Greer paused on the path and shouldered his rifle. A black pistol was holstered at his waist. He took a long drink from his canteen and waved it toward the hillside. They were close now; Peter could feel it in the quickening step of Greer’s men. A hot meal, a cot to sleep on, a roof over their heads.
“Just over the next ridge,” Greer said.
In the intervening hours they had formed something that felt, to Peter, like the beginnings of a friendship. After the initial confusion of their capture, a situation compounded by the fact that neither group would agree to say who they were until the other blinked first, it was Michael who had broken the stalemate, lifting his vomit-smeared face from the dirt where the net had disgorged them to proclaim, “Oh, fuck. I surrender. We’re from California, all right? Somebody, please just shoot me so the ground will stop spinning.”
As Greer capped his canteen, Alicia caught up to them on the path. From the start she had been unusually silent. She’d voiced no objection to Greer’s order that they travel unarmed, a fact that now struck Peter as completely out of character. But probably she was just in shock, as they all were. For the duration of the march to camp she had kept protectively to Amy’s side. Perhaps, Peter thought, she was simply embarrassed that she’d led them straight into the soldiers’ trap. As for Amy, the girl seemed to have absorbed this new turn of events as she absorbed everything, with a neutral, watchful countenance.
“What’s it like?” he asked Greer.
The major shrugged. “Just like you’d think. It’s like a big latrine. It beats being out in the rain, though.”
As they crested the hill, nestled in a bowl-like valley below them, the garrison leapt into view: a cluster of canvas tents and vehicles ringed by a fence of timbers, fifteen meters tall at least and each honed at the top to a sharp point. Among the vehicles Peter saw at least half a dozen Humvees, two large tankers, and a number of smaller trucks, pickups and five-tons with heavy, mud-choked tires. At the perimeter, a dozen large floodlights stood on tall poles; at the far end of the compound horses were grazing in a paddock. More soldiers were moving among the buildings, and along a catwalk at the top of the wall. At the center of the compound, standing over all, a large flag flapped in the wind, blocks of red, white, and blue with a single white star. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than half a square kilometer, and yet, standing on the ridge, Peter felt as if he were gazing into an entire city, the heart of a world he’d always believed in but never actually imagined.
“They’ve got lights,” said Michael. More men from Greer’s unit moved past them, headed down the hill.
“Hell, son,” said the one named Muncey-a corporal, bald as the rest of them, with a wide, snaggle-toothed smile. Most of Greer’s men bore themselves with a soldierly silence, speaking only when spoken to, but not Muncey, who chattered like a bird. His job, fittingly, was to operate the radio, which he carried on his back, a mechanism with a generator run by a hand crank, which stuck from the bottom like a tail.
“Inside that fence?” Muncey said with a grin. “That dirt is Texas. If we ain’t got it, you don’t need it.”
They weren’t regular army, Greer had explained. At least not the U.S. Army. There was no U.S. Army anymore. Then whose army are you? Peter had asked.
That was when Greer had told them about Texas.
By the time they reached the base of the hill, a crowd of men had gathered. Despite the cold, and now the rain, a pattering drizzle, some were bare-chested, exposing their narrow waists, the densely ribboned muscles of their shoulders and chests. All were smooth-shaven, their heads, too. Everyone was armed; rifles and pistols, even a few crossbows.
“Folks’ll stare,” Greer said quietly. “You better get used to it.”
“How many… strags do you usually bring in?” Peter asked. The term, Greer had explained, was short for stragglers.
Greer frowned. They were moving toward the gate. “None. Farther east you still get some. Up in Oklahoma, Third Battalion once found a whole goddamn town. But way out here? We’re not even looking.”
“Then what was the net for?”
“Sorry,” Greer said, “I thought you understood. That’s for the dracs. What you all call smokes.” He twirled a finger in the air. “That twisting motion messes with their heads. They’re like ducks in a barrel in that thing.”
Peter recalled something Caleb had told him, about why the virals stayed out of the turbine field. Zander always said the movement screwed them up. He related this to Greer.
“Makes sense,” the major agreed. “They don’t like spinning. I haven’t heard that about turbines, though.”
Michael was walking beside them. “So what were those things? Hanging in the trees, with the bad smell.”
“Garlic.” Greer gave a little laugh. “Oldest trick in the book. The fucking dracs love it.”
The conversation was cut short as they stepped through the gate, into a tunnel of waiting men. Greer’s squad had dispersed among the crowd. No one was talking. As Peter passed, he saw their eyes darting quickly over him. That was when he realized what the soldiers were all looking at: they were looking at the women.
“Ten-shun.”
Everyone snapped to. Peter saw a figure stepping briskly toward them from one of the tents. At first glance, he was not what Peter would have expected of a high-ranking military officer: an almost barrel-shaped man, a full head shorter than Greer, with a waddling, round-heeled gate. Under the dome of his shorn head, the features of his face seemed scrunched, as if they had been placed too close together. But as he approached, Peter felt the force of his authority, a mysterious energy, like a zone of static electricity that hovered in the air around him. His eyes, small and dark, possessed a frank, piercing intensity, even if, as it appeared, they had been incongruously set in the wrong face.
He regarded Peter a long moment, his hands on his hips, then looked past him toward the others, holding each briefly with the same evaluating gaze.
“I’ll be goddamned.”
His voice was surprisingly deep. He spoke with the same loose-jawed accent as Greer and his men.
“At ease, all of you.”
Everyone relaxed. Peter didn’t know what to say; best, he thought, to wait to hear from this man first.
“Men of the Second,” he declared, lifting his voice to the gathered men, “it has come to my attention that some of these strags are women. You are not to look at these women. You are not to speak to them, or come near them, or approach them, or in any way think you have anything to do with them, or they with you. They are not your girlfriends or your wives. They are not your mothers or your sisters. They are nothing, they do not exist, they are not here. Am I clear?”
“Sir yes sir!”
Peter glanced at Alicia, where she was standing with Amy, but couldn’t meet her eye. Hollis shot him a skeptical frown: clearly he had no idea what to make of this, either.
“You six, drop your packs and come with me. Major, you too.”
They followed him into the tent, a single room with an earthen floor beneath a sagging canvas ceiling. The only furnishings were a potbellied stove, a pair of plywood trestle tables covered with papers, and, along the far wall, a smaller table with a radio manned by a soldier with earphones clamped to the sides of his head. On the wall above him was a large, multicolored map, marked with dozens of beaded pins forming an irregular V As Peter moved closer, he saw that the base of the V was in central Texas, with one arm reaching north across Oklahoma and into southern Kansas, the other veering west, into New Mexico, before it, too, turned north, ending just across the Colorado border-the place where he now stood. At the top of the map, written in yellow on a dark stripe, were the words UNITED STATES INTERMEDIATE POLITICAL, and, beneath that, Fox and Sons Classroom Maps, Cincinnati, Ohio.