Pilliars in the Fall (6 page)

I made it about three steps from the back door when I heard it open again and Blake slipped out to follow behind me.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked in a hushed tone.

“Not yet. Thought I’d see what the weather was doing, and thought this might help too,” I swished the smooth amber liquid in my glass.

“Is it weird having people here at the house?” he asked me seriously.

“No. Well yes, but it’s a good weird. I wasn’t just building it for me you know.”

“Yeah, how ya doing with all that?”

“It’s fine. Nice having you guys here to help keep my mind off of it,” I shrugged.

“I thought you liked being alone?”

“I do. I just like being alone when other people are around,” I laughed at myself again.

“You’re still going to stay with us at Mom and Dad’s though aren’t you?” Blake asked.

“Oh I’ll spend a few nights there, but I like it here. You get a good fire going and it heats up nice and warm. Plus it's peaceful; I can just relax and be alone with my thoughts.”

“Are those good things to be alone with when they’re so dark all the time these days?” he asked the stinging and honest question.

“Hey I’m not gonna off myself or anything like that,” I said, offering him a sip out of my glass. “I know I’m moody and pissy, but you know me, on my own is how I work stuff out.”

“Yeah I know, it still sucks to see you unhappy though,” Blake responded.

“I’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m going to lock myself in here and hide away from the world. I’m good to go.”

“Good, ‘cause I want to know you’ve still got my back if this shit gets worse before it gets better,” he said coolly.

“Those are about the only two things I can guarantee
will
happen.”

Chapter 9

“You have a cup holder in your shower,” Danielle informed me as she closed the door to the second story and came down the stairs, still drying her hair with a bath towel.

“I like to drink beer in the shower… it’s the nicest one I could find. You think I should have gone for a tiled inset one to match the rest of the backsplash don’t you? I knew I should have sprung for the extra!” I played up the dejection.
 

“Boys are weird,” she proclaimed and went over to stand by the fire.

"So what's on the agenda?" Blake came around the corner with a plastic spoon sticking out from the cup of oatmeal he was eating.

After finally falling asleep, I had woken up after all the others and was still nursing my first cup of coffee of the day.

"Anything on the net?" I asked Clint, who was jotting notes on a clipboard at the makeshift radio desk he had set up.

"Nothing for us, some bad local stuff, weather from
Canada, still trying to jump between channels," he yawned and went back to listening to the ear piece.

An hour later we were no further along than before and everyone was starting to get restless.

“What else can we do to get news and information besides the radios?” Danielle prompted.

“I guess we should look at this from a different angle.” Clint sighed.

“Boots on the ground?” I perked up, happy with the idea of getting back out into the woods instead of sitting around my unfinished house, plugging in wires. “It won’t give us much, but I can hit the roads and see what the locals are doing. We’ll get an idea of our immediate security if nothing else.”

“Yep, I didn’t really want to suggest it, but besides getting the other radios hooked up, it looks like that’s the best course of action right now. Probably don’t need to go too far out or for too long, just a half a day doing a good circle of the road traffic within five miles or so of here,” he advised.

“Great, you three should be all set up by the time I get back.”

Apparently I was getting a head of myself as both Blake and Danielle immediately protested the idea. It happened quickly enough that a question of their protests’ motivation started creeping into my head.

“There’s no reason for you to go out on your own and us to all stay here,” Danielle attempted to say in a gentle way. It was too late and I wasn’t buying it.

“Yeah man, this is your place... you know where stuff is at,” Blake backed her up.

Yeah, I knew where stuff was at.

“I also know the area around here better than even Clint, but that’s not the point is it, so let's have it out. Do you two not want to stay here where you can be of some use, or is it that you don’t know if you can trust me without a babysitter?”

“It’s not like that. There’s just no reason someone shouldn’t come with you,” Danielle again tried to explain.

There absolutely was no reason we shouldn’t split up into two pairs, but they missed the mark in presentation if they were going to try to keep their concerns about me hidden.

