Dark Victory - eARC Read online

  We may be off duty, but by God, we’re not going to be unarmed.

  The 89 Café is in a big farmhouse within walking distance of Interstate 89. Story is, after the NUDETS happened on 10/10, some of the passengers that left their dead cars and trucks on I-89 went to the farmhouse, where the family there welcomed them in. They stayed and started working to earn their way, and refugees stopped by and paid for food and shelter, and ten years later, it’s changed some, but it’s still there as a tavern and sleeping joint.

  Out about the large farmhouse there were a couple of pre-war cars, with their guards sitting on the hoods, shotguns across their laps. Horses were at rest by two hitching posts, and there were about a half-dozen wagons parked out in a nearby field. Music comes out from open doors and windows, and after locking our bikes at a crowded bike rack, I took Abby’s hand and we went in.

  The admission fee was one new dollar apiece—pretty steep—but worth it to be far away from the post. Inside the music was loud from a live band of guitar, drums and piano, and there’s sawdust on the floor, and a long bar and tables, and we got a table in the corner. The place was pretty crowded and it’s fun to be out with civvies. We danced some and had lemonade and small cheeseburgers that supposedly come from cows raised nearby, and we laughed and kissed and danced some more, and when the band took a break, it all went south when a sour-looking man in a cheap suit with patches on the knees and elbows came over. He wanted to know how old we were, and when I snapped back, old enough, he showed the both of us a badge and said he was an inspector from the State Liquor Commission. Big deal, I said, and he said, oh yeah, big deal, you’re underage, so get the hell out.

  I said the hell I will, and I showed him my National Guard ID, and he said, big freaking deal, don’t care what uniform you wear, you’re still underage. Out you go, or I’ll pull this bar’s license, and I’ll get you in hack with your superior officer.

  I said I’ve got a commanding officer, but nobody’s superior to me back at my post, and Abby squeezed my hand and pulled me away from the table. I made sure I paid our waitress and outside I was pretty pissed, and to Abby I said, so much for the thanks of a grateful nation, hunh?

  Abby kissed me and said, night’s still young. I can sneak you back into my barracks room and show you the thanks of a grateful Abby. I said, what about the night guards? Abby said, you wouldn’t believe what they won’t see or hear in exchange for an unopened box of ten-year-old Kotex.

  I biked back pretty fast to the post, following a laughing Abby, who’s much speedier than I am.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  As we pull out from the station, Serena says, “That was sweet. Girlfriend?”

  “Fellow Recon Ranger.”

  “Violating the rules against fraternization?”

  I stare at her. “Is that any of your business, Specialist Coulson?”

  She tries to stare right back at me, and then lowers her eyes. “No, Sergeant.”

  Manson laughs. “God help us.”

  “What’s so funny?” I ask, turning my sharp-eyed look to him.

  “Never mind,” he says, looking out the window. We’re now south of Concord, running parallel to Interstate 93. Sunlight glints off the windshields of the abandoned cars on the highway.

  “Mister Manson,” I say with exaggerated politeness. “Do go on. I’ve been accused by some members of my squad of not having a sense of humor. I’d love to learn why the specialist and I made you laugh.”

  Manson looks at the specialist, and then looks at me. “No offense, Sergeant. But you’re sixteen, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Specialist Coulson, would you mind telling me your age?”

  “Fifteen.”

  The train is rattling along now, the old railroad tracks bumpy and making the carriage shudder and shake. Manson raises his voice. “Please don’t take offense, but you’re teenagers . . . children. When I was your age, I was thinking about getting my driver’s license, updating my Facebook page, and trying to get enough money for a new iPhone. Back then, my God, we had a term for parents who were overprotective. We called them helicopter parents, because they hovered over their children for years, making sure they didn’t hurt themselves, or fail in school, or get fired from a job. Back then being your age meant being coddled, protected, having everything handed to you.”

