GPS (23 page)

The men flanking him all stared off into the distance, probably all seeing their own pictures of their days of hell during the war. While every picture was undoubtedly something different, they were all the same.

“Y’all remember ol’ Matty Martinot from Treme, I know you all do,” he went on. “Good man, he was. Never saw Nawlins again, never made that plane ride back home like all us did. Left his life in the ocean out there somewhere. When he was flyin’ them damn suicide missions over Italy, them boys got treated like they was worth less than the other boys because they was black. But by God, they defended them harbors better than anybody and they knew it.

“On the ground it was the same, tough on us, runnin’ with the 761st Tank. But me an’ Ol’ Wally Baxter — Ol’ Wally who died in that shack over on Magnolia Street not long after we got back — we was committed to it. Never asked why, never asked what was in it for us. We knew more about fightin’ for our freedom than most of those boys did — we was fightin’ for it at home too. Me an’ Wally, when we moved on up the road into that forest in Austria toward the end, we was terrified what he was gonna see. Gunskirchen — even the name sounded cold and dead — was waitin’ at the end of that road. We could already smell the dead. Then we started seein’ all those skeletons half-buried next to the road. If you didn’t know what you was fightin’ for before that, or against, you sure knew when you saw that place.”

Jeff was in a trance, trying to see in his own mind what the man was seeing while he spoke. He tried to remember his own life at 18 or 20, and was quickly reminded that it was a typical, meaningless carbon copy of every other American kid’s coming of age at the time. He was just another one who’d tip-toed through high school, went straight off to college and then onto supposed adulthood.

Amazing, Jeff thought, how kids from his generation mostly learned to avoid responsibility even further after high school by going to college, thinking that living in a dorm room was somehow a measure of survival. In truth, he thought, he’d never done anything daring in his entire life. At least not until ...

“Only saw one living thing once we got inside the fences of that camp. There wasn’t even any birds chirpin’ out there, like they knew better than to stay there and went off to someplace better. We was some of the first Americans to walk in there, and God almighty knows most of us wished we could have run right the hell back outta there. The stench in the air, you knew everything was dead. Even the mud in there was full of human remains. The SS had left some of the mass graves still open when they ran off, bodies just stacked down in there, and inside them barracks and that schoolhouse was just a big tangle of arms, legs and heads.

“We came up on this little girl, sittin’ on the edge of one them giant holes in the ground. Couldn’t have been more than, I don’t know, seven? So malnourished and sick, that little girl’s skeleton looked like it was tryin’ to fight its way right out of her and run off too. I’ll never forget her, how could I you know? She never said a word, never even tried to. When a couple of them boys helped stand her up, she just fell right back down. It was like life had just given up on her. Her heart hadn’t stop beatin’, her brain still worked, but the rest of her was just dead, just couldn’t go on livin’ no more. Didn’t want to see what was next. She died before we ever got her out the gates.”

Fighting his own emotions, Jeff tried to act natural while still hanging on the man’s every word. He tried staring indifferently out onto the field, then at the scoreboard. Finally, he just hunched over in his seat, put his head in his hands and listened.

“Few weeks later, it was done and so was I, just like that. Walked out of hell still livin’. Me and ol’ Wally, but not Matty Martinot, no, not ol’ Matty. He’d bought it right there at the end. Just didn’t seem fair, but none of it was fair, you know? Me and some of the boys went over to Mallorca in Spain for a weekend before we came back home, and dammit, you never saw such a beautiful place in your life. That’s my only good memory of the whole thing, but was it ever worth it. After all we done seen over there, all the bodies, all the hurt, all the pain, it just didn’t seem like we’d ever get outta there.

“But when the sun hit my face on that beach, it was like I come out of a coma or somthin’ like that, you know? I knew I was never gonna be able to shake those thoughts from my head — that little girl and then ol’ Matty goin’ missin’ after he got shot down on his last mission. I stood out there on that beach in Spain and I ’membered what ol’ Wally said to me that day at Gunskirchen. He said to me, ‘Ervin, I ain’t seen the sun since we got here. You think God just unplugged that sun to try to hide this place from the rest of the world?’ I told him we’d all see that sun again, and we did. But ol’ Matty never did.”

