Chapter Five
At the vehicles I head to the Stryker, and Bronson can’t wait to set me straight. “Up to the M35, Nat Guard boy. And make sure your mutt doesn’t piss and poop.”
My ears—including the scarred one—burn with embarrassment and I go to the old truck, powered by wood and steam, and go to the open tailgate. Bronson looks me over and says, “You Nat Guard guys always run around overarmed?”
“Not sure what the hell you’re talking about, Bronson.”
He laughs. “Look at you. Pistol at the side, M-4 and M-10 over your shoulders. Big bad doggy running alongside. What? The Creepers peek into your dorm room back at Fort St. Paul and make you wet yourself, you gotta carry so many weapons?”
The soldiers up on the truck are pretending not to see or hear what’s going on. I say, “So what’s your beef?”
“The beef is,” he says sharply, “is you’re humping too much. All that stuff hanging off of you, it’d be easy to fire off an M-4 round and take off the top of one of my troopers, or to send an M-10 round up in the air and waste it, when it could be used on a kill. You know how much those rounds cost?”
“Ten new dollars each,” I say. “Anything else you want to know?”
He steps forward. “Yeah. The M-4 or the M-10. Take your pick. You can’t carry both.”
I pause for a moment, wondering how in hell I had gotten on Bronson’s bad side, and decide it’s a waste of time trying to figure it out. So I take my M-10 off, lean it up against the rear of the 6x6. I take the M-4 off, clear the chamber, remove the magazine, reinsert the 5.56 mm cartridge, and with two spare magazines in a cloth pouch, I hold the whole kit out to Bronson.
“Here it is,” I say.
“Hell, no, don’t bother me with that,” he says. “Hump it back to the ordnance officer.”
I say, “I don’t know who or where the ordnance officer is, so if you want my M-4, Bronson, come and take it.”
“Don’t mess with me, Knox.”
I say, “Not messing with anything…Sergeant. Thing is, I was content to carry the M-4. You got all pissy about it. You want it, here it is. Otherwise, leave me the hell alone.”
He glares at me but steps forward, jerking it out of my hand, examines it and shakes his head. “Damn thing is a piece of crap. Is this what they’re issuing from your Nat Guard unit nowadays, Knox?”
“No,” I say, walking past him. “I got it off a Coastie in Massachusetts.”
Bronson barks out a laugh. “How? You strip it off him after he was dead?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I say. “I stripped it off him after I killed him.”
* * *
Bronson leaves and host of unfriendly faces look down at me, and a voice from the past, an old drill instructor when I was just twelve years old, says, suck it up, Knox, and that’s what I do.
“Give me room, fellas, all right?” I ask, and there’s some grumbling, and first I lift up my injured Thor and bring him to the truck. One of the soldiers rubs his head and I’m proud of my boy, the way he accepts unwanted attention. I swing up my pack and weapons, and I grab a dangling chain and work my way in. There’s more grumbling, but there’s a tiny space on a wooden bench, and I squeeze myself in.
“Thanks,” I say, and the corporal next to me, with a black eyepatch and a nametag stating DE LOS SANTOS says, “Whatever.”
Thor lies down on the wooden floor, avoiding the booted feet, and Bronson comes by, looks up and says, “Hey, Knox, riding in style, ain’t ya. I hear most Nat Guard units still use horses and wagons. Welcome to the Army of interstellar warfare.”
Other guys in the truck laugh and he lifts up the tailgate with a grunt, fastens it with a couple of chains, and walks around the side. A few shouts and the truck jolts, burps, and grumbles, and we’re on the move.
* * *
Out on the road we join up with the rest of Captain Wallace’s company, with four other up-armored Humvees—one with a trailer marked with the Red Cross—two more troop-carrying 6x6 trucks, two support trucks, and the other Stryker, plus a Humvee with loudspeakers mounted on the roof. PsyOps, I guess. Prewar an Army company consisted of three platoons and a heavy weapon platoon, and the same is true today, save most of the Army operates at about half-size, with platoons taking on jobs usually left for companies. Too much fighting and dying, and not enough replacements. The constant history of this damn war.