“Look guys, I get it. But you also better know right damn now that even if you don’t believe I can handle all this on top of everything else, you had better not treat me like a ten year old. You want me pissed off, depressed and unstable, then you keep me bored and sitting around with nothing to do,” I had their attention now and was going to take the opportunity to lay it out there before they kept up anymore of this bullshit.

Then turning to look at Blake directly, I laid into him, even if he didn’t know me as well as when we were kids, we had the same mentality. If anyone, I knew he could identify with where I was coming from the most.

“You’ve been gone a long time but you should still know that I’m at my best when I’m working on something that has me sweating and keeping my mind occupied. I don’t want any more of this kid gloves shit, alright? If you’ve got something for me then you put me to work and don’t second guess it or try to watch over me ‘cause I’ll leave all your asses in the dust. I’m a damn expert on getting stuff done when the walls are crumbling down, so right now, this is my world; you just try and keep up.”

“Sorry man, you know how it is,” he said in the frank way that we could talk to each other.

And that was it. There was no animosity or hurt feelings, just two people on the level that could be honest about themselves with the other one. Clint could see it and knew it, even if he wasn’t right along with us, but I was sure Danielle would take some more time in coming around, and I understood that too.

“So who do you want to help you get set up?” I asked Clint, getting us back on track.

“I’ll keep Danielle here with me. You take Blake out and get him broken back in to our way of things,” Clint smiled, taking his own turn at stirring a hornet's nest.  

“What the hell's that supposed to mean?” Blake asked incredulously.

“It means you’ve got a ton of good experience with exactly what we don’t have, so you’re going to have to relearn, or at least remember and adjust,” I tried saying.

“I don’t get it,” Danielle voiced.

"Yeah man, we were in a damn war zone, I think I can manage," Blake said defensively.

“It's different here. You guys were part of an infrastructure,” Clint attempted to fill in the blanks. I could see that Blake didn’t want to listen to his explanation so I jumped in.
 

“Remember how you told me about riding out on that Blackhawk to recover a stuck rig on your first tour?” I knew he remembered it because he had told me how that was one of a handful of times when he was truly scarred for his life and felt completely on his own while over there.

“Yeah…” he invited me to continue, waiting for the pieces to fill in on what Clint and I were driving at.

“Well you had maintenance crews and pilots to get you there, security to watch out for you, supply to keep you going, and a cafeteria to come back to when you were tired and hungry… all that is on you now. I know I know, you’ve done this before,” I said holding up my hands to cut off the predictable objection. “It’s not like this is something new, it’s just different then what you’re used to.”

“I’ve been out hunting a few times on leave; I’m not totally out of it.”

“I know, but it’s not hunting, it’s combat hunting. It’s understated and discrete and a thinking game. We are all on our own and have to execute like it."
 

"What do you mean?" Danielle asked again, still trying to bridge the gap between theories.

“Well for the most part you guys saw the shock and awe thing; rolling noisily down Main Street to intimidate the yokels. You get spotted by a sniper and you have a platoon and medics available, and worst case, you just blowup the building he's in with an air strike."

"Well obviously we don’t have all that here," Blake rolled his eyes, still resistant to accept the differences.

"Just figure it this way, the military has moved into what I think the current buzzword is Full Spectrum Operations. Meaning that every unit has to be able to do everything from peace keeping to counterinsurgency to high intensity operations... even though they won't be able to give you the time or resources to learn to do any of them particularly well. Right?"

"Well that’s not quite right, or at least I disagree a little, but keep going I guess," Danielle objected.

"Specialized troops aside, the ground troops whose job it is to fight, are supposed to now do house clearing, then get thrown into negotiation, relations, call in strikes... all while having their own MOS to specialize in. Everyone has so much happening on top of the fear of screwing up and bringing down the chain of command or lawsuits, all that hampers a lot of aggressive action.

"So all you're saying is, we have to do all that, but better?" Danielle asked

"The point is, it's just us four here," I interrupted, beginning to tire of the conversation. "It's easier for us to do it better, but you have to think like it. You better know why you're doing what you're doing, because it's just us here.
You
are all you've got.”

"Hey, no chain of command sounds good to me, no accountability except to ourselves, I can live with that," Blake proclaimed happily.

