by James Tarr
“Laser rangefinder,” Renny told him. “I spotted you guys yesterday morning and decided to follow you for a while, see how you operated. You’re the first ARF I’ve seen. A few hours later the Army showed up. I barely got up into a second-floor window in time, and did not have much of a field of view. I feel bad I wasn’t able to give you any more help, but between the distance and the speed everyone was moving, it was over before I had a third shot. That personnel carrier was rolling, but it was coming straight at me, which made things a lot easier.”
“You former military?” Early asked him.
Renny shook his head. “Just an amateur. With a lot of time behind a rifle, hunting and competition. Before all of that got outlawed.”
“Hmmm.” Ed could tell Early had something on his mind, and let him get to it. “You seem a smart enough fella,” Early said. “But you’re no spring chicken. You just don’t up and join a war ten years in.”
Renny nodded. “I can give you the same excuses I’ve been giving myself, if you want. Too old, not my war, never been in the military, things really aren’t that bad…” He shrugged.
“So what changed?” Ed asked him.
Renny looked off in the distance for a bit. “Cancer,” he said finally. He looked at Ed and Early. “Oh, I look fine, and feel fine. But six months ago I got in for my annual checkup, which now is only every four years or so, and they found some spots in my lungs. Cancer. Barely stage two, which means it’s eminently treatable. And survivable. Or would be, if I wasn’t five years too old to qualify for treatment under our glorious single payer socialized medical system.”
“With no treatment, how long do you have?”
“Oh, at least a year, maybe years. And, as I said,” he assured them, “I feel great. Not a symptom. Not even a cough. I could die of a heart attack or stroke before the cancer kills me. But I’m starting to think about my own mortality and seriously regret the things I should have done. This is something I should have done long ago. Now that I’ve got a death sentence, so to speak, heading into a war zone doesn’t seem so foolhardy.”
“You a smoker?” Early asked out of curiosity.
“Twenty-five years ago.”
“Will you give us a minute?” Ed asked him.
“Absolutely.”
Ed and Early moved through the adjoining backyard and stood between two houses where they could see Renny but not be overheard. “Well, Cap’n?” Early drawled. “What do you think of our war tourist?”
Ed made a face. “I’m not getting any bad vibes off of him. He looks more like an accountant than I do, and I am one. Was.” Actually, Renny looked a lot like that old actor, what was his name? Ed wracked his brain. Gene Hackman, that was it! Not exactly a threatening look to him. “Hell, it’s not our city, he can go wandering off and shooting up anything he wants without our permission. And our sniper tourist accountant is light enough on his feet that he can follow us, apparently, without us spotting him. Even toting that rifle and backpack and cancer cells. Close enough to listen in to us talking. I’m not sure if I’m impressed or pissed off, but I’m leaning toward the latter.” The backpack was big and looked heavy as hell, but the man bore it without complaint. “He’d have already been taking potshots at us if that was his inclination.”
“Man’s a hell of a shot,” Early admitted. “Three seventy-five and he throat-punched that roof gunner? If I hadn’t seen that I might not have believed his twelve-hundred-yard story, but that boom stick he’s got is certainly capable of reaching out that far.”
“Was that what he meant? He shot a guy at twelve hundred yards? What is that, over half a mile? Jeezus.”
“Sounds like it. And was smart enough to go under his armor. Let’s just say I’m glad he’s on our side. Which, if I had to hazard a guess, he is. Even if the Army was going to send some people in to infiltrate, they wouldn’t have liver spots and be carrying a home workshop arts ‘n crafts silencer. Everything about him feels authentic to me, including the cancer story.” He stuck a thumb at the man. “And, Cap’n, who’s to say, we kick him loose, he doesn’t keep following us?”
“You just want him on board because then you wouldn’t be the oldest guy on the squad anymore.”
“You’re not wrong.”
The two men walked back to Renny. “It’s a free city,” Ed told the man. “You can go anywhere you want. But if you want to join up with us, we’re going to need to look through your gear.”
