George and Early strolled across the street, rifles held vertically at their sides, and struck up a conversation with the group in the parking lot of the gas station. Four men and two women, all thin and in dirty clothing, standing around a 55-gallon drum cut in half lengthwise. Both halves had been turned on their sides and were supported by metal frames that looked crudely handmade. Ed watched through the binos. The men eyed the rifles of the newcomers but that was about it. Ed knew there was a good chance every man there was carrying a concealed handgun. Or a knife. Or, more likely, both. After about a minute of conversation Early turned and gave them a wave.
Ed crossed last, with Jason. He felt horribly exposed and, perpetually tired as his legs were, wanted to sprint across the cracked pavement. Instead he forced himself to make slow, steady strides, carbine pressed against his side. George and Early were still standing in the parking lot, the rest of the squad having gone past them for the cover of the nearby houses.
“How many more you got in those woods over there, it’s like a clown car,” the man tending the barbecue said to Ed with a smile. “How about you, you hungry?” He gestured at the meat on the grill. Jason’s mouth watered at the smell. “I’d be willing to bet you gentlemen have something worthwhile to trade.”
“Fella’s a born salesman, won’t take no for an answer,” Early said out of the corner of his mouth.
“Or if you’re interested in satisfying another kind of hunger…” the man said, gesturing at the two women beside him. Ed looked at them. The two women were war skinny and had the haunted eyes of people who’d seen too much. One of them smiled at him, the smile not reaching her eyes, and lifted her shirt. Jason’s eyes bulged at the sight of her naked breasts. “The boy here seems like he might be interested.”
“Appreciate the offer, but we’ve got places to be,” Ed said. He had to grab Jason by the shoulder and pull him along, to the accompaniment of laughter.
“You didn’t want any?” Jason said to him as they walked across the lot. “The meat I mean. That smelled really good.” Although the sight of the woman’s small breasts were burned into his brain.
“You see any cows around here?” Ed asked him. “Or chickens?”
Jason blinked and looked around reflexively before realizing it was a rhetorical question. “Ummm…”
“The city’s filled with all sorts of small game, squirrels, rabbits, rats, pigeons, pheasants, turkey, geese, even deer, but none of the locals know how to hunt for shit. What they do know is how to breed dogs, and that’s what was on that grill, since you didn’t notice. Puppy. Puppies.” He turned his head, his eyes boring into Jason’s. His voice became steel. “We do not eat dog.”
A quick stroll across the parking lot and then they were in a neighborhood thick with one story brick-and-siding houses built in the 1950s. Most of the houses had wrought iron bars over the doors and windows for security, back when random street crime was the biggest worry of the residents.
Almost all of the back yards were enclosed with either low chain link or tall wooden fences, often leaning drunkenly. The houses were set close to the street, which meant the front yards were small and very open, with few trees. Some of them were even mown, or at least trimmed. The squad moved as fast as it could, split into two columns on opposite sides of the street, feeling exposed. Two blocks south and east they moved into a community of smaller homes, in much poorer condition. Here the lawns were untended, and there were more trees, but still Ed led the squad south quickly, trying to put distance between them and the city limits just in case someone had spotted them crossing.
At first, Jason had found it odd. The men of the squad would be walking together, sometimes for hours, and never say a word. Only communicate with hand signals. When there was talking, it was whispering and murmuring, the men’s heads nearly pressed together. But he’d very quickly gotten used to it. More than used to it, he understood it. Absent the white noise of vehicular traffic, the city around them, apart from the sounds of nature, was shockingly quiet. A human voice at normal conversational volume carried on the air a surprising distance, as did any loud sounds—an engine, shouting, gunshots.
A mile south they crossed over “Lucky” without incident. They left the shelter of houses and entered a large, quarter-mile-square section of undeveloped land that was nothing but waving grass and thick tangles of trees and brush.
Ed had no idea if there used to be something on the piece of property, or if it was land set aside for a project that had never come to fruition, but the chain link fence around the periphery was so old most of it hung like ripped shower curtains from the supporting crossbar. They jogged across the four lanes of Lucky, slipped through a split in the rusty chain link, then strode through a line of mature maples just inside the fence line. Past the trees were a hundred yards of open grass, knee high, and beyond that a thick patch of woods.
The squad moved through the grass quickly, at five-meter intervals, their pantlegs swishing. In less than a minute they had all moved out of sight under the trees. Inside the tree line they tightened up their distance, and George took the lead. He knew from studying the map that a thousand feet ahead of them, through the patch of woods, was the border of another neighborhood. An old one, with tree cover so complete the houses were nearly invisible to passing aircraft or satellites, at least to the naked eye.
They were weaving between trees, moving up a slight slope in an arrowhead formation, the first house just visible in front of them through the wild green tangles—an attractive edifice with a fieldstone exterior—when Ed abruptly raised a fist. Everyone froze.
Ed cocked his head. He’d heard something. Something bigger than a squirrel. Something close. He gave a quick gesture and the men quickly and quietly moved to cover behind tree trunks, raising their weapons. Weasel happened to be standing in a slight depression and he slowly sank to his belly, disappearing into the grass and ferns.
Ed exchanged a look with George, forty feet away. George had heard it too. Both men shouldered their rifles and peered around the trees they’d chosen for cover. The ground between the trees was not open but rather snarled with bushes and saplings and clumps of grass, all of it deeply shadowed by the canopies of leaves above.
Ed peered into the foliage, hearing a faint snuffling. His thumb moved the selector switch on his rifle from Safe to Fire, and he felt fresh sweat pop out all over his already damp body.
Leaves swayed, a dead branch crunched, and then a furred snout emerged from a thick tangle of raspberry bushes twenty feet ahead. Ed blinked, at first not sure what he was seeing in the dim light under the trees. The fur was various shades of brown, giving the animal a kind of natural camouflage, and its snout was wide. Not an enemy soldier, then. Breathing easier, Ed was just starting to wonder what kind of dog it was when the animal pushed the rest of its body through the thorny bramble with a loud grunt. Everyone on the squad froze at the sight of the massive bear.
Its head was the size of a basketball, and there was a big hump above its shoulders. The light under the trees had disguised its size at first, but as it emerged from the bushes the immense size of the animal was unmistakable. It was chewing something, and its big head swayed from side to side. Then its nose shot up and sniffed. After a half second pause, the animal stood up on its hind legs and swiveled its head to look directly at George, who was closest to it. A sound halfway between snort and growl crawled its way out of the animal’s throat. Its fur was long and thick and medium brown.