Potter was ten feet away, on his back next to the car carcass, his eyes open and unstaring. The pavement around the two men was littered with spent brass. ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees’—Potter, in fact every dogsoldier, believed that credo, and the man had gone down shooting. Potter’s rifle had slid over the hood of the car toward the Tabs when he’d gone down—so far out of reach it might as well have been in Alaska.
Between them on the concrete was Chick’s DD Mk18. He hadn’t known anything about guns before the war, but he’d learned. This particular Mk18, which had served him so well for so long, had started out life as a pistol legal to own almost everywhere in the country—or so he’d been told—before being branded illegal and immoral. By the time it had come into his possession someone had swapped out the SBA3 brace on the back for a Magpul stock and mounted an Aimpoint Comp M5s red dot sight on the receiver, and so it had remained until today.
Chick hadn’t run out of ammo. Currently there was a large hole in the lower receiver where a lucky incoming round had disabled the firearm. Another round from that same burst had hit him in the side. A third had hit his leg. Altogether quite unfortunate.
With a grunt he levered himself up and fired his Glock 19 over the wall, then fell back down as incoming rifle fire from multiple directions sent bullets over his head and thumped into the wall. Chips and concrete dust settled over him. A Growler was on the far side of the gas station parking lot.
He fired the Glock blindly over his shoulder in the general direction of the Growler and stared down at the front of his plate carrier. He had pouches stuffed with magazines for his rifle, which were useless right now. Above the magazines on his chest he’d inked WOLVERINES! with a sharpie not long after joining the squad over four years before. But what really caught his eye was the fragmentation grenade hanging off the side of his plate carrier.
With a lucky toss he might be able to get a handful of the soldiers, maybe damage the Growler. But even if he did, he wasn’t getting away. There were too many of them, and he was too messed up. He wasn’t sure where the other vehicles were, and didn’t know why they weren’t lobbing grenades into his position. It’s what he would have done.
Maybe they wanted to capture him. Take him to the Fun House for interrogation.
At that thought, his eyes traveled to the cargo pocket in his pants, now half-soaked with blood. The mini tablet was in there, as well as the satellite uplink. The Tabs wouldn’t find anything on either, he’d wiped the histories, and even if he hadn’t they didn’t know about the book code.
He was fading fast, and was actually worried that he would pass out instead of die. If he died, then he was dead. If he just passed out, on the other hand, he knew he’d wake up in the Fun House downtown, the little jail the Tabs took anyone they suspected of anti-government activities, or even sentiment. Him, he had no illusions, he was sure they’d waterboard him or something as equally unpleasant to get information. Maybe, probably, straight up torture. He didn’t know anything about such things but he’d been told, by hardcases who knew, that everyone, eventually, breaks. And he couldn’t give up Uncle Charlie or the method the dogsoldiers used to find and decode the messages to get their missions.
With a grunt he fired the Glock over his shoulder once more, than stared at the pistol in his hand. It would be so easy…
He pressed the hot muzzle of the gun against the soft underside of his chin, his hand shaking slightly. Then the shakes grew in intensity, until finally he dropped his hand to his lap.
“Fuck,” he gasped. He couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t because suicide was a sin and forbidden by Jewish law, God himself knew poor little Phillip Stein had long ago strayed far from the faith. If you were a Jew, tattoos were a serious, definite no-no. The Old Testament was pretty fucking clear about that, which was exactly why he’d gotten one when he was in college. Well, actually, he’d gotten it specifically to piss off his parents, who were hypocrites about everything. They claimed to be observant, and went through the motions of Judaism, but the rest of the time they were just horrible people, to everyone including their family, so what did it matter which religion they claimed to follow? By junior high school he was pretty sure he didn’t believe in God, and even if he did, obeying traditions just to obey them, just because they were traditions, went against his very nature.
His mother made a point of telling people, almost proudly it seemed sometimes, that her great-aunt had died in the Holocaust. Then there she was, when things got really bad, making excuses for a government that seemed to be doing all the same things, in spirit if not in fact, as the German government in the 1930s.
The day when everything had suddenly unfolded logically in his mind was crystal clear in his memory, as was the pain from the slap his mother gave him when he told her she had the same kind of perpetual victim/gas chamber mentality that caused her great-aunt to meekly be led to her death in the first place, and that he would not comply. He hadn’t seen or spoken to his parents since.
That had been, what, six years ago? Seven? He’d been pasty and pudgy and balding and realized now that, at the time, he didn’t know anything about anything… but he’d been willing to fight. Now, sixty pounds lighter and more than just ‘balding’, he’d been the commander of Wolverine for twenty-seven months, kicking Tab ass as much as any squad in the city. Two years back they’d killed a Toad, a feat of which he was especially proud. Even though they’d suffered well over one hundred percent casualties over the years, Wolverine had killed well over a hundred Tabs and destroyed a handful of IMPs and at least half a dozen Growlers in addition to that Toad. It had been a good run, a great run, but it appeared that run was over.
He stared down at his broken, bloody body. He just couldn’t, wouldn’t kill himself, and not because of the traditions of a religion he’d finally, probably too late, come to appreciate. No, it was because he just couldn’t give up. That had always been his problem, or so he’d been told, he just wouldn’t quit. And there was no truer definition of quitting than suicide.
There was a sound close behind him and he jerked the pistol over his head and fired twice. He was rewarded with a scream of pain. He would have smiled, if he hadn’t been so tired. Schmucks. When he brought the Glock back down he saw that the slide was locked back on an empty magazine.
“Well, shit,” he muttered, dropping the Glock onto his lap.
Past the grenade hanging from his chest he looked at his left arm sitting lifeless beside his body. His sleeve was rolled up partway, far enough for him to read, maybe for the thousandth time, the tattoo on the inside of his forearm. He’d gotten it a year into his service with the ARF Irregulars. He already had one tattoo, so his body was damaged goods, so to speak, as far as Judaism went, so what was one more?
The tattoo had gotten him through the worst of times. Injuries, death of his men, the horrors of war, the despair of fighting in a conflict that never seemed to end. But every time he felt his body or his resolve grow weak he looked at that tattoo, stared at it, and remembered others who had sacrificed far more than he ever had or even could.
NEVER AGAIN
The words were simple, as was the message, and they’d kept him strong for years. Because ‘Never Again’ meant nothing if you weren’t willing to do something about it. He wouldn’t let them down, he wouldn’t, couldn’t let himself down either. His eyes strayed upward to the bill of the stained, battered baseball cap on his head. Not exactly a yarmulke, but if he was destined to head upstairs in short order for his final interview with the Man, it would have to do….