“Not just that,” Early said, almost apologetically. He looked at the older man. “How do you feel about stripping naked in front of strange men?”
The squad’s first RP was halfway to the general store. It was at a long-defunct school on Greenfield, their old friend ‘Leprechaun’, seven miles south of where they’d crossed the road in the suburbs. The FOR SALE sign in front of the school was so faded it was hard to read, and apparently no one had been interested in the 17 acre site with its 74,000 square foot building before the war erupted.
Ed, Early, and Renny came in from the northwest, through the overgrown lot and past the cracked running track, the parking lot that was nothing but heaved dining room table-sized sections of asphalt split by knee-high weeds.
“This city doesn’t get any prettier, does it,” Renny said, staring at the back of the school. It had been vandalized often over the past decade. There were only a few shards of glass left in the window frames. The graffiti on the brick façade was so old and faded it seemed tired.
They were the last to arrive, and Quentin was on lookout at the rear of the building. “I was wondering if you guys got lost. Who the fuck’s this?” he asked, looking Renny up and down.
“Apparently Theodore is having open tryouts this week,” Ed said, a bemused expression on his face.
Mark was watching out the front windows of the school, and Early relieved Quentin at his spot, eyeballing the parking lot and overgrown field to the rear. The rest of the squad gathered in one of the classrooms in the middle of the long, low building. “This is Renny. He’s been following us for a couple of days now wanted to tag along. He took out the roof gunner on the IMP.”
“You mean this is the motherfucker that nearly got us all killed?” Weasel demanded, jumping up from his seat. He glared at Renny, who looked to Ed.
“You want to join the party, you’re going to have to work this out with them,” Ed told him pointedly.
While the rest of the squad began to have a loud conversation with Renny Ed took George aside and got him up to speed on the new face. “He doesn’t feel wrong to me at all,” he finished, “or Early, but I’m open to counterargument.”
George shook his head and eyed Renny, who wasn’t bowing under Weasel’s anger or Quentin’s dark-browed suspicion. “I trust your judgement. He’s not exactly a teenager, is he? So out of the eight of us, five are too old to be fighting, and Jason’s too young. Christ.”
“Hell, you’re the only one on the squad with any prior experience,” Ed reminded him, “but we’ve done pretty well for ourselves.”
“SWAT team doesn’t exactly count toward military experience,” George said, making a face.
“It’s more pertinent job experience than being an accountant, or comptroller,” Ed pointed out. That had been his last job before this one. He pointed at Quentin. “Truck driver. Mark was an insurance investigator. Early was a plumber. You fight a war with the people and gear you’ve got, not the ones you want,” he said, repeating something he’d heard a military veteran once say. “A ‘well-regulated militia’? You’re fucking looking at it. We’re all soldiers now.”
“They were seconds from spotting you. I took the shot when I had it,” the two men heard Renny say, his voice loud. He sounded exasperated.
“Yeah? Well, we’re going to have to agree to fucking disagree,” Weasel spat back. He stomped away from the man, toward Ed and George. “You make sure Quigley Down Under knows when to stay off the trigger,” he said in passing, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.
T
hey crossed Greenfield and moved behind the small, one-story retail shops lining the east side of the street. The gravel alley was narrow and overgrown with trees, running south between the commercial buildings and the back yards of neighborhood houses.
Not quite half a mile down they met a set of railroad tracks arrowing southeast toward the heart of the city, and turned to follow them. They were at the extreme southwestern border of the city, but there was no visible change as they moved from the city into the adjacent suburb. The streets were thick with houses to either side, but Ed knew their limited view from the tracks was misleading. He wouldn’t take his squad much more than half a mile southwest of the tracks unless they were actively trying to break contact under fire.
