“Where are we?” I wondered.
She shook her head in wonder. “I don’t know, but I can die happy now. Fuck the Army, I’m not leaving this place ever again.”
I just shook my head. A glance outside the door showed me that the Sergeant Major hadn’t been kidding the night before; clean, folded uniforms were waiting outside each door. After a long shower and the delight of toilet paper (seriously, you have no idea how important toilet paper is post-zombie apocalypse. None of those movie directors got that right), my team assembled in the main room on the second floor. None of the people I had seen the night before were to be found, but there were scrambled eggs, fresh bread, butter, and a toaster sitting on the kitchen counter when we arrived, and Doc’s medical bag was neatly unpacked and laid out inspection-style on the coffee table. That reminded me that neither he nor Ziv were anywhere in the building, but after I caught sight of the Sergeant Major’s Wall of Pride that Red was examining; the long lines of military guidons and other goodbye-plaques that most soldiers end up with after a couple decades of Army work, or used to, back when places that made that useless shit still existed, I figured she was legit enough I could trust they weren’t buried in shallow graves somewhere. From my vantage on the insanely comfortable leather couch, I spotted at least half a dozen deployment-related shadow boxes and twice that many from various Army posts. It seemed the Sergeant Major and her husband, from the look of the name plates, had been stationed almost everywhere.
The rest of our packs were resting neatly in a line along the wall. I could tell at a glance that they had all been searched, but when I went through mine I found everything was there. “Nothing about this place makes sense,” I said as I repacked.
“What do you mean?” Brit and Hart had set up the pool table and a sharp crack echoed through the room when Hart broke the triangle. At least three balls, two solid, one striped, landed in the pockets.
“Look around. I haven’t seen any place like this since the plague hit. We’ve got two ex-military with nine deployments between them living on a farm with more food than I’ve seen in years, at least four farmhands, herds of cattle, horses, you name it, surrounded by a sea wall of all fucking things, and zombies on either side of the mainland. What sort of crazy shit is this?”
“The dead are walking the skin of the earth, Sergeant. This place is no stranger than the rest of reality.” Her voice, crisp and clear, cut across the noise from the pool corner. Brit paused halfway through her shot, the white ball landing in the center pocket, unnoticed. Hart straightened up, leaning her pool cue against the window, and opened her mouth to say something, but Ahmed beat her to it.
Whatever you can say about our resident terrorist, he’s not a woman-hater. For all that he and Brit call each other names, more than once he’s risked his life to save hers, so maybe I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when he stepped towards the Sergeant Major and bowed from the waist, placing one hand over his heart in the Afghan gesture of respect. She smiled at him, the lines in her face softening. “Ahmed Yassir,” she said, returning his bow. “You are the absolute last person I ever expected to see here.”
“I am glad to see that you have survived, Sergeant Major. You were a worthy adversary,” he replied.
She chuckled, then seeing our confusion, explained. “I met Ahmed Yassir near Kandahar in 2004. I was with the 82nd then, a battalion Sergeant Major at the time.” She nodded at Ahmed. “He was a frustrating opponent. It wasn’t until I finally sat down with the locals in his area that I learned why. We pulled back some of our COPs off his land, because I had a hunch we could trust him to take out the Taliban without our involvement. He proved me right, and shocked us all when he met with me at a meeting of the local headmen to negotiate a treaty that spared our soldiers’ lives while killing all the Taliban that came close.”
Ahmed nodded. “The agreement worked while you were there. When you left, your replacement was, how do you say… less accommodating.”
She sighed. “I was afraid of that. From the bottom of my soul, Ahmed, I did what I could to convince them to trust you. But old habits die hard, and my replacement had just come from the invasion of Iraq. He was too stupid to listen.”
Ahmed nodded. “We learned that. It is what drove me into the hills, and why Nick there sent me to Guantanamo three years later.”
Her glance towards me then was more of a glare. “You don’t acquit yourself well by doing that, Sergeant Agostine.”
“Water under the bridge, Sergeant Major. They kill us, we kill them.”
“Typical Combat Arms mentality.”
I scowled, crossing my arms. I couldn’t say why, but the old woman made me nervous. “Ahmed an I have worked it out.”
She did not rise to that, simply shook her head. She glanced around the room. “We searched your bags to see who you are, and to ensure you had nothing dangerous to us. You are clearly military, or most of you are—” she eyed Brit for a second “–but I saw no unit markings beyond the tags on your uniform. What unit are you assigned to?”
“We’re Irregular Scouts. Technically we’re not in the Army at all, though for Big Army’s purposes we fall under JSOC.”
She nodded slowly. “Your two soldiers are at my house, a few hundred meters from here. They are both doing fine, although Master Sergeant Hamilton needs some time to recuperate. The General was not a gentle host.”
“Thank you.” I could not hide the relief in my voice at knowing they were still alive.
“We were able to recover sixty-eight people from South Hero,” she said after a moment, moving over to the kitchen to clean up our mess from breakfast. We followed her, Brit and Red snagging the chairs on the opposite side of the bar.
“There were a thousand people on that island,” Red said hoarsely.
“We hope that more were able to make it to North Hero before the bridge was blown. I have heard reports that some of the residents there went south to see if they could find more survivors. Hopefully we’ll find more.” She scraped the leftover food into the sink and stacked the plates into the dishwasher as she spoke. “As for Allen, I met that son of a bitch when we first bought land up here, ten years ago. He was the head of the Vermont National Guard — he lived on Grand Isle and heard, probably through our land agent, that we were both military. He tried talking me into transferring over once I dropped my retirement papers. I wasn’t interested. I could tell the man had an ego, but even I hadn’t expected him to turn into a tinpot Hitler so quickly. I think I was blinded by my belief that someone with that many years of military service wouldn’t forget his obligations to the American people so easily.” She shrugged.
“He’d blocked off the highway leading from the mainland onto South Hero, you saw that. But he sent his people out in forays to what’s left of Burlington in order to pick up supplies. We do the same thing, but we move by boat, so we land south of the city, away from his scouts. He knew about us, of course, and we had to give him a third of our harvest every year just to keep him away. Had he only ground troops, I would have told him to go to hell, but he had air support and was perfectly capable of killing everyone and simply taking over the land. So I negotiated with the bastard.”