“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.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“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.
They crossed Greenfield in pairs. The first two—Quentin and Ed—darted across, and spent five minutes checking the large building and the area around the parking lot, making sure it was clear. Then Ed cupped his hand around his flashlight and hit the button briefly. At the signal, two more figures broke from the fence line on the far side and dashed across the road. They were hard to see in the charcoal light of late dusk.
George dashed across last on his own. Then they closed up, arranged themselves in two columns, and slowly began working their way west through the neighborhood there. Backyards were more hidden from view, but climbing over fences in the dark was a great way to get a stupid injury, and maybe meet up with a pet dog, so they stalked along the front of the houses on either side of a side street, making good time. They stepped through tall lawn grass and hugged the overgrown bushes that decorated the front of most houses, but still felt very exposed even in the dark.
It was not late, and in the fresh dark they heard voices from time to time and saw twice the glow of fires in backyards reflecting off aluminum siding. The smell of cooking meat made all their mouths water.
The men moved quietly through the humid night air, working their way through one neighborhood into another. The houses grew larger, two story colonials, aluminum siding above brick, most with attached two car garages. There were very few cars visible on the street or in the driveways, and Mark, bringing up the rear with the SAW, his feet inside his battered boots hurting (as usual), wondered how many drivable cars were in the garages, and if any of them had gasoline.
After three quarters of a mile Ed brought the group to a halt, briefly consulted with George, and then turned the group dead south on the next street. Ed figured they were far enough removed from the Growlers positioned on Leprechaun, and the crash site now nearly two miles distant, to begin heading south once more. But, aside from all that, the main issue was Slash. Unlike the Ditch, Slash was still in use, one of the approved travel corridors through the city. It ran from the suburbs to the northwest all the way down to the center of the city and the riverfront. Not that it saw a lot of traffic, but its lanes were kept clear of debris. There weren’t a whole lot of bridges across it, and all of them would put the squad out in the open in the time it took to cross.
The residential street dead-ended at a cross-street, and directly across from them was the long narrow parking lot of a former elementary school. The school was long since abandoned, every window broken, the parking lot empty. To the west the lot bordered a small residential subdivision. George took the lead and the men, in single file, followed him along the grass verge between the parking lot on the east and the back yards of the houses to the west. Most of the yards had chain link fences separating their property from the school, but bushes growing out of control and untended for the better part of a decade had swallowed the fence line. Where the chain link was visible it had been distended by the wild foliage into a twisting coil resembling a DNA strand.
The parking lot ran for over five hundred feet, and beyond that was waist-high grass covering several flat acres, the site of an adjacent school that had never been built. The men hugged the overgrown fence line, their legs swishing through the grass, walking slowly, looking in every direction, listening intently.
As they made their way toward the end of the fence line the moon came out from behind the clouds. It was still a slender crescent but bathed the open field around them with cool light.
Just beyond where the fence ended, south of the small neighborhood, a small rise blocked their view southward. The rise was a man-made ridge, about fifteen feet tall, and ran east to west.