The man was a dozen feet away and George had one hand on the pistol grip of his AR, and was still wearing his hard armor plates, so he wasn’t too worried about the man’s knife. If he had a gun it was hidden.
“No, it’s your meat. I’m not a thief. I just smelled the fire and thought I’d come over and say hello.” His eyes darted left and right but he wasn’t sure where Renny was. “I was just passing through the neighborhood. You live here?”
“Not answering your questions. Don’t have to answer your questions!” the man said, shaking the knife at George again, making odd twitches with his head.
“No, you don’t,” George said placatingly, pretty sure the man was suffering from some sort of mental illness. Not too surprising or unusual, actually, with the city in the condition it was. Most of the sane people were long gone. “I’ve got an energy bar, would you maybe want to trade for a little meat?”
The man peered at him suspiciously, and Renny appeared silently on the edge of the firelight on the far side of the small clearing, almost behind the man. He’d circled around, just in case. George slowly pulled the energy bar out of the cargo pocket of his pants. “Trade?” the man said dubiously, his lips pulling back from his teeth. If it was supposed to be a smile it was frightening.
“Sure. If you want.” George shrugged. “If not, I’ll leave you alone.” The man definitely seemed to be alone, and not quite right in the head. A 10-96, using the official designation from his previous life. A wing nut, to use the much more common cop slang.
The man took a few steps toward George around the fire. The knife was still in his hand but looked forgotten. George kept his eyes on the man but Renny was in his peripheral vision. Renny took two steps further into the light and glanced down at the fire. He blinked, stared hard at the fire a few long seconds, then grabbed the Glock holstered across his chest and without hesitation shot the emaciated man in the back of the head. With the suppressor threaded onto the end of the barrel the gunshot was just a loud pop.
“What the fuck!” George shouted, his AR coming up to point at Renny even before the strange man’s body had hit the ground.
“Look in the pot! Look in the pot!” Renny yelled to George, pointing his shaking Glock at the still form on the ground.
AR up and still pointed at Renny, George moved close to the fire and looked to see what Renny was upset about. After a few seconds the AR fell out of his hands and bounced on its sling. George bent down closer, he couldn’t help himself, then suddenly spun and dashed away from the boiling pot. His vomiting was surprisingly loud in the dark.
“Jesus Christ,” George said, finally staggering back into view, wiping a hand across his mouth, staring at the pot and what was on the ground behind the fire. “I almost traded him.” The cooking meat had smelled so good… the thought of what he’d nearly eaten almost made him throw up again. The memory of the tasty smell made his stomach churn. He wrapped an arm around his face in an attempt to cover his nose and block the smell. He blinked away tears, whose very presence unnerved him. He told himself it was the woodsmoke.
“Yeah.” Renny stared at the pot and the badly butchered chunks on the ground next to the fire. “Should we… should we bury her? What’s left of her?”
George’s sigh was long. What he really wanted to do was run away. Screaming. Maybe crying. Instead he said, “Yeah. I suppose we should.” His hand moved up to the handle of his knife. “Do you have a knife?”
“For digging? I’ve got a knife, but I’ve actually got a folding shovel in my pack. I kept thinking I should ditch it, but never did. Want me to get that?”
“Yeah, that’d be better. Is he dead?”
Renny looked over at the unmoving form facedown on the ground, then quickly strode over to the man and shot him twice more in the back of the head, the suppressed gunshots loud in the quiet. “He is now.” He paused. “I’m not burying him,” he said with sudden vitriol.
George nodded. “No, neither am I. Fuck that guy. Leave him for the dogs.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“So what do we know?” Ed asked.
He’d sent Quentin and Weasel out to recon the rendezvous location indicated by Uncle Charlie. On his map it was just a featureless green square, a thousand feet on a side, the “Adams-Butzel Recreation Complex”, and they needed more information. The two men had ditched their rifles and armor before heading out.
The squad had approached from the south late the day before and holed up in just about the only suitable building anywhere near the site, an auto repair shop to the southwest. Technically it wasn’t a two-story business, but it had a very high ceiling and there were glass block windows up near the roof. Empty metal racks probably meant for tires provided easy access to the damaged windows. Both Ed and George had spent time looking through the fractured glass block windows with binoculars, but couldn’t see much of anything. A lot of trees, and maybe in the distance a brown roof. Quentin and Weasel had headed out in the morning and immediately separated. Both had been gone over four hours, but returned within minutes of each other.
“I circled counter-clockwise, Q went clockwise,” Weasel said as they stood around a desk in the office of the auto repair shop. They’d found some paper and a grease pencil for notes. “You’ve got the pencil, you go first,” he told Quentin, who nodded. Jason was up on the roof on watch, having climbed a pile of tires behind the building.
“Okay, basically you’ve got a big square,” Quentin said, drawing one on the back of a parts order form. “Quarter mile on a side or so. We’re just off the southwest corner.” He pointed. “The only buildings are at the southeast corner. The rest of the land is for sports. Was. Tennis courts, baseball diamond, probably other stuff I couldn’t see because the grass was two feet tall. Doesn’t look like any of it’s being used. There’s tracks through the grass from people walking, but it looks like locals, one guy here, two people there.” He made a few marks on the paper. “On the west side here, across Meyers, it’s all businesses. Industrial stuff, machine shops or whatever, small, one-story buildings and big vacant lots full of weeds. But you can’t see into or out of them because there’s a six-foot fence running along the sidewalk.” He drew a solid line. “Corduroy aluminum or whatever the hell you call it. Can’t see through it, and climbing it would be a bitch. I’m guessing it was meant to keep the kids at the sports complex from getting into trouble if they wanted to bail out of practice early.”
“North side of the square is all neighborhood. There are half a dozen streets that head down south and then dead-end at the property line, like,” he gestured with his hand, fingers splayed downward, “the teeth of a comb. You can walk down them. Once you reach the dead end there are hundreds of yards of open field before you get to the complex buildings on the south side. Wide open. If we took a house there, we’d be a hair closer, but we’d be looking at the side or back of the complex, and there’s nothing to see. The east side of the property is a residential street. Houses back up to the complex property. You can’t really see shit from over there between the houses and the garages. Then, once you turn the corner on Lyndon and start heading back this way along the south side, the sports complex buildings are right there. Or maybe it’s just one building, I couldn’t tell if they were connected. Different height roofs, looks like a school.” He shrugged. “I saw a few people on foot in the neighborhoods, but didn’t see anything at the big building itself. No sign of life.” He paused. “Don’t know if that’s good or bad. Metal doors all around the building, but they’re all closed, and I’d bet locked. Only sure way in looks like the front door. Glass and windows there, couldn’t really see how much of it was busted.”