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Jill Repeth awoke in Corporal Donovan’s lap. The man I beat to a pulp, she thought as she looked up into his simple clear eyes. Holding me like a baby. Men are funny creatures.
Seeing her awake he lifted a canteen to her lips, a smile on his own.
She let him pour some water down her throat, trying to assess her condition. She slowly stretched, working her back muscles, then tried to shift her toes.
Thank God! She moved her booted feet backward and forward, left and right, then gently drew her legs up. Nodding thanks she sat up, then rolled over onto her knees and hands. Carefully she stretched out her muscles, searching for twinges or lingering problems, then stood up, using Donovan’s shoulder as a support. Thank you Lord. You make the lame to walk. You and good doctors.
“Thanks, Corporal,” she said, squeezing his shoulder as she let go. “Maybe you should apply to the Nurse Corps.”
His smile got wider. “Maybe ah should. Always did like helpin’ God’s creatures get better. Mama said I should be a vet but that was too much schoolin’ and the recruiter said the Army needed policemen.”
“Well, things are changing all the time. When we get out of this mess I’ll put in a word for you. Maybe we can get them to retrain you for a medical MOS.” She checked her watch, saw it had been two hours since they had started cutting. We’ve become so blasé about these medical miracles. It took nearly getting killed to remind me how amazing this body is.
“Naw. People don’ hardly need no nurses no more with the Eden Plague.” He looked sad. “But maybe the animals do.”
“I think we’ll always need people who care,” she said distractedly as she looked around their little hideout. She walked the perimeter where troops crouched or lay behind cover and concealment, accepting quiet congratulations on her recovery, encouraging them in the face of the disaster, finally coming up next to Colonel Muzik.
“Good to see you up and around, Jill,” he greeted her. “I knew you were too tough to keep down.”
“Thank you, sir.” She looked over his shoulder across the golf course at the wreckage of the battalion’s former position. “We should have dug in.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. Who knew someone would hit us the day after we landed, with armored vehicles and enough force to take on five hundred troops? Right now, though, we need to go get some people out of there.”
“Are the Fredericksburgers gone?”
Muzik smiled up at her. “That’s what I’m going to go find out.”
“No, sir.”
“What?” He looked at her in quizzical disbelief.
“I’m going.”
“You’re barely up and around.”
“And you’re short an arm. Everything’s fine, sir. I’d tell you if it wasn’t.” She squatted down by him, leaning in close. “I can’t hold these people together the way you can, and losing you might break them. You’re in command, sir. So command. This is NCO work. Let me do my job. I’m sure you’ll get a chance for appropriate heroics later.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head, resigned. “All right. Good hunting. Best horses get ridden the most.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, sir.”
He raised binoculars to his eyes. “I haven’t seen any hostile movement over there in a while. I think they withdrew back the way they came. The tank crews bailed out and got picked up by their Strykers. So take a radio and go do some recon. If it’s clear we’ll come back and dig the survivors out. There has to be someone alive underneath all that mess. It’s mostly drywall and wood construction. Edens should make it if we get them out soon.”
“All right, let me gear up.” She recovered her load-bearing equipment and weapons, picked up ammo, and was back in two minutes. “Here I go. Give me what cover you can.”
It was déjà vu all over again as she jogged out of the woods, across the thick grass of the verge and onto the fairway toward the wrecked buildings. A haze of smoke drifted eastward to her left, smelling of burning plastics and wood. Fires smoldered among the rubble.
She angled rightward to take advantage of the smoke and approached the mess from inside the plume, suppressing a cough. Once she reached the cover of wreckage she worked her way around to the right, up the eastward side. When she got to the edge of the smoke she got down and low-crawled forward.
When she had examined the open ground to the north she reached for her radio. “Sir, you copy?” She abandoned code names to rely on simple voice recognition. The radios were encrypted anyway, it was unlikely anyone would overhear; code names were mostly for net control. With a network of only three radios, that wouldn’t be a problem.
