“You okay?” Jason asked.
Early shook his head. “You’re too young, you probably can’t even remember what the country was like before the dang war. How much things had changed ‘fore the war ever started. How bad, how crazy it had gotten. Hell, that’s why the war popped off.” He leaned his head back against the wall and spoke to the ceiling. “Most people jes’ want to be left alone to live their normal, peaceful, boring lives. Even in a war zone. Eat, sleep, work, screw, repeat. Only three percent of the population actually fought in the American Revolution. But, see, the thing is, three percent of a population is jes’ a huge number when you get down to it. Bigger than just about any peacetime army in the world. When push finally came to shootin’ this time around, after so many years of bad and crazy, the guv’mint was shocked at just how many people was willin’ to boogaloo.” He lowered his gaze and stared at the boy. “Cain’t say I was.”
Jason didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his new gun. “It’s ugly.”
“It sure is,” Early agreed. “But it’ll help keep you alive. Remember, though, it won’t go through their armor plates any better than your lever action did. You’ve gotta aim for everything but the plate. Which, when the fur’s flyin’, ain’t so easy to do.” He peered at the boy. “But it ain’t nuthin you haven’t done already. You did a fine job. However, what you’ve got there is an honest-to-God military M4, which means it’s select fire. Hand it here.” Jason did. Early double-checked to make sure the rifle was empty, then turned it so Jason could see the controls. “This is the safety. One click down, like this, and you’re good to go. Semi-auto, one bang per pull of the trigger. Push the selector all the way forward, and you’re in full-auto. Dump that whole thirty-round magazine in two seconds. You don’t want that, you won’t hit anything, and you’ll be out of ammo standin’ there with a stupid look on yer face.”
“Weasel’s MP5 is full auto.”
“And that boy is a tear-ass helluva shot, but even he gets a little trigger happy with his bullet hose sometimes. You, you stay on semi-auto, I’m only showing you the selector so that if you happen to get excited and push the switch too far forward, now you’ll know what you did, and that you need to move the switch back. Got me?”
“Yeah.” Jason still felt like throwing up at the thought of the gunfight. How scared he’d been. All the torn bodies, the blood… but instead he swallowed, and nodded. “I thought we couldn’t use their rifles. That they were a different caliber, and had tracking chips in them.”
“Not these, not the M4s. The new ones, with the molded plastic chassis with the built-in camo pattern.” Early frowned. A number of the soldiers they’d killed, maybe as many as a third, had been carrying older M4s, not the new modern M5 with the high-pressure cartridge. He’d thought the M4s had been completely mothballed. He wasn’t sure what that meant, if anything. And why the fuck were they toolin’ around the city in a Growler convertible?
There’d been Kestrels in the air most of the night, using their FLIR to scan houses, but the squad was far too experienced to be caught like that. They heard Growlers once, but they were no closer than a quarter mile away.
There was a rotating two-man watch throughout the night, and everyone else got what rest they could in the basement of the house underneath the heat-reflective sheeting. Most everyone was awakened by the dawn, but in a city filled with people who, for the most part, had nowhere to go and nothing to do, men on the move at six a.m. by itself was enough to draw attention. Ed’s plan was to wait until eight a.m. or so and have the squad begin slipping out in ones and twos, spread far apart, rifles held vertically alongside their bodies at first to confuse any airborne cameras. Everyone knew the basic route down to the general store, and if they got separated there was a rendezvous point a little more than halfway there.
However, not long after dawn they began hearing Kestrels. While none of them flew directly over the house, they were close, and appeared to be hunting. An hour after the first Kestrel made itself known they heard a Growler, then several more. The sound of their engines would fade. There would be quiet for fifteen or thirty minutes, sometimes even an hour, then the faint sound of one of their engines would drift back to the house. Then men hunkered in the basement, impatient.
“They still looking for us?” Weasel said incredulously. He checked his watch. Just after one p.m.
“We hurt ‘em bad,” Mark reminded him.
“What else do they have to do?” Quentin grumbled.
“This is why we left so early for such a short trip,” Ed said pointedly to Weasel. “Were you with us when we got stuck in that half-collapsed basement for two days?”
“Yeah.”
“We were standing in six inches of freezing water the whole time. Half of us got hypothermia.” He waved a hand around the dim basement. It stunk of unwashed men, but it was dry and significantly cooler than being outside. “This is like the Ritz Carlton compared to that.”
Not quite three hours later they heard distant gunfire. A lot of it. Semi-auto rifle fire, and answering full auto fire from what sounded like heavy weapons, and explosions, a lot of them. George went up to the second floor and listened for a while, then came back down to the basement.
“Sounds like it’s directly east of us. A mile, maybe more.”
“Another squad of dogsoldiers?” Ed asked him. “That sounded like someone letting loose with a Mark 19.” George just shrugged. There was no way to know. Being compartmentalized meant they rarely knew where any other squad was, much less what they were doing.
“Whoever it is, they’re burning through a lot of ammo,”
“If they’re still shooting. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Tabs were shooting at each other while the lil’ doggies crept away,” Early opined. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. The ARF had observed there were many more young and inexperienced soldiers in the Army than in the ranks of the Irregulars. Which was just fine with them.
The gunfire tapered off to single rounds, then there was a final explosion. Five minutes later a Kestrel roared over their house, heading toward the sound of the firefight, so low and close dust came down off the walls.
“We’re staying the night,” Ed announced, staring up at the ceiling, making a decision. His pronouncement was greeted with a few groans, but that was it. They’d long ago learned the value of discretion. Quentin moved to the small battered table in the basement and began fieldstripping his rifle for cleaning. The squad members, at various times throughout the day, had taken the opportunity to clean and lube their rifles.
Ed sat down beside George and started massaging his aching calves. He couldn’t remember what it was like to have legs and feet that didn’t hurt. Add his back to that list, too.
“I never asked, where’d you get your rifle?” George asked him.
Ed looked down at the rifle, then at George. “Why?”
George frowned, then he got it. “Oh, you’re not a gun guy, are you.”
“All I know about guns is on the job training.”
Unlike a surprisingly large chunk of the dogsoldiers George knew a lot about guns, and he was aware of how things had changed. At the start of the war he’d seen AKs in the hands of more than a few doggies. And ARs chambered in .300 Blackout. Not any more. It wasn’t that the guns wouldn’t run, it was that they couldn’t find any ammo for them. Also, the cheap ARs, the ones which didn’t have pinned gas blocks, generally hadn’t lasted more than a year or two. And, while everyone was running an optic of some sort, usually a battery-powered red dot, a decade of civil war had been quite a ‘survival of the fittest’ petri dish for them. Only the exquisitely tough sights, and those that didn’t chew through batteries quickly, had survived to make it this far.