Friday Fiction. Dusty's War.

I've heard that writers shouldn't explain themselves. I'm going to break that rule. The below is an excerpt from Everyone Dies in the End. The book is based in my World at War: Revelation universe, but isn't a sequel, not in the classic sense. In the fall of 1985 the Soviet Union launched 11 nuclear missiles at the United States. We responded in kind. Within the States, life has become a strange mixture of what was and the crumbling society of what is now (Now as in September , 1985). 

Dusty's lost her boyfriend, Eddie. Headed to Philly on one of his numerous business trips to the City of Brotherly love, he was away when the missiles struck. She's headed north to find him, in the company of a rag tag U.S. Army convoy she's met. Just a poor girl, her Remington Model 870, and one hell of a special talent.

Anatol

Captain Anatol Vorishnov was a lucky man. The Soviet submarine Andropov had dropped his Spetsnaz platoon of 40 men on a deserted stretch of South Carolina beach four weeks previously. Vorishnov suspected that his team was but one of many. His orders were simple: “Interdict the movement of supplies.” How he interpreted those orders was less so. For example, he could use his men at the Charleston docks, sniping at workers, attacking convoys waiting to load, sowing dissension among the local populace. On the other hand, he could move inland, camp out next to a likely avenue of approach to Charleston, and ambush enemy convoys. He chose the second route, and it saved his men’s lives. When the missiles struck, Vorishnov and his platoon were dozens of miles from the slag that had been Charleston. Vorishnov and his soldiers were lucky men.

There were 24 left. Vorishnov had them hidden in Cameron, South Carolina, at the intersection of Highway 33 and Highway 176. The pavement curved at the junction of the two small roads, and it provided an open field of fire for his Malyutka anti-tank guided missile team, hiding in the graveyard beside the the town’s beautiful brown stone church. Better known as the AT-3 SAGGER to his American enemies, the 125mm missile was the length of a man's arm and could penetrate and destroy all but the thickest American armor.

The denizens of Cameron had posed a dilemma. To let them go would have been dangerous. Any one of them could have revealed their presence to the militias that roamed the area, eager for more weapons to seize; or the remnants of the United States Army, a much more lethal adversary. But to kill innocent civilians was just as dangerous, at least in Anatol’s mind. Civilization was hanging by a thread, a very thin thread. Every act of needless violence, cruelty, or savagery only brought the thread that much closer to snapping. So Anatol ordered the civilians to be placed under guard in the school gymnasium. Maybe he was soft. Maybe it was a mistake, but this war would end one day, and he would need to live with what he had done.

And what he was doing right now was preparing an ambush. The plan was simple: when and if a convoy passed through Cameron, the Malyutka team would eliminate the most dangerous vehicle. The RPG team in the gas station down the street would take out the lead vehicle. With two vehicles disabled, and a handful of wounded troops to protect, the convoy would be forced to stand and fight. That would play right into the hands of the Spetsnaz. They were in fortified positions, with well-sited weapons. Anyone who stood and fought in the streets of Cameron, South Carolina, wouldn’t be standing for long.

Dusty

The jeep was the most uncomfortable ride of Dusty’s life, but it was also the most welcome. The stiff springs jolted the chassis at every bump in the road, and the tiny seat under the machine gun had very little padding. No matter how she canted her body, repositioned her butt, or flexed her muscles, there was always something poking her as the jeep bounced over the road’s imperfections.

      Nevertheless, the jeep bounced forward and every turn of the wheel brought her closer to Eddie. At least that was what she told herself. An hour droned by as she watched the desolate countryside slide by, stared at the hole in the knee of machine gunner’s pants, or checked the action of the Remington on her knees.

The machine gunner stood beside her, both hands on the large gun’s handles, his legs flexed and eyes alert. The big gun—when she asked, he told her it was a “fiddy cal,” and said nothing more—remained stationary. The gunner’s head continuously swiveled left and right, but he kept the gun pointed straight.

The officer did the same. Although he held his rifle in his lap, his eyes never stopping scanning the fields through which they drove. She’d tried to make conversation, but he was polite, nothing more. His terse responses painted a sad picture.

