Crucible by Knight Stephen & DiLouie Craig & McKinney Joe

Author:Knight, Stephen & DiLouie, Craig & McKinney, Joe [Knight, Stephen & DiLouie, Craig & McKinney, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Horror | Infected
Amazon: B07GXGNC2N
Goodreads: 41559059
Published: 2018-08-27T07:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO.

The pine barrens surrounding Fort Stewart didn’t provide a shit ton of concealment for the battalion’s operations, but Tackaberry figured it was about as good as it could get. While the longleaf pines themselves didn’t offer a lot of opportunity for an enemy to mask its advance, the wiregrass was a different matter. Though there was no chance of a vehicle sneaking up on them overland, foot soldiers could do just that if they were careful and thorough. Tackaberry and his men weren’t terribly concerned about that—caution was a lost art to the klowns—but the notion that the battalion headquarters element could be scouted was something of a worry.

Even klowns had leaders, and those leaders would very much like to know where the First Battalion, Fifty-Fifth Infantry’s tactical operation center lay. Assembly area security was light, as Lee had no recourse but to commit most of his combat power to the operation at hand. By Tackaberry’s count, there were fourteen uniformed soldiers providing area security. At this point, those lightfighters had a lifetime of experience and knew how to get things done, but their numbers were so minimal they could only sit, wait, and pray to an increasingly less benevolent God that a substantial enemy force didn’t discover the encampment.

So Tackaberry assigned his men to make roving patrols in groups of three and report in anything unusual over the walkie-talkies they had liberated from the Underground Hotel before pulling out. The lightfighters didn’t have enough MBITRs to go around, so Tackaberry’s element—call sign Geezer, due to the element’s cumulative age being in the hundreds of years—used newer civilian gear that was actually smaller and probably more secure than their military counterparts. All the channels were encrypted, just in case the klowns had retained some ability to perform signals intelligence. It was just for communication amongst themselves; the bands used were incompatible with the military SINCGARS radios used by Lee’s people in the TOC. That meant if something went down, Tackaberry would have to flag down one of Lee’s troops to pass the intel back to the TOC. He didn’t like that his men hadn’t been issued MBITRs, nor did he appreciate the inference: that Tackaberry and his band of merry old men weren’t being taken seriously.

Well, fuck him, then.

Tackaberry remained inside the TOC’s security perimeter, cradling his rifle. He had been issued MOPP gear, as had the rest of his team, as a precaution against a biological attack. Everyone who was outside the TOC or a vehicle had them, but Tackaberry hadn’t fully suited up yet. The heat of the day was oppressive enough, and he didn’t want to walk right into full-on heat stroke. Like any soldier who had any sanity, he’d always hated MOPP gear. Even though what he had been issued was newer than what he had been forced to deal with over his career, it was just as cumbersome as it had been in his day and still smelled like old farts that had been filtered through dirty socks.

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