by James Tarr
The unplanned ambush of the Army column…he still had nightmares and flashbacks of that, and the rocket destroying the pickup containing all of Franklin. But he’d gotten up, kept moving. Kept shooting. He’d been in a gunfight with soldiers. Killed two, even.
He’d been so mad, for so long. The first soldier he’d killed, running away…the man hadn’t specifically been an employee of the horrific government healthcare system whose policies had killed Jason’s mother, but he’d been fighting for those same people. The soldier defended them, supported them, and went after those people who just wanted to be free, and left alone. Just the thought of how his mother had suffered, how much pain she’d been in…she’d looked like a skeleton there at the end. The rage flared in Jason, making his face hot, and he muscled it back down as he’d been doing ever since she’d died. Swallowed the tears that wanted to come out, and gripped his rifle tighter.
Taking one last look around just to make sure, Jason took a deep breath, then stepped out of the cover of the store and walked down the front of the strip mall, rifle held inconspicuously underneath his arm. His eyes were up, scanning the street ahead of and behind him, the doorways of the businesses, the windows, anywhere and everywhere. After all his time looking for the dogsoldiers, and moving through the city, scanning the area around him had become automatic.
The strip mall ended. He strode quickly through the adjacent parking lot, crossed a side street, and moved to the front of a two-story commercial building. He stepped into a doorway and took a minute to study the road in both directions. He heard laughing somewhere distant, and spotted two seagulls wheeling through the air, but that was it. Finally, assured there were no immediate threats, he walked out into the middle of Pocahontas.
It was the back end of a tank jutting out of a gigantic hole in the middle of the four-lane road. A Toad, he assumed, but he didn’t know anything about tanks. He moved gingerly to the edge of the hole and looked down. The tank was nose down in the hole, its main gun wedged deeply into the damp earth at the bottom of the pit, which had to be ten feet deep. The tank itself was huge; he’d had no idea the machines were so large, he’d assumed they were the size of minivans or something, but the Toad was massive—eight feet tall, seemingly wider than a traffic lane, and as long as two small cars bumper to bumper. Then again, the IMP had been huge too, especially with that big cage welded around it. Unlike most cars whose metalwork seemed just barely strong enough to hold itself together, the Toad was constructed of massive slabs of steel that seemed impenetrable. He couldn’t even imagine facing one of them in battle. And yet…this Toad had been destroyed.
It had been burned, and there was significant damage from explosions. The hatch on the turret was open, and there was a large hole just behind the turret. Was that where the engine was? He wasn’t sure, but that seemed likely, he didn’t see anything else that looked like a likely spot for it. Whatever had been on the other side of the metal cover had been shredded. The Toad had clearly been in the hole a long time. It must have been so severely damaged that the Army had just left it.
The two wide stripes running down the street behind it were pavement, or at least had been before the tank’s treads had chewed it up and spit it out. He could only imagine how heavy the tank was with all that armor. Even though the bottom of the tank treads were flat and maybe six inches front to back, with all that weight pressing down on them they’d chewed into the asphalt like a dull chainsaw.
Jason walked all the way around the vanquished tank, staring at it from every angle. Finally satisfied, he jogged to the far curb. On the north side he moved into the overgrown grass of the neighborhood and quickly disappeared from sight.
Early was the last member of the squad to arrive at Happy Indian, appearing silently in the long grass in front of the small concrete pad that served as a porch as the stars began appearing in the darkening sky. He walked around the side of the house and entered through the door there.
“House still good?” he asked George, meaning the water traps and deliberately soggy mattresses used to defeat thermal cameras.
“Yeah. But Ed didn’t want us all bunched up here, and I don’t know that he’s wrong. Quentin and Jason are right across the street with him. Head over there.”
Early peered out the front windows of the house, which were intact. He looked up and down the street, then headed over.
