After the Roads- Sidney’s Way

by Brian Parker

  “Worse,” Caitlyn deadpanned. “Come on. I’ll show you to the showers. There’s shampoo and conditioner in the dispensers on the stall wall that get refilled regularly. If yours is empty, just ask the person next to you for some.”

  She wrapped the towel around her body and followed behind the soldier. “So, this is the barracks for Able Company, 1st of the 36th Infantry. Not too exciting, I know, but it’s home.”

  Sidney looked around dutifully, but wasn’t too impressed. It looked just like any other hallway with rooms on each side. “First and most of Second Platoon are out on a big mission right now, so the place is fairly empty,” Caitlyn told her. “They’re supposed to be back sometime today, though, so get in there and get that shower before everyone comes back and all the guys start hitting on you.”

  “Guys?”

  Caitlyn stopped. “Oh shit. I forgot to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Sidney asked, dreading the answer. Her mind immediately went to thinking that she was going to be forced to be some type of indentured prostitute for the Army men in return for her room and board.

  “There are only five women in Able Company. We’re all in the Third Platoon, but with so many more males, there’s no way they could establish segregated showers or bathrooms. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Uh…” Even in the refugee camp, the bath and shower schedules were strictly enforced. “Have you had any problems?”

  “Besides the occasional hard on from a nineteen year old as he ogles my body, no.” She leaned in closer, “It’s kind of fun. You get to frustrate the hell out of them and you have your pick of the group for when you need a little sexual release.”

  “Oh, uh… I don’t think I’ll be needing any sexual release.”

  Caitlyn shrugged. “You’re a better woman than I am, Sidney.”

  They continued toward the showers. There wasn’t a door on the room, just a large, open doorway. Sidney could already feel the humidity coming off the running showers inside. Caitlyn popped her head in and looked left.

  “Hey, Dickerson,” she said. “I’ve got Sidney, that refugee we brought over here with us. Make sure nobody fucks with her or I’ll cut your dick off. Got it?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” a male voice echoed from inside.

  Caitlyn returned to the hallway. “Okay, Private Dickerson’s in the shower now. He’s the big guy from Kentucky who helped pack up your tent. Don’t worry, he’s harmless. He’ll look out for you while I take your things over to the laundry. Then I have to stop by the company to make a sworn statement to the commander about my squad’s actions during the riot.”

  “A sworn statement? Are you in trouble?”

  “No. It’s just standard procedure. Every squad leader that responded is being asked to provide one in case there’s some type of investigation after all of this is over.”

  “All of this?”

  “The infected,” Caitlyn replied. “They aren’t going to live forever. Then we’ll be responsible for rebuilding the US.”

  “You think that’s possible? I mean, can we come back from all of this?”

  “Yeah. I think so. There’s already talk about some government assistance along the West Coast. China or Japan or something like that sent some troops to help out. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “China?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it was South Korea. It’s all third- and fourth-hand knowledge from one of the base radio guys that I’ve been seeing.” She shifted out of the doorway. “So, like I said, I’ll be back in about twenty or thirty minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” Sidney mumbled, feeling oddly apprehensive, like a kid being dropped off for summer camp for the first time.

  “You remember which room is mine?”

  “324.”

  “That’s right. See you soon.” Caitlyn leaned in and gave her a kiss on the cheek, then walked back down the hallway toward her room.

  Sidney stood in the hallway for a moment, and then stepped inside. To the left was the bathroom, with several stalls and urinals, along with a double row of sinks. Immediately to the right was a small, open room with benches where people could dry off and get dressed. Beyond that were the showers. Directly along her line of vision was the soldier Caitlyn had mentioned. Was it Dickerson?

  Oh shit! she groaned internally. She’d immediately looked at his crotch when she thought of his name.

  She swallowed her pride and walked to the right. There was one towel hanging from a hook above a bench, so she unwrapped Caitlyn’s towel and hung it up a few hooks down from his. She straightened her shoulders and gave herself a pep talk.

