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“I don’t care if you call me Ed or Sir or Luke Skywalker,” Ed told the young man. “What I care about is the squad. If George or I or Early, or anybody for that matter, tells you to do something, you do it. Don’t ask why, don’t think about it, just do it. You understand?” Jason nodded quickly.

George spoke up, voice low but full of steel. “You don’t know anything, and don’t think you do. And that’s just fine, everybody was green once. Look around. Ask questions if you need to. Keep up, stay quiet, and when the shooting starts watch what the other guys are doing and imitate them. Soldiers get eight weeks of basic training; we don’t have that luxury. You’re going to learn on the job. We do expect you to make mistakes at first.” He stepped close to the young man, and leaned forward. “At first, you understand me?”

Jason nodded quickly. The grizzled veteran did not appear reassured.

“Get some sleep.” There was just enough of a reflection for Ed’s eyes to be invisible behind the lenses of his glasses. “I want everybody sharp for tomorrow. Weasel!” Ed jerked his thumb at Jason. “Check out the kid’s gear. See what he’s got, throw away any dead weight, get him ready to run.”

“You got it, Captain.”

“Sweet dreams,” George growled at him as he turned away.

Weasel had Jason hold a small muted flashlight as he dug through the boy’s pack. “How many clothes you got?” Weasel muttered. “Hell, all you’ve got is clothes, I was hoping you’d have some food.”

“What does that mean?” Jason asked, gesturing at the letters inked on Weasel’s plate carrier above his rifle magazine pouches. LGBTNBBQ.

Weasel looked down to see what the kid was indicating, then looked up with a smile. “Liquor, Guns, Beer, Titties, and Bar-B-Que. Not necessarily in that order.”

“Oh. Uh, how often do you—do we—run into Army soldiers?” Jason asked.

Weasel’s shrug was almost missed in the dark. “We know where they’re headquartered, but we don’t have the numbers or equipment to take them on there, it’d pretty much be suicide, so we patrol and try to ambush them when they’re out looking for us. Or when they’re not. We’ve gone weeks without even seeing a soldier. And we’ve shot up two different convoys in the same day. You never know.” He sighed and looked at the kid.

“Look, what you’ve got in the city, what we do, this isn’t the ARF. The ARF’s out there with its divisions, Gators, Longhorns, everybody else, and they’re actually fighting the war, with tanks and planes and drones and, well, everything else that we don’t have. They’re the real soldiers. What we are is rats. We scurry around this shithole city, hiding in the dark, waiting for someone to walk by. When we see something, we dart in, bite the shit out of it, and disappear. What we’re doing isn’t going to win the war. What we are doing is keeping this city an open wound in the side of those assholes, one that hopefully keeps them weak and distracted from the real fight. Every soldier they station here is one more not on the front. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get your head blown off if you’re not paying attention. So pay fucking attention.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The rear three-quarters of the building was a high-ceilinged, single room machine shop. Most of the machines were gone now; the lathes, the mills, the grinders, even the chairs. All that was left of them were pale outlines on the grimy floor.

The tall, small-paned, steel-framed windows, greasy as they were, let in a lot of early morning light. Dust motes danced in the yellow glow like clouds of gnats. Jason sneezed once, then looked around to see if the sharp noise would get him in trouble. Most of the squad was scattered throughout the big room, gearing up to move out, and paid him no mind.

His urine, as it splashed onto the grate in the floor, was bright yellow. He knew what that meant, and as soon as he was zipped up took several deep swallows from his full canteen. He would’ve liked more, but everyone seemed paranoid about water—how much they had, where would they get more, would this or that rain trap still be in place. He had just the one canteen, and planned to make it last as long as he could.

Jason had been sleeping on the ground or hard floors for weeks but he still wasn’t used to it. Even using his pack as a pillow his back was stiff every morning, but the discomfort didn’t tame the fire he was feeling. Looking around at the others he felt scared and excited at the same time. By the light of day they didn’t seem so scary, but maybe that was just his initial shock wearing off. They looked competent enough. Not that he had any experience to judge them by.

Mark had roused Jason shortly after dawn with a hand on his shoulder. At first he couldn’t remember where he was—he’d been having a dream about that last fight with his father, where he’d grabbed the rifle, stuffed a few things into his pack, and stomped out. He wondered what his father would think if he could see him now. Probably nothing different, that Jason was making a mistake. His father thought that if he minded his own business the war would just go away and things would go back to normal. Of course they wouldn’t, couldn’t, but his father’s only political conviction seemed to be cowardice.

“Uh, Sir?” The word felt strange in his mouth. Ed was crosslegged underneath one of the windows, in shadow. Parts from a water purifier were strewn across yellowed newsprint on the floor before him. There was a pistol in a holster strapped to his thigh and its butt scraped on the concrete floor as he shifted his weight.

“Yes?” Ed didn’t look up. He picked up a small cylinder and looked at it dubiously, then blew into it.

“You said I should ask if I had any questions, and I, uh…” He was embarrassed to ask, which was stupid. It was a valid question. He was trusting his life to these people, wasn’t he? “How come we’re traveling during the day and not at night? Wouldn’t it be safer at night?”

The commander didn’t seem the least perturbed by the implied accusation inherent in the question. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Ed said. He peered at another small part. Beside him on the floor lay his ugly mottled rifle with what Jason thought was a silencer hanging off the muzzle, and an even uglier weapon. At least, Jason assumed it was a weapon. It resembled a break-top single-shot shotgun, but the proportions were all wrong. The barrel was too short, and far too fat. It was dark green, and the wood stock was scratched and dinged. He was already thought of as the new kid that didn’t know anything, and he didn’t want to reinforce that image by asking Ed what that thing was, so Jason bit his tongue.

Not too far away Mark was cleaning his weapon. He was in charge of their SAW, Squad Automatic Weapon, a small-caliber belt-fed machinegun, and he had it broken apart in pieces on the floor. Without looking up he said “Flurr.” Jason turned his head.

“That’s it,” Ed said.

“That’s what?”

“FLIR,” Ed repeated. “Forward, uh…”

“Looking,” Mark volunteered.

“Right. Forward Looking Infrared. The Army owns the sky, and all of their choppers, those Kestrels, have FLIR. You know what infrared is?”

“Heat, right?”

“Right. The FLIR cameras can find you ‘cause of your body heat. Doesn’t matter if you’re hiding behind bushes or have a camouflage tarp covering your body. The heat you’re giving off lights you up like fluorescent paint.”

“I’ve heard that if it’s cold enough they can even see your footprints,” Bobby chimed in from the corner, where he was pissing onto the grate.

“I don’t know about that,” Ed said. He looked at Jason. “But it only works when there’s a substantial difference in temperature between your body and its surroundings.”