The house directly across the narrow asphalt street was nearly identical to Happy Indian. Both were two-story cubes, the second floor clad in white siding, the first in red brick, with detached two car garages to the rear. On the north side of both houses were vacant lots where, once, houses had stood, but they’d been torn down long ago. The former residents of the house now known to the dogsoldiers as Happy Indian had claimed the lot next to their house as their own, landscaped the yard, even extended their fence to enclose it. Past the vacant lots was the alley behind the businesses on Joy Road. Or, at least, what had once been an alley.
The alley had been so overgrown for so long it had nearly completely reverted to nature and was almost unrecognizable as having once been a street. Small chunks of heaved and cracked asphalt peeked from between patches of grass, tangled tufts of weed, and were shadowed by bushes and trees leaning over the alley from either side. The residents treated the alley like an extension of their yards and had for years before the war.
An hour after sunset Mark was on watch on the second floor of the house, his SAW set up nearby on a desk, the squad’s binoculars hanging around his neck. There wasn’t a lot to see out of the windows, but they were all thrown wide open, as listening was often as important as seeing. The squads tended to prefer two story structures as safehouses for a number of reasons. The taller buildings gave them better visibility, and the additional floor provided more clutter to confuse a Kestrel’s thermal imager. Also, technically, you could jump out of a second-floor window in an emergency, although just the thought of doing that while wearing forty-plus pounds of gear made Mark think warmly back to the days when filing work comp claims was a thing.
He paused, blinked, and then cocked his head. He moved to one of the windows and took a couple of breaths, then strode to the upstairs hallway and looked down the stairs. Just as he got there, George appeared at the bottom of the stairs on the first floor.
“You smell that?” George asked him quietly.
“Yeah, I was just gonna ask you,” Mark said. Somebody was cooking over a fire. Somewhere close.
“I’ll check it out. Stay here,” George said to Weasel. He found Renny in the front room. “Let’s go meet the neighbors,” he told the newest member of the squad with a jerk of his head. Any activity that close to where the squad wanted to bed down for the night had to be investigated, and he also wanted to see how the man performed. Renny looked at his big rifle leaning against the wall next to his backpack and decided to leave them both there. He followed George out the side door.
George moved a few steps away from the house and stood in the cool night air for a few moments. The smell of cooking meat was stronger outside. He turned his head this way and that, finally determining that the light breeze was coming in from the northwest.
His eyes were mostly adjusted to the dark but the moon wasn’t up yet. AR on its sling across his chest he moved slowly across the lawn of the house. He didn’t want to trip on an unseen obstacle or otherwise injure himself by being in a hurry when he didn’t need to be.
He found the chain link fence bordering the yard by sense more than anything else. It was only waist high and he climbed it carefully and quietly. He moved forward into the next vacant yard, hearing Renny moving over the fence behind him.
Another thirty feet and he saw the flickering orange of flames. George looked around, getting his bearings, and realized the fire had to be deep in the alley on the block just west of Happy Indian. He moved silently across the lawn then veered left so that when he crossed the street he wouldn’t be on a direct line towards the fire.
As he
drew close he moved ever slower, not knowing how many people were at the cooking fire or who they were. When he was twenty feet away, a thick row of overgrown bushes between him and the fire, he heard muttering. George stopped and listened. He could hear someone moving around, and occasional mumbled words. Then the man passed between the fire and George, clearly silhouetted for a brief moment. One person. Maybe there were more, but he didn’t think so.
Easing forward, George slid between two bushes, then came out on the far side. He pushed through the branches until he was fully revealed by the firelight. “Evening,” he said quietly, holding his left hand up, palm out
The muttering man was on the far side of the fire and jumped up at George’s words. He spun around, a long knife gleaming in his hand. He’d built a small fire on the ground and over it, supported by several cinder blocks, was a large pot. From the sound it was nearly on the boil. The man was bone skinny, his cheekbones hard corners on his skull. His stained clothes hung off him, and it was hard to tell in the dancing orange light if he had brown skin or was just very dirty. “You!” he said, jabbing the knife at George. “You don’t get none! Mine. My meat! No thieves. Thieves get cut!” He shook the knife at George again.