“I copy.”
“They’ve withdrawn. I can’t see anyone. There might be observers in the treeline to the north but there are none visible. Advise you come back and we try to find our people.” Any that are left.
Five minutes later Muzik led the double dozen survivors in beginning the process of dragging pieces of rubble out of the way and calling to find anyone trapped beneath. Jill put two observers on the north corners and then set to work with a will.
They found nineteen of their people in various states of injury. Food and water restored most of them once they were free, though one had lost a leg at the knee.
During this time Jill made a cursory recon of the perimeter, then she hustled back to the remnant of the battalion and reported to Colonel Muzik that she had found no enemy.
“That’s good news,” he responded. “They must have fallen back to their defense lines. But now they have a problem, though they might not know it.”
She looked a question at him.
“They have Edens as prisoners. They took most of our people.”
“How do you know?”
He swept his hand around in a semicircle. “Not enough bodies. Normal wounded to killed ratio in a firefight is something like four or five to one. We have almost a hundred dead bodies here. That means four hundred are missing.”
“Some of these have been executed. Effing sons of bitches.” Jill turned over a body with her foot, one with an extra hole in its head. “This is Sergeant Shute. He was a good kid.”
“They were all good kids.”
“Why did they do it?” She raised her head to stare to the north with cold anger.
“General meanness? You said the Onesie you talked to seemed paranoid.”
“Yes...Demon Plague One effect. Boss...how come I don’t see any dead Homies?”
Muzik looked at her sharply and shook his head, but the damage was done. Others nearby had heard and were all looking at the Colonel. He sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter much now. They had a classified mission. They took off yesterday at nightfall.”
Jill bit back angry words. Eighty more troops might have made a difference, along with the Homies’ MRAPs, armored trucks with heavy weapons mounted – and they weren’t Edens. They might have been able to employ their lethal antitank weapons to take out the enemy LAVs. But she kept her mouth shut. There was no way for Muzik to have foreseen this, no reason to hold back the Homeland Security company. What they should have had was air cover on standby overhead ready to hit armored vehicles with precision guided munitions. But they’d messed it up, top to bottom, herself just as much as anyone because she didn’t foresee it either, didn’t speak up.
“In hindsight, we should have kept them another day,” he admitted, looking around at his people. “I screwed up. But I won’t screw up again,” he declared grimly.
Jill let out a hiss, changing the subject. “We should have insisted on air cover overhead. We should have run earlier. Shoulda woulda coulda.”
“Would you have run? If you weren’t crippled?”
She grimaced at her boss. “I guess not. Not until it was too late.”
Muzik cleared his throat. “But back to the problem at hand – we have to find a way to get our people. And then there are all the ones we shot with Needleshock. There are a couple of dozen dead Fredericksburgers scattered around but they didn’t leave any live ones, not even unconscious ones...”
Jill broke in excitedly, “If they don’t die, most’ll be new Edens. Their friends and neighbors will see them get healed from their burns and scars and wounds – and the old ones will become young. What do you think the Onesies will do?”
Muzik shrugged. “If I had to guess, the same things all the other paranoid control freaks do – internment, quarantine, prison, execution?”
“Then we have to move fast. Tonight, if possible.”
Muzik sighed. “We have maybe forty effectives. Most of them are civilians with uniforms on, a few cops – and you and me. What’s your plan?”
She straightened, smiling crookedly. “Me and you, we sneak in and break them out. Just like old times, sir.”
“Not much of a plan. Gonna be tough.”
“Tougher than the Nebraska?”
“At least we had hot showers. And Spooky.”
“And both your arms. Wish they were all with us here.”
“Me too.” He rubbed his eye with a grimy finger, digging out something that he flicked away.
“Keep them searching around here, will you? Just in case?”
“Sure. But if they find Rick...”
“He’s probably dead. Yeah. Even so.”
Muzik sighed. “All right. They’ll make sure. I’ll tell the doc. She’s senior after me.”
“Thanks, boss.”
