by Noah Mann
Twenty Eight
The impact stunned me, the instantaneous fog filling my head different than that which had come from the proximity to the blasts just moments ago. There I had been subjected to an almost smothering pressure, delivered anonymously, which ripped the breath from my lungs. Here, a person had struck me.
A woman.
“You son of a bitch,” Sheryl Quincy said.
She stood over me, I saw as I regained some mental focus. The same return of awareness allowed me to realize that my rifle was no longer in my grip, but rather lying at an angle across my bent legs where I lay on the forest floor.
“You couldn’t just sign on when the Unified Government came,” she said, staring at me past the fat muzzle of a sawed-off pump shotgun, rage and tears in her eyes. “You had to be top dogs. You had to push everyone away.”
With every word the weapon in her hands stabbed at me, as if she was threatening me with some medieval lance she wielded.
“And now...this.”
She didn’t point or gesture, leaving me to interpret what was fueling her burning hatred beyond what she’d felt toward me. Could it be the body count of her brethren, already in the dozens with the firefight continuing closer to the lake? Or was it something deeper?
“I would have been on top,” she said, openly weeping now. “Up top with...with him.”
What was she saying? That she’d expected to ride the wave of conquest alongside Earl Perkins and be his co-ruler? But ruler over what?
“This was never going to end the way you wanted it, Sheryl,” I said.
Her face tightened at my statement, the reaction all too similar to how her man had shown his displeasure with any display of insolence. They were meant for each other, I thought.
“That may be,” she said. “But I certainly know how you’re going to end.”
A slight pressure on the trigger would end my life. This I knew beyond a doubt. And she was about to make that the last reality I would know.
But before that came to pass, a series of things happened in quick succession. Almost too quick to process at the moment each occurred nearly simultaneously.
A black blur burst into view from her right, launching through the air like a shadowy rocket, impacting the woman who was about to kill me and knocking her into a tree as she pulled the trigger. The shotgun blast, knocked off aim by the unexpected strike on her, hit the ground to my right, sending a shower of dirt and splintered branches into the air. As the debris rained down over me I grabbed my AK and rolled, coming up to one knee next to a nearby pine as the first inkling of what had actually happened became clear.
Ripping. That was what I heard. The sound of flesh being torn and shredded. Along with this was mixed a sickening wet gurgling, and through that some feeble attempt at a scream. As the dust from the thankfully errant shotgun blast cleared, I saw the source of these terrible sounds.
Sheryl Quincy, traitor and wannabe consort of the newest dictator to rise in our blighted world, lay on the ground on her back, sawed-off shotgun a few feet away, her hands vainly clawing at the Doberman whose jaws were clamped onto the front of her neck.
Willow had come from nowhere, which was exactly what she’d been trained to do. This, though, was not in the repertoire she had learned. Or her master hadn’t shared all that she’d been trained to do. Whatever the motivation which had driven the dog’s actions, she was seeing her attack through to the end, whipping her head back and forth to cause more damage, blood pouring out of her clenched jaws and painting Sheryl Quincy’s upper half a deep, dark red. The woman swatted at the dog once more, then her arms fell to her side, her body stilling, the rise of fall of her chest, which had been erratic, ceasing entirely.
She was dead.
Sensing her kill was complete, Willow released her hold on the target of her attack and backed away, turning her attention to me. It was not an aggressive stance she took. Her muzzle, dripping blood, was closed, no teeth bared in any threatening manner. She seemed, instead, to simply be looking me over, as if judging whether I was all right.
Then, a moment later, her survey of my condition done, she turned and bolted off, running south through the grey woods. Gone as quickly as she had come.
I could have ruminated on what had just happened, but there was no time. I had my own place to be, and that was wherever Neil was. I rose to me feet and began to move, more quickly now, the sounds of battle decreasing as I plunged back into the battlefield ahead. Or what had been the battlefield, the scattered bodies thicker the closer I came to the western edge of the lake.
Nearing the edge of the woods, with the slope of the mountain ahead where Neil and I had been separated, I slowed once again and hugged the tree line, a group of five men just ahead, one of them limping, their weapons up and aimed forward. They were from the unit which had appeared on the south side of the lake after the plane’s hard landing on the shore, their mixed attire more visible now, a mix of jeans and BDU pants and camouflage shirts. Every last one of them, though, wore the familiar US military Kevlar helmet, with one distinguishing feature stenciled on the back—USMC.
Marines...
I didn’t know how that was possible. But they, at the very least, were the enemy of my enemy. What that meant I wasn’t sure, but I would soon find out.
“Friendly!” I shouted.
I had no choice but to announce myself, the unit directly between me and where I needed to be. In unison three of the Marines swung my way, the others maintaining their focus forward. My weapon was pointed at the ground, that, and my calling out to them, enough to forestall any attack.
One of the Marines took a few steps my way, his M-16 pointed right at my chest. Until it was not. He shifted his aim off of me and looked me straight in the eye.
“He’s a friendly,” the Marine said.
His ragtag uniform still bore a name stitched onto the breast—Mason.
