“Harry …… HARRY…… HARRY! GODDAMMIT CALLAHAN, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?!“
The one problem with living in the same house as a soldier in his early eighties is the fact that four decades of frequent gunfire lays waste to your ear drums, and then once you add old age, you can see why he should have needed hearing aids. Well, okay, he wasn’t a soldier. Not technically, but that’s beside the point.
“Shut the hell up, punk. You’ll alert the Dead, and if we start getting attacked by zombies, I’ll blow your goddamned head off.” Okay, so he was just as cranky as usual. We’d run out of coffee the day before, and I needed some new books anyway, so it was time for me to do my job.
“I just wanted to let you know that I was heading into town for supplies. We ran out of coffee, and I need some new books. I shouldn’t be more than a few hours.” It was true, because comics were deceptively quick, but to be fair, so are most Clancy novels.
“Make sure to minimize noise. If you’re not back by dark, I’m not coming after you.” Of course he wasn’t.
“Fair enough.” Last thing we’d want is to endanger the fort by leaving it completely unmanned, so I went out to the garage and loaded up the truck. It had everything in it, so I put my vest on and hop in the driver’s seat, putting it in reverse and backing it out of the driveway, turning onto the road into town.
The treeline never changed. Like these towns themselves, TEOTWAKI couldn’t get rid of everything. The places were still there, some of the people, though few in number, were still there. For the most part, it was just me and Harry, but until we see fire and brimstone, we’ll have these fuckin’ trees.
Once I’d gotten inside the suburban sprawl part of La Center, so I had to park the truck and dismount. After putting on my bandanna and shades, I grabbed my sidearm (a customized MAC-10, in case you were wondering) before heading to the bed of the truck to get the bag and the bike. It was just a gym bag that I could use as a backpack, and I siphoned the gas for the dirt bike and the truck from the other vehicles. The truck made one hell of a lot more noise than the bike, especially with the chopper muffler on the dirt bike, so I had to park the truck in an area that I’d already salvaged from. I parked the bike in one block, and once I’d filled the bag I used it to get back to the truck. It’s a simple enough system, but I didn’t have a canopy for the bed, so it’s prone to looting. I hadn’t had any run-ins with golden horde yet, but you can never be too careful.
The beauty of small towns is the illusion of security. A fence is extremely easy to climb, and people with enclosed yards rarely lock the back door. You think that you’d see someone in your front yard, or the dog would start barking, or the alarm would get tripped, but what if none of these apply? Most people never think about stuff like that under normal circumstances, but once shit hits the fan, these are matters of survival. Horde comes through and security doesn’t matter, but they’ll sometimes send scouts. Guys like me, except with a larger and meaner group. Heh, meaner than Dirty Harry Callahan, that’s a laugh. It’d take a horde…
After parking the bike in the next block, I checked the first house. Of course it had a white picket fence, La Center never had a crime rate to speak of, which is partially why I didn’t stay home when shit hit the fan. My home town of Woodland was up to its knees in drug addicts, gangbangers (mostly surreños, courtesy of the I-5 corridor), klansmen, racists and rednecks of varying calibers. The police were always busy, be it gang violence, narcotics possession, crazy parties, or general stupidity. The police force simply didn’t have the manpower required to do its job to the extent that it needed. La Center, on the other hand, was the opposite. There were no gangs to speak of, there were hardly any robberies, and you couldn’t so much as speed without seeing flashing lights in your rearview mirror. Get rid of all these and you’re left with a discreet drug trade, but that’s everywhere. It was far from paradise, but it was more or less secure. Until shit hit the fan, that is.
I hopped the fence, slinging my gun in the process. I pulled it back out when I got to the other side and grabbed my knife from the sheath on my vest, placing the knife in the same hand that grabbed the foregrip, so that I could stab with my left hand as a moment’s notice. After checking the corner around the back of the house, I followed it with the rest of the yard. No zombies, no humans. Pleased with that, I kept my weapons raised and checked the windows and doors for any openings. Of course, just my luck, there weren’t any. I hated it, but I had to make some noise.
I figured that minimalizing noise for stealth doesn’t work the same way that shock & awe might on anyone or anything inside the house. So, I front-kicked the door-jam and aimed my gun, sweeping the room from left to right.