"Good enough," I sighed. "You remember how to recon then?"

"Yeah, I follow your lead and try not to get bored."

He was just filling me with joy and confidence.

"Okay, we’re going to go do a big circle and be back here by nightfall." I was ready to get going.

Blake and I loaded our backpacks and I got out a nice scoped AR15 that I had pieced together for competition a few years ago to loan to Blake so that he would be properly armed. I had chosen for myself to go with a heavier hitting gun and caliber, dusting off the M1 Garand from its place in the back of my gun safe.

"Wait, what about the truck?" Blake asked quickly before we set out. "Should we go try to see if we can figure out where they took it?"

"It's still where we left it." Clint stated from his now normal spot at the radio desk.

"Why? Because of the flat tire?" Blake obviously thought the notion was too ridiculous to put any value into it.

Clint noisily jingled the keys in the air in response.

"Alright, but
it's not that new, they could have hotwired it."

"Sure, but even then they wouldn’t get too far. I wired in a switch under the dash that cuts power to the fuel pump and hit it when we jumped out. Unless you know its there, you'd have a hell of a time finding it," Clint explained.

Passive as well as active car alarms had become standard fare for us over the last few years. Along with a few simple deterrents, like a pit bull in the front seat, it would ensure your car and all its parts stayed relatively intact if you had the need to park anywhere for any length of time.

An hour later, Blake and I were out on our makeshift patrol. Everything was going relatively well, all things considered. There was some sporadic traffic on the main back road that we paralleled for a while. We spied a few families going on with their normal lives at their houses, kids playing in the backyard and the like. One couple looked to be packing up their car and a little tow behind trailer. Another family hoping not to lose all hope... after having lost hope. I smirked at my truthful and sad little joke.

Without really thinking about why, I marked on the map I was carrying which houses still had people living in them. I had known about the few empty ones already as people had slowly abandoned their homes, unable to sell them even at a loss in the fallen market, electing instead to take the loss and move in with other members of their families. For the last few years it was more and more common to hear of multiple families living in one home, but to see it happening virtually in our own backyard made it very real, especially for me who now had less of a family to speak of.

We had been out hiking around, looking over things for over five hours now, our route taking us in a circular path that would eventually lead us back to Clint's truck. Blake groaned some, but for the most part we had stayed quiet and undetected. We took enough breaks to not get worn out and we ate enough food to keep our energy and concentration up. The weather was cool and gray, and it thankfully hadn’t rained on us yet. Yep, everything was all going well right up until those two chicks tried to shank me.

After sitting over an intersection of two roads for a time, we were on our way back and only about two quick miles away from where Clint's truck was waiting for us on the same gently winding, desolate stretch of road. We were maybe tired, and hadn’t seen anything all that threatening all day, so maybe our awareness was a little lax from what it should have been, even so, as Clint had taught us both as kids a long time ago, “You always hunt your way back to camp.”

As usual, we were walking off to the side of the road. It was easy to move quietly over the ground, damp from the fall frosts. Because of this, the forest was basically dead quiet, so the sound of a car door slamming shut on the otherwise quiet road was all too easy to make out. Both Blake and I stopped in our tracks, trying to get a bearing on the sound and the accompanying voices. They were female, just far enough away that we couldn’t pick out specific words. With a look and a shrug, Blake and I continued forward slowly until we could get a better read on the situation.

“I’m telling you, no one is coming.”

We finally were close enough to hear and see the conversation between the two young women. They were maybe in their late teens or early twenties, and what I would call “inappropriately” dressed for the weather.

“There’re a couple hours before it gets dark, someone might still come by,” the other one countered.

“This isn’t going to work, let’s just go home,” the first girl complained again.

“If we… wait, did you see that? Something moved over there.”

In the late rays of sun that were cutting through the clouds, one of the girls had managed to see Blake as he continued to move around, ultimately casting a shadow out onto the road. He realized it at the same time that I did, and in his effort to shrink down and hide, his foot fell out from under him onto a stick that broke with a muted crack.

“Somebody’s up there…” I heard one of the feminine voices clue in on us.