Once combat began in earnest, even though war was never officially declared, the agreed-upon construct called civilization was thrown out the window in most of the cities around the country. Shortly into the war anarchy turned into near-apocalypse as every person or group who had grievances, large or small, current or historical, felt free to act on them, and this was especially true in this suburb variously nicknamed Mecca or Shariatown or Thunderdome, depending on who you were talking to.
Thunderdome was famous for being predominantly Muslim before the war, and had been the site of some of the most furious house-to-house fighting and brutal combat seen anywhere in the country. Ed knew it hadn’t been the military versus ARF or even dogsoldiers, even though that was the official story plastered all over the state-controlled media. Whether it had been good ol’ American race riots, internecine warfare, or Sunni and Shi’a taking the opportunity of the war to participate in some long-hoped-for ethnic cleansing he had no idea, but there’d been huge surging riots in the streets, Molotov cocktails by the hundreds, running gun battles, group executions, and honest-to-God stonings and beheadings. Large swaths of neighborhoods had been burned down in what the government at the time had described as “arson riots”, whatever the hell that meant. Ten years gone, it was even worse. Everyone but the few hardy or crazy souls still living there avoided it day and night. Hell, even the Tabs avoided Thunderdome.
The men moved in two columns, keeping to the grass on either side of the double set of tracks, ready to take cover in the nearby houses and buildings at any second if necessary. Five minutes after starting along the tracks they passed a dead-end residential street to the left where two children were kicking a soccer ball back and forth. The boy waved at them, and Mark waved back, smiling. The girl stood in the middle of the street, frowning at them until they’d moved out of sight.
After walking along the tracks for almost exactly a mile, they passed a spur line heading directly north. There were huge asphalt parking lots to either side of the spur. The one on the west side was filled with hundreds of rusting semi trailers, the one on the east with dozens of flat-tired school buses
George, in the lead, struck off directly east through the bus lot, weaving through the listing hulks. Their paint jobs had faded to a pastel lemon after a decade of sun and wind. On the far side of the parking lot were neighborhood streets thick with homes, but at the start of the war a savage fire had devastated more than half a square mile of streets lined with small two-story houses. The houses were blackened hulks, most collapsed, resembling rotted splintered teeth jabbing up at the sky. None had escaped the inferno. After eight years weeds and saplings had begun to grow through the moldering walls and floors.
They walked down the middle of the street in what had once been a lively, thriving community. It was eerily quiet as, unlike most of the city, absolutely no one lived there. Here and there they passed cars which had burned and melted in the blaze. Their steps echoed off the heat-blistered pavement. Even now, years later, everything smelled of ash.
Four hundred yards into the burnt wasteland they passed the reason for the firestorm; two bomb craters. The blasts had leveled half a block. The craters were overgrown with weeds, with standing water at the bottom, but there was no mistaking what they were. Officially no bombs had been dropped in the city, much less the surrounding suburbs, but the resulting fire had stretched for nearly half a mile east, blown by the strong winds that day. No one knew how many residents had been killed in the fire; at that point in the war local law enforcement had nearly disintegrated and the military was too busy fighting to investigate something that, officially, had nothing to do with them. The suspicion was that the military had bombed the headquarters of one of the instigators of the ethnic cleansing going on in Thunderdome but just didn’t want to admit it, especially after the fire had erupted and spread out of control.
Even nearly ten years later there was very little wildlife in the area. No birds, no small game, nothing but the smell and taste of smoke and charcoal and burnt plastic which coated their tongues and nasal passages with gray-black slime. After another ten minutes they reached the far edge of the burned wasteland which someone long ago had dubbed the Fire Nation. The fire, helped by the wind, had jumped across a number of residential streets in its passage east, but a wider four-lane road running north-south had been enough of a fire break that the flames continued spreading north and south but stopped their eastward progress.
Fear that the military would drop more bombs and cause more fires had driven many of the residents living in surrounding homes undamaged by the fire to leave, so the adjoining neighborhood, even though it was unburnt, was more thinly populated than the number of homes would suggest. Plus, the proximity to the continuing craziness in Thunderdome drove away all but the most stubborn.
