Ed planned to leave the squad in the shadows of the overgrown bushes and trees behind the houses to head up the slope for a peek south. Then he heard the gunfire. One gunshot, then a second, then several. Then a brief burst of automatic weapons fire. All of it quite distant. He cocked his head, then looked at George. George looked back at him and shrugged.
Using hand signals Ed had the squad spread out, then advance into the grass and up the slope. Going prone wasn’t an option, the grass was too tall, but Ed took a knee just below the top of the rise and peered over, George on one side of him, Mark on the other.
The ridge they were on ran along the northern edge of a sea of grass. The patch was nearly square and a quarter mile long on each side. At the very southern end of the square was a large building, formerly the home of a TV station before the government shut most of them down. There was a massive, thousand-foot antenna on the northwest corner of the building in front of them, and sabotage early in the war had brought that down. It lay crumpled on the ground like the accusing finger of a witch, pointing west. When the resistance started posting home addresses of politicians online, and several were murdered, a few in front of their families, the government mostly abandoned the concept of free speech. The only local media source still in operation was a combined TV and radio center located inside the Blue Zone and it only broadcast government-approved news.
North of the building was a drainage pond over one hundred feet wide. Presumably to hide the unsightly station from the residents (as the station didn’t generate any noise that needed to be blocked) there were man-made ridges running along the west, north, and east sides of the property, with clumps of trees here and there. Thanks to the bright moon and their elevated position the men of the squad could see across the vast expanse of grass, the drainage pond, and beyond.
“Where…?” Ed murmured.
After a brief pause, George pointed. Ed looked down the man’s arm, then grabbed his Czech-made Meopta binoculars.
Even though it was dark his binoculars collected light and he could see better through their eight-power magnified lenses than his own eyes in the dark. The TV station sat on the north side of a major east-west road, codenamed Felix. On the far side of Felix was another vacant field and past that some parking lots. Standing proud and isolated past that flat earth were what everyone called The Twins, but was officially The Sapphire. Two matching 18-story apartment buildings with a connecting ground-floor café/convenience store. There was another single and even larger apartment building a quarter mile to the northeast, but that building had burned early on in the war. Many people had died in the vicious fire. The Twins, on the other hand, even at this late date, were still full of residents. Just a handful compared to how many had lived there before the war, but those who had remained had forged a cooperative existence. There were gardens on the balconies and roofs.
From where they crouched on the grassy slope The Twins were half a mile away and clearly visible in the crisp moonlight. The Growlers Ed had spotted earlier at the intersection of Felix and Leprechaun were in the parking lot below the towers, and the gunfire they’d heard was rising in volume. Through the binoculars Ed could see muzzle flashes. Isolated shots out of windows halfway up the western tower, presumably down at the Army vehicles. Heavy return fire, some of it on full automatic. In the otherwise quiet night the gunfire reports rolled over the dark suburbs like thunder.
“The hell’s going on over there?” Mark said quietly, squinting to make out details.
“Why does it sound wrong?” Jason asked Early. He was staring at the scene half a mile away, and his young eyes allowed him to clearly see the details of the Growlers, and the muzzle flashes, but the sound of the gunfire didn’t match up.
“Sound wrong? Oh!” Early said, suddenly understanding. “It’s science, actually. The sound of the gunshots don’t match up to what you’re seeing because the light from the muzzle flash travels at the speed of light. The sound from the gunshots travels at the speed of sound, which is something like a thousand feet per second. Speed of light is a couple hundred thousand miles per second or something crazy like that. Close up, say from across the street, you won’t notice anything, but the further away you are from the fighting, the more of a difference you’ll see. You’ll see the shot before you hear it. That’s also a good way to tell if the person shooting at you is close or far, as bullets travel faster than the speed of sound. If the sound of the bullet hitting nearby comes at the same time as the gunshot, they’re close. If the bullet hits and you have to wait a second or more to hear the gunshot… well, then you know you’ve got a sniper to deal with.”
The men lined up along the ridge saw a long staccato flash from the Growlers, and after a pause the deep bass of the heavy machinegun firing reached them.
“Somebody got pissed off,” Quentin observed.
“That a .50?” Weasel asked.
Quentin nodded. “Roof mounted on a Growler, I’d bet.”
“Kestrel!” George hissed. He’d heard it a second before he saw it, swooping in from the south. The helicopter was running dark. It came in low over the giant abandoned mall to the southeast, circled around to the north side of The Twins, and then suddenly there were flashes and contrails. The front of the apartment building exploded. Bricks and glass showered the parking lot from the missiles impacting the sixth and seventh floors. Then the Kestrel let loose with its minigun. At 2000 RPM, with every fifth round a tracer, the bullets leaping from the six-barreled cannon looked like a reddish-orange laser beam running from the front of the aircraft to the face of the apartment tower. When the sound hit them it sounded like a giant ripping a phone book in half.
“Time to go!” Ed said, biting back more profanity. They wouldn’t be heading south for a while, not with all that activity. He jabbed his hand toward the west. The men slid backward down the hill, got to their feet, and headed through the grass.
Jason looked back wistfully, wanting to watch the action, but couldn’t see over the hill. Instead he followed Early through the tall grass toward more dark houses.
There were more houses past the grassy TV station property, as well as a condo complex filled with duplex units. Past that… Ed wracked his brain, trying to remember the map he stared at so often. The entire area to the west of the sunken freeway was residential. Wall to wall houses. There were a lot of old neighborhoods two miles west of where they were now, choked with mature trees that hindered aerial observation. The squad had one… no, two houses in the area they used, as well as a couple of rainwater catches. If they were in place and undisturbed. Of course, they still weren’t heading south, but they also hadn’t been spotted by any Army units either. At that thought he heard the sound of the Kestrel’s minigun letting loose again.
PART II
THE CITY
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)