  I say nothing, for this is a tale I’ve heard many times from my so-called elders over the years. It’s like they have a need to apologize to us kids for the state of the world or something. He says, “Now, for the most part we depend on you . . . teenagers to defend us. To carry weapons and fight when you’re not old enough to drink, vote or get married. It’s a funny thing, that’s all. From one generation to the next. From a pampered class to a warrior class.”

  Coulson looks like she’s about to speak, but I beat her to it. “That was never our choice, our decision, was it, Mister Manson? We’re defending you because so many adults have died over the years, fighting the Creepers. That’s what we do. We fight, we resist, we protect. You, for example, Mister Manson, if you felt so strongly about teenagers defending you, you could resign your position in the state government and join up. I’m sure with your age and background, you’d become an officer in no time.”

  Manson chooses his words carefully. “I didn’t mean to insult.”

  “Mister Manson, I’ve served in the New Hampshire National Guard for nearly four years. Since I’ve put that uniform on, I’ve never allowed anyone to call me a kid, or boy, or child. Do I make myself clear?”

  Serena is smiling widely and Manson steps up from his seat. “Your colonel will know what you’ve just said, Sergeant.”

  “Outstanding,” I say. “I look forward to the day when we can both tell him about this little talk.”

  Manson’s face colors. “In the meantime, I’m moving to another seat.”

  I nod. “Mister Manson, go right ahead. But I do ask that you remain in this carriage in my line of sight. I’m under orders to escort you to our destination.”

  He doesn’t say a word, but he steps out into the aisle and finds an empty seat about three rows back. With his seat abandoned, I point to it and say, “Thor, go.” I know dogs can’t smile but he seems to grin when he gets off the hard floor and jumps up on the empty seat.

  Serena says, “Good for you.”

  “Excuse me?” I ask sharply.

  She repeats and adds, “Good for you, Sergeant.”

  I turn and look out at the passing landscape of trees, nearly deserted roads, and the old brick buildings of Manchester as we move south.

  After about a half hour of travel, the train starts to slow down, and through the window, I see a piece of history, parked on an otherwise deserted stretch of highway. When the Creeper war started, nearly every ship at sea lost its engines and steering, and nearly every aircraft in the air lost power. Most of them crashed. Up on the highway rests the remains of a British Airways Boeing 747, coming into approach to Boston. With engines out and Boston no longer there, the pilot and co-pilot managed to wrestle their nearly-dead aircraft to a landing on this piece of interstate.

  Pretty fair piece of flying. I wish I could have met them.

  The 747 is still there, and I see smoke wisping its way up in the sky from fires built near the wings and fuselage. The way I’ve heard it, a number of passengers still live in the aircraft, still waiting to go home, wherever their home is.

  After about an hour the train rattles again, slows some more. The landscape out there looks familiar, and I’m chilled. We’re approaching a river valley, and an Amtrak conductor comes through, holding onto the seats to keep his balance.

  The conductor yells out, “Ladies and gents, we’re stopping for fifteen minutes to take on wood and water. We should’ve filled up at Concord but they was low on supplies. Feel free to step out and stretch your legs, if you’d like. But don’t go far. The train whistle will blow twice, and then we’ll depart.”

  Good, I think. I’ll
just stay in my seat.

  The train comes to a shuddering halt. Serena looks to her brother Buddy, who’s calmly staring out the window. Thor is dozing on his side, all four legs dangling over the edge of the seat. The rear carriage door snaps open and I’m content to stay, but up ahead, Mister Manson gets up and steps off the train.

  Damn.

  I rub Thor’s head. “Come on, pal.”

  I move around Serena and with a leashed Thor at my side, I step through the aisle and go outside. Thor sniffs the air, raises a leg against a railway track, and lets loose a stream of urine. It’s a late cool morning, slightly overcast. To the right and below, a valley descends to the slow-moving Merrimack River. Bordering both sides of the river are the old brick buildings and smokestacks of Lowell, a Massachusetts mill town that’s been here for a couple of hundred of years. Most of the brick buildings are shattered and blackened from being blasted a couple of years back.

