“This city doesn’t get any prettier, does it,” Renny said, staring at the back of the school. It had been vandalized often over the past decade. There were only a few shards of glass left in the window frames. The graffiti on the brick façade was so old and faded it seemed tired.
They were the last to arrive, and Quentin was on lookout at the rear of the building. “I was wondering if you guys got lost. Who the fuck’s this?” he asked, looking Renny up and down.
“Apparently Theodore is having open tryouts this week,” Ed said, a bemused expression on his face.
Mark was watching out the front windows of the school, and Early relieved Quentin at his spot, eyeballing the parking lot and overgrown field to the rear. The rest of the squad gathered in one of the classrooms in the middle of the long, low building. “This is Renny. He’s been following us for a couple of days now wanted to tag along. He took out the roof gunner on the IMP.”
“You mean this is the motherfucker that nearly got us all killed?” Weasel demanded, jumping up from his seat. He glared at Renny, who looked to Ed.
“You want to join the party, you’re going to have to work this out with them,” Ed told him pointedly.
While the rest of the squad began to have a loud conversation with Renny Ed took George aside and got him up to speed on the new face. “He doesn’t feel wrong to me at all,” he finished, “or Early, but I’m open to counterargument.”
George shook his head and eyed Renny, who wasn’t bowing under Weasel’s anger or Quentin’s dark-browed suspicion. “I trust your judgement. He’s not exactly a teenager, is he? So out of the eight of us, five are too old to be fighting, and Jason’s too young. Christ.”
“Hell, you’re the only one on the squad with any prior experience,” Ed reminded him, “but we’ve done pretty well for ourselves.”
“SWAT team doesn’t exactly count toward military experience,” George said, making a face.
“It’s more pertinent job experience than being an accountant, or comptroller,” Ed pointed out. That had been his last job before this one. He pointed at Quentin. “Truck driver. Mark was an insurance investigator. Early was a plumber. You fight a war with the people and gear you’ve got, not the ones you want,” he said, repeating something he’d heard a military veteran once say. “A ‘well-regulated militia’? You’re fucking looking at it. We’re all soldiers now.”
“They were seconds from spotting you. I took the shot when I had it,” the two men heard Renny say, his voice loud. He sounded exasperated.
“Yeah? Well, we’re going to have to agree to fucking disagree,” Weasel spat back. He stomped away from the man, toward Ed and George. “You make sure Quigley Down Under knows when to stay off the trigger,” he said in passing, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.
They crossed Greenfield and moved behind the small, one-story retail shops lining the east side of the street. The gravel alley was narrow and overgrown with trees, running south between the commercial buildings and the back yards of neighborhood houses.
Not quite half a mile down they met a set of railroad tracks arrowing southeast toward the heart of the city, and turned to follow them. They were at the extreme southwestern border of the city, but there was no visible change as they moved from the city into the adjacent suburb. The streets were thick with houses to either side, but Ed knew their limited view from the tracks was misleading. He wouldn’t take his squad much more than half a mile southwest of the tracks unless they were actively trying to break contact under fire.
Once combat began in earnest, even though war was never officially declared, the agreed-upon construct called civilization was thrown out the window in most of the cities around the country. Shortly into the war anarchy turned into near-apocalypse as every person or group who had grievances, large or small, current or historical, felt free to act on them, and this was especially true in this suburb variously nicknamed Mecca or Shariatown or Thunderdome, depending on who you were talking to.
Thunderdome was famous for being predominantly Muslim before the war, and had been the site of some of the most furious house-to-house fighting and brutal combat seen anywhere in the country. Ed knew it hadn’t been the military versus ARF or even dogsoldiers, even though that was the official story plastered all over the state-controlled media. Whether it had been good ol’ American race riots, internecine warfare, or Sunni and Shi’a taking the opportunity of the war to participate in some long-hoped-for ethnic cleansing he had no idea, but there’d been huge surging riots in the streets, Molotov cocktails by the hundreds, running gun battles, group executions, and honest-to-God stonings and beheadings. Large swaths of neighborhoods had been burned down in what the government at the time had described as “arson riots”, whatever the hell that meant. Ten years gone, it was even worse. Everyone but the few hardy or crazy souls still living there avoided it day and night. Hell, even the Tabs avoided Thunderdome.
The men moved in two columns, keeping to the grass on either side of the double set of tracks, ready to take cover in the nearby houses and buildings at any second if necessary. Five minutes after starting along the tracks they passed a dead-end residential street to the left where two children were kicking a soccer ball back and forth. The boy waved at them, and Mark waved back, smiling. The girl stood in the middle of the street, frowning at them until they’d moved out of sight.
After walking along the tracks for almost exactly a mile, they passed a spur line heading directly north. There were huge asphalt parking lots to either side of the spur. The one on the west side was filled with hundreds of rusting semi trailers, the one on the east with dozens of flat-tired school buses
George, in the lead, struck off directly east through the bus lot, weaving through the listing hulks. Their paint jobs had faded to a pastel lemon after a decade of sun and wind. On the far side of the parking lot were neighborhood streets thick with homes, but at the start of the war a savage fire had devastated more than half a square mile of streets lined with small two-story houses. The houses were blackened hulks, most collapsed, resembling rotted splintered teeth jabbing up at the sky. None had escaped the inferno. After eight years weeds and saplings had begun to grow through the moldering walls and floors.
They walked down the middle of the street in what had once been a lively, thriving community. It was eerily quiet as, unlike most of the city, absolutely no one lived there. Here and there they passed cars which had burned and melted in the blaze. Their steps echoed off the heat-blistered pavement. Even now, years later, everything smelled of ash.
Four hundred yards into the burnt wasteland they passed the reason for the firestorm; two bomb craters. The blasts had leveled half a block. The craters were overgrown with weeds, with standing water at the bottom, but there was no mistaking what they were. Officially no bombs had been dropped in the city, much less the surrounding suburbs, but the resulting fire had stretched for nearly half a mile east, blown by the strong winds that day. No one knew how many residents had been killed in the fire; at that point in the war local law enforcement had nearly disintegrated and the military was too busy fighting to investigate something that, officially, had nothing to do with them. The suspicion was that the military had bombed the headquarters of one of the instigators of the ethnic cleansing going on in Thunderdome but just didn’t want to admit it, especially after the fire had erupted and spread out of control.