“Just who are we looking for?” pressed the QB.
“Is it Transport making off with the food?” asked Smoker.
The captain gave Smoker a sour expression. Never hand a salesman information he can sell right back to you, it said.
“Oh sure! That’s it,” he said, cackling. “Transport. What ignoramus came up with that idea?”
“His name’s Obadiah,” Stug supplied.
“Oba-what-a, now?”
“Back on point,” said the QB. “If not Transport, who?”
Sticks squinted at her, perhaps assessing how many unis the info was worth. Then he shrugged to himself, committed to his course.
“You probably heard of ’em. Most folks call ’em Wild Ones.”
“The cannibals?” said Smoker.
“Why would cannibals steal…” Stug smacked his lips. “Wait—what have the Amish been feeding us?”
There was amusement among the company, and Sticks’s cackle cut through it like nails scratching metal.
But the QB was getting irritated. She knew exactly who the Wild Ones were. Opportunists trying to survive. Something between homesteaders and scavengers. But she never really believed the cannibal story. Did she?
“So, you’re telling us Wild Ones have suddenly started stealing our shipments from the AZ,” she said. “Why?”
Sticks gestured like he didn’t know or didn’t care. Or both. “Times are hard,” was all he said.
Time to make a decision is what it is, her inner voice fumed. “Right, then. Hatch, you and Alpha Squad are with me. Bracer, leave your 18-millimeter with the company,” she said, eyeing the hundred-pound machine gun on Bracer’s back. “We’ll need to stay light and mobile. Trick, I’m leaving you in brevet command of B Company.” Trick stood a little taller, proud of the unexpected, if temporary, field promotion. “I want you to stay on this side of the river but out of sight,” the QB continued. “Secure Shenks Landing, but outfit for aerial recon flights by Transport. Once you’ve secured the area, give Colonel Neville a situation report.”
Trick raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you, as commanding officer, make the report before you go?”
“As of ten seconds ago, you’re commanding officer, remember?” she said. “The more time we waste making reports, the less likely we’ll get those supplies back.” Plus, her inner voice added, the good colonel prefers the sound of male voices calling him ‘sir.’ For the sake of military discipline, she kept her commentary off the company’s BICE channel.
“Very well, ma’am,” Trick said, his manner reflecting an acceptance that his was the lot of a subordinate officer. Then, paying forward the love, he ordered his sergeant to break out the camouflage nets. They’d set up a perimeter around the ferry landing and protect themselves from Transport eyes in the sky by stringing the nets between the stout trees near the river’s edge. A portable Umbrella, solar powered and cast atop the camouflage, would shield them from infrared scans.
“Five of you? You’re takin’ too many,” Sticks said to the captain. “They’ll hide in the woods.”
“We work in squads,” said the QB matter-of-factly. She didn’t explain further, and Sticks merely shrugged again. What did he care?
“We taking the raft?” asked Stug.
“T’ain’t a raft,” said Sticks. “That’s a pole barge. Only way to get up the Pesky.” He winked, “That’s what I call the little strip of river that goes east. And no, we ain’t takin’ it. Only an idiot poles the river during the day.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the sky. “Too many eyes. Only pole the river at night. Daytime, we rough it cross country and let the trees keep our secret.”
“Then let’s get moving,” the captain said.
As Alpha Squad prepared to move out, the QB stared across the river for a moment toward Little Gibraltar. It was well hidden, even from her knowing eyes. The soldiers behind its walls would be eating another half meal in six hours. Before much longer, they’d be down to quarter rations. And if the island dried up as the supply hub for the entire TRACE network in the south, well—once the roots die, the limbs soon follow. Restoring the food shipments from the AZ was vital if the resistance itself was to survive.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Bellies are rumbling.”
The ferryman led them east away from the river and beneath the canopy of thick trees that painted the landscape of New Pennsylvania. With fall coming on, their cover from spying eyes above was less than it would’ve been just a few weeks before, but it would do. They followed a well-worn path Sticks knew by heart, though the trail itself felt erratic. But, Mary soon realized, there was a method to the old man’s madness. He favored the broad-leafed maples over the cedar and pine trees for the better cover they provided, and sometimes walking under their protection required a bit of meandering.
