less the “dogsoldier” moniker, had yet to be coined.

  They’d been on the move south for four and a half days, inside the city limits for the last three. The teams kept in contact via frequency-hopping transmitters they were pretty sure were impossible for the Army to home in on. Still, to be safe, they kept transmissions to a bare minimum and relocated immediately whenever possible. It was still early enough in the game that neither side was really sure of what the other was capable of. The government had beaten down the rebels almost everywhere, although at great loss of life, and their thinking was that the war, such as it was, would be over shortly. The newly-reorganized guerrillas hoped to prove them wrong.

  All but one of the teams had seen at least one Army patrol. Military presence on the street was a lot higher then. Buttoned-up columns of two to four vehicles was the norm, winding through the rubble-strewn streets at a slow walk, usually led by a poorly armored Growler way out front to draw hasty fire. In a city where every block held a thousand places for a sniper to hide the Army troops had experienced a rekindled love for armor. The lead vehicle was followed by at least one IMP flanked by dismounted infantry to check the buildings to e
ither side. While these patrols weren’t difficult to surprise, at the first shot the army troops would pile into the backs of the IMP’s, button up, then use their heavy weapons to level every building in sight. One sure sign of a veteran patrol was armor crawling down not one but two parallel streets while the dismounted troops searched the yards and houses in-between. This U-shaped formation was hard to evade without being spotted and impossible to ambush effectively, but wasn’t seen as often because it was slower and more work for the troops. Luckily none of the six teams had been spotted on the way down, although there’d been a few close calls.

  Ed tried to stay out of the way as much as possible, but there were a lot of bodies and not a lot of room. It wasn’t the smallest house he’d overnighted in, but they’d been there all day and most of the night before, waiting for their contact. He wasn’t late, not yet, in fact they’d been a day early, but everyone was antsy just the same.

  Ed had all of a month under his belt. A month since he’d joined up, not really long enough for him to do anything but get armored webgear, a weapon (used, and he didn’t want to think about what might have happened to its previous owner), a few patrols under his belt, and realize just how far in over his head he was. That he was blissfully ignorant of all things military was an understatement—he had no military or police experience, and had only fired guns a few times before the war—paintball guns.

  He’d been bounced around from group to group, not really feeling welcome at all. They needed new bodies, but nobody seemed eager to take responsibility for him. Those patrols he’d been on had been terrifying at first, even though he’d learned quickly. Local guerrilla activity was near its high-water mark but somehow his squad was never where the action was. They’d had a few scares, sure, but he still hadn’t seen a soldier closer than two blocks away.