  I take a deep breath. My chest is so tight it’s like I’m wearing body armor. Around me on this slope of the valley, the ground has been torn up, disturbed, trees tossed aside, exposed roots dangling, clumps of dirt still hanging onto them. Long lines of trenches remain open in places, with scraps of clothing and broken wood. There’s other debris as well. The blasted hull of an Army M1-A1 Abrams tank, rolled on its side, the barrel sticking up into the air. Two school buses, scorched and windows broken, the yellow paint still visible. Rusted cables as thick as my wrist, tangled around in the dirt. Up on a far slope, wreckage of an Air Force fighter jet, maybe an F-15 or an F-22. I can’t tell. Lower in the valley, two Creeper exoskeletons on their back, their stiff articulated legs sticking up in the air. Grass and brush have grown over some of the torn up landscape, but the area around the exoskeletons is gray and dead.

  I look away from the old battlefield, see Manson standing and sharing a cigarette with a man about his age, also wearing a suit. Manson still has the leather satchel chained to his wrist. I wonder what’s in the satchel. I wonder why he’s seeing the President. Still wonder why I was picked to be here. Two other men in suits pass by, heading towards Manson and his companion, one man saying to the other, “ . . . that Tess Conroy, she still has the President’s balls in her make-up box, I mean, how long does she think people are going to sit still . . .”

  And a muttered reply, “ . . . hard to believe that Kansas governor’s got the gonads to run against him this fall . . .”

  They walk out of earshot. Politics. Can’t stand it. Serena and her brother Buddy come up to me, she holding his hand. She looks down at the valley and says, “Is there where it was? The Battle of Merrimack Valley?”

  “It was,” I say. I turn and look around some more, remembering those frantic days. Serena says something else and I turn back to her. “Sorry, could you say that again? My left ear is burned. Don’t hear that well from that side.”

  She says, “You were here, weren’t you. I can tell by your face.”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “Is that where you got your ear hurt?”

  It doesn’t make sense but my damaged left ear is throbbing with remembered pain. I say, “Tell me where in Maine you’re stationed, and I’ll tell you, specialist. Does that sound fair?”

  She says, “All right. Fair exchange. Bangor.”

  “Is that where your dad’s from?”

  “Yes. And now he’s at the Capitol. My brother and I haven’t seen him in a few months, which is why I got leave to visit him.”

  I rub at my ear. Lucky, pretty little girl, knowing where her dad is. Unlike me. “Yeah, this is where I got hurt. During that battle. Lost a chunk of my hearing as well.”

  “Were you in Recon Rangers then?”

  “No,” I say. “I had joined up only two years earlier. I was with the regular 157th Field Artillery Unit. But during the Battle of Merrimack Valley, we didn’t have much in the way of field artillery. We had some 105-millimeter mortars and some AT-4 anti-tank missiles. It was a mixed bag of what had survived the first few years of the war. We used everything and anything we could get our hands on.”

  The sounds of the passengers talking amongst themselves, the locomotive releasing steam and smoke, the gurgling of the water being pumped in from a nearby water tower, all these noises recede. The memories come back to me, slowly overtaking everything, like a spring flood overflowing a streambed and lapping at your life.

  I say, “The Creepers have a base near the Connecticut border. One night a couple of dozen Creepers popped out and started moving north in a skirmish line, burning and blasting everything in their path. General Ray Spenser, a regular officer, stationed at the Pentagon, was vacationing in Vermont when the war started. By the time of this battle, he was ready, as best as he could be, commanding the blocking forces. Most of the country’s front-line units had already been destroyed or hollowed out from the first years of the war. The concern was that the Creepers were going to sweep up through New Hampshire, and then take out the whole Maine coast and some important installations up there . . . so we were going to stop them. He sent out a mimeographed letter, Order of the Day it said. It quoted a famous French general during the Battle of Verdun, in 1916. His name was Robert Nivelle.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Pretty simple, but it worked. ‘They Shall Not Pass.’ Got it? They had kicked the crap out of us for years, but this time, we drew a bloody line in the sand, and they weren’t going to pass. Even if it meant using trench warfare tactics from the last century, they weren’t coming through.”