I may not have served in the military or police forces, but I did spend six months at a US Army recruiting station. At the time, the Army was doing something called Future Soldier Training (so you can imagine how hard I laughed when Ghost Recon used that as a title). The point was to prepare us for Basic Combat Training, whether we had signed a contract or not. I was denied three consecutive times over a six month period, but it was a great way to fill up my Thursday afternoons. We learned absolute basic infantry tactics, and they pay off. In this case, breaching and clearing. It’s pretty simple. Once you’ve kicked open the door with a well placed front-kick, you sweep in the direction of the door. Since this one opens from left-to-right, I start on the far left corners of the room, moving to the right, checking them for zombies or humans. Still nothing, thank God.
The way these houses are set up, the kitchen was directly to my left, but I had to clear the entire house before I could raid the kitchen for food or supplies. That being said, the first thing I checked was the pantry. I scored a can of coffee and a bag of Pringles. I set them aside so that I could eat them for lunch, then moved on to the next part of the floor. Laundry rooms are easy, as it’s difficult to hide for very long in a cupboard or the dryer, so that one took almost no time at all. The living room was just as easy, as these places almost never had fireplaces. Far from being environmentally healthy.
The upper floor was more of the same. Bedrooms and bathrooms were a piece of cake, not very many supplies left. Most people took the common knowledge stuff, like painkillers and band-aids, not very many allergy meds. When survivors saw Harry’s flags still flying, they tended to stop by and trade. When the world ended, all system of currency went kaput, so whatever economy still existed was based on theft, scavenging and barter. These allergy medications were worth double their weight in bullets and Top Ramen.
Content with that state of things, I went back to the kitchen. I loaded up the bag first, with every non-perishable good that I can find, starting with the coffee. I look into the Pringles, praying that they hadn’t gone bad. These things had so damned many preservatives in ‘em that they didn’t mold, but they did go stale. I got to thinking, and found some Tabasco. You could refrigerate it or keep it out in the pantry, didn’t matter either way. Again, didn’t go bad. Some Tabasco on each chip, I was in heaven. Once I was finally done with the bag, I tossed it in the trash, zipped up my bag and went outside so that I could take the haul back to the truck. That was when I ran into problems.
Getting up, he points his gun at me and yells “drop it motherfucker!” Naturally, I respond by dropping down to use my bike as cover, which is an extremely bad idea, while I set my gun on the seat, telling him to drop his. I yelled back “You shoot me, half my food comes with me!” I got a look at him. Something struck me as odd.
He was using a ski mask, probably for the same reason as my bandanna, but he was dressed in full black,with a thick wool coat, thick as my military field jacket (dad was career military), but a suppressed M9 seemed a tad unnecessary, yet handy. Minimize noise, minimize the zombie’s attention, plus the commonality of the 9mm. Hell, my MAC uses 9mm’s. Then there was his accent- a surprisingly thick Irish accent. Irish. You don’t hear that very often. Around here, if you heard an accent it was most likely Spanish or Russian.
This guy rang a bell, but I had bigger shit to worry about. Keeping my sights on him, and him keeping his on me, I tried to negotiate my way out of this. This guy could be a valuable asset, so I work my magic.
“Tell ya what- I just started scavenging this block, so I’ll split it. You get that side,” pointing across the street, “and I get this side. Nobody gets shot.”
“How do I know you’re for real?” It was a far question in this world, always was, so I just keep at it.
“You seem familiar. I can’t put my finger on it, but you come off as the kind of guy that I’d want to avoid fucking with, so let me ask- what do I possibly have to gain from getting into a tango with you?” I slowly set the bag down, stood up and backed up with my gun trained on him. “That silencer and that coat could fetch a pretty penny, but so can my allergy meds and Tabasco.” Nodding to the bag “I wanna live just as much as you, so why are we even having this conversation? Hell, you could have killed me from the jump. For fuck’s sakes, YOU’RE IN MY TRUCK. You could have just blown my brains out as I unloaded my bag, but you didn’t. Y’know what, why in the hell was that?”
“To stall you.”
“What?”
This made no sense, but once it did I just dropped my gun, sheathed my knife and raised my hands, like getting arrested. That’s when I got what I needed. A new voice, American, slightly to my left.
.
“Atta boy.” That was when I thought to myself ‘time to go to work’. This is why Harry left me on.
I quickly turned in his direction, preparing an elbow strike to the face. Got him right in the nose as I spun to my right to avoid getting shot and dove to this guy’s back right as he turned. I’d never seen someone turn like that, fluid and solid at the same time. It was like a 180 Kajukenpo turn, but perfected, like this is what he did before the dead rose.
