“No, you shouldn’t.” Ed cocked his head at Jason, who was looking a little unsure at the thought of a solo patrol. “Kid, you wandered around the city for a week looking for us. Now you’ve got a better gun, armor, grenades, and half a dozen guys who’ll come running in your direction if they hear anything. You’ll be fine.”
The houses were mostly two-story duplexes with red brick and white siding, nearly all the streets running due north/south and east/west. There were few trees, at least at first, and the men of Theodore felt very exposed, which is exactly why Ed had them stagger their departures and routes so much, so they looked anything like a military unit on the move. Mark and Weasel walked west into the Fire Nation before turning north. Jason had instructions to move a block or two east before turning north, and George was five minutes behind him. Renny headed directly north, Quentin followed ten minutes after him, and Ed ambled after him a few minutes later. Early was the last person to leave the house.
Jason had been told to not be in any hurry, that stealth was more important than speed. Still, he had to fight the urge to move fast. The yards were mostly overgrown, but there were occasional signs of habitation or people passing through the area. He walked slowly through the grass close to the residences, pausing frequently to look around and listen, ready to duck between houses if he heard vehicles or aircraft.
After a quarter mile the two-story duplexes shrank to small brick bungalows. He passed several diamond-shaped orange signs warning of road construction ahead. After ten years in the sun and wind their orange had faded to a pale peach. He never saw any evidence of actual construction.
The new rifle still felt strange in his hand, but he was getting used to the armor plates squeezing his chest and back. His backpack was heavy with ammo and water, but for once he didn’t mind. He took a brief pause after moving a third of a mile or so. The houses here were stacked close together, separated only by the width of their driveways, and he stood in the shadow between two houses, sipping a bottle of water, watching and listening. Nearly every house had a detached one- or two-car garage in back, some of them in very poor condition. All of the back yards were fenced as well, which would have made travel through them slow and noisy.
Most of the houses had their first floors four feet or so above ground level, and their covered porches were six steps off the front sidewalk. When moving through neighborhoods Jason always felt there were dozens of eyes following him, but knew this was probably his imagination. Probably.
He relieved himself against the side of the house, put the half-empty bottle of water into a side pocket of his pack, and moved out again. On the next block he passed behind the hulk of an elementary school. It was an old building, with an ornate brick chimney. The building itself seemed undamaged, but it was dark and quiet.
A few hundred yards farther up was a major cross-street, Warren Avenue, code-named Pocahontas by the dogsoldiers for some unknown reason, eventually shortened to Poke. There were one-story businesses lining either side of the road, which was two lanes in each direction.
He crossed an alley. There was a bakery on the right and the fire-scarred shell of a strip mall on the left. Across Poke was a large gray building that looked like a warehouse and from the signage used to be a wholesale distributor. Of what, he had no idea.
Jason stepped through a hole in the cinderblock wall and stood inside the end store of the destroyed strip mall. He moved through the debris toward the front of the store and looked out at the street, craning his head to peer as far as he could in both directions, east and west. He’d traveled half a mile in not much more than twenty minutes, so he had plenty of time.
A shirtless man rode a bicycle down the middle of Pocahontas, his chain squeaking. The squeaking brought three dogs out of the ruined door of the bakery. They stared after the bicyclist and sniffed the air. One was a cute black and white collie, the other a huge brindle boxer, and the third a short-haired white terrier who couldn’t have weighed fifteen pounds. After a few seconds of indecision they headed south, retracing Jason’s route, trotting along the sidewalk.
Several hundred yards west in the middle of Pocahontas was something large and dark. It rose from the center of the street and from his vantage point it looked like a big piece of furniture sitting in a sinkhole, but Jason knew that couldn’t be right. Stretching out behind it, running down the street past him and heading east into the distance were two wide marks on the pavement he couldn’t quite understand.
As he tried to figure out what he was looking at, his mind wandered. Joining up with ARF… it wasn’t what he’d thought it would be. He’d thought he’d get a uniform and be with a bunch of other guys his age, marching and training and then fighting. He realized now that was totally idiotic. That’s not what the war was, at least not here, and maybe not anywhere.
The men of Theodore weren’t what he was expecting either. Then again… they were. Ed looked like an accountant, but he had the confidence and ease of command and carried himself like the experienced veteran he was. George seemed the closest thing to a professional soldier of anyone in the squad and had cut the throats of two downed soldiers so emotionlessly it had chilled Jason to the bone. Early appeared to be just a dumb redneck, but for a big man with a big gun he could move without making a sound and was far smarter than he first seemed. Quentin, Weasel, Mark… none of them were who or what he’d pictured when he’d thought of dogsoldiers. And yet that’s exactly who they were. What they were. None of them had been professional soldiers, they were just ordinary people who’d been forced, or chosen, to become soldiers. Like himself, he supposed.
And here he was, on his own, trusted, wearing armor and carrying a full-auto military rifle, inside the infamous city itself, heading to some sort of secret rendezvous. Truthfully he felt like a fraud, still only playing at being a soldier, but vowed to live up to the expectations of everyone else in Theodore.
The unplanned ambush of the Army column… he still had nightmares and flashbacks of that, and the rocket destroying the pickup containing all of Franklin. But he’d gotten up, kept moving. Kept shooting. He’d been in a gunfight with soldiers. Killed two, even.
He’d been so mad, for so long. The first soldier he’d killed, running away… the man hadn’t specifically been an employee of the horrific government healthcare system whose policies had killed Jason’s mother, but he’d been fighting for those same people. The soldier defended them, supported them, and went after those people who just wanted to be free, and left alone. Just the thought of how his mother had suffered, how much pain she’d been in… she’d looked like a skeleton there at the end. The rage flared in Jason, making his face hot, and he muscled it back down as he’d been doing ever since she’d died. Swallowed the tears that wanted to come out, and gripped his rifle tighter.
Taking one last look around just to make sure, Jason took a deep breath, then stepped out of the cover of the store and walked down the front of the strip mall, rifle held inconspicuously underneath his arm. His eyes were up, scanning the street ahead of and behind him, the doorways of the businesses, the windows, anywhere and everywhere. After all his time looking for the dogsoldiers, and moving through the city, scanning the area around him had become automatic.
The strip mall ended. He strode quickly through the adjacent parking lot, crossed a side street, and moved to the front of a two-story commercial building. He stepped into a doorway and took a minute to study the road in both directions. He heard laughing somewhere distant, and spotted two seagulls wheeling through the air, but that was it. Finally, assured there were no immediate threats, he walked out into the middle of Pocahontas.