by James Tarr
Potter was ten feet away, on his back next to the car carcass, his eyes open and unstaring. The pavement around the two men was littered with spent brass. ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees’—Potter, in fact every dogsoldier, believed that credo, and the man had gone down shooting. Potter’s rifle had slid over the hood of the car toward the Tabs when he’d gone down—so far out of reach it might as well have been in Alaska.
Between them on the concrete was Chick’s DD Mk18. He hadn’t known anything about guns before the war, but he’d learned. This particular Mk18, which had served him so well for so long, had started out life as a pistol legal to own almost everywhere in the country—or so he’d been told—before being branded illegal and immoral. By the time it had come into his possession someone had swapped out the SBA3 brace on the back for a Magpul stock and mounted an Aimpoint Comp M5s red dot sight on the receiver, and so it had remained until today.
Chick hadn’t run out of ammo. Currently there was a large hole in the lower receiver where a lucky incoming round had disabled the firearm. Another round from that same burst had hit him in the side. A third had hit his leg. Altogether quite unfortunate.
With a grunt he levered himself up and fired his Glock 19 over the wall, then fell back down as incoming rifle fire from multiple directions sent bullets over his head and thumped into the wall. Chips and concrete dust settled over him. A Growler was on the far side of the gas station parking lot.
He fired the Glock blindly over his shoulder in the general direction of the Growler and stared down at the front of his plate carrier. He had pouches stuffed with magazines for his rifle, which were useless right now. Above the magazines on his chest he’d inked WOLVERINES! with a sharpie not long after joining the squad over four years before. But what really caught his eye was the fragmentation grenade hanging off the side of his plate carrier.
With a lucky toss he might be able to get a handful of the soldiers, maybe damage the Growler. But even if he did, he wasn’t getting away. There were too many of them, and he was too messed up. He wasn’t sure where the other vehicles were, and didn’t know why they weren’t lobbing grenades into his position. It’s what he would have done.
Maybe they wanted to capture him. Take him to the Fun House for interrogation.
At that thought, his eyes traveled to the cargo pocket in his pants, now half-soaked with blood. The mini tablet was in there, as well as the satellite uplink. The Tabs wouldn’t find anything on either, he’d wiped the histories, and even if he hadn’t they didn’t know about the book code.
He was fading fast, and was actually worried that he would pass out instead of die. If he died, then he was dead. If he just passed out, on the other hand, he knew he’d wake up in the Fun House downtown, the little jail the Tabs took anyone they suspected of anti-government activities, or even sentiment. Him, he had no illusions, he was sure they’d waterboard him or something as equally unpleasant to get information. Maybe, probably, straight up torture. He didn’t know anything about such things but he’d been told, by hardcases who knew, that everyone, eventually, breaks. And he couldn’t give up Uncle Charlie or the method the dogsoldiers used to find and decode the messages to get their missions.
With a grunt he fired the Glock over his shoulder once more, than stared at the pistol in his hand. It would be so easy…
He pressed the hot muzzle of the gun against the soft underside of his chin, his hand shaking slightly. Then the shakes grew in intensity, until finally he dropped his hand to his lap.
“Fuck,” he gasped. He couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t because suicide was a sin and forbidden by Jewish law, God himself knew poor little Phillip Stein had long ago strayed far from the faith. If you were a Jew, tattoos were a serious, definite no-no. The Old Testament was pretty fucking clear about that, which was exactly why he’d gotten one when he was in college. Well, actually, he’d gotten it specifically to piss off his parents, who were hypocrites about everything. They claimed to be observant, and went through the motions of Judaism, but the rest of the time they were just horrible people, to everyone including their family, so what did it matter which religion they claimed to follow? By junior high school he was pretty sure he didn’t believe in God, and even if he did, obeying traditions just to obey them, just because they were traditions, went against his very nature.
His mother made a point of telling people, almost proudly it seemed sometimes, that her great-aunt had died in the Holocaust. Then there she was, when things got really bad, making excuses for a government that seemed to be doing all the same things, in spirit if not in fact, as the German government in the 1930s.