The man was a dozen feet away and George had one hand on the pistol grip of his AR, and was still wearing his hard armor plates, so he wasn’t too worried about the man’s knife. If he had a gun it was hidden.
“No, it’s your meat. I’m not a thief. I just smelled the fire and thought I’d come over and say hello.” His eyes darted left and right but he wasn’t sure where Renny was. “I was just passing through the neighborhood. You live here?”
“Not answering your questions. Don’t have to answer your questions!” the man said, shaking the knife at George again, making odd twitches with his head.
“No, you don’t,” George said placatingly, pretty sure the man was suffering from some sort of mental illness. Not too surprising or unusual, actually, with the city in the condition it was. Most of the sane people were long gone. “I’ve got an energy bar, would you maybe want to trade for a little meat?”
The man peered at him suspiciously, and Renny appeared silently on the edge of the firelight on the far side of the small clearing, almost behind the man. He’d circled around, just in case. George slowly pulled the energy bar out of the cargo pocket of his pants. “Trade?” the man said dubiously, his lips pulling back from his teeth. If it was supposed to be a smile it was frightening.
“Sure. If you want.” George shrugged. “If not, I’ll leave you alone.” The man definitely seemed to be alone, and not quite right in the head. A 10-96, using the official designation from his previous life. A wing nut, to use the much more common cop slang.
The man took a few steps toward George around the fire. The knife was still in his hand but looked forgotten. George kept his eyes on the man but Renny was in his peripheral vision. Renny took two steps further into the light and glanced down at the fire. He blinked, stared hard at the fire a few long seconds, then grabbed the Glock holstered across his chest and without hesitation shot the emaciated man in the back of the head. With the suppressor threaded onto the end of the barrel the gunshot was just a loud pop.
“What the fuck!” George shouted, his AR coming up to point at Renny even before the strange man’s body had hit the ground.
“Look in the pot! Look in the pot!” Renny yelled to George, pointing his shaking Glock at the still form on the ground.
AR up and still pointed at Renny, George moved close to the fire and looked to see what Renny was upset about. After a few seconds the AR fell out of his hands and bounced on its sling. George bent down closer, he couldn’t help himself, then suddenly spun and dashed away from the boiling pot. His vomiting was surprisingly loud in the dark.
“Jesus Christ,” George said, finally staggering back into view, wiping a hand across his mouth, staring at the pot and what was on the ground behind the fire. “I almost traded him.” The cooking meat had smelled so good…the thought of what he’d nearly eaten almost made him throw up again. The memory of the tasty smell made his stomach churn. He wrapped an arm around his face in an attempt to cover his nose and block the smell. He blinked away tears, whose very presence unnerved him. He told himself it was the woodsmoke.
“Yeah.” Renny stared at the pot and the badly butchered chunks on the ground next to the fire. “Should we…should we bury her? What’s left of her?”
George’s sigh was long. What he really wanted to do was run away. Screaming. Maybe crying. Instead he said, “Yeah. I suppose we should.” His hand moved up to the handle of his knife. “Do you have a knife?”
“For digging? I’ve got a knife, but I’ve actually got a folding shovel in my pack. I kept thinking I should ditch it, but never did. Want me to get that?”
“Yeah, that’d be better. Is he dead?”
Renny looked over at the unmoving form facedown on the ground, then quickly strode over to the man and shot him twice more in the back of the head, the suppressed gunshots loud in the quiet. “He is now.” He paused. “I’m not burying him,” he said with sudden vitriol.
George nodded. “No, neither am I. Fuck that guy. Leave him for the dogs.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“So what do we know?” Ed asked.
He’d sent Quentin and Weasel out to recon the rendezvous location indicated by Uncle Charlie. On his map it was just a featureless green square, a thousand feet on a side, the “Adams-Butzel Recreation Complex”, and they needed more information. The two men had ditched their rifles and armor before heading out.