I look around at my fellow soldiers, most of them around my age, a mix of male and female, except for one older guy sitting up near the cab. Next to me is a girl with PFC chevrons and a BALATNIC name patch, wearing a helmet that looks ridiculously large on top of her small head.
“So who are you guys?”
She says, “First Platoon, K Company, First Battalion, 14th Army Regiment.”
“Hell of a mouthful,” I say. “Is your ell-tee on another truck?”
“No, man,” a voice says. “This is the First Platoon, all of it. And our ell-tee got her head scorched off two weeks ago.”
I count the faces. There are nine here. Nine. Usually a platoon is minimally staffed at eighteen.
“Who’s in charge then?” I ask.
Balatnic says, “Sergeant Bronson, for now.”
“I’d think he’d be up forward, instead of one of the Humvees,” I say.
Somebody laughs, there’s a muttered obscenity, and Balatnic changes the subject. “Where are you from, Sarge?”
“Fort St. Paul in New Hampshire,” I say.
Another voice: “What unit?”
“New Hampshire National Guard,” I say. “Second Recon Rangers, First Battalion, attached to the 26th Yankee Division.”
A voice further back says, “Oooh. Nat Guard. Guess we’ve won the war after all and can go home.”
I keep my mouth shut, not wanting to engage in the years-old feud between National Guard and regular Army. Truth is, there isn’t much difference now, but some governors—like ours in the Granite State—pretend they have overall control of the National Guard units, and as a matter of pride, keep their unit names.
Again I note the crossed bayonets of their division patch and say, “Where’s the 10th hanging their hats nowadays?”
De Los Santos says, “We tend to roam around a lot, Sarge. Home base used to be Fort Drum before the war. But we tend to hang out in Rome and then change operational bases every few months. Don’t like to be a sitting target.”
“The rest of your regiment back there?”
Oh my, silence, such that I can even hear somebody talking in the front cab. I have the horrible feeling I’ve just trespassed onto something forbidden, something taboo, and De Los Santos spits on the truck’s floorboards. “No,” he says. “Rest of the regiment is in Kabul.”
Afghanistan. When the war began the military went from a time when the White House could talk to a squad leader in a desert in Iraq, to a time when every form of electronic communication was destroyed overnight. That meant hundreds of thousands of soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen were instantly cut off from their homeland. Only now, with the reintroduction of steamships and telegraph systems, have very basic communications been reestablished.
But what happened to these abandoned units—collapsing into armed brigands, turning into mercenary forces for local governments, or staying on with their traditions and laws of a nearly forgotten land—still isn’t very well known.
I just say, “Sorry,” and De Los Santos shrugs and says, “You run into many Creepers there in the Nat Guard, Sarge?”
“Enough.”
He laughs. “Shit, Sarge, you’re gonna learn a lot hanging with us. We eat Creepers for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You ever kill one?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“How many?”
I don’t think they’ll believe anything I say, so I reply again with, “Enough.”
We’re on State Highway 5, heading west, consisting of two lanes in each direction. The roadway is cracked and bumpy, and abandoned cars have been pushed or dragged to the side, making for a relatively straightforward ride, although after years of no landscaping work, trees and brush are crowding us in.
A young woman leans into the middle of the group and says to me, “What the hell was going on back there, at the Dome? Never seen nothing like that, ever. Seven Creepers out in the open…not even moving! Were they all dead?”
“No,” I say. “They surrendered.”
That quiets them down, and for about a quarter mile nobody says anything, and then someone says, “The hell you say. Surrender? You sure they weren’t killed?”
“They surrendered.”
De Los Santos says, “How come you’re so sure, Sarge?”
“I was there.”
Another bit of quiet, except there’s one hell of rattle as we go over a patch of Highway 5 that’s turned into gravel and crushed asphalt. A soft voice. “That’s what I heard, you know. That they had surrendered. How did that happen?”
