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  I note the dismissive tone in his voice and say, “No, uncle.”

  The pencil is again in his hand. “Very well. Dismissed.”

  I get up and make to leave, and he says, “Randy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for the steak. It was delicious. Your aunt Corinne and Heidi enjoyed it. But just so you know . . .”

  My hand is on the doorknob. “What’s that?”

  His voice is harsh. “I know Aunt Corrine has invited you to move in with us. Forget it.”

  “Already forgotten . . . sir,” I say, as I go into the outer office.

  Later I make my way to the gymnasium, back in civvies once more, where the Ranger Ball is being held. I’m so very late, but the music is still loud as I go through the doors and onto the dance floor. The music comes from a man named Clayton who used to own a radio station in the state’s largest city, Manchester. He wears jeans and T-shirts that have some sort of awful color pattern that’s called tie-dum or tie-dye or something like that. His gray beard comes down mid-chest. His gear is more than a half-century old, and because of its age, it survived the opening weeks of the Creeper war, scores of specialized nukes were dropped into the upper atmosphere, the EMP effects catapulting most of the world back to the late 1800s.

  Once upon a time, I’ve learned, guys and gals my age could carry around thousands of pieces of music on a little computer smaller than my hand. Now, the music playing tonight at the Ranger Ball comes from round black discs called records, with lots of pops and static and scratches, and some of them are older than Clayton.

  I’m greeted with a slow-moving tune from the “Beatles,” and I scan the interior of the gym. The male-to-female ratio is about three to one, so there’s a fair number of young men standing by themselves against one wall, where bleachers have been folded back. The dance has been going on for a while and there’s the scent of sweat and the sound of laughter and a feeling that maybe, just maybe, this war is really over and that this wouldn’t be the last dance for some of us.

  Civilian life, I think. What could it possibly be like for someone like me?

  I look in particular for one special some of us, and find her doing a slow dance with Dewey, the mess officer, who’s plump-looking in khakis and a white T-shirt. Abby looks fine in a short black dress exposing her strong tanned and scarred legs. She spots me looking at her and sticks out her tongue. Maybe she’s joking, maybe she’s not. I wander off to what’s left of the refreshment table. There are two half-empty bowls of punch, a couple of platters of crackers and fruit, mostly scrounged through, and some dirty napkins. The “Beatles” song is still playing. I’m nudged and see it’s Clayton, the disc jockey. He raises his voice a bit. “Enjoying the night?”

  Not particularly, but he looks eager so I say, “Yes, very much.”

  He scoops up a handful of crackers and fruit, stuffs them into his bearded mouth. “Love this old music. Funny world, eh? Was a time when I couldn’t keep track of the new crap that was coming out every year by some non-talented kids with fair skin and good hair . . . and now they’re all gone. Lady Gaga, Sir Gogo, all that crap.” He slaps his belly and goes back to his black records. “Just me and my records, real rock and roll, we’re all that’s left.”

  Goodie for you, is what I want to say, but I keep my mouth shut.

  The slow dance stops and I go out to the gym floor, catch up with Abby, who has a wide smile for Dewey, who still has his heavy hands on her slim body. Then he sees me and drops his hands, like Abby’s hips had suddenly burst into flames or something, and shuffles away. To Abby I say, “Sorry I’m late.”

  Abby shrugs, like it doesn’t matter, and I don’t like her pissy look. “That’s okay. Saved a spot for you for the first three dances, and then I decided not to wait. Something going on?”

  I hesitate. “Yeah, but that’s all I can say.”

  “OPSEC?”

  “The same.”

  “Nice excuse.”

  “It’s not an excuse,” I say. “Look, I want to—”

  The music roars up again, something fast moving from “The Kinks,” and Perez, a skinny guy with wide shoulders from our second platoon comes over, and Abby says, “Sorry, Randy. I promised Tio here after Dewey. Later, maybe?”

