“It’s a big part of it.” Stryker looked away, seeming almost embarrassed.
“Well, I guess we need to make some babies.”
“We do,” Stryker replied, “I really want kids.”
“Me too.”
“We could start now,” Stryker said with a lecherous expression.
“I don’t do rooftop sex.”
“Me either, but we could start a new trend.”
“Well, no, but I do want you to know how badly I feel for you. I don’t really understand it, but I know you well enough to know that if you’re still feeling that kind of rage, it must be hard to live with.”
“It is.”
Erin was forming a reply, when the silence surrounding a setting sun was shattered by the roar of the big cat.
“What the hell?” Stryker said, as he turned to the west, where the deafening roar echoed off a distant hilltop.
“Izu?” Erin asked.
Stryker nodded with a numb expression.
“Is he following us?”
“Would appear so. Stay here. I’m going to the west side.”
Stryker ran across the rooftop at a crouch and glassed the area to the west. He spotted the lion on a hilltop a few hundred meters away.”
Izu roared again.
Stryker glanced around, confused and wondering why the cat was now roaring with almost a ceaseless monotony, and then glanced down.
He turned back to Erin and pointed down, raised three fingers and made a walking motion toward her with the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand.
Erin nodded her understanding.
Stryker pointed at her, then pointed two split fingers, one at each eye, and then pointed to the east.
Erin again nodded, turned to the east, and leveled her weapon over the parapet.
Stryker screwed his suppressor into the barrel of his carbine, stood up and aimed straight down the side of the building, where three men stood in infrared evasion suits and whispered so quietly he couldn’t hear them. They were also concerned about the roar from the big cat and one pointed to the west and raised his AK.
He emptied the mag into the clump of men by holding the carbine away from his body and aiming straight down, changed mags, and emptied another one at their already prone bodies. The M-4 made a chugging noise that seemed deafening to Stryker, but was no more than the sound of a loud cough.
Stryker looked down and saw no movement.
Izu roared once more and then fell silent.
Stryker looked up from the carnage below him, saw the lion staring at him on the rooftop, and then watched him walk away and disappear behind the hilltop.
“Shit,” he muttered.
He moved back to where Erin kneeled, her weapon still leveled to the east.
“You’re right, this is a seriously weird day,” Stryker said as he took a knee to her right side.
“Does that thing want to eat us?” Erin asked.
“No, he just saved our asses,” Stryker replied in a thoughtful tone.
“What happened?”
“Three terrorists were coming up on us from the west.”
“How did the drones miss them?”
“They were wearing the infrared evasion suits,” Stryker replied with a note of wonder entering his voice.
“So they could be all around us and we wouldn’t know.”
“Yeah, that is possible.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Get us a guard kitty in the morning.” Stryker replied. “I’ll take the first watch. From now on, we can’t assume we have good intel and we have to keep watch.”
“Guard kitty?”
“You need to sleep now. We can talk about it in the morning.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“As a bad case of penicillin resistant V.D. Go to sleep.”
“Christ,” she muttered, and turned away.
CHAPER NINETEEN
Stryker walked toward the big cat. He left the M-4 in the Humvee, where Erin sat watching his approach with her weapon aimed at the lion.
He hadn’t been hard to find, and they drove less than five minutes on the freeway before they again found him warming himself on the hot pavement.
He depressed his throat mic as he walked, discovered the terrorist were still not moving, and asked the tech to advise them of any movement.
“You already said that,” a snarky voice replied.
“Stow that shit, or I’ll have my lion eat you,” Stryker replied. A silence followed.
Stryker sat down twenty meters from Izu, and pulled his XD from the holster and set it to his right side. He grabbed a piece of jerky from his messenger bag and threw it in front of him, and then spent the better part of twenty minutes clipping and filing his fingernails.
Every so often, he glanced up and saw the big cat staring at him with what seemed to be a quizzical expression, but he ignored it and went back to filing his nails.
“How long is this going to take?” Erin asked from his earbud.
“As long as it does,” Stryker replied.
The big cat yawned, and then stretched and rolled over on its back and lay with its paws skyward.
Stryker continued to work on his nails and, finally, Izu stood on his paws and began approaching him at what seemed to be a snail’s pace.
“Come to daddy, kitty,” Stryker murmured.
Izu walked toward him, tail twitching and moving from side-to-side the whole time, stopped a few meters away, and then sniffed the air, his nose wrinkling as he took in the scent of the meat. He took a step back, and then ate the jerky.
Stryker kept his eyes down and worried an index finger nail until he again looked up and saw Izu seated and staring at him. He stared back into the lions eyes.
“We’re both are the top of the food chain,” Stryker said softly. “I could have killed you, but I didn’t.”
Izu stared back at him.
Stryker slowly extended his left hand, palm up.
“Have you lost your mind?” Erin’s asked in Stryker’s earbud.
