James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

“A wild game dinner after a snack of military munchies?” George said to Ed as the two men pored over the map spread out on the kitchen table. “I’m going to get fat.” Just about everyone in the squad had their own map, but Ed’s was the only sample that had been laminated. Ed snorted.

“What are we, about three miles from the general store?” George put his fingertip on the laminated surface.

“Straight line. If it’s still open for business. And about the same distance to Uncle Charlie’s rendezvous point, but I don’t want to head there. Not yet. We’re not due for days, and I don’t want to draw any unwanted attention to the area. Presuming nothing untoward happens tonight, we can head out in the morning, very slow and careful. Shouldn’t take too long to get to the store.” Ed frowned. “I want everyone spread out when we go. I mean really spread out, fifty foot intervals or more, so that if anyone gets spotted they’ll look like they’re alone, at least at first. I don’t know if they’ll have high altitude drones up or satellites, but we hurt them bad today, and they’re going to want payback.”

“It’s weird,” Jason said to Early, hefting his new rifle. Early had shown him how to disassemble it for cleaning and watched him put it back together. “You just look through the tube, and where the red dot is, that’s where the bullet hits?”

Early nodded. “Provided its zeroed. Lot easier than the iron sights you’ve been using. That’s why everyone’s gun has them.” They were sitting in a downstairs hallway, facing each other, backs against the wet plaster walls.

“Yours doesn’t.”

“My M1A is very old school. But unlike your lever gun it’s a semi-auto, holds twenty rounds and is quick to reload, and hits harder than anything anybody else here is carrying except Quentin’s sawed-off shotgun, and that’s an across-the-street gun at best. Although it’s actually for drones.”

Early stared down at the scarred wood stock of his rifle. He’d been carrying it since the start of the war. He’d owned it for twenty years before the war had ever started. It was long, heavy, and recoiled quite a bit, but he knew it like a part of his body. It had saved his life more times than he could count. And with it he’d taken more lives than he cared to remember. He sighed, and looked up. Jason saw the look on his face and couldn’t read it.

“You okay?” Jason asked.

Early shook his head. “You’re too young, you probably can’t even remember what the country was like before the dang war. How much things had changed ‘fore the war ever started. How bad, how crazy it had gotten. Hell, that’s why the war popped off.” He leaned his head back against the wall and spoke to the ceiling. “Most people jes’ want to be left alone to live their normal, peaceful, boring lives. Even in a war zone. Eat, sleep, work, screw, repeat. Only three percent of the population actually fought in the American Revolution. But, see, the thing is, three percent of a population is jes’ a huge number when you get down to it. Bigger than just about any peacetime army in the world. When push finally came to shootin’ this time around, after so many years of bad and crazy, the guv’mint was shocked at just how many people was willin’ to boogaloo.” He lowered his gaze and stared at the boy. “Cain’t say I was.”

Jason didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his new gun. “It’s ugly.”

“It sure is,” Early agreed. “But it’ll help keep you alive. Remember, though, it won’t go through their armor plates any better than your lever action did. You’ve gotta aim for everything but the plate. Which, when the fur’s flyin’, ain’t so easy to do.” He peered at the boy. “But it ain’t nuthin you haven’t done already. You did a fine job. However, what you’ve got there is an honest-to-God military M4, which means it’s select fire. Hand it here.” Jason did. Early double-checked to make sure the rifle was empty, then turned it so Jason could see the controls. “This is the safety. One click down, like this, and you’re good to go. Semi-auto, one bang per pull of the trigger. Push the selector all the way forward, and you’re in full-auto. Dump that whole thirty-round magazine in two seconds. You don’t want that, you won’t hit anything, and you’ll be out of ammo standin’ there with a stupid look on yer face.”

“Weasel’s MP5 is full auto.”

“And that boy is a tear-ass helluva shot, but even he gets a little trigger happy with his bullet hose sometimes. You, you stay on semi-auto, I’m only showing you the selector so that if you happen to get excited and push the switch too far forward, now you’ll know what you did, and that you need to move the switch back. Got me?”

“Yeah.” Jason still felt like throwing up at the thought of the gunfight. How scared he’d been. All the torn bodies, the blood… but instead he swallowed, and nodded. “I thought we couldn’t use their rifles. That they were a different caliber, and had tracking chips in them.”

“Not these, not the M4s. The new ones, with the molded plastic chassis with the built-in camo pattern.” Early frowned. A number of the soldiers they’d killed, maybe as many as a third, had been carrying older M4s, not the new modern M5 with the high-pressure cartridge. He’d thought the M4s had been completely mothballed. He wasn’t sure what that meant, if anything. And why the fuck were they toolin’ around the city in a Growler convertible?

There’d been Kestrels in the air most of the night, using their FLIR to scan houses, but the squad was far too experienced to be caught like that. They heard Growlers once, but they were no closer than a quarter mile away.

There was a rotating two-man watch throughout the night, and everyone else got what rest they could in the basement of the house underneath the heat-reflective sheeting. Most everyone was awakened by the dawn, but in a city filled with people who, for the most part, had nowhere to go and nothing to do, men on the move at six a.m. by itself was enough to draw attention. Ed’s plan was to wait until eight a.m. or so and have the squad begin slipping out in ones and twos, spread far apart, rifles held vertically alongside their bodies at first to confuse any airborne cameras. Everyone knew the basic route down to the general store, and if they got separated there was a rendezvous point a little more than halfway there.

However, not long after dawn they began hearing Kestrels. While none of them flew directly over the house, they were close, and appeared to be hunting. An hour after the first Kestrel made itself known they heard a Growler, then several more. The sound of their engines would fade. There would be quiet for fifteen or thirty minutes, sometimes even an hour, then the faint sound of one of their engines would drift back to the house. Then men hunkered in the basement, impatient.

“They still looking for us?” Weasel said incredulously. He checked his watch. Just after one p.m.

“We hurt ‘em bad,” Mark reminded him.

“What else do they have to do?” Quentin grumbled.

“This is why we left so early for such a short trip,” Ed said pointedly to Weasel. “Were you with us when we got stuck in that half-collapsed basement for two days?”

“Yeah.”

“We were standing in six inches of freezing water the whole time. Half of us got hypothermia.” He waved a hand around the dim basement. It stunk of unwashed men, but it was dry and significantly cooler than being outside. “This is like the Ritz Carlton compared to that.”

Not quite three hours later they heard distant gunfire. A lot of it. Semi-auto rifle fire, and answering full auto fire from what sounded like heavy weapons, and explosions, a lot of them. George went up to the second floor and listened for a while, then came back down to the basement.