  “Sure, later, maybe,” I shoot back, and with the music really roaring along, I go outside. A waste to haul ass out there after seeing my uncle. The night air is cool and crisp, but I note something burning. I go around to the side of the gym and see a flame flickering, beyond some rhododendron bushes, and there’s a group of guys from my platoon and the second. A smell of tobacco and someone’s smoking a very expensive and forbidden cigarette. There’s a small oil lamp on the ground and someone says, “That you, Sergeant Knox?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Just taking a breather. Relax.”

  I can feel them doing just that, since I could have put them in hack for sneaking out of the Ranger Ball and for the cigarette smoking, but I don’t have time nor interest in rousting them. Instead I stand there and lean against the brick wall of the gym, listening to them pass the time like most soldiers: either complaining or trying to make sense of things.

  Tonight it’s the latter, and one guy says, “Creepers don’t make sense, and don’t nobody else convince me.”

  “‘Course they don’t make sense,” comes another voice. “They’re friggin’ aliens.”

  First guy says, “But they’re so damn primitive.”

  A couple of guys laugh and the second voice says, “C’mon, Harmon, you can’t believe that. Damn Creepers arrived here on a friggin’ starship of some kind, and in less than a week, they killed off more than half the planet, drowned every major coastal city, and fried so many electronics that my younger brother thinks electricity is something magical.”

  Then comes the quick reply. “Maybe so, but what did they do next? Hunh? Dispatched those killer stealth sats that kill anything that flies, anything that uses recovered electronics above a certain level, and set up bases where they come out and raise hell. But why? For ten years they parade around in their exoskeletons, killing and burning, and sometimes getting killed in return. What’s the point?”

  I say, “You sound disappointed, Harmon. Like you wanted them to kill us all off during the first six months of the war.”

  Harmon says, “Not at all, Sergeant. It just . . . just doesn’t make sense.”

  The music is still thumping from inside the dance hall. I say, “Maybe they’re great white hunters.”

  Somebody else says, “The hell you mean by that, sarge?”

  “Back in the mid to late 1800s, rich white hunters would go to Africa and hunt big game,” I explain. “It was expensive, they used the latest technology to travel great distances, and sometimes they’d get killed when they got gored by a rhino or trampled by an elephant. Maybe the Creepers are here to hunt humans, just for the fun of it.”

  The guys keep quiet, and one says quietly, “That’s crap, Sergeant. There’s no way a technologically advanced civilization like the Creepers would travel all this distance just to kill things. Don’t make sense.”

  I say, “Really? Then look what they’re doing. They came across interstellar space and they’re doing what, exactly? Killing humans. Doesn’t look like they’re making large Creeper settlements, or stealing water or diamonds, or breeding us for steaks, like those old science fiction movies. Maybe it don’t make sense, but I’m just reporting what I’m seeing.”

  Nobody says anything, and I go on. “Look at it this way. You’re working in a factory or a farm in England, Victorian age. Barely keeping a roof over your head, a couple of meals away from starvation for you and your family. Each day is one drudge day after another. Then you hear that your rich countrymen are using the most highly advanced steamships of the day to travel great distances to a foreign land to shoot things. What do you think your reaction would be? Does that make sense?”

  Another pause, and someone says. “Hell of a thing.”

 
; “Yeah,” another says, “and speaking of hell of a things, you guys hear anything more about possible discharges coming up?”

  The talk then turns excited and hopeful, as these young fellow soldiers of mine consider what it might be like, to actually be out of the National Guard, and with that, I head on back to my barracks.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Before the war began, there were only four train stations in the entire state of New Hampshire. True story. Now there are at least a dozen, as steam and coal make a comeback under the very non-benevolent attention of the Creepers’ killer stealth satellites. Across the country more stations have been built as well, as the government slowly rebuilds the railroads and bridges, as well as rounding up obsolete equipment to fill in the demand created by both the lack of air travel and about ninety-nine percent of vehicle traffic that existed before 10/10.