The day when everything had suddenly unfolded logically in his mind was crystal clear in his memory, as was the pain from the slap his mother gave him when he told her she had the same kind of perpetual victim/gas chamber mentality that caused her great-aunt to meekly be led to her death in the first place, and that he would not comply. He hadn’t seen or spoken to his parents since.
That had been, what, six years ago? Seven? He’d been pasty and pudgy and balding and realized now that, at the time, he didn’t know anything about anything…but he’d been willing to fight. Now, sixty pounds lighter and more than just ‘balding’, he’d been the commander of Wolverine for twenty-seven months, kicking Tab ass as much as any squad in the city. Two years back they’d killed a Toad, a feat of which he was especially proud. Even though they’d suffered well over one hundred percent casualties over the years, Wolverine had killed well over a hundred Tabs and destroyed a handful of IMPs and at least half a dozen Growlers in addition to that Toad. It had been a good run, a great run, but it appeared that run was over.
He stared down at his broken, bloody body. He just couldn’t, wouldn’t kill himself, and not because of the traditions of a religion he’d finally, probably too late, come to appreciate. No, it was because he just couldn’t give up. That had always been his problem, or so he’d been told, he just wouldn’t quit. And there was no truer definition of quitting than suicide.
There was a sound close behind him and he jerked the pistol over his head and fired twice. He was rewarded with a scream of pain. He would have smiled, if he hadn’t been so tired. Schmucks. When he brought the Glock back down he saw that the slide was locked back on an empty magazine.
“Well, shit,” he muttered, dropping the Glock onto his lap.
Past the grenade hanging from his chest he looked at his left arm sitting lifeless beside his body. His sleeve was rolled up partway, far enough for him to read, maybe for the thousandth time, the tattoo on the inside of his forearm. He’d gotten it a year into his service with the ARF Irregulars. He already had one tattoo, so his body was damaged goods, so to speak, as far as Judaism went, so what was one more?
The tattoo had gotten him through the worst of times. Injuries, death of his men, the horrors of war, the despair of fighting in a conflict that never seemed to end. But every time he felt his body or his resolve grow weak he looked at that tattoo, stared at it, and remembered others who had sacrificed far more than he ever had or even could.
NEVER AGAIN
The words were simple, as was the message, and they’d kept him strong for years. Because ‘Never Again’ meant nothing if you weren’t willing to do something about it. He wouldn’t let them down, he wouldn’t, couldn’t let himself down either. His eyes strayed upward to the bill of the stained, battered baseball cap on his head. Not exactly a yarmulke, but if he was destined to head upstairs in short order for his final interview with the Man, it would have to do….
“Look at this sad piece of shit, he looks like he pissed himself.” The soldiers laughed at the guy sitting slumped in a pool of his own blood, empty pistol in his lap.
“Did he bleed out? We should have just grenaded his ass.”
“You don’t have to tell me, jack, but they want prisoners to interrogate. No, look, he’s fucking breathing. Medic!” he called out. “We’ve got a live one o
ver here.” The speaker stepped close to the guerrilla and bent down to snag the pistol sitting on the man’s thighs as a war trophy. The injured man startled him by grabbing at his arm, and the soldier saw his eyes were now open. The guerrilla’s bloody hand clamped onto the side of the soldier’s armored vest.
“Get the fuck off me, man!” the young soldier said, more startled than scared. He jerked back and the guerrilla fell forward, then rolled onto his side. Most surprising of all, the man who seemed near death was actually…laughing.
“The fuck you laughing at, dickhead?” one the soldiers surrounding him demanded.
“Wolverines,” Major Phillip Abraham Stein croaked, the smile on his bloodied face radiant. Then the grenade, which he’d had wedged under his thigh until five seconds earlier, the pin pulled, detonated.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Late the next morning, Weasel left the shelter of the house first, just ambling along through the overgrown yards, keeping close to the houses. They hadn’t heard an aircraft or vehicle since just after midnight, and Ed decided moving was safer than staying in place any longer.