All Jeff could think of was the little girl he’d seen, the one he took the picture of when he first walked out into that desert. The one for whom he’d grabbed that gun and blasted away without hesitation. The one for whom he felt he still wanted to fight.

“Now all these young men and women out here, these kids out here today, they gettin’ called. Don’t even matter what color you are no more, how old you are. They all gettin’ the same call, like we did. They ain’t no draft now, and no Hitler out there no more, that’s the truth, no more Gunskirchen or Dachau. But there’s plenty of bad people don’t like us one bit.”

The man was beginning to struggle to get the words out, choking up on them as they came and trying not to let his emotions spill over. Seemingly refusing to cry now over the horrors that occupied his late teens and early 20s, the man’s mouth continued to open and close for another moment, but the words had ceased. The men around him didn’t bother to notice.

“Granddad, you tellin’ all them old war stories again? Give these men a break!”

“Hey, hey! Daz my great grandson! Just look at that man right-cheh now!”

All the attention, Jeff’s included, suddenly steered left to a kid in desert fatigues who looked to be in his late teens standing on the steps in the aisle. It pulled the men right out of that time and those places and pains of long ago — Jeff could see it as it happened — and back into the moment of now. They came back to life at once, gushing with smiles and standing up to greet the kid who at once broke into a giant grin himself. Jeff sat in silence, watching the men trip over one another as they pulled themselves up to properly greet the kid still standing at the end of the row of stadium seats.

“Oh, don’t get up y’all. Come on now!” the kid said, embarrassed at the wave of attention flooding his way. But the men wrestled out of their seats to clap the kid on the shoulder and try to reach an arm around him, nearly sending the whole lot of them tumbling down the steps. Jeff tried not to miss a single word of the conversation, and he caught a glimpse of Zephyrs outfielder Brandon Lyles, who had been swinging a weighted bat on the other side of the foul ball screen at the backstop — the game now just minutes from starting — but who was now standing motionless. His bat was resting on his shoulder, a faint smile on his lips as he watched the same thing Jeff watched.

The kid the old men were fawning over — a couple of them using canes to hold themselves upright as they did — was immaculately dressed. The nameplate stitched across his clean, starched, tucked and ironed camouflage shirt said ARSENEAUX. The American flag patch on the shoulder was practically glowing in the hazy, setting sun. The kid’s cocoa-brown skin seemed a wonderful complement to his flawless, sand-colored uniform.

There was only one imperfection, one that was immediately apparent to Jeff but one which the old men acted as though they simply did not notice as they all gathered around him on the steps. Although the kid’s military dress was near perfect, his uniform shirt was missing its right sleeve. In fact, the shirt had clearly been altered to help accommodate this abnormality. The right sleeve was not necessary in this case because the kid wearing the shirt no longer had a right arm to put in it.

Minutes later, as the national anthem droned out of the stadium’s public address system, uniformed soldiers standing on the field presenting the flag and almost everyone in the stadium saluting it, Jeff stopped fighting back the tears and simply let them roll down his cheeks for the duration of the song. While it might have been an improper thought at this moment, Jeff wished for the very first time that he could make that GPS in his car take him back to that place, the place where his own calling might be answered.

- 27 -

The silver Lexus came skidding across a large, sandy clearing roughly a half-mile from camp early Sunday morning. Josh Simmons had always thought himself a damn good driver, and even now, when the very concept of driving a car had long since changed forever, he smiled to himself in the wake of a silky smooth, perfectly-timed arrival before checking the GPS on his windshield one last time and powering it off.

The engine still purring, he gently nudged the gas pedal and pushed the car out of the growing sunlight and into the overhang of some large firs at the end of the clearing. A flock of Monarch butterflies exploded from the trees and into the sky as he did, as if to send word of Simmons’ arrival.