Mary also noticed bluebells along the path, and the little girl still sitting inside her soul longed to reach down and pluck one, to draw its fragrance into her lungs. But she settled for noting their beauty in her mind only—off-channel, of course—and moving on.
Pesky Creek, as Sticks named it, was deeper than it looked. They noticed schools of large shad fish swimming in the clear water. The second time they spotted them, Stug’s stomach grumbled. Two hours passed swiftly, marked by furtive glances upward by Hawkeye and random slaps by Stug. For a man born on an Amish farm, Stug had little tolerance for bugs.
“How long till we get to these thieves?” he asked, punctuating his question with a whack at his neck. “I’m in the mood to punch something bigger.”
“Not long at all,” cackled Sticks, striding over a final gathering of weeds and wildflowers into a clearing.
B Company unslung their laser rifles. The mid-morning sun shone bright and warm on the site where the Amish deliverymen had been ambushed. Fifty feet in front of them, one of the three missing wagons stood on its side, a wheel shattered and strewn among the weeds. According to the reports Mary got back at the camp, none of the half a dozen Amish drivers had been hurt; the scavengers had merely pointed them at the river and told them to get moving. The Wild Ones must’ve overturned the wagon afterward. Why?
“Why would they trash the wagon?” wondered Bracer, echoing Mary’s thoughts. “Why not pack off the supplies in the buggy that brought ’em?”
“Wild Ones are sorta like the Amish,” explained Sticks. “Very practical. Maybe the wagon was damaged in the fight with the drivers.”
“The Amish don’t fight,” said Hatch.
“Okay, good point,” said Sticks, shutting up. He had the air of a man who’d been caught in a lie, Hatch thought. His faith in the ferryman had been thin before. It now evaporated entirely.
Cautious now, the lieutenant said, “Hawkeye, heat sig the clearing. Give me a one-hundred-foot radius around us, too.”
The spotter put his omni-lens to his eye and scanned for heat signatures, making a 360-degree arc across the wagon and surrounding tall grass.
“Looks clear,” he reported. “A few animals in the underbrush.”
“I still don’t understand the wagon,” said Bracer.
Sticks fidgeted nervously.
“I do,” answered Stug, walking across the open ground. When he reached the overturned wagon, he pointed at the bolster beneath the driver’s seat, then to the axle near it. “Laser fire.” Now that he was closer, the sergeant noticed random foodstuffs strewn about. Dropped in a hurry, looked like.
“Lasers?” Hawkeye asked the question that had popped into everyone’s heads. “When the hell did the Wild Ones get lasers? Hell, we just got lasers!” The spotter wrapped both arms protectively around his weapon.
“T’weren’t them with the lasers,” said Sticks finally.
“Transport?” Bracer’s tone wondered what the Authority would want with a bunch of scavengers.
“Looks like it.” The QB jerked her head toward the far side of the clearing. The weeds and grass had been flattened by the antigravity engines of some kind of air ve
ssel. “But where are the bodies? It’s not likely the scavengers won the skirmish, much less took no casualties.”
“You shouldn’t underestimate ’em,” said Sticks. “They won. Or there’d be bodies.”
Hatch understood. “They take their dead and wounded with them.” He rounded on the ferryman. “You knew about this. Why didn’t you tell us?”
The old man regarded him. “We weren’t sure you’d come if you really thought Transport was involved. A few salvagers? Well, you’d come to that party for sure.”
“We?”
Sticks closed his mouth.
“Hawkeye,” Hatch said, glaring at the old man, “scan the hills with your omni-lens for heat sigs. Find out if there are eyes on us.”
The spotter acknowledged the order.
Stug wandered over to the landing site. “It was a dropship all right,” he said, recognizing the landing pattern.
He found arrows cut by hand from tree limbs and tipped with flint points. A knife of quartz, jagged and hand-sized, was embedded in the earth. And there was blood. Whatever else had happened here, the Wild Ones—armed only with handmade weapons—had chased off a much more advanced Transport dropship armed with a state-of-the-art Gatling laser. The Amishman in him appreciated the irony. The soldier in him was impressed as hell.