The officer’s unit, the 24^th Mechanized, had been shipped to West Germany in the second week of the war. The men she rode with now were reserves, replacements for the soldiers consumed in a war with a voracious appetite for blood. The officer—his name was West, Lieutenant Zak West—was a recent graduate of officer candidate school in Fort Benning, Georgia, the base of the 24^th Mech. West had been placed in command of an infantry platoon, assigned to a reserve battalion slotted to head to Germany, and then the nukes came. Fort Benning hadn’t been hit, which didn’t make sense, but much about the world didn’t make sense.

She asked him what they were doing now.

“Restoring hope,” was his laconic reply.

The radio hissed, and West put the flattened, black handset to his ear. She couldn’t follow the conversation over the roar of the jeep’s engine and the rushing wind, but she managed to catch a few words... words like “fuel” and “soon.”

The convoy pulled over at three gas stations in various stages of disrepair over the next ten miles. None of the three had diesel, but a fourth one did. The station was small, painted white, with boards over the windows, and a NO TRESPASSING sign on the door. Above the green roof was a red plywood sign with “Gas” in large block letters.

West dismounted. The gunner on the “fiddy cal” trained his weapon on the station; the other soldiers aimed theirs down Route 176. Behind the station, wind ruffled acres upon acres of dead tobacco. Fortunately, the breeze was blowing away from her, so Dusty could smell none of the rotting plants.

No sooner had West’s boots hit the pavement, than the station’s door opened. Out stepped a wizened old man. He was thin as a rail, black as mahogany, and deep creases lined his face. His hands held a hunting rifle. That takes guts, Dusty thought with a smile. A convoy of tanks—or whatever they call these things— shows up at your door, and you have the balls to meet them with your pitiful squirrel gun.

She liked the man right away. She rested her shotgun against her seat, hopped off the jeep, and followed West toward the man. If she could help, she would. The officer glanced back, but said nothing, and she wouldn’t have cared if he had. She didn’t need anyone’s permission. Together, they approached him.

The owner stood there, squinting at them in the mid-morning sun saying nothing, resting the rifle in the crook of his arm: his expression inscrutable, the deep lines on his face unmoving

West removed his helmet before addressing the man. The simple gesture raised her opinion of him by a quarter-notch. “Good morning, sir.”

She wouldn’t have thought it possible a moment before, but the wrinkles compressed even more as the old face squinted at West.

“Who ya with?” The voice was deep and gravelly.

“Sir, I’m not sure what you mean.”

The wrinkled face nodded. “That’s bullshit, son, and you know it. Now, who are you with? Do you still stand by the oath you took when you put on that uniform, or are you a no good, gas-stealing renegade?”

For a moment, a long moment, West was motionless. Then he nodded. “Sir, I serve the United States of America and its people. What does that make me?”

The face broke into a grin. “Why, that makes you one of the good guys, son.” The black man turned, and yelled through the open door into the station. “Elle, come on out. They’re real, by-God, American soldiers.”

A woman stepped into the sun. She was as wide as the man was thin, dressed in a simple, cotton dress. The man leaned his rifle against the wall, and placed an arm around the woman’s massive shoulders. “My name’s Sam, and this is Elle. What can I do for you?”

Fifteen minutes later, the convoy was gassed up. Dieseled would be a better word, thought Dusty. The troopers— who had dismounted to stretch their legs and relieve themselves in the surrounding fields—were back in place, and West stood beside the jeep, talking to the couple. On the asphalt beside him rested two cases of Meals Ready to Eat, or MREs as his men called them, and a case of water. Sam and Elle didn’t want payment, but West had insisted.

“We would pay you, sir,” the lanky officer stated as the cases were stacked,”but money isn’t worth much right now. I hope this is enough."

There were tears in Elle’s eyes. She wiped them with a white hanky pulled from the voluminous pockets of the billowing dress. Sam stared stoically at the cases of food and water. “We’re not through yet,” the gravelly voice rumbled as the wrinkled head shook side to side. “As long as we have men the likes of you all...” He raised his eyes to the entire column of armored vehicles. “As long as we have men like you all, we ain’t through.”