Using the extreme caution he developed during his many travels here, Simmons turned off the engine and sat in the car a moment longer. Ignoring the butterflies in the air and, to some extent, in his stomach, he studied the line of trees off to his left, which opened out into the flat desert plain. In this part of the country, that plain stretched for some 45 miles into the distance before running headlong into a series of canyons and plateaus. No movement out there. To his right, he now felt certain, would be a rough path up and through the scrub and eventually into the transient camp he’d helped to set up back in late March.

He flipped open the backpack on the passenger seat, slid out the Glock 9mm from the outer pocket and made sure it was loaded. The Freemen hadn’t found this campsite yet, at least he didn’t think, but it certainly didn’t mean they wouldn’t find it today. The bastards spent their whole lives on the hunt, and there was no telling when some of their scouts might come crashing through the brush. Simmons had come to live for those opportunities to kill or be killed. It was the only addiction he’d ever suffered.

He opened the door, stepped out and pushed the gun into the waistband of his camouflage pants, and then stripped off his t-shirt and threw it into the car. Still looking and listening in every direction, he gently pushed the door closed with a click and walked around to the passenger side, his hiking boots crunching lightly in the earth below. He swung that door open carefully, slung the big pack onto his shoulder and then leaned into the door until it clicked shut.

The father of two had lived his double life long enough now to know there was no point locking the doors. If anyone other than a fellow transient found the Lexus sitting out here today — a rare day off for Simmons this time of year back home — the car would be lost to him forever and Simmons lost to his other life forever. The beautiful sedan would be gone, either torched in an FB ambush or simply stolen and stripped of all of its working parts. The loud beep of the alarm being armed would only draw attention to himself and the car anyway.

Fonseca would be waiting for him at the camp. Today, the entire division would pack up the base that had served them well for more than a month now, loading all of their supplies into pickup trucks in preparation for the big move north along the eastern edge of the mountains. It would take all day, even without any interruptions from the FB, and Simmons wished as he began looking for the path to the camp that he would find some new men waiting with the usuals when he got there. They needed more numbers.

Late Sunday night, the transients would head toward one of the former revolucion strongholds on the eastern plain, in the outskirts and ruins of Viejo Victoria. At the end of that long trek, the transients would replenish their supplies, catch their breath and revisit some of the old camps out in the remote desert looking for vehicles and other useful relics.

The revolucion jefe had reported to Paulo that the FB had already gotten mostly everything it could get from that region and moved on, a giant pack of coyotes following the scent of blood to the south. But some stragglers would definitely still be around to keep the FB’s stake in the ground in the area. The revolucion soldiers passing through there still saw plenty of action as they tried to erase the remaining FB presence and keep pushing north to reclaim the border and isolate the FB intruders in the south. The war was nothing more than a relentless shoving match.

Despite the guilt associated with his constant travel back and forth, Simmons was glad he wouldn’t be taking that ride with the boys into the wastelands outside Victoria, now undoubtedly littered with sun-dried skeletons and renegade Freemen maniacs.

Like everything else in the war, the move north out of the Xicotencatl ruins late Sunday night alone would be fraught with peril, as would the next critical leg of the journey. When they arrived in Old Victoria, if they arrived, Fonseca, his men and whichever newcomers might successfully come into the mix in the next couple of days wouldn’t be around long. On Monday night, their convoy would be starting a two-day journey west to join what had been billed as a critical training camp Wednesday in the old city.

It was there, inside Estadio Revolucion — Simmons always thought the name of the tattered baseball stadium was just too much of a coincidence, but that really was its name — that Paulo and the other transient leaders would set the sabotage plan in motion. The stadium was planted squarely in the old downtown sector of the largest remaining revolucion stronghold in the north. There, all four of the transient divisions would converge. Each man would be trained for his specific role in the mission, from the snipers to the hose men to the simple gunmen who would be charged with mowing down every FB man and visiting whore that managed to make it out of the ring of fire at the ranch.