Cheeks bulging with fries, Sunnie shook her head.
“Suicide-by-bridge? Building?” Using her teeth, Mavis ripped more ketchup packets open. Boy did that sound cold. True, but cold. Suicides hit the ten-percent mark last week. The head-shrinkers predicted the number might rise to twenty-five percent by the end of the year.
Almost as deadly as the flu.
“No.” Sunnie raised her soda toward the screen.
Mavis pushed a pickle further under her bun. “What then?”
“North Korea.” Sunny tucked another helping of fries inside her mouth. “They’re threatening military action, saying the epidemic was a terrorist attack by the US.”
Sweet Jesus! Why did fools have to think everything was a terrorist attack? Couldn’t Mother Earth just be pissed off at the polluters clinging to her skin? “How in the world do they plan to fight with half their soldiers dead?”
Sunnie’s brow furrowed. “Half? I thought the Redaction only had a thirty-five percent fatality rate.”
Doubts bubbled through Mavis’s chest and emerged as humorless chuckles.
“That’s the official body count.” But the classified satellite photos told a far different story. Asia was on fire, and it showed in the smoke permeating the air from Alaska to Florida and the haze swallowing the Phoenix skyline. “The Dear Leader underreports bad news.”
Or maybe his thugs had burned so many citizens alive in the cities, they didn’t count them as Influenza casualties. But still… to blame someone else for a world-wide pandemic was new level of insanity for Pyongyang. Swiveling on the bench seat, Mavis drew the straw to her mouth and pulled hard on her shake. Although the TV’s volume remained low, she read the newscaster’s lips. The sweet, cold creamy taste turned to ash on her tongue.
“Not just military action. If the US doesn’t give into their reparation demands, there’ll be war.”
Chapter Two
The cot groaned as David Dawson hunched over the acoustic guitar in his lap. His thumb plucked at the string while he adjusted the silver peg heads. For a moment, the repeated notes mingled with the snores of his two sleeping barrack mates before escaping out the tent’s open window and lost themselves in the snap of an unsecured flap.
David strummed his guitar softly before using his nails to pick out the notes of a lullaby. The music swelled against the canvas of the Tent Expandable Modular PERsonnel barracks. Closing his eyes, he blocked out all thoughts of the TEMPER quarters and lost himself in the melody.
No more empty spaces in place of unnecessary cots. No more garbage bags for over-ripe corpses. No more refrigerated trucks needing rotting bodies to be unloaded and dumped into dirt pits—mass graves of the forgotten.
Forgotten.
His fingers stumbled over G. Before the discordant note faded, he opened his eyes. Hell, he had no one to remember him even before the Redaction took half his unit. More than half. Sixty-three percent to be exact. He had to wear two copper bracelets to have enough room to etch every name.
God must be a woman to pick and choose so illogically who stayed and who was called home.
His right hand silently played the rest of the song while his left hung from the guitar’s ribs. Why leave him behind? Gutierrez had a wife and baby daughter. Martin had two orphaned sons. Washington had his bride.
He had the service.
And soon even that would be gone.
Sweat beaded on his lip. Four months of civilian life. One hundred and six days out of the Army, and he’d signed up with the National Guard. He loved those weekends and looked forward to the two-week duty. But it wasn’t enough time in uniform. Not nearly enough to fill the white noise of freedom or the stretch of meaningless down time.
If it hadn’t been for the Redaction…
He licked his lips, tasted the fear above the salt. Soon, they’d muster him out again.
Too soon.
Removing the pick from the strap, David switched to a Jim Croce song. He rocked to the rhythm, but his heart thudded to a different beat. The thick, full notes weighted with the emptiness of his future. He’d take up fishing in the summer and hunting in the winter.
And the other two seasons?
He strummed harder.
Six cots away, Michelson snorted in his sleep and rolled over. His hand covered his eyes, blocking out the twilight.
David forced himself to ease up, to tease the notes from the string, instead of bullying them out. Maybe he’d travel the country. Visit every national park, every scenic wonder, and every large ball of twine in every territory, federal district and state.
That might fill up a few years, but then what was he supposed to do?
Forty-five was too fucking young to retire.
And he refused to become a mercenary. A real man needed a mission not money.
Light flooded the vestibule at the end of the sixty-four foot long tent. Moments later, the plywood door hit the shock-cord. The impact rippled along canvas.
“ShitFuckDamn!”
Private Robertson must be having a good day to use only three swear words.
Smiling, David continued into the song’s last refrain. At the Redaction’s peak, the North Carolina private had gotten up to twelve by his count. Gutierrez had argued that Robertson’s record was seven because he’d repeated many words in Spanish.
Robertson hadn’t sworn the day they’d shipped Gutierrez’s body back to Sierra Vista.
“Yo, Big D!” Private Robertson strutted into the barracks. His military gait interrupted by the cocky hitch he adopted when off-duty.
David stopped the song before the last chord finished resonating though the guitar. Well shit! If Robertson was calling him Big D, he might be in for a seven-swear word night. “That’s Sergeant Major Dawson to you, Private.”
“Yes, Sir. Big D, Sir!” Robertson snapped to attention and saluted like he was performing for a five-star general before flashing his palm. The camouflage t-shirt of his Active Combat Uniform stretched tight across his muscled chest and rode up the bulging biceps.
David checked the urge to laugh. That would only encourage the private’s bad behavior. Not that he needed much. If the kid wasn’t such a top-notch soldier, his mouth would have gotten him busted down to swamp gas the day he enlisted, almost had on the day he came under David’s command.
“You retarded, Private? Must be to keep calling me, sir. I work for a living.” Hugging the guitar to his chest, David glanced at the black-haired, blue-eyed devil who had kept up the group’s morale while on grave duty. “Let me make this simple. My first name’s Sergeant, last name’s Major. Got that, you ass?”
Robertson winked. “That’s me, Big D. I’m an ass man. Big asses, little asses.” He cupped his big hands in front of his body and thrust his hips forward suggestively. “I’d tap practically any ass, so long as it’s not a real ass. Not into none of that bestiality shit.”
David cleared his throat. Yep, the kid took any word as encouragement. “Is there a point somewhere in your ramblings?”
“Not a point exactly, Big D. But my sword is long and thick.” He stopped pumping his hips, threw back his head and ran his hands up his chest. “Makes the ladies scream, ‘enough, oh God, enough.’“ Even white teeth flashed and dimples dented both of his cheeks. “It’s why you all should call me G instead of—”
“Rubberman?” David pinched the bridge of his nose before the throbbing flooded his head. “The man who bounces from subject to subject?”
Robertson snorted and crossed his muscular arms over his chest. His ACU’s stretched taut. “Yeah, well, you’re the dog who chases the chicks with double-D’s and above.”
“I’m Big D, for Top Dog.” David shook his head, knowing he should let the comment pass. He liked breasts—small ones as well as large. What straight man didn’t? “I’m in charge of Jack-wagons like you.”