James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

“Beautiful, beautiful,” Ed murmured.

There were more cars here, because this neighborhood still had residents. Here as in most areas ringing the city the remaining people had banded together to survive. Behind the fences and blank faces of the houses they’d find communal gardens, catch basins for water, perhaps chicken coops, all guarded by residents who knew their neighbors by name and had developed a healthy distrust of anyone just wandering by. It was in neighborhoods like these that the squad usually hid to heal and re-equip if they didn’t head out into the country. The locals, those part of the ARF Irregulars’ “Underground Railroad”, provided them food, water, and funneled them ammunition and medical supplies, sometimes from the strangest sources. The same was true of the unoccupied safe houses throughout the region—the squad would show up and find the cabinets freshly stuffed with antibiotics from Spain and Poland, ammunition from South Africa and Turkey, batteries and binoculars from the Czech Republic, ghost guns, water bottles, baby wipes, vitamins—they’d seen it all.

The SUV coasted along, bristling with rifle barrels and filled with nervous faces. The street was quiet and for the most part clear; here and there scorchmarks marred the pavement, but the vehicles that had burned had all been towed away. Sold for scrap, most likely, before the scrap yards were closed down.

They passed an old man, shuffling north along the sidewalk with a plastic bag swinging from gnarled fingers. When he heard the car coming he looked up, revealing dark haunted eyes. He stopped, and as the SUV drew close he raised a quivering hand. George lifted a hand in response, and the two men stared at each other until the vehicle rolled by. Then the man began shuffling northward again. George’s hand clenched into a fist, then relaxed and settled around the pistol grip of his carbine.

Jason looked left and right out the windows. Block after block of houses, small, neat, many obviously still occupied. “People live here?” he asked.

“Not nearly as many as used to, but more than you’d think,” Ed told him. “A lot of the people who fled the city had relatives or friends living in the suburbs.” Ed peered down each passing street. Bedroom communities like this one, with absolutely no businesses except on the busiest through-streets, had fared the best in the fighting.

Quentin slowed as they reached the next mile road, and everyone in the SUV looked right and left. They saw a few scattered people on foot, and a short line in front of what was probably a store of some sort, but nothing that looked threatening. Sure, the guy leaning against the front of the store had a shotgun poorly concealed behind his leg, but he was store security, not Army. The old vehicle surged forward across the avenue and continued southward along the same residential street.

Ed bent forward over the seat. “Things seem quiet today. Is gang activity down?” George shrugged. He didn’t know.

They rolled by a small beige brick community church, hardly bigger than a house, then a narrow boulevard with a grassy median narrow enough to jump across. As soon as they passed it Jason noticed the increased alertness in the men around him. He felt the big vehicle slowing down.

“Quentin, you kill the engine before we turn the corner.” George looked over his shoulder into the interior of the car. “I want four on each side when we un-ass the vehicle. Make that three on the left, Quentin’ll stay with the car. Early, you grab the cherry, keep him close.”

“Gotcha.”

“I’ll take right point, initiate the approach,” Ed said. “Watch the houses on either side just before, if there’s going to be an ambush that’s where they’ll be hiding.”

What was happening? Jason realized everybody knew but him. “Where are we going?”

“OP. Observation Post near the Ditch,” Ed told him. “Might be empty, might be occupied, might be hot, might be blown, no way to tell ‘til we get there.”

Ahead, the street they’d been on for almost two miles without incident— Thank God for small favors , Ed thought—rolled through to a tall red brick wall. The residential street dead-ended at the westbound service drive of the Ditch, which was what everybody called the sunken interstate running east-west for twenty-five miles, several miles north of the city limits proper. The wall had been erected to block the noise of the cars zooming by below. Jason could just make out the empty space beyond the service drive where the once busy freeway had been carved deep into the ground in an attempt to make it both safer for the residents and quieter. The effort had proved only partially successful.

A hundred feet before the brick wall, still coasting along at twenty miles an hour, Quentin cut the engine, then swung a hard left onto an east-west side street. It looked no different from any of the other three dozen streets they’d already passed, lined with small houses on small lots. A few derelict cars were in evidence.

They coasted a third of the way down the block, until the Ford had slowed to walking speed, then Quentin pulled to the curb. Before the SUV had even stopped men were bailing out of the car in every direction. Jason frantically slid across the seat and out of the open door, not wanting to be the last man out of the car. He was, except for Quentin, who crouched behind the wheel. Early was jogging heavily across the street, heading for the gap between two houses, and Jason scrambled after him, rifle in hand.

The houses were single story red brick pillboxes with white siding trim, most with attached one or two car garages. Many of the lawns had gone unmowed for years, and the bushes had grown wild. In their neutral clothing the squad disappeared as they moved into the long grass. Early pulled Jason close in behind him as he hugged the corner of a house and peered up the street. The other members of the squad had also ducked in-between houses and were watching and listening. They could hear birds, and someone talking loudly a very long way off, and the soft chug of the Ford’s exhaust.

After a minute, Ed broke from the shadows of a massive yew bush and slowly moved forward, carbine up. He kept close to the houses, moving from shadow to shadow, swishing through the long grass, his eyes darting back and forth. He would have preferred to traverse the backyards of the houses toward the OP, but just about every one was enclosed by chain link. Climbing over fences was slow and usually noisy, and fences trapped you.

George began paralleling the squad leader on the opposite side of the street. He was more exposed to the early morning sun, but there was nothing he could do about that. At least they had some overhead cover; maples here and there leaned over the narrow street. He kept to the thigh-high grass and used whatever overgrown and gone-to-seed shrubs and ornamental trees he could find for concealment as he slid east. Mark, Early, and Jason silently moved out and began following him, keeping at least a house length interval between each man. Bobby and Weasel shadowed Ed, watching the far side of the street as much as their own.

At least a quarter of the houses on the street were maintained to some degree, and Ed could feel eyes on him as he picked his way across overgrown lawns and cracked driveways. He tried to ignore the crawling sensation on the back of his neck every time he went on patrol. There was no real way to predict or protect against snipers and so he did his best not to think about that one bullet. If it happened, it happened.

It was a long block, but he finally drew within five or six houses of the end of the block, The Pres, and the OP. Ed knelt behind a browning arborvitae and studied the remaining length of the street. He dug out the binoculars and examined the front of each house, each window and door, and the short section of The President where it passed in front of their side street. He saw nothing amiss. His had been the first boots in days to walk through the overlong front yards of the houses, but this far north that didn’t really mean anything. Everyone used the sidewalks and streets in this neighborhood. It was a lot different in the City.