  You can do this. You are a sexy, confident woman. It’s just nudity. You’ve been naked in front of lots of people.

  The last part, for good or bad, was true and she grabbed the thought and held on to it as she walked back toward the shower holding all of the items that Caitlyn had given her.

  “Nice tats,” Dickerson said. Her hands flew upward, covering her breasts. He laughed. “I said tats. You know, tattoos?”

  “Uh, thanks,” she replied, smiling in embarrassment as she sat her things on the little wire ledge screwed into the tile.

  “I’m Eric. Nice to meet you, ma’am,” the soldier said from close behind her, startling her.

  She turned quickly, her stomach protesting the quick movement, and saw him only a couple of feet behind her with his hand outstretched.

  “Ah…”

  His smile faltered and he dropped his hand. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that we weren’t introduced before.”

  Sidney tried to put aside her inhibitions about her new surroundings. She forced a smile and reached out. “Sorry. This is all so new to me. I’m Sidney.”

  He shook her hand gently before letting it drop. “I’m in Sergeant Wyatt’s squad. Anything you need, let me know. Okay?”

  She nodded shyly and turned back to the wall to turn on the water. As she stood to the side, adjusting the temperature, she risked a quick, furtive glance toward Dickerson. His penis was just a little bigger than it had been when she first came into the room.

  She laughed out loud and stepped under the water.

  “What?” the young soldier asked. “I know. My dad was a huge football fan.”

  “What?” she mimicked, confused.

  “Eric Dickerson,” he said. “Go ahead, I’ve heard it all.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” she admitted.

  “Eric Dickerson? NFL running back? He holds the single season rushing record?”

  “Nope,” she laughed, raising her arms up to work the water into her hair so she could wash it.”

  “Oh, come on!” he said. “How do you not know who he is?”

  “I’m not that big into sports, sorry.”

  “That’s sacrilege, ma’am,” he said, scrubbing between his ass cheeks.

  Sidney glanced down at her feet, the water was a ruddy brown color, reminding her that she was covered in blood and ash from the burning infected. She wondered if the ash drifted this far from the walls.

  Dickerson finished showering a few minutes later and walked by her. “I’m gonna wait out here in the latrine for you, ma’am. Sergeant Wyatt wanted me to make sure that nobody bothered you on your first day.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Oh yes I do. She’ll beat the shit out of me if anything happens while I’m supposed to be watching after you. She doesn’t mess around.”

  “Okay. I’m warning you, though, I’m going to be a while. I haven’t shaved my legs in about four months.”

  “It’s okay, ma’am. I don’t have anywhere to be until 0600 tomorrow when we go out to the wall.”

  Sidney nodded, noticing the man’s eyes lingering on her body for a moment too long. “See everything you needed to, Eric Dickerson?”

  “Uh… I’m sorry, ma’am,” he rushed over his words. “I’ll be right out here.”

  He disappeared ar
ound the corner and she laughed aloud once more. She was actually starting to feel like a human again. Even though the setting and the circumstances were odd, she enjoyed interacting with other people who weren’t watching her warily, waiting for her guard to drop so they could take whatever it was that she had.

  Plus, Private Dickerson had been easy on the eyes.

  True to his word, Dickerson was waiting in the small dressing room with only a pair of boxer shorts on, holding his towel. She acknowledged him with a slight nod as she walked by, naked and dripping wet.

  “Feel better, ma’am?” he asked, doing his best to look at the floor.

  “Much better, thank you.”

  She struggled with the brown towel to dry off. Just as Caitlyn had warned her, the damn thing resisted water and worked more like a squeegee to push the water around than to absorb it. It was truly a marvel of modern manufacturing failure. After what seemed like hours of twisting, turning, and stretching to reach all the crevices on her body, she was dry enough to wrap the towel around herself.

  “All done,” she announced, noticing the obvious bulge in Dickerson’s shorts after her show.