Mason...
Mason?
The stuttering thought, and its accompanying recognition, stunned me for a moment. Until I heard another Marine call out a crushing report.
“Wounded friendly up here!”
I looked, as did Mason, both of us fixing our attention to a spot where the slope curved around to the trail on the backside. The very spot where I’d expected to Neil to appear.
And there he was, lying against a stump, waving one bloodied hand weakly before him to signal ‘cease fire’, that motion enough to let the approaching unit believe that he was not a threat.
“Neil!”
I bolted from the edge of the tree line, running past more bodies as Mason and the other Marines followed, moving cautiously. I was not, racing at full bore, leaping over bodies, one I recognized as Bryce, his right leg blown nearly off. That could have been what I’d heard—the grenade Neil had kept with him. He might have used it against the former Air Force PJ during a frantic confrontation.
As it turned out, I was only partly right.
I dropped my AK and knelt next to my friend, checking him over.
“You missed all the fun,” Neil said, a catch in his breath that worried me.
As did the blood spurting from three holes in the front of his shirt.
“I got the son of a bitch,” my friend said, his head tipping to the left.
I tracked his gesture quickly and saw a familiar face.
Earl Perkins lay on his side, a knife stuck in the side of his neck, his huge revolver grasped in his dead hand.
“He and Bryce,” Neil half gasped. “Not quick enough to take me down. Not before...before...”
He couldn’t finish the statement. I slid close and eased my friend so that he lay against me, looking up to the Marines as they reached our position. Two continued past, checking for any lingering threats. Mason and another Marine, a sergeant with the name Pompana penned in black marker upon his helmet cover, helped their limping younger comrade to a rock that faced us.
“Sit here, Buller,” Mason said.
The w
ounded private took a seat and winced as his leader pressed hard against the spot where blood was trickling from the back of his leg.
“Looks like the cavalry actually came,” Neil joked, his swimming gaze finding me next. “This is a tough one, Fletch.”
I looked to Mason, the impossibly familiar young officer. Then again, this had been a journey of impossibilities, including the fact that I was with my friend again.
For now.
“You have a medic?” I asked.
“Corpsman, Fletch,” Neil corrected me, lifting one of his hands from where it lay against my stomach to eye the thick smear of blood upon it. “They’re Marines. They drag Navy types with them to bandage their boo boos.”
It was a gentle ribbing, but neither Mason or I saw any humor in the moment.
“Gunny, go get Doc Lockton,” Mason said. “Make it quick.”
“Aye, sir,” the gunnery sergeant acknowledged.
He sprinted off as the other two Marines, both lance corporals as indicated by the crossed rifles beneath their single chevron, returned from their quick check of the area.
“It’s clear, lieutenant,” one of them reported.
“Kiplinger, set up an OP fifty yards into the woods,” Mason directed, turning his attention to the other enlisted man. “Stans, get up that slope and overwatch our position here.”
I was hearing this and all that was happening around us, but my focus was on my friend, who I was holding as he was dying.
Twenty Nine
“They’re getting help,” I told Neil.
Mason was tending to his lightly wounded Marine while Gunny Pompana was running in full gear along the shore toward the downed plane, where their corpsman, Doc Lockton, was presumably tending to the pilot they’d pulled from the wreckage. In a few minutes that man of medicine would be here, summoned to help my friend. To save my friend.
I feared, though, that was not to be.
“I did kill him, right?” Neil asked me, a few bloody bubbles appearing at the corner of his mouth.
“You got him,” I confirmed.
Neil smiled, the trickle of aspirated blood spreading across his lips, leaving the impression of a garish gash upon his face. Perkins’ demise pleased him, it was plain to see. Even through the pain and realization of his condition, he found satisfaction in knowing that the despot had fallen.
“You should have seen the look on his face when he saw my knife,” he said.
“Willow took out Sheryl Quincy,” I shared.
My friend chuckled weakly.
“Taken out by a dog,” he said. “I’d say that’s a fitting...a fitting...”
His words ended as a wave of pain rolled through him. Every muscle seemed to tighten as he curled into a ball, his head pressed against my chest
“It’s gonna be okay,” I told him.
His tensed body relaxed after a moment and he looked up at me.
“You’re wondering,” my friend said, still more bloody spittle bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
“Stop talking,” I told him, looking down the shore toward the lake, searching for some sign of the corpsman. “I need help here!”
Mason looked over to me while he held pressure on Private Buller’s superficial leg wound. A round had grazed the back of the young Marine’s thigh, deep enough to open a collection of blood vessels, but he was alert and still held his weapon, ready to fight.
“The doc will be here,” Mason assured me.
There was no treatment I could give my friend, though. No tourniquet to apply which would stop the hemorrhaging within his body. He’d taken three rounds just below center mass. Rifle rounds. At least one had exited I could tell by the warm wetness pumping from his back where it rested against my leg. They must have come from Bryce, I imagined, both he and Perkins confronting Neil before he bested them both. Sheryl Quincy had seen it all, I assumed, her man’s death enraging her and causing her to seek me out. Why she hadn’t dispatched Neil I didn’t know. Perhaps he’d seemed gone already.
