Midnight Skills by William Allen

Author:William Allen [Allen, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Dystopian
Publisher: Malleus Publishing
Published: 2018-06-22T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 39

Private Dwayne Silcott eased through the trash in the mouth of the dark alley, moving his body carefully around the random bottles and cans lining the asphalt. Not so random, he thought, after Wonderboy pointed them out.

Mansour’s derisive label for the serious, and somewhat scary, young man still made the twenty-year-old private smile to himself, though he stopped when he remembered what’d happened to Mansour. Not that he missed the dead man, who’d honestly rubbed Dwayne the wrong way. He’d only been with Second Squad for about a month before the FNG, Messner, showed up, but during that time, the corporal managed to make the two privates miserable. Mansour’s lazy ways, brown-nosing attitude, and constant scheming made Dwayne wonder exactly why the weasel-like man volunteered in the first place, but Dwayne had known the man was a cancer in their squad.

The Fucking New Guy, FNG, Messner, still remained an enigma to Dwayne. The Old Man, as Dwayne tended to think of Captain Jefferson, knew the kid’s father from their time in Marine Corps, of all things. Messner wasn’t a Marine, though. By his own account, he’d been a high school student when the lights went out. A highly-trained one, though, if Dwayne could judge such things.

Silcott knew some hardcases, and not from living the thug life, as some might blindly assume given his race. Dwayne never belonged to a gang, unless you counted his high school baseball team. No, Dwayne’s father ran a successful construction company in their hometown of Denton, and Marshall Silcott had given a veteran’s preference when hiring.

Most of the men and a few women, who’d taken advantage of that preference with Silcott Construction were just like everybody else, with a mortgage and a car note and two kids at home. They worked hard, played hard, and went home after forty hours of swinging a hammer or fitting windows. A few, well, a few of them seemed to be trapped with one foot in the humdrum everyday civilian life and the other, back on some dusty foreign battlefield.

Those guys would work for a couple of months framing houses or pouring concrete, then take a leave of absence and disappear. Sometimes for a month, and other times for as much as six. Marshall never complained, and as far as Dwayne could tell, his father never asked questions either, when the men turned up again and asked for their jobs back.

Dwayne, youngest of three siblings being raised by their divorced father, tended to gravitate toward the business. This was an opportunity to spend time with his father, as much as a chance to make some cash for all the things a teenager wanted to drop on the latest gaming console or the cool, new sneakers.

His father hadn’t cut Dwayne any slack, though, and working under the hot Texas summer sun as a laborer on a construction crew hardened up the young man’s body. Rubbing elbows with the other men also expanded his horizons when it came to spending time around all kinds of people.

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