Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

“Uh…” Tara said, flushing and looking away.

“Daddy’s a soldier,” Emily answered for her mom.

“Oh,” I said. Genius . I turned my full attention back to the road. Emily started to say something else, but Tara raised a finger to her lips and she stopped. Idiot . I chided myself. I noticed Danny give me another sideways glare too, which told me what he thought of my question. Tara was no doubt worried about her husband, hoping he’d be there when they arrived home, realizing he might not be. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

“It’s okay,” she whispered back. Flipping moron . I cursed myself again.

We looped south and west around Belle Fourche. We were a bit unnerved by an abundance of red dots in town and scattered radar movement on the screen. No doubt they were enemy troops. But realizing no one was changing course and coming towards us, we continued south and east, past the South Dakota city of Spearfish. We stopped briefly to fuel up, a half-mile before the Wild West modeled town of Deadwood. We’d gotten used to all the bodies by now and were expecting to see more in Deadwood, but there were none. It sounds weird, but I knew we were all of the same mind on this one: This wasn’t good .

We pulled off Main Street into a cemetery, the only area in town with tree cover. I wanted to ask if anyone else found irony in the fact there were likely fewer dead people in the cemetery than in the town, but given my recent run of brilliant questions, and the discovery a few seconds later of a large number of the bodies in a giant hole, I decided against it. My sense of humor had a strange habit of peaking at the most stressful of times. Coping mechanism no doubt . That wouldn’t have helped me, or anyone , here. A cleanup crew of some sort had already been here, but were they still here? We couldn’t afford to wait around and find out. It was getting light, and we had to find somewhere to hide within the next hour. Then the truck drove by.

About the time the Americans arrived in Deadwood, Captain Eddie and his men were pulling into Spearfish, only twenty minutes back. In Spearfish, they ran into two more companies of men, one from Pakistan and another from North Africa. Not wanting to give away any details of their deviated mission, he forbid any of his men to consume alcohol (lest it cloud their common sense and loosen their tongues) and ordered his soldiers to claim they’d been one of the smaller companies assigned to the northern South Dakota border—and they were just beginning to reverse course now.

No one seemed to care. None of the companies were expected to report back to central command for another four days, so it didn’t matter who was where. Many of them were drunk. Most were telling victory stories, accounts full of murder, rape and plunder. Eddie hadn’t allowed any of his men to assault the women they’d found or take any valuables. They were only here to kill. As far as he knew, the Americans hadn’t raped wives or taken possessions when they’d attacked Libya. They had just killed his people. Eddie was fine with exact revenge, nothing more. The Pakistani company had only lost three men so far; the other African company had lost five. Eddie and his men shared a similar humiliation over their staggering losses, so they kept theirs to themselves. They had killed many, so they spoke freely of those, but not a single word was spoken of the “lions.”

Captain Eddie and his brother joined several other officers in a bar where they were all talking strategy. Rapid City had been swept clean and burnt to the ground last night. Many troops that had come from Sioux Falls were still camped there. Eddie knew the Americans wouldn’t be in Rapid City. These two companies had come through Sturgis and Deadwood yesterday. Sturgis had been burnt down, and Deadwood would be destroyed this morning. Today they would be sweeping down through the Black Hills, where they would meet the southern companies of troops in Hot Springs and head back east with them. Eddie knew the area well from studying the Americans’ maps, and he stated they would join them in Deadwood, if that was all right. Then they would head back east, Eddie explained, although he had no intention of doing that. No one objected to his joining them in Deadwood.

Around 8 a.m., his men back up in Montana radioed. Best as they could tell, the entire attack had been carried out by two men on bicycles. Bicycles? Perhaps their heat signals had mimicked those of deer. Were his men that stupid? It seemed one man had been perched up on a ledge while the other had done the ground level fighting. There were two bullet holes through each windshield from the Americans’ guns, and one of the trucks had a shattered driver-side window from a larger caliber gun. In all, they found twenty-two American shell casings. So they are capable of missing . The attack seemed to be over quick.

Eddie ordered them to get down here fast and meet him and the rest of the men in Deadwood.

Around 10 a.m., the other two companies departed Spearfish towards the neighboring towns of Deadwood and Lead with Eddie, Lazzo, and fifty-four of their men accompanying them. When they drove into Deadwood, it was already burning, as was Lead. Drones had been flying over Spearfish and Rapid City all morning, and troops that had reached the Wyoming state line last night had passed back through this area already. Figuring those troops must have set the fires and moved on, the other two companies continued south towards Custer. Eddie told the other officers that he was waiting for some of his men and he’d be heading back across the state when they arrived. He thanked them for allowing him to tag along and wished them luck.

His four trailing men arrived a little before noon. But instead of heading east, Eddie and his men broke off west towards Newcastle, Wyoming.

Outside Newcastle, minutes before 1 p.m., Eddie swerved his jeep to the side of the road. Something had been bothering him since they’d left Deadwood, and he finally figured out what it was. For those fires to have been raging as they were around noon and to still have so much fuel to burn, they would have had to been set to burn in stages and to have only recently been lit, or to just have been bombed by the drones. The drones wouldn’t have bombed a town troops would be passing through in a few hours. None of these military companies presumably had ever set a staged fire, nor would they have known how or wanted to. They wouldn’t have been intent on salvaging anything. They would have simply fueled and torched it all. Seeing no one else there, the officers had made incorrect assumptions and moved on. They didn’t care who had done it. It was done.

Eddie, on the other hand, had been so eager for an excuse to break off from those troops he’d only been thinking about his own cover. The Americans couldn’t have known what Eddie was up to, but they could have anticipated the other troops moving on. That fire was controlled, built, and staged to direct the other companies the fastest possible way out of town. The faster they cleared out, the faster the Americans could follow them out.

The arsonists had been hiding in plain sight. “Damn it!” Eddie screamed, pounding the dashboard. Not again .

When that truck drove past the cemetery, we knew it was too late to run. The sun was coming up, and the drones would start flying soon. We couldn’t get out of town fast enough, and we couldn’t stay here in the open. In Wes’s opinion, there was only one thing we could do. Burn the city, our way, before the soldiers came and did it. Blake had plenty of experience staging fires. It sounded like a plan.