Or perhaps she wanted the full measure of her vengeance to be delivered upon me.
“It’s okay to wonder,” Neil said, his voice drifting down toward a whisper. “You’ve done this before. You want to be sure.”
“Neil, just, hang on,” I said, gripping his hand tight while cradling his head. “Where is the Doc?!”
“Johnny Tartek,” my friend said, and I looked down at him. “Johnny Tartek.”
I puzzled at what he’d said. It wasn’t nonsense, but the name meant nothing. At least to me.
“What are you saying, Neil?”
For an instant a smile stretched across his lips, brightening his ashen face. Then, a few seconds later, the expression went slack. As did the rest of him. His body relaxed fully where it lay against me and his head tipped back ever so slightly in my arms, all tension gone from him.
Neil Moore was dead. For real this time.
I eased his body down to the ground and scooted back a foot or so, taking in the sight of him, lying there. Gone from my life again.
The Navy Corpsman, Chief Wally Lockton, arrived a few minutes later.
“He’s gone, doc,” Mason informed him.
Lockton did a quick check for vital signs, then looked to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I nodded acceptance of his condolences, then the Navy man found a discarded jacket and placed it over my friend’s face.
“Doc,” Mason said, getting his corpsman’s attention. “Buller took a graze.”
Lockton moved to the wounded Marine and began working on him. Mason shifted positions and sat on a rock a couple yards from me.
“Too much going on to chat,” Mason said. “You’re all right?”
I wasn’t, but he was focusing on the physical aspect of injury.
“Just my hand from a few days ago,” I said.
Mason nodded and shed his helmet before taking a seat on the ground facing me, his back against the stump of a snapped-off pine.
“I remember you,” Mason said.
“I remember you, too,” I said.
It had been more than two years, but his face, one of the first we’d seen when arriving in Colby, Kansas, stood out amongst the dearth of others to remember.
“Been a while,” the young officer said, drawing a breath of the cool mountain air rolling in off the lake, the acrid scents of battle already dissipating.
“There’s a family out there,” I said. “South of the lake somewhere in hiding. Their dog...saved me.”
“War dog in our midst, eh?” Mason commented, attempting to inject some lightness in the exchange. “I’ll send an element out to make contact.”
“I’ll go with them,” I said. “They won’t recognize your men.”
“Fair enough,” Mason agreed.
I looked to the spot a few feet away where Neil lay under the jacket Doc Lockton had placed over his body, my gaze searching futilely for some sign of movement. Of breathing. Some indication that, yet again, my friend had cheated death.
Johnny Tartek...
His words didn’t trouble me. They confused me. Why some random name whose meaning only he knew had been the final words he offered made no sense to me? Then again, the presence of the man sitting next to me didn’t either.
“Can I ask how the hell you ended up here?”
Mason snickered lightly. He was tired, but not beaten. The youthfulness I remembered from his already toughened face back in Kansas had been replaced by twenty years of hard living crammed into only a few.
“We’re on our way to Bandon,” he said.
My puzzled silence opened the door for a more complete explanation.
“Major James and the Osprey he flew you back in never returned,” the lieutenant said.
“I know,” I told him.
“How do you know?”
I shared the events surrounding our return aboard the Osprey, and its conscription into our defense of Bandon against the advancing Unified Gove
rnment forces. When I came to the part about the aircraft being downed during the battle at the Rogue River, Mason quieted. Captain Hogan and Lieutenant Grendel had died with their Marine commander that day, the actions of all three certainly saving not only my life, but the town of Bandon as well.
“I had no idea,” Mason said. “Our satellite radio died right after you left. We couldn’t transmit or receive. And our shorter range units failed one by one over the next few months. We had one radio left that could receive only, and that was in our aircraft. That’s how we zeroed in on you. Your enemies didn’t practice any sort of radio discipline. They were broadcasting their locations, and what they were seeing. They mentioned Bandon several times in exchanges. That’s what got us interested.”
“I’m glad you got interested,” I said. “So you ended up leaving Kansas.”
“Several of my guys heard you all talk about your town when you came to Colby,” Mason explained. “After Major James didn’t return, we had no contact. Zero. From anyone. Not HQ, not anywhere. We were totally on our own.”
“And you were in command,” I said.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “A lowly louie as maybe the senior ranking Marine left on planet earth.”
“You made the decision to leave.”
“I had to,” Mason said. “We had dwindling supplies and no resupply in sight. After six months the writing was on the wall.”
I processed what he had said, some of the mental math tripping me up, along with the logistics.
“That makes it about an eighteen-month trip,” I said. “Did you hoof it or have vehicles? Did you hop the plane ahead to scout your route?”
Mason smiled a knowing smile.
“No, we left our ride about fifteen miles south of here on a stretch of railroad track,” he said.
His explanation didn’t register for a moment. And then it did.
“Heckerford?”
The lieutenant nodded, that knowing smile now registering the same disbelief mine was.
