“Fuck no,” Thor said, wiggling in tight behind the rifle. “Fuck that.” It was hard to get into a comfortable prone position on plywood while wearing hard body armor. “Fuck those guys.”
“Roger that,” Harris said, unsurprised. Thor had a zero-tolerance policy for bad guys. He turned and announced, “Going loud,” in a voice loud enough for the other men in the church with them to hear. Community outreach commencing in 3… 2… 1….
Thor had a clean backdrop, just a row of busted storefronts. With five unarmored targets he decided speed was more important than precision. He centered the reticle of his scope on the chest of the most visible man at the roadblock, sitting on the hood of a wheel-less Buick, and began squeezing the trigger of his carbine. The rifle bucked, the supersonic crack of the bullet loud, but the suppressor absorbed most of the blast.
Between the weight of the scope and the suppressor the BCM Recce barely recoiled and Thor saw the impact. As the man, seemingly in slow motion, began to topple backward, he moved the reticle to the next closest gang member and broke the trigger quickly.
The three remaining gang members finally realized they were taking fire and dove for cover. However, because of the suppressor and the way sound echoed in the urban environment, while they heard the crack of the shots the men weren’t sure where they were coming from. Thor shot the third man as he crouched beside an overturned and fire-gutted Ford Bronco, looking in the wrong direction. The remaining two opened up with their AKs on full auto, spraying bullets everywhere.
One of the men finished emptying his thirty-round magazine. He was mostly out of sight behind the vehicles, but Thor aimed at what he could see, a shoulder, and scored a hit. Even four hundred feet away he could hear the man’s screams. The lone uninjured man must have done a reload, because he popped up and fired another thirty-round magazine—once again, in the wrong direction. Thor shot him in the neck and the man grabbed at his throat and dropped to the ground, flopping. Thor shot him again in the chest and the man stopped moving.
The screaming faded away, but whether that was because the shoulder-hit man had died or lost consciousness or some other reason was impossible to determine. Thor scanned the intersection through his scope. He couldn’t see anyone moving, then suddenly one of the gang members, maybe the screamer, was struggling atop the Harley. Apparently his plan was to start the motorcycle and drive away? Thor shot him in the side of his chest and the man fell backward, the Harley going down on top of him.
“Like I said, fuck those guys,” Thor said with some venom. “What I want to know is, where the fuck did they find full-auto AKs?”
“Conversions?” Harris opined, looking through the binoculars.
“Those guys don’t look like they could convert beer to piss. I’d like to take a look at those guns, see where they’re from. See if those rumors we’ve heard about China and Russia helping out the Tabs are true.”
The two dogsoldiers heard an incoming rumble, growing louder. Motorcycles. A lot of them.
“I think you may have to wait a bit on that, boss.”
“What part of the city you grow up in?” Barb asked Quentin. They were walking back toward the general store after dropping off the case of energy bars with the rest of Theodore. Barb had ten loaded magazines weighing down her shoulder bag, but she wasn’t complaining. They were sharing an energy bar and a bottle of water.
“I didn’t.”
“Oh? I thought you were a local.”
“Grew up in Toledo. Only came here a couple years after the fighting started, once I started thinking for myself and figured out who the bad guys really were. Which… feels like my whole life.”
“I hear that.”
Quentin glanced at her. Barb had a lot of gray hair. “You’ve got kids, right?”
She nodded. “Grandkids.”
“In the city?”
“No, they went south. Begged me to go too, when all this craziness started, but I guess I’m stupid and crazy. Least that’s what my girl Jackie told me. This is my city, so I’m going to stick by it.” She shrugged. “I never thought I was political, but after working two jobs and raising four kids to always do the right thing, a government shutting down websites and putting people in jail just for criticizing it was enough to get my back up, and that was before they doubled my taxes to pay for all the new government programs, gave the right to vote to illegals and unending free shit to lazy asses who don’t do nothing but vote for more free shit for theyselves.”
Quentin snorted. “You sound like my uncle.”
They reached the last house before the market. It was almost directly across the street from the boarded-up two story brown brick building where Curly kept all the good stuff, and Quentin guessed Ed and Weasel were inside there now. He glanced over at the building, but couldn’t see anything on the second floor through the reflective tint on the windows.
“I’m gonna hang here, wait for Ed and Weez to finish their business,” Quentin told Barb. He didn’t want to hang around inside the market, not with half a dozen soldiers there.
“You mind some company?”
“No ma’am.”
“Don’t you do that. Don’t you dare. I already feel old enough. You call me ma’am again and I’ll kick your ass. And don’t call me auntie, I hate that shit too.”
They were both laughing as they moved into the shade of the front porch. Quentin sat down on one of two chairs that somehow hadn’t been stolen or vandalized. Barb stepped up to the front door and knocked, getting a surprised look from her companion.
“Plenty ‘a houses in this city look abandoned, but ain’t,” she told him. “Doesn’t pay to advertise you might have stuff to steal. But if we’re going to sit on their porch, it’s only polite to ask permission first if someone’s here.”
No one responded to her knock, and after peering through one of the grimy windows, she took the chair opposite Quentin. They sat for a while on the porch, staring off in the distance, lost in their own thoughts.
“It’s going to come back.”
“What?” Quentin looked up. “What is?”
“The city,” she told him. “It’s been going downhill since I was a girl. The riots, white flight, black flight, Murder Capital, Devil’s Night fires, corrupt hip hop mayors, worthless city councils… the war’s just the latest thing, you know? But you look at what’s going on in there,” she gestured at the hulk of the market, “and the rest of the city. Folks making it, putting in the work that needs to be done. It’s the people that make a city. A city ain’t the houses or the streets or the sidewalks, it’s the people who live there. The people who are here, who are still here after all this, they know how to put in the work. Are putting in the work, in spite of everything.”
“A city may be people, but you still need roads and houses. How much of the city is even standing?” he wondered.
“You’d be surprised. It won’t be the same,” she agreed. “More garden and farmland inside the city limits than since the French and British were fightin’ each other ‘round here. Or was it the French and Indians? Don’t matter. What matters is that the people who are still here are stubborn, and they know how to work. If they didn’t know, they learned. I think, probably, that the same is true for the people all over this country. The war didn’t get rid of all the lazy weak people, but it sure thinned the herd, you know? Once we get through this, it’ll be an uphill road, but it’ll be a better country. Maybe not for us, but for my grandbabies.”