The day after: An apocalyptic morning (128 page)

              Skip and Jack made one more attack fifteen minutes later, coming in from the north this time. The reaction by the Auburnites below was a little faster on this run, prompting Skip to pull off target before Jack's entire clip had been fired. No bullets struck the helicopter.

              "Let's head back," Skip said as he climbed back up to high altitude. "I think we've got our message through and there's no sense pushing our luck."

              "I don't imagine they're going to sleep very well after that," Jack said, pulling the magazine out of his weapon.

              "Nope," Skip agreed, "I don't imagine they will. They might start to drift off around 4:00 AM or so just from sheer exhaustion though. So what do you say we get up at 3:30 and hit them again?"

              "I'm up for it," he said with a grin.

              They flew on into the night and landed safely twenty minutes later.

              Part 16

              "You did what?" Paula asked her co-wife, unsure if she had heard her correctly.

              Christine looked shamefaced. "I seduced Maggie last night," she repeated. "I don't know what came over me. We were washing up together and we were naked and we'd been talking about... you know... how combat makes you horny and all and... well... I kept looking at her and before I knew it..."

              "Yeah?" Paula prompted, her eyes wide.

              "Before I knew what was happening, I was touching her, and kissing her, and then... well... doing other things to her."

              "Other things?"

              "I ate her," she admitted, dropping her eyes to the ground.

              "You... ate her?"

              Christine nodded. "Yes," she whispered. "And then I made her get me off with her fingers."

              "Jesus," Paula said, unsure what else to say.

              It was 6:45 AM, just before first light, and the teams had just geared up for the day's harassment missions. Christine had pulled Paula aside after everyone was equipped, obsSarately to talk to her about some tactical Micker but in reality wanting to confess her sin of the night before. She had been wracked with guilt all night over what she had done, spending most of it tossing and turning instead of getting needed sleep. Though she had justified her actions in her mind when they were occurring, her justifications had not held up very well afterward.

              Paula pondered these facts carefully for a few moments, setting her M-16 down on the locker room bench in the weapons room to free up her hands. She took Christine into her arms and hugged her comfortingly, pulling her against her. Christine, who's own weapon was already sitting down, returned the embrace gratefully.

              "I cheated on you guys," she said pitifully. "I'm so sorry."

              "Shhh," Paula soothed, stroking her hair with her fingers. "It's all right. Believe it or not, I'm not really that offended. I'm more surprised than anything."

              "But Skip..."

              "I don't think he would be that offended either," Paula said. "It may be a double standard and sexist and all that, but its simple reality. Having a sexual encounter on the side with another woman is not the same as having one with a man. Not in the man's eyes and usually not in the woman's either."

              "But I betrayed the vows we made," she said.

              Paula smiled. "We vowed to honor and respect each other," she said. "We vowed to be loyal to each other. We never actually vowed not to eat out another woman."

              "What?" Christine said.

              "Well, with Skip, that was kind of implied and with us, it was kind of implied that we not take other men, but we did not actually vow that part. Remember, we discussed the possibility that other women might come into the relationship in the future?"

              "Well, yes... but... I thought that... well... I mean..."

              "You didn't think that you would be the one to bring one in, did you?" Paula asked.

              "No. But what are you saying? Are you saying that Maggie should be part of our... our marriage now?"

              "Not necessarily," she said, "but it's something that should be considered, isn't it? I like Maggie well enough and I know that she's lonely. I've also seen Skip giving her the eye on occasion as well. Now adding a member to a marriage is not something that should just be leapt into, but... it's something to think about."

              Christine shook her head a little, overwhelmed. "Wow," she whispered. "This is just too much."

              "Did Maggie like what you did to her?" Paula asked.

              "She was reluctant at first. But she didn't stop me or even push me away."

              "Did she come?"

              Christine smiled. "Oh yes. You've taught me well. She damn near beat me to death when she came."

              Paula giggled, giving her co-wife a last pat and then releasing her. She gave her a quick peck on the lips, a kiss that was just a little bit more than sisterly. "Maybe we'll all sit down with Skip sometime soon and have a talk about all of this. For now, I wouldn't let it stress you. We have plenty of other things on the plate that should be stressing you without adding that to the mix. How's Maggie taking it this morning? Will you be able to work together out there?"

              "She hasn't said much to me yet, but I haven't sensed any hostility or anything. I think she's confused. The same way I was the first time you and I did that."

              "Did what?" Paula said, wanting her to say it.

              "Made love," Christine said, giving her another kiss, a longer one.

              "She'll work it out," Paula said, feeling her face flush a little at the kiss. "In the meantime, why don't we go assemble? We have some asses to kick this morning, don't we?"

              "Yep. Let's go kick 'em."

              The Placer County Militia soldiers were very slow stirring out of their sleeping bags that morning to eat their meager breakfast and resume their march. To the very last man they were all living on less than two hours of broken sleep, much of which had been plagued by nightmares of the events that had befallen them. Skip and Jack's follow-up air attack at 5:00 AM - while it had only cost three lives - had had the desired effect of shattering the morale once more just when they had started to think that things had slacked off.

              Bracken, with an untidy growth of stubble on his face and with dark circles under his eyes, gathered up his platoon commanders for a conference just before move out.