The squad stopped and stared across the four-lane road at the undamaged houses on the far side. Ed pointed. “Check it out,” he murmured to Quentin and Mark, and Mark nodded.
The two men jogged across the street. They knew Ed had pointed not at the first house on the corner beyond the border of the fire zone, but instead the one behind it. The residence he’d indicated was a tall two-story cube clad in red and brown brick. It was a duplex, with great views out the windows in every direction, and they’d used it before.
The rest of the squad hunkered in the shell of a house. The second story had collapsed into the first, and if they brushed anything their hands or clothing came away black. They tried not to touch anything.
Ed had his binoculars in hand, and watched Quentin and Mark move the hundred or so yards to the house in question. He raised the binoculars as the men disappeared around the corner. After perhaps ninety seconds, Mark appeared in one of the second-floor windows and gave a wave.
“Looks like it’s still open for business,” George said ten minutes later, using the binoculars to stare out an east-facing window of the duplex. “I see foot traffic. Not a lot, but then again we’re coming in the back way.”
“Where are we?” Jason asked.
“The general store’s about a quarter mile east of here,” Mark said. “It’s a big market in a warehouse. Fruits, vegetables, sometimes meat, gas generators, appliances, anything and everything. Stuff grown here, stuff funneled in here, stuff liberated from the Army stores like antibiotics, stuff looted out of empty houses. It’s a combination farmer’s market, flea market, and garage sale.”
“And whorehouse,” Weasel added with a smile.
“There is that. We’re coming in the back way, almost in what you’d call a blind spot. Everyone avoids Thunderdome and there’s nothing in the Fire Nation but charcoal. Most of their customers come from the east or north and go in the front door, on the other side of the building. You been here before?” he asked Renny.
“Never made it this far south,” the older sniper said. “What’s Thunderdome?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Mark said to him.
“Well, we go in covert, concealed handguns only, no rifles, nothing that looks like military clothing. There’s nothing illegal about the market being there and occasionally they’ve got a military presence hanging around. They drive through, or stop and harass people, or maybe just buy a few things. Visit the hookers. Sometimes sell the stuf
f they steal from their own warehouses or each other. Sometimes seize contraband, which could be illegal stuff, or could just be something that they want and don’t want to pay for. Point is to not get noticed by the soldiers or, more importantly, shot.”
“I’ll head in with Weasel and Quentin,” Ed said. “Any more than three and it’ll draw attention. If the crusty bastard is still running the joint, we’ll see if he’s got anything interesting to trade.”
“I’d like to see this place,” Renny said. He spread his hands and gestured at himself. “I don’t exactly look threatening.”
Ed nodded his head once. “And I’d like for you to see it. Some day. But the truth is, fancy rifle or no, until I actually see you kill someone or commit a war crime I don’t trust you.”
Renny pursed his lips together, blinked twice slowly, then nodded. “Fair enough.”
“How many magazines and grenades can we afford to part with?” Ed said to George. He started stripping off his armor.
“What is he going to have that’s more valuable than grenades and ammo?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? I guess we’ll find out. How many?”
“We’ve been short on ammo for so long I hate to trade any of it, but we’ve got ninety thirty-round AR mags, and only four of us are using ARs,” George observed. “I’d say we could part with ten without blinking. Maybe as many as thirty, and a handful of frags. But just thirty loaded AR mags should put us in hookers and blow for a week, forget the grenades.”
Ed nodded. “I’m aware.”
“I’ve got a big wad of cash I looted from the bodies,” Weasel admitted.
“You did?”
“Where do you think I got the cigarettes?’
“Unless you filled a wheelbarrow with the stuff I don’t know how valuable it is with the hyperinflation we’ve got going on,” George observed. “It’s good for starting fires, I guess.”
“With all the ammo we’ve got to trade I doubt we’ll need that cash, but that’s good to know,” Ed told him.