I adjust myself in the wooden seat, take in the surrounding landscape, mostly flat farmland and trees. The sky is overcast and there are some flickers of light out to the west as another chunk of space debris comes back to Earth.
“I’m still not sure,” I say. “There’s…a young soldier. Private. He has…special abilities. He learned some of the Creeper language. He convinced them to open their Dome and surrender.”
Balatnic is excited. “Does that mean the war’s over?”
And another voice says, “Your ass is in an Army truck, heading to a Creeper Dome. Does that look like the war’s over?”
She blushes and I feel bad for her, and she looks down at her feet. I rummage in my coat pockets, find a bit of dried venison, and I pass it over to her. “Want to give this to my dog?”
Balatnic brightens up, takes the meat from my hand. “Sure! What’s his name?”
“Thor,” I say.
She says, “Hey, Thor, hey.”
Thor lifts his head up and takes the meat from her fingers, and licks her fingers. She smiles. “What kind of dog is he? He looks like a German shepherd.”
“He does, doesn’t he,” I say. “He’s a Belgian Malinois.”
Thor lowers his head, rests it between his paws. Balatnic says, “Does he bite?”
I smile at her. “Only if you’ve been very, very bad.”
* * *
We thump along the bumpy road for another hour, and then the convoy approaches a turn-off to the right and slows down. There are a series of horn blasts—sending out signals to the drivers I’m sure—and one Stryker comes to a halt, while the rest of us move ahead and spread out. There’s a shout of, “Take a break, stretch those legs,” and we all tumble out.
But there’s something wrong.
I stand with Thor next to me, considerably lightened up by not carrying the M-4, and I stroll over the cracked asphalt with the grass and weeds growing knee-high. All of a sudden I wish I was carrying my M-4, which are designed for shooting humans, not aliens, for humans are the trouble right now.
The exit is blocked by three junked cars, pushed together, and there’s a wooden fence and a large sign, professionally painted, which surprises me. The sign is black letters on white background, and states: SANCTUARY ZONE: NO MILITARY ALLOWED. Two men in jeans and black coats are standing before the sign, carrying scoped hunting rifles, and there’s an older woman there as well, talking quickly to Captain Wallace, hands moving around. The woman is well dressed in clean jeans and a light brown corduroy jacket, and her white hair is pulled back in a bun.
“What the hell?” I ask. Balatnic is next to me, her helmet still ridiculously large, and she says in a soft voice, “No go zone.”
“No go zone for who?”
“Us,” she says. “Military, militia. People who’ve set up no go zones, they think if they leave the aliens alone, the aliens will leave them alone. That means not letting military units travel through their territory.”
“You’re kidding me.”
She says, “That look like kidding to you? Don’t you have peacers back in New Hampshire?”
“A few,” I say, remembering the odd protest out in front of Fort St. Paul. “Our base…the National Guard seized it from a prep school after the war started, moved in and took over their quarters. We get protests every now and then from former teachers and faculty members looking to kick us out and get their school back.”
“What does your base commander do?”
That would be my uncle, Colonel Malcolm Hunter. His sister married my dad, an event that he’s never forgiven Dad for, because my Uncle Malcolm believes Dad caused her death, and the death of my sister.
Not that Dad has ever said anything to me about it.
I say, “He ignores them, tells the rest of us to ignore them, and then when they leave, he sends them some leftovers from our mess. Hearts and minds, that sort of thing.”
A sergeant from another platoon stomps by, murmuring something, and with my bum ear I can’t make it out, but Balatnic says, “Shit, so that’s the problem. They’re blocking the quickest way to the Dome. If they don’t let us through, that’s another half-day travel.”
“Well,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “You wanna talk about hearts and minds? If Sergeant Cooper has his way”—the sergeant that just went past us—“those peacers are gonna have their hearts and minds splattered all over that pretty sign.”