              "We need to stop being so fucking predictable for them," he said, puffing on his third cigarette of the daylight hours. "That's why they're ravaging us so much. We're marching right along a corridor where they know exactly where we are and where they have time to plant their forces in our path. That shit needs to stop."

              "How?" Colby, who was perhaps the most rattled of all the lieutenants, wanted to know.

              "We need to spread out," Bracken said. "Instead of marching in a single-file column, we need to expand out to the sides. We're going to divide into two wide columns and we're going to march on both sides of those hills as we go and we need to keep plenty of space between men. Don't let one fucking burst from that M-16 they have take down a whole group."

              "Navigation will be harder," Stu, puffing a cigarette of his own, said. "Our maps of this area aren't worth a shit."

              "We have compasses," Bracken said. "And we've marched through this area in the past. It'll slow us down, that's true, but it'll also keep them from picking us off as easily."

              Stu nodded, seeing the wisdom of this thought.

              "And there's another thing," Bracken added. "This'll be a little harder for the men. Our ammunition usage needs to decrease. At the rate we're firing off our rounds, we're not gonna have enough bullets for the main attack when we get there. Tell your men that they are not to return fire when under attack unless they know exactly what they're shooting at. If they didn't see the flashes from the attack, don't shoot. We can't afford it."

              Nobody disagreed with this statement of course - it only made sense - but everyone knew it was a decree that was going to be very difficult to enforce. Telling soldiers - especially conscripts who did not particularly believe in what they were doing - not to shoot when they were being attacked was akin to telling them not to breathe.

              "And finally," Bracken said, "when we are attacked, we need to react faster in pursuit of the attackers. If we can kill one of these squads before they can get away, I believe we will go a long way towards ending this thing. Even better would be the capture or destruction of that helicopter - capture being preferable of course. So this is what we're going to do. When the attacks come, those soldiers that are immediately in the fire zone need to hit the ground and return fire. Everyone else needs to stay on their fucking feet and move as quickly as possible towards the enemy position to surround it. If your platoon is to the rear of the attack, you fucking run your men there. And I mean run. Run them as fast as you can and get around on the flanks of these fuckers. They're hitting us from two hundred yards or so. If we move fast enough, we can catch them. Is everyone clear on this?"

              Everyone was clear.

              "All right," Bracken said. "Brief your men and we'll move out in twenty minutes. Colby, Covington, your platoons will be on the points of both columns."

              Paula's team, slated for first attack this morning, had been atop of their hill for well over two hours now and still there was no sign of the approaching enemy. Part of that long delay was that they had been placed a little further south of the enemy than had been standard the previous day. The reason for this was so that they could plant a few of Steve Kensington's mines around the base of the hill and atop it, both to slow down their pursuers and to give them a little added surprise. But still, the Auburnites should have shown by now. Had they been slowed down that much by the previous day's attacks? Or was something else in the works? Paula didn't know and her lack of knowledge made her antsy.

              The other members of her team - Leanette, Hector, and Doris Campbell - were similarly antsy with the lack of the enemy's appearance. To help ease this nervousness, the four members of the team made idle chitchat - their voices kept just loud enough to hear each other - about the way things had once been in the world.

              "Remember those stupid credit card offers?" Leanette asked with a smile, her rifle slung over her knees as her muddied face peered around a large tree trunk to the ground below. "Introductory rate of 5.6 percent! Credit line of five thousand dollars! They used to come in the mail every damn day."

              "I remember them," Doris said, shaking her head a little. "They got your name from those supposedly private credit reporting agencies and mailed them off to anyone who a good rating."

              "Yeah," Paula said, peering through her binoculars to the emptiness below. "And after the three month introductory rate, the interest went up to freakin twenty-one percent."

              "That's the truth," Leanette said. "I got into so much trouble with those things. I did all the finances at home and I had like six of those things that were maxed out. Here I was, the wife of a man who made ninety thousand a year and I had us more than thirty thousand dollars into debt that he didn't even know we had. Every month I would have to shuffle everything around just to meet the minimum payments and it was getting so that the utility bills and the house payments were getting paid late just to cover it. I was a basket case worrying about when John was going to find out about it."

              "I wouldn't know about any of that," said Hector, the former landscaper. "If I cleared a thousand dollars a month it was a good month. My name never seemed to get on any of those mailing lists."

              "See, Hecky," Leanette, one of his wives, pointed out. "You don't know how lucky you were. It was hell being upper class. Absolute hell."

              "I know," he told her. "You were late paying me more than once, weren't you? Apparently the hired help was low on your list of priorities, right?"

              "Sorry, babe," she said. "You did do a fabulous job of trimming my bushes though. Still do in fact."

              Everyone had a laugh at this.

              "It's funny how important all of that was back then," Doris said. "Money I mean. How much you got, how much you would get next year, whether or not you'd be able to afford that new Mercedes so that the neighbors would know you were still successful. All of that just went right down the toilet when that comet came in."

              "Hopefully for good," Paula said. "Things have been reduced to a much more basic need now; the need to survive. Now survival doesn't mean keeping the bank account in the black and the kids dressed in the right clothes so people won't talk. Now it means sniping at invading fascists who are trying to enslave us. All of this in just a few short months."