I reverted to a Krav Maga stance, slimmed with my left foot in front and my hands in front of my face as he went for a palm strike to my sides. I turned right to give him an elbow to the throat, as he leaned back and chopped me right in the throat. Knowing the stakes here, I couldn’t let this guy win. I had to distract him long enough to get a burst off at the fightin’ Irish.
I leaned back and prepared a Thai kick to the back of his leg, just below the knee, but it was like he knew what I was doing before I knew what I was doing. You don’t plan a fight. It’s like a brutal dance of death, you know the steps and you know the tempo, but you don’t know which one’s coming next. Most sports, you could play on defense or offense, but not this one. You can’t rely on just one, you have to have a balance of the two, and I’d never seen anyone with as a complete mastery of the two as this guy. I was going to have to rush this.
He turned at just the right moment, catching my leg in midflight, and pulled on it, yanking me to the ground where Irish had a clear shot. I did what I do best and improvised by grabbing my knife as I hit the ground. Trying to overpower the pain with adrenaline, which my body was doing a pretty good job of anyway, I rolled backward in way that I never looked away from them, which is a lot harder than it sounds, I stood up and threw my knife at the American, but he moved out of the way. Luckily, the trajectory was it just the right angle that it got Irish in the bicep, saving my precious ammunition as I hauled ass for the front fender.
Once I’d made it to the front, I had to work to the side of the bed. I had to anticipate that the American would be carrying. This guy was definitely ex-military, most likely Special Forces, but even that didn’t sit right. Those guys are trained to rely on their weapons, close-quarters only when mission critical. This guy would have pulled on me several times, but he didn’t. He used non-lethal moves when he should have pulled a knife, but he didn’t. This guy had my attention, but his face looked familiar. I thought I saw these guys on the news somewhere, CNN most likely, but it may have been back when my dad and I watched Glenn Beck. No, finally started to remember, but too late.
Right when I had backed up enough to get a clean shot at Irish, I heard a familiar clicking of the safety on a rifle. Crap. Again, I dropped my gun. Heh, not a single round had been fired. I took a rifle butt to the head, and I started to fade just as Irish came over and started kicking me, steel-toed boots by the way, until soldier boy tore him off, thank God
When I finally came to, I was tied up to the rear axle of my truck, in somebody’s garage. I can think of worse, so I wasn’t too worked up. After a minute, I heard footsteps and saw soldier boy walking over. He just grinned. All that, and he grins?! I’m thinking to myself, what the fuck is this guy on? I just stabbed his friend, another one of his buddies knocks me out, I’m tied to my own truck, and he’s grinning?! I am so thoroughly boned…
“That was awesome. It’s been a while since we had a fight like that, and I never would have bet that Cathy would get the finishing blow.” Naturally, you can expect my response
“Wait, I got knocked out by a chick?!”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t mess with her. I could take her and I still wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Her name’s Cathy Ryan. Her husband, Jack, prevented a war between the US and Russia when there was that nuclear attack in Baltimore. She ran the immediate trauma clinic at the time.”
“How in the hell did her husband prevent a war?”
“He was an analyst for the CIA. He specialized in the former Soviet Bloc, so he was able to convince his superiors that it was an independent terrorist attack. I never worked with him, but that’s pretty kick ass.”
It all made sense! He didn’t go for non-lethal strikes because the CIA preferred human intelligence over digital, and this guy was old enough that he would have worked for them in the 90’s.
“Wait, you were CIA?”
“Yeah, though the news would’ve told you I was a terrorist. They hunted me when I lost my memory, so I returned the favor. Took down the entire program.”
“I knew it! You’re Jason Bourne!”
“David Webb, actually, but that was a different life. None of that matters anymore.”
“Still! You took down a CIA assassination program all by yourself, causing a huge scandal in the process! It was all anybody talked about until the Saints came back!” I was impressed- this guy was as big a hero as they came.
He started laughing when I mentioned the Saints. I looked at him puzzlingly. Without even looking, he said “I freed them from prison after the dead came back.”
THIS blew my mind completely. Jason Bourne and the MacManus brothers working together?! I just couldn’t believe it.
“Okay, now it’s my turn to get some information. What’s your name?”
“James Franklin. I was a college student when shit hit the fan.”
“Okay, James, where’d you learn to fight like that?”
“I took Krav Maga for a few months, Kajukembo at the school, and I just mimicked Bruce Lee movies and Power Rangers reruns.”
He started laughing at that last bit, but he got what he wanted.
“Okay, obviously you’re a Scout. You’re not living on your own, you’re part of a larger group. Where are you guys at?”
“BOURNE, GIMME A MINUTE WITH THAT COCKSUCKER!!” Jason dropped his head at that.
“Murphy, I’m working here! You already beat him so bad that Cathy could barely stitch him up! There is no way in hell that I’m letting you torture this kid!”
“Where’d you find that guy?” When I asked, he just looked at me.
“You said that I was all anybody talked about until the Saints came back to Boston. Well, there’s one of them.” And that clicked too. It was Murphy MacManus, the younger of the two.
“Wait, where’s Connor? The two never acted independent.”
“Zombies. I was getting them out of the prison when Connor tried to hold back the horde.”
“And that’s why he’s so angry.” It made sense. These two guys loved each other more than most brothers ever do. They took a bullet for each other on multiple occasions, so if one of them had to watch the other one die, knowing there was nothing he could do about it; it’d make him into an inherently angry person.
“Yeah, just don’t ask him to talk about it. Like I asked before, where’s your base?”
“I can take you there, or at least navigate your way there. I’m warning you now, the place is has plenty of guns and ammo to go around, but the guy at the sentry post is older’n God and meaner than all of you combined. If you put me at the front, he won’t hesitate to shoot all of us.”
“What’s he using?”
“A laser-sighted M14. I’m telling you, this is a bad idea. You might as well be walking right into a heavily armed fort. He’ll hear you coming, and even if he doesn’t, he’ll kill us all.”
“Odds are that I’ve worked with him. Who is he?”
“Harry Callahan.”
“Wait, Dirty Harry Callahan?!”
“Yeah. Now you see what I’m talking about.”
“Murphy’ll love this… YO! MURPH! THIS KID SAYS HE WAS SCOUTING FOR DIRTY HARRY!”
Murphy walks in, grinning.
“No fuckin’ way! There is no way that you’ve been shackin’ up with Harry Callahan, there’s just no way. How’d you find him?”
“Simple. When he was forced to retire, he came up here to get away from San Francisco, and he had family nearby. When he did, he started collecting guns, ammo, hunting equipment, just prepping in general.”
Bourne nodded in approval, then started with “Smart man. What kind of sentry post does he have?”
“It’s a hunting stand that we’ve rigged onto the roof. You can rig up just about anything with enough duct tape.” They laughed at that, but knew it was true.
He bowed his head, like he was thinking. Without looking up, he gave us his plan. “Okay, the only one of us with a ranged weapon is Cathy, so I’ll have her drive while James and I are in the back. He’ll navigate, I’ll get Harry in my crosshairs, and we’ll talk him down. Sound good?”
Murphy and I nodded, so he had to go explain it to Cathy. When he tried to grab her rifle, she freaked out at him, like he was taking her kid away. It occurred to me that it may have belonged to her husband, so I decided to ask Murphy.
“Hey, you mind if I ask a few questions?”
He didn’t look at me. “Shoot.”
“I’m sorry about stabbing you in the arm, I was just trying to survive. In all fairness, you tried to kill me, so we cool?”
“Yeah, we’re cool. Next question.” Still focusing on the argument in the next room.
“What happened to Cathy’s husband?”
“Did Jason tell you about Connor?” This time, he started shaking his head, as if to refresh his memory.
“Yeah…”
“Well, a few days after Connor died, we were trying to get the hell out of Boston, so we headed north. Figured that the fuckers would freeze in the snow up in Canada, or at least more rural New England. We had just hit Baltimore when we ran into Cathy, all by her lonesome. When we asked her about the rifle, she explained that her husband was a jarhead in the Balkans. It was his rifle, decked out and everything, just for something like this. When the outbreak first hit and his bosses at the CIA told him to stay home, he taught her how to use it. She already knew how to use a pistol, but rifles and pistols ain’t exactly similar.”
This is true. Pistols you grip with both hands just behind the trigger, or with only one hand. Rifles you grab with both hands, one at the front and the other on the handle.
Rifles you grab with both hands, one at the front and the other on the handle. This one was really nice, with a horizontal foregrip and a hunting scope. Most foregrips are vertical, so that you sort of pull it down, but horizontal foregrips are much more ergonomic, so that you do the same thing with only using half the effort. Hunting scopes have a variable zoom option, so that you can go at close, medium, or long range and still take the dick off a fly with its adjustable crosshairs.
Then, for added accuracy, it has a laser-sight on it. Batteries last forever, so it’s a great weapon. Given that they traveled from one coast to the other, I’m went ahead and assumed that she also had a night-vision scope for night-time hunting. That was when it occurred to me that they could have camped out in New England for a while, so why come here?
“We asked her what happened to him, and she said that he got infected just after the initial outbreak. He had a flu at the time, so his immune system couldn’t keep back the airborne stuff. Heh, it’s funny. You’d think that in the 21st century, we wouldn’t be worrying about getting killed by the flu.”
It made sense. Obviously it was airborne, and if your immune system was weakened enough that could happen. I’d never heard of it happening before, but I was still learning how to live in this world.
“Why’d you come all the way here?”
He started to chuckle, then he answered. “The problem with New England in the winter is that it’s too cold. We couldn’t last very long in the snow, so we had to come to a place that didn’t get that cold, but still had a small enough population that we could scavenge. We were going small town to small town, scavenging when we had to.”
“When did you start stealing from other survivors?”
“We needed the bike. We figured that it was best to keep the group small, knock you out and take it. Jason could’ve easily done it, but you put up a better fight than any of us anticipated. We figured that we’d try to shack up with you. Jason figured that if you could talk me down, you can talk down anybody.”
I still think that they might’ve overestimated my abilities, but it was worth a shot. Jason had finally gotten the rifle from Cathy, but he had to hand her his pistol in return. I don’t know why it surprised me that it was a Glock. Glocks are famous throughout the US because of their reliability. They fire just like every other 9mm on the market, albeit a bit bulkier and clunkier, but it was more reliable. Like the AK platform, its reliability was due in large part to the fact that it had half the parts of its competitors, could be buried in the mud for months and still work flawlessly, and it was used by military and law enforcement agencies throughout the western world for that very reason. This is one time that our military industrial complex actually paid off.
The only customization on his Glock was a laser-sight, so it was a lot easier to use. She put that one in her waistband while Bourne put on the strap of Cathy’s M4, checking the magazine on it first. That ammo’s somewhat easy to find, as the AR platform was pretty popular for hunting and shooting.
“Last question?”
“Go for it.”
“Would you mind cutting me loose? I’m not gonna be much use if I’m duct taped to my axel.”
He chuckled, taking my knife and pointed the tip at me.
“If you try to kill any of us again, I’ll kill you myself. You know what Connor and I used to do.”
“And you’ve gotten a lot meaner since he died.”
“Exactly. You fuck with me, I’ll fuck you up in ways you can’t even imagine.”
“Understood.” Satisfied with that answer, he finally cut me loose. He handed my knife back to me, making me wonder where my vest went. After asking him, he had Jason bring me my vest and MAC. I sheathed my knife and strapped my MAC, checking the ammo and chamber before flicking on the safety.
I asked them if we were ready to go, and they all loaded up. After Jason and Murphy pulled up the garage door, Cathy jumped in the driver’s seat and backed up so that they could close it. After that, Murphy rode shotgun, and Jason and I rode in the bed. We both sat with our backs to the glass while I put my bandanna and sunglasses back on. I directed them to the house and had them slow down when we were in earshot. That was when Jason propped the rifle on the side of the bed and took aim, using it for cover. Not a terrible idea, but I would’ve used the wheelwell. I told him that and he shrugged it off, so whatever. I figured that he’d been doing this longer, so whatever.
As expected, he just barely missed one of the tires, yelling “THAT WAS A WARNING SHOT. IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO TRADE, GO THE FUCK AWAY.”
Now it was time for me to do my job. Without getting up, I leaned toward and yelled back “HARRY, I BROUGHT THEM HERE. I THOUGHT THEY COULD JOIN US HERE.”
“JAMES, YOU KNOW THAT I LIKE TO KEEP IT SMALL. YOU CAN STAY, BUT NOT THE REST OF THEM.”
“HARRY, COME ON. WE’RE SITTING ON MORE MEDICINE AND AMMUNITION THAN WE CAN EVER USE OR TRADE. WE’VE GOT MORE THAN ENOUGH ROOM FOR THESE GUYS, AND WE CAN USE THE HELP. YOU’RE OLD, YOU SHOULD’VE DIED YEARS AGO, AND I NEED SOMEONE WHEN YOU FINALLY DO GO. WE’LL FOLLOW YOUR ORDERS, LIVE UNDER YOUR ROOF, AND OPERATE JUST LIKE NORMAL. JASON CAN TAKE OVER WATCH FOR YOU AT NIGHT, AND TAKE THREE MAN SCOUTING PARTIES. WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY HURT?”
There was a pause, like he was looking for an excuse.
“THERE ARE MORE OF THEM THAN OF US.”
“JUST BY ONE. THEY’RE FANS OF YOURS, EVEN.”
“THEY WERE CRIMINALS.”
“HARRY, I WAS NOBODY BEFORE THIS, YOU’VE BEEN NOBODY FOR 20 YEARS, THEIR RECORDS HAVEN’T AMOUNTED TO SHIT SINCE THE WORLD ENDED. YOU KNOW IT, I KNOW IT, THEY KNOW IT. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO OR WHAT WE WERE IN BACK THEN, ALL THAT MATTERS IS WHO WE ARE NOW AND HOW WE CHOOSE TO STAY ALIVE. THE SIMPLE FACT IS THAT THERE ARE STRENGTH IN NUMBERS.”
Another pause. He didn’t respond for a minute, so I took a leap of faith. I kept my gun on safety, hopped out of the vehicle. Jason asked me what I was doing, I held my hand up to get him to stop. I raised my hands, walked in front of the truck to continue this. I could see the laser slowly move over to my chest, then my heart, then my forehead. I was sweating bullets, but I had to do this.
“HARRY, WE NEED THIS. THEY NEED THIS. YOU NEED THIS. I’M SAYING RIGHT NOW THAT THIS WILL KEEP US ALIVE A LOT LONGER, AND I’M BANKING MY LIFE ON IT. JASON, YOU GOT HIS POINT TARGET OR JUST HIS AREA?” Those are military terms. Area target is his upper body, like his chest, but a point target is a specific area, like his left shoulder.
“Point target, forehead.”
“YA HEAR THAT, HARRY? IF YOU SHOOT ME, LETHAL OR NOT, HE WILL KILL YOU. LAY DOWN YOUR GUN, OR HE WILL SHOOT. I REALLY DON’T WANT TO DO THIS, BUT THAT’S HOW IT WORKS IN THIS NEW WORLD. DON’T YOU GET IT? WE’RE ALL JUST TRYING TO SURVIVE! WE SHOULDN’T BE WORRYING ABOUT EACH OTHER, WE SHOULD BE WORRYING ABOUT THE SORRY SONS OF BITCHES THAT ARE ALREADY DEAD!!”
“Speaking of which…” Murhy muttered. I turned to look in his direction, and he wasn’t kidding. I don’t know if it was the shot, the yelling, or both, but there was a mob of zombies heading right for us from the treeline. I saw the laser move as Harry waited for them to get to the barbed wire across the street. We all did, until Jason started shooting. I saw what he was doing, so I called over Cathy and Murphy and hopped the fence. I still don’t know if they knew what I was doing, but regardless they followed my lead. I hopped the fence, flipped the safety off my MAC and grabbed my knife. Murphy and Cathy spread out from me so that we could keep a uniform shooting position, firing single rounds. When they got close enough, I used my knife while Murphy and Cathy just shot them, but Jason and Harry kept shooting. I hardly noticed when they were reloading, cuz I was focusing on my cluster.
I think that was when Harry realized that there was no way he and I could’ve taken them on alone, and they couldn’t have come that far based on how soon it had been since we started shooting and shouting. It took us fifteen minutes, but we cleared the field without having to retreat past the fence, and Harry didn’t start picking them off. He had to know that he could have, and I’ll guarantee that it occurred to him at least once, but he didn’t act like it.
After the fight, Cathy checked us for wounds, then we checked out our own weapons and ammunition. We parked the truck and went into the house, acting like it was nothing. Jason went up to relieve Harry while I made some coffee. Once he got done, he made sure we all had our weapons on safety while I served the coffee. He actually smiled when I served it. I knew this was going to be the start of something good.
FINAL ROSTER-
Harold “Dirty Harry” Callahan- Captain
David Webb, a.k.a. “Jason Bourne”- Sniper
Murphy MacManus- Berserker
Caroline “Cathy” Ryan- Medic
James Franklin- Negotiator/Scout