He extended an ebony hand. “Lieutenant West, it is an honor.”

West took the hand, white on black. “Sir, the honor is mine.”

Without another word, he stepped into the jeep and sat. Another minute and they were on the road, the moist, South Carolina air whistling by. Dusty leaned forward to where the officer could hear her words. “Y’all are good men.” The helmet (which he had settled on his head as the jeep’s tires began rolling) bobbed once, and he smiled. She sat back, refocusing on the scarred land slipping by. Five minutes later, she noticed the outskirts of a small town on the horizon. A beautiful brown stone church stood in the field to the side. Again she leaned forward. “What’s that?” she asked.

West pulled a worn map from his thigh pocket. “Cameron,” was the one-word reply.

Anatol

“Contact.” The word sent a spark through Anatol’s exhausted body. “Four M113s, one jeep, unknown number of infantry, approaching from the east on Route 176,” the voice continued, scratchy in his earpiece.

Anatol felt the urge to look for himself, to lay his own eyes on the box-like armored personnel carriers the Americans called M113s. Doing so, however, would entail leaving his prepared position in the library. He knew his men, mourned each one’s death, and trusted them implicitly. If the observation post on the east side of town said an American column was approaching, it was, and that was that.

“Roger,” he replied.

“Nikolai,” he radioed the sergeant in charge of the Sagger anti-tank guided missile team, “wait till we fire and then take out the trailing track.” For a moment his ear bud hissed quietly, and then Nikolai confirmed the order. It was the only direction Anatol needed to give. The rocket propelled grenade, or RPG, team at the end of the road would target the lead vehicle. With the lead vehicle in flames, and the trailing armored personnel carrier destroyed by the Sagger team, the Americans would be trapped and easy targets for his remaining men.

He could hear the squeaky drive sprockets of the M113s growing louder from his position on the second floor of what, once upon a time, must have been a children’s reading room. The two windows facing the street had been shattered, long before his men entered the town. The room’s child-sized tables now rested against the windows, and Spetsnaz troopers had further fortified the position with improvised sandbags made from the local citizenry’s pillow cases.

Below, at the end of the street, the first M113 swung into view, behind it an old-style American jeep. Anatol placed his hand on the shoulder of the PKM machine gunner beside him. “Steady, steady…now!” The machine gunner squeezed off a short burst. The slugs sparked off the flat metal top of the M113, working their way back to the American machine gunner’s torso protruding from the hatch—the American machine gunner who even now was swinging his .50 caliber heavy machine gun toward Anatol’s library window—and ripped apart the American’s body with the hail of 7.62mm bullets.

The lead M113 accelerated, but an RPG round, streaming smoke from its tail, slammed into it, and the M113 smashed, into the adjacent clothing boutique and crashed through the window. No one emerged. Anatol’s gaze didn’t linger on the destroyed track. A bright explosion from the rear of the American column singled the success of Nikolai’s Sagger team. Shrapnel from the exploding M113 spread like lethal spores through the column, one piece striking the brick facing of the hardware store adjacent to the jeep, another clanging against the side of an M113 with a bell-like gong.

The two remaining M113’s dropped their ramps and spilled their infantry onto the street. Anatol didn’t care about them…he wanted their leader. He tapped his machine gunner’s shoulder and pointed toward the jeep.

Dusty

If this wasn’t Hell, Dusty was sure Satan’s home couldn’t be much worse. The air vibrated from the pounding of guns and the exploding M113s. Buzzing hornets filled the air. But of course they weren’t hornets, they were bullets, and bullets were much more lethal.

In front of the jeep, an M113 rested in the plate glass window of a small clothing store, a mannequin flaming against the side of the green metal. A man—it was the machine gunner, she thought— smoldered on top of the vehicle. Oily black smoke seeped from the edges of the ramp she had seen the APC use but a few minutes ago to load a squad of laughing soldiers at Sam and Elle’s service station. The ramp was still closed; she doubted there was anyone left inside to laugh.

