“Don’t hit me anymore,” the sergeant whimpered. “I can’t see. Jesus, you’ve blinded me!”
Marty was suddenly feeling so bad for the man that he nearly started crying himself. “Don’t fucking move!” he hissed.
“I won’t,” whimpered the severely injured man. “I swear!”
Marty went down the hall and opened the first door to find a man humping a woman in her mid-forties. She had blond hair and was staring off into deep space.
“What the fuck?” the naked man said, climbing off the cot from between the woman’s legs. “Get the fuck—”
Marty shot him in the throat and turned around, kicking open the door to the room directly across the hall, where another woman was being violated. He shot the man in his stomach and turned to face down the hall, shooting each of the three men to emerge from their rooms. The sixth man had obviously chosen to hide, so Marty walked over the bodies and opened the door to find him cowering on the bed with his hands over his head. He was a young airman, no older than nineteen. The woman he had been molesting, even younger than her tormentor, was obviously in a deep fog like the others.
Marty shot him in the head, nearly jumping out of his skin a second later to the sound of a thunderous explosion outside the trailer.
“Kill me,” the girl begged. “Please!”
Marty stepped forward, kissing his fingers and touching them to her forehead.
“Close your eyes,” he said gently, hearing the sounds of men clamoring out of the next trailer, followed by those of automatic rifle fire. The girl closed her eyes and he did the same as he held the barrel of the .45 near her temple and pulled the trigger. The slide locked back on the weapon as the last shell was ejected, and he turned from the room without looking at her, ejecting the spent magazine and slapping in a new one. He did not look into the other rooms he passed, holstering the pistol and unslinging his carbine as he made for the door, stepping over the sergeant’s now lifeless body where he still lay on the floor in front of the desk.
“What the fuck’s he doing in there?” Sullivan said as they stood waiting to find out what would happen.
Ninety seconds later three half-naked men came piling out of the adjacent trailer with rifles in hand. Apparently none of the airmen in the garage had been able to hear Marty’s shots over the generator, but the men next door had.
“The jig’s up!” Emory said. “I got the garage.”
Sullivan shot down the men coming from the trailer as Emory fired a grenade into the bay, hitting the generator and blowing the men in the garage to kingdom come. He shot more half-naked men as they came scrambling from the trailers, and he nearly shot Marty too as he came running across the lot with ever more men showing up out of the darkness.
“The fuel truck!” Sullivan shouted, banging Emory on the helmet and pointing far to the right of the trailers. “Burn it down!”
She fired a grenade and blew up the fuel truck, roasting a number of airmen as they were running past it.
Marty made it back unscathed and the three of them slipped away into the night, grabbing up the stashed MREs along the way.
“You stupid fuck!” Sullivan said later, tossing the cases of MREs onto the ground near the Jeep. “What the fuck was that about? Huh?”
“I couldn’t find a charger in the command car,” Marty lied. “So I decided to check the trailer.” He pulled the charger from inside his vest. “I got this med kit, and some more grenades for Shannon’s popgun too.”
“Never again!” Sullivan said, jamming his finger into Marty’s face. “Never again! And I want your goddamn word! You don’t have the right to play games with my life!”
“You’re right,” Marty said, chastened. “It won’t happen again. You’ve got my word.”
They put half the MREs inside the Jeep and lashed the other half to the roof with the fuel cans. At first light they decided to stop for some rest and parked the Jeep off the road beneath an overpass in the desert. Emory volunteered to keep first watch because she was too wired to sleep, and soon Sullivan was snoring away behind the wheel with the seat back. Marty sat with Emory on the hood of the Jeep for warmth.
“You should try and get some sleep,” she said.
“I’m too wound up.”
“I’m getting to know you. You lied earlier. Why’d you really go into that trailer?”
“I heard someone hurting a woman,” he said. “Are all military men fucking psycho?”
“No,” she said. “And not all those guys back there are psycho either, but if the good-natured guys are outnumbered, what are they going to do? They have to eat.”
“They could take off like Sullivan did.”
“And I’m sure plenty of them have, Marty. You’re talking about a lot of young guys with guns and no worthwhile leadership. It starts at the top. That’s what was wrong with our unit. We had a wife-beater for a C.O.”
“Think we can trust Sullivan?” Marty asked.
“He made a cute pass at me back there before your little show. I’m pretty sure he’s a gentleman.”
“Does he have a chance with you?”
“I dunno,” she said with a shrug. “Like he said, I might get desperate.”
“Can you do that? I mean… you know.”
She put her arm around his shoulder, pulling him closer. “It’s like this, Marty. There’s two kinds of lesbians. Those who like intercourse and those who don’t really care for it.”
“Which are you?”
“Well, I used to like it once in a while with the right guy. Now, I dunno. It’ll take time…”
“Plus you might be—”
“Oh, thanks for reminding me,” she said, letting go of him. “I’d actually managed to forget about that. With any luck, I’ll have a goddamn miscarriage.”
“And if we make it the whole nine months?”
“Well, you’re gonna have to deliver the goddamn thing.”
“Me? I don’t know shit about birthing babies.”
“There’s plenty of time for me to teach you all you need to know. Now, do me a favor and don’t bring it up again.”
They sat quietly for a while, then Emory slipped down from the hood and stood looking out across the dim morning expanse of Arizona. “Marty, I don’t know what I’ll do if it looks like him… I might kill it.”
“Nine months is a long time to grow attached, Shannon. Let’s wait and see how you feel by then.”
“What about you? Do you have any kids out there anywhere?”
He smiled sadly and shook his head.
An hour later Marty was dozing in the passenger seat of the Jeep when something woke him up. It was the sound of a rotary winged aircraft, the first aircraft he’d heard in the sky since the impact. Sullivan was still snoring, but Emory was nowhere to be seen. He walked out from beneath the bridge to see her come sliding down the embankment.
“Fuck me!” she shouted. “Gunship coming in along the highway, flying snake and nape!”
“Snake and what?”
“Nape of the earth, Marty. Get outta sight!”
They listened to the helicopter come thundering overhead and on up the highway to the north.
“They’re taking a serious risk,” Marty said. “There’s still too much particulate matter in the air. They’ll burn the turbines up.”
“Must be why they’re flying so low,” she said. “That and they gotta be looking for us.”
Sullivan had awoken to the sound of the rotors and joined them, watching after the helicopter. “Blackhawk, loaded with rockets. They’re definitely pissed.” He turned around and pointed at Marty. “This is on you, cowboy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well… forget it, we just gotta deal with it.”
An hour later the helicopter came back. By now its engines were smoking from sucking in so much dirt and ash, but it swung wide of the highway by a hundred yards for a look beneath the bridge, where Marty had gotten out of the Jeep and stood hidden behind a column. The door gunner immediately opened fire on the vehicle.