Ed hadn’t been joking; he staggered the departure of the rest of the squad so that it took ten minutes for them all to exit the house. Ed took it upon himself to leave last. Quentin was half a block away, nearly invisible as he swished through the thigh-high grass. The men from long experience were moving in the shadows wherever possible, and at that hour of the morning the shadows from the houses on the south side of the street stretched almost halfway across their front yards. Everyone was moving slowly with the weight of the gear they’d taken from the ambush site.
Ed had been on the move for fifteen minutes when he stopped and tucked himself between two houses. He’d had a strange feeling all morning, like being watched or even followed, but he hadn’t seen anything. Hadn’t heard anything. But still….
He peered out past a crumbling porch column down the street he’d just traveled, rifle butt at his shoulder, uneasy. The military didn’t do subtle or sneaky—they rolled up in armor or came in with helicopters firing missiles and miniguns—so even if he wasn’t imagining it, whoever or whatever was following him wasn’t Army. Could it be that damn bear? He shivered at the thought, then dismissed it. They were far away from where they’d run into that beast, and he couldn’t imagine there was more than one in the city. On the other hand, there’d been ten thousand dogs roaming the streets of the city before the war. Seeing dog packs was a daily occurrence for the squad, or near to it, but they were rarely a problem. Dogs were smart and they’d learned early on that men with rifles were not an easy source of protein. Ed hadn’t had to kill a dog in years.
“I thought you’d spotted me day before yesterday,” Ed heard from behind him. He spun around, rifle coming up. A dozen feet away was a man with his hands up, trying to look as non-threatening as possible.
Ed’s mind raced. “Passing by on foot, the house we laid up in?” He spotted the barrel of the rifle slung over the man’s shoulder. “You’re the sniper.”
“That’d be me. You boys looked a mite jumpy, thought I’d give you some time to relax so I didn’t catch a bullet in the face. You stayed holed up longer than I thought you would. But it gave me some time to check you out, see if you were serious.”
If Ed had wanted to put a face to their mysterious sniper, it wouldn’t be this man. He was in his early sixties and thickening with age, nearly bald, and wearing glasses. In addition to the huge barrel of sniper rifle sticking up behind his back he wore a large backpack, and had a pistol in a holster across his chest.
“You by yourself?” Ed’s eyes darted left and right.
“By my lonesome,” the man said pleasantly, his hands still up, palms facing Ed. “I’m Renny.”
“Renny?”
The man shrugged. “Actually, it’s René, but that’s a girl’s name, or so I was told all through grade school. Renny saved me from having to punch a lot of guys in the face.”
“You just wander into the city by accident?” Ed squinted at him, trying to get a feel for the man.
“Just finally got tired of sitting on the sidelines. And I’m not getting any younger.”
Early appeared soundlessly behind Renny, M1A in his hand. As quiet as he’d been Renny still turned his head and nodded in Early’s direction.
“I’m sorry if I gave you boys a start, but you were blown one way or the other. I thought it might help if I took the initiative. Took out the roof gunner for you. Did I get the driver? I didn’t think my rifle would get through that armored glass.”
Ed took a breath, then lowered his carbine. He’d developed good instincts for judging people after years of combat and sneaking around the derelict city, and Renny wasn’t giving off any danger signs. “No, driver got hit by shrapnel.” He frowned. “You sat and waited on us for a day?”
The man shrugged. “Your team handled itself well, but you sticking in one place allowed me to do a little surveillance, figure out if it was luck or skill that got you through that.”
“It was a little bit of both. Where you were holed up, across the street?”
The older man nodded. “But I snuck in close after dark, listened to you talking for a couple hours. Wanted to get a feel for you gentlemen, see if I could trust you.”
Early’s face grew dark. “You snuck in?” It was obvious he didn’t believe it. They’d had people on watch continuously.
Renny turned and looked at him. “From your voice, you’re Early. You’ve got a kid in there, sounds like a teenager. And what the hell kind of name is Weasel?”
