James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

“The pigeon yesterday.”

“You don’t have any food of your own in that pack?”

Jason shook his head. “I ate up all my food looking for you guys.”

George made a sound, and held the bar out to Jason. “Here, finish this, I don’t want you collapsing on us.”

Quentin was in the other room, heating up several pots worth of water carried from the nearby river. They had the time, and boiling the water wouldn’t tax their already overwrought water filters.

Weasel and Early returned to the house within a few minutes of each other. Weasel had his pockets stuffed with edible greens including dandelions and daylilies, and Early had a squirrel and a rabbit that he’d shot with the suppressed .22 he carried. The gun was so quiet none of the men in the house had heard it go off, but then again the woods stretched almost half a mile south from the edge of the golf course in a point-down narrow triangle shape.

Early looked at Quentin, boiling the water, at the greens Weasel had, then at Ed. “Well, Cap’n, I was gonna clean these critters and stick ‘em on a fire, but it looks like we got us all the makings of a soup pot here.” There was a question in his statement. Ed looked at Weasel, his eyebrows up.

“Yeah, some of what I brought would do for soup,” Weasel said. “The dandelion leaves and wild carrots will taste better after a boil.”

“Then cut ‘em up,” Ed told the two men. “Looks like we’re having rabbit-squirrel vegetable soup for breakfast.”

“I’ll see if I can find bowls or cups or something,” Mark said, standing up.

“See if you can find any herbs as well,” Weasel said to him. “Maybe salt. I’d kill for some salt.”

“I think we’ve picked the cupboards pretty clean,” Ed cautioned him.

“And rice. Dry rice lasts forever, if you can keep the bugs out of it, and it’s perfect for soup.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Mark told him.

“Should we follow the river south?” George asked Ed as the squad—minus Weasel and Early, who were on watch—ate and drank the soup from a motley collection of bowls and cups Mark had salvaged. Mark had also found a small plastic bag of uncooked white rice in a house two doors down. Not much more than a cup’s worth, but it was unspoiled and went into the soup, providing some desperately needed carbohydrates. Looting was stealing what you didn’t need, and was not something they ever did. Salvage, on the other hand, retrieving unused items that you needed to survive… that was something they did as often as they could. Still, they were very careful not to take anything from houses that weren’t clearly unoccupied. “Then turn east once we get far enough south and head to the general store?” Ed had his map of the city laid out on the table before them, and George used a finger to suggest a route.

For most of its southward wend through the city the river was bordered by narrow city parks or just strips of undeveloped land thick with trees. Not quite two miles south of them it meandered through a large cemetery.

“I like that it’ll keep us away from prying eyes, but it also keeps us away from cover,” Ed replied. “A Kestrel rolls over us we’re going to want more than tree trunks to hide behind.”

“Haven’t been on this side of the city for a while now,” Mark observed. “I’m curious how much of that land around the river is gardens.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s a good point,” George admitted. “Ready source of water… we could be tromping through tomato plants and dodging scarecrows. If there’s anybody living in the area, they’ll be getting water from the river.”

“There’ll be people living there,” Mark told him. “There are people living everywhere. Still. I don’t understand it.”

“They just never left,” Quentin said. “It’s their home.”

“But no power, no water? War zone?”

Quentin shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t say they were smart. The military still runs the distribution centers, handing out just enough food. Those are keeping a lot of people in place, and dependent, just like they like ‘em.”

Spread across the city, the three distribution centers operated by the government handed out food, medicine, and bottled water to the residents, but they never seemed to have enough. They didn’t charge for anything, it was a “humanitarian” gesture, but the foodstuffs and antibiotics had always been in short supply, and from everything they’d heard and seen the supply seemed to be drying up. There’d been reports of near riots.

ARF had never attacked the soldiers guarding the distribution centers, or the centers themselves. If there was one sure way to turn the citizenry against you, it was disrupting or destroying the one government organization that was trying to help them as opposed to jail them or kill them…

“I wonder if there are any fish in it,” Ed mused.

“The river?” George blinked. “That’s a good question.”

“I’m thinking we keep to the neighborhoods on the east side of the river. Quarter, half a mile out from it, far enough that we won’t be bumping into anybody that lives near the water. Once we cross into the city it’s, what, six miles south and a little east to the general store?”

“More or less.”

Mark knew the area well and pointed at the map. “For the first couple of miles there are houses galore, no vacant lots. Even though there are a lot of people still living in those hoods, only maybe a tenth of the houses are occupied, so we’ve got lots of places to bail if we hear a chopper. Every house has a basement. Pretty much all the blocks are rectilinear.”

“Rectum what?” Quentin said with a smile. George snorted.

“Rectum? Damn near kilt ‘em,” Early added.

“Rectangles, they’re fucking rectangles,” Mark said, rolling his eyes with no little bit of exasperation. Then he paused, and got quiet.

“What is it?” Ed asked, seeing the look on the big man’s face.

“I grew up in that neighborhood,” Mark said, pointing. “I mean, it was kinda shitty back then, suffering from decades of high taxes and high crime, people being paid to do nothing, which kills your soul slowly, and then taught in public school that the country sucked, that it had never been great, all our heroes and founding fathers were racists or whatever, but at least it was a neighborhood, you know? Now…” He got an ugly look on his face, and glanced at Jason. He wanted to make sure the young man understood.

“Humans need government kid, get more than four of us in the same place at once and you need somebody to take charge. But government is a necessary evil. Both necessary… and inherently evil. Government cannot exist, cannot function, without restricting the freedom of the people it governs. But that’s the agreement that we as a society make, setting up a government to do what individual people can’t, with that famous ‘consent of the governed’.”

“But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” George said.

Mark nodded. “When the government stops trying to govern and help the people and instead starts trying to control them, that’s when wars start. Or genocides. The two things governments do best. Perhaps the only two things they’re good at. Our government stopped trusting us decades ago, treating us like misbehaving children instead of citizens with rights. And then we weren’t stupid kids in their eyes, the government started acting, starting passing laws that made it clear it considered us all incipient idiotic criminals who couldn’t be trusted. With guns, with our money, choosing our doctors, plastic bags, plastic straws, gas-guzzling cars… with freedom.

“They’ve been putting people on our side in jail for years for violation of this or that law, none of which had any effect on public safety, and for years, maybe even decades, we just took it. And took it. Until we didn’t. It wasn’t until police, federal agents, politicians, prosecutors and judges started getting shot that most people woke up to the fact that there was a war on. Had been going on for decades actually, but for most of that time it was a cold war. And most everybody in the country except those in the middle of the fight had no idea it was even going on. Until the shooting started.”