“I’m not sorry we missed this,” Kane said. “They slaughtered these people.”
“Looks like somebody didn’t want them getting into the city,” Forrest surmised. “I’m guessing it was the Forty-fifth I.D.”
A mile farther ahead a pair of large spotlights unexpectedly snapped on in the pitch-black, blinding them both. Kane slammed on the brakes and grabbed for his carbine, but Forrest caught his arm. “It’s gotta be the Forty-fifth. Give ’em a chance to look us over.”
Both men shaded their eyes and waited as a group of soldiers surrounded the Humvee, shouting for them to show their hands.
“Hold your fire!” Forrest was shouting at them. “We’re with the Eighty-second!”
“Exit the vehicle!” someone shouted. “Hands in the air!”
Both men exited and stood with their hands up, still squinting against the intense light.
“Hold your fire, guys,” Forrest said. “Take it easy. We’re on your side.”
“Move it!” a soldier said, prodding him forward with the muzzle of an M-16.
They were marched through an opening in a barricade of cars stacked two high, then across an open lot into a Texaco station with blacked-out windows. The inside of the makeshift command post was well lit with military lanterns, and the shelves were empty, all of them jammed up against the walls out of the way.
A black sergeant with a bald head sat in an easy chair behind the counter smoking a cigar. His uniform tag said that his name was Lee, the patch on his shoulder the dingy gold thunderbird of the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, a division reactivated a few years before the asteroid had ever been spotted.
“These men were trying to get into the city,” one of the soldiers said.
Lee stood up and came around the counter to Kane, the cigar caught in the corner of his mouth. They were of equal size and height. “You two smell good enough to fuck,” he said, puffing at the cigar. “Where the hell you comin’ from?”
“I’m afraid that’s classified information, Sergeant,” Forrest said.
Lee turned to look him over. “That’s a term that’s lost most of its meaning around here, Captain.”
“The fact remains. Who’s your commanding officer?”
“These guys are Special Forces,” one of the soldiers said, pointing out the patches on their left shoulders. “They must’ve been in the rear with the gear all this time.”
“That so?” Lee asked. “You two a couple of REMFs?” This was an unofficial, pejorative military acronym standing for Rear Echelon Mother Fucker.
“Sergeant, I’ve already told you that’s classified information. I won’t tell you again. Now who’s your C.O.… or are you all that’s left after that battle out there?”
Lee stood chewing the cigar. “Colonel Short still commands.”
“Then I’ll need to speak with him,” Forrest said. “In the meantime, Sergeant, I’ll be holding you personally responsible for our vehicle and equipment.”
Lee glanced at his men and smirked. “Responsible to who, Captain?”
Forrest knew all too well there wasn’t much left to intimidate with in terms of a military hierarchy, but if he lost the initiative, they were screwed. He was only now getting a good look at the two men covering them, and they were but mere shadows of the soldiers they had once been, filthy and unshaven, dark circles beneath their eyes. Lee was shaven and better kempt, but he was obviously equally exhausted. “To your C.O. Who the hell else?”
“Got any ID?” Lee asked.
“Just our tags,” Forrest said. “Left our AGO cards back at Bragg.”
“Lemme see.”
Both men took their dog tags from beneath their jackets for the sergeant to read.
“Okay,” Lee said, believing they were at least who they said they were. “Turn your pistols over to my men until after you’ve met with the colonel.”
Kane and Forrest took their .45s from their holsters and surrendered them.
“Don’t lose them,” Forrest said.
“I’ll take these cats to the colonel myself,” Lee said. “Tell Sergeant Behan he’s in charge till I get back.”
Sergeant Stacker Lee then grabbed a flashlight from the counter and led them out the back door to a waiting black Cadillac Escalade. He gave the keys to Forrest and told him to drive. “I’ll sit in the back. Just follow my directions.”
Colonel Eugene Short’s quarters were a mile off the highway in a very nice home at the edge of what had once been a wealthy neighborhood. There were four men on guard outside the house wearing night vision devices on their helmets and four more on guard inside. There were more lanterns lighting the inside of the home where Short was sitting down to a meal of heated green beans and canned potatoes. A generator hummed somewhere beneath the floor but there was no electric light to be seen.
“These men were taken into custody at the northern barricade, sir. They’re Special Forces with the Eighty-second and claim to be on a classified mission.”
Short was a graying man of fifty-two with drifting, watery blue eyes. He was clean shaven and wore a semiclean digitally camouflaged uniform bearing the eagle insignia of a full colonel with the Forty-fifth Division. “A classified mission?” he said dubiously. “I find that rather difficult to believe.”
“That’s what they claim, sir. They’re also very clean and smell of soap and aftershave.”
Short stood from the dining table and came over to Forrest and Kane, both of whom stood rigidly at attention.
“At ease, gentlemen,” the colonel said, looking them over. “You boys are well fed sons of bitches, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Forrest said.
“How is that?”
“I’m afraid I’m not exactly at liberty to say, Colonel. But we’re obviously traveling with a well equipped and sizable force.”
Short took a humorous glance at Sergeant Lee. “Did that sound like a veiled threat to you, Sergeant?”
“It did, sir.”
“It was no kind of threat at all, sir. I was merely attempting to answer the colonel’s question without exceeding my mission parameters.”
“Take a seat at the table, gentlemen.” Short then ordered his personal guards out of the room, leaving the four of them alone as he reclaimed his chair. “You’re both Green Berets,” he said, forking a potato into his mouth.
“Yes, sir.”
“See how the green beanies are, Sergeant? They take themselves too seriously… even now.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee said.
“Captain Forrest,” the colonel went on, “would it be safe for me to assume that a detachment of the Eighty-second Airborne has made its way here all the way from North Carolina for purposes unknown?”
“That much would be safe to assume, sir, yes.”
“And you came across on Interstate 40?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see,” Short said, forking another potato into his mouth and chewing it completely before swallowing, savoring it to the last. “Well, Captain, would you care to hear how I know that story to be complete bullshit?”
Neither Forrest nor Kane made a reply to the colonel’s query.
“Of course you would,” the colonel went on. “Well, on the night the meteor hit, there were some pretty massive earthquakes around these parts… which caused the engineers working over at the Parkersburg nuclear power plant to panic and abandon ship without bothering to power down the reactor. So the core melted down and burned right through the bottom of the plant—China syndrome. Only it never quite made it to China. It hit groundwater and sent a huge cloud of radioactive steam into the air, killing everybody within a fifty-mile-wide corridor east of the plant for a hundred miles. It’s a dead zone now, and Interstate 40 runs right through it.” He paused long enough to eat a forkful of beans, then said, “What do you have to say to that, Captain?”