  “Okay, ma’am. Just in time, too. It sounds like the other platoons got back from their mission.”

  He stood and led the way, holding his towel low in front of his crotch. She followed him to the hallway. “I’m this way,” he said, pointing toward the opposite direction. “Room 301 if you need anything.”

  “Oh, okay. I’m staying down with Cait— With Sergeant Wyatt.” He nodded and went toward his room.

  Sidney walked down the hallway as a large group of men came in, fully geared up for combat. Several of them gave her the once over as she walked barefoot, covered only in a towel, toward her new room.

  When she was almost there, she noticed a face that looked familiar. “Hey, I know you,” she said. “You were the medic that checked me out when I came to the city.”

  “I’d like to check you out,” he laughed, high-fiving several of his buddies.

  “Real mature, Specialist Mitchell,” Caitlyn said from her doorway. “This is Sidney. She’s under my direct supervision. Anyone caught fucking with her will have to answer to me. Got it?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” the medic replied. Several nearby soldiers replied in the affirmative as well.

  “Good. She’s gonna be staying here for a few days. Treat her like a member of Able Company and we won’t have any problems.”

  Sidney hurried down the hall and slipped into Caitlyn’s room where she dug through the plastic bag of clothing she’d gotten from the PX yesterday. As she changed, the soldier stood in the doorway talking to a Hispanic male NCO.

  “Were you guys successful?” she asked.

  “Yeah, we got five full trailers of food and medicine. Cleaned the place out, and even had room for some other shit like cigarettes, a bunch of folding camp chairs, sunscreen, and bug juice.”

  “The LT say how long that stuff will last?”

  “Nah,” the guy replied, “but you know him. He wants everyone to believe that it’ll be okay, so he won’t say anything.”

  She nodded and glanced over her shoulder at Sidney and smiled. Then she turned back around. “There are too many people here, Gallegos. It’s not sustainable.”

  “I heard you guys took care of some of that problem today.”

  Caitlyn shook her head. “It was disgusting, man. They were rioting and shooting at the Civilian Division troopers bringing them food. We got the order to put it down.”

  “How many?” Sergeant Gallegos asked.

  She shrugged. “Early estimates are—” She stopped and looked back at Sidney again. “Estimates are pretty high. The commander thinks maybe as many as ten thousand. There was a lot of lead flying in both directions.”

  Sidney’s vision began to go black at the edges and she got light headed. She stumbled backward and had to sit on the bottom bunk.

  “Are you okay?” Caitlyn asked. Somehow she was kneeling right in front of Sidney.

  “I, uh… Yeah. I thought I heard you say ten thousand refugees were dead.”

  Caitlyn’s lips thinned. “They didn’t stop fighting us, even after we shot into the crowd with small arms. They didn’t begin dispersing until we opened fire with the Bushmasters.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The big gun on top of the Strykers. It tore through them. Sidney, it was horrible.”

  “And you killed ten thousand of them? Of us?” she accused.

  “No. Most of the deaths occurred from people trampling one another.” She shuddered and then sighed. “It was so stupid. Over food.”

  Sidney remembered what her attacker said. They’d rioted over seeing her with bags of clothing and thought it was food. In effect, she’d killed all those people.

  “I… I need to lie down for a little while,” Sidney said.

  “Of course.” Caitlyn stood and stepped back. “I’m gonna go get cleaned up. Don’t freak out if that guy I was talking to, Staff Sergeant Gallegos, comes in here. He’s on the top bunk.”

  “Your roommate is a guy?”

  “Being an NCO comes with a few perks, like this massive room for just the two of us,” Caitlyn said, holding her arms wide and then pulling her shirt off.

  “He doesn’t think it’s weird when you, ah, release your sexual tension with one of the guys?”

  “Well, so far, he’s never been in the room. He’s in First Platoon and we usually have different schedules.”

  “Oh.” Sidney’s eyelids were drooping as the day’s events caught up with her. “Where should I set up my mattress?”

