“Hey,” I say, getting his attention. “I don’t have a Firebiter.”
His is on and he offers me a smirk. “Sounds like a personal problem. You always go out in the field underequipped like this?”
“No, today’s a special day,” I say.
“Quartermaster truck, near the end of the line,” he says. “Go see if she has anything for you.”
I trot back with Thor following right at my side, now feeling the energy from the other soldiers gearing up, cracking jokes, getting ready to put their asses out there. If all goes well, this won’t be combat. The PsyOps Humvee will go out and do its job, and things will be cool, without a single shot being fired in anger, or disappointment, or whatever.
But since when did anything go well in wartime?
The quartermaster corporal, the nice young lady who helped gear me out the other day at the Dome site, sees me approach the rear of her truck and says, “Make it quick, Sergeant. Things are about to get interesting.”
“Firebiter vest,” I say. “I don’t have one.”
“Shit. Well, let’s see.” She climbs up and into the rear of the truck, small flashlight in hand, moves around and kicks things through, and there’s a triumphant sound. She comes back and tosses it at me. It’s a Firebiter all right, but…well, there are dark brown stains around the collar, and tears here and there. It’s old and has been well-used and smells of someone else’s body.
“Best you can do?” I ask.
“Only thing I can do,” she says. “Those things are pricy and whenever a shipment gets sent out, sticky-fingered rear echelon assholes—who’ve only seen Creepers on newsreels or in Stars & Stripes—pick ’em out.”
I hold up the vest. “It’s been used.”
“Yeah, by a nice guy named Flanders. Last month, he got caught up in a raid we were making on a Creeper gathering point. He didn’t make it, but at least his vest did. Don’t worry, the vest wasn’t hit.”
I start putting it back on. “What was hit, then?”
“Everything above the shoulders.”
I clench my teeth, buckle up the vest. It feels sodden and moist, like Flanders’s blood, tears and sweat are now part of the fabric.
* * *
Back I go and Bronson is talking it up with his platoon, but I see Dad, Captain Wallace, two lieutenants and the first sergeant loudly discussing something at her command Humvee. I think I hear Bronson call out my name as I slide by, and I ignore him. With my medically certified twenty percent hearing loss in my left ear, I tend to ignore a lot…which sometimes gets me into trouble.
Like I care.
Up at the Humvee Captain Wallace is shaking her head. “Damn it, the only thing I know is that there’s a Creeper Dome somewhere over there, to the north, just above a stream. And that’s not enough.”
The tall blonde lieutenant says, “I can take a couple of squads out on a skirmish line, work through the woods and—”
Wallace looks up at the gray sky. “Because of those damn peacers, the sun will be coming down soon. I want this mission wrapped up now.”
It’s like I’m no longer under my own power, and I step forward, elbowing aside a lieutenant I haven’t met yet—a black guy older than me, nametagged JACKSON—and I say, “Captain Wallace?”
She says, “What is it, Sergeant?”
“Ma’am…my MOS…well, I’m a Recon Ranger.”
Jackson says, “So?”
“So I’ve got my K-9 unit with me. We’ve got experience sniffing out Creepers and their Base Domes. You give us the word, ma’am, we’ll set out right now and be back, as soon as we can, with their position located and mapped out.”
Dad is quiet but looks proud. Wallace says, “You run this by Bronson yet?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why?”
“Because it made sense for me to contact you, ma’am.”
“But you’re assigned to his platoon.”
I rub Thor’s head. “Sorry, ma’am, that wasn’t made clear to me. I just thought I was with Sergeant Bronson’s platoon because there was an extra space on his truck.”
Dad covers a smile with his hand, and Wallace hands me a folded-over topo map with grid coordinates overlaid on it.
“Get out there and get back,” she says. “Quick as you can.”
I salute her. “Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
I’m getting a canteen filled and checking my gear one more time when Bronson approaches me. “What, you forget something you learned in Basic?”
“What’s that, Bronson?” I say, fastening the canteen to my side.
“Never volunteer, ever,” he says.
My M-10 is leaning against the side of the truck I was riding in, and I pick it up. It’s heavy, tubular and bulky as hell, and it and its brothers have saved my skinny butt more times than I care to remember.
I sling it over, check the bandolier. Three 50 mm rounds safe and secure. If I’m very, very lucky, I’ll be walking back later to this truck with Thor, with all rounds unexpended.
“Guess we skipped that part,” I say, “when we learned all the different ways to sneak up on a Creeper. Later, Bronson. Keep yourself safe and dry.”
He stares at me but I’ve stared back at nastier things before, walking on six legs, and I say, “Thor, come,” and off we go.
* * *
I don’t want to make a big deal of it and just want to get away, so I take a quick compass fix, figure out where north is, and into the woods Thor and I go. With each step I guess I should have been getting scared of what my boy and I were getting into, but truth is, I was glad to get away from that mob. Oh, they seemed cool enough, once they figured out you knew which end of the boot to pour piss out of, but I missed my own crew, and as Ranger Recon I’m used to working alone, save for canine companionship.
