“I only gave him half a shot,” Cargo said.
“Right. Cover that with a sheet,” Landrum indicated the corpse. “Grab the boy, I’ve got Mom, we’ll dump them on the couch so they don’t wake up in the same room with him.”
It would be impossible to spare the two civilians the grief and horror of losing their scumbag father and husband this way. They’d wake up and find him, dead. However, the Recalma did more than get them quiet without killing them. It disrupted neurotransmitters in the brain in a way that prevented long-term memories from forming. Completely. The vision of seeing Tyler killed right in front of their eyes wouldn’t be repressed. It simply wouldn’t be there. At all.
A long time ago, there had been a saying that you couldn’t un-see things. Modern medicine had a cure for that, if you got there right on the spot. These two wouldn’t remember the last one to three days. There were several drugs that could do it. Recalma had the advantage of being fast, complete, and neutralizing all the adrenaline and related stress hormones and effects.
It was easier to get men to take the shot when they knew that any civilians watching could unsee it, after all.
While they’d close the door as best they could, it might get pretty cold in here before morning. They piled all the blankets and stuff they could easily find on top of the two survivors, placing them right next to each other for shared body heat. On the top, Cargo put a red and blue patchwork quilt with rocking horses that he’d found in the kid’s room. He noticed absently that it looked like good work — something Grandma Wendy would like. The boy was lucky somebody had cared enough to make it for him.
“She punched me. On an op. For no damn reason. Twice!” George Schmidt danced around the court, dodging Tommy Sunday to land a nice shot through the hoop. “Nothing but net,” he crowed.
The gym they were in only had enough light to see clearly because it had a lot of high-up windows, many of which gaped, empty of glass. The shards scattered around the edges of the court revealed that the breakage had come from outside. The stray rocks lying around suggested its cause. Someone, or someones, had been awfully bored. That the vandalism was old, or had at least started long ago, showed from the water stains down the cinderblock walls and the warped and rotting edges of the floor boards under the breakages. George had taken one side of the room, Cally the other, when they arrived, just to make sure that every breakage was old. The gym was in one of many post-war ghost towns. Farming continued in the open land around the town, but large agribusiness had gotten larger with the post-war hybrid technologies. Hectares of waving wheat went from seed to harvest without a single human setting foot on the fields. Smart machines and engineered seed took care of all that.
In the heartland, the breadbasket of the world, agribusiness ruled. Where you could really see it was in the scores of ghost towns dotted all over the Midwest. The disadvantage of a ghost town for dropping any tails was that any car turning off a route or highway stuck out like a sore thumb. The advantage was that because cars back in town were so rare, it was hard for a tail to hide.
He could watch the roads into and out of town, but he could not watch every little tractor and truck trail the farmers used to use. The plan was to loop around and hit a road some small distance out from the town. Their tracks would be found, of course, but by then they hoped to have confused the trail and slipped away.
Meanwhile, Harrison and Sands were out in an ancient utility shed in the backyard of the slowly collapsing house next door repainting the car. Cally was making lunch on an ancient Coleman camp stove they had found, unaccountably half full of fuel, in said shed. She had appointed herself cook on the grounds that Harrison was the only other team member who could fix a decent meal from their box of supplies in the trunk. She had declared that she wasn’t going to eat sandwiches twice in one day if she could help it.
Hence, George and Tommy were free for a little quick PT with an old ball that it had taken Harrison about five minutes to repair, and George was free to vent about his beaut of a black eye.
“What had happened just before that?” Tommy asked, shooting carelessly over the short man’s head. To his chagrin, he missed and his opponent recovered on the rebound. He concentrated more on the game while Schmidt filled in the details of their heroic egress from the Greenville Police Station.
“Oh. So she was taking a guy down and you inserted yourself to help. Yep. That’d do it.” Tommy intercepted the ball in the air and shot again; this time he made it. “What the hell is it with you two?” he asked.
When George started to say something, Tommy just shook his head, grinning. “I know James Stewart,” he said. “You do not want to let him catch you cuddling up to his wife.”
“Cuddling up to her? Half the time I want to strangle her,” the other man said.
“You two are so junior high.” Tommy missed the grab and watched as the ball dropped through the basket from another of Schmidt’s seemingly effortless shots. Schmidt was good enough, despite his height, that the game of one on one wasn’t nearly as mismatched as it might have seemed.
“You want to fuck her. Join the club. You can’t. She thinks you’re cute, so it’s worse. You still can’t. End of story, grow the fuck up,” the big man said, but he said it in such a matter-of-fact tone that it was impossible to take offense.
“She thinks I’m cute?” George echoed.
“Dude. James Stewart’s wife. You’re damn good, but he’s better. I wouldn’t. And she won’t, anyway.”
“But she thinks I’m cute.” The little blond man missed his shot by a mile, letting Sunday recover the ball for an easy lay-up.
“You’re hopeless,” Sunday pronounced. “Just find somebody else to screw and behave yourself until it wears off. And if you don’t, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He focused and dropped another one right in. “That’s ten. My game.”
“What do you mean ‘join the club’?” Schmidt asked suspiciously as they walked off the court.
“Don’t look at me. You’ve seen my Wendy. There’s a club, all right. I didn’t say I was in it.”
“You didn’t say you weren’t.”
Tommy set the ball down by the door to the old locker room, which, unlike the gym itself, was dark as hell. They just had to go through there to get to the lobby of the building. “Hopeless,” he repeated.
The gym at the base had water fountains on two sides. Miraculously, the chiller on one of them even worked. Aluminum bleachers stood collapsed against the walls on each side of the basketball court. The curtain at the far end of said court was open, leaving a good view of exercise machines, a free weight section, and a compressed obstacle course. All were in use, as was the matted martial arts area. The DAGgers on base, even the ones who were Bane Sidhe first, coped with their enforced idleness in a way that kept them fit, busy, and not coincidentally, together. PT was a near religion for them and, like people turn to faith and each other in times of trouble, the DAGgers immersed themselves in PT schedules that were frankly brutal, raising protests from the medics who they kept busy with over-training injuries. Bane Sidhe sports medicine, as a result of decades of Tchpth patronage and lack of Darhel interference, was leagues ahead of their prior experience. With fear of injury greatly reduced, the men took full advantage of their extended envelope. They did, at least, readily share the facilities with the permanent denizens of the base and the dependents.
The Bane Sidhe field operatives, however, made it subtly clear that they were sharing their facilities with DAG. With the large number of DAGgers who had started as Bane Sidhe, and the others having witnessed the performance of the upgraded field operatives, especially the women, this didn’t cause the friction it might have. There was respect between professionals. Rivalry, but it was a bit hard to get used to cute chicks who could and would run you into the ground or kick your ass, situation depending. Not that they were that far ahead of peak male athletes. They didn’t always win. It was still a novel experience for those who hadn’t previously encountered upgrades.