Chapter One — "Long Sleeves"

  July 9, 1993 — Knox Country, Kentucky, Knox Exclusion Zone

  The truck had come to rest at a slant, its right front tire dropped into a drainage ditch the driver hadn't seen until it was too late. It sat there like a tired animal, hood up, steam long since gone, just a dull green shape in the shade of the tree line with soldiers arranged around it in postures that told Gary everything he needed to know about their situation. One leaning against the tailgate with his chin on his chest. One sitting apart with his knees up. One standing at the tree line with his rifle held low and his attention on the oaks. None of them looking at each other. A squad that had run out of things to say and was waiting for someone to tell them what came next.

  He stopped walking. Put his arm out. Diane walked into it without breaking stride, read him without looking, and stopped too.

  Jesse drew up behind them with Lily's hand in his. Lily clicked her Walkman — the dry plastic sound of a button being pressed on a machine that had nothing left to play.

  "Army," Gary said.

  "I can see that," Diane said.

  The road was a single lane of cracked asphalt that ran between two walls of Kentucky oak and sweetgum, the light coming through at a low angle and turning everything amber. Hot. Still. An afternoon that pressed the air flat against the ground and held it there. The sulfur smell was in everything — faint, metallic, the taste of a penny held under the tongue. It had been there since June and Gary had stopped noticing it the way you stopped noticing a noise until someone mentioned it, and then it was all you could hear.

  He had driven this road a hundred times in his life. To work and back, to Carl's deer camp, to the Piggly Wiggly in Muldraugh when Diane's list was long enough to justify the drive. He had never once thought about cover or sight lines or what was in those trees, and now he thought about almost nothing else. The calculation ran without his permission — distance to the tree line, angle of approach, number of soldiers, number of rifles, whether the one at the trees was watching the oaks or watching the road. The arithmetic had started on July 4th and it had not stopped and he was beginning to understand that it was not going to stop.

  One of the soldiers had seen them. He was already calling back over his shoulder.

  "Stay behind me," Gary said.

  "Gary." Diane's voice was even. The voice she used when she needed him to hear her and not just the word. "Walk normal."

  He walked normal.

  The sergeant met them in the road. Early thirties, Gary guessed, with the particular blankness of face that meant he'd already used up whatever expression he'd started the week with. His uniform was dark with sweat across the shoulders and under the arms and it hung on him the way clothes hung on a man who had been wearing them for days. Long sleeves. Gary noticed the long sleeves. Ninety-two degrees and the man had his left sleeve rolled down tight to the wrist and buttoned.

  "Folks." Not a question, not a greeting. An acknowledgment.

  "Our car's about a half mile back," Gary said. "Front axle. We've been walking since about two o'clock."

  The sergeant looked past him at Diane, at the kids. Something in his face moved and then didn't — the reflex of a man who still recognized civilians and had trained himself to stop reacting to them.

  "Where are you headed."

  "We have a property. Off Ridgeway, south of—"

  "You're not going to make Ridgeway tonight."

  Gary knew that. He'd known it since the axle. He said nothing.

  Behind the sergeant, a younger soldier had appeared and was watching them with barely concealed desperation. Early twenties, soft-faced — should have been stocking shelves at a Winn-Dixie somewhere. He was looking at Jesse the way people looked at other people when they wanted to talk and hadn't in a while — not the words but the fact of another face, another person who was not his squad, not the road, not whatever they'd seen on the way down from West Point.

  "Sergeant Morrow," the young one said. "We got room by the truck. In the shade."

  Morrow didn't turn around. "Shores."

  "They got a little kid, Sergeant."

  A beat. Gary watched Morrow's jaw work. Something being calculated — not whether to let them stay but what letting them stay would cost, what it would mean for the squad's posture, whether kindness was a resource he could still spend.

  "You're welcome to rest in the shade," Morrow said. "We're not going anywhere for a while."