  I continue staring out there in the distance. “Back then, we didn’t have the Colt M-10 rounds. So we made do with what we could . . . hell, we had a couple of platoons of regular 10th Mountain Division, New Hampshire and Massachusetts National Guard units, and even had members from the 369th Sustainment Brigade. They were from New York City and called themselves the Harlem Hellfighters. They’d been out on training up in New York state when Manhattan got hit. They were tough and mean and did everything they could to fight the Creepers.”

  Coulson says, “How did we win, then?”

  I shrug. “Who says we won? There’s still some dispute about the final outcome. But by God, we held them here . . . held them here and pushed them back. “‘twas a famous victory,’ you know. General Spenser, he had a sense of how and where they moved based on intel he got from dispatchers and runners from across the country. The Creepers tend to follow valleys and moving water, for whatever reason. Even then, he had less than a day to prep the battlefield, and prep he did.”

  Coulson starts to talk and I interrupt, pointing to the valley. “We still weren’t able to destroy the Creepers outright. Still can’t figure out why those exoskeletons are so tough. But we could slow them, turn them back, and if lucky, cripple or kill the creatures inside. On this side of the valley, the general buried lengths of cables under the dirt. On the other side of the valley, he hid artillery, best as he could. When the Creepers rolled through here, the cables were dragged up, snagging the Creepers’ legs. Slowed them down. Artillery units opened fire, chewing up the landscape, rolling the Creepers over, tangling them. He even had a couple of M1-A1 and A2 tanks and some Air Force jets in reserve, which he sacrificed . . . poor bastards driving and flying knew they were on a suicide mission, and they went in anyhow. The killer stealth sats in orbit were quick in picking up powered vehicles like jets and tanks, but they were able to do some damage before they got whacked.”

  My breath is catching. “A couple of long-range snipers were there, too, firing depleted uranium rounds into the Creepers’ main arthropod stalk. They were able to knock a few out. Even had sappers that went down and wrapped charges around the legs of the exoskeletons while they were tangled up or on their backs. Hardly any one of those sappers came back.”

  Coulson says quietly, “Were you near here?”

  I shake my head. “A klick or two away. We were dropping harassing and interdiction rounds on the Creepers as they got slowed down by the cables or the sappers
.”

  “How did you get hurt?”

  Odd, I know, but I’m starting to hear the sounds of shouts, of outgoing rounds, explosions. My knees are quivering. “A new recruit got separated from my squad. He got fried. I went and rescued him, nearly got my head taken off as well. Dragged him back nearly a klick to our position.”

  “You were very brave.”

  “Did my job.”

  “Bet he was happy to see you.”

  Melendez, that had been his name. Poor old Melendez. “Maybe. Maybe not. A Creeper laser took off his legs at the knees. He screamed every meter when I dragged him back. He was twelve. Just a kid.”

  The train whistle blows once, twice, and I look to her and then my bud and say, “Thor, let’s go.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Inside the train, a surprising moment. Manson motions me over and I step up to him, and he says, “I meant no disrespect back there, Sergeant. My apologies. Sometimes . . . I just let the job get to me, be a wiseguy. You work for the governor, a lot of times you gotta say no. No to a town looking for a new bridge. No to a county looking to increase its food rationing. No to families looking for firewood assistance. You say no a lot, you tend to be a son-of-a-bitch.”

  His eyes still look like a mirror of Buddy’s, so I let it slide. “Very well, Mister Manson. Water under the bridge and all that.”