The squad had approached from the south late the day before and holed up in just about the only suitable building anywhere near the site, an auto repair shop to the southwest. Technically it wasn’t a two-story business, but it had a very high ceiling and there were glass block windows up near the roof. Empty metal racks probably meant for tires provided easy access to the damaged windows. Both Ed and George had spent time looking through the fractured glass block windows with binoculars, but couldn’t see much of anything. A lot of trees, and maybe in the distance a brown roof. Quentin and Weasel had headed out in the morning and immediately separated. Both had been gone over four hours, but returned within minutes of each other.
“I circled counter-clockwise, Q went clockwise,” Weasel said as they stood around a desk in the office of the auto repair shop. They’d found some paper and a grease pencil for notes. “You’ve got the pencil, you go first,” he told Quentin, who nodded. Jason was up on the roof on watch, having climbed a pile of tires behind the building.
“Okay, basically you’ve got a big square,” Quentin said, drawing one on the back of a parts order form. “Quarter mile on a side or so. We’re just off the southwest corner.” He pointed. “The only buildings are at the southeast corner. The rest of the land is for sports. Was. Tennis courts, baseball diamond, probably other stuff I couldn’t see because the grass was two feet tall. Doesn’t look like any of it’s being used. There’s tracks through the grass from people walking, but it looks like locals, one guy here, two people there.” He made a few marks on the paper. “On the west side here, across Meyers, it’s all businesses. Industrial stuff, machine shops or whatever, small, one-story buildings and big vacant lots full of weeds. But you can’t see into or out of them because there’s a six-foot fence running along the sidewalk.” He drew a solid line. “Corduroy aluminum or whatever the hell you call it. Can’t see through it, and climbing it would be a bitch. I’m guessing it was meant to keep the kids at the sports complex from getting into trouble if they wanted to bail out of practice early.”
“North side of the square is all neighborhood. There are half a dozen streets that head down south and then dead-end at the property line, like,” he gestured with his hand, fingers splayed downward, “the teeth of a comb. You can walk down them. Once you reach the dead end there are hundreds of yards of open field before you get to the complex buildings on the south side
. Wide open. If we took a house there, we’d be a hair closer, but we’d be looking at the side or back of the complex, and there’s nothing to see. The east side of the property is a residential street. Houses back up to the complex property. You can’t really see shit from over there between the houses and the garages. Then, once you turn the corner on Lyndon and start heading back this way along the south side, the sports complex buildings are right there. Or maybe it’s just one building, I couldn’t tell if they were connected. Different height roofs, looks like a school.” He shrugged. “I saw a few people on foot in the neighborhoods, but didn’t see anything at the big building itself. No sign of life.” He paused. “Don’t know if that’s good or bad. Metal doors all around the building, but they’re all closed, and I’d bet locked. Only sure way in looks like the front door. Glass and windows there, couldn’t really see how much of it was busted.”
“Hmm.” Ed stared at the hand-drawn map, and then at the blank green square on his city map that was the site. “Weasel?”
“South side of the property is Lyndon. Along Lyndon, for pretty much the entire length, is a junk yard. Well, junk yard, tow lot, auto repair, maybe something having to do with construction or the cement business, there was a mountain of busted concrete, but the thing is the place is giant, and there’s that same kind of fence Q was talking about running all along the sidewalk on Lyndon. There are no slits in the slats,” he blinked at the sound of that, then continued, “so you can’t easily see into the yard. Or out. The office of the junk yard, though, is almost directly across the street from the sports complex building where we’re supposed to go. And there’s no fence blocking the view there. We could slide through the gap in that fence right next door and we’re in the junk yard. Far side of it is the office, and from there we’re practically on top of that place, we could set up there and see anybody and everybody coming and going. It’s really the only place we could position ourselves anywhere near it, and the only place where you can see shit unless you want to loiter on the sidewalk.”