  “No such luck,” Caitlyn replied, fully nude now. “There was a big hole cut in it from that kitchen knife. Until we can get it repaired, you and me are gonna have to share the bed. You okay with that?”

  Sidney nodded and lay back as Caitlyn came over to her and pulled the sheet and blanket out from under her body. She noticed dreamily that the soldier’s body was just as she’d imagined it would be: firm, pale, and visually appealing.

  “When Gallegos gets undressed, don’t freak out.”

  “Why?” she muttered, already falling into sleep.

  “Because that fucker’s got a giant cock. Scared the shit out of me the first time I saw it, thought he had an infection or something.”

  Caitlyn laughed and grabbed her wet towel from behind the door. Just before she fell asleep, she heard Gallegos say, “Yeah, real funny, bitch.”

  “We all love you, buddy,” Caitlyn replied.

  10

  * * *

  FORT BLISS MAIN CANTONMENT AREA, EL PASO, TEXAS

  SEPTEMBER 16TH

  “Shit, son. You did it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “To be honest, I didn’t think it would work. There’s so many of those damned things out there that I figured you guys would have to abort.”

  Jake swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat when the division commander, Major General Bhagat, complimented him. Now, the praise seemed tarnished, lessened by the older man’s admission that he didn’t have any faith in Jake and his men. What a crock of shit.

  “I was confident that it would work, sir,” Colonel Albrecht, the 1st Stryker Brigade commander, stated. “Lieutenant Murphy is one of the Ready First Brigade’s most able and adaptable leaders—that’s why I assigned it to his battalion. I knew it would filter down to him and he’d make this thing work.”

  The general nodded at the colonel. “Thanks, Jim.” He turned back to Jake and held out his hand. Grasped between his fingers was a triangular coin, painted yellow, blue, and red with a bold number “1” emblazoned above a cannon with tank treads and a red lightning bolt over the top of it. At the bottom, the words “OLD IRONSIDES” denoted the First Armored Division patch. “Here you go, Lieutenant Murphy. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do for now. I’m sure that somebody will write you up for an actual award soon, and since I’m the highest ranking Army officer on the installat
ion—hell, possibly in the entire western half of the United States at this point—I’m pretty sure I’ll approve it.”

  He winked and Jake took the coin from him. “Thank you, sir.”

  “That food will go a long way toward helping people eat, Lieutenant. You did good.”

  “I barely had anything to do with it, sir. My men were—”

  “Can it, son. I’ve already been told that you led the team down on the ground and about your soldier who was killed. That could have just as easily been you, so don’t go saying that you didn’t put yourself at risk.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jake replied dumbly. He’d had a lot of time to think about Sergeant Orroro’s death and he’d never even once considered that he could have been bitten.

  “Now, you go tell your soldiers that Iron Six personally told you that I’m proud of them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The general looked down at a stack of papers in front of him and then back up at the two men. “Alright, sir. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to meet Lieutenant Murphy,” Colonel Albrecht said.

  “No problem, Jim. I want to talk to you about a few more operations that my planners think are within range, and about that riot in your sector yesterday.”

  “My staff is preparing a full report, sir. I—”

  “Forget it, Jim.” The general stopped and looked at Jake. “Good job, Lieutenant. Go back to your platoon. I’m sure you’ve got a mission coming up soon.”

  Jake nodded and saluted, which the general returned. “Hey, Jake,” Colonel Albrecht called as he wheeled around. “Come see me at 1700, I want to get a quick debrief. No slides or any of that crap, just talk to me, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He wheeled back around and walked stiffly toward the door. Behind him, he heard the general say, “Damnedest thing, that riot. On one hand, it’s a tragedy. On the other, it’s a godsend. Ten thousand less mouths to feed.”

  “Actually, sir, the new estimates put it closer to twenty thousand.”

  “Damn,” the general said. “Now, that will make that food go a lot farther…”