George shrugged. “You’re not a gun guy, or a competition shooter. If you were, me saying that on a good day I could run a plate rack in three seconds might mean something. That’s six six-inch metal plates, seven yards away. Think six headshots. These guys weren’t seven yards away, they were seven feet away, and not expecting it. The other guys on the SWAT team lost their minds and would have arrested me reflexively if I’d given them a chance, but the muzzle of a smoking gun in your face tends to reorient your priorities. I zip-tied them, and I walked away. Walked away from the scene, walked away from the job, walked away from my whole life.”
“Family?” Ed asked. Ed had never inquired about George’s personal situation.
“Daughter,” George said. “And an ex-wife. They were living down in Florida, I was pretty much estranged from both of them. Haven’t talked to either in forever. Since the war broke out. Which happened not too long after that.”
“You didn’t know,” Ed said to his number two about the woman he’d killed.
“I should have, though,” George said. “I should have asked questions instead of just blindly following along.” He looked at Ed and said simply, “And I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. But no matter what I do, how many of them I kill, it doesn’t bring her back.”
Major Phillip Abraham Stein, commander of Wolverine—Phil-A to a lot of his friends, and Chick to everyone else—listened to the man breathing. His breath was chugging in and out, slow, uneven, wet, syrupy. Bubbling? No, closer to burbling, like one of those picturesque streams out in the woods somewhere, happily bouncing over stones and through fallen branches. Except, of course, that it wasn’t a stream, it was a human being in a lot of pain struggling to pull air into his lungs. Which still wouldn’t have been great cause for concern, in a war zone a lot of horrible things happened, people died every day, except that, in this particular case, all those troublesome sounds were coming out of his own mouth.
His squad had been heading south-southwest, carefully, slowly, doing everything they could to not get spotted by anyone, as instructed, when they heard one hell of a firefight half, maybe three-quarters of a mile ahead of them. They immediately took a left turn and headed east, trying to put some distance between them and whoever and whatever the hell was going on over there. The firefight hadn’t gone on very long, but it had been fierce while it lasted, with a couple of explosions that sounded like grenades. Before long he’d spotted a fresh column of black smoke, probably marking the spot where whatever had happened, happened.
Ten minutes later Potter, his #2, had recommended they get under cover, because you just knew a gunfight that big was going to draw a lot of attention. He’d been right, as usual—they’d barely gone to ground inside a half-collapsed small commercial building when the first Kestrel had roared overhead.
Whatever had happened it seemed to have seriously upset the Tabs, because between the incessant circling helicopters and the rumble of patrolling Growlers, Wolverine only made it another block east before giving up on any further movement that day. They overnighted in a big two-story house that three generations earlier had probably been very nice—now they were happy that the roof only leaked a little, and nothing inside the house had been set on fire by recreational arsonists.
The next day hadn’t been much better. Birds back and forth overhead for most of the morning and into the afternoon. The occasional distant sound of a vehicle, no doubt military. “Whatever happened, the Tabs are pissed,” Brown observed, staring up at the ceiling.
Finally, as the sun was heading west, the activity died down. They hadn’t heard a wheeled vehicle in hours, and the closest aircraft had been well over a mile away. Chick had been itching to put more distance between them and that firefight, as well as move further southward toward their objective, even though they had all the time in the world to get there.
They moved out slowly, carefully, walking through the back yards of the decrepit homes, finding their way to a gravel alley that ran behind the detached garages to the rear of the houses. With all the trees and bushes gone wild they felt invisible as they walked down either side of the narrow alley.
Near the end of the block Chick stopped and held up a hand. He’d heard something, a whimpering scramble that sounded like an injured dog. He and Brown rounded the corner of the last house together and saw two men behind a low commercial building. One of the men was standing, the other was atop a very skinny naked black woman. Even though she looked about twelve Chick thought for a second the act might have been consensual, or perhaps a business transaction—he’d seen a lot worse things during his time as a dogsoldier—then he saw the revolver in the hand of the man watching, and the knife in the hand of the man atop the girl. And her terrified angry face.
“Hey, fuckers!” he shouted reflexively.
The standing man turned, the revolver started to come up, and Brown put three bullets through the man’s chest with his AK-V.
“Don’t you do it!” the man atop the girl said, pressing the knife to her throat and staring at them with wild eyes. “Don’t you fucking do it! I’ll—” The bullet from Chick’s Daniel Defense Mk18 hit him just below the bridge of his nose and the man fell backwards off the girl, the back half of his head gone. She screamed reflexively and scrabbled backward from the dead body.
“You okay? Where are your clothes?” Chick asked her, gun down and hands up soothingly. He didn’t approach her, the knife had fallen out of the dead man’s hand and was right beside her hip.
“Shit, I don’t know. They cut ‘em,” she said, sobbing. But she wasn’t just sad, she was angry, too, which he was glad to see.
“I think we might be able to find something for you to wear,” Chick said.
Potter had an old button-down shirt in his pack that was long enough on her to cover the essentials, but she still took the holey t-shirt offered by Fine and wrapped it around her waist for an additional layer of psychological protection.
“We need to di-di,” Brown said.
“Yeah, I know,” Chick agreed. They were too exposed there, and hadn’t moved after shooting. “You got someplace to go?” he asked the girl, as he walked around the corner of the commercial building to take a peek at the area. There, less than a hundred yards away, were an IMP and two Growlers who’d heard the gunshots and were creeping in as quietly as they could.
“Contact! Displace!” he screamed, and then the roof gunner on the IMP let loose with the full-auto grenade launcher, and the one atop the Growler joined in with his belt-fed M240B.
The girl and maybe half the men of Wolverine died where they stood, before they even had a chance to fight back, shredded by the bullets and grenades landing between the buildings. Chick found himself with Potter and Brown in a fighting retreat through backyards, using houses as cover, as the vehicles surged forward, trying to encircle them. A long burst of machine gun fire slipped between houses and took Brown down as he hopped a fence right behind Chick.
Now Chick stared down at himself. The syrupy breathing was problematic but he was sitting upright, so at least there was that. Of course, he couldn’t really move his left arm, and his legs weren’t much better. The amount of blood he could see on his skin, and his clothes, and the pavement underneath, seemed excessive. Quite uncalled for. His back was against a low concrete wall, and there was the rotted hulk of a car to his left, providing cover in that direction. There was a burned-out gas station on the other side of the wall behind him. In front of him was a small, half-collapsed house. The five steps leading up to its porch might as well have been a mountain.