“I never took you for an optimist.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Is that what I am? I think it’s more nature than anything else. Nature moves in cycles. Things have been so bad for so long here, I think it has to get better, to balance everything out.”
Quentin just grunted. He didn’t know what he believed any more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Everyone clear on the next RP?” Ed asked. “We’ve got a couple hours before dark, but the move is only a mile and a half or so. No need to hurry. We’ve got a lot of houses in this area but not many people, so there are plenty of bolt-holes if you need them. I want big intervals and multiple routes of travel, so anyone paying attention, even an eye in the sky, won’t be sure we’re all together. And don’t be obvious with your rifles, if possible. What’d we codename this one, Happy Indian?” He looked around the table. The house they were heading to was on Cheyenne just south of Joy Road—their codenames were simple so they were easy to remember.
“Yeah,” Mark told him.
There was a safe house operated by the “underground railroad” less than half a mile from Happy Indian, but Ed didn’t want to use it. Didn’t even want to go near it. It was known, and used, by a number of dogsoldiers, and he wanted Theodore to keep as low a profile as possible before arriving at Uncle Charlie’s rendezvous. That included avoiding other squads.
“We’re only four miles from where this “family reunion” is happening, and we’ve got a couple of days to get there. The closer we get to Uncle Charlie’s meeting time the more careful I want to be. I’ve got a feeling, I think this is big. Franklin got the word, and I don’t know if Mickey is going but they obviously knew about it as well.”
The squad was standing around the kitchen table where he’d spread out his deteriorating map. The mood was good as everyone was full up on energy bars, fresh water, and some of Renny’s venison jerky, plus Ed had acquired a surprising number of much-needed items. A dozen new-in-the-packaging rechargeable lithium batteries, twenty bottles of water now distributed among their packs, six military MREs, half a bottle of children’s gummi multi-vitamins, a fifty-round box of Curly’s specialty 9mm ammo for Weasel, one bottle of amoxicillin, a Survivor Filter water bottle, and an honest-to-God mini drone. It was a commercial product and seemed almost new, and Curly had both the controller and owner’s manual. The squad hadn’t had a working drone in forever. For all of that Ed had traded Curly a total of twenty-five loaded magazines and two grenades, but even after donating an additional ten magazines to Mickey every AR carrier in Theodore had nearly fifteen 30-round magazines.
Uncle Charlie’s rendezvous spot was almost four miles directly north of their current location, but Ed didn’t want to head straight in. The squad would be heading north and a bit west to a house they’d laid up in before. It had several rain traps, and a few engineered leaks in the roof to keep two mattresses and several blankets wet to provide cover from the thermal imagers on the Kestrels.
“You think it’s somehow related to that detention center raid?” Weasel asked. They’d spread the word about that to the rest of the squad.
Ed looked at George, then Early, and all three men shook their heads in agreement. “I don’t see how it could be,” Ed said. “Not directly.”
George added, “There are no detention centers within five hundred miles of here. That we’ve heard about, at least, but definitely not in the metro area. Just the jail the Tabs are running downtown, and I don’t know how many people are even in that. And if that’s what someone at the ARF brain trust has in mind for us, raiding that, we might all have to think about doing a hard pass. Place is a fortress, and every Toad they’ve got is two minutes away. It’d be suicide.”
“You hear anything at the general store, people you overheard, or from Mickey or talking to Curly? Any sense that something unusual’s going on?”
Ed shook his head. “No. Mickey might have intel, but if they’ve got it and we’re not cleared we’ll never know about it. Shelly makes me look like a neighborhood gossip. She probably knows where Hoffa’s buried and who really shot JFK.”
“Those chicks are tight with operational security,” Weasel agreed.
“Barb’d carve you like a turkey if she heard you call her a chick,” Mark scolded him. That every woman on Mickey carried a hidden knife in addition to whatever guns they might have was an unverified rumor everyone believed. The rumor implied it was a result of rapes, or attempted rapes, back when the war was new, which was completely plausible. The city was hellishly dangerous for anyone, but especially women, and the city was Disneyland for women compared to Thunderdome.
“What’s Hoffa?” Jason asked.
“Sweet Jesus, son, you make me feel old,” Early said to him, frowning.
Since he was already irritating the man with questions, Jason decided on one more. “Why do we call them Tabs?”
Early blinked. “I guess I don’t know.”
“I do,” George said. He fixed Jason with a stare, and as he told the story the rest of the squad listened in, as only a few had ever heard it before. “Early on at the beginning of all this shit, before the shooting really started, a TV news crew got invited to tag along with a federal tactical unit that was doing a raid on a house. Nice house, in the suburbs somewhere. The raid team is all in black, body armor, rifles, helmets, balaclavas, the whole tactical ninja look. If I remember correctly they’d gotten a tip that the homeowner had some banned guns he hadn’t turned in for destruction. Knocked down the front door with a ram, came in shouting, whole shock and awe thing, but all they did was scare the crap out of the guy and his family who were watching TV. Kept him in handcuffs and the wife and kids at gunpoint while they searched the place. They didn’t find any banned guns, just a couple of bolt action .22 rifles that you’d use for plinking or shooting squirrels. This was after they outlawed all the scary evil black guns, but before they banned all firearms.
“But, see, they weren’t happy about that, they wanted to look like heroes in front of the cameras. So, when they found some leftover PVC pipe in his basement that he’d used to repair one of his sinks they arrested him for constructive intent to build silencers. Which is a federal felony. Multiple federal felonies, one for every piece of plastic tubing. So they tell him this, guys in body armor and helmets yanking him up, telling him he’s going to federal prison for a couple decades, right in front of his little girls who are terrified and his wife is crying. The guy is completely in shock, because he’s not a criminal, he doesn’t know shit about silencers, doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, hell, he hasn’t done anything wrong, and he keeps saying they’ve got the wrong guy, that there’s been a mistake. He keeps saying over and over again that they’re making a mistake. And the head SWAT guy is playing it up for the cameras, being a smartass, and says, laughing it up, ‘Like I haven’t heard that before. Put it on my tab.’ That video got shown on the evening news, and it didn’t get much attention, at least not until the guy got shanked in jail later that week and died. Then it exploded all over social media. He became a martyr for the cause, shall we say. And right about then is when a lot of people decided to take a stand and shit went seriously sideways.”
“I never heard that before,” Renny admitted.
“I have,” Weasel said bitterly. He frowned at George. “That happen before or after you took out that fed raid team?”
“It happened two weeks after I went on the run,” George said. “Helped me confirm I’d made the right decision. Time to go. Christ,” he muttered, shouldering his pack. He shook his head and gave Ed a wry smile. “I suppose I shouldn’t complain since the weight is all water and ammo.”