Another explosion rocked the rear of the column, the brightness flashing on the buildings’ brick and glass facings. Something buzzed by her head, its sound reminiscent of a slowly whirring helicopter blade. An instant later, the brick of the adjacent store exploded, pieces of mortar and brick showering the jeep.

Above her, the “fiddy cal” began chugging, ripping fist-sized chunks out of the green double doors to her right. West spun toward her. “Get out!” His voice was almost lost in the cacophony. Past his head, she saw a gun barrel pointing at them from a second-story window. The barrel winked light, and she knew she was going to die.

She knew wrong.

The winking barrel’s bullets traced a jagged pattern up the hood of the jeep—the bullets making solid thupts when they penetrated, sparking off the hood when they didn’t. The jagged pattern reached the jeep’s flip-up windshield, shattered it, and then tore into the driver. His body jerked in the seat, and his neck exploded, bits of flesh flying into Dusty’s face. Unlike the experience in the farmhouse kitchen, she felt no revulsion at the gore; there wasn’t time for that. A wave of gratitude swept over her: gratitude that it had been the driver, not her, who'd had his neck blown away. Fast on its heels came the guilt, hot and sexy. But no time for that either.

The fiddy-cal chugged again, wood splintered under the windowsill of the neck-chewing machine gun, and then she dove from the jeep. The street was asphalt, uncompromisingly hard, but most welcome. To her left she could see nothing but the black asphalt, oil and gas dripping from the jeep’s underside, and—on the far side of the jeep—the tips of the driver’s fingers, blood rolling off of them in a steady stream. Above her the big machine gun continued to chug. Through the air, the angry hornets that weren’t really hornets continued to zip. Dusty cringed, hugging the ground with all her might, terrified of the deadly chaos, the smell of smoke, diesel and blood thick in her nose. To the right, West hit the ground running.

Two bounds and he reached a pair of concrete barricades on the far side of the street, relics from an unfinished construction job. He jumped over them as fire from the enemy machine gun traced his progress, bullets sparking white off the black asphalt. No sooner had he disappeared behind the barricades than he popped back up, his assault rifle tucked under his chin. Pop, pop, pop—he fired in the direction of enemy machine gun. Chugga, chugga, the fiddy-cal dished lead above Dusty. West looked back down the street, and she spotted blood on his cheek-his, or someone else’s, she didn’t know. West yelled at a soldier behind her.

“Sarge, lay some lead on that PKM in the window!”

She turned her head, afraid that even that tiny movement would bring the hornets calling. It didn’t. She saw the man who must have been the Sarge tap two soldiers behind him and point to the window. Then three things happened, three events that would forever change Dusty’s life.

The first event didn’t seem so bad. She spotted a pair of rifles, barely protruding from the second-floor windows above West’s head, across the street from the gun he had labeled a PKM. The second event was much worse. With a flash, the M113 beside the man formerly known as Sarge evaporated. One minute Sarge was there, directing his men, the M113 a wall beside him, its machine gunner adding its fire to the rising level of American resistance. The next second they were all gone. There was no sign of Sarge or his men, and the twisted metal that had once been the M113 burned brighter than a Halloween bonfire. Finally, the PKM, or at least she guessed it was the PKM, took out the soldier on the Jeep’s fiddy-cal. One moment the big gun was firing. The next the PKM replied. Dusty heard a series of slaps, like a plastic spatula on plaster, and the big, black man fell out of the Jeep and onto the pavement beside her. He was dead, most assuredly dead, most of his head nothing more than a bloody morass. She wanted to scream, should have screamed, but the two rifles on the second story across from the PKM choose that moment to pump a pair of bullets into Zak West. She saw them fire, saw West drop behind the concrete barricades, and her fear turned to rage. White-hot, passionate, focused rage.

She shouldn’t be able to help. She knew that, or at least she thought she did; but then again, she had shifted position when she escaped the vampires, and she had never been this enraged in her whole freaking life. Her anger was searing: a ball in the pit of her stomach, a resolve in the stem of her brain. The shotgun, her shotgun, was hard under her body. She jacked a round into the chamber, looked at the two rifles, and willed it.