  The mechanic was still under the truck when they settled against the rear wheel well, Lily between Diane's knees, Jesse with his back to the metal like he could sleep but wouldn't. Gary sat where he could see the road in both directions. He'd been sitting this way for five days — back to something solid, eyes on the approaches. Before July 4th it had been a habit left over from the Reserve, something Diane teased him about at restaurants. Now it was the only way he could sit and not feel the skin between his shoulder blades crawl.

  "What's wrong with it?" he asked the pair of boots sticking out from under the chassis.

  A pause. The sound of a wrench slipping, metal on metal, and then the particular silence of a man deciding how honest to be.

  "Transfer case," the boots said. "Maybe the driveshaft. Both, probably." Another pause. "Definitely both."

  "You have parts?"

  "Not those parts."

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  Gary looked at Morrow, who was standing at the front of the truck looking down the road the way a man looks down a hallway he expects someone to come through. "How long you been here."

  "Since about eleven," Shores answered for him. He'd sat down nearby with the natural, uninvited ease of someone used to being tolerated. "Hit the ditch coming around that curve. Sergeant said we'd wait for another unit to come through." He picked at the grass beside the road. "That was five hours ago."

  "Shores," Morrow said. Not loud.

  "Sorry, Sergeant."

  Lily held up her Walkman toward Diane. A gesture she'd been making since July 3rd — the tape run through, both sides played to silence, and still she held it up like an offering or a question or the only language she had left for the thing she needed. Diane looked at it, pressed the play button, let the hiss answer. Lily took it back and held it in her lap with both hands, listening to the nothing the way you'd listen to a seashell if the ocean were the thing you'd lost.

  The other one — Reyes, Gary had caught the name from the quiet way Shores said it, the way you'd say the name of someone you were worried about — hadn't moved from the tree line. He stood with his back partly to the group, rifle at the low ready, watching the oaks with the fixed attention of a man who had learned that looking away was the thing that let it get close. Gary had been watching him watch the trees for twenty minutes.

  "He always like that," Gary said quietly.

  Shores glanced back. "He saw something. On the way down from West Point." He said it like he was reporting weather. Like that was what it had become — weather, atmospheric, the condition of the air they all breathed now. "He doesn't say what. But since then, yeah. Like that."

  Gary filed it. Reyes had seen something, wouldn't say what, and had decided that the tree line was where his attention lived now. Gary understood that. He understood it better than he wanted to.

  Diane was looking at Morrow. Gary knew her looking at Morrow — the diagnostic attention, the way her eyes tracked the arm, the posture, the slight asymmetry in how the man held himself. He'd been doing it himself, but Diane's version was professional and his was something older, something from the Reserve that read injury as tactical information: how fast can this man move, how much can he carry, how long before whatever's wrong with him becomes everyone's problem.

  "Your sergeant hurt his arm," she said. Low. Not to Shores.

  "He said it was—"

  "I know what he said." She wasn't unkind about it. She was an ER nurse from a hospital that had stopped being a hospital on July 3rd — Cortman Medical, where the waiting room had filled with people who had the summer flu and then filled with people who had something else and then filled with things that weren't people anymore. She had seen, in those last two days, enough to know that what people said and what was true had become different countries. "When did it happen."

  Shores looked at his hands. "Yesterday morning."

  The light was going.

  Gary had the angle of it figured down to maybe forty minutes of useful visibility, and then another twenty of the gray in-between where you could see shapes but not details, and then the dark, which was not darkness the way darkness had been a week ago. The dark now was the time when the things that moved wrong had the advantage and the things that moved right did not, and every minute between now and then was a minute he was spending sitting against the wheel well of a dead truck on a road that went nowhere he could get to before the light ran out.

  He'd said none of this out loud. Diane knew. Jesse was beginning to understand — Gary could see it in the way the boy's eyes moved, tracking the angle of the light through the canopy, glancing at the trees the way Reyes glanced at the trees, learning the grammar of vigilance from a man he'd never spoken to. Sixteen years old and reading a soldier's body language for threat assessment. The knowledge of what that meant sat in Gary's chest like a stone he couldn't swallow and couldn't spit out.

  Morrow came and sat on the running board nearby. It was the first time he'd stopped moving.

  "You were Reserve," he said. Not a question.

  "How."

  "Way you've been standing." Morrow rested his elbows on his knees. His left sleeve was rolled down tight. "Way you looked at my men before you looked at me."

  Gary said nothing.

  "What unit."

  "That matters right now?"

  Morrow almost smiled. The face moved in the right direction and then stopped, like a door that opened an inch and caught on the chain. "No." He looked at the road. "You know what's out there."

  "I know what I've seen."

  "Then you know we can't stay here after dark."

  Gary looked at him. "I know that. You know that. What does your CO know."

  Morrow was quiet a long time. Quiet long enough to be its own answer.

  "My CO," he said, "is in West Point. I had radio contact this morning." He paused. "This morning."

  The boots were still under the truck. The sound of trying had stopped.

  Lily had fallen asleep against Diane, the Walkman still loose in her hand, the headphone cord tangled in her fingers. Jesse sat awake and rigid, watching Reyes, studying the way the soldier held the rifle and the way his weight shifted and the intervals at which his eyes swept the tree line — learning something from him, or trying to, the way a boy learns from a man who is doing the thing the boy is afraid he'll need to do.

  Diane looked at Gary across the sleeping child. He held her eyes. Two seconds — the whole conversation, held in the silence that soldiers and children made necessary.

  She looked at Morrow's arm.

  Gary looked at the trees.

  The light kept going.

  It was Cutler who finally came out from under the truck, wiping his hands on a rag that had stopped doing anything useful an hour ago. He stood up, looked at Morrow, and shook his head once.

  Shores stopped talking. Webb, who'd been quiet all afternoon, looked at the road. Hicks, who'd been sitting apart with his knees up, put his head down.

  "Okay," Morrow said. Just that.

  He stood. Straightened his sleeve by reflex — the small, automatic gesture that told Gary more than anything Shores had said. A man protecting a wound doesn't think about covering it. He just does it, the way you blink, the way you breathe. Morrow looked at Gary.

  "There's a deer camp," Gary said. "About three quarters of a mile east. Off the road. My brother-in-law's. It's solid."

  "You know the way in the dark."

  "I know these roads."

  Morrow looked at the trees. At Reyes. At his men. At Lily asleep against Diane, one hand still wrapped around a yellow Walkman that hadn't played anything in two days.

  "Alright," he said.

  Gary fell back as they started to move, letting the column sort itself out — Reyes and Shores ahead, the family in the middle, Cutler and Webb and Hicks behind, Morrow at the rear. The formation was instinctive, not ordered. These men had been walking together long enough that the geometry of who went where had settled into the bones of the squad without anyone drawing a diagram.

  Diane came up beside him. Lily on her back now, asleep across her shoulders, the dead weight of a child who had learned to sleep through movement because the alternative was not sleeping at all.

  "Morrow," she said quietly. A verdict she'd reached after hours of watching.

  Gary looked at her.

  "We'll deal with it at the camp," she said. "Not here."

  He didn't ask her what she meant. He didn't ask if she'd talked to Morrow. He looked at the road ahead, at the last amber light in the canopy going orange and then red and then the gray that came before the dark, the color draining out of the world the way it drained out of everything now — slowly, and then all at once, and then gone.

  "Yeah," he said.

  Jesse was walking close. Close enough to hear, Gary realized. He looked at his son — really looked, the way you stopped doing when a kid was always there and always fine and the looking was something you saved for emergencies — and saw a jaw set the way Gary's own jaw set, and eyes that moved the way Reyes' eyes moved, and hands that hung at his sides with the fingers slightly curled, ready to grab something or someone or nothing, just ready, the readiness itself the thing that had replaced whatever had been there before.

  The boy didn't look back.

  They walked. The road bent east and the trees closed in overhead and the last of the light went amber to gray and the gray thickened and the sound of their footsteps was the loudest thing in the world.

  Somewhere in the trees off to the left, something moved.

  Reyes had already stopped walking.