bring my old life back. But if I could help to make it stop, that would be worth everything.
Walter stuck his relieved head out the door into the cold and smiled. “Thanks, Jason. You’re okay.”
My breath curled out into the dark. No, I wasn’t. But I could be.
Chapter Seven
The next morning we drew our M-16s from the armorer and went straight to hell.
Not just Third Platoon, but the whole eight-hundred-man training battalion mounted an olive drab convoy of antique deuce-and-a-halfs, belching diesel soot in volumes unseen since cars went electric years ago. We rolled west toward Pittsburgh’s ruins beneath a drifting grit plume that a day before had been strip malls and skyscrapers and children. Exhaust soot seemed irrelevant.
We rocked and shivered on facing benches under our truck’s canvas top.
Somebody asked, “Why’d we draw weapons? Did the fuckin‘ aliens land this time?”
“Looters.”
“Fuck! I ain’t shootin‘ no brothers.”
“Brothers all gone, hombre! So’s the loot.”
“We’re gonna feed fuckin‘ civilians.”
Troop-truck discourse isn’t Question Time at the House of Lords.
Rural Pennsylvania unreeled beyond the open tailgate. At first, we saw the occasional cow trying to graze a frozen field. Closer to Pittsburgh the cows stumbled, deaf and disoriented even a day later from blast-wave overpressure.
The trucks slowed to a crawl in the gloom as we closed on the city. Civilians lined the roads, headed away from the grit plume. Cars were outbound, but also well-dressed people pushed shopping carts piled with plastic trash bags. Parents walked, pulling kids in coaster wagons and yard carts.
Some kids waved. Their parents shielded their eyes against our convoy’s headlights and stared at us like we were insane. Or they were.
It was dark by the time we got close enough to smell it
Burned buildings and flesh. “Dark” is inaccurate. Pittsburgh still burned, and red glow reflected from low clouds lit our faces. We dismounted the tracks, grateful for the leg stretch, and formed up.
The residential streets around us were a flat, tract-house neighborhood of undamaged two-story homes. They were old enough that the now-dead trees in the yards had grown to be as big around as my leg. Soot piled inches deep on everything and kept falling.
Captain Jacowicz addressed the company. Drifted soot grayed his hair and made him cough behind his government-issue paper mask.
He put hands on hips. “You know what happened here. They pulled us out of training to assist. We’ll search for survivors, secure property against looters, aid displaced civilians, and assist MI teams.”
Our back-of-the-truck brain trust had guessed right about most of our mission. But MI teams? MI was Military Intelligence Branch. What was that about?
We played hurry-up-and-wait for an hour in the cold while ash snowed down, and Jacowicz talked on the radio. Candles or lanterns lit the house windows around us. They silhouetted curious heads, grown-ups and kids peeking around curtains. These were the lucky survivors. But they had no power, no water, no heat, no groceries.
A smaller truck pulled up, dropped its tailgate, and we unloaded boxes. C-rations. The civilian population was about to learn why war was hell. At least if our mission was to distribute food back here, that was safer than going closer to the burning city core.
When the truck emptied, a drill motioned to me to climb in back.
“What’s up, Drill Sergeant?”
He shrugged. “The spooks need a warm body. You just volunteered, Wander.”
Spooks. Why would Military Intelligence need one half-baked trainee? I bounced against the truck’s canvas sides as it lurched away from Walter and the rest of Third Platoon. As they faded away in the ashfall my throat swelled. It wasn’t fair. They weren’t much family, but they were all I had, and now I was losing them.
I bounced along for minutes feeling sorry for myself before I realized that the light was redder, and I wasn’t shivering. The smell got worse and the fire’s roar louder.
I snatched up the canvas side flap. Toppled wooden power poles wrapped in black cable made the streets an obstacle course. Cars lay on their sides. House windows gaped black and shattered.
The truck stopped, and, again, I dismounted. Closer to the blast zone!
The fire’s heat baked my exposed cheeks. It sucked air to itself, making wind that snapped at my uniform sleeves. I guessed I was a couple miles from downtown, if the Projectile had hit dead center. This neighborhood remained recognizable, brick warehouses or old offices, half-flattened. Even after a day, the flames at city center volcanoed a half mile high. Their roar shook the street so the broken glass that paved it shimmered as it reflected the orange firestorm. The truck turned back before I could blink.
Fifty feet away, a middle-aged captain was silhouetted against the firestorm. He stood alongside a folding table, and above him rose an ash-coated canvas canopy. The canopy centered three sides of a square formed by olive drab trailers. Floodlights on poles glared down on the canopy while a portable generator buzzed somewhere.
He shouted through cupped hands. “You’re not in hell, but you can see it from here.”
I saluted. Instead of returning it, the captain waved me closer, with a tired hand untrained by Field Manual FM 22-5, Drill and Ceremony.
He looked me up and down, his hands on his hips. “Ever had experience with extraterrestrials?”
I smirked. “My drill sergeant’s pretty strange.”
He sighed. “Well, I told them I just needed a strong back. Coffee?” He waved at an aluminum pot and stacked cups on the table.
“I’m Howard Hibble.”
I shook his hand. It was so thin he’d never make one dead-hang pull-up. His uniform was contemporary camouflage pattern, not like our last-century training togs. Captain’s bars hung crooked from one side of his collar and the Military Intelligence Compass-Rose-Dagger from the other.
Captain Hibble ran a lean hand through flattop gray hair and dragged on a tobacco cigarette. “Don’t expect drill-sergeant crap from me. You’ve probably been in the army longer than I have. Until last month I was Walker Professor of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Studies at the University of Nevada. Believe it or not.”
I believed. He’d never spent time with the likes of Drill Sergeant Ord. His uniform sagged over his scarecrow frame, as wrinkled as the skin of his face. His boots looked like he shined them with a Hershey bar.
“All my life I hoped we weren’t alone in the universe.” He hacked and looked around at the flames. “Now I wish we were.”
“What am I doing, here, sir?”
“For now, bunk in that truck over there. I’m the only one in this menagerie still awake. We go when its cooler and lighter.”
I’d been bouncing in a deuce-and-a-half since before the previous dawn. The “extraterrestrials” remark sounded ominous, but “bunk” was music to my ears.
By morning, the firestorm had burned itself out. The wind had died, and only scattered fires flickered.
I stumbled, scratching, into the dawn and toward the latrine.
Other soldiers wandered the quadrangle formed by the truck trailers. I use the term “soldier” loosely. Unlaced boots and stubble sprouted everywhere. Ord would explode if he saw this bunch. This whole unit had to be
Intel weenies. I’d heard outfits like this existed. “Unconventional” assemblages of brainy weirdos. I eavesdropped on yawned conversations. This platoon included aerospace engineers, biologists, even psychics and aboriginal water-sniffers. As a race we were grasping every straw in the search for answers.
Under the center canopy, Hibble scavenged through a cardboard doughnut box. He stepped away, chewing, while powdered sugar flurried onto his chest. “Help yourself. Then you and I are going into the city core to hunt