Early fought back his anger, realizing it was counterproductive. “You find that peashooter just leanin’ in the back of your closet?” he asked the man, staring at the rifle on his back.
A smile crept across Renny’s face. “Not quite.”
“Mind if I…?” Early held out a hand.
“Not at all.” Moving slowly, the man unslung the rifle from his shoulder and held it out to Early, who slung his M1A over his shoulder to take it. Ed blinked. The bolt action sniper rifle made Early’s big M1A appear dainty. The stock wore a gray camouflage pattern.
Early opened the bolt and verified the chamber was empty, then removed the loaded magazine from the rifle. “Sweet baby Jesus, what is this?” Early turned the magazine so Ed could see the big cartridges stuffed inside.
“It’s a big prick.”
“A…what?”
Renny smiled. “GA Precision custom rifle in .300 PRC with a Templar action and McMillan A-6 stock done in Urban Ambush camo. Five-round detachable box mags. Twenty-six-inch Bartlein barrel with a gain twist. 250-grain Hornady A-Tip bullets, handloaded myself. Nightforce NX8 2.5-20X scope, Atlas bipod. It’ll do half MOA if I do my part. Way too much gun for the city, I’ve only had two shots over four hundred, but I decided I’d rather be overgunned than under.” He paused and shrugged. “Although one of those long ones was at twelve-sixteen. Trust me, it’s not as impressive as it sounds, I’ve got one of those Gen 3 Ventus gadgets from Trijicon, rangefinder with doppler lidar that tells you the wind and everything. I’m just the monkey pulling the trigger. Took him in the thigh because of the armor plates they’re wearing. Seemed to work well enough, and I was so far away they had no clue where I was. Wasn’t sure it would go through the armored glass in that APC, but hope springs eternal, as they say.”
“You follow all that?” Ed asked Early. All he knew about guns was what he’d picked up on the fly with the Irregulars. Or from watching TV, back in his previous life.
“Jes’ barely. Pretty sure this rifle and scope combo cost more than my first house. Weighs as much too.” He closed the bolt, reinserted the magazine, and handed it back to their visitor.
“Over twenty pounds empty, but between the weight and the muzzle brake it stays flat enough I can usually see my hits.”
“Been keeping busy?” Ed asked pointedly.
“You mean before I spotted you gents? Got in the area not quite three weeks ago.
Had a few targets of opportunity, but not nearly as many as I’d hoped. Should have expected that, I guess, people have been sniping at ‘em from day one with everything from BB guns on up. I’ve been working my way, very slowly, into the city proper, but I will admit I’m out of my element. I know how to shoot, and keep out of sight, but I don’t know the city. It’s been…spicier than I expected, but that’s on me. You gentlemen seem like you know what you’re doing, and it appears you’re heading somewhere. I’m thinking I’d like to tag along.” He paused, and smiled. “If it will get me in your good graces, I’ve got twenty pounds of smoked venison in my pack. A doe gave me a headshot shot last week, and I’ve been going through food a lot faster than I have ammo. Luckily I didn’t miss and have to track it through yards.”
“With that rifle? I expect not.”
The man shook his head. “Glock.”
Early looked at the pistol holstered diagonally across the man’s chest. “That muffler homemade or store bought?”
The man glanced down at the sound suppressor screwed onto the muzzle of his Glock 19. He’d had to cut a hole in the bottom of the leather holster to wear the pistol with the suppressor attached, and it wasn’t fast to draw, but having a pistol on him that when fired wasn’t much louder than a hand clap had been very very useful. “Didn’t the government seize all the store-bought ones? I’m pretty sure all the registered suppressors that weren’t turned in when they were banned were seized in the raids that came after.” He shrugged. “But they didn’t close down hardware stores, or seize all the lathes. I could teach a monkey to machine a suppressor in ten minutes.”
Early frowned. “That shot you took on the IMP roof gunner. How far was that?”
“I lased the abandoned car, the one the IMP ran into, at three hundred and forty-four yards. So, three-seventy-five or so.”
“Lased?” Ed asked.