  Concord, the state’s capitol, has a train station set up next to the old Boston & Maine railroad tracks that run parallel to the crumbling concrete and asphalt of Interstate 93. From where it’s located, it has a good view of the gold dome of the capitol building. The station was slapped together by an Army Corps of Engineers unit a couple of years after the war began, and it’s basic concrete and wood. Outside of the entrance is a confusing mess of people and vehicles. There are horse-drawn wagons and buggies, a steam-powered Greyhound bus and two Army Humvees (one of which dropped me off) along with three cars from the late 1950s and early 1960s that weren’t impacted by the Creeper attack. Each of those cars has an “A” gasoline ration sticker on its windshield, and when the doors open up, the well-dressed male and female passengers are accompanied by hard-eyed and muscled men who casually keep one hand underneath their jackets.

  In addition to the passengers pushing their way into the station, there are a few homeless types outside begging, as well as two guys in ratty Army uniforms sitting in old folding lawn chairs. An empty wheelchair is parked nearby. One is a muscular black guy whose legs are gone just below the knee, and the other is a Hispanic fellow whose face is a mass of burn tissue and whose eye sockets are empty and sunken. There is a professionally-printed sign at their feet with a cardboard box next to it. The sign says, ALL GAVE SOME, SOME GAVE ALL. THANK YOU. And below those words is the official seal from the Department of Veterans Affairs, to let everyone know these guys are legit. Sometimes civilians who get fried by a Creeper try to pass themselves off as vets, and they last maybe a day or two before something bad happens to them.

  I drop a pre-war quarter dollar into the box while the black guy eyes me and says, “Stay safe, bro.”

  “Thanks,” I reply. “I’ll try.”

  The blind Hispanic vet moves his head and says, “Smell something fine. Mind if I touch ’em?”

  “Not at all,” I say, and I lead Thor over, and the Hispanic guy sighs and rubs my dog’s head. Thor leans into him. The vet says, “Rubio was my boy, during the day . . . when I got smoked, he stuck with me . . . led the medics to me . . . poor guy got scorched too, didn’t make it through the night after I got hit.”

  The guy rubs Thor’s head one more time and turns away. His companion wipes at his eyes.

  I go into the train station.

  An hour earlier I was in my barracks room, getting ready to depart, still trying to get a handle of what I had to do and where I had to go, when our batman came in and whistled at me. “Looking mighty fine, Sergeant,” Corporal Manning says.

  “Stuff it,” I say, feeling cross. I was still thinking about Abby and last night’s disaster of a dance, and I feel out of place, wearing my Army Service Uniform. Stuck in my front pockets are the old photo of my family, my blessed Rosary, and my souvenir from my first Creeper kill.

  The old man slowly lowers himself down and sits on my bunk. “You’re on a long trip and you’re dressed up like you’re getting a promotion? Or a court martial?”

  “How in hell do you know what I’m doing?”

  Manning laughs. “Sign of a good soldier is knowing what his uppers are doing. So why are you dressed like that, Sergeant?”

  In my open bag I put in another pair of clean socks and underwear, noting I’m down one set because Specialist Millett hadn’t yet returned the borrowed pair. “Orders, what else.”

  Manning shakes his head. “You should wear your standard fatigues, Sergeant. No matter what anybody says, everything outside of this base is a combat zone. You should dress like that, and carry the right gear.”

  “What kind of gear?”

  “You’ve been in Recon Ranger this long and can’t figure out what kind of weapons to bring?”

  “The colonel said Colt M-10 was out of the question.”

  “Which leaves a lot of other options, don’t it.”

  I look to his old, seasoned and wise face, decide to lighten the subject. “Tell me again about that other television show. Not the one about the housewives. The one about the sisters.”

  He snorts. “Three pudgy sisters with lots of make-up and expensive dresses who went to a lot of parties, got into fights, got married and divorced, and had camera crews following their every choreographed step. Their mother took pride in whoring them out, and their stepfather had so much facial surgery it looked like his head was made of wax. That was the television show.”

