Ed’s mouth dropped open. On its back legs the bear had to be ten feet tall, and looked as wide as a garage. His mind quivered in place for a moment. He had no idea what you were supposed to do when confronted by a bear. Not run away, he was pretty sure bears viewed that as an invitation to attack.
Making a decision, George stepped out from behind the tree. He didn’t want to be seen as trying to hide. He gestured with his hand still behind the tree; show yourselves.
Taking a deep breath, Ed stepped out from his tree. The giant bear swiveled its eyes toward him, startled, then toward Mark farther back as the big man moved out from behind the two-trunked oak he’d been behind. Then it saw Jason, and Quentin. Then Early. When Weasel slowly rose from the grass, seemingly out of nowhere, the bear made a loud sound, almost a bark, of displeasure. It sank back down to all fours and slowly, insouciantly, turned around and padded off, stopping several times to look over its shoulder at the squad. For as huge as the creature was it made almost no noise pushing through the underbrush.
Keeping his eyes and his rifle trained on the spot in the brush where the bear had disappeared, Ed waved for the squad to move. He heard them behind him, heading for the house. After waiting another minute Ed began heading that way too, walking backward, rifle butt still against his shoulder. He found George next to him, and the duo backed up together, slowly, carefully, all the way to the house, where they found Mark covering them with the belt-fed SAW.
The house was empty and smelled dusty. The squad collapsed in the main room.
“Jesus fuck, I need a minute,” George gasped, his face white. “I nearly had a goddamn heart attack. That bear was big as a car.”
“What do you think that thing weighed?” Jason marveled.
“I think that was a grizzly,” Quentin said.
“Eight hundred, a thousand pounds,” Early estimated. “I think it was a grizzly too.” He had more experience hunting prior to the war than the rest of the squad combined.
“We could have killed him easy, right?” Jason said, looking around at all the weaponry.
“Not before he made at least one of us into a chew toy,” Mark said with a grim smile. He looked over and saw Ed’s hands quivering. “You okay?”
Ed shook his head as he pulled out a canteen and took a sip. “Years ago somebody told a story about how they’d run into a lion patrolling the east side, but I always assumed it was horseshit. I think I might owe him an apology now.”
“You think it walked all the way down from up north?” Jason asked.
“You mean like you? More likely it escaped from the zoo. Like that lion, if that story’s real. Zoo’s only ten miles from here.”
“Man, I haven’t thought about the zoo in years,” Mark said. “I know it’s shut down now, but did they close it, or just abandon it? You think they let all the animals loose?” He couldn’t believe the vets and everyone else who worked there tending the animals would just leave them in their pens to starve. “Anyone know?” He just got shaking heads and shrugs.
“Could a lion survive the winter? The snow?” Jason wondered.
“Like we didn’t have enough shit to worry about in this shithole,” Weasel said. “Now it’s lions and tigers and motherfucking bears. Oh my.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Combat made you expect the unexpected, to make plans but assume they would fall apart at the first gunshot, but still, a bear? Ed had thought he’d seen it all, after nearly a decade of fighting, but the bear had been something else entirely. For some reason it made him remember one of the first “unexpected” incidents of the war, or at least his part of the war. When he really hadn’t known anything, but still, apparently, had been very lucky…
The street had been quiet and nearly empty all day. A few pedestrians had scurried down the sidewalks as fast as their legs could carry them, obviously aware just how dangerous their neighborhood had become. Most of the homes looked undamaged until you got close and saw how few of the windows sported whole panes. Half the houses were bungalows and half were a full two stories, almost all of them clad in brown or red brick, and it was difficult to see bullet holes in dark brick from more than ten feet away. More than one fierce firefight had swept through these streets. While the conventional battle was long over, almost none of the area residents had returned, even though their homes (compared to some in the city) were relatively undamaged.
At the far end of the block squatted an ugly two-story house of brown brick. From the outside it appeared unremarkable, except perhaps for the fact that it was surrounded on all sides by shorter bungalows. A person looking out its second-floor windows would have an unrestricted view in every direction.
The men inside the house had arrived just after dark the night before and were getting tired of waiting. There were twelve of them in the house, for the most part bloodied veterans of the guerilla war not yet eight months old. The night before they’d sent out two eyeball drones and kept a quiet watch in shifts, peeking out past the sheets tacked to the inside of the empty window frames. Once the sun came out they could move around a bit inside the shadowed rooms, but no one was about to relax south of the border. They still kept watch, but now it was for their informant. He wasn’t late, not yet, but the waiting wasn’t doing anybody any good.
The twelve-man team was the lead element in what really was the first organized probe of Army-occupied territory since the combat at the start of the ground war. The two sides had been trading fire every day since the shooting began, but organized groups larger than one or two six- to eight-man squads were something the Army hadn’t really seen since their decisive victory in the eight-day city-wide battle at the beginning of hostilities. Up-armored pickup trucks had proved no match for the military’s tanks and armored personnel carriers.
This, however, was a recon in force, numerous twelve-man teams moving south in a loose arrowhead formation, going slow and quiet, avoiding contact, gathering intelligence, their ultimate goal a hit and run on the armory/fuel depot near the city’s geographic center. The men were organized into squad-sized cells but the official ARF Irregulars designation, much less the “dogsoldier” moniker, had yet to be coined.
They’d been on the move south for four and a half days, inside the city limits for the last three. The teams kept in contact via frequency-hopping transmitters they were pretty sure were impossible for the Army to home in on. Still, to be safe, they kept transmissions to a bare minimum and relocated immediately whenever possible. It was still early enough in the game that neither side was really sure of what the other was capable of. The government had beaten down the rebels almost everywhere, although at great loss of life, and their thinking was that the war, such as it was, would be over shortly. The newly-reorganized guerrillas hoped to prove them wrong.
All but one of the teams had seen at least one Army patrol. Military presence on the street was a lot higher then. Buttoned-up columns of two to four vehicles was the norm, winding through the rubble-strewn streets at a slow walk, usually led by a poorly armored Growler way out front to draw hasty fire. In a city where every block held a thousand places for a sniper to hide the Army troops had experienced a rekindled love for armor. The lead vehicle was followed by at least one IMP flanked by dismounted infantry to check the buildings to either side. While these patrols weren’t difficult to surprise, at the first shot the army troops would pile into the backs of the IMP’s, button up, then use their heavy weapons to level every building in sight. One sure sign of a veteran patrol was armor crawling down not one but two parallel streets while the dismounted troops searched the yards and houses in-between. This U-shaped formation was hard to evade without being spotted and impossible to ambush effectively, but wasn’t seen as often because it was slower and more work for the troops. Luckily none of the six teams had been spotted on the way down, although there’d been a few close calls.