“Well?”
“Nothing, sir.” But no sooner had Hawkeye said it than he held up a hand. “Wait. I see ten, maybe fifteen in the tree line of that hill.” The others followed the direction of his lens to a wooded hill a hundred yards to the north. “I didn’t see them at first. They … they’re masking their signatures somehow. Their heat sigs are human-shaped, but it takes closer inspection to see them.”
“What are they doing?” asked the QB.
Hawkeye shrugged. “Looks like they’re watching us watching them.”
A feeling crept up the back of Hatch’s neck. “They’re just standing there?”
“Yep.”
“Crap. Stug—”
As he turned to his sergeant, the behemoth who loved bar fights already had his hands in the air. Beyond him, emerging from the tall grass beyond the dropship’s landing zone, at least fifteen Wild Ones approached in a semicircle, surrounding Stug.
“Sir,” said Hawkeye, still observing the people on the hill, “they’re starting to move this way. It’s like they don’t even care if we see them.”
“Hawk,” Bracer said, tapping his spotter on the shoulder. When Hawkeye turned an irritated eye on him, the heavy-weapons man jerked his head at Stug.
“Oh.”
Hatch watched the QB for how to play it. But she followed Stug’s lead. Her laser rifle hung swaying by its strap at her side as she raised her hands in the air.
“And you call yourself a spotter,” fumed Hatch, raising his own.
Hawkeye shrugged. “Looked clear.” The point man’s dark humor, as old as warfare.
“Uh-huh.” You sure about this? Hatch asked, aiming his BICE chatter at the back of the QB’s head.
Do you see the missing food? she answered. Assuming we could even mow them down without biting it ourselves, how would we find it?
She had a point.
As the circle closed in, the soldiers of B Company formed a tight circle of their own, their backs to one another. If it turned ugly—uglier—they wanted their laser rifles pointing out, not in.
Covered in mud, the Wild Ones stopped ten feet away from them. A few of them held body shields made of glass, obviously pilfered from Authority troops at some point. The resistance fighters were now completely surrounded by muddy scavengers with spears, bows, and knives made of quartz. All just as deadly as lasers in close quarters.
One of the Wild Ones stepped forward. He was older, with a thick beard and a long rifle slung across his back. He was chewing some kind of green plant and didn’t seem worried about offending anyone with the green spittle mucking up his beard. The man considered the QB admiringly, then Hatch and the others. When his eyes landed on Stug, he backed up half a step.
Sticks walked out to meet him. “Like we agreed, eh?”
“Agreeing yes, you and us,” said the muddy man with the gooey green beard. He withdrew a bag that clinked as he handed it over. “Much more money you,” he said.
“Much more money me, indeed!” replied Sticks.
“Sonofa—”
“Now, now, Sergeant,” said the ferryman. “Why get paid once when twice is twice as nice?”
“That’s the last time TRACE will pay you for anything,” said the QB quietly. Hatch knew that tone. The calm before a storm.
“Oh, I dunno,” said Sticks. “Wait and see. This ain’t a trap. It’s an opportunity.”
“I’d like an opportunity,” Stug scoffed, moving toward him. “Want to know what I’d like an opportunity for?”
The large, muddy man stepped between Sticks and the sergeant. The ferryman darted out of the way as Stug’s grip found the scavenger’s shoulders. But the older man dropped straight down, pulling Stug off balance. He fell forward, and the Wild One lifted with his legs, shouldering the big man in the gut. Surprised by the maneuver, Stug went airborne. He hit the ground hard, flattening the grass, then recovered and rolled up on one knee. The other man, a big, green, beardy grin on his face, stood ready to catch and flip him again. Stug hesitated, knowing he’d underestimated his opponent once already. The muddy man knew how to wrestle. But Stug wasn’t prone to making the same mistake twice.
The Wild Ones aimed their weapons at the sergeant.
“Sure, hide behind your sticks and arrows. Big man with backup.”
“Shutting it, Man Mountain,” the muddy man said, his green grin fading. “Or flipping again, that’s me.”
“Stug, stand down,” Hatch said.
