EPTWill make this "choose your own adventure" in Part 2.
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Today was our tenth anniversary. Three thousand six hundred days, spent fighting. Fighting them.
Who are they? But then again, who am I?
I’ve kept one self-portrait of myself from before the War. The next time I smiled I didn't have all my teeth. I was twelve when the first DF-41 hit Pine Gap, Australia, one of the many eyes of the gods of thunder and lightning, trained on half the world’s population, on the enemy. The retaliatory strikes came hard and fast, and within a mere twelve hours it was over.
The morning didn’t come for another month. We ate our dog to survive. Thank God our neighbors had one, too, or else we might have been on their menu. Of course, it soon didn’t matter for them, because the radiation killed everyone within thirty miles, except for me. I’d later learned that there was a new casing, a new isotope, a different half-life. It took a week for the bones in my leg to set. I was lucky, that gave me an excuse to stay inside, not join the rest in searching for food. I smelled my family before I could find them.
My name is Paul Meitner. I’m infantry; a sergeant, because I’m twenty-two; too old to have much enthusiasm but too young to have much experience. They give me an Uzi and tell me urge teenagers into the cold, into their first taste of bullets and radiation and death. When they run back (they always do, the first time), I am to give my charges a choice between certain death in the rear and a fool’s chance at the enemy line.
They are the Fundies. Product of a marriage between some fundamentalist megachurch pastor, the remnants of the 10th Mountain Division, and the surviving air assets around Colorado Springs, they were the only cohesive political power west of the Mississippi left, converting people by the sword, like Mohamed did in Arabia fourteen centuries ago. Some of us didn’t really like their crazy millennialist agenda, what with their claim that Christ ruled their kingdom, so we got together to send them to the Paradise they wanted. But with their training, morale, and equipment, the only hope we had of winning was by starving them out of oil and praying (ironically) they didn’t nuke us into oblivion first.
Three days ago Blaine, our scout, landed in the camp on half a wing. Apparently the Fundies and their military friends in Colorado Springs had felt so threatened they’d loosed a priceless Stinger missile on him. I saw him eating in the mess hall. Sally had made him his favorite food, rigatoni with sausage, but he was so spooked that he drank a pint and ate nothing.
I ended up sharing the rigatoni with a pretty nurse. I sure wasn’t going to let half a pound of fresh Italian sausage go to waste, not when I see people killing each other over hardtack and tree bark outside. I also had that icy feeling in my gut telling me it’s just going to be like Lake Mead all over again.
Lake Mead was our last major offensive. It’d been my first, three years ago. The Fundies had been digging in the area for months, and had recently brought in their trump card: fifteen SRBMs, each with enough throw weight and range to nuke Pescadero.
We outnumbered the bastards three to one, but I guess that made it even worse of a massacre. We were charging up the eastern edge of the Lake Mead valley with rifles and grenades versus pillboxes and helicopter gunships. Out of a platoon of thirty, only three of us made it. We all got promoted and moved to phantom platoons without anyone left.
But at least the intel had been right. The Fundies C4’d their Pershings as we broke through the perimeter. And the electricity the Hoover Dam gave us was a huge boost, even if we had to use half our air defense assets just to keep it safe.
My suspicions were confirmed three hours after dinner. I slipped the order to my men, happy that I’d had the good sense to let them sleep half an hour early.
Assemble at 0430 by the train station, await further orders on the train.
We could move by daylight now because they didn’t have enough jet fuel left to spare on sorties against troop trains. As I walked up and down the bunks, I saw that the quartermaster had given every man a new military rifle, three full magazines, two hundred more loose rounds, and five days of supplies. My boys were also much better fed and trained than I was on my first mission. It was progress, but to what tomorrow I could not begin to fathom.
