“So I’ve heard,” George replied with a smile. He checked his watch, then pointedly looked at Ed, who nodded.
They’d been inside the house for an hour. Longer than Ed had first intended, but they’d heard Kestrels passing nearby twice, and he was loathe to head outside when helicopters were in the air close enough to hear.
“Haven’t had electricity but three weeks this year, but the water’s running two or three days a week. ‘Course, you still have to boil it. I’d offer you some, but it’s been four days since I got a trickle out of a faucet. I would like a favor to ask of you boys, though, before you leave,” their host said from his chair. “Might sound a bit odd.”
“Try us,” Early said, leaning on a door frame, letting Willis lick the watermelon juice off his fingers. The dog was very friendly as well as being seriously arthritic.
“If any of you feel the urge to do your business before you get on the road, I’d be obliged if you could do it around the corner,” he pointed, “where I’ve got a compost pile. Every little bit helps.”
Early’s face split in a huge smile. “Well, Sir, folks have been telling me my whole life I’m full o’ shit, it’s about time I finally put that to good use.” George snorted and Ed shook his head.
Before they headed out, Ed took a moment to talk to the entire squad. They were all hurting, some more than others. It wasn’t the first time they’d had a casualty, but it had been quite some time since Theodore had suffered a loss, and they’d all been feeling lucky. Untouchable. Especially after Weasel’s close call with the Toad.
“Bobby was a good man, and he will be sorely missed,” he said to their solemn faces. He traded a look with Quentin, and squeezed Weasel’s arm. “As will everyone we lost today. Franklin was as good as they get, and if it wasn’t for Arnold, that magnificent bastard, we’d all be dead too.” He paused. “A whole squad, plus one, is a stiff price to pay for a Kestrel, but don’t think they scored a walk-off home run on us. Maybe losing that one bird, that one thirty million dollar bird, will put a hole in their air coverage that will save lives tomorrow or the day after. Either way, we don’t have time to grieve. Not now. We’ve got a mission.” He paused, then his voice got steely.
“Are you dragging? Are you tired? Sad? Want to quit, go home, take a long nap, have a good cry? Make it personal. Remember the names of the men who died today, fighting for freedom. Remember their jokes, their laughter, the things they did that annoyed the fuck out of you. Remember their bloody, burned faces. Bring that pain, that hurt, that outrage at the unfairness of it all with you wherever you go. Make it personal. Because if you don’t keep that fire in your belly, the enemy will kill you, and getting killed is about as personal as it gets.” He looked around the squad, and Jason was shocked by the anger on the man’s face. “And if we all keep our heads on straight, maybe we’ll get an opportunity to fucking avenge them. We clear?” He got a chorus of yessirs and thumbs up.
Half an hour earlier they’d heard the muted rumble of several Growlers rolling down a street nearby to the north, but then nothing. “Haven’t heard a Kestrel in ten, maybe fifteen minutes,” Early said, staring out the window. “And it was way the hell off, at least a mile and a half.” All of them had become experts at gauging the distance of armor and aircraft.
“Twelve minutes,” George said, glancing at his big watch. It was solar powered and GPS enabled, although several times a day it lost all connection to the commercial GPS satellites. He didn’t know if that’s because the army was jamming their signal, they were being routed away from the city, they’d been downed as part of the war effort… So many questions, so few answers.
“We’ll separate into two groups, but I want to stay line of sight. Leprechaun is just a couple hundred yards west of here,” George told them, using the nickname for the major road that paralleled “The President” a mile to the west. “I want to cross it, then start heading south.”
“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.”