James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

“That’s a big ass road,” Weasel pointed out. “We’ll be wide open.”

“So we’ll need to be quick about it.”

“You don’t want to search the neighborhood for a car?” Quentin asked.

“There’s but one car in this neighborhood with more than a drop of gas in it,” Russell spoke up from his easy chair. “It belongs to Amy Robinson, down the block. You’ll have to cut through three locks to get to it, and by that time she will have stitched you up one side and down the other with birdshot from her giant duck gun.”

“There’s seven of us,” Mark pointed out.

“She don’t care. She’s feisty.” He smiled, his white teeth just visible in the gloom. “That’s why I like her.”

“Sounds like you’re doing more in your afternoons than just reading and gardening,” Mark observed.

Another flash of teeth. “That just may be. I ain’t dead yet. There’s a small market, half mile west of here, sometimes they have gas. They take cash, food… or ammo. But then, I guess, you’d have to find a car to put it in.”

“We’ll make do,” Ed told him. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

They slipped out the back door in ones and twos, moving silently through the yards. They could hear birds, and the occasional squirrel, a random dog barking in the distance, and the sound of the wind moving through the treetops above the houses.

They crossed the last neighborhood street in two columns and then moved between houses, into the back yards of the residences that lined Leprechaun on the east side. Ed moved to the edge of the back yard which was separated from Leprechaun and the sidewalk there by a six-foot wooden fence. There were enough missing slats in the fence for him to see up and down the street easily, and he pulled out his binoculars.

Leprechaun—Greenfield on maps—was two lanes running north/south with a center left turn lane between them. Even with little vehicular traffic the concrete lanes were heaved and cracked after a decade of winters with no repair. There was a two-story brown brick office building directly across from the squad on the west side of the street. A fading “Government Health Care” sign hung over the front door, but there wasn’t an unbroken window visible, and only a few vehicles in the lot, all of which sat on flat tires. Behind the building was another neighborhood of one- and two-story brick houses. To the north and south of it were more small commercial buildings and empty parking lots.

Ed signaled for the rest of the squad to stay put and moved two houses north. There he slipped through an opening in the wood slat fence made by a privet grown wild. Just two feet away was a mature maple. He stood between the tree trunk and the huge bush, nearly invisible in the shade, and looked up and down Greenfield. To the north he saw several people on foot, maybe a quarter mile up. Not military. To the south….

“Shit,” he muttered.

Not quite three-quarters of a mile south was a major cross-street, and through the binos he could see several Growlers scattered across both north- and south-bound lanes. A few soldiers on foot around the vehicles. It appeared to be an impromptu roadblock. And past that, beyond where he knew there was another sunken highway running northwest/southeast, Slash in ARF-speak, he saw a Kestrel circling. He could faintly hear it, and guessed the bird was roughly a mile and a half away.

He retreated into the backyard and made his way to the squad. He pulled them together under the overhang of a house and related what he’d seen. “If I can see them, they can see us if we try to cross,” he said quietly, stating the obvious. “So we wait until they displace, or until it gets dark. Then we cross Leprechaun. I want to get on the far side of that road ASAP.”

“They looking for us?” Jason said nervously.

“Wouldn’t you be? We downed one of their helicopters and killed the crew. But they don’t appear to be doing a full grid search of the area, so it seems they aren’t sure which way we went after the crash. They’re all south of here, so until that changes we’re going to keep heading west. Spread out in a defensive perimeter, find some cover, and I’ll give you the signal when we can move out. It might be a while.”

“Terrified?”

Jason looked up at Mark. The big man with his big belt-fed machinegun was smiling at him, no malice in the quiet question. Jason, hunkering in a dark corner between a fence and the back porch of a house as the light finished fading, nodded. He’d been walking through bad neighborhoods, rifle in hand, for quite some time before meeting up with the guerrilla fighters, but that had been an adventure. Whatever risk it involved seemed distant. However, after joining up with them, and then the confusing horror of the helicopter attack… suddenly the threat of death seemed very, very real. Still, he couldn’t be scared every second of every hour. For most of the last few hours he’d just been tired. The terror was intermittent.

Mark said to him, “Holding a rifle and feeling like a tough guy is a far cry from the reality of it all, which is that you’re out here hunting people… and people are out here hunting you. I’d tell you to not jump and twitch at every sound, but me telling you, and you being able to do it, are two different things.”

“I guess.”

Mark smiled down at the teenager. “It’s not that us old guys aren’t scared… when it’s time to be scared. But that’s when people are shooting at you. Worrying about when you’re going to get shot at, when it’s not happening, will give you an ulcer. Trust me. Been there, done that.” His smile got wider. “These days I’m just too old and tired and hungry to be scared unless someone’s actually shooting at me.”

Jason nodded, then realized he was nearly invisible in the gloom. “I just can’t believe there’s no water or electricity.”

“You had that, at home?”

“Water all the time, although you had to filter or boil it before you could drink it. Scheduled power blackouts once or twice a week. But that’s nothing like this.”

“Hell, there’s still a little water and power out here, in the suburbs,” Mark told him. “Maybe not predictable, but it’s there. In the city, there’s nothing, except in the Blue Zone. Hasn’t been anything for years.” He waved a hand around. “You think this is dark, just wait.” He nodded and wandered off, checking the perimeter.

Jason had moved around a bit since the squad had gone to ground. He’d looked out into the neighborhood and peered through the fence up and down Leprechaun (which he thought was a dumb name). Here and there he saw an electrical or battery-powered light, the flickering of a fire, and the glow of candles. Occasionally the sound of talking or laughing carried on the wind. There were people out there, living their lives, like the friendly old man, Russell.

Russell had offered them the use of his fireplace inside his house or the fire pit outside for them to cook the pigeons Weasel had caught, but Ed hadn’t wanted to risk the heat or smoke. After an hour of waiting for the roadblock to disperse, Weasel had slunk off and cooked the birds inside a nearby house which had been gutted by fire some years past, then distributed the food to the squad. It wasn’t much more than a few ounces of meat per person, but it was welcomed nonetheless.

As the sun sank toward the horizon the sky filled with clouds, and darkness approached quickly. When Ed could no longer see anything of the roadblock to the south other than lights he figured it was safe to cross the street.

“I know we normally go to ground when it’s dark, but I want to put some more distance between us and the crash site. And that roadblock,” Ed told George and Early. He saw their heads nod in the dim light.