Sergeant Jake Higgins of the Eleventh Colorado Detention Militia Battalion (CDMB) was very drunk. He staggered down a dark city street in Topeka, Kansas, heading toward trouble.
None of the lamps worked and low clouds hid the stars. Because of that, he crashed against a garbage can, knocking it to the ground with a lot of noise and slurred curses. He fell, and his hands squished against something wet and smelly. Then he felt wetness soak through his knees.
With a lurch he rose, swaying and blinking, muttering more profanities. His two best friends snored in a bar whose name he couldn’t remember. They were fellow militiamen of the Eleventh, and the three of them had been to Hell and back this winter. Jake had left his friends in the bar because the bartender had shut him down, and this soldier still needed more to slake his thirst.
Jake was a stocky young man with good shoulders, barely out of his teens and already a hard-bitten fighting man. He had survived Amarillo, Texas last summer when the Chinese had surrounded several U.S. divisions. It had been grim butchery, but Jake and a number of his compatriots had fought their way free of the encirclement and headed northwest. Jake had been the only one to reach Colorado. He’d arrived in time to go to Denver. There, he had survived the historic siege of Denver, the equal to the siege of Stalingrad in World War II. During the fighting, he had worked up the ranks from private and fought his way free with the rest of the Eleventh to the Rockies.
“Gotta be an open bar around here somewhere,” Jake muttered. His eyesight had gone sideways and he had to squint what seemed like down a tunnel to tell where he went.
There. He spied a blinking light. It was down a long alleyway with old trash barrels lining the route as if they were sentries. The light had red and blue colors, a neon sign. Surely, that must be a bar or a place to drink, at least.
In a lurching step, he set off for the neon sign.
Jake hadn’t always been a good soldier boy who obeyed every order. Originally, he had found himself in a detention center, in a cell, learning that it didn’t pay to protest the President and his dictatorial policies. Jake had been kicked out of college because of the protests. He’d made them with others because they hadn’t cared for the illegality of some of President Sims’ decrees. Homeland Security people in the detention center had known how to take care of such talk and such ill-advised thoughts. They had special cells for that.
Jake spat in the darkness. In truth, he hadn’t learned his lessons very well. They’d let him go to join a Militia battalion because his old man, Colonel Stan Higgins, had been a hero in the Southern California fighting. His father had also been a hero in 2032 in Alaska. His father presently commanded the famous Behemoth Regiment. His father was a war hero and Jake was proud of his old man. He wanted to be like his dad and like his grandfather, who had died in the Alaskan War, killing Chinese invaders.
The Higginses knew how to soldier. That was clear to anyone with eyes to see. Jake was young, and he had learned about old-style America where a man spoke his mind. His father had taught him history, and his father had taught him that America was a unique and special country, the apple of God’s eye. Jake spoke his mind, and Homeland Security people didn’t like that, no thank you.
Yet he was a militiaman of the Eleventh CDMB, a hard-fighting man in the Homeland Security apparatus. The higher-ups in the organization liked him, including the steroid monster, the lieutenant. Go figure. In fact, the lieutenant was one of the two men snoring in the last bar.
Jake laughed, although it had a sour note to it. He loved America, but he didn’t like holding back about what he thought. He’d bled for his country. He’d put his life on the line more times than he could remember. Even more, he’d killed for America. The killing was why he was out here staggering around looking for more to drink.
It was funny. No one had told him about this. Killing a man…it took something out of you. Sometimes his dreams—
Jake shook his head, and he cursed. He didn’t want to think about his dreams. He wanted to forget them. He wanted to forget about exploding bodies and pieces of bloody human sticking to his cheek. He wanted to forget about jabbing a knife into Chinese soldiers, or gunning them down as they ran away. Most of all, he wanted to forget about how good it felt when they ran and how good it felt to kill another human being so he could live another day.
Jake worried about himself. He worried about what sort of person he had become. Sure, the Chinese had invaded them. They deserved no better than death. But should he
He remembered up in Alaska in his childhood. They’d had a cat named Tinkerbell. As a kid, he had called it Stinkerbell, and that had made his sister yell. Anyway, the cat caught a young jackrabbit once. The cat had played with its prey, clawing it, throwing it around and waiting for it to try to run away. As the baby jackrabbit made its feeble attempt to flee, the waiting cat pounced, caught the little thing and bit it in the neck. Jake remembered watching, fascinated. He’d thought the cat cruel, although his dad had told him later that that was the way of predators.
Jake swallowed uneasily.
Maybe he should stop blaming the Militia. Maybe he had always been a killer, and this war had simply brought it out of him. He had killed fellow human beings.
Jake stopped, and he banged the back of his boot heel against the alleyway. He didn’t want to think deep thoughts. The war had caught him. That’s all. He’d been through the worst of it. He’d survived Denver and had seen truly awful things. He would never be able to tell others who hadn’t been through it what it had been like. He felt closer to his grandfather, who had been a weirdo at the end of his life. His grandfather had been a warrior. War, and especially killing, changed a man. There was simply no way around that.
“Hey!” Jake shouted.
He’d almost reached the neon sign. A soldier opened the door, and Jake heard music and saw flashing lights. He also caught the flash of a naked tit. Oh, okay, this was a strip club.
Jake grinned from ear to ear. He didn’t realize there had been one of these in Topeka. Several seconds later, he paid the entrance fee, stomped his feet upon entering, and stared in fascination at the woman on stage. She wore a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and little else, and her tits jiggled as she danced around the pole. Oh man, but she was hot.
“Beer,” he told a burly man.
The bald man with a square build didn’t say anything. He just pointed at the obvious bar.
Jake staggered there, slapped money on the bar and waited, turning and watching the woman gyrate to the pulse-pounding rock and roll. She ground her hips against the pole, moved away and high-stepped. She stared at the men looking up at her, and she spied Jake at the bar. She took off her cowboy hat—she had dark hair that spilled down to the middle of her back. She twirled the hat around and threw it at Jake.
The hat sailed through the air. Men turned around, watching it. Jake reached up drunkenly, and he caught the hat. Maybe she’d been a powder-puff quarterback in high school. It had been a good throw; right at him. Jake laughed, and he put the hat on his head.
“Here you go, cowboy,” a pretty woman said on the other side of the bar. She clunked a full glass on the wood. “Have a good time.”
Jake agreed with her, picked up the beer and staggered to the stage.
Men sat beside it, looking up with lust-glazed eyes at the dancer. They held bills in their fists. The stripper danced for them one by one, and each man put dollars on the stage. She was good at picking them up.
Jake watched spellbound, drinking beers and judging three different strippers. He went to the restroom several times. The last time he bumped against walls, and he vomited in a sink.
“Hey, stupid,” a tall man said. “Use the toilet for that.”
Hardly able to see at this point, Jake gave him the finger. The man scowled, gave him the finger back. It was the longest finger Jake had ever seen, with a black-painted fingernail bitten down close. Jake rushed the guy. He hit Mr. Black Fingernail several times. They were uncoordinated swings, but they were enough. He left the tall guy on the restroom floor, with his eyes closed.
As Jake tried to stagger back to the stage, a waitress intercepted him.
“Your nose is bleeding,” she said.
“Huh?” Jake asked.
“It looks like someone hit you,” the woman said. “Are you okay?”
Jake brushed his nose and was amazed to see bright red blood on his fingers. He laughed, wiped his nose