Izu sniffed again, turned his rump toward Stryker and farted loudly as he walked away.
“That was interesting,” Stryker muttered as he watched the Izu leave.
The big cat twisted his torso, looking over one shoulder, and stared back at him. Stryker saw some ambiguous understanding come to his eyes. He turned, walked away, and disappeared into the hills to the north.
“Okay, “Erin sighed. “I’ve had enough of this installment of Animal Kingdom, so get your ass back here so we can do what we have to do.”
Stryker stood, and walked back toward Erin, grinning broadly.
“What the hell was that all about?” Erin did not look happy.
“He warned us last night.”
“And why does that make this a good thing to do?”
“He’ll warn us again. Big cats hunt at night, and that is when we need some help, because we can’t trust the drones anymore.”
“Do you honestly believe that?”
“Well, I guess I’m not willing to bet the farm on it, but it worked once and I just thought it couldn’t be a bad idea to try and make him trust us.”
“Do you think he does?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“So, you parlayed with a lion based upon a hunch?”
“No, based upon a hope? But it’s not the first time a hope worked for me.”
“When was the last?”
“Fallujah. I met a girl in a market and gave her chocolate and she followed me around for a while.” Stryker glanced away. “I never saw her again until we invaded the town and set up to direct the bombing of the city.”
“What happened?”
“Every morning I got up and looked down into a courtyard before the fighting started. On the second day, when things were getting bad for us, I looked down and saw her. I knew it was her because she wore the same Pink Floyd blouse that she had in the market. It was torn at the shoulde
r and I could see a knobby looking bone sticking out of the top of the shirt. There was no way it was another girl.”
“What did she do?”
“She was pointing to the snipers that surrounded us from a window in her house. It was open and she was leaning out of it and looking right at me.”
Erin looked confused, and then asked, “Did that make a difference?”
“It made all the difference.”
“Why?”
“Because finding out where a sniper is usually costs a lot of men. She saved a lot of lives.”
“How did she know it was you?”
“She couldn’t have, as far as I could tell.”
“Then, why did she help?”
“I don’t know,” Stryker answered with a note of frustration. “What I do know, is you can never understand every single thing in life that makes it a good day for you. You take what comes at you, you accept the good with the bad, but you never overlook what might be possible if you try.”
“So, you honestly think Izu will help us?”
“He already has.”
“But you think giving him a piece of jerky is going to matter?”
“It can’t hurt, it cost us nothing, and who knows. I never thought giving a piece of chocolate to a little girl would save lives for us either, and maybe it didn’t. But, I can’t divorce one action from the other when there is no other possible explanation for her helping us. So, I just do what I can to try to tip the scales in our direction.”
“We need to get back to the lookout,” Erin said.
Stryker glanced back at the direction that Izu headed when he left their encounter and replied, “Yes, we do.”
They rode back to the building in the Humvee, with Stryker driving and Erin in the passenger’s seat. After they again parked and moved up the stairwell, they emerged onto the structures roof and again took positions on the east side of the building.
Erin settled back into a crossed-legged position and rested the M-4 barrel on the parapet. Stryker did the same, taking a knee. After a few moments, Erin asked, “How long are we going to wait here?”
“Until they move?”
“We could be here for days.”
“Might be,” Stryker allowed.
“We don’t have any food.”
“You can live three weeks with no food.”
“I’d rather not,” Erin said.
“Me either, but sometimes it sucks being us. We can live with it.”
They both fell silent and continued watching as the sun began lowering behind their backs and the landscape grew fainter and then was bathed in a pinkish hue before the darkness erased the landscape around them.
“Erin,” Stryker whispered.
“Yes.”
“Put your monocular down. We know they are sending out forward elements with infrared evasions suits now, so try to focus on one hundred meters out at a level you would expect to find their faces?”
“Why?”
“They have to able to see to move, so that will be the only part of them that we can spot. They will look like very small signatures, but they will emanate heat.”
“Got it.”
“I’m going to move around the perimeter of the roof for a while and see if we have any problems on our sides or back.”
“I got this side,” she whispered back.
CHAPER TWENTY
Stryker was sitting on the roof, looking to the east, lamenting his second day with no coffee and feeling grumpy and out-of-sorts. The sun was rising, ascendant and slowly illuminating the landscape around him. He continued to stare to the east, wishing they could conclude this mission and head back to the base and find a giant urn of coffee.
Erin was curled in a ball, to his side, sleeping with her M-4 held to her chest. Stryker stared at her for a long moment, and then a grin split his face. She looked like a sleeping Madonna, her face motionless and seemingly at peace. It occurred to him that it was unusual for her to be expressionless. Her face was constantly animated and she always looked the way she felt; sometimes elated, sometimes truly pissed off, but he was seldom confused about what she was feeling at any given moment.
Then, he thought about Edwards, who was the polar opposite of Erin. His expression was always devoid of any emotion at all. His was the ultimate poker face and he never seemed up or down. He just plowed through life with the same frozen look on his face.
Stryker had no awareness of the degree of his own animation. He had seen himself in mirrors, but was so unaware of how others saw him that he had never really thought about it.
He was generally not a reflective person, and was tempered by the rigors of the Marine Corps, and later by Force Recon, to focus on the task at hand, ignore distractions and to act only after carefully reasoning though a situation and options for action. That he had been raised by a taciturn little pellet of another former marine, his grandfather, added little to his ability to spend time wondering about himself or his missions.
Yet, there was something about the sunrise, and perhaps the lack of coffee, that placed him in an unusually contemplative mood. He glanced down at Erin, feeling a surge of love fill him, and then thought about their relationship. Stryker realized that she was not only his lover, but his best friend, and he genuinely liked her as a person and companion.
He seldom confused friendship with romantic love, but realized that they had both. Then, he realized that, for the first time in his life, he was with somebody who shared his warrior ethos and spiritual fierceness. She was someone who was as concerned as he about doing the right thing and facing danger with an implacable resilience that could not conceive of backing away from a problem based upon self-preservation.
Stryker remembered the slap across the face that Elle had administered when Edwards was wounded. Her words still stung and he felt sheepish about the truthfulness of what she had screamed at him. He certainly didn’t feel like a hero when Edward’s life hung in the balance. The fact was he felt desperate and afraid. As he thought it over, he recognized that he always had mixed feelings about Elle. She struck him as a show horse, with her impeccable looks and educated east coast accent. Stryker wondered if he failed to give her a fair shake based upon his own prejudices.
“God,” he muttered. “I’m giving myself a headache.”
Stryker finished his rumination by concluding that people get killed and wounded on the battlefield. What happened to Edwards was regrettable but, as the saying went, “shit happens.” There were so many ways to get killed or wounded in a war zone that it was impossible to count them all. People walked of cliffs in the dark, some were victims of friendly fire incident, and others had the bad luck to be walking in a column of other fighters moving over terrain filled with IEDs. They just happened to be the one who activated the detonator and ended up dead or at Walter Reed being fitted for new artificial legs.
It sucked. The whole thing. It was brutal, senseless, and confusing. The randomness of it had always struck him as a cruel joke and, at times, he had to wonder if any of it really mattered. People had been killing each other since the dawn of time and, with brief intervals of peace, it has gone on pretty much uninterrupted since man started walking upright.
Erin uttered a soft moan, rolled over, and started snoring loudly. Stryker grinned, resisting the temptation to wake her and complain about the noise.
Stryker gazed again to the east, willing the terrorists to get off their asses and march to the town.
Nothing moved.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” Erin asked as she struggled to a sitting position. She looked entirely different now, her hair was sticking out in all directions and her expression was blank.
“I’m not tired, and I probably couldn’t sleep anyway.”
“Have you had any sleep at all?”
“No, but I’m fine.”
“You want to get a nap now?”
“Naw. The suns up and if they are going to make a move, it’s probably going to be today.�
��
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’m guessing they are just as tired of this shit as I am and, sooner or later, they’ll run out of patience and roll the dice by entering town.”
Erin stood and stretched, raising her arms over her head.
“Nice rack,” he said.
“Too early for humor,” she growled back.
“No, I really mean it.”
“You need to get your eyes examined.”
“They work fine,” Stryker protested, and they both fell silent for a moment.
“Did anything happen while I was sleeping?” Erin asked.
“No, it was quiet all night.” He again glanced to the east and shook his head in disgust.”
“Have I ever told you that I really like you?” Stryker asked.
“Well, I guess I presumed that you did.”
“You’re not getting it. I don’t mean I just love you; I also really like your company and being around you. You’re also my best friend.”
“It’s supposed to be that way.” Erin looked at him with a baffled expression.
“Not always. I’ve known couples that we desperately in love that fought all the time.”
“We fight,” Erin pointed out.
“Well, we argue, but I never get angry with you.”
“You piss me off all the time,” Erin replied in a matter-of-fact tone.
“How about you just tell me you like me too?” Stryker sighed with a resigned tone.
“Well, I don’t always like you. Sometimes you make me very angry and I want to beat you senseless.”
“Let me know if that happens in the future.”
“Oh, you’ll know,” Erin replied with a grin.
“That’s reassuring.”
Stryker’s earbud crackled. “They’re moving.” There was a note of excitement in the man’s voice.”
“Direction, distance and course,” Stryker replied.
“They just started out. Due east and heading right at you. Still two klicks out and in the same concave formation.”
“Spacing?”
“The same,” he answered. Stryker pumped his right fist.
“Yes,” he said.
STRYKER - OMNIBUS: BOOKS 3-5: A Post Apocalyptic Tale Page 30