  “I know that,” I say. “But what did they do?”

  Manning says, “Just what I told you, Sergeant. That’s it. Hell of a thing, watching that collection of idiots, knowing you once went to battle and bled on their eventual behalf.”

  “Korea?” I ask.

  He says not a word, looks like he’s thinking. The old corporal doesn’t talk much about what’s gone on with him, and I think this is a good time to press him. “What was Korea like?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Curious,” I say. “Remember? I’m just a kid. We’re always curious.”

  He takes a breath, folds his wrinkled hands across his belly. “Cold. Stark. Like the surface of the moon. Sometimes you could half-convince yourself you weren’t even on the Earth. The Chinese . . . they’d attack at night, in huge waves, one right after another, blowing bugles, ringing cymbals. To this day I still can’t stand the sound of bugles and cymbals. We fired back, called in artillery strikes, air strikes, and the bastards kept on coming. Had to put wet towels on the machine gun barrels so they wouldn’t warp from all the heat. We were outgunned, outnumbered . . . but we pushed them back, by God, we pushed them back . . . not many remember what we did back then, but we did it, when and where it counted.”

  When he’s talking his eyes shift, so he’s looking at a far corner of the room, thousands of miles and decades away. His gaze comes back to me. “As bad as it was then, Sergeant Knox, you’ve got the tougher fight. The Chinese . . . we couldn’t understand them either, like the Creepers, but at least they was human. And you . . . I don’t care what you been told, you’re going into a combat zone. Want my advice, Sergeant?”

  “Always,” I say.

  He gets up, slaps me on my shoulder. “Dress and arm yourself accordingly.”

  I look to him, start unbuttoning my shirt, knowing I was going to visit the K-9 kennels before leaving. But before he leaves, I call out, “Corporal?”

  “Sergeant?”

  “If . . . if a letter comes from my dad, you’ll make sure to keep it safe, right?”

  A solemn nod. “You can count on it, Sergeant.”

  In the wide hallway of the Concord train station, the benches are hard plastic and are almost full of passengers. A male Amtrak employee wanders the hall, uses a megaphone to announce the next train leaving, heading off to Keene. As the good corporal suggested, I’m wearing standard BDUs and a jacket, denoting my name, rank and unit. Belted around my waist is my 9 mm Beretta, and stuck in my boot is my Army-issue Blackhawk knife. My pack is in one hand, and Thor’s leash is in the other. I make my way to a ticket station and present my orders, and the very young lady wearing a well-mended Amtrak uniform that looks two sizes too big for he
r, does some stamping and writing, and then peers over the counter, sees Thor.

  “The dog going with you, too?”

  “He sure is,” I say.

  She glances down at my orders. “I only see authorization for you.”

  I take my orders from her hand, point to a sub-paragraph. “See that? ‘Provide transportation for Sergeant Randy Knox, New Hampshire Army National Guard, as well as accompanying equipment.’”

  I show her my assault pack, and then my leash. “This bag and the dog are my equipment, ma’am. Now. Do I get a ticket for him or do I need to contact my commanding officer, so he can talk to your station master?”

  She frowns, bites her lip, and does another round of stamping and signing, and passes the cardboard slips over. “There you go. Two round-trip tickets for you and your . . . equipment. Concord to the Capitol, and then back again.”

  I note the hesitation and awe in her voice in the last sentence. It’s not considered polite to say aloud the name of our latest capitol city, like those extremely orthodox Jews who don’t say the name of their God aloud or in print. Since the war began, the capitol has moved around the country at least a half-dozen times, before settling in at its current location. It’s been there for three years, a record I’m told. The previous times the Creepers found out where the new capitol was located and blasted it from orbit with their killer stealth sats. So even its name isn’t mentioned aloud in polite or not-so-polite company.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I say, putting the precious cardboard tickets in a side jacket pocket. “I appreciate it.”