Thor is happily trotting next to me, sniffing, tongue hanging out, bandages secure around his middle. I stop and he stops and I squat down on one knee, rub his head. He licks my wrist.
“Let’s take it easy today, boy, all right? Just a hunting mission, that’s all.”
His brown eyes take me in, and he licks my wrist one more time. I get up and check the compass reading. North was over by that big pine tree. We’d head there, find another landmark, and do our best. I carefully look around, checking the scenery, just low brush, mix of pine trees and a couple of birches.
I pat Thor on the head. “Thor!”
He snaps to.
“Hunt!”
And off he goes.
I keep eyes on him as best I can, as he races side to side, stopping to sniff the air, doubling back to make sure he doesn’t miss anything. One sure sign of Creepers are the smell of cinnamon—which our white coats still can’t explain—but with his sniffing skills, Thor can track and detect better than any human…better than most K-9 units I’ve come across.
I take my time, looking for any disturbances that mark Creepers—burnt homes, trees, broken trunks, excavated cemeteries—and also look for running water. For some reason, the alien bastards tend to move around flowing fresh water.
Why?
See cinnamon, scent of, mentioned before.
Thor is a blur of black fur out there in the distance. I note a clearing up ahead and slow down.
An old campsite, it looks like. Underbrush and saplings have been cleared away. There are two depressions where tents have been set up. There’s a firepit. I stick my hand in the firepit. Cold, dead ashes. Long time ago. By the base of a tree there’s some broken brown glass. Beer bottles. Broken ale bottle with a familiar but faded label, showing a red human hand crushing a miniature black Creeper. RED VENGEANCE. Yeah, we’ll see about that.
So. Outpost? Coastie encampment? A couple of local guys wanting to have some fun before going into Basic?
Who knows.
I stand up, and Thor barks.
I start moving.
He barks again, and I can tell he’s standing still.
Good boy!
It looks like the woods are thinning. I’m checking my compass reading. Still heading north. A good sign.
There’s Thor, sitting, panting contentedly, head turning to me as I approach. He lets off another bark, and I come up, rub his head. “Good boy, Thor…real good boy.”
I check my pockets, find no treats. Just a piece of soap. Damn.
“Later, boy, okay? Later.”
Thor’s excited look is tinged with disappointment. He whines, moves in a circle, and barks once more. “Promise,” I say. “Promise.”
I move slowly and say, “Stay,” and he does just that.
I go through the thinning tree line, and—
Nothing.
The trees are gone.
Just a black ribbon of ash.
I kneel down, hide as best as I can behind some pine saplings.
Not much cover but it’ll have to do.
Out there is a large farm with rolling pasturelands, fences, siloes, and several barns and outbuildings. A beautiful sight it must have been, years ago, but now the pastureland is burnt and reburnt crusty dirt and grass, and most of the fences have either been scorched or smashed. The buildings are in lousy shape as well, with broken windows, shattered walls, and sunken roofs. One of the three siloes has been split from top to bottom. I note heaps of bones scattered across the blasted land, some in a heap, like they were trying to escape. Horses, probably, or maybe cows.
And who’s responsible?
Creepers, of course, maybe the same ones living in that Dome right in the middle of the fields.
Or the second Dome, built so that part of it crushed an outbuilding.
“Well, that’s interesting,” I whisper, because Kara’s Killers were only supposed to approach one Dome, and here we were, with two, same shape, same size, same color.
So when did that happen?
Unfortunately for me, there’s no signs or plaques denoting when these blue-gray Domes were constructed, or how. Still a mystery after all these years is how the damn things get built. They literally appear out of nowhere, or at least, in a very few seconds. The best idea I’ve heard is that at night, when one sees the hard line of light marking an attack from an overhead killer stealth satellite, that the beam of light is somehow transmitting a Dome-in-waiting, which unfolds and sets itself up.
Not a bad theory as theories go, but above my pay grade. Thor is at my side, trembling, and I rub his head and back. “Good boy,” I murmur. “Good boy.”
I look out at the farm again, take out the topo map with the plastic overlay. I match up some landmarks, see a stream crossing over there on my left, and with an attached wax pen, I mark up on the map where the Creepers are located.
Now what?
Now to get back to Captain Wallace. I turn and think, well, it would be relatively easy to backtrack and report to the captain where and how I located them, along with the intelligence that there are two Domes waiting for us, not one.
But that would only be a partial mission success. Captain Wallace needs to get to this spot with that PsyOps Humvee, and so far, she doesn’t have a way to do it.
Which means it’s time to get going.
I check on that stream, see it moves parallel…to an access road. Or dirt driveway, or however you want to call it.
“Come along,” I whisper to my buddy. I move back into the tree line, and then head off to the access road. I travel slow, knowing that the two Creeper Domes are close enough for me to be seen and heard, and Thor moves with quiet care, right along me.
Then we come across the access road, which cuts to the left. I check the topo map.
There.
The road is crumbling and washed out in several places, but it seems to lead right back to the state road where the convoy had parked. After slowly thrashing through some brush, we make it to cracked and bumpy asphalt.
The state road.
Thor comes to me. I rub his head again. “Recon Rangers come through again.”