Stug exhaled his fury, retreating a half step but no more.
“Ferryman going now.”
“Oh, sure! I’m not one to overstay a welcome, no sir!” Turning to the QB, the near-toothless river man said with clear satisfaction, “I told you not to underestimate them.” Then the menace in his voice was gone, replaced by a happy-go-lucky tone. “But no one listens to me, no sir! Well, y’all have a nice parlay now, ya hear? I wager I’ll be seein’ you again!” In a moment, Sticks had faded into the grass, a gummy whistle his herald.
The Wild One doing all the talking then turned to the QB. “Being leader here?” he asked.
“I’m in command, yes.” The captain imbued a threat in her voice that her raised arms didn’t much support. “Captain Mary Brenneman.”
“Name being Goa Eeguls,” he said. “Needing to talking, we. Putting arms down now, you. Keeping hands from triggers. Or sticking you, that’s us.”
“Yes, we need to discuss where our food is,” the QB said carefully, trying to establish some measure of power equity in the conversation.
Eeguls smiled, the green spittle making a bright curve in his beard. “Not knowing already? All your food belonging us.”
Riverwalk
The Wild Ones escorted them out of the clearing. And strangely—an assessment everyone shared via BICE—the scavengers didn’t demand the soldiers turn over their weapons. Like Sticks, their captors kept the trees overhead as often as possible, and in short order, the party passed over the wooded hill, picking up the group Hawkeye had spotted earlier. Within half an hour, they’d entered a short box canyon and followed a well-worn path to a cap rock resembling a thumb pointing at the sky. Below it, a camp nestled into the cliffs overlooking Pesky Creek.
The QB was fascinated as they passed into the community itself. That’s the word for it, her inner voice said. Not camp. Community.
The Wild Ones had adapted the rock formations to form dwellings. Sheets of stone served as roofs for apartments, and caverns had become rooms. Naturally occurring gaps in the vertical rock of the cave walls formed windows fronting a common area. This central open space framed a foyer of flat stone structures where children played and adults tanned skins and tended fires wi
th meat roasting over them. Stug’s stomach began to growl again.
“I sure hope that’s not people,” he whispered to Hatch. The lieutenant passed him a glance that said, Me too.
“Walking this way, Man Mountain,” Eeguls said, waving them past the children who stopped their play to gawk in fear and awe at the bulky soldiers passing by. Most of the children were captivated by the laser rifles; their simple, sleek industrial plastic was undoubtedly a stark contrast to the bumpy weapons of stone and wood they were used to seeing. Several of them stared openly at Stug, perhaps wondering if, as Eeguls had suggested, he’d come to life from the stone around them, a real, live Man Mountain.
Then Mary noticed a girl of about ten or twelve years old watching them from one of the cookfires. The girl refused to turn her eyes away, staring up defiantly at the uniformed, hard-cast woman walking by. Mary attempted a smile for her, perhaps seeing a reflection through time in the young girl’s face. But the girl’s eyes, so young to be so old, returned no kindness. Rather, their flinty flatness dared the stranger to make trouble for her people.
Not so very different, you and I, thought Mary to herself, her smile saddening at the corners. The girl’s gaze tracked her warily as the soldiers of B Company moved deeper into the settlement.
They came to a formation stretching upward to a second floor. A graying man, cleaner cut than the others around him, sat working a huge knife along a piece of wood as he talked to other Wild Ones hunched in a circle. Their conversation quieted as the QB and her soldiers approached.
The gray man put the knife down and stood up from the group. He watched them approach, acknowledging Eeguls, who stopped before him and bowed slightly.
“Bringing them like you asking,” said Eeguls.
“Appreciated,” said the gray man. He gestured to the woman sitting next to him, and she handed Eeguls a leather satchel. “All the tobac you can chew.”
“Many and much more thanks,” said Eeguls, opening the bag and staring inside. He stuck his nose in and took a big whiff. As he looked back at the QB, the green spittle-smile stretched across his beard. “Easy-peasy.” Then his face turned serious. “Being nice. Or getting the pointy end. Understanding?”
Tales of B-Company: The Complete Collection Page 12
