The Future War

moved and they all sprang back, some screaming.

'She won't bother you for long,' a guard said. 'But we can't bury her just yet.' The other guards snickered and the newcomers looked at her in deep dismay.

The women looked at one another and then a new look at the place they were to stay. It was filthy beyond description, with a stench that could only come from terrible sickness and much death.

'You said clean,' a woman said, rolling up her sleeves. 'Do we have cleaning supplies?'

The guards looked at one another, marking this as one to watch. Then their leader indicated a closet at the end of the long room.

'Okay,' the woman said. 'Let's get to work, ladies.'

* * *

'Now remember, the guards are all bad guys,' Reese said.

'But the inmates aren't, and those shacks wouldn't stop a spitball or a stiff breeze, much less a bullet. Now let's go.'

He felt himself smiling grimly as they moved in through the thickening twilight.

Somebody designed this camp to keep people from getting out, not in, he thought. And those creeps may be wearing the uniform, but they're prison guards and muscle, not soldiers.

That's why they don't have anyone out here.

He still wished he had more night-vision equipment, or that the enemy had less. That could be arranged…

Sergeant Juarez and two men were walking down the road toward the camp's entrance, which was flanked by two watchtowers. Reese made himself not check his weapon again—that would be fidgeting—and kept still behind the bush that sheltered him. Juarez and his troopers were playing it calmly, walking up with weapons slung; soldiers from the camp—

pseudosoldiers, he reminded himself—came out to meet them.

Far too many of them. I was right: that bunch never went through basic.

The last thing you wanted to do in a suspicious situation was crowd a lot of men right out in the open. An experienced and suspicious NCO would have sent one or two men out to greet the newcomers, keeping the rest back under cover and ready to react if anything went wrong.

Which it was about to do. Through the binoculars Reese could see the leader of the camp guards smiling and nodding as Juarez spoke, the broad gestures of the sergeant's hands… and then one going to the small of his back.

' Go!' Reese barked as the noncom pulled the pistol out and shot the guard in the stomach.

Then Juarez hugged the body to himself and used it as a shield, emptying the magazine into the crowded enemy as the two soldiers following him swung their assault rifles down and opened fire as well.

Reese ran forward, hoping that the dozen others behind him would follow—the rest of Juarez's squad were over on the eastern side of the camp, and it was all survivalists and odds-and-sods here.

From their yelling, they were following him. 'Shut up!' he shouted—not the most inspiring battle cry in the world, but it would have to do.

Ahead of him was one of the observation towers; a wooden box on top of four splayed wooden legs, with a little roof above it.

There was a searchlight and two machine guns in the box; the guards there were both looking at the firing around the gate, though… and the tower was outside the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp.

' Go!' he barked, panting slightly as they reached the tower.

Reese went down on one knee, his carbine to his shoulder. The figures up top were dim, until they lit up the searchlight…

'Perfect,' he whispered as he gently squeezed the trigger.

Braaaapp. One short burst, and a body toppled over the edge of the railing, falling inert not far away.

That left the other one, who was turning a machine gun Reese's way.

'Open fire!' he bellowed. ' Shoot, for Chrissake!'

The survivalists did, belatedly. For an instant, the man above looked as if he was dancing—bullets went through the floor of the wooden observation box as if it wasn't there. One of them struck the searchlight, and it went out with a shower of sparks that left orange afterimages drifting across Reese's eyes.

'You, you, get up there!' he snapped. 'Man those guns. The rest of you, follow me!'

Hot damn, he thought. For the first time since Judgment Day he was doing something, something that might help. Striking back, at least, at the machine and its collaborators.

* * *

Dennis Reese looked at the… Well, collaborator, I suppose, he thought.

The man had been passing for a corporal when Reese and Mary left the camp. Now he was in Yanik's quarters and wearing his rank insignia… and not being very cooperative.

'I won't tell you zip,' he said.

'I think you will,' Reese said, conscious of the slight tremor in his voice.

He'd had time to tour the camp. A lot of the people he'd known hadn't been buried yet; the matron at the clinic where Mary had worked was lying where she'd fallen near her chair, swollen and purple, with flies walking across her eyes.

' Nada,' the man said; he had a thin stubbled face and hard eyes.

Juarez touched Reese on the shoulder. 'Sir, I think you should so for a walk,' he said.

'What?' Reese asked.

'Sir, you should go for a walk. Check on the people. We'll call you when this is taken care of.'

Reese opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. There were times an officer should take a walk—not something that was covered in the formal curriculum at the Point, but it did get passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation.

And Sergeant Juarez had seen everything that Reese had.

Reese smiled at the man in the captain's uniform and walked out. There was a lot of work to do… and one of Juarez's men was bringing up a bucket of water.

By the time the noncom joined him—Reese had carefully not listened to the sounds—the camp inmates were gathered. Reese looked down on them from the steps; they'd gotten the lights working again, and a corner of his mind was wondering whether they could salvage the camp generator and take it with them. It would be so useful… The faces looking up at him held fright, anger, despair.

'What do you mean, these weren't really the army?' a man asked.

'The American army doesn't do this'—Reese pointed around; everyone had been shown the mass graves —'to American citizens. This was a bunch of terrorists pretending to be soldiers.'

'And you're the real army?' somebody called.

'There isn't one left,' Reese said grimly. 'It died on Judgment Day. We're the… resistance. And we're not just fighting for America; we're fighting for the survival of the human race.'

Juarez bent to whisper in his ear. 'Sir, you're damned right about that. We got a lot out of him…'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN