Starship Thunder by Joseph McRae Palmer

Author:Joseph McRae Palmer [Palmer, Joseph McRae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ansible Publishing, LLC
Published: 2024-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

IT WASN’T QUITE bedtime when we got back to the camp, so we sat by the Brooks’ campfire and chatted. After a few minutes, Ricki approached me and said, “Hey, Kory, you want to play checkers?”

I felt too tired for anything but talking. “I’m not any good. You should probably ask somebody else.”

“It’s okay. Maybe I can teach you some tricks.” His voice was so soft I could barely hear him over the crackle of the fire.

The hopeful gleam in his eyes was too much for me to resist, and I felt bad for how we’d been ignoring him the past few days. “Okay, maybe one game.”

Ricki set up a small table near the fire and placed a checkerboard on it and the pieces. He let me be white, which was good because I liked to react to the other player’s moves.

He moved one of his pieces diagonally, and I responded with one of mine. He moved another, and I another. Then he captured one of mine, I captured one of his, and then he captured two.

Ricki won the first game with five of his pieces still on the board. I didn’t feel bad about it because I hadn’t played checkers in years, not since the orphanage. And Ricki was pretty good.

After finishing, he told me what I’d done wrong that had made me lose to him. It was helpful, and I used it in our next game. I still lost, but Ricki only had two pieces left this time.

Ricki had a contagious laugh and a dry sense of humor. “Don’t be so jumpy,” he said to me with a straight face at one point after I made a dumb move.

It took me a second to catch the checker pun. When I did, we had a good laugh, even though it was pretty juvenile as jokes went.

“You want to go shooting with us sometime?” I asked him after our third game.

His eyes lit up. “Could I?”

“Sure, why not? If your parents are okay with it.”

“Yeah,” Baxter said, “that’s fine, as long as Gunny’s supervising.”

Ricki nodded with satisfaction.

“We’re short on guns and ammunition right now,” I said, “but we’ll have more in a week or two. Then I’ll invite you along.”

“I’m actually a pretty good shot,” Ricki said.

“He sure is,” Baxter said. “He’s probably killed more rabbits than I have. Ricki’s got a real sharp eye and a steady hand.”

I nodded and pursed my lips. “Well, there you go. I should have asked you before.”

Ricki’s face beamed.

About then, the graveyard watch was about to start. Lasting from midnight to 4:00 am, Destiny was scheduled to take it. But I felt restless after all the talk today about Kergans, insurgents, and the Pattons. I told her I’d swap with her, and she accepted with a smile.

All the talk had left me with a sense of pending doom. Something terrible would happen, and I didn’t want to be asleep when it did. So, I sat out in the freezing dark for four hours, waiting, letting the anxiety eat away at me.

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