A third grenade erupted without warning in the narrow space between Conner and Debbie, rocking Conner and wrenching his gear to one side. Lashing nerve endings up and down his right side, leaving them numb — insensate — like after a splash of frigid water. His world spun once, and then again, and his head dipped as if he were beginning to doze on a long car trip. Then he was wide awake.
Conner caught his head and focused on Debbie. She was horribly wounded. Her left side was chewed up and bloody. It was impossible to tell where her gear ended and the pulp of her body began. Her dull eyes stared his way unmoving. Unfocused. He reached for her.
Nothing happened. His head spun again, and he blacked out for an instant. He reached for her again. Nothing. He looked down. His severed arm lay beside him, but that made no sense. His dizziness was worsening. He was hallucinating. His gaze was orbiting its intended focus as his head swung in broad circles until it collapsed.
“It doesn’ ma se’se,” Conner mumbled, now looking up at the bright morning sky. “It doesn’…” A ring of helmets appeared around him, staring down at him. Chinese soldiers. They clutched their weapons but didn’t fire. They didn’t move to frisk or disarm him. They did nothing but stare down at him wide-eyed. Horrified.
“Go-to-’ell!” Conner cursed with his last breath.
“Dig the slit trenches deep!” Sergeant Collins ordered. Stephie dropped her crushing pack onto the front lawn of a suburban Atlanta home. “Fire in the hole!” yelled an engineer down the street. Everyone dropped where they were and lay flat on the ground. Suddenly, the busy street was still. Stephie waved the kids, who were waiting on the front steps, back inside their house. A stunning boom rattled Stephie’s nerves and broke several windows. Two pines fell across Mason Street, barring traffic to the west.
They rose and resumed their labor. “This is it,” Animal said as he dug a pit. Stephie, John Burns, Stephon Johnson, and Peter Scott were digging a slit trench through the well maintained grass that connected Animal’s machine gun nest to the side yard and the shelter of a retaining wall. The blades of their short-handled, metal shovels were locked at ninety-degree angles. They picked at the sod with rapid blows. The narrow, shoulder-height crease through the earth would be the machine gun crew’s only means of escape.
The kids in the last family to flee Mason Street again waited on the front steps as their mother and father fought loudly inside. The enemy was only three hours away, but since neither side could effectively project air power, there was little chance of a surprise air raid. Three hours meant three hours.
Stephie grunted in excruciating pain with each pick and lever motion. She had dug two dozen holes in the week since the invasion, falling back without fighting every time.
“Ya know,” Animal growled, “I can’t believe we gave up four hunderd miles without a fuckin’ fight!” Stephie looked at Animal but kept up her pace. Men paused to shed heavy webbing and hot body armor. Animal shook the bushes and ornamental tree behind which he dug as he punished the earth with a long-handled shovel. Heaps of angry dirt flew into branches overhead. His M-60 rested on a bipod pointed down Mason Street toward the enemy. The killing ground fell away into a gently curving, tree-lined street. “Onefuckin’ week they been,” Animal chopped the ground and grunted, “pourin’ outa them ships, and we ain’t fired a single fuckin’ shot!”
Stephie stretched her back to ward off a cramp and stared at the vocal machine gunner. He shouldn’t be talking. He shouldn’t be saying what he was saying. “We were da-a-amned lucky,” Animal bellowed, “we weren’t pocketed on that highway! Twice! We could be Chinese PO-Ws right now. The Fightin’ 41st captured sittin’ in a fuckin’ traffic jam with our all our weapons safed so we don’t accidentally fuckin’ shoot anybody!”
“There are kids on the porch!” John admonished.
“Oh,” Animal paused to snap, “and so fuckin’ what, prick? You realize the Chinese destroyed the 3rd Armored and 6th Infantry Divisions in two days! Two days!” His meaning was clear. The lower-numbered, regular-army divisions were America’s top of the line. Animal pointed across the chimneys, now useless satellite dishes, and verdant treetops. “You hear any guns out there between us and them?” There was silence. Always before, a solid wall of fire had separated their lines from the onrushing Chinese. “We’re it, compadres! The new front line!” Animal had stopped digging, and so had the men and women of first squad. “Now, me and Massera, here,” Animal said, casting a thumb at his assistant machine gunner, “we’ll go all the way with you fuckers. All the way! But if you run like scared rabbits, I’m gonna turn this-60 on yer motherfuckin’ asses and mow you down!”
“No-obody’s running!” tore out of Stephie’s throat, cutting Animal short. Her shout echoed off houses. Other squads stopped digging, and Staff Sergeant Kurth — at the bottom of the street — turned. “We’re not gonna fold!” Stephie shouted with equal parts conviction and hope. “If we’re gonna die, we die together! Fighting! With honor!”
The street was silent for what seemed like forever.
“Remember Guantanamo Bay!” someone cried from down the street.
Men and women by the dozen rallied to the cry by repeating the three words. It helped steel Stephie’s nerves and shut Animal up.
Kurth marched up the painted white line down the center of Mason Street, but he did nothing to stop the full-throated shouts of the forty teenagers. By the time Kurth paced up the sidewalk past Stephie, all had returned to digging and planting landmines without Kurth uttering a word. “Kids,” he said to the children at the front of the house with one foot resting on the steps, “git yer par’nts and git goin’.” Kurth scared the children — and everything else — without meaning to. The kids disappeared, then quickly reappeared with their father, who checked the tightness of bungee cords on his lamp-covered SUV. The well-heeled, cyber-yuppie survivalists were prepared, Stephie thought, for the escape.
Peter Scott chopped into a sprinkler line, which instantly sprayed the reeling trench diggers. Animal’s escape route began to fill with water. “Shit! You fuckin’ moron!” Animal bitched. The rapidly soaked soldiers — John, Stephon, Peter, and Stephie — whose nerves were jagged and on edge, began to laugh their asses off. The homeowner returned to the utility keypad outside the house and turned off the house’s water main.
Staff Sergeant Kurth stood with his fists planted on his hips. Within seconds, magically, the front door flew open. The man of the house headed for the SUV. The oven-mitt-clad woman of the house emerged with a tray and handed Kurth a freshly baked cookie. With the same pissed-off expression that he always wore, Kurth accepted the cookie and, to the surprise of everyone, seemed to savor every bite. The woman went from soldier to soldier handing out freshly baked cookies. Stephie chuckled safely from a distance. But when the kind-looking woman held the tray out to Stephie, the woman said, “I don’t do too many things well, but chocolate chips are the very tastiest thing I make. I wanted you and the boys to have it.”
Stephie slowly took a cookie into her dirty hand. A bite made it into her mouth before her lips quivered. The woman handed the waiting Animal her tray and wrapped her ample arms around Stephie, who bit her lips and jammed her eyes shut.