* * *
Since we’re just standing around not doing anything, I walk with Thor up to the barricade. Captain Wallace is there, with her grizzled first sergeant, a lieutenant—a skinny blonde woman who looks to be over two meters tall—and Dad. Wallace has her helmet held in the crook of her arm and her voice is low and firm. “Ma’am,” she says, “I promise, we don’t plan to stay in your township. We just need to pass through.”
The woman’s voice isn’t as calm, slightly high pitched, but she’s not giving an inch. “The hell you are,” she says. “Ever since I was a child, the military has lied and lied. It lied in the Gulf of Tonkin, in Vietnam, in the Middle East, in Nigeria, and now, here. Well, it ends here. We citizens voted in a regular, fully legal town meeting to exclude all armed forces from trespassing here.”
“Ma’am,” Wallace says. “With all due respect, we’re the armed forces of your nation. How can we be trespassing?”
Her chin juts out in defiance. “Because we don’t want you. Because this is a sanctuary township. No armed forces, nothing to provoke the aliens. We leave them alone and, God willing, they’ll leave us alone.”
“Do you think they even recognize or appreciate what you’ve done?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Do you think they recognize or appreciate how many of them you’ve killed since they arrived here?”
Both the lieutenant and the sergeant start to talk, mostly about who started what upon their arrival, but Wallace remains calm, lifting up a hand. “I see. But wouldn’t you agree that their aggression upon arrival, by establishing the orbital base, setting off the high-altitude nuclear weapons, and dropping asteroids to cause the tsunamis…don’t you think they realized they would get a military response?”
Some of the troopers mutter about how we’re wasting time, how we need to get going, that these crazy folk are just holding us up, and the woman says, “Who knows? For ten years we’ve been killing them. Perhaps if we tried something else, accommodating them and being open for discussion, to air our mutual grievances, perhaps that would end with a positive result for the both of us. Those aliens…perhaps they’re just refugees, fleeing a dying world or dying star. Is what they did to us any different from what our European settlers did to the First Peoples here?”
Captain Wallace looks like she’s going to grind her teeth down to dust, keeping calm, and then she puts her helmet back on, tightens the strap, and says, “First Sergeant.”
“Ma’am.”
I think all of us are just not moving at all, wanting to hear Wallace’s orders, wanting to know what all of us are going to have to do to get either around, through, or above the barricade.
She says, “Move the convoy out. We’ll take the alternate route.”
Some more mutters and the first sergeant says, “Yes, ma’am,” and we move out, leaving the people of peace and their town behind us in just a very few minutes.
* * *
We drive along, sitting in silence, and I look to the rear at the rest of the convoy, still rattling along on this potholed and cracked highway. I spot the rear Stryker, with its Creeper skull on the front, and the two flags flying at the rear.
I turn and say to Balatnic, “What’s up with the other flag back there, the Scottish one.”
“Give it a guess,” De Los Santos says.
It then comes to me, about our abandoned troops stuck halfway around the world when we all went back to the late nineteenth century. Why wouldn’t it happen for other forces?
I ask, “Does that mean there’s Scottish troops mixed in here? Or British troops?”
More laughs. A soldier up in the middle says, “Man, didn’t you ever see the movie Braveheart? The one with that crazy Aussie actor?”
Too many times, I think, and I say, “Sure, I’ve seen it.”
“Captain Wallace,” the soldier says. “She’s a direct descendant of William Wallace, that Scottish rebel.”
Balatnic chimes in. “Plus she’s also related to General William Scott Wallace, the guy who ran V Corps during the Second Gulf War. His crew attacked Iraq back in ’03, drove more than five hundred miles in less than two weeks through enemy territory. Hell, Sully up there, he was in on that run, right?”
Sullivan offers a slim smile. “I was. Better class of people back then, too.”
More laughs, and I guess this is an old joke among the First Platoon. The first soldier adds, “Captain Wallace…she takes her history seriously, as well as her job.”
Balatnic nudges me, “But God, don’t start in about bagpipes.”
“Sweet Jesus, no,” De Los Santos says, and I get comfortable in my seat, get comfortable where I am.