* * *
We walk for about five minutes when a voice calls out, “Halt.”
I do just that, but my hand rests on my holstered 9 mm Beretta. Two soldiers emerge from the woods on the right side of the road, and one—who’s desperately trying to grow a moustache—says, “You’re Knox, right?”
“Yep.”
“We’re from the Third Platoon. Part of a picket line up and down this road. Orders are, we come across you, we get the map and send it down the line.”
“I can do that.”
A third soldier emerges, pushing a battered mountain bike. “Combat courier. Think you or your dog can outrun me?”
“Probably not,” I say. I hand over the precious map and say, “I’ve marked it here, but make sure Captain Wallace knows this: there are two Creeper Domes at this location, not one.”
The combat courier is a young guy wearing non-issue black bicycle shorts, but I know if a courier is fast, that bit of uniform play is always overlooked. His legs are thick, muscular, and scarred here and there with shrapnel wounds or burns.
He takes my map, tucks it into his jacket. “Imagine that,” he says. “An intelligence failure. Later, guys.”
He bikes off and I have a sweet memory of my Abby, back home at Fort St. Paul, one of the best combat couriers I know, and someone I was dating before I got entangled with Serena and her quiet, deadly brother.
I wonder what she’s doing right now.
The thought troubles me, and I take Thor over to a cleared spot at the side of the road, settle down against a couple of exposed rocks.
Wait, I think. Just wait.
* * *
The two other soldiers share a forbidden cigarette. I hear an engine noise that quickly rises in volume, and then something on two wheels roars by in a blur. I get up and say, “Hey, that looks like a motorcycle.”
“Good eyes,” the moustache kid says. “You been in the Army long?”
“Too long,” I say. “Combat courier?”
“Yeah, for long distance communications.”
I shake my head. “We’re still using just bicycles, back in New Hampshire.”
Another grinding of engines, and the lead eight-wheeled Stryker vehicle rolls in. I spot the rest of the convoy stretched out behind it, including Captain Wallace’s command Humvee. I walked around the scarred and battered Stryker—this one bearing a flapping American flag and a New York State flag.
And something else I hadn’t noticed before: two adhesive signs on the rear (called bumperstickers, I believe), each saying the same thing: I HEART NY.
Nice to see somebody remembering.
Captain Wallace emerges from her Humvee and says, “Well done, Sergeant.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She looks up and down her convoy, her company, and says, “Let’s get this war won, shall we?”
I just nod in agreement.
An Excerpt from the Journal of Randall Knox
Among the many rules and regulations in my world—including not keeping a diary, which rule I’m obviously breaking—is one about compiling or inquiring about civilian causalities. Oh, information’s passed along when units are attacked or do the attacking, and the Red Cross does its best to notify next-of-kin when someone is injured or killed in action, and sometimes there are little notices in local papers or bigger notices in Stars & Stripes if a general or colonel gets charred, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about are the detailed reports of what happened during the first few days of the war, after the Creepers took up station in orbit, dropped the NUDETs to smoke our electronics, and th
en shoved asteroids into Earth’s atmosphere to land in the seven seas and cause tsunamis to drown most of Earth’s coastal cities. That was the curse, I guess, of how humankind developed, how so many of its most populous cities were built along the coastline. Think of it: New York, Rio, Mumbai, Tokyo, London, Shanghai…so many millions at risk, so many millions drowned, and yet, no official word of just how many died during those first few weeks.
Why?
Morale, I guess. The surviving governments or armies-in-charge don’t want the population to feel like the war is already lost, with cities drowned or abandoned because of lack of power, with millions of corpses littering the countryside or stuck inside skyscrapers.
Me, I think there are more folks alive than whatever authority is out there gives credit. When the war began, most governments told their people to shelter in place, or stay at home. But I think that most folks did what was reasonable at the time: packed up and got the hell out of a target area.
Good for them, they survived. Yet their survival led to another problem, that of coastal refugees—known as Coasties—who live as gangs up and down the coastlines, refusing to go into resettlement camps or adjustment centers, who dream of the day the waters will recede and their home cities are revealed, dried out, and have the power restored.
Nice fantasy, I guess. Another fantasy is that of survivors out there, wandering the landscape, working years later to come home. I remember a few years after the war started—I was probably ten or thereabouts—seeing flyers, placards and signs at Red Cross centers and crossroads, listing photos, names and last known addresses of friends and relatives. I asked Dad a couple of times if I could make a flyer listing Mom and my sister Melissa, and he always agreed to help, though his face would look heavy and his speech would slow, watching my handiwork.
This led later to an argument I had a couple of times with him: what happened to Mom and Melissa when the war started? All I know is that we got separated from them, and that we lived and they didn’t. At the time we lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts. The last time I said something was probably four or five years ago, when I asked Dad once more, and he sat in his favorite old chair in our shared quarters back at Fort St. Paul. With tears in his eyes, and a shaking voice, he said, “Randy…I will give you this house, I will cheat to help you advance in the Army, and I will steal to keep you fed, but please, please, please…never ask me again.”
Red Vengeance Page 6
