“He’s one of them,” Gianelli said. “Shoot the bastard!”
Alec heard the snick of a gun being cocked. “No,” he commanded, as loudly as he could manage. “He saved my life. Leave him alone. He wasn’t with them. He pulled me out of the line of fire.”
“You got hit?” Gianelli asked, striding to Alec. His face was grimy, streaked with soot. His partner kept his rifle levelled at Ferret.
“No,” Alec said. “I’m... I wasn’t hit.”
After an hour of cleaning and changing clothes, Alec felt strong enough to look for some food. The other men were dragging off the bodies of the dead, tending to each other’s wounds. The word had quickly spread that Alec’s deepest injury was soiled pants. The men shied away from him.
He found Jameson by a small cookfire, near one of the remaining trucks.
“You’re okay,” Jameson said.
Alec nodded. “And you?”
“Broke a fingernail on the safety of my rifle,” he said with utter seriousness.
“How many... did we lose?”
“Three killed, five wounded. Two pretty seriously. The other three are just scratched. Could have been a lot worse.”
We’re down to a dozen men, Alec thought. “Did they get one of the trucks?”
Nodding, Jameson said, “It cost them twenty-two dead.”
“And wounded?”
“They dragged most of their wounded away,” Jameson said flatly. “The others died.”
A single pistol shot cracked through the smoldering darkness.
“That’s the last one now,” Jameson said.
“I got caught between you and them,” Alec mumbled. “Went out to... never got my pants down.”
Jameson shrugged. “I hear Ferret dragged you to safety. Guess I’ll have to start trusting him a little.”
“Yeah. Maybe he can help us locate some food.”
Jameson excused himself and left Alec alone by the tiny fire. While Alec tried to get some hot broth down, he heard one of the men grumbling: “I don’t care if he does hear me! He was crapping in his pants while Ollie and the rest of ‘em were getting killed. Some leader!”
And then Jameson’s voice, quiet, calm. “Maybe you don’t care if he hears you but if I hear you make another crack like that I’ll break your jaw. Understand? He was sick... still is.”
The reply was mumbled too low for Alec to hear.
He leaned back against the metal of the truck and held the warm cup of broth in both trembling hands. A dozen men. Twelve against Thebes. Twelve of us and two trucks to cross the country and find Douglas and the fissionables. And most of the men think I’m either a coward or a madman. Or both.
He almost laughed. The only real friend he had among them was the half-witted Ferret.
Alec looked up. The first hint of dawn was lightening the sky to the east. It would feel good to have sunlight wanning him again.
“All right,” he whispered to himself. “Two trucks and twelve men. We start north. Now!”
BOOK THREE
Chapter 19
It was pleasantly cool among the trees. The Sun still felt hot, falling in mottled patches through the swaying branches and lighting up the grassy glades of clearings among the trees. The breeze had a tang to it as it gusted in from the northwest. The leaves were already falling, their colors fantastic. Alec had never seen such a profusion of reds and golds before.
But he was not paying attention to the autumn foliage now. He lay on his belly atop a carpeting of soft leaves at the rim of a hill, under the cover of the maples and birches. Out in the cleared valley below stood a walled village. A cluster of little huts with thin plumes of smoke curling from a few chimneys.
Ron Jameson lay beside Alec. “They picked a good location. Couple of klicks out in the open. Nobody can get to them without them seeing him first and closing their gates.”
Nodding, Alec raised his binoculars to inspect the village’s wall. Old cinderblock, mostly. Some newly made brick. Wooden gates, probably scavenged from one of the abandoned cities nearby.
He noticed a few men working in the cornfield between the woods and the village. No women were in sight, although they might have been in among the rows of two-meter-high stalks.
“They’re greedy,” Alec said quietly. “They’ve planted cornfields all the way from the edge of their wall to the edge of the trees. And they’re trying to get a second crop in before the frosts come.”
Jameson grinned. Perfect cover.
On Alec’s other side, Ferret jabbed an excited finger. “Road,” he said. “Carts. Wagons.”
