Smith shook his head. “I wish. Phoenix is a ghost town, same with Scottsdale, Mesa, Tucson. We’ve never been able to raise anyone at White Sands or Camp Pendleton.” He shook his head again. “You must have every living person in southern California here.”
“No,” said St. George. “There’s a group of about two hundred people down in Beverly Hills. They’re what’s left of a street gang called the South Seventeens. Real die-hards who refused to join us here in the Mount.” He shrugged. “We check in on them once a week or so, make sure they’re doing okay. And we still find a few survivors here and there who’ve managed to make it this long on their own, although...” He looked past the helicopters to the gate. “It’s been a while since we found anyone.”
“Hey,” said the younger man. “I know it’s been tough, but this isn’t the day to be getting morose. This is the day it all gets better. You saved all these people. You brought them through hell and got them home.”
St. George looked at Freedom talking with Danielle and Barry, the Black Hawks flanking the Melrose Gate, and the crowd mobbing the soldiers. “I guess we did,” he said.
“Hell, yeah, you did.” Smith gave him a punch in the arm. “Welcome back to the United States of America.”
Chapter 13 - The Spirit of Freedom
THEN
My great-great grandfather was born a slave. On his fourth birthday he and everyone he knew became free citizens of the United States. When he was eighteen, he changed our family name to what he thought was the greatest word in the English language. I never met him, but my father did. It’s a powerful thing, to think how short a time that was.
Now there’s a black man in the White House. And a black man was selected to be the symbol of the new American military. It was a long process for both of us.
My first posting as an officer was Iraq. December of 2003. I’d been there for eight weeks, a freshly-minted second lieutenant, when a soldier in my section, Private First Class Adam James, found a well-constructed IED on a patrol. He was killed instantly. From what I was told later, the two soldiers on either side of him were dead within the hour. They were lucky never to regain consciousness. Sergeant James Cole lost his left leg and three fingers off his left hand. I was thrown fifteen feet into the side of our Humvee.
Three men dead. One crippled for life. I suffered a concussion, a broken arm that needed two pins, five fractured ribs that got wire supports, and eleven pieces of shrapnel which needed to be surgically removed. One of the doctors said they took out as much metal as they put in. I know some men and women who save such things as trophies. I didn’t want to be reminded of failing the people under my command.
I spent three months in a hospital in Germany, received a Purple Heart, and was put back in the field. I always prefer to be in the field, and those days an officer who went into the field willingly was considered an asset.
Six years later I was standing in front of the colonel’s desk at Project Krypton, asking to be assigned to the field. It was May fourteenth, 2009. I recall thinking later we should mark it as the day the world ended, but that kind of negative thinking was bad for morale.
“They’re mindless things,” Shelly told me. “This virus turns people into walking vegetables. No real threat at all unless they’re in large numbers. The media’s just blowing things out of proportion again.”
I hadn’t served under the colonel for long. I don’t think I even knew if he was married or not at that point. I did know he was a horrible liar. Lying is a politician’s game, not a soldier’s. All good soldiers are bad liars. The best ones are horrible at it.
Shelly was lying. There were uprisings in every major city. Even Yuma proper had reported a few dozen wandering the streets. If there were dozens wandering the street in a state where more than half the citizens carried firearms on a regular basis, it didn’t bode well for anywhere else. But he was a good soldier, and his orders told him it wasn’t a crisis and we weren’t needed.
“Be that as it may, sir,” I said, “I’m requesting deployment into one of the hot spots. The Unbreakables are ready to go.”
“It’s still too soon for active deployment,” Shelly said. “Sorensen thinks all of you need another month or so of observation. Especially you, captain. It’s been three weeks since you finished your treatments.”
“And I feel excellent, sir. Better than excellent.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. It was what passed for a polite smile in the colonel’s office. “The official decision, captain, is you and your men would just be overkill.”