Everyone Dies in the End #26

Cindy

Loudly enough for Cindy to hear, and if Cindy—a woman who had never fired a weapon in anger before yesterday—heard the gun, she was sure Dixon did too. And he did, stopping the Jeep CJ6 and jumping from the side door in a blur of green camouflage and black gun metal.

“Gunfire,” he yelled at the small following convoy. “Dismount, disperse.” The survivors of the Cameron ambush spread to either side of the road, the last M-113 clanking by on the right. Cindy swung out of the jeep. Yesterday’s firefight had bound her to these men, and if they were going into harms way again, she was going with them.

They were in the city proper. A block or two over, a large building burned furiously. It had been easy to spot when they had crested the hill a mile back, and the fire’s smoke choked the air. The soldiers tore cloth and wore it over their face bandito style. Dixon offered her a square, and she obediently tied it across her mouth and nose. It helped, but just a little.

The gunfire crescendoed; the original rapid popping growing into a fusillade of noise, a popcorn popper gone crazy. Yet despite the volume, or perhaps because of it, it was difficult to tell the exact location of the firefight. Cindy knew the battle was in front of them, but couldn’t tell how far in front. Evidently, Dixon couldn’t either. He had scouts out now, and the men moved out slowly, lining each side of the street, the M-113 following cautiously, smoke from the burning buildings weaving between them. Dixon broke his discussion with one of his men, the one called Sergeant, to look at Cindy.

“Stay here.”

She laughed, couldn’t help it. He was sweet; sweet but stupid.

“Look, Zak. You’re not Tarzan, and I sure as hell ain’t Jane.” She looked at the men scurrying up the road, rifles at the ready. “We all needed each other yesterday. No reason to think today will be any different.”

He glared at her.

“Sir?”  It was the young Sergeant. Cindy guessed he was the replacement for the guy named, Sarge. The guy that had evaporated with the M-113 in Cameron.

“If you don’t mind me saying, Sir, she‘s right. I don’t know what she did, or how she did it, but she saved our ass yesterday. Sounds like it’s going to get hot up ahead. We can use every gun we can get.”

Dixon’s eyes shifted to the Sergeant, and it wasn’t a look Cindy would have wished on anyone.  “I know what we need, Sergeant.”  His tone was cold, menacing.

The piercing blue eyes returned to her, but for only a moment, and then he shrugged. “Suit yourself,” and without another word to Cindy, he resumed his discussion with the flustered Sergeant.

Cindy matched his shrug, and raised him an unconcerned look. She snatched her shotgun off the CJ6’s brown leather seat, and headed off at a trot, eager to join the advancing men.

The soldiers of Dixon’s command moved cautiously up the street, scouts in the lead, sprinting from one piece of cover to the next, the main body of men split on either side of the street, not displaying the caution of the scouts, but still wary. The street on which they advanced looked no different than any other they had traveled in Charlotte, or most anywhere else for that matter. Civilization’s refuse cluttered the pavement, and the buildings—mostly small offices and stores—were missing the glass in their windows and the furniture in their rooms. Some of the furniture littered the street; so did burned cars and trucks, as well as those that just appeared abandoned. Not thirty feet ahead the passing of a soldier frightened crows from what appeared to be a bundle of rags. When Cindy passed the spot, she realized that it was indeed little more than rags, but those rags covered an emaciated corpse. The smell, despite the cloth covering her face, gagged her.

She wished she could fly away.

            Of course she could do something exactly like that, although teleportation felt nothing like flying, it felt more like being turned inside out and pushed out of reality’s rear end. But she didn’t know how to teleport when she didn’t know where she was going. It only seemed to work when she could visualize the place in which she wished to appear. So for now she walked with caution, just like the other members of Zak Dixon’s command.