Anatol

The Americans were in bad shape. The explosion of the third APC and the demise of the .50 cal gunner in the back of the jeep were the telling blows. There was little left but to mop them up. The firing died as his men searched for targets. A scream pierced the lull, high, desperate, and short. Anatol looked in time to see a flash, hear the dull pop of a shotgun, and the scream ended as abruptly as it began. An AK-74 burped, answered by another dull pop, and then nothing.

Anatol shifted his position, peering through the cracked glass of the library window. I must know what is happening, he thought.

It wouldn’t take long to find out.

Dusty

 The two riflemen—she guessed they were Russians by their strange-looking uniforms—were dead. Killed by the Remington in her hands. Shot in the back when she materialized in the room. Across the street the PKM spewed a stream of bullets. She saw the room flicker behind it, visualized it, willed it, and…

…the world turned inside out, light bent, reality grew thin, and she was there, the PKM loud in her ears.

Dusty gasped. Each teleportation felt like a punch in the stomach. But no one heard her gasp. The PKM was deafening and the three men in the room—the machine gunner, a leader pointing across the street, and another rifleman—were facing the windows. Ignoring her lurching stomach, she pressed the shotgun to her cheek. The stock felt cool against her hot flesh. She sighted the back of the machine gunner’s head and fired. The skull dissolved in a red mist, and he collapsed on his weapon, bright red blood and grey brain matter steaming as it flowed down the short white wall with pretty pink and blue books stamped on it. Amazingly, there was no reaction from the other two. In the din of battle they must have thought the killing blow came from the street below. She was hot, excited, the thrill almost sexual. Breathing hard, she pumped, sighted, and shot the rifleman, the force of the buckshot throwing him out the window that he had been using for a firing port. Cool, her brain whispered. The coolness didn’t last. The remaining Soviet spun, pulling his assault rifle to his shoulder. She envisioned the floor beside him and reality grew thin…

Anatol

Where the hell did she come from? Anatol swung his rifle toward the blonde behind him. Two more of his men lay dead, but they would be her last victims. He pointed his AK-74 at her stomach, squeezed the trigger, and…the woman disappeared. What the hell?

And then she was beside him, the shotgun barrel against his cheek. Her voice, sultry and deep, was the second to the last sound he ever heard.

“Go home, Ivan.”

The shotgun blast was the last.

Dusty

She stood at the window. Vomit coating her lower lip, whether from teleportation-induced nausea, carnage-induced nausea, or just self-loathing she didn’t know. She really didn’t care. The street was quiet—at any rate, quieter than the ear-pounding cascade of sound that had enveloped it but five minutes before. Small-arms fire popped half-heartedly, but the ambush had ended as quickly as it had started. She had ended it as quickly as it started. Her breathing was still hard, her face hot, and her body tingled. She shouldn’t feel this way, shouldn’t feel thrilled.

She looked at the two headless Russians in the room and, once again, vomit sprayed from her lips. She leaned out the window. Perhaps fresh air, the rancid, smoke-laced fresh air of the street below, would calm her stomach. Then she saw something that once again made it flutter. Standing behind the concrete barrier, talking to one of his soldiers as he pressed his hand against an obviously wounded arm, stood Zak West. She smiled, the expression mixing with the tears on her cheeks, a pang of reflexive guilt causing her to reach for the picture in her jeans. The picture of Eddie.

Mark H. Walker served 23 years in the United States Navy, most of them as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal diver. He is the owner of Flying Pig Games, the designer of the aliens-invade-Earth game Night of Man, the author of World at War: Revelation, a creepy, military action, with a love story, alternate history, World War Three novel thing, as well as Desert Moon, an exciting mecha, military science fiction novel with a twist, with plenty of damn science fiction in it despite what any reviewer says, Everyone Dies in the End, and numerous short stories. All the books and stories are available from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing right here. Give them a try. I mean, what the hell? The games? Well that's Flying Pig Games. Retribution the sequel to World at War: Revelation, will release in the summer of 2015.

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